New Books Network

It is common today to treat depression and other mental disorders as concrete illnesses – akin to having pneumonia or the flu.  In fact, being prescribed a pill after complaining to your family doctor about feeling depressed is a common occurrence.  But are mental disorders really illnesses the way that a sinus infection is?  Gary Greenberg, in his fascinating new book The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (Blue Rider Press, 2013),  argues that the answer is no.  The DSM, which categorizes and defines mental disorders, is socially contructed, he claims, and changes over time.  Homosexuality, for example, was considered an illness until 1973, and Asperger’s, now widely considered by the public to be a real condition (which many identify with), may no longer be in the newest revision of the DSM.   Greenberg is not indicting  all psychiatry or arguing that people should not take antidepressants, but he is criticizing the assumption that mental suffering is the same as physical suffering, arguing that mental anguish is often a multi-layered problem that cannot be fixed by a pill or explained by brain malfunction (though we are often led to believe that this is the case).  Allowing the DSM to dictate reality as if it were a scientifically grounded book is a mistake, and we should be more aware of the haphazard way in which it was assembled. Audio Interview with Gary Greenberg

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort’s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press, 2012) reframes the histories of early and contemporary human genetics. Rather than treating eugenics as “a contaminant of good, honest biomedicine,” the book shows that early human genetics had many of the same basic goals – human improvement and the relief of suffering – as genetic medicine today. At the same time, contemporary genetic medicine emerges as much less benign than it has often been depicted. All of this is accomplished through a sensitive historical tracing of two major approaches to understanding human heredity through the twentieth century: a Galtonian approach characterized by a concern with quantification, public health, and populations; and a Garrodian approach characterized by an interest in conceptualizing the human as individual, and in synthesizing heredity with other forms of knowledge. As we follow these threads along with Comfort, he introduces us to a bookful of colorful, vibrant characters from the history of medical genetics: the idealistic inventor of a “Gumption Reviver,” the sanitarium-operator who was fond of prescribing yogurt-enemas, and the medical geneticist with a talent for boogie-woogie piano, among others. These figures are embedded in an exceptionally carefully-wrought narrative of the spaces, practices, and events by which medicine became genetic, genetics became molecular, and molecules made the engineering of humanity possible in a new way. In the course of our discussion, we talked about the importance, for Comfort, of paying careful attention to elements of the writer’s craft when composing a historical work. The John McPhee essay on narrative structure that was mentioned in that part of the interview can be found here (A subscription to the New Yorker is required to read the full piece.) The Oral History of Human Genetics Project can be found here.

“Power through freedom.” Michael Serazio’s Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013) traces the mushrooming world of geurilla marketing—defined to include word-of-mouth, viral, and advergaming, along with a host of other, often hidden kinds of persuasion. The book describes the ways that advertisers give up “control” to consumers through “authentic” discovery, dialogue, amateurism, the non-sell sell, and even anti-marketing messages themselves—all of which serve, paradoxically, to reinforce control and commercialism. The consumer subject, writes Serazio drawing on Foucault and Gramsci, is strategically engaged to act without the sense of being acted upon—a kind “corporate ventriloquism.” The book includes rich, detailed case studies and interviews with marketers, who recount their “cool sell” campaigns for America’s Army, PBR, and Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken.”

Dale Maharidge’s Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War (PublicAffairs, 2013) is something of a departure from our regular offerings. Normally our authors are established academics specializing in the field of military history. Dale Maharidge, however, is an award-winning journalist who, prior to Bringing Mulligan Home, has had only limited exposure to the subject of the Pacific Theater in World War II. What he does bring however is a personal stake in the topic – his father Steve Maharidge served in the Sixth Marine Division, and took part in the assaults on Guam and Okinawa. As a child and then as a young man, Dale was both enthralled and frightened by his father’s regular accounts of the war – enthralled as a son learning more about his father’s experiences in combat; frightened by the storm of emotions and anger that often accompanied his stories. Inspired to learn more about his father’s service, Dale came to understand how Post-Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injury shaped his father’s post-war life, as well as that of the dozen other Marines he interviewed who served alongside him. Though written in a journalistic style, Dale Maharidge reserves the bulk of the text for the personal testimony of his twelve interview subjects. The account they weave spares no word or emotion as it offers a harsh testimony of the power and violence of the Pacific War. The collected narratives present a visceral account of combat that rivals Eugene Sledge’s classic With the Old Breed, while also bearing witness to John Dower’s conclusions in his groundbreaking monograph, War Without Mercy. While the book does occasionally lag, caught up in inconsistencies and missed conclusions, in the larger perspective these flaws are minor. Bringing Mulligan Home captures the ugly, nightmarish side of the Pacific War, but never at the expense of the humanity of his father, or his compatriots (well, there is one exception – but more on that in the interview).

By the fall of 1986, the Los Angeles heavy metal band Slayer had two solid but unspectacular records, 1984′s Haunting the Chapel and 1985′s Hell Awaits, to their name.  Meanwhile, producer Rick Rubin had started a record company, Def Jam, in his dorm room in NYU, and after a handful of successful rap releases, was on the lookout for new talent for his label. In a New York City nightclub, he found it in Slayer. D.X. Ferris, in his taut and entertaining 33 1/3 series book Reign in Blood, explains how this seemingly incongruous paring of a rap guru and four speed-metal merchants ended up making rock history with their 1986 thrash-metal release Reign in Blood. Rubin, whose genius has always resided in his ability to help artists capture the essence of their greatness, found the band’s lengthy, more traditional heavy metal songs unappealing. What he liked, Ferris argues, was the faster, heavier, and aggressive aspects of Slayer’s material. This made him a perfect partner for the band’s late guitarist, Jeff Hanneman, who loved hardcore punk rock almost as much as he loved heavy metal. The resulting album, Ferris maintains, is “the gold standard for extreme heavy metal.”  The LP’s ten songs are played with military precision and at a frenzied pace. And its lyrical themes are nothing if not disturbing: serial killers, witches burned at the stake, pandemics, the fall of Heaven, and perhaps most extreme of all, a meditation on Nazi sadist Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s depraved ”Angel of Death.” This last song, as Ferris shows, stirred charges of anti-Semitism and encouraged CBS Records to back away from its deal to distribute the LP. By drawing on interviews with everyone from members of Slayer to fans, the witty and engaging Ferris makes a convincing case for the album’s significance and its continuing influence in the world of heavy metal. D.X. Ferris is the author of Reign in Blood and has contributed pieces for RollingStone.com, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Popdose, Village Voice, and Decibel, among other publications. He is also the creator of Suburban Metal Dad, Heavy Metal Game of Thrones Reviews and is the proprietor of Pentagrammarian.com, the world’s only metal-oriented grammar and usage website. For his work he was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists’ Reporter of the Year in 2011 and is the recipient of numerous other journalism and writing awards. Ferris can be reached on Twitter @dxferris and @slayerbook.

Hello again. I’m Al Emid and I’m back here on New Books Network with another author interview. I normally review non-fiction financial books since I cover that sector professionally but lately I’ve encountered an increasing number of books that take serious financial topics – even hardcore financial topics – if you will and wrap them in a fictional story. Awhile back, I spoke to Ron McCabe who wrapped a story about the impact of ponzi schemes – much of it from personal experience — inside a murderous revenge tale. And in today’s review I look at another book using that approach. Independence Day is coming up and it has various associations depending on your point of view. For some it’s a reminder of history, for some it’s a political event and for some it’s chance to get in some extra relaxation on the sundeck. Jonathan Chevreau adds another meaning. In his book Findependence (Trafford Publishing, 2013) day he looks at a fictional couple’s search for financial independence and what happens to them along the way. Jonathan is a financial writer, magazine editor and author of earlier books including The Smart Funds Series, the Wealthy Boomer and Krash! I’m going to ask him about both the concept of financial independence and why he chose this approach. Within the next few weeks, I’ll talk to Turney Duff about his book The Buy Side – A Wall Street Trader’s Tale of Spectacular Excess in which he chronicles illegal trades and illegal substances. I’ll also talk to Nancy Hubbard at Goucher College in Maryland about her book Conquering Global Markets – Secrets from the World’s Most Successful Multinationals in which she chronicles the expansion into emerging and frontier markets by companies ranging from Cargill to Ford Motor Company and even IMAX. I hope you enjoy all of these author interviews.

Belmont (Graywolf Press, 2013) is a book of poems written by both a grownup and a child and each seem quite aware of the other. This split-consciousness, if you will, hangs around most of the poems, but not in a tense or obvious way, but from afar, after one has put the book down. Belmont is written by a confident adult, with the disassociated charm of a child playing alone: the one doesn’t need to be validated by us, while the other doesn’t know we’re even in the room. This is the book’s strange disposition: a warm and loving indifference. When young poets are eager to impress, they often just bully the reader with novel forms and precious philosophy. This sort of aesthetic nervousness doesn’t exist in Belmont. Instead, Stephen Burt‘s virtue of clarity is reflected back to us in a number of ways: the humbling attention to craft, the amicable but rambunctious diction, and being unapologetic about subject-matter that is both public and private. How many poets have the guts to write about the suburbs and family life without either great cynicism or great sentimentality? Burt’s poems remind us, without ever saying it (which would be indulgent) that for the soul to be quiet and easy, a person has to suffer through nostalgia. Belmont, however, spares us most of that suffering because the poet is looking at what is right in front of him – flourishing – even if the present is sometimes the past. Throughout the book, Burt puts an interesting burden on a reader of contemporary poetry because in order to find pleasure in the poems, one must allow the poems to befriend them, and for them to befriend you, one must be willing to be as vulnerable and mature as Burt is throughout Belmont.

One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes there’s no way around this and we just have to try to press on with it. Under those conditions, although I get used to it, I can’t help wondering whether the result will make sense to an outside listener. I mention this now because Anne Cutler‘s book, Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words (MIT Press, 2012), is an eloquent and compelling justification of my worrying about precisely this issue. In particular, she builds the case that our experience with our native language fundamentally shapes the way in which we approach the task of listening to a stream of speech – unconsciously, we attend to the cues that are useful in our native language, and use the rules that apply in that language, even when this is counterproductive in the language that we’re actually dealing with. This explains how native speakers can typically process an imperfect speech signal, and why this sometimes fails when we’re listening to a non-native language. (But I hope this isn’t going to be one of those times for anyone.) In this interview, we explore some of the manifestations of the tendency to use native-language experience in parsing, and the implications of this for the rest of the language system. We see why attending to phonologically ‘possible words’ is useful in most, but not quite all, languages, and how this helps us solve the problem of embedded words (indeed, so effectively that we don’t even notice that the problem exists). We consider how the acquisition of language-specific preferences might cohere with the idea of a ‘critical period’ for second-language learning. And we get some insights into the process of very early language acquisition – even before birth – which turns out to have access to richer input data than we might imagine.

Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism.  He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as “the pragmatic maxim.”  According to this maxim, the meaning of a concept or a proposition is ultimately to be defined in terms of the “sensible” and “practical” effects it would produce in the course of experimental action. That is, of course, a crude articulation.  But, according to Peirce, the view of meaning that the maxim articulates has vast philosophical implications.  Peirce’s pragmatism is at once anti-skeptical, fallibilist, verificationist, inferentialist, and realist.  Indeed, that looks like a motley crowd of philosophical commitments.  How might they be made to hang together? In his new book, The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), Christopher Hookway explores the complexities of Peirce’s philosophy.  With chapters devoted to topics ranging from Peirce’s fallibilism, his philosophy of language, his views on mathematics, his rejection of psychologism, and his theory of abduction, Hookway presents Peircean pragmatism as a formidable and strikingly contemporary philosophy.  Hookway’s book will be of great interest to anyone interested in pragmatism and the history of 20th-century philosophy, but it also has much to offer to those working on current debates in fields like epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic.

Early Korea is a resource like no other: in an ongoing series of volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute of Harvard University, the series provides surveys of Korean scholarship on fundamental issues in the study of early Korean history, archaeology, and art history. The volumes, produced with full-color illustrations and biographies of each of the contributing authors, each contain a thematic focus section and several auxiliary essays that cover various aspects of the study of early Korean history and archaeology, notes from the field, and key primary sources in translation. Collectively, the contributions to each volume provide a representative picture of the state of the field of various aspects of early Korean studies in Korea today. This is an incredible resource for specialists in Korean studies, for non-specialists who want to incorporate attention to early Korea into their teaching or research, and for interested general readers. Early Korea 3: The Rediscovery of Kaya in History and Archaeology (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is the latest volume in the series, and it explores the history of Kaya, an ancient polity centered on a region in the southernmost part of the Korean peninsula. Though I was unfamiliar with this particular aspect of Korean history before reading the volume, I quickly found that Kaya history offered a fascinating example through which to reconsider some of the most fundamental issues that face all historiography: the challenges of reconstructing a story from a conflicting, multilingual, and partial textual record; the use of ancient records to justify modern political and imperial interests; and the ways that incorporating attention to archaeological evidence can profoundly transform historical accounts of a region. I spoke with its editor, Mark Byington, about both the broader context of the Early Korea Project and the specific historical and thematic focus of this most recent offering.

At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have changed its ways. It had spent the second half of the century building a system of shared sovereignty that was set to expand not just into the countries of the former Soviet bloc, but into what used to be the USSR itself. In the words of one author, Europe (or at least its model) was about to run the  21st century. Things look different now, of course, thanks to the impact of the financial crisis on the single currency, the euro. However  the European Union (as the project is currently named) has managed to burnish its image in some areas – for instance it now on the verge of covering 28 countries, and even managed to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize (somewhat controversially, although after the first half of the 20th century its role in keeping Europe largely at peace is certainly laudable). The project that lies at the heart of this is the subject of Luuk van Middelaar‘s The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union (Yale University Press, 2013). It’s not a history book as such, but more a book of political philosophy, that knits together a series of concepts, challenges, and constructs, that together have formed something that in the dark days of the immediate post-War period seemed a long, long way away. As such, it’s rather an important book. The continent and the European project have both been riven by crises over the last half decade, and some of the achievements Brussels can point to are now seriously threatened. Luuk – who has had a ringside seat of the crisis as the speechwriter for President Herman van Rompuy – has a look at the underpinnings that go beyond the immediate debates, and the insights this provides will no doubt play a role in shaping the European project (whatever it becomes) in decades to come. Enjoy the interview!

Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and the legacy he left for thinkers who attempted to leverage tradition in the face of political change.  Maciag’s book is well-written and smartly conceived.  His subject spans the entire history of the United States, from the Revolution to the present day, and introduces readers to American thinkers who continue deserve our attention.  He also does an expert job addressing the conflict between liberalism and conservatism by demonstrating the roles historical contingency and personality play in shaping these complicated terms.  Maciag’s book serves a diverse community of readers, from academics looking for smart arguments about political theory to general readers who are interested in origins and development of the poles of American politics.

Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of separation, and brought them in to participate in a research study. And so began the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. At the time, psychology leaned heavily toward the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. The twins provided unique information about the role of genes and environment in human development. Over the twenty years of the study, massive amounts of data about the twin pairs were collected about intelligence, personality, medical traits, and many other aspects of development. The results changed our understanding of how we become who we are in adulthood. In her book, Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Harvard University Press, 2012), Dr. Nancy Segal describes the history of the controversial Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, as well as the results of the study and case examples of these fascinating twin pairs.  Her book recently won the prestigious William James Book Award from The American Psychological Association.

Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Oregon’s Gretchen Soderlund, is about far more than the title suggests. Using sex trafficking and scandal as a starting point, Soderlund delves into an era of journalism that features muckrakers and sensationalists, key political players and journalists with social and cultural agendas. It is a book about racial identity, journalists and their audiences, and Great Britain’s influence on journalistic practices and culture. “From an early twenty-first century vantage point,” Soderlund writes, “it is clear that issues of immigration, urbanization, heterosociability, and racial mixing were stitched into white slavery narratives.” Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism took Soderlund deep into the archives of journalism history. The result is a thorough, important discussion about one of the key periods in American journalism.

The title says it all: Diana Vreeland was, in fact, that Empress of Fashion, reigning over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for half a century. As a result, her life story stretches the conventions of biography, which so often presents mid-century women’s lives merely as a series of relationships. Amanda MacKenzie Stuart‘s Empress of Fashion: Diana Vreeland, A Life (Thames & Hudson, 2013) provides a stunning alternative: the work narrative. Vreeland’s is the story of an individual who, through sheer will, became the person she wanted to be. Today, we often read biography for inspiration and Vreeland herself searched for such in the lives she encountered and read, as Stuart writes: “At this point Diana wobbled back toward the idea of finding a great person on whom to model herself: ‘then by that I can become great.’” And yet she came up short, writing in her diary, “You know for years I am and always have been looking out for girls to idolize because they are things to look up to because they are perfect. Never have I discovered that girl or that woman. I shall be that girl.” Stuart’s portrait of Vreeland revolves around this notion that she, a woman who was not considered conventionally attractive, excelled in the world of beauty by virtue of this vision- this driving idea of being The Girl and showing readers how they might be their own version of The Girl as well. The element that separates the notion of The Girl from fashion journalism today is that The Girl was- at least in the beginning- attainable, more an attitude supplemented by seasonal accessories and small touches than a look defined by brand names. In  the end, as Stuart mentions in our interview, Vreeland’s is a story of great hope: that one doesn’t have to a be a conventional beauty to be fashionable, one doesn’t have to be a man to produce exceptional work, one doesn’t have to conform to the lives and standards of others to be great. Simply by being herself, by being that girl she couldn’t find anywhere else, Vreeland became an icon. As a friend recalled: “She didn’t merely enter a room, she exhilarated it.”