A ROUNDUP OF 140 OR SO JAZZ, BLUES, BEYOND, AND OTHER BOOKS PUBLISHED IN THE PAST YEAR OR SO
1) BIOGRAPHIES
2) PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTIONS, HISTORY,
REFERENCE, CRITICISM, ETC.
3) MISCELLANEOUS
1) BIOGRAPHIES
Lew Shaw, Jazz Beat Encore: More Notes on Classic Jazz (AZtold Publishing Company)
“Even in a time of constant change, Classic Jazz is alive and well and continues to be relevant in today’s musical environment. ‘Classic’ is defined as ‘serving as a standard; an enduring example; always revered and never obsolete; a treasured art form that secures its future by honoring its past.’ In Jazz Beat Encore, More Notes on Classic Jazz, veteran jazz journalist Lew Shaw takes the reader along as he travels his jazz beat and presents a group of contemporary musicians who have interesting and reflective stories to tell that can only broaden a jazz fan’s appreciation of what it’s like to make music for a living as well as gain a better understanding of what is happening on the band stand. The 43 profiles in Jazz Beat Encore are a representative cross-section of today’s music makers: Dan Barrett, Butch Miles, Cynthia Sayer, Ehud Asherie, Rebecca Kilgore, Harry Allen, Joey Alexander, Randy Sandke, Wesla Whitfield, Chuck Redd, Scott Robinson, Howard Alden, John Allred, and thirty more.”
Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson (Chicago Review Press)
“An essential story of blues lore, black culture, and American music history. Robert Johnson’s recordings, made in 1936 and 1937, have profoundly influenced generations of singers, guitarists, and songwriters. Yet until now, his short life—he was murdered at the age of 27—has been poorly documented. Gayle Dean Wardlow has been interviewing people who knew Johnson since the early 1960s, and he was the person who discovered Johnson’s death certificate in 1967. Bruce Conforth began his study of Johnson’s life and music in 1970 and made it his mission to fill in what was still unknown about him. In this definitive biography, the two authors relied on every interview, resource, and document, much of it material no one has seen before. This is the first book about Johnson that documents his lifelong relationship with family and friends in Memphis, details his trip to New York, uncovers where and when his wife Virginia died and the impact this had on him, fully portrays the other women Johnson was involved with and tells exactly how and why he died and who gave him the poison that killed him. Up Jumped the Devil will astonish blues fans worldwide by painting a living, breathing portrait of a man who was heretofore little more than a legend.”
Bruce Conforth, former professor of folklore, blues, popular culture, and American history at the University of Michigan, was the founding curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Gayle Dean Wardlow is a highly regarded blues historian who has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of prewar blues records. His book Chasin’ That Devil Music is a classic of blues literature. He lives in Pensacola, Florida.
“This is the book the blues world has been waiting for. Authored by two uniquely qualified scholars following years of extensive interviews and exhaustive research, the result is fascinating, important, and factual, without agenda or embellished narrative. . . . It is in my view a far more moving account than many others that have been obscured by so much fantasy. It’s a can’t-put-it-down kind of book—an exciting, great read.” Rory Block, celebrated acoustic blues guitarist/singer and five-time Blues Music Award winner.
“Finally an in-depth biography of one of the greatest blues musicians ever. The clearing up of the myths and mysteries is a relief. The work of the authors is meticulous. They detail Robert Johnson's journey with facts, creating a full view of his life and times, his friends and influences, so the reader has a comprehensive understanding of how he came to be the greatest of the Delta bluesmen. I am blown away!” John Hammond, Jr., eight-time Blues Music Award winner, Grammy winner, and member of the Blues Hall of Fame.
“As the grandson of the iconic blues singer Robert Johnson, I’m honored that the truth is finally being revealed. . . . Up Jumped the Devil contains the real story of his life and does away with all the myths.” Steven Johnson, vice president, Robert Johnson Blues Foundation
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Annye C. Anderson, with Preston Lauterbach, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, Foreword by Elijah Wald (Hachette Books).
“Though Robert Johnson was only twenty-seven years young and relatively unknown at the time of his tragic death in 1938, his enduring recordings have solidified his status as a progenitor of the Delta blues style. And yet, while his music has retained the steadfast devotion of modern listeners, much remains unknown about the man who penned and played these timeless tunes. Few people alive today actually remember what Johnson was really like, and those who do have largely upheld their silence-until now. In Brother Robert, nonagenarian Annye C. Anderson sheds new light on a real-life figure largely obscured by his own legend: her kind and incredibly talented stepbrother, Robert Johnson. This book chronicles Johnson's unconventional path to stardom, from the harrowing story behind his illegitimate birth, to his first strum of the guitar on Anderson's father's knee, to the genre-defining recordings that would one day secure his legacy. Along the way, readers are gifted not only with Anderson's personal anecdotes, but with colorful recollections passed down to Anderson by members of their family-the people who knew Johnson best. Readers also learn about the contours of his working life in Memphis, never-before-disclosed details about his romantic history, and all of Johnson's favorite things, from foods and entertainers to brands of tobacco and pomade. Together, these stories don't just bring the mythologized Johnson back down to earth; they preserve both his memory and his integrity.
For decades, Anderson and her family have ignored the tall tales of Johnson "selling his soul to the devil" and the speculative to fictionalized accounts of his life that passed for biography. Brother Robert is here to set the record straight. Featuring a foreword by Elijah Wald and a Q&A with Anderson, Wald, Preston Lauterbach, and Peter Guralnick, this book paints a vivid portrait of an elusive figure who forever changed the musical landscape as we know it.”
Annye C. Anderson is a retired educator and organic gardener who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Preston Lauterbach (coauthor) is the author of Bluff City, Beale Street Dynasty, and The Chitlin'Circuit. He lives near Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Annye Anderson's lush, vivid memories from Robert Johnson's home base give the bluesman a personal dimension like never before. How he walked, the pomade in his hair, his protection of his guitar. The aura of mystery remains, but with Brother Robert, Johnson gains character and context, and becomes more of a person than we've ever known this specter to be.” Robert Gordon, author of Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, and It Came From Memphis.
Photographs, index.
Richard Carlin and Ken Bloom, Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm, and Race (Oxford University Press)
“A new biography of one of the key composers of 20th-century American popular song and jazz, Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race illuminates Blake's little-known impact on over 100 years of American culture. A gifted musician, Blake rose from performing in dance halls and bordellos of his native Baltimore to the heights of Broadway. In 1921, together with performer and lyricist Noble Sissle, Blake created Shuffle Along which became a sleeper smash on Broadway eventually becoming one of the top ten musical shows of the 1920s. Despite many obstacles Shuffle Along integrated Broadway and the road and introduced such stars as Josephine Baker, Lottie Gee, Florence Mills, and Fredi Washington. It also proved that black shows were viable on Broadway and subsequent productions gave a voice to great songwriters, performers, and spoke to a previously disenfranchised black audience. As successful as Shuffle Along was, racism and bad luck hampered Blake's career. Remarkably, the third act of Blake's life found him heralded in his 90s at major jazz festivals, in Broadway shows, and on television and recordings.
Tracing not only Blake's extraordinary life and accomplishments, Broadway and popular music authorities Richard Carlin and Ken Bloom examine the professional and societal barriers confronted by black artists from the turn of the century through the 1980s. Drawing from a wealth of personal archives and interviews with Blake, his friends, and other scholars, Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race offers an incisive portrait of the man and the musical world he inhabited.”
Richard Carlin is a Grammy Award-winning author of numerous books on popular music, including Country Music: A Very Short Introduction, The Big Book of Country, and Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways.
Ken Bloom is a Grammy Award-winning author of Show and Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes, Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time, and Broadway: An Encyclopedia. He is the co-founder of Harbinger Records, has been a Broadway correspondent for NPR and the CBC, and has directed and produced shows at Town Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, among other venues.
“Along with many others, I have been waiting for a new, scholarly, thorough, and insightful biography of this one-of-a-kind American figure. Finally, we have one, nicely-illustrated and carefully documented.” John Edward Hasse, author of Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington.
“Blake, in his ten decades of life, persevered through some highs and many lows, only to be truly celebrated for his remarkable talents when he reached his nineties. That we never, ever really know a person is a much-said truism. And yet, Carlin and Bloom, through their extensive and exhaustive research, will make a reader feel and believe that he indeed does know Eubie Blake.” Peter Filichia, critic emeritus of The Newark Star-Ledger.
Photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Ricky Riccardi, Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong (Oxford University Press).
“Nearly 50 years after his death, Louis Armstrong remains one of the 20th century's most iconic figures. Popular fans still appreciate his later hits such as "Hello, Dolly!" and "What a Wonderful World," while in the jazz community, he remains venerated for his groundbreaking innovations in the 1920s. The achievements of Armstrong's middle years, however, possess some of the trumpeter's most scintillating and career-defining stories. But the story of this crucial time has never been told in depth until now. Between 1929 and 1947, Armstrong transformed himself from a little-known trumpeter in Chicago to an internationally renowned pop star, setting in motion the innovations of the Swing Era and Bebop. He had a similar effect on the art of American pop singing, waxing some of his most identifiable hits such as "Jeepers Creepers" and "When You're Smiling." However as author Ricky Riccardi shows, this transformative era wasn't without its problems, from racist performance reviews and being held up at gunpoint by gangsters to struggling with an overworked embouchure and getting arrested for marijuana possession. Utilizing a prodigious amount of new research, Riccardi traces Armstrong's mid-career fall from grace and dramatic resurgence. Featuring never-before-published photographs and stories culled from Armstrong's personal archives, Heart Full of Rhythm tells the story of how the man called ‘Pops’ became the first ‘King of Pop.’”
Ricky Riccardi is Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum and author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years. He runs the online blog The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, and has given lectures on Armstrong at venues around the world, including the Institute of Jazz Studies, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Bristol International Jazz and Blues Festival, and the Monterey Jazz Festival. He has co-produced numerous Armstrong reissues in recent years, including Satchmo at Symphony Hall 65th Anniversary: The Complete Concert, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong Cheek to Cheek: The Complete Duets, Pops is Tops: The Verve Studio Albums, and two volumes of Decca Singles for Universal Music, in addition to Columbia and RCA Victor Live Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars for Mosaic Records.”
“Riccardi's Heart Full of Rhythm is the best account we have of Armstrong’s vital work with big bands, the research is impeccable, the ardor contagious.” Gary Giddins, author of Bing Crosby: Swinging On A Star The War Years, 1940-1946.
“This book is an exuberant treasury of new information about one of the most significant and influential musicians of all time. Most significant here is that this careful researcher torches the clich� that Armstrong rose in a 1920s flash and then fell onto the swords of commercialism. In soaring prose, Riccardi walks you through vital musical/cultural decades while re-introducing a man we thought we knew but who was even greater.” Robert G. O'Meally, Founder and Director Of Columbia University's Center For Jazz Studies and Editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and The Romare Bearden Reader.
“At last! A thrilling and intimate journey through the most undervalued period of Armstrong’s career! Every chapter is a revelation!” Catherine Russell, Grammy Award-Winning Jazz/Blues vocalist and daughter of Luis Russell.
“This vitally American story has been expertly told in this superlative biography SWING THAT MUSIC indeed!” Loren Schoenberg, Senior Scholar/Founding Director, National Jazz Museum in Harlem.
“Riccardi’s meticulous scholarship and his exuberance for all things Armstrong make Heart Full of Rhythm a must-read for all interested in Armstrong, jazz, and our shared cultural heritage.” Jon Faddis, trumpter, conductor, composer, and educator.
“Dedicated research, access to ideal sources, and fine storytelling combine to shed new light and insight on the most interesting and least well-documented period of Armstrong's fabled life. Riccardi has done it again, but even more so.” Dan Morgenstern, Director Emeritus of The Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.
Photographs, notes, index.
Travis Atria, Better Days Will Come Again: The Life of Arthur Briggs, Jazz Genius of Harlem, Paris, and a Nazi Prison Camp (Chicago Review Press)
“Based on groundbreaking research and including unprecedented access to Briggs’s oral memoir, Better Days Will Come Again is a crucial document of jazz history, a fast-paced epic, and an entirely original tale of survival. Arthur Briggs’s life was Homeric in scope. Born on the tiny island of Grenada, he set sail for Harlem during the Renaissance, then to Europe in the aftermath of World War I, where he was among the first pioneers to introduce jazz music to the world. During the legendary Jazz Age in Paris, Briggs’s trumpet provided the soundtrack while Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the rest of the Lost Generation got drunk. By the 1930s, Briggs was considered “the Louis Armstrong of Paris,” and was the peer of the greatest names of his time, from Josephine Baker to Django Reinhardt. Even during the Great Depression, he was secure as “the greatest trumpeter in Europe.” He did not, however, heed warnings to leave Paris before it fell to the Nazis, and in 1940, he was arrested and sent to the prison camp at Saint Denis. What happened at that camp, and the role Briggs played in it, is truly unforgettable.”
Travis Atria is the author, with Todd Mayfield, of Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Billboard, Wax Poetics, and other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.
“If you’ve never heard of Arthur Briggs, join the club. After reading Travis Atria’s intensely readable, superbly researched account, you sure as hell won’t forget him. Atria has uncovered a largely untold, often harrowing tale of jazz, race, and international politics, and he has made it into a nail-biter.” Gary Giddins, author of Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star and Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker.
“Arthur Briggs is a name you may not know now but will never forget after reading the details of his life: from his humble beginnings in Grenada, to Harlem in its golden Renaissance, to Europe—primarily France—through most of the twentieth century. The trumpeter and bandleader became a Zelig of Paris’s jazz age—playing with, and for, some of the biggest names of the era: Louis Armstrong and Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway. Music propels Briggs’s saga, and, for a black man adrift in a white world, is eventually his means of survival—playing classical music in a Nazi prison camp, and teaching music in the years after World War II. Atria’s storytelling is intimately detailed and grandly epic, tragic and triumphant, living up to its title.” Ashley Kahn, author of A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Ate van Delden, Adrian Rollini: The Life and Music of a Jazz Rambler (American Made Music Series) (University Press of Mississippi).
“Adrian Rollini (1903–1956), an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, played the bass saxophone, piano, vibraphone, and an array of other instruments. He even introduced some, such as the harmonica-like cuesnophone, called Goofus, never before wielded in jazz. Adrian Rollini: The Life and Music of a Jazz Rambler draws on oral history, countless vintage articles, and family archives to trace Rollini’s life, from his family’s arrival in the US to his development and career as a musician and to his retirement and death. A child prodigy, Rollini was playing the piano in public at the age of five. At sixteen in New York he was recording pianola rolls when his peers recognized his talent and asked him to play xylophone and piano in a new band, the California Ramblers. When he decided to play a relatively new instrument, the bass saxophone, the Ramblers made their mark on jazz forever. Rollini became the man who gave this instrument its place. Yet he did not limit himself to playing bass parts―he became the California Ramblers’ major soloist and created the studio and public sound of the band. In 1927 Rollini led a new band that included such jazz greats as Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer. During the Depression years, he was back in New York playing with several bands including his own New California Ramblers. In the 1940s, Rollini purchased a property on Key Largo. He rarely performed again for the public but hosted rollicking jam sessions at his fishing lodge with some of the best nationally known and local players. After a car wreck and an unfortunate hospitalization, Rollini passed away at age fifty-three.”
Ate van Delden is a music scholar whose writing has appeared in such publications as Doctor Jazz and Vintage Jazz Mart and in the form of liner notes to several CDs. He is a former board member of the Doctor Jazz Foundation, a Dutch organization for the promotion of classic jazz.
“Ate van Deldens Adrian Rollini biography is quite detailed and tells about his personal relationships, musical development, many gigs, and his rarely-discussed later years. . . .This definitive and very well researched book tells the full story and should be of great interest to fans of 1920s jazz.” Scott Yanow, Jazz Around Town – L.A. Jazz Scene.
“This book promises to be the definitive biography of multi-instrumentalist, band leader, and composer Adrian Rollini, a largely overlooked (in the literature) but nevertheless important jazz musician who rose to prominence in the mid-1920s and remained there for nearly two decades.” Bruce Raeburn, Curator Emeritus, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.
Photographs, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index.
Stephen A. Crist, Dave Brubeck's Time Out (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz) (Oxford University Press).
“Dave Brubeck’s Time Out ranks among the most popular, successful, and influential jazz albums of all time. Released by Columbia in 1959, alongside such other landmark albums as Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Time Out became one of the first jazz albums to be certified platinum, while its featured track, “Take Five,” became the best-selling jazz single of the twentieth century, surpassing one million copies. In addition to its commercial successes, the album is widely recognized as a pioneering endeavor into the use of odd meters in jazz. With its opening track “Blue Rondo la Turk” written in 9/8, its hit single “Take Five” in 5/4, and equally innovative uses of the more common 3/4 and 4/4 meters on other tracks, Time Out has played an important role in the development of modern jazz.
In this book, author Stephen A. Crist draws on nearly fifteen years of archival research to offer the most thorough examination to date of this seminal jazz album. Supplementing his research with interviews with key individuals, including Brubeck's widow Iola and daughter Catherine, as well as interviews conducted with Brubeck himself prior to his passing in 2012, Crist paints a complete picture of the album's origins, creation, and legacy. Couching careful analysis of each of the album's seven tracks within historical and cultural contexts, he offers fascinating insights into the composition and development of some of the album's best-known tunes. From Brubeck's 1958 State Department-sponsored tour, during which he first encountered the Turkish aksak rhythms that would form the basis of “Blue Rondo la Turk,” to the backstage jam session that planted the seeds for “Take Five,” Crist sheds an exciting new light on one of the most significant albums in jazz history.”
Stephen A. Crist is Professor of Music History at Emory University. He works largely in European music of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with additional interests in hymnody and jazz. He served as contributing editor of Bach Perspectives, Volume 5: Bach in America and contributing co-editor of Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations. His publications on Dave Brubeck have appeared in the Journal of Musicology and elsewhere, and a new study of the Modern Jazz Quartet's reception of the music of J. S. Bach is forthcoming in Bach Perspectives, Volume 13.
Musical scores, bibliography, index.
Ben Sidran’s The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma (Nardis Books) “Captures seven hit-making decades during the American recording industry's glittering, freewheeling years. Tommy LiPuma was one of America's most successful record producers whose work with seminal artists like Miles Davis, Diana Krall, Barbra Streisand, Rickie Lee Jones, George Benson, and Willie Nelson went on to sell over seventy-five million records. It is also a picaresque journey that opens with the murder of a man on a dirt path in Sicily and concludes with five trips up the Grammy red carpet. The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma is real-life Horatio Alger adventure storied with bootleggers, gangsters, artists, hipsters, set in a revolutionary time in music history that changed popular culture around the world. Finally, it's a deeply personal account of how music saved one man's life, and how he went on to affect the lives of millions of others.”
Author and musician Ben Sidran has been a major force in the contemporary history of jazz and rock & roll, having played keyboards with or produced such artists as Steve Miller, Mose Allison, Diana Ross, Boz Scaggs, Phil Upchurch, Tony Williams, Jon Hendricks, Richie Cole and Van Morrison. Though primarily renowned as a gifted pianist, composer, producer, among other music-related roles, Ben Sidran has also made a name for himself as a writer. Sidran's first book, Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to Western Literary Tradition (Da Capo Press), is based on his doctoral dissertation. Talking Jazz: An Oral History (Da Capo Press), published twenty-four years later, collects personal interviews with jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. His third literary endeavor, Ben Sidran: A Life in the Music (Unlimited Media), expresses his life-long affair with music and all its functions: as prayer, as community, as legacy, and as nothing but a party. He delves into the complex relationships between African-Americans and Jews, fathers and sons, history and hope, money and technology, ecstasy and transformation. His penultimate book, There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream, was a 2011 finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and remains a teaching text in Jewish Studies programs everywhere.
“Tommy was my best friend, my creative partner, my mentor, my confidant, and my producer for twenty-four years. As time goes on, I realize just how special he was.” Diana Krall
“Tommy was a fantastic producer. He always had a great sense of humour . . . he would sit in the studio with us musicians and make every session a complete joy.” Paul McCartney
“Tommy was a great producer and a real friend.” Willie Nelson
Photographs, discography, index.
Wolfgang Sandner, Keith Jarrett: A Biography (Popular Music History) (Equinox)
“This expanded/updated English version of Wolfgang Sandner's 2015 original German book comes out at a bittersweet moment for Keith Jarrett fans. At the end of October, ECM released another masterpiece in the series of Jarrett's solo concerts, this time captured in Budapest, for our enjoyment and amazement (how does he do this!). Joy was muted. The week before Jarrett disclosed in a New York Times interview published on 10/21/2020 that he might never again perform, following strokes in February and May 2018. Long-time fans need no reminder about the truly amazing career of this one-of-a-kind musician. But hopefully this excellent biography attracts interest of more casual fans interested in learning more. And for sure, at least for this long-term fan, there's a lot to learn as well. This in spite of having bought and listened to Jarrett's recordings since the 1971 Facing You. So, I'd conclude you need not hesitate.” Kari, an Amazon reviewer
Photographs, discography, bibliography, index.
Mark Miller, Of Stars and Strings: A Biography of Sonny Greenwich (Tellwell Talent)
“‘I’m not a working musician,’ the legendary Canadian jazz guitarist Sonny Greenwich once declared. ‘When I decide to play, I play to awake people spiritually. That's the only reason.’ For that, and for his stirring, distinctively linear style, he was hailed in 1970 as ‘the Coltrane of guitar players.’ In truth, though, Greenwich made music entirely on his own transcendent terms in the course of an uncompromising 50-year career that took him from the smallest of clubs in Toronto and Montreal to the Village Vanguard and Carnegie Hall in New York and back. Of Stars and Strings is an engaging study of a rare Canadian original, and a valuable contribution by Mark Miller to the history of jazz in Canada.”
Mark Miller has been a writer — journalist, critic, author, historian —and photographer in the field of music, specifically jazz, for more than 35 years. He is the author of 10 books and served from 1978 to 2005 as the jazz columnist for Canada’s National Newspaper, The Globe and Mail. He has also written for Coda Magazine, Down Beat, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, Saturday Night and several other popular and scholarly publications.
Photographs, bibliography, notes, discography, index.
Bill Beuttler’s Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century (Lever Press) presents, in the author’s conception—some will judge it to be fanciful; it is but worth considering—what the art form of jazz will sound like down the road a piece. It does so via in-depth, if meandering, profiles of seven young musicians and a trio as examples of the artists who will be, in his view, among those in the vanguard creating the shape of the idiom as it marches into the future: Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, , Miguel Zenón, Anat Cohen, Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, and The Bad Plus.
He places two epigraphs at the volume’s outset, the first by pianist Jason Moran: “I’m not an isolationist, and I’m not obsessed with trying to do anything new. I feel as attached to history as my teachers might have been. I’m trying to do what they did—keep it free and open. I use their language and reshape it. The ones who have passed, when I meet them at the big gate they’re going to ask me, ‘Did you take care of our music?’”
The other epigraph is by bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding:
“The most important artist and the most important time is, like, right now. It's the people who are learning now, and creating new things right now. Idol worship doesn't help this music in any way."
When I read these two contrasting paragraphs, I was reminded of what Jackie McLean told me three decades ago in an interview: “I tell my students, ‘It’s an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn the language all the way through. How are you going to know what’s new to play, if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?’”
Actually, when the epigraph is partially quoted to her by Beuttler during one of his interviews with her, Spalding walks her obiter dictum back a bit. Using it out-of-context, as Beuttler does, somewhat misrepresents her view. She clarifies: “I don’t mean it in the sense of ‘Forget what those guys did.’ I mean addressing, honoring the legacy and what happened, and also recognizing that these are human beings who have infinite capacity, just like anybody does. Knowing that we have unique, unbounded capacity, too, that we can cultivate if we’re not trying to emulate what already worked. Because I do think honoring our elders and our predecessors is critical, but I also think you can’t try to become them. You have to be your own thing, and I know that [emulation]’s not where the source flows—it flows from your life. That [i.e., what came before] can be evidence of what’s possible.” (The bracketed word and phrase are Beuttler’s.)
In other words, “If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn,” as Charlie Parker famously opined.
I am intrigued by Beuttler declaring in his Introduction that Make It New is “modeled” on the late Joe Goldberg’s (1932-2009) 1965 Jazz Masters of the 50s (a far better organized collection of a dozen interviews of major jazz figures), which had been on my shelves since the 1970s when I inadvertently encountered Joe at the local public library soon after my spouse Erika and I relocated to Elkins, West Virginia, a decade and a half ago. Joe had recently resettled in Elkins, where he had spent some of his early years, after several decades in Hollywood working in the film industry. He told me that the advantage he had over the other writers in the series of a half-dozen Jazz Masters volumes edited by Martin Williams was that “The musicians were all still alive and I knew them and could interview them.” That, of course, is also the advantage that Beuttler had in compiling Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century, and he has taken splendid advantage of that similar opportunity.
One correction that I must make is that he credits Joe Goldberg with “what turned out to be his only book.” Beuttler evidently is unaware that Joe authored one other book, Big Bunny: The Inside Story of Playboy (Ballantine Books, 1967).
Also, in a habit that I find unprofessional for a writer on an art form, Beuttler—except in the case of his interviewees—consistently cites many musicians without naming their instruments, assuming, I suppose, that his readers are as knowledgeable of the music and its makers as he is.
A major failing of the volume is that it lacks an index.
Here is the jacket blurb of Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century, followed by a bio I.D. of its author and one Amazon Commentator’s assessment of the book:
“As jazz enters its second century it is reasserting itself as dynamic and relevant. Boston Globe jazz writer and Emerson College professor Bill Beuttler reveals new ways in which jazz is engaging with society through the vivid biographies and music of Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, The Bad Plus, Miguel Zenón, Anat Cohen, Robert Glasper, and Esperanza Spalding. These musicians are freely incorporating other genres of music into jazz—from classical (both western and Indian) to popular (hip-hop, R&B, rock, bluegrass, klezmer, Brazilian choro)—and other art forms as well (literature, film, photography, and other visual arts). This new generation of jazz is increasingly more international and is becoming more open to women as instrumentalists and bandleaders. Contemporary jazz is reasserting itself as a force for social change, prompted by developments such as the Black Lives Matter, #MeToo movements, and the election of Donald Trump.”
Bill Beuttler teaches courses in magazine writing, editing, and publishing at Emerson College. Before joining Emerson, he spent three years covering jazz for the Boston Globe and teaching journalism at Boston University. Beuttler's more than three decades of magazine work includes stints as a senior editor at the Discovery Channel, Men's Journal, and Boston magazine, and as an associate editor at DownBeat and American Way. He has also been published in JazzTimes, Jazziz, The Atlantic, Esquire, Chicago magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Cooking Light, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications.
“5.0 out of 5 stars. A jazz treat: infectious and informative.
I am a veteran jazz devotee. The music is indispensable to my existence. Make it New adds welcome depth to my knowledge. Superbly written and researched, Beuttler goes deeper than most into sociological, spiritual and intellectual contexts. The telling has a lived-in feeling that takes us inside the music. And Beuttler doesn’t disguise his passion for jazz: his love of the music is infectious. A book both for jazz intellectuals and beginners.” Justin Freed, Amazon.
Notes, Interview Sources.
Sammy Stein, with Debbie Burke, Gender Disparity in UK Jazz: A Discussion (https://www.sammystein.org).
“The new book from Sammy Stein with Debbie Burke gets inside the UK jazz scene, looks at gender disparity issues and discusses the reality, the potential for change and the ways ahead. Following Sammy’s books for 8th House (Women in Jazz and In Their Own Words) this book is a transatlantic project, connecting two writers from the UK and the US in their first joint publication.”
Sammy Stein is a popular reviewer, author and columnist, writing for three columns where she brings her keen analysis and eye for detail. She has reviewed music by Sting, Bowie, Monk, Coltrane, Binker & Moses, Mats Gustafsson, Claire Cope, Tina May and many jazz musicians. Her book All That's Jazz (Tomahawk Press) received critical acclaim and her Women in Jazz (8th House) gained the JazzTimes Distaff Award, made the Gearbox list and was nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association for best jazz book. She has curated several radio series, been on Jazz FM, BBC, Jazz Bites Radio, and more. Sammy organized the London Jazz Platform mini-festival event. She was named the Jazz Journalists Association International Editor.
Debbie Burke (editor) is an award-winning editor and author whose jazz blog has earned international praise. Her other books include Icarus Flies Home, Tasty Jazz Jams for Our Times, Glissando: A Story of Love, Lust and Jazz, The Poconos in B Flat, and Music in the Scriptures. She is also the owner of Queen Esther Publishing LLC.
“Essential reading- highly recommended.” Anne Frankenstein, JazzFM.
The Jazz Stories Project, David Haney, Colin Haney, editors. (CadenceJazzWorld.com/The-Jazz-Stories-Project.html).
“Here is a book for every musician and every lover of music. Over 100 stories, presented by the artists themselves. Hours of enjoyment. Years in the making! From 2012 to 2019, Cadence writers and interviewers asked subjects to present stories in their own words. They were asked a simple question. Do you remember a turning point in your life?
The results could and did fill a book.”
The musicians answering that question are:
Carla Bley, Florian Weber, Lionel Loeke, Jan Hammer, Freddie Green, Gary Peacock, Paul Motian, Paul Bley, Hank Jones, Steve Swallow, Les McCann, Ron Free, NRG Ensemble, Eloe Omoe, Michael White, Lester Bowie, Louis Sclavis, Mike Nock, Paul Horn, Collin Walcott, Klaus Koenig, Norma Winstone, Charlie Haden, Dave Holland, Joe Lovano, Julia Huelsmann, Gunter "Baby" Sommer, Steffen Schorn, Nils Wogram, Thomas Meyring, Kathrin Mueller, Famoudou Don Moye, Michel Portal, Amina Claudine Myers, Wayne Dockery, Juliane Wilde, Brian Blade, John Patitucci, Danilo Perez, Bill Gottlieb, Wayne Horvitz, Marty Ehrlich, Kevin Norton, Branford Marsalis, David Earle Johnson, Milt Hinton, Barre Phillips, Mike Richmond, Eberhard Weber, Christian Scott, Joachim Kuehn, Pierre Charial, Jack DeJonnette, Don Byron, Ruf der Heimat, David Krakauer, Monika Roscher, John Scofield, Bruce Hampton, Bennie Wallace, Jeff Mosier, Bob Belden, Ornette Coleman, John Talylor, Glen Moore, David Friesen, David Haney, Buel Neidlinger.
Plus a special 60-page section, ‘Photo Jazz Stories: Photos and Captions,’ by world-traveling photographer and writer Patrick Hinely, drawn from his personal archive of festival photography and accompanied by his annotations.
“This a splendid collection, both for its first-person accounts by the musicians and for the hundreds of photographs by major jazz photographers and many illustrations of album covers, all reproduced to crisp perfection. And it is a very handsome volume. This is one to both read right through and keep handy for browsing.” W. Royal Stokes, author of The Essential W. Royal Stokes Jazz, Blues & Beyond Reader and other books on jazz and blues and the trilogy of novels Backwards Over.
David Whiteis, Blues Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Chicago (Music in American Life), photographs by Peter M. Hurly (University of Illinois Press).
“Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face. David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis. Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.”
David Whiteis is a journalist, writer, and educator living in Chicago. He is a past winner of the Blues Foundation's Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Achievement in Journalism. He is the author of Southern Soul-Blues and Chicago Blues: Portraits and Stories. Peter M. Hurley is a photographer, muralist, graphic designer, and songwriter, and an active contributing photographer to Living Blues magazine.
“In his latest history on Chicago blues, Whiteis is as usual informative and stimulating, while addressing some considerably contentious issues. The author has long demonstrated that he is one of the best writers on blues. He has a way with words that can paint a vivid portrait of his subject or scene.” Robert Pruter, author of Chicago Soul.
Photographs, notes, index.
Ashley Kahn’s George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters (Musicians in Their Own Words) (Chicago Review Press) “is an authoritative, chronologically arranged anthology of Harrison’s most revealing and illuminating interviews, personal correspondence, and writings, spanning the years 1962 to 2001. Though known as the ‘Quiet Beatle,’ Harrison was arguably the most thoughtful and certainly the most outspoken of the famous four. This compendium of his words and ideas proves that point repeatedly, revealing his passion for music, his focus on spirituality, and his responsibility as a celebrity, as well as a sense of deep commitment and humor.”
Grammy-winning author Ashley Kahn has received widespread critical acclaim for A Love Supreme: The Making of John Coltrane’s Signature Album and Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. His other books include The House That Trane Built and, as cowriter, The Universal Tone, Carlos Santana’s autobiography. He teaches at New York University, and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other publications.
“Despite all the pressures of fame, George Harrison managed to stay grounded, and real, and to live a life in full. In George Harrison on George Harrison, Ashley Kahn has summoned up a portrait of the artist as public figure, as friend, as husband, as spiritual devotee, through a kaleidoscopic assemblage of letters, interviews, broadcast transcripts, and more. Harri-son was thoughtful, sensitive, honest, warmly funny, kind, and very, very smart. It all shines through in this beautiful collection.” Tom Piazza, author of Why New Orleans Matters
“No one does a better job than Ashley Kahn at bringing us behind the scenes into the inner workings of the music world. He’s done it again with this mind-expanding book on George Harrison and the Beatles.” Ted Gioia, author of Music: A Subversive History
“The quiet Beatle—Janis Joplin’s favorite Beatle, by the way—finally gets his say in this superb collection of Harrison’s letters, interviews, and writings. Ashley Kahn, super-sleuth, has unearthed some real gems. Experiencing the evolution of this amazing musician and human being through his own words makes for an astounding journey.” Holly George-Warren, author of Janis: Her Life And Music
Index.
Ted Montgomery, The Paul McCartney Catalog: A Complete Annotated Discography of Solo Works, 1967-2019 (McFarland). “This complete discography of Paul McCartney's solo and other post-Beatles work examines his entire catalog. It covers his studio and live albums and compilations, including the trance, electronic, classical and cover albums and selected bootleg recordings; all of the singles; videos and DVDs; and the 15 radio shows he made as Oobu Joobu. Each song is reviewed in depth, providing a wealth of information for both dedicated McCartney fans and those just discovering his music.”
Ted Montgomery's writing has appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and websites. He lives in Brighton, Michigan.
Index.
Craig Brown, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
“Though fifty years have passed since the breakup of the Beatles, the fab four continue to occupy an utterly unique place in popular culture. Their influence extends far beyond music and into realms as diverse as fashion and fine art, sexual politics and religion. When they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, fresh off the plane from England, they provoked an epidemic of hoarse-throated fandom that continues to this day.
Who better, then, to capture the Beatles phenomenon than Craig Brown―the inimitable author of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret and master chronicler of the foibles and foppishness of British high society? This wide-ranging portrait of the four lads from Liverpool rivals the unique spectacle of the band itself by delving into a vast catalog of heretofore unexamined lore.
When actress Eleanor Bron touched down at Heathrow with the Beatles, she thought that a flock of starlings had alighted on the roof of the terminal―only to discover that the birds were in fact young women screaming at the top of their lungs. One journalist, mistaken for Paul McCartney as he trailed the band in his car, found himself nearly crushed to death as fans climbed atop the vehicle and pressed their bodies against the windshield. Or what about the Baptist preacher who claimed that the Beatles synchronized their songs with the rhythm of an infant’s heartbeat so as to induce a hypnotic state in listeners? And just how many people have employed the services of a Canadian dentist who bought John Lennon’s tooth at auction, extracted its DNA, and now offers paternity tests to those hoping to sue his estate?
150 Glimpses of the Beatles is, above all, a distinctively kaleidoscopic examination of the Beatles’ effect on the world around them and the world they helped bring into being. Part anthropology and part memoir, and enriched by the recollections of everyone from Tom Hanks to Bruce Springsteen, this book is a humorous, elegiac, and at times madcap take on the Beatles’ role in the making of the sixties and of music as we know it.”
Craig Brown is a prolific journalist and author. He has been writing his parodic diary in Private Eye since 1989. He is the only person ever to have won three different Press Awards―for best humorist, columnist, and critic―in the same year. He has been a columnist for The Guardian, The Times (London), The Spectator, and The Daily Telegraph, among others. He currently writes for The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. His New York Times bestseller, Hello Goodbye Hello was translated into ten languages.
“Time-play and what-ifs are part of Brown’s formidable bag of tricks, deployed to add emotional range and a poignant twist to his comic vignettes. His biographical method―combining fragments, lists, excerpts, quotes and flights of whimsy―is executed as brilliantly here as in 2017’s glittering Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret . . . Brown’s book is an idiosyncratic cocktail of oral history, personal memoir, tourism and biography.” Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post.
Photographs.
Peter Guralnick’s Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing (Little, Brown and Company) “covers old ground from new perspectives, offering deeply felt, masterful, and strikingly personal portraits of creative artists, both musicians and writers, at the height of their powers. ‘You put the book down feeling that its sweep is vast, that you have read of giants who walked among us,’ rock critic Lester Bangs wrote of Guralnick’s earlier work in words that could just as easily be applied to this new one. And yet, for all of the encomiums that Guralnick’s books have earned for their remarkable insights and depth of feeling, Looking to Get Lost is his most personal book yet. For readers who have grown up on Guralnick’s unique vision of the vast sweep of the American musical landscape, who have imbibed his loving and lively portraits and biographies of such titanic figures as Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, and Sam Phillips, there are multiple surprises and delights here, carrying on and extending all the themes, fascinations, and passions of his groundbreaking earlier work.”
Peter Guralnick's books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, Sweet Soul Music, and Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. He won a Grammy for his liner notes for Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, wrote and co-produced the documentary Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and wrote the scripts for the Grammy-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. His most recent book is Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll.
“Peter Guralnick is a dedicated explorer, and like all explorers with true mastery of their quest, he is singular and tenacious. He goes deep into the difficult emotional undercurrents, and the contradictions of success, in the lives of artists, and by subtle extension, into his own life. He is a writer of great sensitivity and intuition, who lyrically untangles the network that exists between artist and art, persona and humanity, rhythm and melody, the mortal desires that underscore it all, and, crucially and seamlessly, his own relationship to everything and everyone he contemplates.” Rosanne Cash.
Photographs, notes, index.
Heather Augustyn, Women in Jamaican Music (McFarland). “As the ubiquitous Jamaican musician Bob Marley once famously sang, ‘half the story has never been told.’ This rings particularly true for the little-known women in Jamaican music who comprise significantly less than half of the Caribbean nation's musical landscape. This book covers the female contribution to Jamaican music and its subgenres through dozens of interviews with vocalists, instrumentalists, bandleaders, producers, deejays and supporters of the arts. Relegated to marginalized spaces, these pioneering women fought for their claim to the spotlight amid oppressive conditions to help create and shape Jamaica's musical heritage.”
Heather Augustyn is a continuing lecturer in the English department at Purdue Northwest. She has written seven books on ska and Jamaican music and lives in Northwest Indiana.
“A must-have for fans of Jamaican music.” Charles, Reggae- Steady-Ska.com
Photographs, bibliography, notes, index.
Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (Music in American Life) (University of Illinois Press).
“The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works.
Price's twenty-five years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create three hundred works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives, Rae Linda Brown illuminates Price's major works while exploring the considerable depth of her achievement. Brown also traces the life of the extremely private individual from her childhood in Little Rock through her time at the New England Conservatory, her extensive teaching, and her struggles with racism, poverty, and professional jealousies. In addition, Brown provides musicians and scholars with dozens of musical examples.”
Rae Linda Brown was a professor at the University of Michigan and a professor and Robert and Marjorie Rawlins Chair of the Department of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She was the author of Music, Printed and Manuscript, in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters: An Annotated Catalog. She died in 2017. Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop.
“The Heart of a Woman is a complex and engaging read of the life and music of Florence B. Price that illuminates how the cultural and intellectual lives of African Americans are deeply embedded in the tapestry of America’s social and musical history. Rae Linda Brown’s work extends beyond the conventional biography as it offers an analytical narrative that interrogates Price’s negotiation of the politics of race and gender, her role in advancing the black symphonic aesthetic, and her dedication to social change and racial equality on and off of the concert stage. The timeliness of this book and the revival of Price’s music are reflective of how the world’s consciousness has finally caught up with intellectual labor offered by both Florence Price and Rae Linda Brown.” Tammy L. Kernodle, author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams.
Photographs, bibliography, notes, discography, index.
Daisy Dunn, The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny (Liveright).
“When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder’s notebooks―filled with pearls of wisdom―and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man, who would grow up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, and chronicler of the Roman Empire from the dire days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan. A biography that will appeal to lovers of Mary Beard books, it is also a moving narrative about the profound influence of a father figure on his adopted son. Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with extracts from the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn paints a vivid, compellingly readable portrait of two of antiquity’s greatest minds.”
Daisy Dunn is a classicist, art historian, and cultural critic. She is the author of Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet and The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation. She lives in Surrey, England. Her website is www.daisydunn.co.uk, and she can also be found on Twitter as @DaisyfDunn.
“If you were writing a biography of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus―or Pliny the Younger, the author of one of the most famous collections of letters surviving from the early Roman Empire―it would be hard not to start with the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, on the Bay of Naples, in 79 A.D., for Pliny was the only writer to leave us an eyewitness account of the catastrophe. The English classicist Daisy Dunn… wisely does not resist the temptation… She succeed[s] in making Pliny [the Younger]…a poignant character, the kind of person who has to do the dirty jobs of an empire and, having done them, gets no compliments…. Neither Pliny knew that his homeland’s great mountain, Vesuvius, was nourishing in her bosom the extermination of so many of her people. This somehow makes the two men’s kinship closer.” Joan Acocella, The New Yorker.
“If only Daisy Dunn’s book had been around back when I was an aspiring classicist . . . . Dunn is a good writer, with some of the easy erudition of Mary Beard, that great popularizer of Roman history, and her translations from both Plinys are graceful and precise. Ultimately her enthusiasm, together with her eye for the odd, surprising detail, wins you over.” Charles McGrath, New York Times Book Review.
Illustrations, maps, timeline, notes, bibliography, index.
Suetonius, How to Be a Bad Emperor: An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers), edited by Josiah Osgoo (Princeton University Press).
“If recent history has taught us anything, it's that sometimes the best guide to leadership is the negative example. But that insight is hardly new. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Suetonius wrote Lives of the Caesars, perhaps the greatest negative leadership book of all time. He was ideally suited to write about terrible political leaders; after all, he was also the author of Famous Prostitutes and Words of Insult, both sadly lost. In How to Be a Bad Emperor, Josiah Osgood provides crisp new translations of Suetonius's briskly paced, darkly comic biographies of the Roman emperors Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. Entertaining and shocking, the stories of these ancient anti-role models show how power inflames leaders' worst tendencies, causing almost incalculable damage. Complete with an introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Be a Bad Emperor is both a gleeful romp through some of the nastiest bits of Roman history and a perceptive account of leadership gone monstrously awry. We meet Caesar, using his aunt's funeral to brag about his descent from gods and kings―and hiding his bald head with a comb-over and a laurel crown; Tiberius, neglecting public affairs in favor of wine, perverse sex, tortures, and executions; the insomniac sadist Caligula, flaunting his skill at cruel put-downs; and the matricide Nero, indulging his mania for public performance. In a world bristling with strongmen eager to cast themselves as the Caesars of our day, How to Be a Bad Emperor is a delightfully enlightening guide to the dangers of power without character.”
“This enticing selection from Suetonius's Lives highlights the role of four Roman emperors as anti-role models―egregious examples of how not to behave, which may also resonate with more recent political leaders.” Catharine Edwards, author of Death in Ancient Rome.
“If you were writing a biography of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus―or Pliny the Younger, the author of one of the most famous collections of letters surviving from the early Roman Empire―it would be hard not to start with the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, on the Bay of Naples, in 79 A.D., for Pliny was the only writer to leave us an eyewitness account of the catastrophe. The English classicist Daisy Dunn . . . wisely does not resist the temptation . . . . She succeed[s] in making Pliny [the Younger] . . . a poignant character, the kind of person who has to do the dirty jobs of an empire and, having done them, gets no compliments. . . . Neither Pliny knew that his homeland’s great mountain, Vesuvius, was nourishing in her bosom the extermination of so many of her people. This somehow makes the two men’s kinship closer.” Joan Acocella, The New Yorker.
Illustrations, timeline, notes, bibliography, index.
Notes, bibliography.
Horace, How to Be Content: An Ancient Poet's Guide for an Age of Excess (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers), edited by Stephen Harrison (Princeton University Press).
“What are the secrets to a contented life? One of Rome’s greatest and most influential poets, Horace (65–8 BCE) has been cherished by readers for more than two thousand years not only for his wit, style, and reflections on Roman society, but also for his wisdom about how to live a good life―above all else, a life of contentment in a world of materialistic excess and personal pressures. In How to Be Content, Stephen Harrison, a leading authority on the poet, provides fresh, contemporary translations of poems from across Horace’s works that continue to offer important lessons about the good life, friendship, love, and death. Living during the reign of Rome’s first emperor, Horace drew on Greek and Roman philosophy, especially Stoicism and Epicureanism, to write poems that reflect on how to live a thoughtful and moderate life amid mindless overconsumption, how to achieve and maintain true love and friendship, and how to face disaster and death with patience and courage. From memorable counsel on the pointlessness of worrying about the future to valuable advice about living in the moment, these poems, by the man who famously advised us to carpe diem, or “harvest the day,” continue to provide brilliant meditations on perennial human problems. Featuring translations of, and commentary on, complete poems from Horace’s Odes, Satires, Epistles, and Epodes, accompanied by the original Latin, How to Be Content is both an ideal introduction to Horace and a compelling book of timeless wisdom.”
Stephen Harrison is a British classicist and Professor of Latin Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He specializes in the poetry of Virgil and Horace, the Roman novel and the reception of classical literature. A graduate of Balliol College, Harrison has held his current position since 1987 and is an occasional visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen and at the University of Trondheim..
“Horace is an unparalleled source of inspiring life advice from the ancient world. This engaging guide to his wisdom succeeds by showing the interconnectedness and continuing relevance of his key themes, including the brevity of life and the importance of being content with one’s material and emotional lot.” Jennifer Ferriss-Hill, author of Horace’s Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living.
Index.
John Took’s Dante (Princeton University Press) is “An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine Comedy. For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography, which offers a fresh account of the medieval Florentine poet's life and thought before and after his exile in 1302.
Beginning with the often violent circumstances of Dante's life, the book examines his successive works as testimony to the course of his passionate humanity: his lyric poetry through to the Vita nova as the great work of his first period; the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia and the poems of his early years in exile; and the Monarchia and the Commedia as the product of his maturity. Describing as it does a journey of the mind, the book confirms the nature of Dante's undertaking as an exploration of what he himself speaks of as ‘maturity in the flame of love.’ The result is an original synthesis of Dante's life and work.”
John Took is Professor Emeritus of Dante Studies at University College London. His books include L'Etterno Piacer: Aesthetic Ideas in Dante and Dante, Lyric Poet and Philosopher: An Introduction to the Minor Works.
“A magisterial work, the result of a lifetime's devoted engagement with Dante's work and all that went into making the man and the poetry.” Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College, Dublin
“A beautiful book that reflects decades of thinking and teaching on Dante. Readers will not be disappointed by Took's incisive, comprehensive readings of the Divine Comedy and other works.” Piero Boitani, Sapienza University of Rome
“John Took offers a splendidly comprehensive and well-informed account of Dante's work. Full weight is given to the ways in which the poet's writings reflect and respond to historical context. But above all the poetry itself is seen, rightly and enthusiastically, as a 'coruscation of delight.'” Robin Kirkpatrick, University of Cambridge
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index of names.
Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton (Princeton University Press).
“John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defenses of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost―but would first justify the killing of a king. Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton’s formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton’s development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton’s best-known works from this period, including the “Nativity Ode,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Comus, and “Lycidas.” Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton’s astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.”
Nicholas McDowell is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The English Radical Imagination and Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Milton.
“This is a masterful and engaging intellectual biography. McDowell has a new narrative to tell about Milton during these formative years. Chapter after chapter contain fresh information and sharp new readings of Milton's works and the biographical evidence.” David Quint, Yale University.
“This is a superb book and a massive achievement. It will be the decisive book on the subject for a generation.” William Poole, Oxford University.
Illustrations, notes, index.
Michael W. Cole’s Sofonisba's Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work (Princeton University Press) is an account of “The formation and career of the first major woman artist of the Renaissance. Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1535–1625) was the daughter of minor Lombard aristocrats who made the unprecedented decision to have her trained as a painter outside the family house. She went on to serve as an instructor to Isabel of Valois, the young queen of Spain. Sofonisba’s Lesson sheds new light on Sofonisba’s work, offering a major reassessment of a Renaissance painter who changed the image of women’s education in Europe―and who transformed Western attitudes about who could be an artist. In this book, Michael Cole demonstrates how teaching and learning were central themes of Sofonisba’s art, which shows women learning to read, play chess, and paint. He looks at how her pictures challenged conventional ideas about the teaching of young girls, and he discusses her place in the history of the amateur, a new Renaissance type. The book examines Sofonisba’s relationships with the group of people for whom her practice was important―her father Amilcare, her teacher Bernardino Campi, the men and women who sought to be associated with her, and her sisters and the other young women who followed her path. Sofonisba’s Lesson concludes with a complete illustrated catalog of the more than two hundred known paintings and drawings that writers have associated with Sofonisba over the past 450 years, with a full accounting of modern scholarly opinion on each.”
Michael W. Cole is professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University. His recent books include A New History of Italian Renaissance Art, with Stephen J. Campbell, and Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure. He lives in New York City.
"A substantial monograph that opens at the poignant moment when Sofonisba ‘left her father’s home’ to study art.” Deborah Solomon, New York Times
“Sofonisba's Lesson tells the story of how it was possible for a young Cremona woman to make a name for herself in the competitive man’s world of 1550s Italy and further afield in Spain . . . . Having run through the biographical information intrigued and entranced, the reader will hit upon the catalog of works without even realizing it; Cole writes with a style that is both thought-provoking and relatable, his subject matter indelibly endearing.” Cindy Helms, New York Journal of Books.
“This insightful book provides a fascinating and original introduction to the first great woman artist of Renaissance Italy. Sofonisba's Lesson makes a timely contribution to Renaissance art history and women's studies, providing a comprehensive and much-needed examination of a major painter.” Babette Bohn, author of Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing.
“Michael Cole makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of the art and life of the Cremonese painter Sofonisba Anguissola, and to broader discussions of women artists in the Renaissance.” Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Paintings throughout and an illustrated catalog of the more than two hundred known paintings and drawings that writers have associated with Sofonisba over the past 450 years.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Nathaniel Fanning, Sailing Under John Paul Jones: The Memoir of Continental Navy Midshipman Nathaniel Fanning, 1778-1783, edited by Louis Arthur Norton (McFarland). “Connecticut privateer Nathaniel Fanning (1755-1805) was captured by the British during the Revolutionary War. Upon his release, he joined the Continental Navy and sailed as a midshipman under Admiral John Paul Jones during his most famous battles. Fanning later obtained his own command, sailing from French ports to prey upon British warships.
This new edition of Fanning's memoir--first published in 1806--provides a vivid account of wartime peril and hardship at sea, and a first-hand character study of Jones as an apparent tyrant and narcissist. Vocabulary, spelling and narrative style have changed in the more than two centuries since Fanning's chronicle, and some details clash with historical and geographical data. The editor has updated and annotated the text for modern readers.”
Louis Arthur Norton, professor emeritus from the University of Connecticut, has published extensively on maritime history topics. Several of his journal articles have been awarded prizes for non-fiction and one for fiction. He lives in West Simsbury, Connecticut.
Photographs, notes, index.
Gillian Gill, Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
“How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies—of strength, style, and creativity—shaped Woolf’s path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf’s French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L’Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf’s aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.”
Gillian Gill holds a Ph.D. in modern French literature from Cambridge University, and has taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale, and Harvard. She is the New York Times best-selling author of We Too, Nightingales, Agatha Christie, Mary Baker Edd,; and We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals. She lives in suburban Boston.
“Gillian Gill has written a bold, incisive book—vividly conceived, impeccably researched, always questioning and ever original. By shedding light upon the gutsy, powerful women who shaped Virginia Woolf’s life and work, Gill makes a compelling argument about legacy, inheritance, and our female forebears’ enduring influence.” Katharine Smyth, author of All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf.
“An engaging, fully persuasive account of the women who stirred Virginia Woolf’s imagination. Gillian Gill’s broad-minded reading of Woolf’s relations with her womenfolk recontextualizes the legends of Bloomsbury.” Carolyn Burke, author of Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keefe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Jill D. Snider’s Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur (The University of North Carolina Press) “recreates the life of this extraordinary man through historical detective work in newspapers, business and trade publications, genealogical databases, and scholarly works. Mapping the social networks his family built within the Presbyterian church and other organizations (networks on which Headen often relied), she also reveals the legacy of Carthage's, and the South's, black artisans. Their story shows us that, despite our worship of personal triumph, success is often a communal as well as an individual achievement.”
Jill D. Snider is a historian and writer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
“This is one of the best black inventor biographies I have read in quite some time. Jill D. Snider deftly unearths the life of Lucean Arthur Headen from sources that can be difficult to find--something that makes writing about African American people of this era challenging. This is an impressive work of history and biography.” Rayvon Fouche, author of Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports
“Forging a diverse coalition of allies, Lucean Arthur Headen learned to thrive as an independent African American inventor, international entrepreneur, and social advocate in an era of Jim Crow segregation, corporate R&D, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Jill Snider's absorbing biography will help readers understand this remarkable man in the context of his times.” Eric S. Hintz, Smithsonian Institution
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
James E. Overmyer Cum Posey of the Homestead Grays: A Biography of the Negro Leagues Owner and Hall of Famer (McFarland). “Cumberland Posey began his career in 1911 playing outfield for the Homestead Grays, a local black team in his Pennsylvania hometown. He soon became the squad's driving force as they dominated semi-pro ball in the Pittsburgh area. By the late 1930s the Grays were at the top of the Negro Leagues with nine straight pennant wins. Posey was also a League officer; he served 13 years as the first black member of the Homestead school board; and he wrote an outspoken sports column for the African American weekly, the Pittsburgh Courier. He was also regarded as one of the best black basketball players in the East; he was the organizer of a team that held the consensus national black championship five years running. Ten years after his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he became a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame--one of only two athletes to be honored by two pro sports halls.”
Jim Overmyer is a baseball history author specializing in the Negro leagues. In addition to Queen of the Negro Leagues, he is the author of Black Ball and the Boardwalk, a history of the black Atlantic City Bacharach Giants team of the 1920s, and has contributed to several other publications, including Shades of Glory, history of black baseball in America. He is an editor of Black Ball, a scholarly journal of black baseball history. He is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, and belongs to its Negro Leagues, Nineteen Century, Deadball, and Business of Baseball committees. He was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2006 special committee that voted to induct seventeen persons from the Negro leagues and the black baseball period before the leagues were formed as members of the Hall. He lectures on baseball history, primarily African-American and lives in Tucson, Arizona.
“Last year saw the publication of the first biography of Oscar Charleston, the Negro League's greatest player, which swept the Casey and Seymour awards as the year's best baseball book. This year, we have another first biography of the Negro League's most important figures, Cum Posey. Posey is the only person admitted to both the baseball and basketball Hall of Fames and his story, previously untold, is even more remarkable then expected. Starting as a basketball player, Posey evolved into the force behind the legendary Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues. Overmyer's work details the strong moral force behind the man without glossing over the glaring inconsistencies in which he engaged to survive in a hard world. Posey's story, as told in this volume, is in fact the story of the Negro Leagues over its 40 years of existence. An essential contribution to the genre.” Steven R Greenes, Amazon reviewer
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Charlie Nelms, From Cotton Fields to University Leadership: All Eyes on Charlie, A Memoir (Well House Books/Indiana University Press).
“Charlie Nelms is a person of the soil. The fifth of eleven children born to subsistence farming parents who struggled to make a living on their little 40-acre farm in the Arkansas Delta, Charlie decided as a young boy picking cotton that education was the best route for escaping the dehumanizing effects of poverty and racism, which defined life for most Southern Blacks during the 1950s and 60s. With the constant encouragement and support of his parents, teachers, and mentors, he graduated high school and enrolled at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College, an historically black college in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Agronomy and Chemistry. He earned both his master’s and doctorate in Higher Education and Student Affairs from Indiana University. With a fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Charlie spent two years as a doctoral fellow in Higher Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Charlie Nelms, a native of the Arkansas Delta, has devoted his life to equalizing opportunities for disenfranchised peoples. He is currently a senior scholar at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a Center Scholar at the Center for Postsecondary Research, Indiana University School of Education, as well as retired Chancellor, North Carolina Central University, and IU Vice President for Institutional Development and Student Affairs Emeritus. In retirement, he works with historically Black colleges and universities to strengthen leadership and governance.
Dr. Walter M. Kimbrough is president of Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dr. Kimbrough holds degrees from the University of Georgia, Miami University of Ohio, and Georgia State University. He has been recognized for his research on historically black colleges and universities, African American men in college, and fraternities and sororities. In 2010 he was named as part of the Ebony magazine Power 100 list and in 2013 he became one of NBC News/The Griot.com's 100 African Americans making history today.”
“Far too often we meet leaders and forget their journeys to leadership. We forget the struggles, the stumbles, the surprises, and the enormous amount of hard work they put in, amidst twists and turns along the journey. Charlie Nelms has written an autobiography that is authentic, humble, and serves as an example for those leaders who will follow him. His voice, honesty, humor, and compassion shine through his life story.” Dr. Marybeth Gasman, Director, Penn Center for Minority-Serving Institutions, author of Educating a Diverse Nation: Lessons from Minority-Serving Institutions.
Photographs, notes.
E. James West, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press).
“From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination. E. James West's fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony’s political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present. Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history.”
E. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University.
“E. James West’s book is the first major examination of Ebony as a forum for black historical discourse and the magazine’s long-time executive editor Lerone Bennett Jr.’s multifaceted thought, work, and scholarship as a leading popular historian of the black past and vital contributor to the post-war black history movement. A well-researched and accessible study situated within the growing field of black intellectual history, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. is a major contribution to our understanding of what West aptly calls 'popular black history.'” Pero G. Dagbovie, author of Revisiting the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American history in the Twenty-First Century.
Notes, bibliography, index.
Troy R. Saxby, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life (University of North Carolina Press).
“The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray (1910–1985) was a trailblazing social activist, writer, lawyer, civil rights organizer, and campaigner for gender rights. In the 1930s and 1940s, she was active in radical left-wing political groups and helped innovate nonviolent protest strategies against segregation that would become iconic in later decades, and in the 1960s, she cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW). In addition, Murray became the first African American to receive a Yale law doctorate and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Yet, behind her great public successes, Murray battled many personal demons, including bouts of poor physical and mental health, conflicts over her gender and sexual identities, family traumas, and financial difficulties. In this intimate biography, Troy Saxby provides the most comprehensive account of Murray's inner life to date, revealing her struggles in poignant detail and deepening our understanding and admiration of her numerous achievements in the face of pronounced racism, homophobia, transphobia, and political persecution. Saxby interweaves the personal and the political, showing how the two are always entwined, to tell the life story of one of twentieth-century America's most fascinating and inspirational figures.”
Troy R. Saxby is an academic and research officer at the University of Newcastle.
“Until recently, there has been very little written about Pauli Murray, and Saxby has made excellent use of her voluminous papers to dive into her life story. He shows how Murray worked to fashion a coherent sense of self, providing important insights into how her private life related to her public endeavors.” Susan Hartmann, author of The Other Feminists: Activists In The Liberal Establishment.
“In recent years, we've been able to learn much more about the incredible life and work of Pauli Murray. She gave all that she could to make the United States confront its failure to live up to its own creed of liberty and justice for all. Now, Troy Saxby's new biography of Murray helps us to understand both the personal cost and the existential sources of her courage. If suffering and struggle are the fates that make us more human, Murray's courage and faith in the face of pain and despair teach us the gritty truth of how one woman became not only a hero for humanity but a modern saint.” Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
“Ground-breaker, activist, strategist, and saint, Pauli Murray has been celebrated for the many ways in which she shaped the women's movement and the long civil rights movement. Her fiery activism was fueled by the founding traumas of both the black experience, broadly, and her own family history. Bringing together her emotional complexity and her brilliant drive to make better things possible, this book is an elegantly crafted account of Murray and the complex, wrenching world on which she made her mark.” Adriane Lentz-Smith, author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Aubrey Malone, Sidney Lumet: The Actor's Director (McFarland). “Punctilious to a fault, Sidney Lumet favored intense rehearsal, which enabled him to bring in most of his films under budget and under schedule. An energized director who captured the heart of New York like no other, Lumet created a vast canon of work that stands as a testament to his passionate concern for justice and his great empathy for the hundreds of people with whom he collaborated during a career that spanned over five decades. This is the first full-scale biography of Lumet, a man generally regarded as one of the most affable directors of his time. Using the oral testimonies of those who worked with him both behind and in front of the camera, this book explores Lumet's personality and working methods.”
Author and critic Aubrey Malone has written many books on the cinema. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
“Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with in-the-moment details of the high and low moments: We see meetings with Al Pacino over Stone’s scripts for Scarface, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July; the harrowing demon of cocaine addiction following the failure of his first feature, The Hand (starring Michael Caine); his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface; his stormy relationship with The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino; the breathless hustles to finance the acclaimed and divisive Salvador; and tensions behind the scenes of his first Academy Award–winning film, Midnight Express.
Chasing the Light is a true insider’s look at Hollywood’s years of upheaval in the 1970s and ’80s.”
“Chasing the Light is a deep book, illuminated and relentless, prose at its best. . . . What Oliver Stone has written will last, because I have never seen anything like his insights into the way the film industry works.” Werner Herzog
“Oliver Stone is a giant provocateur in the Hollywood movie system. His autobiography is a fascinating exposure of Stone’s inner life and his powerful, all devouring energy and genius that drove him to become one of the world's greatest filmmakers. Stone rattles cages. He pricks the bubbles of the namby-pambies. He provokes outrage. He stirs up controversy. He has no respect for safe places. Oliver Stone is larger than life. Chasing the Light says it all.”
Sir Anthony Hopkins
“Oliver Stone's narrative, his life story about the heartbreaks, the near misses, and finally the triumphs is a Hollywood movie in itself. I thank Oliver for writing Chasing the Light, especially for my NYU grad film students—or anybody else with artistic dreams of working in this thing called the movie business. Oliver, in honest and sometimes brutal fashion, lays it out—what it took for him to get to where he hoped to be—a successful writer/director working in Hollywood; the road it took is hard AF. Bravo. Bravo. Bravo.” Spike Lee
Photos, index.
Sarah Cole, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press)
“H. G. Wells played a central role in defining the intellectual, political, and literary character of the twentieth century. A prolific literary innovator, he coined such concepts as “time machine,” “war of the worlds,” and “atomic bomb,” exerting vast influence on popular ideas of time and futurity, progress and decline, and humanity’s place in the universe. Wells was a public intellectual with a worldwide readership. He met with world leaders, including Roosevelt, Lenin, Stalin, and Churchill, and his books were international best-sellers. Yet critics and scholars have largely forgotten his accomplishments or relegated them to genre fiction, overlooking their breadth and diversity. In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells’s work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that literature had a pressing place in public life, and his works reached a wide range of readers. While recognizing Wells’s limitations, Cole offers a new account of his distinctive style as well as his interventions into social and political thought. She illuminates how Wells embodies twentieth-century literature at its most expansive and engaged. An ambitious rethinking of Wells as both writer and thinker, Inventing Tomorrow suggests that he offers a timely model for literature’s moral responsibility to imagine a better global future.”
Sarah Cole is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and dean of humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War and At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland.
Notes, bibliography, index.
J. Alison Rosenblitt, The Beauty of Living: E. E. Cummings in the Great War (W. W. Norton & Company)
“E. E. Cummings is one of our most popular and enduring poets, one whose name extends beyond the boundaries of the literary world. Renowned for his formally fractured, gleefully alive poetry, Cummings is not often thought of as a war poet. But his experience in France and as a prisoner during World War I (the basis for his first work of prose, The Enormous Room) escalated his earliest breaks with conventional form?the innovation with which his name would soon become synonymous.
Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings’s Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other “modern” movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, shipped out to Paris, and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention center at La Ferté-Macé. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice.
Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet’s life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity, and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries, and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings’s career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century’s most famous poets. 16 pages of illustrations”
J. Alison Rosenblitt is the director of studies in classics at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford and author of E. E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza. She lives in England.
“A sparkling narrative of Cummings’s early life. The Beauty of Living is a compelling account of Cummings’s complicated personal, sexual, and family relations, a platform on which J. Alison Rosenblitt can exercise her exceptional skills as an analyst of poetry and art. This is a profoundly enlightening introduction to Cummings by a gifted critic.” Bernard O’Donoghue, author of The Seasons of Cullen Church
Photos, notes, bibliography, glossary, indexes.
Ursula Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan (Bloomsbury Publishing). “John Buchan's name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous adaptations for film, television, radio and stage, beginning with the celebrated version by Alfred Hitchcock. Yet there was vastly more to 'JB'. He wrote more than a hundred books – fiction and non-fiction – and a thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul – given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada. His teenage years in Glasgow's Gorbals, where his father was the Free Church minister, contributed to his ease with shepherds and ambassadors, fur-trappers and prime ministers. His improbable marriage to a member of the aristocratic Grosvenor family means that this account of his life contains, at its heart, an enduring love story. Ursula Buchan, his granddaughter, has drawn on recently discovered family documents to write this comprehensive and illuminating biography. With perception, style, wit and a penetratingly clear eye, she brings vividly to life this remarkable man and his times.”
Ursula Buchan studied modern history at New Hall, Cambridge, and horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She is an award-winning journalist and author, having written eighteen books and contributed regularly to the Spectator, Observer, Independent, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Telegraph, and The Garden. She is a daughter of John Buchan's second son, William.
“John Buchan was a writer of considerable significance but he was also a man who led a remarkable public life. This magnificent biography leads us through that life with great style and understanding” Alexander McCall Smith
“[An] outstanding biography. . . . Though factual, it reads like a big, rambling Victorian novel, and takes you, as novels do, into other people's lives.” John Cary, Sunday Times
“Page-turning, buccaneering stuff.” Laura Freeman, The Times.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Philip Gefter, What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon (Harper Collins)
“In his acclaimed portraits, Richard Avedon captured the iconic figures of the twentieth century in his starkly bold, intimately minimal, and forensic visual style. Concurrently, his work for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue transformed the ideals of women's fashion, femininity, and culture to become the defining look of an era. Yet despite his driving ambition to gain respect in the art world, during his lifetime he was condescendingly dismissed as a ‘celebrity photographer.’
What Becomes a Legend Most is the first definitive biography of this luminary—an intensely driven man who endured personal and professional prejudice, struggled with deep insecurities, and mounted an existential lifelong battle to be recognized as an artist. Philip Gefter builds on archival research and exclusive interviews with those closest to Avedon to chronicle his story, beginning with Avedon’s coming-of-age in New York between the world wars, when cultural prejudices forced him to make decisions that shaped the course of his life. Compounding his private battles, Avedon fought to be taken seriously in a medium that itself struggled to be respected within the art world. Gefter reveals how the 1950s and 1960s informed Avedon’s life and work as much as he informed the period. He counted as close friends a profoundly influential group of artists—Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Harold Brodkey, Renata Adler, Sidney Lumet, and Mike Nichols—who shaped the cultural life of the American twentieth century. It wasn't until Avedon's fashion work was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late 1970s that he became a household name. Balancing glamour with the gravitas of an artist's genuine reach for worldy achievement—and not a little gossip—plus sixteen pages of photographs, What Becomes a Legend Most is an intimate window into Avedon's fascinating world. Dramatic, visionary, and remarkable, it pays tribute to Avedon's role in the history of photography and fashion—and his legacy as one of the most consequential artists of his time.”
Philip Gefter is the author of two previous books: Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, which received the 2014 Marfield Prize and was a finalist for both the Publishing Triangle’s Shilts-Grahn Nonfiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Best Biography/Memoir; and a collection of essays, Photography After Frank. He was an editor at the New York Times for over fifteen years and wrote regularly about photography for the paper. He lives in New York City.
“Gefter weaves the particulars of Avedon's life story into a larger narrative about American culture in the decades after World War II. . . . Read in the context of our own precarious political and ecological moment, this assessment alone argues eloquently for the abiding, even urgent relevance of Avedon's imperfect Art.” Caroline Weber, The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Barack Obama, A Promised Land (Crown).
“In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office.
Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.
“Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. . . . [A Promised Land] is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid. . . . The story will continue in the second volume, but Barack Obama has already illuminated a pivotal moment in American history, and how America changed while also remaining unchanged.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The New York Times Book Review.
Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms. He is the author of two previous New York Times bestselling books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, and the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Michelle. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.
Photos, index.
Jelani Cobb, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (Bloomsbury Publishing).
“When voters in 2008 chose the United States' first black president, some Americans hailed the event as a sign that the nation had, at long last, transcended its bloody history of racial inequality. Obama's victory was indescribably momentous, but if the intervening years proved anything, it is that we never leave history entirely behind. Indeed, this may be the ultimate lesson of the Obama era.
First published in 2010, The Substance of Hope is acclaimed historian Jelani Cobb's meditation on what Obama's election represented, an insightful investigation into the civil rights movement forces that helped produce it, and a prescient inquiry into how American society does-and does not-change. In penetrating, elegant prose, Cobb teases apart the paradoxes embodied in race and patriotism, identity and citizenship, progress and legacy.
Now reissued with a new introduction by the author, reflecting on how the seismic impact of the Obama presidency continues to shape America, The Substance of Hope is an indelible work of history and cultural criticism from one of our most singular voices.”
Jelani Cobb is a historian, and a professor of journalism at Columbia University. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015, he is a recipient of the Sidney Hillman Award for Opinion and Analysis, as well as fellowships from the Ford and Fulbright Foundations. He resides in New York City.
“This little book is packed with common sense observations that are given weight and meaning through Professor Cobb's academic and historical insight.” Melissa Harris-Perry.
“A provocative book, from a provocative mind.” Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Notes, bibliography.
2) PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTIONS, HISTORY,
REFERENCE, CRITICISM, ETC.
Jeff Gold, Sittin' In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s (Harper Design).
This a splendid collection of photographs of nightclub patrons gazing in rapt attention to some of the greatest of jazz musicians as they perform at renowned venues in major jazz centers: New York, Atlantic City, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I can’t speak familiarly of the cities other than D.C., where I was born in 1930 and remained in it and nearby Maryland until 1953, returning in 1970 for another 3½ decades. The nine pages devoted to my native city is short shrift for this important jazz center. I wish that more clubs had been highlighted in the section on D.C., which provides a page each, with a photo or illustration, for a mere four of them and in the chapter’s preface names only eight others. Especially deserving of inclusion but missing are the Brown Derby, the Blue Mirror, the Showboat, and Uptown Jazz, plus the several downtown movie houses that featured big bands in their stage shows. In the period covered (pre-1960s), these and a number of other unnamed venues featured major jazz musicians.
Sittin’ In does mention one of D.C.’s principal 1940s-50s after-hours jazz clubs, the Villa Bea (misspelling it as Villa Bier). I have a personal connection with the Villa Bea in that my extended family rented the stand-alone structure 2019 19th Street NW (see photo below) from 1923-33, that is, before it housed the Villa Bea, an illegal “bottle club,” in the building’s garden-level full basement, which had been my newspaper reporter uncle Jack’s quarters. My two brothers, Billy and Turner, both older than I, were born in bedrooms of 2019 19th Street NW and it was my initial home, from 1930 to 1933, when the family dispersed to Georgetown, the Dupont Circle area, Cleveland Park, and other D.C. neighborhoods.. By the way, the three stories above the Villa Bea accommodated gambling and the address was also a hangout for hookers, providing bedrooms in which they could ply their goods.
2019 19th Street NW, Washington, D.C., which housed, in its garden-level basement, the 1940s-50s after-hours jazz club Villa Bea. The writer of this book roundup spent his first three years (1930-33) in it with his parents, two older brothers, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
In the publisher’s words, Sittin' In is “A rare collection of more than 200 full-color and black-and-white souvenir photographs and memorabilia that bring to life the renowned jazz nightclubs of the 1940s and 1950s, compiled by Grammy Award-winning record executive and music historian Jeff Gold and featuring exclusive interviews with Quincy Jones, Sonny Rollins, Robin Givhan, Jason Moran, and Dan Morgenstern.
In the two decades before the Civil Rights movement, jazz nightclubs were among the first places that opened their doors to both Black and white performers and club goers in Jim Crow America. In this extraordinary collection, Jeff Gold looks back at this explosive moment in the history of Jazz and American culture, and the spaces at the center of artistic and social change. Sittin’ In is a visual history of jazz clubs during these crucial decades when some of the greatest names in in the genre—Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, and many others—were headlining acts across the country. In many of the clubs, Black and white musicians played together and more significantly, people of all races gathered together to enjoy an evening’s entertainment. House photographers roamed the floor and for a dollar, took picture of patrons that were developed on site and could be taken home in a keepsake folder with the club’s name and logo. Sittin’ In tells the story of the most popular club in these cities through striking images, first-hand anecdotes, true tales about the musicians who performed their unforgettable shows, notes on important music recorded live there, and more. All of this is supplemented by colorful club memorabilia, including posters, handbills, menus, branded matchbooks, and more. Inside you’ll also find exclusive, in-depth interviews conducted specifically for this book with the legendary Quincy Jones; jazz great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins; Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan; jazz musician and creative director of the Kennedy Center, Jason Moran; and jazz critic Dan Morgenstern. Gold surveys America’s jazz scene and its intersection with racism during segregation, focusing on three crucial regions: the East Coast (New York, Atlantic City, Boston, Washington, D.C.); the Midwest (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City); and the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco). This collection of ephemeral snapshots tells the story of an era that helped transform American life, beginning the move from traditional Dixieland jazz to bebop, from conservatism to the push for personal freedom.”
Jeff Gold is a Grammy Award-winning music historian, archivist, author and executive. Profiled by Rolling Stone as one of five "top collectors of high-end music memorabilia," he is an internationally recognized expert who has consulted for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Museum of Pop Culture (formerly the Experience Music Project), and various record labels and cultural institutions.
“Sittin’ In is in a word—exquisite. Meticulously laid out and extensively researched, it’s a deep dive into this amazing period of American cultural history. These venues and this amazing music were among the best vehicles for integration the country ever had. This was an America really making a go of bringing people together. It wasn’t legislation. It was Jazz. And it worked. We are incredibly lucky to have Sittin’ In. The musicians in these pages made some of the most sublime music you will ever hear. Seek it out if you have not already.” Henry Rollins (Henry Lawrence Garfield), born in 1961 in Washington, D.C., is an American musician, singer, actor, presenter, comedian, activist, host of a weekly radio show on KCRW (Santa Monica), and a regular columnist for Rolling Stone Australia.
Mark Ruffin, Bebop Fairy Tales: An Historical Fiction Trilogy on Jazz, Intolerance, and Baseball (Rough In Creative Works).
“The author compels us to look at white privilege from multiple angles, and to look at the traumatic malignancy of Black hatred. As well, he nudges us to investigate more closely our own biases—explicit, implicit, or internalized—all while telling us some impressive facts about legendary jazzers, sportsmen, and the cities they incarnate. Pretty cool.” from the Foreword by Terri Lyne Carrington.
“In his three stories connected by common themes, Mark also shows the impact of race on those institutions and on our culture in 20th-century America. Baseball, jazz, and race. Yes, it’s a book about America.” Lee Mergner, JazzTimes.
“The music is alive and so are characters who breathe and speak and act out fully realized narratives built on the foundation of jazz legend. His stories weave together details drawn from song lyrics, cultural history, and his own rich imagination, creating scenes of musical transcendence as well as harsh, racial reality. These tales may be drawn from the annals of jazz, but they offer enduring lessons of life in America for all of us.” Ashley Kahn
“Mark Ruffin’s Bebop Fairy Tales captures the heart and soul of the American experience during the 20th century with humor, wit, and accuracy, just like the solos of the jazz musicians he uses as his artistic muse. It’s the best kind of history: poetic, noetic, and hip.” Ben Sidran
Carlotta Hester, The Pure Drop (Govinda Gallery/ To order, please call 202-333-1180 or email popart@govindagallery.com).
Ireland’s Anglo-Celt newspaper, publishing since 1846, featured a story about Carlotta Hester’s just-released book of live-action drawings of traditional Irish music artists called The Pure Drop. This book celebrates the 10th anniversary of the All Ireland Music Festival, the largest festival of its kind in the world. Here is that story.
Carlotta Hester and The Pure Drop
by Thomas Lyons
Anglo-Celt
July 16th, 2020
During the summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012, American artist Carlotta Hester made over 150 drawings in County Cavan. Each a rendering of traditional Irish musicians, singers, and dancers captured at the height of their creative flow.
Now the artist has gathered a selection of her drawings in a beautiful publication called The Pure Drop.
Chris Murray is the publisher of the collection: “It occurred to me that the 10th anniversary of the Fleadh festival was this summer and that it coincided with the staging of the Ulster Fleadh in Cavan. I thought it would be great to mark that by publishing Carlotta’s wonderful live-action drawings. Even though the Ulster Fleadh is canceled, we felt that because the drawings are timeless we would go ahead with it.”
Hester’s drawings are created directly from life while listening to the music in every festival setting: street sessions, theatres, dance classes, pub sessions, master classes, outdoor concerts, cross-border gatherings, and more.
The impact of the experience on the artist and the publisher is apparent when Chris speaks of the time: “Those three summers were an extraordinary time for us. We had never been to an All Ireland Fleadh before and the experience was just magical.”
The book features musical artists from all over Ireland, Scotland, England, and the United States. The sketched portraits include fiddlers Tommy Peoples and Oisin MacDiarmada, harpist Catriona McKay, and lilter Seamus Fay.
The Pure Drop is a celebration of the artistry of deep-rooted Irish traditions which continue to thrive today: “We have to thank Martin Donohoe. He was our Irish music guru.”
The book is very much a Cavan publication: “I had the book printed in Cavan at Harvest Moon in Killeshandra. It is very much a celebration of coming home and discovering traditional music and being moved by its artistry.”
Carlotta Hester has exhibited in Washington DC, Ireland, and Cuba. She combines her art practice with art teaching, and has been the art teacher at the prestigious Maret School since 1994.
The book had an official launch on Sunday, August 9, 2020 in The Farnham Arms Hotel, Cavan Town, Ireland. It celebrated the book and the 10th anniversary of the 2010 All Ireland Fleadh festival in Cavan.
W. Royal Stokes, The Essential W. Royal Stokes Jazz, Blues, and Beyond Reader (Hannah Books).
“Drawn from his extensive archives and including some previously unpublished materials, The Essential W. Royal Stokes Jazz, Blues, and Beyond Reader provides a generous sampling of the author’s journalism from his years as the Washington Post’s jazz critic and across his four decades as a contributor to JazzTimes, DownBeat, and online forums. An autobiographical essay on his earlier academic career and the transcript of a two-hour talk about his jazz life round out the volume. More than 100 photographs enhance one’s enjoyment of this splendid collection.W. Royal Stokes was the recipient of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He is the author of Growing Up With Jazz: Twenty-Four Musicians Talk About Their Lives and Careers, Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson, and other books on jazz and blues and the trilogy of novels Backwards Over.”
“W. Royal Stokes’ The Essential W. Royal Stokes Jazz, Blues, and Beyond Reader (Hannah Books) is a compendium of the works of a leading jazz journalist, historian, and critic. This hefty (560 pages) softcover, large format book is a well organized, well annotated, and well illustrated (103 photos) collection of the major contributions of W. Royal Stokes. He has been reporting on a broad spectrum of hip music for over half a century, on radio and in his writings, for DownBeat, JazzTimes, and the Washington Post, among many others. His interview technique allows the artist to express themselves without judgment or interpretation, yet his well-written, astute and comprehensive observations come through loud and clear as a true participant. Hence this offering is most valuable and insightful for younger readers who seek insights into the jazz, blues, and alternative music scenes. The reader will joyfully return to this book many times on his/her musical discovery journey to learn from the master.” F. Dance
Photographs, index.
Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (Heyday). “In the 1940s and 50s, a jazz aficionado could find paradise in the nightclubs of San Francisco’s Fillmore District: Billie Holiday sang at the Champagne Supper Club; Chet Baker and Dexter Gordon jammed with the house band at Bop City; and T-Bone Walker rubbed shoulders with the locals at the bar of Texas Playhouse. The Fillmore was one of the few neighborhoods in the Bay Area where people of color could go for entertainment, and so many legendary African American musicians performed there for friends and family that the neighborhood was known as the Harlem of the West. Over a dozen clubs dotted the twenty-block-radius. Filling out the streets were restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and stores, many of them owned and run by African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans. The entire neighborhood was a giant multicultural party pulsing with excitement and music. In 220 lovingly restored images and oral accounts from residents and musicians, Harlem of the West captures a joyful, exciting time in San Francisco, taking readers through an all-but-forgotten multicultural neighborhood and revealing a momentous part of the country’s African American musical heritage.”
Elizabeth Pepin Silva is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and former day manager of the historic Fillmore Auditorium. She holds a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University.
Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist, and professor emeritus of art at UC Santa Cruz with a longstanding interest in the cultural landscape of the African diaspora in the Bay Area and internationally.
220 photographs, bibliography, index.
Harald Kisiedu, European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950–1975 (Wolke Verlag/https://www.wolke-verlag.de/bestellungen-privat/).
“This book is a historical and interpretive study of the movement of jazz experimentalism in West and East Germany between the years 1950 and 1975. It complicates the narratives advanced by previous scholars by arguing that engagement with black musical methods, concepts, and practices remained significant for the emergence of the German jazz experimentalism movement. In a seemingly paradoxical fashion, this engagement with black musical knowledge enabled the formation of more self-reliant musical concepts and practices. Rather than viewing the German jazz experimentalism movement in terms of dissociation from their African American spiritual fathers, this book presents the movement as having decisively contributed to the decentering of still prevalent jazz historiographies in which the centrality of the US is usually presupposed. Going beyond both US-centric and Eurocentric perspectives, this study contributes to scholarship that accounts for jazz’s global dimension and the transfer of ideas beyond nationally conceived spaces.”
Harald Kisiedu is a music historian and lecturer at the Institute of Music at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences. He is also a saxophonist, improviser, and recording artist.
“Few studies have understood how improvised music functions as a complex ecosystem, indeed an interlocking one that overlaps and exchanges with other like ecosystems, not just musical ones, but artistic, political, and social ones as well. Perhaps only George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself and Kevin Whitehead’s New Dutch Swing have managed to capture the intricacies of free music – or what Lewis has termed “experimentalism” – in this way, with the depth and feeling that it deserves. Harald Kisiedu’s magnificent European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950-75 joins the ranks of these groundbreaking books, adding indispensable substance to the current scholarship. Basing his argument on meticulous primary research that includes many unknown or under-discussed details, Kisiedu moves deftly between biography, history and analysis, ultimately depicting improvised music in Germany as part of a continuum with African American jazz, rather than falling into line with received knowledge, which has tended to treat it as a major break – an ‘emancipation,’ to use the problematic language often deployed – from its precursors and contemporaries in the United States. This allows Kisiedu to investigate the complexities of race, in particular, in the emergent new music of both West and East Germany, but also to evaluate the specificity of German improvised music, its relationships to Fluxus and its place in relation to new art and contemporary composed music in Europe, and the political and social contexts of the divided country in which it all emerged. Along the way, Kisiedu provides the most detailed biographical portraits of his principal subjects – Peter Brötzmann, Alex Schlippenbach, Manfred Schoof, and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky – yet published in English, and the book includes an important trove of newly discovered and previously unpublished photographs.“ John Corbett, author of A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation.
“Harald Kisiedu’s groundbreaking interdisciplinary study trenchantly illuminates how during the Cold War and after, first-generation German and Swiss experimental musicians challenged national, political, conceptual, and racial borders to produce cosmopolitan new forms and practices of free improvisation. Kisiedu brings the study of improvised music together with German studies, critical race theory, and political science to produce a rigorous yet intimate portrait of the musical, cultural, and personal relationships among highly innovative musicians who shaped a new future of music.” George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
Photographs, notes, bibliography.
James A Harrod, Stars of Jazz: A Complete History of the Innovative Television Series, 1956-1958. (McFarland)
“Imagine an educational television series featuring America's greatest jazz artists in performance, airing every week from 1956 to 1958 on KABC, Los Angeles. Stars of Jazz was hosted by Bobby Troup, the songwriter, pianist and vocalist. Each show provided information about the performance that heightened viewers' appreciation. The series garnered praise from critics and numerous awards including an Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. A landmark series visually, too, it presented many television firsts including experimental films by designers Charles and Ray Eames. All 130 shows were filmed as kinescopes. Surviving films were donated to the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where 16 shows have been restored; 29 additional shows are in the collection. The remaining 85 kinescopes were long ago discarded. This first full documentation of Stars of Jazz identifies every musician, vocalist, and guest who appeared on the series and lists every song performed on the series along with composer and lyricist credits. More than 100 photographs include images from many of the lost episodes.”
“James Harrod grew up in northern Wyoming and first began listening to jazz while in high school in the 1950s. After graduating from Portland State College in 1965, he moved to southern California where he was a bookseller until his retirement in 2002. His publishing credits include liner notes for four compact disc reissues of Pacific Jazz artists: Bud Shank/Bill Perkins Quintets, and the Chet Baker Quartet Live (three volumes). He has written numerous articles for the Dutch discography journal, Names & Numbers. He conceived the World Wide Web exhibition, The Jazz Photography of Ray Avery, in 1994. His jazz research website, http://jazzresearch.com/, was registered and established in March of 2000. He maintains several jazz related blogs at Google Blogger.” His research focuses on jazz in Los Angeles during the years 1945-1960. He is a member of the Jazz Journalists Association, the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and the Los Angeles Jazz Institute. He lives in Laguna Beach, California.
“Harrod has done a superb job of using the available resources to present a complete picture of the genesis and production of this important televised jazz series. By the time that you finish reading this book, you will have learned about this significant slice of jazz history and will feel sad that you cannot see all of the shows. But, you will surely head to YouTube to enjoy what is currently available.” Joe Lang, Jersey Jazz.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Robert L. Stone, Can't Nobody Do Me Like Jesus!: Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community, Foreward by Eric Lewis Williams (University Press of Mississippi).
“Folklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended photo captions in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community offer the reader an intimate view of this unique tradition of passionately played music that is beloved among fans of American roots music and admired by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other scholars. In 1992, a friend in Hollywood, Florida, introduced Stone to African American musicians who played the electric steel guitar in the African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches House of God and Church of the Living God. With the passion, skill, and unique voice they brought to the instruments, these musicians profoundly impressed Stone. He produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program, which Arhoolie Records licensed and released worldwide. It created a roots music sensation. In 1996, Stone began to document the tradition beyond Florida. He took the photos in this book from 1992 to 2008 in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida, and at concerts in Italy. The images capture musicians as they play for worship services before spirit-filled believers singing, dancing, shouting, praying, and testifying. Stone gives the viewer much to witness, always presenting his passionate subjects with dignity. His sensitive portrayal of this community attests to the ongoing importance of musical traditions in African American life and worship.”
Robert L. Stone is an independent folklorist and photographer based in Gainesville, Florida. He has been documenting the steel guitar tradition of African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches since 1992. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stone produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program released by Arhoolie Records as CD 450 Sacred Steel in 1997. Stone, continuing his work with Arhoolie, has produced eight more CDs and directed the Sacred Steel documentary video. In 2011, the Florida Department of State honored him with the Florida Folk Heritage Award.
“When I first heard Bob Stone’s recordings of sacred steel music, it was like discovering a marvelous, magical world. The artists had a deep soul and power like nothing recorded since the golden ages of blues, gospel, and soul. Seeing these photographs, I am reminded that the music was part of a far larger world and am forever grateful to Stone for preserving so much beauty, dignity, and passion.” Elijah Wald, author of Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.
David Menconi, Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk (University of North Carolina Press).
“This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina's extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state's music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina's Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina's sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.”
David Menconi is North Carolina's 2019 Piedmont Laureate, and a longtime music/arts critic. His writing has appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Spin, Billboard and Salon.com. See davidmenconi.com for more.
Photographs, bibliography, discogrphy, index.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture (A Ferris and Ferris Book) (University of North Carolina Press). “In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.”
Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. Her previous books include A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940.
“Not only is Cool Town the most detailed account we'll get of the music of Athens, Georgia, the out-of-the-way college town that gave us the B-52's and R.E.M. It's also a thorough, deeply felt history of a seminal local bohemia that even as it matured changed the surrounding culture more than that culture changed it.” Robert Christgau, author of Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017.
“A delightful dive into the rich history of the Athens, Georgia, music and arts scene that has nurtured and inspired so many. Grace Hale experienced the scene firsthand, and her recollections are warm, but she doesn't shy away from difficult subjects. I was honored by her inclusion of Pylon as a central part of the story.” Vanessa Briscoe Hay, vocalist, Pylon and Pylon Reenactment Society.
Photographs, notes, index.
Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music by John W. Troutman (The University of North Carolina Press). “Since the nineteenth century, the distinct tones of kika kila, the Hawaiian steel guitar, have defined the island sound. Here historian and steel guitarist John W. Troutman offers the instrument's definitive history, from its discovery by a young Hawaiian royalist named Joseph Kekuku to its revolutionary influence on American and world music. During the early twentieth century, Hawaiian musicians traveled the globe, from tent shows in the Mississippi Delta, where they shaped the new sounds of country and the blues, to regal theaters and vaudeville stages in New York, Berlin, Kolkata, and beyond. In the process, Hawaiian guitarists recast the role of the guitar in modern life. But as Troutman explains, by the 1970s the instrument's embrace and adoption overseas also worked to challenge its cultural legitimacy in the eyes of a new generation of Hawaiian musicians. As a consequence, the indigenous instrument nearly disappeared in its homeland.
Using rich musical and historical sources, including interviews with musicians and their descendants, Troutman provides the complete story of how this Native Hawaiian instrument transformed not only American music but the sounds of modern music throughout the world.
The Organization of American Historians named Kika Kila the winner of the 2017 Lawrence W. Levine Award for the Best Book in American Cultural History.
The Association for Recorded Sound Collections named Kika Kila the winner of the 2017 Award for ‘Best Historical Research in Recorded Popular Music.’”
John W. Troutman is Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
“John W. Troutman’s Kika Kila is a deeply researched, definitive history of the Hawaiian steel guitar, but more than that, it is an eloquent and convincing argument for the influence and centrality of Hawaiian music--and, in particular, Hawaiian musicians--in the broader history of American music.” Elijah Wald, author of Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.
“Kika Kila is a tour de force, documenting the steel guitar's indigenous Hawaiian roots, while also challenging longstanding conventions in the music industry and in scholarship on American popular music. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Troutmanʻs book is a gift of insight and appreciation for the steel guitar, arguably the most endearing sonic icon of Hawaiian music.” Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman, Professor of American Culture and Music, University of Michigan.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (Zone Books)
“Bob Dylan’s reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (originally published as Bob Dylan's Poetics) is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan’s compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan’s innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan’s earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan’s achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan’s work. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.”
Timothy Hampton teaches literature at the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of the romance languages, focusing primarily on the Renaissance, he has written widely about literature and culture. Recently he has been writing about popular music. A study of the history of cheerfulness is in progress.
“With a style that turns analysis into a form of suspense, Timothy Hampton can walk you through ‘Visions of Johanna’ or ‘Summer Days’ the way the art historian T. J. Clark can walk you through Manet’s Olympia. There’s the same generosity of spirit, the same love for the work and the social meanings it absorbs, transforms, and sends back. You really do begin to get a sense of how the songs work--Bob Dylan's songs, but anyone's songs, too--how they are assembled or assemble themselves. And just when you think you've learned the language, Hampton will throw a curve.” Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick.
“This is a truly powerful book written by one of the leading scholars of the history of poetry today. The writing is clear and intellectually most exciting: Dylan’s idiosyncratic genius is explained more compellingly than ever before. Hampton remains relevant, exciting, and persuasively accurate as he shows the genesis of the songs as musical and literary forms and assesses their originality. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work will become a standard account, destined to appear in class lists under ‘required reading’; it contains the searching close readings of songs that will both enable future study and require contestation for an alternative account: the study sets a gold standard.” Nigel Smith, William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern.
Notes, bibliography, list of songs cited, index.
Paul Morley, A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love With Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History) (Bloomsbury Publishing)
“For readers of Mozart in the Jungle and Year of Wonder, a new history of and guide to classical music. Paul Morley made his name as a journalist covering the rock and pop of the 1970s and 1980s. But as his career progressed, he found himself drawn toward developing technologies, streaming platforms, and, increasingly, the music from the past that streaming services now made available. Suddenly able to access every piece Mozart or Bach had ever written and to curate playlists that worked with these musicians' themes across different performers, composers, and eras, he began to understand classical music in a whole new way and to believe that it was music at its most dramatic and revealing. In A Sound Mind, Morley takes readers along on his journey into the history and future of classical music. His descriptions, explanations, and guidance make this seemingly arcane genre more friendly to listeners and show the music's power, depth, and timeless beauty. In Morley's capable hands, the history of the classical genre is shown to be the history of all music, with these long-ago pieces influencing everyone from jazz greats to punk rockers and the pop musicians of today.”
Paul Morley grew up in Stockport, Cheshire, and has worked as a music journalist, pop svengali and broadcaster. He is the author of a number of books on music – Ask: The Chatter of Pop, Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, Joy Division: Piece by Piece: Writing About Joy Division 1977–2007, and Joy Division: Fragments – as well as an acclaimed memoir of his early years, Nothing. Paul has written for a number of publications, including the New Statesman, the Sunday Telegraph, NME, the Observer and the Guardian.
“Morley's expansive present-tense prose flows from the loosening of the superego, his id let out to play in a style that’s at times neo-gonzo, at others like an inspired hybrid of Mike Cohn and the Julian Cope of Krautrocksampler. I hold him to be one of the great pop writers. You might even call him the Bowie of rock journalism.” Barney Hoskyns, The Guardian on Morley's The Age of Bowie.
“Morley is a bright writer, and most of his commentary on specific pieces and composers is sophisticated and insightful.” John Rockwell, The New York Times Book Review.
Photographs, illustrations, index.
S. L. Kotar and J. E. Gessler, The Steamboat Era: A History of Fulton's Folly on American Rivers, 1807-1860 (McFarland)
“The steamboat evokes images of leisurely travel, genteel gambling, and lively commerce, but behind the romanticized view is an engineering marvel that led the way for the steam locomotive. From the steamboat's development by Robert Fulton to the dawn of the Civil War, the new mode of transportation opened up America's frontiers and created new trade routes and economic centers. Firsthand accounts of steamboat accidents, races, business records and river improvements are collected here to reveal the culture and economy of the early to mid-1800s, as well as the daily routines of crew and passengers. A glossary of steamboat terms and a collection of contemporary accounts of accidents round out this history of the riverboat era.”
S. L. Kotar and J. E. Gessler have been writing together for more than four decades.
“Colrful, anecdotal, and interesting. . . . Recommended.” Choice.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, glossary, index.
Candacy A. Taylor’s Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (Harry N. Abrams) is “The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for black motorists. Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the ‘black travel guide to America.’ At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because black travelers couldn’t eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem. It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and Overground Railroad celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America.”
Candacy Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian. Her work has been featured in over 50 media outlets including the New Yorker and The Atlantic. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants including The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives in Denver, Colorado. Visit her website at taylormadeculture.com and follow her on Twitter @candacytaylor.
“With passion, conviction, and clarity, [Candacy] Taylor’s book unearths a fascinating and true—if not willfully obscured—history of African American activism and entrepreneurship in the United States. This remarkable study broadens our understanding of black life, leisure, and struggles for equality in twentieth-century America, presents the Green Book as a social movement in response to a crisis in black travel, and makes a compelling case for the need to protect more diverse African American sites that have been heretofore underappreciated.” Brent Leggs, Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright/W. W. Norton).
It’s hardly a secret that mobility has always been limited, if not impossible, for African Americans. Before the Civil War, masters confined their slaves to their property, while free black people found themselves regularly stopped, questioned, and even kidnapped. Restrictions on movement before Emancipation carried over, in different forms, into Reconstruction and beyond; for most of the 20th century, many white Americans felt blithely comfortable denying their black countrymen the right to travel freely on trains and buses. Yet it became more difficult to shackle someone who was cruising along a highway at 45 miles per hour.
In Driving While Black, the acclaimed historian Gretchen Sorin reveals how the car―the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility―has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. She recounts the creation of a parallel, unseen world of black motorists, who relied on travel guides, black only businesses, and informal communications networks to keep them safe. From coast to coast, mom and pop guest houses and tourist homes, beauty parlors, and even large hotels―including New York’s Hotel Theresa, the Hampton House in Miami, or the Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles―as well as night clubs and restaurants like New Orleans’ Dooky Chase and Atlanta’s Paschal’s, fed travelers and provided places to stay the night. At the heart of Sorin’s story is Victor and Alma Green’s famous Green Book, a travel guide begun in 1936, which helped grant black Americans that most basic American rite, the family vacation.
As Sorin demonstrates, black travel guides and black-only businesses encouraged a new way of resisting oppression. Black Americans could be confident of finding welcoming establishments as they traveled for vacation or for business. Civil Rights workers learned where to stay and where to eat in the South between marches and protests. As Driving While Black reminds us, the Civil Rights Movement was just that―a movement of black people and their allies in defiance of local law and custom. At the same time, she shows that the car, despite the freedoms it offered, brought black people up against new challenges, from segregated ambulance services to unwarranted traffic stops, and the racist violence that too often followed.
Interwoven with Sorin’s own family history and enhanced by dozens of little known images, Driving While Black charts how the automobile fundamentally reshaped African American life, and opens up an entirely new view onto one of the most important issues of our time.”
Gretchen Sorin is distinguished professor and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. She has curated innumerable exhibits―including with the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum and the New York State Historical Association―and lives in upstate New York.
“Makes powerfully clear the magnitude of the injustices and harrowing encounters endured by African-Americans traveling by ‘open’ road, as well as of their quiet acts of rebellion and protest, which went far beyond having to find alternative places to eat, sleep and buy gas…. Deeply researched… Driving While Black is more focused on the history of African-American car ownership and travel, exploring why both have been so important to African-American life.... A scholarly examination of the history of black mobility in this country from the antebellum period to now, including the ongoing quest by whites in power to deny or restrict that mobility.” Bridgett M. Davis, New York Times Book Review.
Photographs, illustrations, notes, index.
PRIDE: Fifty Years of Parades and Protests from the Photo Archives of the New York Times (Abrams Books). Introduction by Adam Nagourney, text by David Kaufman, photo editing by Cecilia Bohan.
“It began in New York City on June 28, 1969. When police raided the Stonewall Inn—a bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood, known as a safe haven for gay men—violent demonstrations and protests broke out in response. The Stonewall Riots, as they would come to be known, were the first spark in the wildfire that would become the LGBTQ rights revolution. Fifty years later, the LGBTQ community and its supporters continue to gather every June to commemorate this historic event. Here, collected for the first time by The New York Times, is a powerful visual history of five decades of parades and protests of the LGBTQ rights movement. These photos, paired with descriptions of major events from each decade as well as selected reporting from The Times, showcase the victories, setbacks, and ongoing struggles for the LGBTQ community.”
“To take in the breadth of [PRIDE’s] contents – to see the scope of LGBTQ+ rights, from the first Christopher Street Day march in 1970 to protests for transgender rights just last year – is to witness the power of visibility firsthand.”
them.
“This book is a powerful visual history of five decades of parades and protests for equality. Educational and visually enriching, complete with photos from The New York Times, this book is the perfect companion for any coffee table.”
BookTrib.
William B. Helmreich, The Queens Nobody Knows: An Urban Walking Guide (Princeton University Press).
Bill Helmreich walked every block of New York City―some six-thousand miles―to write the award-winning The New York Nobody Knows. Later, he re-walked most of Queens―1,012 miles in all―to create this one-of-a-kind walking guide to the city's largest borough, from hauntingly beautiful parks to hidden parts of Flushing's Chinese community. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he had with residents during his block-by-block journey through this fascinating, diverse, and underexplored borough, Helmreich highlights hundreds of facts and points of interest that you won't find in any other guide. In Bellerose, you'll explore a museum filled with soul-searing artwork created by people with mental illness. In Douglaston, you'll gaze up in awe at the city's tallest tree. In Corona, you'll discover the former synagogue where Madonna lived when she first came to New York. In St. Albans, you'll see the former homes of jazz greats, including Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday. In Woodhaven, you'll walk a block where recent immigrants from Mexico, Guyana, and China all proudly fly the American flag. And much, much more. An unforgettably vivid chronicle of today's Queens, the book can be enjoyed without ever leaving home―but it's almost guaranteed to inspire you to get out and explore this captivating borough.
Covers every one of Queens's neighborhoods, providing a colorful portrait of their most interesting, unusual, and unfamiliar people, places, and things
Each neighborhood section features a brief overview and history; a detailed, user-friendly map keyed to the text; photographs; and a lively guided walking tour
Draws on the author's 1,012-mile walk through every Queens neighborhood.
Includes insights from conversations with hundreds of residents.”
“First-rate. . . . a superlative gift idea (perhaps as part of a set, along with the author’s earlier walking books) for anyone, walker or not, with an ardor for New York, including armchair adventurers who simply enjoy learning about complex urban societies.” Mark Orwoll, East-West News Service.
Peter Lunenfeld, City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined (Viking).
“How did Los Angeles start the 20th century as a dusty frontier town and end up a century later as one of the globe's supercities - with unparalleled cultural, economic, and technological reach? In City at the Edge of Forever, Peter Lunenfeld constructs an urban portrait, layer by layer, from serendipitous affinities, historical anomalies, and uncanny correspondences. In its pages, modernist architecture and lifestyle capitalism come together via a surfer girl named Gidget; Joan Didion's yellow Corvette is the brainchild of a car-crazy Japanese-American kid interned at Manzanar; and the music of the Manson Family segues into the birth of sci-fi fandom. One of the book's innovations is to brand Los Angeles as the alchemical city. Earth became real estate when the Yankees took control in the nineteenth century. Fire fueled the city's early explosive growth as the Southland's oil fields supplied the inexhaustible demands of drivers and their cars. Air defined the area from WWII to the end of the Cold War, with aeronautics and aerospace dominating the region's industries. Water is now the key element, and Southern California's ports are the largest in the western hemisphere. What alchemists identify as the ethereal fifth element, or quintessence, this book positions as the glamour of Hollywood, a spell that sustains the city but also needs to be broken in order to understand Los Angeles now. Lunenfeld weaves together the city's art, architecture, and design, juxtaposes its entertainment and literary histories, and moves from restaurant kitchens to recording studios to ultra-secret research and development labs. In the process, he reimagines Los Angeles as simultaneously an exemplar and cautionary tale for the 21st century.”
Peter Lunenfeld is vice chair of UCLA's Design Media Arts department, and a faculty member in the Urban and Digital Humanities programs. He has published award-winning essays and several books with the MIT Press about the ways in which art, design, and technology intertwine. He has lived in Southern California for over thirty years.
“This is a luminous, engrossing book. Lunenfeld evokes all of the texture and complexity of Los Angeles in a wholly original way —as both a real place and an imagined place, central to the American psyche.” Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book.
“Here is a title to be added to the list of great meditations on Los Angeles. City at the Edge of Forever is a book about southern California but it is also a book about all of us, about how fringes become mainstream, how politics morphs into culture, and how culture mutates uncontrollably under the American sun.” Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Photographs, notes, index.
William Hansen, The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myth (Princeton University Press)
“Captured centaurs and satyrs, incompetent seers, people who suddenly change sex, a woman who remembers too much, a man who cannot laugh―these are just some of the colorful characters who feature in the unforgettable stories that ancient Greeks and Romans told in their daily lives. Together they created an incredibly rich body of popular oral stories that include, but range well beyond, mythology―from heroic legends, fairy tales, and fables to ghost stories, urban legends, and jokes. This unique anthology presents the largest collection of these tales ever assembled. Featuring nearly four hundred stories in authoritative and highly readable translations, this is the first book to offer a representative selection of the entire range of traditional classical storytelling. Complete with beautiful illustrations, this one-of-a-kind anthology will delight general readers as well as students of classics, fairy tales, and folklore.”
William Hansen is professor of classical studies and folklore and codirector of mythology studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
“Enchanting.” Victoria Rimell, Times Literary Supplement
“An extraordinarily entertaining bedside book.” Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“I cannot recommend it highly enough.” Edith Hall, Literary Review
“William Hansen's marvelous treasury lets us experience for ourselves the timeless tales that made the ancient Greeks and Romans think, shudder, and laugh.” Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons .
Nigel Spivey, The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase (University of Chicago Press).
From the perspective of my limited view of classical scholarship—I departed academe and the field of classics five decades ago (http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs147/1102932454996/archive/1112415778593.html#LETTER.BLOCK35)—Professor Spivey’s The Sarpedon Krater has my vote as the Most Fascinating Classics Book of the Year.
“Perhaps the most spectacular of all Greek vases, the Sarpedon krater depicts the body of Sarpedon, a hero of the Trojan War, being carried away to his homeland for burial. It was decorated some 2,500 years ago by Athenian artist Euphronios, and its subsequent history involves tomb raiding, intrigue, duplicity, litigation, international outrage, and possibly even homicide. How this came about is told by Nigel Spivey in a concise, stylish book that braids together the creation and adventures of this extraordinary object with an exploration of its abiding influence. Spivey takes the reader on a dramatic journey, beginning with the krater’s looting from an Etruscan tomb in 1971 and its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, followed by a high-profile lawsuit over its status and its eventual return to Italy. He explains where, how, and why the vase was produced, retrieving what we know about the life and legend of Sarpedon. Spivey also pursues the figural motif of the slain Sarpedon portrayed on the vase and traces how this motif became a standard way of representing the dead and dying in Western art, especially during the Renaissance.
Fascinating and informative, The Sarpedon Krater is a multifaceted introduction to the enduring influence of Greek art on the world.”
Nigel Spivey is a senior lecturer in classical art and archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of several books, including Understanding Greek Sculpture, Enduring Creation, The Classical World, and The Ancient Olympics. He also presented the major BBC/PBS series How Art Made the World.
“Spivey scales mountains, hurtles into caves, treks across deserts, and submits to shock treatment for the eyes in the first few episodes of [the PBS series] How Art Made the World. . . . In broaching questions about the genesis and meaning of art, [he] draws on some of the world’s best-known works of art and architecture for answers.” Benjamin Genocchio, New York Times.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Richard Stoneman’s The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks (Princeton University Press) Is “An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCE. When the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander’s army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new and strange world. They knew a few legends and travelers’ tales, but their categories of thought were inadequate to encompass what they witnessed. The plants were unrecognizable, their properties unknown. The customs of the people were various and puzzling. While Alexander’s conquest was brief, ending with his death in 323 BCE, the Greeks would settle in the Indian region for the next two centuries, forging an era of productive interactions between the two cultures. The Greek Experience of India explores the various ways that the Greeks reacted to and constructed life in India during this fruitful period. From observations about botany and mythology to social customs, Richard Stoneman examines the surviving evidence of those who traveled to India. Most particularly, he offers a full and valuable look at Megasthenes, ambassador of the King Seleucus to Chandragupta Maurya, and provides a detailed discussion of Megasthenes’ now-fragmentary book Indica. Stoneman considers the art, literature, and philosophy of the Indo-Greek kingdom and how cultural influences crossed in both directions, with the Greeks introducing their writing, coinage, and sculptural and architectural forms, while Greek craftsmen learned to work with new materials such as ivory and stucco and to probe the ideas of Buddhists and other ascetics. Relying on an impressively wide variety of sources from the Indian subcontinent, The Greek Experience of India is a masterful account of the encounters between two remarkable civilizations.”
Richard Stoneman is an honorary visiting professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. He is also a consulting editor in classics for I. B. Tauris. His many books include The Ancient Oracles and Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend.
"Drawing on a vast array of research, [Stoneman] has compiled a magisterial overview of 'the Indo-Greek era', beginning with Alexander’s crossing of the Hindu Kush mountain range in 327 BC and ending with the severing of contact about three centuries later. [The Greek Experience of India is an] intriguing and valuable book.” James Romm, New York Review of Books.
Photographs, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
Robert Goodwin, América: The Epic Story of Spanish North America, 1493-1898 (Bloomsbury Publishing). “At the conclusion of the American Revolution, half the modern United States was part of the vast Spanish Empire. The year after Columbus's great voyage of discovery, in 1492, he claimed Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands for Spain. For the next three hundred years, thousands of proud Spanish conquistadors and their largely forgotten Mexican allies went in search of glory and riches from Florida to California. Many died, few triumphed. Some were cruel, some were curious, some were kind. Missionaries and priests yearned to harvest Indian souls for God through baptism and Christian teaching. Theirs was a frontier world which Spain struggled to control in the face of Indian resistance and competition from France, Britain, and finally the United States. In the 1800s, Spain lost it all. Goodwin tells this history through the lives of the people who made it happen and the literature and art with which they celebrated their successes and mourned their failures. He weaves an epic tapestry from these intimate biographies of explorers and conquerors, like Columbus and Coronado, but also lesser known characters, like the powerful Gálvez family who gave invaluable and largely forgotten support to the American Patriots during the Revolutionary War; the great Pueblo leader Popay; and Esteban, the first documented African American. Like characters in a great play or a novel, Goodwin's protagonists walk the stage of history with heroism and brio and much tragedy.”
Dr. Robert Goodwin is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. He is the author of Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South and Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682, He appears on Spanish radio and TV and writes for Spanish newspapers. He lives between London and Seville, where he regularly conducts archival research.
“Goodwin writes with verve and can be read with pleasure . . . . He revels in set pieces, evoking historical personalities, particularly swashbuckling characters. . . a rattling good story.” J.H. Elliott, The New York Review of Books.
Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton University Press).
Since the publication of Eliza May Butler's Tyranny of Greece over Germany in 1935, the obsession of the German educated elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted, if severely underanalyzed, cliché. In Down from Olympus, Suzanne Marchand attempts to come to grips with German Graecophilia, not as a private passion but as an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope. The book argues that nineteenth-century philhellenes inherited both an elitist, normative aesthetics and an ascetic, scholarly ethos from their Romantic predecessors; German "neohumanists" promised to reconcile these intellectual commitments, and by so doing, to revitalize education and the arts. Focusing on the history of classical archaeology, Marchand shows how the injunction to imitate Greek art was made the basis for new, state-funded cultural institutions. Tracing interactions between scholars and policymakers that made possible grand-scale cultural feats like the acquisition of the Pergamum Altar, she underscores both the gains in specialized knowledge and the failures in social responsibility that were the distinctive products of German neohumanism.
This book discusses intellectual and institutional aspects of archaeology and philhellenism, giving extensive treatment to the history of prehistorical archaeology and German "orientalism." Marchand traces the history of the study, excavation, and exhibition of Greek art as a means to confront the social, cultural, and political consequences of the specialization of scholarship in the last two centuries.”
Suzanne L. Marchand is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University. She is the author of numerous essays on the history of anthropology, archaeology, and classical scholarship in Germany and Austria and is the coauthor of the world history textbook Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (W. W. Norton).
“An enormously rich and stimulating book. . . . It is a masterly study of an important chapter of the classical Greek bearings on the modern world.” Craige Champion, Classical World
“Impressive. . . . Marchand's work will fascinate historians, philosophers, literary theorists, and . . . Humanists. . . . It provides . . . the definitive study of the historical decline of German 'institutional philhellenism.’”Josef Chytry, American Historical Review.
Photographs, bibliography, notes, index.
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (One World/Penguin Random House), edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain.
“A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges ‘some 20-and-odd Negroes’ onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume ‘community’ history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.”
“An engrossing anthology of essays, biographical sketches, and poems by Black writers tracing the history of the African American experience from the arrival of the first slaves in 1619 to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement . . . With a diverse range of up-and-coming scholars, activists, and writers exploring topics both familiar and obscure, this energetic collection stands apart from standard anthologies of African American history.” Publishers Weekly.
Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News correspondent. He is the author of many books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and three #1 New York Times bestsellers, How to Be an Antiracist; Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored with Jason Reynolds; and Antiracist Baby, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky. In 2020, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Keisha N. Blain is an award-winning historian, professor, and writer. She is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, the president of the African American Intellectual History Society, and an editor for The Washington Post's "Made by History" section. Her writing has appeared in popular outlets such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, Politico, and Time. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America.
Notes, index.
Michael C. Thomsett, Slavery and Racism in American Politics, 1776-1876, Foreword by Ken West (McFarland). “From the very inception of the United States, few issues have been so divisive and defining as American slavery. Even as the U.S. was founded on principles of liberty, independence and freedom, slavery advocates and sympathizers positioned themselves in every aspect of American influence. Over the centuries, the characterization of early American figures, legislation and party platforms has been debated. The author seeks to clarify often unanswered--or ignored--questions about notable figures, sociopolitical movements and their positions on slavery. From early legislation like the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 to Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, this book explores some of America's most controversial moments. Spanning the first American century, it offers a detailed chronology of slavery and racism in early U.S. politics and society.”
Michael C. Thomsett is the author, coauthor, or compiler of many books including topical dictionaries, collections of quotations and history books. He lives in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Jessica Ingram, Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial (Documentary Arts and Culture, Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University) (University of North Carolina Press). “At first glance, Jessica Ingram's landscape photographs could have been made nearly anywhere in the American South: a fenced-in backyard, a dirt road lined by overgrowth, a field grooved with muddy tire prints. These seemingly ordinary places, however, were the sites of pivotal events during the civil rights era, though often there is not a plaque with dates and names to mark their importance. Many of these places are where the bodies of activists, mill workers, store owners, sharecroppers, children and teenagers were murdered or found, victims of racist violence. Images of these places are interspersed with oral histories from victims' families and investigative journalists, as well as pages from newspapers and FBI files and other ephemera. With Road Through Midnight, the result of nearly a decade of research and fieldwork, Ingram unlocks powerful and complex histories to reframe these commonplace landscapes as sites of both remembrance and resistance and transforms the way we regard both what has happened and what's happening now—as the fight for civil rights goes on and memorialization has become the literal subject of contested cultural and societal ground.”
Jessica Ingram is assistant professor of art at Florida State University.
“Inviting and engaging. Ingram's book is both reflexive and reflective, guiding us through a difficult history and creatively telling these hidden histories with a sensitivity to a highly trafficked past. Her pioneering approach as a photographer and archivist gives us a new way of looking at the South and the civil rights movement from someone who grew up in the South.” Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present.
“An unparalleled approach to the topic of civil rights history in photography—studies such as this are so needed today. Ingram's poignant photographs make these quiet, forgotten southern landscapes come alive. An original thinker and dedicated artist, Jessica Ingram fosters a rhythm and flow that captives the reader and draws them in to the very end.” Cheryl Finley, author of My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South and Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon.
William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (University of North Carolina Press). “Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. In From Here to Equality, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, Darity and Mullen offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen--slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination--makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.”
“Darity and Mullen have written a vital intellectual history and a roadmap for these times. Tragically, the nation continues to bequeath its original sin to yet another generation with a persistent unpaid debt and unearned privileges. The issue of reparations for African Americans is long-debated but not often enough seriously considered. This book is a glimmering exception. From Here to Equality is tautly written, fiercely argued, and passionately committed to the spirit and letter of freedom.” Tressie McMillan Cottom, PhD, author of Thick: And Other Essays.
Notes, index.
Thavolia Glymph’s The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era)
(University of North Carolina Press) “shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation's fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. However, Glymph makes clear that women's experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War's disorder and death.”
Thavolia Glymph is professor of history and law at Duke University and author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household.
“Thavolia Glymph has written the first history of the Civil War that brings to light the full panoply of women's thoughts and experiences. With eloquence, brilliance, and an unrelenting commitment to rendering the complexity of her gendered framework, she presents the war's meaning to slave and free, black and white, Unionist and Confederate, elite and poor, combatant and noncombatant, and citizen and stateless refugee—all women in the ‘house divided against itself' and in the fight that tore the nation asunder.” Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Harvard University.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, indexes.
Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital (University of North Carolina Press). “Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents lack full political rights. Tracing D.C.'s massive transformations--from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation's first black-majority city, from ‘Chocolate City’ to ‘Latte City’--Asch and Musgrove offer an engaging narrative peppered with unforgettable characters, a history of deep racial division but also one of hope, resilience, and interracial cooperation.”
Chris Myers Asch teaches history at Colby College and runs the non-profit Capital Area New Mainers Project.
George Derek Musgrove is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
“An ambitious, comprehensive chronicle of the civic experience of blacks, whites and other races over more than two centuries in Washington. . . . [It] succeeds in being both scholarly and accessible to the general reader.” Robert McCartney, The Washington Post
“An ambitious, kaleidoscopic history of race and politics in Washington, D.C. . . . Essential American history, deeply researched and written with verve and passion.” Kirkus Reviews.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Christopher Hall, Abandoned Baltimore: Northside (America Through Time). “Baltimore, Maryland, is a city full of history and cultural diversity. However, through the years, the area has been plagued with poverty and forced gentrification that has left the once bustling city in a state of disarray. There are over 16,000 vacant rowhomes within Baltimore. Crime rate is on a rise while population is on decline. Through all the mayhem, many incredible places have been simply disregarded and forgotten about. Many streets that were once full of life now resemble an apocalyptic wasteland. The north side of Baltimore, away from the Chesapeake Bay and industrial side that the city is known for, is home to many interesting abandoned buildings, including schools, churches, asylums, and more. Through the lens, photographer Christopher Hall sets out to showcase and bring awareness to these incredible structures that have been forgotten. His work takes you inside the dilapidated places where few venture. Join Christopher on his visual journey through time as he explores what has been abandoned on the north side of Baltimore City.”
Christopher Hall is currently a student in his first year at Maryland Institute College of Arts working towards a BFA in photography. At just nineteen years old, he has been featured in many galleries for his work as well as receiving many notable awards such as a Gold Key for his portfolio submission in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Christopher began exploring abandoned places about three years ago and it has been a very strong passion of his ever since. Based in Maryland, he travels up and down the east coast exploring what has been left behind.
Photographs, bibliography.
Christopher Hall, Abandoned Baltimore: Southside (America Through Time).
“Baltimore, Maryland is a city full of history and cultural diversity. However, through the years, the area has been plagued with poverty and forced gentrification that has left the once bustling city into a state of disarray. There are over 16,000 vacant row homes within Baltimore. Crime rate is on a rise while population is on decline. Through all the mayhem, many incredible places have been simply disregarded and forgotten about. Many streets that were once full of life now resemble that of an apocalyptic wasteland. Within the southern side of Baltimore lies many tourist destinations such as the inner harbor, and the football and baseball stadiums. While millions of people flock to these areas every year, many are unaware of the disregarded buildings that sit just a few blocks away. Forts that were used to protect the city during the 1800s are now forgotten. Huge industrial buildings that were once vital parts of Baltimore's economy sit vacant with no purpose. Through the lens, photographer Christopher Hall sets out to bring light to what has been left in the dark, and to bring back the forgotten history of the southside of Baltimore City.”
Christopher Hall is currently a student in his first year at Maryland Institute College of Arts working towards a BFA in photography. At just nineteen years old, he has been featured in many galleries for his work as well as receiving many notable awards such as a Gold Key for his portfolio submission in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Christopher began exploring abandoned places about three years ago and it has been a very strong passion of his ever since. Based in Maryland, he travels up and down the East Coast exploring what has been left behind.
Photographs, bibliography.
Kate Dossett, Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) (University of North Carolina Press). “Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.”
Kate Dossett is associate professor of history at the University of Leeds and the author of Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism and Integration in the United States 1896–1935.
“An interdisciplinary tour de force, Kate Dossett's trailblazing study of Black performance communities is a richly illuminating investigation into a revolutionary world. She works with Black theatre manuscripts not only to excavate but to examine the complicated, collaborative, and creative relationships experienced by playwrights, actors, directors, and audiences during the Federal Theatre era. In her powerful social, literary, cultural, and political history, she maps a myriad of Black acts of artistry, authorship, and activism to do hard-hitting justice to the pioneering ways in which Black performance communities 'imagined radical paths to the future.'” Celeste-Marie Bernier, author of Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Sam Roberts, A History of New York in 27 Buildings: The 400-Year Untold Story of an American Metropolis (Bloomsbury Publishing).
“As New York is poised to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary, New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the story of the city through bricks, glass, wood, and mortar, revealing why and how it evolved into the nation's biggest and most influential. From the seven hundred thousand or so buildings in New York, Roberts selects twenty-seven that, in the past four centuries, have been the most emblematic of the city's economic, social, and political evolution. He describes not only the buildings and how they came to be, but also their enduring impact on the city and its people and how the consequences of the construction often reverberated around the world. A few structures, such as the Empire State Building, are architectural icons, but Roberts goes beyond the familiar with intriguing stories of the personalities and exploits behind the unrivaled skyscraper's construction. Some stretch the definition of buildings, to include the city's oldest bridge and the landmark Coney Island Boardwalk. Others offer surprises: where the United Nations General Assembly first met; a hidden hub of global internet traffic; a nondescript factory that produced billions of dollars of currency in the poorest neighborhood in the country; and the buildings that triggered the Depression and launched the New Deal. With his deep knowledge of the city and penchant for fascinating facts, Roberts brings to light the brilliant architecture, remarkable history, and bright future of the greatest city in the world.”
Sam Roberts is the Urban Affairs correspondent of the New York Times. He hosts The New York Times Close Up, which he inaugurated in 1992, and the podcasts Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name, and The Caucus. He is the author of A History of New York in 101 Objects and Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America, among others. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and New York. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.
“A nuanced, richly researched book that delves deep into the history of the city and speaks volumes about its past, present and future . . . a must-read as the metropolis, now almost 400 years old, continues to (re)shape itself and the world.” NPR.org
Photographs, index.
Mary Beth Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (Knopf). “This masterly work of historical writing, Mary Beth Norton's first in almost a decade, looks at the sixteen months during which the traditional loyalists to King George III began their discordant "discussions" that led to their acceptance of the inevitability of war against the British Empire and to the clashes at Lexington and Concord in mid-April 1775. Drawing extensively on pamphlets, newspapers, and personal correspondence, Norton reconstructs colonial political discourse as it happened, showing the vigorous campaign mounted by conservatives criticizing congressional actions. But by then it was too late. In early 1775, governors throughout the colonies informed colonial officials in London that they were unable to thwart the increasing power of the committees and their allied provincial congresses. Although the Declaration of Independence would not be formally adopted until July 1776, Americans, even before the outbreak of war in April 1775, had in effect "declared independence" by obeying the decrees of their new provincial governments rather than colonial officials. The much-anticipated new book by one of America's most dazzling historians--the culmination of more than four decades of Norton's research and thought.”
Mary Beth Norton is the author of five books and co-editor of several others. Her textbook, A People and a Nation, a survey of U.S. history written with five other authors, has been published in ten editions and has sold more than 500,000 copies. Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita of American History at Cornell University. She lives in Ithaca.
“[Norton] does not fundamentally challenge the traditional trajectory of events in that decisive year. What she does do is enrich the narrative, filling in the story with a staggering amount of detail based on prodigious research in an enormous number of archives. . . . She wants to re-create as much as possible the past reality of this momentous year in all of its particularity. Only then, she suggests, will we come to appreciate the complexity of what happened and to understand all of the conflicts, divisions, and confusion that lay behind events, like the Tea Party, that historians highlight and simplify. . . . She seems to have read every newspaper in the period, and she delights in describing the give and take of debates between patriots and loyalists that took place in the press.” Gordon S. Wood, The Wall Street Journal.
“This was a world on the verge. Though every era writes its own history of the American Revolution, and this one is written from our world on the verge, Mary Beth Norton's 1774 is neither a celebratory account nor a cautionary tale. The Revolution is told not just from the perspective of Boston or Philadelphia, but from a more capacious and complex early America, a vital history of a vital time, told with an unflinching eye for the telling details and sometimes agonizing missteps that took Americans into war and independence. A brilliant book, by one of the very most insightful and significant historians of our time.” Karin Wulf, executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and professor of History at William & Mary.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Andrew F. Lang, A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era) (University of North Carolina Press).
“Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans regarded the United States as an exceptional democratic republic that stood apart from a world seemingly riddled with revolutionary turmoil and aristocratic consolidation. Viewing themselves as distinct from and even superior to other societies, Americans considered their nation an unprecedented experiment in political moderation and constitutional democracy. But as abolitionism in England, economic unrest in Europe, and upheaval in the Caribbean and Latin America began to influence domestic affairs, the foundational ideas of national identity also faced new questions. And with the outbreak of civil war, as two rival governments each claimed the mantle of civilized democracy, the United States' claim to unique standing in the community of nations dissolved into crisis. Could the Union chart a distinct course in human affairs when slaveholders, abolitionists, free people of color, and enslaved African Americans all possessed irreconcilable definitions of nationhood? In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political, and social ramifications of the war and its meaning rippled through the decades that followed, not only for the nation's own people but also in the ways the nation sought to redefine its place on the world stage.”
“In A Contest of Civilizations, Andrew F. Lang delivers an impressive survey of deeply held notions of mid-nineteenth-century American exceptionalism. He combines lucid prose with a judicious approach in a multifaceted examination of the struggles to define the national identity before, during, and after the Civil War. Always thoughtful and often provocative, Lang relates the dramatic story of the United States testing its ideals of liberty and freedom against a background of turmoil at home and what Americans perceived as tyranny abroad.” Joan Waugh, coauthor, The American War.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Susan Berfield’s The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism (Bloomsbury Publishing) is “A riveting narrative of Wall Street buccaneering, political intrigue, and two of American history's most colossal characters, struggling for mastery in an era of social upheaval and rampant inequality. It seemed like no force in the world could slow J. P. Morgan's drive to power. In the summer of 1901, the financier was assembling his next mega-deal: Northern Securities, an enterprise that would affirm his dominance in America's most important industry-the railroads. Then, a bullet from an anarchist's gun put an end to the business-friendly presidency of William McKinley. A new chief executive bounded into office: Theodore Roosevelt. He was convinced that as big business got bigger, the government had to check the influence of the wealthiest or the country would inch ever closer to collapse. By March 1902, battle lines were drawn: the government sued Northern Securities for antitrust violations. But as the case ramped up, the coal miners' union went on strike and the anthracite pits that fueled Morgan's trains and heated the homes of Roosevelt's citizens went silent. With millions of dollars on the line, winter bearing down, and revolution in the air, it was a crisis that neither man alone could solve. Richly detailed and propulsively told, The Hour of Fate is the gripping story of a banker and a president thrown together in the crucible of national emergency even as they fought in court. The outcome of the strike and the case would change the course of our history. Today, as the country again asks whether saving democracy means taming capital, the lessons of Roosevelt and Morgan's time are more urgent than ever.”
Susan Berfield is an award-winning investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News, where she has covered some of America's largest corporations. She has been interviewed on PBS NewsHour, NPR's Weekend Edition and All Things Considered, Marketplace, On Point, and elsewhere. Her research for The Hour of Fate, her first book, took her to archives in New York, St. Paul, Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was supported by a Logan Nonfiction Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
“Susan Berfield has captured a critical moment in American history with a ripping good yarn. Written with verve and a perceptive eye for detail, The Hour of Fate artfully brings to life two of our nation's most celebrated personalities, caught in an astonishing drama even larger than themselves. It is impossible to read Berfield's fast-paced and entertaining account of events a century ago without gaining deeper insight into the momentous events we wrestle with today.” Scott Miller, author of The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). “A unique collaboration between the American Civil Liberties Union and authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, Fight of the Century features original essays by the most influential writers at work today—including Jennifer Egan, Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Salman Rushdie, Jesmyn Ward, and more—each writing about a landmark ACLU case, published in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the organization. The American Civil Liberties Union began as a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller and Jane Addams. A century after its founding, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, prize-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the ACLU’s 100-year history. In Fight of the Century, bestselling and award-winning authors present unique literary takes on historic decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, the Scopes trial, Roe v. Wade, and more. Contributors include Geraldine Brooks, Michael Cunningham, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Neil Gaiman, Lauren Groff, Marlon James, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Morgan Parker, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, Elizabeth Strout, Jesmyn Ward, Meg Wolitzer, and more. Fight of the Century shows how throughout American history, pivotal legal battles, fought primarily by underdogs and their lawyers, have advanced civil rights and social justice. The ACLU has been integral in this process. The essays range from personal memoir to narrative history, each shedding light on the work of one remarkable organization as it shaped a country. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.”
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Maps and Legends, Gentlemen of the Road, and the middle grade book Summerland. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children. You can visit Michael online at www.michaelchabon.com.
“This is a book I'll be coming back to again and again, both for my own reading and for use in courses I teach. It covers a huge range of civil rights cases, presenting them clearly and offering succinct, engaging reflections on them. This is the kind of writing, involving both research and personal reflection that I encourage my students to do. If things go as I plan, I will use this as a class text for the first time next winter.” Sarah Hope.
James M. Banner, editor, Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today (The New Press) is “The historic 1974 report for the House Committee on the Judiciary, updated for today by leading presidential historians. In May 1974, as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment following the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee commissioned a historical account of the misdeeds of past presidents. The account, compiled by leading presidential historians of the day, reached back to George Washington’s administration and was designed to provide a benchmark against which Nixon’s misdeeds could be measured. What the report found was that, with the exception of William Henry Harrison (who served less than a month), every American president has been accused of misconduct: James Buchanan was charged with rigging the election of 1856; Ulysses S. Grant was reprimanded for not firing his corrupt staffer, Orville Babcock, in the “Whiskey Ring” bribery scandal; and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration faced repeated charges of malfeasance in the Works Progress Administration. Now, as another president and his subordinates face an array of charges on a wide range of legal and constitutional offenses, a group of presidential historians has come together under the leadership of James M. Banner, Jr.—one of the historians who contributed to the original report—to bring the 1974 account up to date through Barack Obama’s presidency. Based on current scholarship, this new material covers such well-known episodes as Nixon’s Watergate crisis, Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, Clinton’s impeachment, and George W. Bush’s connection to the exposure of intelligence secrets. But oft-forgotten events also take the stage: Carter’s troubles with advisor Bert Lance, Reagan’s savings and loan crisis, George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and Obama’s Solyndra loan controversy. The only comprehensive study of American presidents’ misconduct and the ways in which chief executives and members of their official families have responded to the charges brought against them, this new edition is designed to serve the same purpose as the original 1974 report: to provide the historical context and metric against which the actions of the current administration may be assessed.”
James M. Banner, a Guggenheim Award–winning historian, was on the Princeton faculty in 1974 when he contributed to the presidential misconduct report and is now an independent historian in Washington, DC. He was a co-founder of the History News Service, a moving spirit behind the National History Center, the author of many books, including Being a Historian, and the editor of Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today (The New Press).
“A very useful compendium, which allows important conclusions to be drawn about the present occupant of the White House.” Elizabeth Holtzman, former congresswoman and member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate era.
Notes.
Craig Fehrman, Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). “In Craig Fehrman’s groundbreaking work of history, Author in Chief, the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history—Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929—to ones we know and love—Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which was very nearly never published—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works. Presidential books have made an enormous impact on American history, catapulting their authors to the national stage and even turning key elections. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the first presidential book to influence a campaign, and John Adams’s Autobiography, the first score-settling presidential memoir, Author in Chief draws on newly uncovered information—including never-before-published letters from Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—to cast fresh light on the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation’s leaders. We see Teddy Roosevelt as a vulnerable first-time author, struggling to write the book that would become a classic of American history. We see Reagan painstakingly revising Where’s the Rest of Me?, a forgotten memoir in which he sharpened his sunny political image. We see Donald Trump negotiating the deal for The Art of the Deal, the volume that made him synonymous with business savvy. Alongside each of these authors, we also glimpse the everyday Americans who read them. Combining the narrative felicity of a journalist with the rigorous scholarship of a historian, Fehrman delivers a feast for history lovers, book lovers, and everybody curious about a behind-the-scenes look at our presidents.”
Craig Fehrman is a journalist and historian who’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He lives in Indiana with his wife and children.
“Fehrman offers a decade of painstaking research boiled down into a supremely engaging narrative about presidents and their relationship to reading and writing.” Rebecca Rego Barry, Fine Books Magazine
“Craig Fehrman takes us from Thomas Jefferson—a president who happened also to be the best prose stylist around—to the age of the obligatory campaign biography, on to the modern blockbuster. Along the way we meet revisionists, ghost writers (Truman went through four), runaway bestsellers (it seems there was a sport at which Calvin Coolidge excelled), surprising flops. We learn that the Civil War turned the occasional authorial impulse into a flood of literature; that Nathaniel Hawthorne quietly wrote a campaign biography; that the most literate presidents can meet with the worst reviews. Shapely, original, and brimming in anecdote, Author in Chief expertly illuminates, amid much else, how history finds its way into the books.” Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches
“This book is just as fun and fascinating when taking you inside the minds of presidents as into ordinary eighteenth-century bookworms. It’s witty, charming, fantastically learned, and engrossing. I loved it.” Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland
Photographs, notes, index.
Linda Barrett Osborne, Guardians of Liberty: Freedom of the Press and the Nature of News (Abrams Books for Young Readers/ Grade 6 Up.)
“Guardians of Liberty explores the essential and basic American ideal of freedom of the press. Allowing the American press to publish—even if what they’re reporting is contentious— without previous censure or interference by the federal government was so important to the Founding Fathers that they placed a guarantee in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Citing numerous examples from America’s past, from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement to Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies, Linda Barrett Osborne shows how freedom of the press has played an essential role in the growth of this nation, allowing democracy to flourish. She further discusses how the freedoms of press and speech often work side by side, reveals the diversity of American news, and explores why freedom of the press is still imperative to uphold today. Includes endnotes, bibliography, and index.”
“Deeply researched and beautifully written, Guardians of Liberty enlightens and entertains readers of any age.” Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post.
“Grade 6 Up. This book seeks to live up to the promise contained in its subtitle-explicating freedom of the press and the nature of news. Nine chapters cover everything from the partisan press in Colonial and Revolutionary America to the incendiary rise of ‘fake news.’ In the introduction, Barrett Osborne poses a series of questions: “How does the press act as a watchdog against government abuses? Can freedom of the press exist in time of war without endangering national security? Why does it matter that different points of view are represented?” The text attempts to answer those questions by explaining the history of the press's role in American society as well as key controversies and court cases. Sidebars and highlighted feature segments provide additional information detailing technological advances that revolutionized journalism. Notable individuals and developments in the history of the news are also described. A time line of key events, source notes, and a selected bibliography round out this title. A timely title that offers solid research and an engaging structure. Recommended for upper junior high and high school libraries, and students with a nose for news.” Kelly Kingrey-Edwards, Blinn Junior College, Brenham, Texas.
“Deeply researched and beautifully written, Guardians of Liberty enlightens and entertains readers of any age.” Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post.
Photogaphs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index
Lina Jakob, Echoes of Trauma and Shame in German Families: The Post–World War II Generations (Indiana University Press).
“For decades to speak openly of German suffering during World War II―to claim victimhood in a country that had victimized millions―was unthinkable. But in the past few years, growing numbers of Germans in their 40s and 50s calling themselves Kriegsenkel, or Grandchildren of the War, have begun to explore the fundamental impact of the war on their present lives and mental health. Their parents and grandparents experienced bombardment, death, forced displacement, and the shame of the Nazi war crimes. The Kriegsenkel feel their own psychological struggles―from depression, anxiety disorders, and burnout to broken marriages and career problems―are the direct consequences of unresolved war experiences passed down through their families. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and a broad range of scholarship, Lina Jakob considers how the Kriegsenkel movement emerged at the nexus between public and familial silences about World War II, and critically discusses how this new collective identity is constructed and addressed within the framework of psychology and Western therapeutic culture.”
Lina Jakob is a cultural anthropologist with a PhD from the Australian National University.
“This complex story is engagingly told through highly readable life histories and analysis and provides much to think about concerning the aftermath of traumatic histories.” Francesca Merlan, Australian National University.
Photographs, bibliography, index.
Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (Simon & Schuster) is a “definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.
Adam Higginbotham writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, and Smithsonian. He lives in New York City.
“Superb, enthralling and necessarily terrifying . . . the accident unfurls with a horrible inevitability. Weaving together the experiences of those who were there that night, Higginbotham marshals the details so meticulously that every step feels spring-loaded with tension. . . . Amid so much rich reporting and scrupulous analysis, some major themes emerge. . . . Higginbotham’s extraordinary book is another advance in the long struggle to fill in some of the gaps, bringing much of what was hidden into the light.” Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“Adam Higginbotham's brilliantly well-written Midnight In Chernobyl draws on new sources and original research to illuminate the true story of one of history’s greatest technological failures—and, along with it, the bewildering reality of everyday life during the final years of the Soviet Union.” Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History and Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine.
Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
Robert M. Gates, Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World (Knopf)
“Since the end of the Cold War, the global perception of the United States has progressively morphed from dominant international leader to disorganized entity, seemingly unwilling to accept the mantle of leadership or unable to govern itself effectively. Robert Gates argues that this transformation is the result of the failure of political leaders to understand the complexity of American power, its expansiveness, and its limitations. He makes clear that the successful exercise of power is not limited to the use of military might or the ability to coerce or demand submission, but must encompass as well diplomacy, economics, strategic communications, development assistance, intelligence, technology, ideology, and cyber. By analyzing specific challenges faced by the American government in the post-Cold War period--Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Russia, China, and others--Gates deconstructs the ways in which leaders have used the instruments of power available to them. With forthright judgments of the performance of past presidents and their senior-most advisers, firsthand knowledge, and insider stories, Gates argues that U.S. national security in the future will require learning, and abiding by, the lessons of the past, and re-creating those capabilities that the misuse of power has cost the nation.”
“[Gates's] tone is judicious and nonpartisan, and he grades all the administrations fairly according to his standards of professional competence. . . The familiar stories gain new life and interest when told by somebody who’s been in the room where it happens. Gates says what he thinks and refuses to pull his punches and, as a result, the book offers in one volume the most accurate record available of recent American security policy, the most incisive critique of that policy and the most sensible guide to what should come next.” Gideon Rose, The New York Times Book Review
“Few Americans have the depth and breadth of hands-on national security experience that Gates has. . . . He skillfully blends the knowledge and discipline of a scholar with the hard-earned experience of a practitioner to produce a well-organized and superbly written book to lead America forward into a very different and challenging new world, and it is here that Gates’s admonitions are most compelling.” Richard Moe, The Washington Post
“While the book certainly offers the former defense chief’s insights from being 'in the room,' I was most impressed by his thoughtfulness and clarity when it comes to the imperative for strengthening America’s civilian toolkit. It’s an impressive message for a former defense secretary of both Republican and Democratic administrations to make the first chapter of his book a clarion call on the failure to invest in our nation’s civilian national security tools.” Liz Schrayer, President & CEO, U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.
Notes, bibliography, index.
Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). “‘The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,’ writes political analyst Ezra Klein. ‘We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.’ In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.”
Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and cofounder of Vox, the award-winning explanatory news organization. Launched in 2014, Vox reaches more than 50 million people across its platforms each month. Klein is also the host of the podcast the Ezra Klein Show, cohost of the Weeds podcast, and an executive producer on Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. Previously, Klein was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg.
“The story of this impeachment is the story of American politics today: polarization. It affects almost every aspect of American political life and has been studied by scholars from many different angles, with dozens of good historical and experimental approaches. Wouldn’t it be great if someone would digest all these studies, synthesize them and produce a readable book that makes sense of it all? Ezra Klein has done just that with his compelling new work, Why We’re Polarized. It is likely to become the political book of the year. . . . Powerful [and] intelligent.” Fareed Zakaria, CNN
“Few books are as well-matched to the moment of their publication as Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. . . . Klein’s careful book explains how different groups of Americans can see politics through such different lenses, examining how various psychological mechanisms allow committed partisans to rationalize almost anything their party does. . . . This book fully displays the attributes that have made Klein’s journalism so successful.” Dan Hopkins, Washington Post
“Why We’re Polarized delivers. . . . What Klein adds especially to [is] our understanding of how we got here—why Trump is more a vessel for our division than the cause, and why his departure will not provide any magical cure. . . . A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis.” Norman Ornstein, New York Times Book Review.
Notes, index.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right Hardcover (Princeton University Press).
“Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland shows how tomorrow's far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels. Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives? Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood. Hate in the Homeland is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today's far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization.”
Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education at American University in Washington, DC, where she also runs the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) in the Center for University Excellence (CUE).
“From a foremost expert in the field, Hate in the Homeland is the most sweeping and persuasive account yet of the worldwide threat to democracy posed by the resurgent white power movement and other far-right activists. In examining the spaces and processes of radicalization, Miller-Idriss offers hope for real solutions. This book is required reading, especially for journalists, policymakers, and activists.” Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.
“Hate in the Homeland is a profound, robust, and highly original work by one of the world's very top scholars of the far right. In this pathbreaking and important book, Cynthia Miller-Idriss explores critical, overlooked avenues for combatting the rise of far-right extremism across the globe.” Kathleen M. Blee, author of Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s.
Notes, bibliography, index.
Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (Knopf)
“Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody ‘family values,’ and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room. It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.”
Stuart Stevens is the author of seven previous books, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. He has written extensively for television shows, including Northern Exposure, Commander in Chief, and K Street. For twenty-five years, he was the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation's toughest political campaigns. He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College; and UCLA film school. He is a former fellow of the American Film Institute.
“In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies. . . . This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history. . . . Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it.” Julian E. Zelizer, The New York Times.
“This book is going to become an important reference volume for future historians trying to explain what happened to the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century and the Trump era. It takes someone with Stuart Stevens' insights as a writer to be able to see this story and deliver it to us the way he has.” Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC
“Stuart Stevens has written a brilliant book. Stop whatever you are doing. Order it on Amazon.” Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC.
Notes, bibliography.
Peter Strzok, Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
“When he opened the FBI investigation into Russia’s election interference, Peter Strzok had already spent more than two decades defending the United States against foreign threats. His career in counterintelligence ended shortly thereafter, when the Trump administration used his private expression of political opinions to force him out of the Bureau in August 2018. But by that time, Strzok had seen more than enough to convince him that the commander in chief had fallen under the sway of America’s adversary in the Kremlin.
In Compromised, Strzok draws on lessons from a long career—from his role in the Russian illegals case that inspired The Americans to his service as lead FBI agent on the Mueller investigation—to construct a devastating account of foreign influence at the highest levels of our government. And he grapples with a question that should concern every U.S. citizen: When a president appears to favor personal and Russian interests over those of our nation, has he become a national security threat”
Peter Strzok is the former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence and a 22-year veteran of the Bureau. He served as one of the original case agents for the Russian couple who inspired the TV series The Americans, and he has investigated a range of other high-profile cases, from WikiLeaks to the 9/11 hijackings to Hillary Clinton’s private email server. He was selected to head the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and worked with Robert Mueller as a leader of the FBI’s efforts in creating the Special Counsel’s Office. Also a veteran of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, he is the recipient of the FBI’s highest investigative honor, the Director’s Award for Excellence. He lives in Virginia with his family.
“Out of all the books about Trump that are constantly coming out, this one has to be the most important thus far. The guy heading up the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign is writing about it. This is history in the making and will no doubt be one of the most talked about stories in American history for decades. Why would you not want to get the story straight from the horse's mouth? I haven't finished the book yet, but find it hard to put down. The counterintelligence info in general is pretty fascinating. I haven't even reached the Trump campaign parts yet.” Amazon Customer 5.0 out of 5 stars
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (Liveright)
“The Republican Party appears to be divided between a tax-cutting old guard and a white-nationalist vanguard―and with Donald Trump’s ascendance, the upstarts seem to be winning. Yet how are we to explain that, under Trump, the plutocrats have gotten almost everything they want, including a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, regulation-killing executive actions, and a legion of business-friendly federal judges? Does the GOP represent “forgotten” Americans? Or does it represent the superrich? In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a definitive answer: the Republican Party serves its plutocratic masters to a degree without precedent in modern global history. Conservative parties, by their nature, almost always side with the rich. But when faced with popular resistance, they usually make concessions, allowing some policies that benefit the working and middle classes. After all, how can a political party maintain power in a democracy if it serves only the interests of a narrow and wealthy slice of society? Today’s Republicans have shown the way, doubling down on a truly radical, elite-benefiting economic agenda while at the same time making increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to their almost entirely white base. Telling a forty-year story, Hacker and Pierson demonstrate that since the early 1980s, when inequality started spiking, extreme tax cutting, union busting, and deregulation have gone hand in hand with extreme race-baiting, outrage stoking, and disinformation. Instead of responding to the real challenges facing voters, the Republican Party offers division and distraction―most prominently, in the racist, nativist bile of the president’s Twitter feed. As Hacker and Pierson argue, Trump isn’t a break with the GOP’s recent past. On the contrary, he embodies its tightening embrace of plutocracy and right-wing extremism―a dynamic Hacker and Pierson call “plutocratic populism.” As Trump and his far-right allies spew hatred and lies, Republicans in Congress and in statehouses attack social programs and funnel more and more money to the top 0.1 percent of Americans. Far from being at war with each other, reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of a party that now actively undermines democracy to achieve its goals against the will of the majority of Americans. Drawing on decades of research, Hacker and Pierson authoritatively explain the doom loop of tax cutting and fearmongering that characterizes our era―and reveal how we can fight back.”
Jacob S. Hacker is a political scientist at Yale University, and the coauthor of three books, including the New York Times bestseller Winner-Take-All Politics. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Paul Pierson is a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the coauthor of three books, including the New York Times bestseller Winner-Take-All Politics. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Notes, index.
The Washington Post Fact Checker Staff, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (Scribner).
“In perilous times, facts, expertise, and truth are indispensable. President Trump’s flagrant disregard for the truth and his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, specious misstatements, and bald-faced lies have been rigorously documented and debunked since the first day of his presidency by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker staff. Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth is based on the only comprehensive compilation and analysis of the more than 16,000 fallacious statements that Trump has uttered since the day of his inauguration. He has repeated many of his most outrageous claims dozens or even hundreds of times as he has sought to bend reality to his political fantasy and personal whim. Drawing on Trump’s tweets, press conferences, political rallies, and TV appearances, The Washington Post identifies his most frequently used misstatements, biggest whoppers, and most dangerous deceptions. This book unpacks his errant statements about the economy, immigration, the impeachment hearings, foreign policy, and, of critical concern now, the coronavirus crisis as it unfolded. Fascinating, startling, and even grimly funny, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth by The Washington Post is the essential, authoritative record of Trump’s shocking disregard for facts.”
Since 2007, The Washington Post Fact Checker has held Democrats, Republicans, and advocacy groups accountable for their claims by awarding "Pinocchios" for false or misleading statements.
Glenn Kessler has been editor and chief writer of The Fact Checker since 2011 and has worked at The Washington Post since 1998. Kessler and his team earned an honorable mention in the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. He is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
Salvador Rizzo is a national politics reporter for The Washington Post. He writes for the newspaper's Fact Checker unit and has fact-checked hundreds of claims from politicians and advocacy groups. He is a graduate of Emory University.
Meg Kelly is a video editor and reporter for The Fact Checker at The Washington Post. She has covered national politics since 2015--first at National Public Radio and, since 2017, with the Post's Fact Checker team. She graduated from Barnard College in New York.
“A great public service of a book.” Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker
“An authoritative and pull-no-punches guide through Trump's alternative universe....a reader-friendly reference for voters, reporters and editors who soon will be seeking clarity and context once the fall campaign kicks into full swing.”The Record
“An extremely valuable chronicle.” Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President - Updated and Expanded with New Essays (Thomas Dunne Books) Bandy X. Lee, Editor and Author, Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs, and 39 more contributors.
“As this bestseller predicted, Trump has only grown more erratic and dangerous as the pressures on him mount. This new edition includes new essays bringing the book up to date―because this is still not normal. Originally released in fall 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was a runaway bestseller. Alarmed Americans and international onlookers wanted to know: What is wrong with him? That question still plagues us. The Trump administration has proven as chaotic and destructive as its opponents feared, and the man at the center of it all remains a cipher.
Constrained by the APA’s “Goldwater rule,” which inhibits mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures they have not personally examined, many of those qualified to weigh in on the issue have shied away from discussing it at all. The public has thus been left to wonder whether he is mad, bad, or both. The prestigious mental health experts who have contributed to the revised and updated version of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump argue that their moral and civic "duty to warn" supersedes professional neutrality. Whatever affects him, affects the nation: From the trauma people have experienced under the Trump administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond. With eight new essays (about one hundred pages of new material), this edition will cover the dangerous ramifications of Trump's unnatural state.
It’s not all in our heads. It’s in his.”
Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., is a Forensic Psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine and a Project Group Leader for the World Health Organization Violence Prevention Alliance. She earned her degrees at Yale, interned at Bellevue, was Chief Resident at Mass. General, and was a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. She was also a Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health. She has taught at Yale Law School for more than fifteen years and has spearheaded a number of prison reform projects around the country, including of the notorious Rikers Island jail of New York City. She’s written more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters, edited more than a dozen academic books, and is author of the textbook Violence.
“This is an historic work in the history of American psychiatry. We have never been in this place before.” Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC
“There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump . . . profound, illuminating and discomforting.” Bill Moyers
“The stand these psychiatrists are taking takes courage, and their conclusions are compelling.” Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books/Crown Publishing Group).
“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.”
Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Snyder is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
“We are rapidly ripening for fascism. This American writer leaves us with no illusions about ourselves.” Svetlana Alexievich, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings. Put a copy in your pocket and one on your bedside table, and it will help you keep going for the next four years or however long it takes.” Masha Gessen
“Please read this book. So smart, so timely.” George Saunders
“Easily the most compelling volume among the early resistance literature. . . . A slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital. . . . Clarifying and unnerving. . . . A memorable work that is grounded in history yet imbued with the fierce urgency of what now.” Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post.
Timothy Snyder, Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (Crown).
“On December 29, 2019, historian Timothy Snyder fell gravely ill. Unable to stand, barely able to think, he waited for hours in an emergency room before being correctly diagnosed and rushed into surgery. Over the next few days, as he clung to life and the first light of a new year came through his window, he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning.
And that was before the pandemic. We have since watched American hospitals, long understaffed and undersupplied, buckling under waves of coronavirus patients. The federal government made matters worse through willful ignorance, misinformation, and profiteering. Our system of commercial medicine failed the ultimate test, and thousands of Americans died.
In this eye-opening cri de coeur, Snyder traces the societal forces that led us here and outlines the lessons we must learn to survive. In examining some of the darkest moments of recent history and of his own life, Snyder finds glimmers of hope and principles that could lead us out of our current malaise. Only by enshrining healthcare as a human right, elevating the authority of doctors and medical knowledge, and planning for our children’s future can we create an America where everyone is truly free.”
“[Snyder’s] litany of the many ways the United States bungled the coronavirus response is eloquent and pointed. . . . His cry of rage is certain to get your attention. There’s an initial thrill when reading Snyder’s take on American health care. He’s a brilliant historian whose deep understanding of the origins of fascism and the lessons of the Holocaust made his best-selling book, On Tyranny, published on the heels of the 2016 presidential election, all the more credible. And his critique that the health-care system is organized in a way that maximizes profits for a few, wastes a lot of money and too often leaves patients confused, lacking access and feeling uncared for is correct.” Katie Hafner, Washington Post .
Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Road to Unfreedom, On Tyranny, Black Earth, and Bloodlands and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. His work has received the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
3) MISCELLANEOUS
Twyla Tharp, Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life (Simon & Schuster). “One of the world’s leading artists—a living legend—and bestselling author of The Creative Habit shares her secrets for harnessing vitality and finding purpose as you age. From insight to action, Keep It Moving is a guidebook for expanding one’s possibilities over the course of a lifetime. At seventy-seven, Twyla Tharp is revered not only for the dances she makes—but for her astounding regime of exercise and non-stop engagement. She is famed for religiously hitting the gym each morning at daybreak, and utilizing that energy to propel her breakneck schedule as a teacher, writer, creator, and lecturer. This book grew out of the question she was asked most frequently: ‘How do you keep working?’ In Twyla’s own words: ‘This book is a collection of what I’ve learned in the past fifty-five years: from the moment I committed to a life in dance up until today. . . it identifies a “disease” and offers a cure. That disease, simply put, is our fear of time’s passing and the resulting aging process. The remedy? This book in your hands.’ Keep It Moving is a series of no-nonsense mediations on how to live with purpose as time passes. From the details of how she stays motivated to the stages of her evolving fitness routine, Tharp models how fulfillment depends not on fortune—but on attitude, possible for anyone willing to try and keep trying. Culling anecdotes from Twyla’s life and the lives of other luminaries, each chapter is accompanied by a small exercise that will help anyone develop a more hopeful and energetic approach to the everyday. Twyla will tell you what the beauty-fitness-wellness industry won’t: chasing youth is a losing proposition. Instead, Keep It Moving focuses you on what’s here and where you’re going—the book for anyone who wishes to maintain their prime for life.”
Twyla Tharp, one of America’s greatest choreographers began her career in 1965, and has created more than 130 dances for her company as well as for the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, London’s Royal Ballet, Denmark’s Royal Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. She has won two Emmy Awards for television’s Baryshnikov by Tharp, and a Tony Award for the Broadway musical Movin’ Out. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1993 and was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. She holds nineteen honorary degrees, most recently from Harvard University. She lives and works in New York City.
“An exhilarating mélange of sage advice and stamina-building exercises.” O: The Oprah Magazine
“This book is two books in one: First, a dancer’s story of injury, depression, and healing; and second, a how-to book for anyone who is facing aging. As with her books The Creative Habit and The Collaborative Habit, this one has grit because Tharp has figured all this out for herself. . . . Of course, Tharp herself, still choreographing in her late ’70s, is an inspiration.” Wendy Perron, dancer, choreographer, and teacher who was the editor-in-chief of Dance Magazine from 2004 to 2013 and author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings (Wesleyan University Press).
Creative Patterns (lulu.com, 2020), the second edition of a book on improvisation and the creative process first published in 1973, consists of 30 pages of musical notation plus a Preface and Introduction and is “about the interrelation of the 12 tones to each other,” explains its author, pianist and soprano saxophonist Joel Futterman. He has also authored The Design (lulu.com, 2010), “A riveting mystery that deals with existentialism and the ability to become conscious,” and The Question (lulu.com, 2016), which “provides a series of dialogues of questions and parables that advance the search for inner and outer peace.”
If people are curious,” says Joel Futterman, “books, CDs, listening samples, and information about me can be found on my website at: http://www.joelfutterman.com/.”
“We are fortunate to have a master of creative improvisational music in our area [Norfolk, Virginia] though [Joel Futterman] mostly plays elsewhere including Europe, Canada, Russia and in cities like New York where he finds appreciative audiences. Though rooted in the phrasing of advanced modern jazz, his creative music explores the deeper consciousness of tonality and the possibilities of music. As Nat Hentoff wrote in response to his music, ‘Intellect connects with feelings and desire . . . a musician in full communication with himself and others.’ Al Markowitz, Veer Magazine.
“Form and structure is a breathing thing that is growing every second we live. In this book, Joel Futterman shares some of his insight to being yourself. There are no magical scales just magical people and Joel Futterman is one of them.” William Parker, Musician, Composer and Author
“An artist who has richly textured ever changing musical landscape.” Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune.
Emily Hamilton-Honey and Susan Ingalls Lewis, Girls to the Rescue: Young Heroines in American Series Fiction of World War (McFarland). “During World War I, as young men journeyed overseas to battle, American women maintained the home front by knitting, fundraising, and conserving supplies. These became daily chores for young girls, but many longed to be part of a larger, more glorious war effort--and some were. A new genre of young adult books entered the market, written specifically with the young girls of the war period in mind and demonstrating the wartime activities of women and girls all over the world. Through fiction, girls could catch spies, cross battlefields, man machine guns, and blow up bridges. These adventurous heroines were contemporary feminist role models, creating avenues of leadership for women and inspiring individualism and self-discovery. The work presented here analyzes the powerful messages in such literature, how it created awareness and grappled with the engagement of real girls in the United States and Allied war effort, and how it reflects their contemporaries' awareness of girls' importance.”
Emily Hamilton-Honey is an associate professor of English and gender studies at SUNY Canton, specializing in series fiction, girlhood studies, and post-bellum and Progressive Era American women's literature and history. She lives in Potsdam, New York.
Susan Ingalls Lewis is a professor emerita in the department of history, SUNY New Paltz, specializing in American women's history, the Progressive Era, and New York State history. She lives in Rosendale, New York.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy (Knopf). “‘I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child’: so Nabokov famously, and infamously, wrote when introducing his 1973 volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where Strong Opinions left off, presenting Nabokov's public writings from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two last interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature would bring him to teach and write in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe as a recognized literary master. Straddling Russian, French and Anglophone worlds, Nabokov discovers contemporary literature and culture at his own pace and with his own strong dispositions. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov's supreme individuality and his alertness to the details of life past and present illuminate the page and remind us why he has been called the greatest of prose stylists.”
Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin, including the brilliant novels The Defense (1930), Invitation to a Beheading (1934) and The Gift (1938). In 1940, he left France for America, where he taught at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, and wrote some of his greatest works, Speak, Memory (1951), Lolita (1955), and Pnin (1957). In 1959 he returned to Europe, where he wrote more masterpieces, Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969), and translated his earlier Russian work into English. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has published on literature (American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, Polish, Russian), from epics to comics, art from the Paleolithic to the present, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, but most of all on Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, translator, and more. His works have appeared in nineteen languages and won awards on four continents.
Anastasia Tolstoy, a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, holds a doctorate from Oxford, where she completed a DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov and the Aesthetics of Disgust. She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov's neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn.
“Immense fun . . . . Any sensitive reader will linger over the beautiful sentences with which Nabokov enriches even his most casual prose.” Michael Dirda, The Washington Post.
“Gives us a window into the earlier decades of Nabokov’s life . . . . This new collection is an expansive record of Nabokov’s worldview and aesthetic philosophy, but one particularly fascinating element of Think, Write, Speak is the insight it gives us into how Nabokov, staunchly opposed to the politicization of literature, navigated being a public explainer of Russian arts and letters in the midst of the Cold War.” Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic.
Notes, index.
Richard Ford’s Sorry for Your Trouble: Stories (Ecco/Harper Collins) is “A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit and candor. In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them. Typically rich with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.”
Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day. He is winner of the Prix Femina in France, the 2019 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Princess of Asturias Award in Spain. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Canada. His story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank with You, Rock Springs, and A Multitude of Sins. He lives in Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina Ford.
“Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence…One page later, a sparkling note of Fitzgerald. . . . Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation, and it’s gratifying to hear his sentences pay homage. . . . Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the “well-crafted, writing-class story,” that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings." New York Times Book Review.
Paulette Simon, The Fiddler: A Novel (William Morrow).
“In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down. Till now, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty thanks to his slight stature, youthful appearance, and utter lack of compunction about bending the truth. But following a barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas, Simon finds himself conscripted, however belatedly, into the Confederate Army. Luckily his talent with a fiddle gets him a comparatively easy position in a regimental band.
Weeks later, on the eve of the Confederate surrender, Simon and his band mates are called to play for officers and their families from both sides of the conflict. There the quick-thinking, audacious fiddler can’t help but notice the lovely Doris Mary Dillon, an indentured girl from Ireland, who is governess to a Union colonel’s daughter. After the surrender, Simon and Doris go their separate ways. He will travel around Texas seeking fame and fortune as a musician. She must accompany the colonel’s family to finish her three years of service. But Simon cannot forget the fair Irish maiden, and vows that someday he will find her again. Incandescent in its beauty, told in Paulette Jiles’s trademark spare yet lilting style, Simon the Fiddler is a captivating, bittersweet tale of the chances a devoted man will take, and the lengths he will go to fulfill his heart’s yearning.”
Paulette Jiles is a novelist, poet, and memoirist. She is the author of Cousins, a memoir, and the novels Enemy Women, Stormy Weather, The Color of Lightning, Lighthouse Island, and News of the World, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. She lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.
“The reader is treated to a kind of alchemy on the page when character, setting and song converge at all the right notes, generating an authentic humanity that is worth remembering and celebrating.” S. Kirk Walsh, New York Times. Walsh’s debut novel, The Elephant of Belfast, will be published next year.
Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light (Book 3 of Wolf Hall Trilogy) (Henry Holt and Co.)
“Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her peerless, Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.”
Hilary Mantel is the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for her best-selling novels, Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Wolf Hall has been translated into 36 languages, Bring Up the Bodies into 31 languages, and sales for both books have reached over 5 million copies worldwide. In addition to the Wolf Holf trilogy, she is the author of A Place of Greater Safety, Giving Up the Ghost, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, Vacant Possession, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Fludd, A Change of Climate, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O’Brien, and Learning to Talk.
“The Mirror & the Light is the triumphant capstone to Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII. . . . The world is blotted out as you are enveloped in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology. . . . Mantel is often grouped with writers of historical fiction, [but] the more apt, and useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political power.” Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
J.C. Hopkins, The Perfect Fourth (Noir Nation).
“Preston Gomez plays piano in Heaven, a San Francisco dive bar. His wife, Suzanne, has been murdered in Brooklyn. Somebody killed her with her own trumpet. Mona, his girlfriend, has been gone for three months. He suspects her of the murder. After embarking on a cross-country trek in a 1971 Dodge Dart Swinger in search of the truth, he becomes the lead suspect in the New York investigation.”
J.C. Hopkins is a Grammy nominated songwriter, producer and leader of the world renowned J.C. Hopkins Biggish Band.
He has published three books of poetry and his jazz-noir novel The Perfect Fourth.
David Hajdu, Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction (W. W. Norton & Company)
“Adrianne Geffel was a genius. Praised as the ‘Geyser of Grand Street’ and the ‘Queen of Bleak Chic,’ she was a one-of-a-kind artist, a pianist and composer with a rare neurological condition that enabled her to make music that was nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. She and her sensibility are now fully integrated into the cultural lexicon; her music has been portrayed, represented, and appropriated endlessly in popular culture. But what do we really know about her? Despite her renown, Adrianne Geffel vanished from public life, and her whereabouts remain a mystery to this day. David Hajdu cuts through the noise to tell, for the first time, the full story of Geffel’s life and work, piecing it together through the memories of those who knew her, inspired her, and exploited her—her parents, teachers, best friend, manager, critics, and lovers. Adrianne Geffel made music so strange, so compelling, so utterly unique that it is simply not to be believed. Hajdu has us believing every note of it in this slyly entertaining work of fiction. A brilliantly funny satire, with characters that leap off the page, Adrianne Geffel is a vividly twisted evocation of the New York City avant-garde of the 1970s and ’80s, and a strangely moving portrait of a world both utterly familiar and like none we’ve ever encountered.”
David Hajdu is the author of five acclaimed books of cultural history, biography, and criticism, including Lush Life, and a three-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He is the music critic for the Nation, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and a songwriter and librettist. He lives in New York City.
“Like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or This Is Spinal Tap, David Hajdu’s Adrianne Geffel will become part of our cultural lexicon. This is satire at its best: painfully accurate, and utterly enjoyable.” Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl.
Kadya Molodovsky and Anita Norich, A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg's Journal (The Modern Jewish Experience) (Indiana University Press).
“Rivke Zilberg, a 20-year-old Jewish woman, arrives in New York shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, her home country. Struggling to learn a new language and cope with a different way of life in the United States, Rivke finds herself keeping a journal about the challenges and opportunities of this new land. In her attempt to find a new life as a Jewish immigrant in the US, Rivke shares the stories of losing her mother to a bombing in Lublin, jilting a fiancé who has made his way to Palestine, and a flirtatious relationship with an American ‘allrightnik.’”
Kadya Molodovsky (1894–1975) was one of the most well-known and prolific writers of Yiddish literature in the twentieth century. Born in Bereze, a small town in what is now Belarus, educated in Poland and Russia, Molodovsky was an established writer when she came to the United States in 1935. Known primarily as a poet, essayist, and editor, she published over twenty books, including plays and four novels.
Anita Norich is author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer; and editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives; Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intercontext; and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures. She is Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and translates Yiddish literature, and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.
“A rare gem! Anita Norich has a rare understanding of her subject matter. Her own experience as an immigrant and her Yiddish spirit are evident in all aspects of her work. When will she publish her own journal? This book, its author, and its translators are true gems.” S. Choron, Amazon
Christine Coulson, Metropolitan Stories: A Novel (Other Press). “From a writer who worked at the Metropolitan Museum for more than twenty-five years, an enchanting novel that shows us the Met that the public doesn't see. Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museum's devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people—along with a few ghosts. A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.”
Christine Coulson began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991 as a summer intern in the European Paintings Department. She returned in 1994 and, over the next 25 years, rose through the ranks of the Museum, working in the Development Office, the Director’s Office, and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. In 2019 she left the Met to write full-time.
“Written with elegance, wit, and a flair for comic genius, Metropolitan Stories describes the museum world as it is and as it strives to be. Coulson is a brilliant narrator of the fantastical and the all-too-plausible excesses of curators and museum directors. Her infectious sense of fun, her steady flow of insights into the human heart and its foibles, her wanton but beady-eyed attention to blind ambition, her passion for art itself, and most of all her deep sense of human character make this not only a delightful book, but also a deeply rewarding one. It marks the emergence of a major new talent.” Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree.
Sulaiman Addonia, Silence Is My Mother Tongue: A Novel (Graywolf Press).
“A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bed sheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.”
Sulaiman Addonia spent his early life in a refugee camp and went on to earn an MA from the University of London. His novel The Consequences of Love was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
“Addonia’s chorus of characters is exquisite, and his interrogation of both traditionalism and love in the desperate circumstances of a Sudanese refugee camp makes for a stunning, enveloping read.” Wayétu Moore, author of The Dragons, the Giant, The Women.
“Stunning. Addonia’s prose layers imagery and insight to keep us glued right to the spectacular end. This is a splendid, compulsive reading experience.” Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.
“Silence Is My Mother Tongue is a remarkably accomplished and circuitously constructed tale that highlights the poetic aesthetic of its creator as well as its central protagonist.” Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane.
Claudia Rankine, Conversation (Graywolf Press).
“Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation―Just Us urges all of us into it. As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces―the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth―where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.”
Claudia Rankine is the author of five previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, and Citizen. She is a MacArthur Fellow and is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
“Rankine has emerged as one of America’s foremost scholars on racial justice. . . . [To] a past we have avoided reckoning, Rankine will be helping America understand itself, one conversation at a time.” Jeff Rowe, Associated Press.
“This brilliant and multi-layered work by Claudia Rankine is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness. . . . A rare honesty toward a potential affirmation. Anyone who turns away from this bold and vital invitation to get to work would be a damn fool.” Judith Butler, American philosopher and gender theorist and author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
“With Just Us, Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. Written with humility and humor, criticism and compassion, Just Us asks difficult questions and begins necessary conversations.” Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American novelist, a MacArthur Fellow, and Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Illustrations, photographs.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (Penguin Classic)
“The last decades have seen an explosion of the prose poem. More and more writers are turning to this peculiarly rich and flexible form; it defines Claudia Rankine's Citizen, one of the most talked-about books of recent years, and many others, such as Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade and Vahni Capildeo's Measures of Expatriation, make extensive use of it. Yet this fertile mode which in its time has drawn the likes of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Seamus Heaney remains, for many contemporary readers, something of a mystery. The history of the prose poem is a long and fascinating one. Here, Jeremy Noel-Tod reconstructs it for us by selecting the essential pieces of writing—by turns luminous, brooding, lamentatory and comic —which have defined and developed the form at each stage, from its beginnings in 19th-century France, through the 20th-century traditions of Britain and America and beyond the English language, to the great wealth of material written internationally since 2000. Comprehensively told, it yields one of the most original and genre-changing anthologies to be published for some years, and offers readers the chance to discover a diverse range of new poets and new kinds of poem, while also meeting famous names in an unfamiliar guise.
Jeremy Noel-Tod is a lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and lead poetry reviewer at the Sunday Times. He has previously written for the Daily Telegraph, the Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books. His books as an editor include the revised edition of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013) and Complete Poems of R. F. Langley (Carcanet, 2015).
“A wonderful book - an invigorating revelation . . . . An essential collection of prose poems from across the globe, by old masters and new, reveals the form's astonishing range.” Kate Kellaway, Observer
Index of poets, index of titles.
Peter Murphy, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt (Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities) (Stanford University Press).
This a fascinating study of a strikingly modern 500-year-old poem.
“Thomas Wyatt didn't publish "They Flee from Me." It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells—in vivid and compelling detail—of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across 500 turbulent years. Wyatt's poem becomes an occasion to ask and answer numerous questions about literature, culture, and history. Itself about the passage of time, it allows us to consider why anyone would write such a thing in the first place, and why anyone would care to read or remember the person who wrote it. From the deadly, fascinating circles of Henry VIII's court to the contemporary classroom, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also introduces us to a series of worlds. We meet antiquaries, editors, publishers, anthologizers, and critics whose own life stories beckon. And we learn how the poem came to be considered, after many centuries of neglect, a model of the "best" English has to offer and an ideal object of literary study. The result is an exploration of literature in the fine grain of the everyday and its needs: in the classroom, in society, and in the life of nations.”
Peter Murphy is John Hawley Roberts Professor of English at Williams College.
“Beautifully written and utterly original, Peter Murphy's study of Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me' as it passes through the hands and minds of readers from the sixteenth century to the present is a profound meditation on how we remember and forget the past, on everything that makes us truly human.” John Guillory, New York University.
“Murphy turns the story of a single work into a moving, lyrical meditation on the vicissitudes of poetry as it enters the unpredictable worlds of readers, collectors, editors, and scholars. Beautifully attuned to what can and cannot be known about a poem's history, this book provides a model for understanding what it means for literature to endure.” Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota.
“We take great poems to have survived history by virtue of their excellence. Peter Murphy shows how wrong we are. He tells a vivid, compelling story of one poem's survival across five centuries of reckless printers, contentious critics, warring editors, and devoted readers, and of all the good luck that's kept it alive.” Jeff Dolven, Princeton University.
Illustrations, bibliography, index.
Erica McAlpine, The Poet's Mistake (Princeton University Press)
“Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth's lakes. Poetry―even by the greats―is rife with mistakes. In The Poet's Mistake, critic and poet Erica McAlpine gathers together for the first time numerous instances of these errors, from well-known historical gaffes to never-before-noticed grammatical incongruities, misspellings, and solecisms. But unlike the many critics and other readers who consider such errors felicitous or essential to the work itself, she makes a compelling case for calling a mistake a mistake, arguing that denying the possibility of error does a disservice to poets and their poems. Tracing the temptation to justify poets' errors from Aristotle through Freud, McAlpine demonstrates that the study of poetry's mistakes is also a study of critical attitudes toward mistakes, which are usually too generous―and often at the expense of the poet's intentions. Through remarkable close readings of Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Clare, Dickinson, Crane, Bishop, Heaney, Ashbery, and others, The Poet's Mistake shows that errors are an inevitable part of poetry's making and that our responses to them reveal a great deal about our faith in poetry―and about how we read.”
Erica McAlpine is associate professor of English at the Oxford University and a tutorial fellow at St Edmund Hall. She is the author of the poetry collection The Country Gambler.
“McAlpine displays a sensitive ear, a command of poetic history, and a critical intelligence that makes fine distinctions clear and meaningful. The Poet’s Mistake is a model of good academic criticism.” Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine.
Notes, bibliography, index.
John Garth’s The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth (Princeton University Press) “takes you to the places that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien to create his fictional locations in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and other classic works. Written by renowned Tolkien expert John Garth, The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien features a wealth of breathtaking illustrations, including Tolkien's own drawings, contributions from other artists, rare archival images, and spectacular color photos of contemporary locations across Britain and beyond, from the battlefields of World War I to Africa. Garth identifies the locales that served as the basis for Hobbiton, the elven valley of Rivendell, the Glittering Caves of Helm's Deep, and many other settings in Middle-earth, from mountains and forests to rivers, lakes, and shorelands. He reveals the rich interplay between Tolkien's personal travels, his wide reading, and his deep scholarship as an Oxford don. Garth draws on his profound knowledge of Tolkien's life and work to shed light on the extraordinary processes of invention behind Tolkien's works of fantasy. He also debunks popular misconceptions about the inspirations for Middle-earth and puts forward strong new claims of his own. An illustrated journey into the life and imagination of one of the world's best-loved authors, The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien provides a unique exploration of the relationship between the real and the fantastical and is an essential companion for anyone who wants to follow in Tolkien's footsteps.”
John Garth is the author of the award-winning Tolkien and the Great War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). A writer, editor, and consultant, he gives talks and teaches courses internationally. He is also a regular contributor to the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, and other leading publications. He lives in Hampshire, England. Twitter @JohnGarthWriter.
“Fascinating, gorgeously illustrated and thought-provoking . . . . [A] masterful book.” Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post.
Photographs, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index.
Greg Masters, It Wasn't Supposed to Be Like This (Crony Books).
“In this new book of poems, his ninth from Crony Books, Masters cuts through the lies perpetrated as the American Dream pitched to us like soap detergent over the past 50 years. The title poem is an attempt at a sort of "Howl 2". Written in a wayward trochaic octameter (eight beats a line) it is a grand kvetch to pierce veneer, call out government miscreants and establish truths attesting to perspectives chronically pushed to the margins and excluded from corporate boardrooms and TV fantasies. The bulk of the book is taken up by "My East Village," another epic poem (in trochaic octameter) that chronicles the downtown neighborhood Masters has lived in for the past 45 years, celebrating its cultural riches while bemoaning its blandification. When he arrived in Manhattan's East Village in the mid-1970s, Greg Masters pounded rock and roll drums in basement dives, “alternative” spaces, CBGB and Irving Plaza and attended readings and workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Along with Michael Scholnick and Gary Lenhart, he edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977-1985. In 1977-78, along with a crew of poet comrades, he produced a cable TV show, Public Access Poetry. From 1980-83, he edited The Poetry Project Newsletter. He has worked for a number of book, magazine and web publishers, beginning as a proofreader and copy editor and then for the last 20 years as a managing editor. This is the ninth book of his writing issued by Crony Books.”
Homie: Poems (Graywolf Press) “is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family―blood and chosen―arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.”
Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert boy], winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They live in Minneapolis.
“The radiance of Homie arrives like a shock, like found money, like a flower fighting through concrete. . . . This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way.” Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
“Homie does not just meet expectations. It shatters them. Smith is at their absolute best, technically and narratively, throughout their third collection, experimenting with form and turning convention on its head.” Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question
Phillipa K. Chong’s Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology) (Princeton University Press) is “An inside look at the politics of book reviewing, from the assignment and writing of reviews to why critics think we should listen to what they have to say. Taking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics’ Circle explores the ways that critics evaluate books despite the inherent subjectivity involved, and the uncertainties of reviewing when seemingly anyone can be a reviewer. Drawing on interviews with critics from such venues as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, Phillipa Chong delves into the complexities of the review-writing process, including the considerations, values, and cultural and personal anxieties that shape what critics do. Chong explores how critics are paired with review assignments, why they accept these time-consuming projects, how they view their own qualifications for reviewing certain books, and the criteria they employ when making literary judgments. She discovers that while their readers are of concern to reviewers, they are especially worried about authors on the receiving end of reviews. As these are most likely peers who will be returning similar favors in the future, critics’ fears and frustrations factor into their willingness or reluctance to write negative reviews. At a time when traditional review opportunities are dwindling while other forms of reviewing thrive, book reviewing as a professional practice is being brought into question. Inside the Critics’ Circle offers readers a revealing look into critics’ responses to these massive transitions and how, through their efforts, literary values get made.”
Phillipa K. Chong is assistant professor of sociology at McMaster University. Follow her at https://twitter.com/ChongSOC
“Filled with acumen and understanding, Inside the Critics’ Circle carefully dissects the reviewing process, a subject that academics and the reading class will find fascinating, relevant, and disturbing. The book’s theoretical claims rest on solid empirical foundations and I applaud its topic and research.” Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University
“In Inside the Critics’ Circle, Phillipa Chong immerses herself in the fluid and uncertain freelance world of newspaper-based book reviewing, where reviewer-writers adhere to the informal norms of playing nice, punching up the status hierarchy of authors. This book will interest academicians and practitioners in the sociology of culture and work, communications, media studies, and journalism, and freelance tastemakers whose reviews of consumer goods appear in print, broadcast, and online media.” Daniel B. Cornfield, Vanderbilt University.
Notes, bibliography, index.
Grant Snider, I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf (Harry N. Abrams).
I’m giving this splendid volume to my grandson for his eleventh birthday. He’s a reader and already has a commodious bookshelf!
“It’s no secret, but we are judged by our bookshelves. We learn to read at an early age, and as we grow older we shed our beloved books for new ones. But some of us surround ourselves with books. We collect them, decorate with them, are inspired by them, and treat our books as sacred objects. In this lighthearted collection of one- and two-page comics, writer-artist Grant Snider explores bookishness in all its forms, and the love of writing and reading, building on the beloved literary comics featured on his website, Incidental Comics. With a striking package including a die-cut cover, I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf is the perfect gift for bookworms of all ages.”
Grant Snider is an orthodontist by day and an artist by night. His comics have been featured in the Kansas City Star, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, as well as The Best American Comics 2013 anthology. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his wife and four children. Visit him online at incidentalcomics.com.
“This playful, self-aware collection of strips and gags on the joys and frustrations of reading and writing is equal parts lighthearted and sincere.” Publishers Weekly
“Grant Snider has a prescient book for these times.” Chris Arrant, Newsarama.
Illustrations, index.
Charlotte Artese, Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories (Princeton University Press).
“Shakespeare knew a good story when he heard one, and he wasn't afraid to borrow from what he heard or read, especially traditional folktales. The Merchant of Venice, for example, draws from “A Pound of Flesh,” while King Lear begins in the same way as “Love Like Salt,” with a king asking his three daughters how much they love him, then banishing the youngest when her cryptic reply displeases him. This unique anthology presents more than forty versions of folktales related to eight Shakespeare plays: The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, King Lear, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. These fascinating and diverse tales come from Europe, the Middle East, India, the Caribbean, and South America, and include stories by Gerald of Wales, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Giambattista Basile, J. M. Synge, Zora Neale Hurston, Italo Calvino, and many more. Organized by play, each chapter includes a brief introduction discussing the intriguing connections between the play and the gathered folktales. Shakespeare and the Folktale can be read for the pure pleasure these lively tales give as much as for the insight into Shakespeare's plays they provide.”
Charlotte Artese is professor of English at Agnes Scott College and the author of Shakespeare's Folktale Sources.
“Shakespeare and the Folktale is a pleasure to read and a rich resource for anyone who loves Shakespeare or storytelling. The book's lucid introductions to each play and tale-type provide insight into how Shakespeare wrote the plays and how audiences engaged with and understood them.” Patrick Ryan, author of Shakespeare’s Storybook: Folk Tales That Inspired the Bard
“This delightful collection is certain to appeal to Shakespeare enthusiasts of all ages. The accessible introduction and framing essays brilliantly explain the value of folktales to Shakespeare study. And the folktales themselves―thoughtfully selected from diverse cultures and times―are enormously pleasurable to read. A must-have for Shakespeare teachers.” Gina Bloom, University of California, Davis
“This anthology is a revelation. It might change perceptions of Shakespeare's plays and reopen the challenging, central question of why they have had such a long and robust afterlife.” Douglas Lanier, author of Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture.
Bibliography, index.
Dennis Baron, What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She (Liveright)
“Addressing one of the most pressing cultural questions of our generation, Dennis Baron reveals the untold story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular-they. Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are sparking a national debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Colleges ask students to declare their pronouns along with their majors; corporate conferences print name tags with space to add pronouns; email signatures sport pronouns along with names and titles. Far more than a by-product of the culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are, however, nothing new. Pioneering linguist Dennis Baron puts them in historical context, noting that Shakespeare used singular-they; women invoked the generic use of he to assert the right to vote (while those opposed to women’s rights invoked the same word to assert that he did not include she); and people have been coining new gender pronouns, not just hir and zie, for centuries. Based on Baron’s own empirical research, What’s Your Pronoun? chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played―and continue to play―in establishing both our rights and our identities. It is an essential work in understanding how twenty-first-century culture has evolved.”
Dennis Baron, professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, has long been a national commentator on language issues, from the Washington Post to NPR and CNN. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Champaign, Illinois.
“A scrupulous and absorbing survey. Its great virtue is to show that these issues are nothing new . . . This scholarly assiduousness, though, also makes him the ideal pilot through these contentious political-linguistic waters. If you want to know why more people are asking ‘what’s your pronoun?’ then you (singular or plural) should read this book.” Joe Moran, New York Times Book Review
Illustrations, notes, index.
Brian Buirge, Jason Bacher, and Jason Richburg, Do the F*cking Work: Lowbrow Advice for High-Level Creativity (Harper Design). “A wake-up call for creatives who need that inspiring kick to finally create the thing they’ve been meaning to make, while celebrating the journey of trying, learning, and failing. Over the last eight years, Jason Bacher and Brian Buirge of Good F*cking Design Advice (GFDA) have made a name for themselves in the international design community, inspiring creatives, artists, and entrepreneurs with their products, weekly e-mails, and most important, their unorthodox advice about work ethic and the creative process. Do the F*cking Work is a collection of 100 beautifully packaged pieces that showcase their irreverent advice—inspiration that will help unstick even the most dedicated procrastinators. Covering everything from drinking your morning coffee to handling productive criticism, from embracing failure to rejecting the status quo, their insights upend conventional thinking and teach you to embrace and celebrate the journey of creation—the joy of trying, failing, learning, and sometimes failing again. To make something good we have to make some mistakes. Bacher and Buirge teach you to embrace the unknown and to f*cking laugh at yourself during the process. There is a method to their madness—a surprising reassurance that is baked into their bluntness. We’re all trying, messing up, and trying again. And there’s joy to be found in that—something we often overlook in our rush to get everything done and get it right the first time. With personal insights, actionable advice, stylish visuals, and lots of colorful language, Do the F*cking Work will leave you feeling renewed and inspired, and will make you see that the value of work is as much about the process as the outcome.”
Justin Gomer, White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights (Studies in United States Culture) (University of North Carolina Press).
“The racial ideology of colorblindness has a long history. In 1963, Martin Luther King famously stated, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." However, in the decades after the civil rights movement, the ideology of colorblindness co-opted the language of the civil rights era in order to reinvent white supremacy, fuel the rise of neoliberalism, and dismantle the civil rights movement's legal victories without offending political decorum. Yet, the spread of colorblindness could not merely happen through political speeches, newspapers, or books. The key, Justin Gomer contends, was film--as race-conscious language was expelled from public discourse, Hollywood provided the visual medium necessary to dramatize an anti–civil rights agenda over the course of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In blockbusters like Dirty Harry, Rocky, and Dangerous Minds, filmmakers capitalized upon the volatile racial, social, and economic struggles in the decades after the civil rights movement, shoring up a powerful, bipartisan ideology that would be wielded against race-conscious policy, the memory of black freedom struggles, and core aspects of the liberal state itself.”
Justin Gomer is assistant professor of American studies at California State University, Long Beach.
“Justin Gomer's book reveals how Hollywood films helped transform colorblind ideology from a liberal weapon against prejudice into the new common sense that ‘race’ no longer matters since racism is dead. A tour de force, Gomer’s takedown of colorblind ideology offers a new perspective on the drama, comedy, and horror that is the late twentieth century.” Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Cleaver Patterson, Don't Go Upstairs!: A Room-by-Room Tour of the House in Horror Movies (McFarland). “Throughout cinematic history, the buildings characters inhabit—whether stately rural mansions or inner-city apartment blocks—have taken on extra dimensions, often featuring as well developed characters themselves. Nowhere is this truer than in the horror film, where familiar spaces—from chaotic kitchens to forgotten attics to overgrown greenhouses—become settings for diabolical acts or supernatural visitations. Showing readers through a selection of prime movie real estate, this book explores how homes come to life in horror with an analysis of more than sixty films, including interviews and insights from filmmakers and scholars, along with many rare stills. From the gruesome murder in the hallway of The House by the Cemetery (1981) to the malevolent haunting in the nursery of Eel Marsh House in The Woman in Black, no door is left unopened.”
Cleaver Patterson is an author, journalist, and film critic based in South West London. He has written for numerous periodicals including The Sunday Times Magazine, Rue Morgue, Scream, Starburst and Video Watchdog.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
Stephen Handzo, Hollywood and the Female Body: A History of Idolization and Objectification (McFarland). “From the first, brief moving images of female nudes in the 1880s to the present, the motion picture camera made the female body a battleground in what we now call the culture wars. Churchmen feared the excitation of male lust; feminists decried the idealization of a body type that devalued the majority of women. This history of Hollywood's treatment of women's bodies traces the full span of the motion picture era. Primitive peepshow images of burlesque dancers gave way to the ‘artistic’ nudity of the 1910s when model Audrey Munson and swimmer Annette Kellerman contended for the title of American Venus. Clara Bow personified the qualified sexual freedom of the 1920s flapper. Jean Harlow, Mae West and the scantily clad chorus girls of the early 1930s provoked the Legion of Decency to demand the creation of a Production Code Administration that turned saucy Betty Boop into a housewife. Things loosened up during World War II when Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth ruled the screen. The postwar years saw the blonde bombshells and ‘mammary madness’ of the 1950s while the 1960's brought bikini-clad sex kittens. With the replacement of the Production Code by a ratings system in 1968, nudity and sex scenes proliferated in the R-rated movies of the 1970s and 1980s. Recent movies, often directed by women, have pointed the way toward a more egalitarian future. Finally, the #MeToo movement and the fall of Harvey Weinstein have forced the industry to confront its own sexism. Each chapter of this book situates movies, famous and obscure, into the context of changes in the movie industry and the larger society.”
Stephen Handzo taught in the film division at Columbia University. He managed movie theaters in New York City and was a member of the projectionists' union. He has written for such publications as Film Comment, Cineaste and Bright Lights and contributed to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film. He lives in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
W. Royal Stokes, a novelist and a former professor of Greek and Latin languages and literature and ancient history, was the 2014 recipient of the Jazz Journalists Association’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award. He has been observing the jazz, blues, and popular music worlds since the early 1940s. He was editor of Jazz Notes (the quarterly journal of the Jazz Journalists Association) from 1992 to 2001, was Program Director of WGTB-FM (D.C.) in the 1970s, and has participated in the annual Down Beat Critics Poll since the 1980s. He hosted his weekly programs “I thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say . . . .” and Since Minton’s on public radio in the 1970s and ’80s. He has been the Washington Post's jazz critic and editor of JazzTimes and is author of The Jazz Scene: An Informal History from New Orleans to 1990, Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson, Living the Jazz Life: Conversations with Forty Musicians about Their Careers in Jazz, Growing Up With Jazz: Twenty-Four Musicians Talk About Their Lives and Careers and The Essential W. Royal Stokes Jazz, Blues & Beyond Reader. His trilogy of novels Backwards Over was published in 2017-2018. Publications he has written for, in addition to the Washington Post and JazzTimes, include Down Beat, Mississippi Rag, Jazz Notes, JazzHouse.org, and JJA News. A founding member of the JJA, he authored, for JJA News, “The Jazz Journalists Association: A 25-Year Retrospective” (http://news.jazzjournalists.org/2013/06/the-jazz-journalists-association-a-25-year-retrospective/). He is currently at work on a memoir.