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According to Wikipedia, recorded discoveries of bog bodies—human bodies which have been found remarkably preserved by the unique conditions of the sphagnum bogs in which they are found—go back as far as the 18th century. The mystery surrounding the significance of these bodies and the nature of their demise has for centuries provoked a macabre fascination in the public mind, but until the mid-twentieth century, no one even knew how long the bodies had lain in their muddy graves. As Philip Hoare notes in a recent book review in the Telegraph, it was not until Danish archaeologist PV Glob's 1969 book The Bog People, that many of these bodies were revealed to be human sacrifices dating back to the early iron age. As Hoare writes "sentenced to death for worldly crimes but slain to propitiate the terrible deities, they were strangled with leather nooses or were pinned face down with wooden struts to drown in the mud."

Hoare continues:

As a young girl in Copenhagen, Karin Sanders, [author of the new book on the subject Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination], was also a fan of Glob's book. But hers is a decidedly post-modern account, one which seeks to show how the bog bodies took their place in our culture, out of theirs, 'estranged from us even as they mirror us'. She deftly teases out the paradoxes: born of neither land nor water but something in between, the bodies are an uncanny link between the pagan beliefs that prompted their deaths and our own supposedly rational world.

Demonstrating the profound impact these discoveries have made on modern western society, Sanders shows how these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past.

To find out more read the complete review in the Telegraph.

Archived in Biology | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Today marks the 24th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle disaster. On January 28, 1986, 73 seconds into flight, the NASA rocket exploded and disintegrated over Cape Canaveral. The tragedy was especially devastating because schoolchildren in classrooms across the country watched the launch live in support of New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe. What began as a celebration quickly turned into calamity, as the plume of the explosion seared into a generation's memory.

In the aftermath of the disaster, journalists and investigators blamed production problems and managerial wrong-doing. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect.

But there was much more going on behind the scenes. Ten years after Challenger, the Press published The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA by sociologist Diane Vaughan. In it, she recreates the steps leading up to the fateful launch decision, contradicting conventional interpretations to prove that what occurred at NASA was not skulduggery or misconduct but a disastrous mistake. In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.

No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster is a story not of evil but of the banality of organizational life. This powerful work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be reexamined and offers an unexpected warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.

Archived in Books for the News
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The New Republic has just debuted its new online book reviews site, and in the midst of clicking around we were pleased to note that The Book as it's called, is featuring one of our titles amongst its inaugural reviews. In an article posted to the site last Wednesday, Harvard economist Edward L. Gleaser reviews Dominic A. Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography—a thoroughly detailed and uncommonly intimate portrait of the city and its inhabitants written by a native Chicagoan. In his piece Glaeser inventories a few of the main topics in the book including Chicago's rapid industrial growth in the early 20th century, the city's role in the invention of the skyscraper, and Pacyga's unique focus on the stories of the city's working class.

Navigate to TNR's The Book to read the full review and see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
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Gina Ulysse, author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, has been quite busy in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti. Born in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, since her hometown's recent tragedy, Ulysse has been inundated with calls asking for her insights—as both a former resident and current scholar of Haiti—on the quake, its aftermath, and what it means for the future of one of the poorest and most embattled countries in the Western hemisphere. She has done numerous interviews and op-eds for NPR, the Huffington Post, and PRI's The World radio program with more to come. Click on the links to navigate to the articles—we'll update the page as more of Ulysse's commentary becomes available. In the meantime find out more about Ulysse's fascinating study of entrepreneurial women in the Caribbean isle in Downtown Ladies.

Update: As promised here are a couple more links to some of Ulysse's recent writing and commentary on Haiti:

From the January 11 edition of the Huffington Post, an article titled ""Avatar," Voodoo and White Spiritual Redemption"

From Duke University's Social Text journal — "Dehumanization & Fracture: Trauma at Home & Abroad"

And listen to this interview with Ulysse and Kate Ramsey, historian of Haiti and the Caribbean from Wisconsin Public Radio's Here On Earth: Radio Without Borders.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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"What has most distinguished American responses to destruction over the past three centuries or so is a widespread conviction, born of beliefs and experience, that calamities are instruments of progress. In place of stoic resolve, many Americans (and certainly dominant American ideologies) embrace disasters as a means of escaping from the present into a better future."

Kevin Rozario is associate professor in the American Studies program at Smith College.

Also see Rozario's recent article on the Haitian earthquake for the Wall Street Journal or read an excerpt from The Culture of Calamity.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Elaine Allensworth, co-author of a new study recently released by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, was invited on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight yesterday to discuss the book's findings. The book tracks the effects over a twenty year period of the radical program of reform put in place by the Illinois General Assembly in 1988—a program which has utilized some controversial tactics to accomplish its goals from the consolidation of students, to staff replacements, to wholesale school closures. Listen in as Allensworth and others deliver an insightful analysis of the project to reform Chicago's public school system on the Chicago Public Radio website, then read an excerpt from Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Education
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This morning the Supreme Court invalidated the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the McCain-Feingold Act) as well as overturning its previous decisions upholding restrictions on corporate spending in political elections. An article in the New York Times states: "The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle—that the government has no business regulating political speech."

Back in 2004 we published The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform by John Samples which made exactly that argument about campaign finance laws generally and the McCain-Feingold Act in particular. Samples argued that restrictions on campaign contributions not only inhibit the exercise of the constitutional right to speech, but that there is little to no evidence that campaign contributions really influence members of Congress. And that so-called negative political advertising improves the democratic process. And that limits on campaign contributions make it harder for new candidates to run for office, thereby protecting incumbents.

Back in 2004 our copywriters wrote that The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform "defies long-held assumptions and conventional political wisdom." Let’s now add that it accurately predicted the future.

We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
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A poem by August Kleinzahler appearing in the January 7 issue of the London Review of Books recently caught our eye. We were charmed by not only its title, "The Exquisite Atmography of Thomas Appletree, Diarist of Edgiock," and its unforgettable lines (such as "BALSAMIC PANSPERMICAL PANACEA JUICE OF HEAVEN") but by its purported source: the 1703 of weather diaries of Thomas Appletree. A young and educated man, Appletree recorded, in meticulous detail and unique poetic style (a "speciall Language" which Kleinzahler honors in his poem), descriptions of the weather over Worcestershire in western England every day throughout the year 1703. The diarist aspired to great renown, writing "I should think my name as immortall" as astronomer Johannes Hevelius, whose maps of the moon had been published in 1647. Alas, he failed to even include his name on his great contribution. But recently historian Jan Golinski, in researching Enlightenment attitudes about the weather, rescued the diary, identified its author, and set out to subject the document to its first serious scholarly study since its creation.

Appletree and his weather diary feature prominently in Golinski's 2007 book British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment. In it, he reveals how a new sense of the national climate emerged in the eighteenth century from the systematic recording of the weather, and how it was deployed in discussions of the health and welfare of the population. Enlightened intellectuals hailed climate's role in the development of civilization but acknowledged that human existence depended on natural forces that would never submit to rational control. Reading the Enlightenment through the ideas, beliefs, and practices concerning the weather, Jan Golinski aims to reshape our understanding of the movement and its legacy for modern environmental thinking. With its combination of cultural history and the history of science, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment counters the claim that Enlightenment progress set humans against nature, instead revealing that intellectuals of the age drew characteristically modern conclusions about the inextricability of nature and culture.

Though the "obstinate" cold which "begins to pinch my fingers in writing" is history, Appletree lives on in Golinski's pages and in Kleinzahler's poetry. And more than three hundred years on, we're still talking about the weather, albeit less colorfully than the diarist of Edgiock.

Archived in Books for the News
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Kevin Rosario, author of The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America has written an insightful piece for the Wall Street Journal on Haiti's recent tragedy. Drawing on the topic of his book Rosario's article offers a brief historical account of how Western culture has interpreted similar disasters in the past and details the rise of what he calls a "dominant narrative of disasters as instruments of progress"—a narrative which, in light of recent calamities like Katrina and Haiti, Rosario notes might itself be starting to fall apart.

Navigate to the Wall Street Journal website to read the article, or for a more thorough examination of how disasters have played out in the Western consciousness pick up a copy of The Culture of Calamity, or read an excerpt.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Psychology | Sociology
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The University of Arizona in conjunction with PBS has posted an interesting video featuring Fulvio Melia on the topic of his new book Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics. Check it out below. More info on the book follows.

For decades after its initial publication Einstein's theory of general relativity, which used six interlocking equations to describe the effect of gravitation on the shape of space and the flow of time, remained largely a curiosity for scientists. Further research into Einstein's work was hindered by its extreme complexity and lack of empirical verifiability. That is, until a twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate solved its great riddle in 1963. Roy Kerr's solution emerged coincidentally with the discovery of black holes that same year and provided fertile testing ground—at long last—for general relativity. Today, scientists routinely cite the Kerr solution, but even among specialists, few know the story of how Kerr cracked Einstein's code.

In Cracking the Einstein Code Fulvio Melia offers an eyewitness account of the events leading up to Kerr's great discovery. Melia vividly describes how luminaries such as Karl Schwarzschild, David Hilbert, and Emmy Noether set the stage for the Kerr solution; how Kerr came to make his breakthrough; and how scientists such as Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking used the accomplishment to refine and expand modern astronomy and physics. Today more than 300 million supermassive black holes are suspected of anchoring their host galaxies across the cosmos, and the Kerr solution is what astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe much of their behavior.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What you can do right now: Donate $10 to the American Red Cross—charged to your cell phone bill—by texting "HAITI" to "90999."

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An article on the NPR website on workplace diversity poses the question "should The Office be used in HR training?" And while anyone familiar with the show might find the question itself quite laughable, the article quotes Sheri Leonardo, senior vice president for human resources at Ogilvy Public Relations saying "as an HR person, I sometimes cringe… some of the stuff is so outlandish, politically incorrect, morally incorrect and everything else—but at the same time I say, 'God, I would love to take clips of this and use it for training, because it's so perfect.'"

Ogilvy argues that The Office, where the exaggerated insensitivity and ignorance of its characters serves as the basis for much of its humor, offers some entertaining insight into issues of workplace diversity and often employs scenarios that Ogilvy says are not too far from what people often encounter in the real world.

NPR quotes Jean Mavrelis, author with Thomas Kochman of a recent book on such issues, Corporate Tribalism: White Men/White Women and Cultural Diversity at Work, who shares Ogilvy's view that despite claims that we now live in a "post-racial America," workplace diversity is still a major issue. Mavrelis remarks: "You'd be surprised how many executives are sent to our diversity class to be 'sensitized' so they don't have to be fired." The article continues:

But if an office environment is too restrictive, Mavrelis says, that tension is often counterproductive.

"The worst climate for learning about diverse others," she said, "is one in which white males are afraid that someone will call the diversity hot line and end their careers if they make a 'mistake.'"

…

"It is [also] critical to create a climate where diversity 'mistakes' can be made and people can be learners," Mavrelis says.

That means that someone who has been accused of being insensitive, or even racist, should be ready to apologize—and to learn from the experience. The key is that people consider the impact words and deeds have on people with different social and cultural experiences from their own.

'We've been able to move people to a place where they go from taking cross-cultural communication breakdowns personally, to asking themselves, 'I wonder if something cultural is going on here,' which changes the conversations," Mavrelis said.

Still, anyone who might be tempted to use Office-style humor to bridge cultural barriers in the workplace ought to be very careful.

"Humor is the least effective way to build relationships at work, yet having a sense of humor is critical," she said.

"The episode of The Office where they celebrate 'Diversity Day' [see the clip below] is hysterical," Mavrelis said, "and shows how difficult it is to discuss diversity when people don't know what they don't know."

The best way for a white boss like Michael Scott to build cross-cultural relationships at work, Mavrelis says, is to help a diverse group of employees develop their careers.

"That builds trust, which in turn builds goodwill for when white folks do make the inevitable diversity blunders," she said.

Read the full article on the NPR website.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
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Last November we were pleased to note that Randall Couch was the recipient of Corneliu M Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation for his translation from the Spanish of Mad Women by Chilean Gabriela Mistral. The award—named after the translator of the work of one of Romania's leading poets—highlights the important, but unfortunately relatively scarce, contributions of literature in translation to the English speaking world. The award was announced by judges Elaine Feinstein and Stephen Romer on Thursday, 19 November 2009 in an event at London's Romanian cultural center, the Ratiu Foundation, which has recently posted some photographs of the event on their website. For more on the award navigate to http://www.romanianculturalcentre.org.uk/.

About Madwomen:

A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral's most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.

From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting "madwomen" who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral's poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral's final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated "madwoman" than most have ever known.

Archived in Awards | Poetry
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Concerned about the current state of the American educational system? Then you won't want to miss this webinar hosted by the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago Thursday, January 14, 2010 9:00 am. The authors'—researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research—will present the findings contained in their book which provides a detailed analysis of why 100 of Chicago's elementary schools showed extraordinary progress in attendance and test scores over a seven-year period and why 100 others did not. The webinar will also feature an audience discussion and Q&A; after the talk. For more information about the webinar navigate to the website for the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute. For more about the book read an excerpt.

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The science section of today's New York Times is running an article about animal communication—more specifically, communication among some of our closest primate ancestors like chimpanzees, baboons, and monkeys—that sheds light on some of the recent research scientists have been conducting to decipher the meaning behind their grunts and yells.

In the hopes that this research will one day yield some insight into how the human faculty for language has evolved, as the article notes, scientists like Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth have dedicated their lives to studying primate societies in the field to help piece together a clearer evolutionary road map between monkeys, and us.

The NYT's Nicholas Wade cites the scientists' research published in several of their books, including their fascinating study of vervet monkeys in How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species, and their more recent Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, to demonstrate how their work has helped to reveal some primate species to possess a number of the essential faculties that also underlie human language.

"Yet," as Wade writes, "monkeys have been around for 30 million years without saying a single sentence. What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?"

In the article Cheney and Seyfarth, along with several other leading scientists in the field, offer some diverse hypotheses, but in the end it seems they all agree that the once blurry line between humans and our primate ancestors seems now to be coming into clearer focus.

Check out the science section of the NYT to read the article or read this excerpt from Baboon Metaphysics.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Books for the News
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As we've previously noted, Donald Westlake's (1933-2008) early Parker novels—the hard-boiled noir thrillers he wrote under the name Richard Stark—have been making a comeback since we began reissuing them in '08.

But we can't take all the credit for the resurgence of the ruthless Parker. In the summer of '09 Eisner Award-winning comic book artist Darwyn Cooke released his graphic adaptation of one of the first books of the series—The Hunter—at the 2009 Comic-Con International in San Diego where it made a big splash amongst the comic book world's elite tastemakers. And now it seems that the federally sanctioned tastemakers in Washington have taken notice too. According to Almost Darwyn Cooke's Blog Darwyn is scheduled to discuss his graphic adaptation of The Hunter at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Saturday January 30, 2010 starting at 4 PM. Mr. Westlake, I'm sure would be pleased to see such an enthusiastic reception of his classic character of crime fiction from all corners.

For more about the event see Calum Johnston's Almost Darwyn Cooke's Blog or check the event listing on the Smithsonian website.

For more about Darwyn's graphic adaptation of The Hunter check out his publisher's website at www.idwpublishing.com.

And finally, check the Press's website to find out more about the Parker novels and read this interview with the author.

Archived in Books for the News | Fiction
Posted by TXM at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Tribune's Julia Keller recently penned an article about a man who knows the city "like the back of his hand,"—and is one of its most prominent writers—Reginald Gibbons, whose evocative collection of writing about our fair city in Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories comes out April 2010.

Though a native of Houston, Gibbons' new collection reveals that his muse is clearly the city of Chicago, where he has lived and taught for many years as a professor of English at Northwestern University. As Keller writes:

It was coming to Chicago—a place in which, to Gibbons' eye, the past and present commingle in rackety yet luminous profusion—that truly set fire to his imagination, he says. "I got such a powerful feeling in Chicago, a feeling I've never gotten in New York—the historical echo of the spaces downtown, the feeling that everyone who has ever worked here is still here. There's a profoundly good feeling of being connected with the generations."

And in Slow Trains Overhead Gibbons combines this connection to the city of Chicago with his inimitable command of language to capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Read more about Reginald Gibbons on the Tribune website.

Archived in Chicago | Poetry | Reviews
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Allan Meltzer author of the definitive History of the Federal Reserve recently made an appearance on C-SPAN to discuss Federal Reserve policy before and after the financial crisis and the role that current chairman Benjamin Bernanke has played. While Bernanke has recently made it quite public that he believes that lax regulation of the financial industry rather than lax management at the Fed is to blame for the recession, Meltzer has some different ideas. Check out the streaming video below:

Check out the University of Chicago website for more about Meltzer's A History of the Federal Reserve.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
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As Patricia Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times reviewing two new books on higher education, "champions of the market can turn up in the oddest places. At the same time that bankers and businessmen are acknowledging the downsides of unregulated capitalism, college and university reformers are urging the academy to more closely embrace the marketplace." And one of the reformers Cohen reviews is our author.

In Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities James C. Garland draws on more than thirty years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. As Cohen writes:

Mr. Garland is concerned with putting public university systems on a solid financial footing. Although they educate 80 percent of the nation's college students, public institutions have seen their quality sapped by shrinking government aid, changing demographics and growing income inequality. In Saving Alma Mater, Mr. Garland argues that government should end subsidies altogether and allow supply and demand to rule. Let public universities compete for students and set their own tuitions. To ensure that poor students can afford to attend, legislatures should eliminate institutional financing and instead use that money for financial aid to individuals. In essence, he proposes a voucher system.…

Mr. Garland also wants to bring some market discipline to the culture of academia. While professors tend to be progressives, they are stubbornly conservative when it comes to change. Indeed, as Mr. Menand points out, early reformers argued that the only way to elevate excellence above profits in a capitalist society was by protecting the profession from the market's insistence on cash rewards.

The result, Mr. Garland maintains, is that professors are oblivious to the costs of complex procedures, drawn-out debates and layers of committees; appeals to increase efficiency and productivity are routinely scorned.

For more about Garland's take on financial reform in public universities read Cohen's complete review on the NYT website. Or check out the following links for a debate we hosted right here on the blog several weeks back when we invited Garland, and another of our authors, Gaye Tuchman—whose book Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University presents a formidable counterpoint—to dialogue on the issue.

Part 1

Part 2

Also read an excerpt from Garland's book and see the author's blog.

Archived in Economics | Education | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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An article in today's New York Times spotlights one of North America's most endangered large cats: the Florida panther. Despite lending its name to the local hockey team and its status as the state animal since 1982, Florida panthers (actually a subspecies of the North American cougar) have been on the brink of extinction for generations, mostly due to the depletion of their habitable range by agriculture and development.

Yet, as the NYT's Natalie Angier points out, these cats enjoy a certain amount of popularity in the south, perhaps because one of the biggest hurdles to gaining public support for conservation efforts in other parts of the country isn't a factor. As Angier writes "in contrast with mountain lions in California and other Western states, which have been known to ambush, kill and partly consume the occasional jogger or hiker, there are no recorded cases of a Florida panther's attacking a human being." Nevertheless, she writes, a rebound in development across the state could mean "it is only a matter of time and sustained human encroachment before a Florida panther pounces on a Florida land speculator." (On the other hand, perhaps this is one of the best arguments from an economic standpoint for preserving the species.)

Thus finding a path to a peaceful coexistence between humans and cougars is paramount in many conservationist's minds as we come to understand the role big cats play in the ecosystem. And perhaps no researcher has contributed more to this understanding than Maurice Hornocker who conducted the first long-term study of cougars in the Idaho wilderness in 1964 and is co-editor with Sharon Negri of a new book on the subject, Cougar: Ecology and Conservation. The capstone to Hornocker's long career studying big cats, Cougar is a powerful and practical resource for scientists, conservationists, and anyone with an interest in large carnivores. He and conservationist Sharon Negri bring together the diverse perspectives of twenty-two distinguished scientists to provide the fullest account of the cougar's ecology, behavior, and genetics, its role as a top predator, and its conservation needs. This compilation of recent findings, stunning photographs, and firsthand accounts of field research unravels the mysteries of this magnificent animal and emphasizes its importance in healthy ecosystem processes and in our lives.

For more about these fascinating creatures and their struggle for survival check out Natalie Angier's article in the New York Times or navigate to the press's website for more about the book.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The perfect remedy for those mid-winter blues, Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen's fascinating (not to mention funny) tale of their careers as the first interracial comedy team in the history of show business in Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White, is now available for download free from the Press website.

About the book:

As the heady promise of the 1960s sagged under the weight of widespread violence, rioting, and racial unrest, two young men—one black and one white—took to stages across the nation to help Americans confront their racial divide: by laughing at it.

Tim and Tom tells the story of that pioneering duo, the first interracial comedy team in the history of show business—and the last. Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen polished their act in the nightclubs of Chicago, then took it on the road, not only in the North, but in the still-simmering South as well, developing routines that even today remain surprisingly frank—and remarkably funny—about race. Most nights, the shock of seeing an integrated comedy team quickly dissipated in uproarious laughter, but on some occasions the audience's confusion and discomfort led to racist heckling, threats, and even violence. Though Tim and Tom perpetually seemed on the verge of making it big throughout their five years together, they grudgingly came to realize that they were ahead of their time: America was not yet ready to laugh at its own failed promise.

Eventually, the grind of the road took its toll, as bitter arguments led to an acrimonious breakup. But the underlying bond of friendship Reid and Dreesen had forged with each groundbreaking joke has endured for decades, while their solo careers delivered the success that had eluded them as a team. By turns revealing, shocking, and riotously funny, Tim and Tom unearths a largely forgotten chapter in the history of comedy.

Check back each month for more free e-books from the University of Chicago Press or for all our currently available e-books, see our complete list of e-books by subject.

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Biography | Chicago | Commentary
Posted by TXM at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)