New Books Network

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science]  Jeffrey Henig is the author of The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2013). Henig is Professor of Political Science and Education at Teacher’s College and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. In his book, he explains that much scholarship and commentary on school reform has been segmented and sporadic, overly focused on particular reforms, and thereby unable to fully explain the larger arcs of reforms overtime. The thesis of the book is that the shift from education governance based in single-sector institutions, such as elected school boards, to broad-based institutions, such as mayor controlled school systems, has not received the attention it deserves. In this way, the book fits neatly with previous books featured here by Jesse Rhodes and Sarah Reckhow. Henig goes about unpacking this change, the winners and losers, and the possible direction of future school reform. The book is deeply rooted in the political science literature, but also speaks to issues of public management, education policy, and social movements.

Today we’ll be discussing Lance Fortnow‘s book The Golden Ticket:P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible (Princeton University Press, 2013).  The book focuses on the challenges associated with solving problems requiring significant computation, such as “What is the largest group of Facebook users, all of whom know each other?”  If it is shown that all computational problems can be solved relatively easily (this is known as showing that P=NP), then such problems as finding a cure for cancer and other diseases would be much more easily solved. Listen in and find out how.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Nicholas Popper’s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing. Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy!

There is much to love about Jonathan Abel’s new book. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (University of California Press, 2012) brilliantly takes readers into the performance of different modes of censorship in the early and mid-twentieth century. Some practices of censorship by Japanese writers, readers, and authorities left traces that now rest in a transnational and multi-sited archive of marks, symbols, and conspicuous absences. In extended sections of the book that treat the preservation, production, and redaction of censors’ traces as they emerge from this translocal archive, Abel considers how the structures and processes of a textual archive (broadly defined) offer an architecture for building a history of censorship. Along the way, we are offered insights into the kinds of texts in which the history of the censor is inscribed, the kinds of texts and subjects that most invited the censor’s hand (whether the “censor” was an author self-editing or an authority figure coming to a text after its completion), and the capacities of censorship to generate new forms of literary production. At several points in the book (and especially in Pt III) Abel is wonderfully self-reflexive, experimenting with narrative forms to embody the kinds of textual practices that he writes about in his own writing style. The book closes with a coda that looks at information restriction in mid-twentieth century Japan and critically considers prevailing attitudes toward historicization in the disciplines of Asian studies. Redacted is full of contributions to fields that might not be obvious from the title: readers interested in archive studies, histories of the body, studies of translation, and histories of observation and violence will find inspiration here. Enjoy!

Can the spoken word be a reliable record of past events? For many Native people, the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Histories of family, tribe, and nation, narratives of origin and migration, foodways and ceremonies, and the provisions of countless treaties have been passed down through successive generations without written documents. The colonizing society has maintained a starkly different view, elevating the written word to a position of authority and dismissing the authenticity of oral tradition. Are these two views irreconcilable? Exploring the contested memorialization of four controversial episodes in the history of the Delaware (or Lenape) Indians’ encounter with settlers, Andrew Newman finds unexpected connections between colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material culture. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is a thoughtful meditation on how we know the past.

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without these delightful illusions… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.’ Chanel’s is a life that, all these years later, still reads as radical, which puts into perspective how terribly shocking it must have appeared in the early 20th century. Chaney has chosen an unusually challenging subject. Mired in myths, some of them of her own devising, the image of Chanel that has been passed down to us is clouded at best and, as Chaney acknowledges, quoting L.P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ The story of Chanel’s life emerges in more muted tones than one might expect, with gray areas aplenty, from which it is unreasonable to demand clarity or place judgment. And yet Coco Chanel remains an uncompromising account. Chaney doesn’t ignore Chanel’s capacity for storytelling but, rather, explores the meanings of her stories, their unrealities, and the significance of the details that Chanel chose to omit. She doesn’t side-step the controversies surrounding Chanel’s life during the occupation of Paris, but instead grapples head-on with the moral ambiguities and compromises that occurred during the Occupation and in Vichy France. What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a complex, intelligent, unapologetic, incredibly hard working woman.

Pragmatism is American’s home-grown philosophy, but it is not widely understood.  This partly is due to the fact that pragmatism emerged out of deep philosophical disputes among its earliest proponents: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.  Although it is agreed that they are the founders of Pragmatism, they also held opposing views about meaning, truth, reality, and value.  A further complication emerges in that it is widely believed that Pragmatism was purged from the philosophical mainstream and rendered dormant sometime around 1950, and then recovered only in the 1980s by Richard Rorty. In her new book, The American Pragmatists (Oxford University Press, 2013), Cheryl Misak presents a nuanced analysis of the origins, development, and prospects of Pragmatism.  She shows that Pragmatism has always come in a variety of flavors, ranging from the highly objectivist views of Peirce and C. I. Lewis to the more subjectivist commitments of James and Richard Rorty.  More importantly, Misak demonstrates that Pragmatism has been a constantly evolving philosophical movement that has consistently shaped the landscape of English-language philosophy.  On Misak’s account, Pragmatism is the philosophical thread that runs through the work of the most influential philosophers of the past century.  Her book will be of interest to anyone with interest in Pragmatism or twentieth-century philosophy.

Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, the shirtless Duce, Ferraris, Vespas, doping scandals, World Cup celebrations, Serie A officials on the take, Il Grande Torino, and the barefoot marathoner Abebe Bikila.  You find all this and more in Simon Martin’s history of Italian sports, Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair with Sport (I.B.Tauris, 2011). Simon’s book is sports history at its best—that is, it’s history at its fullest.  As you hear in the interview, Italian sport offers a window to understanding the country’s uneven economic development, its fractious politics, the ideology and aesthetics of Fascism, the unrelenting weight of corruption, the role of the Catholic Church, and the persistent divide between North and South.  Above all, there is the unresolved question of what it means to be Italian.  Metternich’s adage that “Italy is only a geographical expression” still holds a kernel of truth, some 150 years after the Risorgimento. One of Simon’s principal arguments is that sport is the one thing which most consistently binds the country together. Simon’s book was awarded the 2012 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize, presented each year by the British Society for Sports History.  This was the second time he’s received the award, having won in 2004 for his history of Italian football under Fascism.  You can also find interviews with other winners of the Aberdare Prize in the New Books in Sports archive: the 2011 winners, Chris Young and Kai Schiller, talking about their book on the 1972 Munich Olympics; and Tony Collins on his history of English rugby union, which won the award for 2010.        

[Cross-posted from New Books in African Studies] It’s a routine observation that journalists never give Africa a fair shake of the dice: they’re only ever there for the famines and wars. James Brabazon is a journalist who made his career in Africa, first in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and then in places like Zimbabwe and DRC. His book My Friend the Mercenary: A Memoir (Canongate, 2010), is about a friendship that grew up with an unlikely figure – a white mercenary and former colonel in the apartheid-era South African special forces – and how he was almost caught up in a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea that saw this unlikely friend spend six years in one of the continent’s worst prisons. My Friend the Mercenary certainly does have that typical African background of war and violence, but it is not fly-in, fly-out journalism. It’s a very human book that sheds light on how wars build bonds between people, how wrong decisions cost lives, and about the difficulties of looking for the real impact of violence on ordinary people. There is a first-hand account of the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea (and civil war in Liberia) that is closer to the events than anything else out there. The book is also a very African story that gives the continent far more texture and sympathy than most other works of journalism. First and foremost ‘My friend the mercenary’ is also an extraordinary story, well written, and a cracking good read. I hope you enjoy the interview.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Since the “taiko boom” of the closing decades of the twentieth century, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performance medium. Shawn Bender’s recent book takes us through the history and spaces of this art, from the stretching of animal skins to make its instruments through the seemingly incongruous sounds of taiko in The Scorpion King. Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion (University of California Press, 2012) is a wonderfully rich study that will satisfy readers completely unfamiliar with the medium, as well as taiko aficionados. Based on years of fieldwork with a number of groups and extended experience living and working with taiko performers, Bender’s work focuses on the ways that the history and ethnography of taiko can help us understand how living and performing in modern global societies transforms our experience of the local, and how the performance of locality is embodied in the muscles and bones of human flesh. In the course of our conversation we spoke of many aspects of the work and of taiko, including the marathon-running drummers of Kodo, Pierre Cardin’s taste for loincloths, and interesting recent attempts to standardize taiko drumming through printed textbooks. Enjoy!

The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink’s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had become a prominent media presence in Korea and abroad. Framing the story within the larger discourse of Pŏpko ch’angshin (preserving the old while creating the new), SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2012) introduces readers and listeners to the wider history of Korean percussion music. Hesselink locates the roots of SamulNori in itinerant performance culture in Korea, focusing in particular on the namsadang wandering minstrels and their acrobatics, puppetry, and other performing arts in what reads as a wonderful contribution to the broader history of movement and itinerancy in world history. (Fans of the film The King and the Clown [Wang ui namja, 2005] will recognize this category of namsadang performers!) A CD is included with the book, allowing readers to listen in on some of the major SamulNori works in Hesselink’s account. (My particular favorites were the songs produced by the collaboration between SamulNori and the Euro-American jazz quartet Red Sun.) Readers who are already acquainted with traditional Korean percussion will find much of interest in this history, and others will find a new world of music to explore.  Enjoy!

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco’s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) pays special attention to the many resonances of emplacement and locality, and to the agency of the Vesuvian landscape, as it explores the continuities and transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century volcanic landscape. Volcanology emerged along with Neapolitan identity while volcanoes became emblematic of the south in the writings of European travelers: rumbling, unpredictable, given to heated eruptions. Cocco’s account shows us the beauty of these transformations as they were embodied in paintings, poems, letters, and other media. Scholars and enthusiasts of the urban and political history of Europe will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the history of vernacular understandings of nature. Enjoy!

Patrick Dunleavy is the author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection (Potomac Books, 2011). He provides us with a fascinating insight into the radicalization process within the prison system. This is a sensitive topic but Dunleavy does not provide a political commentary on radicalization or Islam but rather acknowledges that the process can occur and gives us a detailed recounting of one such group within the New York Correctional system. He discusses a few key characters and how they ended up in prison and the circumstances that led to their participation in radical thought. The most interesting parts of the book for me were the methods of prison life that aided the process; the ability to communicate with the outside world and the massaging of internal security routines to allow interaction and coordination with others inside the system. This is not a morality play, but rather a description of a process. We can certainly learn a lot through books such as these that reduce our naivety about the ingenuity of prison inmates who have a lot of time to think and experiment with their immediate environment. Radicalization is a serious issue but for me this was a book more about the world of incarceration than terrorism.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary’s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in Biography] Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death. In light of this tendency,  Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II. And the music! That voice! ”Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title. “That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does. *No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press.