New Books Network

[Cross-posted in New Books in Biography] When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role—yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now. In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences. While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension of La Nouvelle Revue Française,  she demonstrates the rare coming together of an artist and the art of his time to form “un present parfait.” It was a year that influenced not only his poetry but also his prose. As Hargrove writes, the theater Eliot encountered while in Paris “may have been the inspiration for the difficult dramatic goal which Eliot later set for himself: to write verse drama in an age conditioned to prose and to write of spiritual and moral concerns in an age largely devoid of and unsympathetic to them.” But perhaps most impressive- especially to any lover of Paris- is Hargrove’s meticulous recreation of the city as it was then. Through chapters on sport, popular entertainment, transportation, etc., she elegantly situates the young poet amid a city so alive it seems to strain against the page. The end result is a book that leaves the reader longing for both the poetry and Paris.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Biography] From the moment it first hit the headlines in August 1933, the case of Violette Nozière captivated France, embodying the prevailing uneasiness regarding class, gender, and sexuality. It was a damn good story, one whose details shifted with the passing weeks and months, and it was precisely this “troubling ambiguity” that so captured the nation’s attention. As Sarah Maza writes in her excellent new biography, Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (University of California Press, 2011): “The controversy around Violette was constant and wrenching, yet never clearly burst into the open. It was disturbing in an entirely new way.” The Nozière case came at a time when both French intellectuals and the masses were particularly enamored of crime culture, and it was rendered all the more beguiling by the fact that nobody knew who to root for: the father who abused his daughter, the daughter who killed him, and the mother who repudiated her in court. All of the protagonists, at one time or another, seemed incredibly sketch. The Nozières were a typical lower middle class family in which something had gone horribly wrong and, as new information was revealed, sympathies shifted over and over again. Were Violette’s parents ambitious upstarts or representative of the upwardly mobile lower middle class? Had they lost control of their willful daughter or enabled her wildness by granting her excessive freedoms? Was Violette a horrible monster or the victim of sexual abuse? Maza gorgeously weaves together social history, crime culture, gender theory, and thorough research to present the complexities of the crime. Simultaneously, she incorporates small details regarding everyday, inter-war Parisian life, which grounds both Violette and her crime in a concreteness that is often missing in history books. She writes: “The story of a specific girl in a particular family matters because when social scientists use expressions like ‘geographic mobility,’ ‘growth of the service sector,’ or ‘democratic consolidation,’ there is a danger not just that we will put down what we are reading but, more importantly, that we will forget that these were experiences that affected the real lives of people in concrete and dramatic ways.”

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned, the “bad guys” of Western history, for they (apparently) didn’t like reason, truth, progress and all that. First among the black-hats was Joseph de Maistre. He believed the French Revolution was “satanic,” as were the ideas behind it. Or so I thought until I read Carolina Armenteros‘ excellent book The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Turns out de Maistre was a good deal more subtle and thoughtful than the “received view” of him suggests, and Carolina does a marvelous job of making plain how and why. In this interview, Carolina explains not only the complexity of his thought, but also that he wasn’t really French, let alone a black-hat wearing reactionary.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] In the late 19th century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-industrial areas like Paris, left people without the sense of belonging that characterized “traditional” life. Durkheim was not alone in thinking that there was something fundamentally sick-making about modernity. Marx called the modern malady “alienation” (Entfremdung), Weber called it “disenchantment” (Entzauberung), and Freud called it “discontent” (Unbehagen). The more general term used in fin de siècle Europe was “neurasthenia,” a condition of nervous exhaustion caused by the frenetic pace of modern life. The theory that modernity was pathological was put to the test on several occasions in the early twentieth century. One of the earliest was the Paris flood of 1910. It’s the subject of Jeffrey H. Jackson‘s wonderfully told tale Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010). By Jackson’s revealing lights, social science did not fare very well. When the Seine river literally rose up out of the ground and over its banks, things in Paris did not fall apart as Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Freud might have predicted. Far from it: the Parisians generally pulled together, fought the rising waters, and helped one another. They were not “normless,” “alienated,” “disenchanted,” or “discontented.” They knew just who they were: French citizens. They knew just what to do: lend a hand. And they knew just why they did it: national duty. This isn’t to say that some sort of ideal democracy magically emerged out of the flood waters. It didn’t. As is always the case, people in desperate situations do desperate (and often stupid) things. The deluge ripped the veneer of normalcy from daily life and revealed underlying conflicts. But more than anything else the Paris flood revealed the remarkable strength of modern republican nation-states. Unlike their much praised “traditional” counterparts—the monarchies of early modern Europe—they did not fall apart when put under significant strain. They cohered and even grew stronger. We shouldn’t think, however, that this solidarity was an entirely good thing. National unity had a much darker side, as would be shown only a few years later. Nations are often very good at helping themselves, as the Paris flood demonstrated. But they are also very good (if “good” is the right word) at fighting other nations, as was demonstrated with horrible clarity in World War I and World War II. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Having  found themselves in a very nasty war with the Germans, the French decided that it might be useful to enlist their African and Southeast Asian colonials in the fighting. As Richard Fogarty demonstrates in his excellent new book  Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (The Johns Hopkins University Press,  2008), this effort to draft the colonials led to no end of paradoxes. France was the home of Republicanism, and Republicans are supposed to be keen on  liberté, égalité, fraternité. But the colonials weren’t at liberty–they were subjects. Neither were they equal–they enjoyed few of the rights of the native French. And of course they weren’t  brothers–rather they were “children” of France.  Yet the French felt free to ask their colonial underlings to undertake the highest act of civic sacrifice, namely, to fight and die for la Patrie. Would this sacrifice earn them liberté, égalité, fraternité? No. In fact, it didn’t earn them much but a hellish trip to what looked like the end of the world. For, as Fogarty shows, French racism trumped French Republicanism throughout the war (and after, one might add). The colonial soldiers were segregated, stereotyped, and often used as cannon fodder. Some French felt bad about this. But most didn’t. After all, the colonials needed to be “civilized” in order to enjoy the fruits of Republicanism, and presumably the French believed that asking them to die for their would-be motherland would help accomplish this feat. All it probably did was engender bitterness, as the French were to discover some decades later when their empire slipped away. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out. France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic settlement. So which was it to be: France a nation of free-thinking citizens or France a nation of Catholic Frenchmen? The question was not definitively answered during the Dreyfus Affair, but new (and somewhat disturbing) possibilities were sketched out. The analysis of these new paths is one (among many) of the great strengths of Ruth Harris‘s new book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt, 2010) . She shows that both sides—the Dreyfusards (aka “Intellectuals”) and the Anti-Intellectuals—used the Affair to elaborate their visions for France and, in the process, worked themselves into a tizzy. They began to believe things that, well, only a lunatic could believe. French political culture entered a kind of surreal moment (a bit like American political culture during the O.J. trial if you ask me). Alas, the French didn’t quickly come back to reality after the Affair ended. They organized parties and continued to fight. And they are still fighting. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Human Rights] It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity—perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on—with the executioner’s aid—the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless. Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a necessary evil. They had come to view execution as a sort of ultimate banishment, and not as an opportunity for an object lesson. It was a tool for getting rid of people—the quicker and quieter, the better. In fact, the French government finally put an end to public executions in 1939 when one particular guillotine collided with photo journalism. No matter how speedy the blade, the shutter was faster. Historian Paul Friedland concludes his rich and expansive new book, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), by drawing back the curtain on this aspect of the guillotine’s past. Even more importantly, moreover, Friedland demonstrates that modern preoccupations with exemplary deterrence as a justification for punishment have led to distortions in how we understand public executions as they happened in the past. He begins his study in the medieval period, where he observes that public executions functioned mainly as rituals for repairing damage to the social fabric. He then follows the thread over half a millennium, tracing many evolutions in attitudes and practice, but never finding deterrence theory at work quite as some commentators have. Paul Friedland is an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012).

What if analysts took steps to keep their analysands out of the hospital when they were beginning to breakdown? What would that look like? In Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown (Routledge, 2013), the eminent psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, walks us through that process. Beginning with his treatment of psychotic and manic depressive patients in the 1970s in London, Bollas sought to increase patients psychoanalytic sessions and to work with a team of psychiatrists and social workers who were analytically savvy. When these fragile patients disturbances became heightened, Bollas et co. worked in such a way that none of his patients needed to endure the shock and awe of hospitalization. Now, 40 years later, he has published a book that looks deeply into a way of working that confidently declares psychoanalysis to be THE treatment of choice for the person breaking down. By expanding sessions from five times a week to twice a day seven days a week or from morning to early evening, he discusses with us how breakdowns attended to in this way can become their antithesis: a breakthrough. He is passionate and as always, an intelligent maverick. This interview promises to give analysts and analysands cause to pause regarding our relationship to the frame and the doing of business as usual. His belief in the human need to find a human other to hear us in our darkest moments, an other especially attuned to unconscious meanings, is convincing. For Bollas, being with a person breaking down demands we change our modus operandi. A breakdown is in a way an opportunity that can be dealt with by psychoanalytic means. To not attend to a breakdown is to put the analysand at risk of simply and devastatingly sealing over the elementary forces that brought the breakdown to the surface in the first place. Always thought provoking, in this interview Bollas weds theory and technique, expanding the reach of psychoanalysis with great creativity.

Marc Ambinder is the author, with D.B. Grady, of Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (Wiley, 2013). He is a contributing editor at GQ and The Atlantic magazine, and has served as White House Correspondent for National Journal. His new book investigates executive power and the role secrets play in US policy making. He weaves together eye-opening stories with a larger meditation on transparency and open government. His story toward the end of the book about a Secret Service accidentally shooting at and missing the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while he entered a vehicle in New York, has already drawn considerable interest for what it may say about the relationship between the Bush Administration and Iran. Why wasn’t that secret ever leaked?

To read Samuel Amadon’s latest book of poems, The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), is to know for the rest of your life what it feels like to be punched in the nose. In these poems, we are introduced to a band of misfits who turn deviant behavior into a sublime activity. The poems, written in a street-wise vernacular, are honest to the point of humiliation and despair. Full of rhetorical and formal mania, the poems produce in the reader feelings of anxiety and heightened awareness, and joined with the shocking content, the final effect is devastating. The Hartford Book is a journey to the underworld where the slum and street-corners are enchanted, and there’s only one outlaw – the poet – that seems remotely aware of an alternative path, a path that leads straight out of Hartford. In the interview, the poet and I discuss a variety of topics: the poet in the academy, the process of writing The Hartford Book, the formal aspects of his poetry, and much much more. I hope you enjoy our talk as much as I did.

Sarah Reckhow is the author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics (Oxford University Press 2013). Reckhow is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. Her book probes significant questions about the role of philanthropic foundations in education reform. Through in-depth case studies of New York City and Los Angeles, Reckhow demonstrates how a particular view of school reform has been funded by major foundations such as Gates and Eli Broad. Emphasizing new types of schools, particularly charter schools, and reforms focused around a business-oriented view of school management, foundations have reshaped education in these two cities. Yet differences in governance that exist between the two cities also have resulted in a different role for funders and funding. Reckhow weaves together this story with novel data collection and excellent interviews. The book should be read by scholars in public policy, education, and nonprofit studies.

Aminda M. Smith’s fascinating new book traces the history of transformations in the way that the PRC understood social control, deviance, and thought reform. Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) excavates the histories of thieves, prostitutes, and beggars from a wide range of letters, diaries, novels, films, memoirs, oral histories, media accounts, and classified government documents. Reintegrating vagrants into the history of reeducation changes how we understand the scope and nature of the Chinese Communist thought reform project. Smith takes us into the reeducation centers that served as laboratories where the rapidly changing ideas about the relationships between thought reform, labor, and individuals were worked out over the course of the early twentieth century. Taking readers from the countryside into urban centers and ultimately into Beijing, the book traces the emergence and metamorphosis of notions of the “People” over the course of this history, paying special attention to the central role that marginal figures of society played in definitions of this crucial concept. In addition to introducing some of the fascinating individuals that populate Smith’s account, in the course of our conversation we also talked about the opportunities and challenges of accessing those stories from an archive of “official sources.” Enjoy!

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe’s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to reflect on the reinterpretation and refashioning of alchemy from the eighteenth century to the present. Principe’s pages reveal histories of alchemy that are wonderfully rich and diverse, and we meet them in laboratories, recipes, images, dramatic plays, and poems. In the course of our conversation, we talked about aspects of the craft of the alchemist as well as that of the historian, including Principe’s fascinating attempts to recreate alchemical recipes and practices in his own laboratory. Enjoy!

In 2008, when entertainment magnate Lalit Modi launched the Indian Premier League, he took a title that was new to the world of cricket: Commissioner. Modi’s idea for the structure of the IPL had American origins.  He had studied in the United States in the mid-1980s, where he encountered the model of professional teams not as clubs rooted to their communities but as franchises held by wealthy owners, and thus saleable for handsome profit.  In American professional sports, each cartel of these franchises is led by a single, powerful executive.  Roger Goodell of the NFL and David Stern of the NBA represent the model of the Commissioner as CEO: they punish players, coaches, and even team owners for violations of rules, but more importantly, they work to increase the reach and revenue of the league and its teams.  As Lalit Modi recognized, a league led by a single Commissioner, rather than a fractious governing board, ensured that decision-making would be streamlined, negotiations with sponsors and networks would be straightforward, and profits for all of the owners would increase. The model of the league Commissioner comes from America’s oldest professional team sport: baseball.  Amidst scandal in the game and rancor among team owners, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed Commissioner in 1920 and given extensive powers, in an attempt to save baseball from itself.  The title of Andrew Zimbalist’s book, In the Best Interests of Baseball: Governing the National Pastime (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), refers to the mandate that Landis and his successors received from the owners: they were to ensure that the game would not be sullied by the corruption of players or the greed of owners.  But there was one problem: baseball’s commissioners were appointed by and served at the pleasure of the team owners.  In the decades following Landis’ appointment, there was constant struggle between the holder of the office and the owners who paid his salary over the power and role of the Commissioner.  The story that Andy tells in his book is the evolution of this baseball institution, from Judge Landis to current Commissioner Bud Selig, a former team owner who now governs the game in the interest of the owners. Bud Selig has been much maligned by baseball fans, including the host of this podcast.  But Andy offers a new view of the Commissioner.  The Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College, Andy is the author of many books on the economics of baseball, and he has served as a consultant on various matters related to baseball, for teams, municipal councils, and even the Office of the Commissioner.  He has been a strong critic of Selig, but his overall appraisal of the Commissioner is favorable.  Baseball is stronger and more stable now than it was twenty years ago.  The question is: what will happen when the current, strong Commissioner steps aside?

“First do no harm.” Every doctor in the Western medical tradition swears to observe this basic principle of the Hippocratic oath before he or she receives a license to practice. Yet in Nazi Germany, doctors who had sworn to heal participated in grotesque medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners, conducted sterilization campaigns against their fellow-citizens, refused treatment to terminally ill patients, and supported euthanasia, eugenics, and antisemitism. How did they justify such a perversion of their calling? This is the question that Douglas R. Skopp addresses in Shadows Walking (CreateSpace, 2010), his extensively researched account of the intertwining lives—like the snakes on Aesculapius’s staff—of two fictional German doctors, the boyhood friends Johann Brenner and Philipp Stein, from 1928 to their final meeting near the end of World War II. The novel opens in Nuremberg in 1946, with Johann working under an alias as a janitor in the Palace of Justice, where the Allied trials of Nazi war criminals are underway. A chance meeting with his estranged wife—furious to discover that her husband has been hiding in the city for months—sparks in Johann a desire to explain in a letter the crimes he has committed since he last saw her, the reasons why he has allowed her to believe that he died in the last days of the war. Every paragraph of his letter leads into a flashback that reveals a segment of his past and pushes Johann farther down the road to Nazism and Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Philipp, as a German Jew, experiences the shrinking horizons and worsening abuse that Nazism inflicted on its victims. Because of its subject matter, Shadows Walking is not easy to read, but it is an important book, well worth the investment of time and energy. Skopptraces the path by which fundamentally decent people can descend into barbarism if they forget the importance of compassion. It could happen in Germany—and did. It could happen here. It could happen anywhere.