University of Texas Press

Houston Chronicle :: Texas Furniture, Volume One

2012-02-17T22:05:00.000-06:00

Texas Furniture, Volume One

By Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren
Buy It Now

Early Texas furniture industry was well beyond primitive

By Allan Turner

Sam Houston was spitting mad about the wagon load of furniture arriving at his Huntsville home. The stove had no pipe, the bed's canopy and side rails were missing and a bedpost was split, the mirror was shattered and the sideboard was "infamous beyond all things else."

"The veneering is broken and split," Houston furiously complained to the Galveston merchant who sold the items. "Wherever it needed it, and I should say at least 20 places, it has been puttied. ... One end of the sideboard was split for near a foot and filled with wax. I have not told you all, nor is it worth the trouble."

Furnishing a house in mid-19th century Texas, where even short-distance transportation could be treacherous, could pose serious problems. Thousands of early Texas settlers arrived with little more than a trunk, and the items needed to fill their homes - especially those in the hinterland - often were improvised on the spot.

Yet, when it came to furniture, Texas was filled with surprises. Among the frontier settlers were skilled craftsmen capable of transforming native woods into functional, sometimes highly sophisticated, furnishings.

Read the full article at chron.com »

2012 AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal Showcase

2012-02-17T08:33:00.002-06:00

From the AAUP (American Association of University Presses) Website:

Judging for the 2012 AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal Show took place January 26-27 at the AAUP Central Office in New York City. Approximately 226 books, 300 jacket and cover design entries, and 4 journals were entered. 49 books, 1 journal, and 30 jackets/covers were chosen by the jurors as the very best examples from this pool of excellent design.

The 2012 Book, Jacket, & Journal Show will premiere at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Chicago, June 18-20, 2012. The show will be exhibited around the country from September 2012 to April 2013; dates and locations will be announced in late summer.

See the full showcase »

UT Press received honors in three areas: Scholarly Illustrated (Designing Pan America), Trade Illustrated (The Austin Chronicle of Music Anthology), and Jackets & Covers (Maras).

Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural
Visions for the Western Hemisphere

by Robert Alexander González

Designer: Derek George

Production Coordinator: Ellen McKie

Acquiring Editor: Jim Burr

Project Editor: Leslie Tingle

Buy It Now!

Maras: Gang Violence and Security
in Central America
by Thomas Bruneau
Designer: Lindsay Starr
Production Coordinator: Kaila Wyllys

Buy It Now!

The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology

by Austin Powell and Doug Freeman

Designer: Lindsay Starr

Production Coordinator: Ellen McKie

Acquiring Editor: Allison Faust

Project Editor: Leslie Tingle

Buy It Now!

UT News :: The Gernsheim Collection

2012-02-14T08:28:00.002-06:00

The Gernsheim Collection
by Roy Flukinger
Buy It Now

“The Gernsheim Collection” Earns Recognition
Feb. 14, 2012

AUSTIN, Texas — "The Gernsheim Collection," co-published by the Harry Ransom Center and the University of Texas Press, has been awarded an Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, which honors a distinguished catalog in the history of art published during the past year.

Edited by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator Roy Flukinger, "The Gernsheim Collection" coincided with the Ransom Center's 2010 exhibition "Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection," which explored the history of photography through the Center's foundational photography collection.

"The Barr Award is a great honor for the university, as well as for the Ransom Center," said Flukinger. "The Ransom Center has a longstanding commitment to scholarship and learning, and it is rewarding to have this recognition by the College Art Association."

Read the full UT News article »

UT Know :: 100,000 Hearts

2012-01-23T12:46:00.013-06:00

100,000 Hearts
By Denton A. Cooley, M.D.
Buy It Now

A memoir with heart
By Briscoe Center for American History

Pioneering surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley performed his first human heart transplant in 1968 and astounded the world in 1969 when he was the first surgeon to successfully implant a totally artificial heart in a human being.

In his new memoir, “100,000 Hearts,” Cooley (BA, 1941) shares his life story and his transformation from a shy boy to one of the world’s most important surgeons. The photographs in the slideshow above appear in his memoir.

In “100,000 Hearts,” Cooley recounts his childhood in Houston and his experiences as a basketball scholarship recipient at The University of Texas of Austin. After medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and at Johns Hopkins, Cooley served in the Army Medical Corps. While at Johns Hopkins, Cooley assisted in a groundbreaking operation to correct an infant’s congenital heart defect, which inspired him to specialize in heart surgery. Over the course of his career, Cooley and his associates have performed more than 100,000 open heart operations and have been forerunners in implementing new surgical procedures.

Of all his achievements, however, Cooley is most proud of the Texas Heart Institute, which he founded in 1962, in Houston, with a mission to use education, research and improved patient care to decrease the devastating effects of cardiovascular disease.

Cooley notes the importance of his time at the university in his memoir: “The four years that I spent at UT gave me the knowledge and skills I would need for both medical school and life. Because of what my alma mater gave me, I have always tried to support it in every possible way.”

It’s particularly fitting that this book has strong ties to the university. The memoir is published by the university’s Briscoe Center for American History and is distributed by the University of Texas Press. Don Carleton, the Briscoe Center’s executive director, worked closely with Dr. Cooley in shaping the contents of the memoir.

As Tom Brokaw said, “Dr. Cooley has always played at the top of his game, whether as a basketball star at the University of Texas or as a world-class heart surgeon. How he accomplished all that is a must read.”

Read more, and see the slideshow at utexas.edu »

Austin American-Statesman :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

2012-01-18T09:22:00.000-06:00

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison SystemBrown case highlights reluctance to parole longtime offenders
By Mike Ward

Eroy Brown, whose acquittal on murder charges involving the deaths of a prison warden and a farm manager in the 1980s shook the Lone Star corrections system to its roots, is coming up for parole again.

Brown is serving 90 years as a habitual criminal for robbing a Waco convenience store of $12 and some candy bars. The graying, almost 60-year-old is serving time in a South Carolina prison because a federal judge thought his safety could not be guaranteed in a Texas lockup. If he's granted parole, he would be sent to a pre-release program in California.

If he's denied parole, he would be released within five years without any supervision under controversial early release policies enacted in the 1970s to ease prison crowding in Texas.

"He got more publicity for (the acquittal) than Christ on the cross," said Houston attorney Bill Habern, who was Brown's lawyer on the murder charges. "The (prison) system still to this day doesn't believe he should have been acquitted. ... What is probably going to happen is called getting even."

Brown's case highlights a long-standing issue with Texas' parole system: a reluctance to parole longtime offenders with high-profile cases, even those who soon will be freed anyway, and those with serious and costly health problems.

Brown is earning liberal credits for good behavior on his sentence, which he would finish by 2017, according to current calculations. At that time, he would be released free and clear, with no supervision.

Brown is among just 4,208 of Texas' 156,000 convicts who are still accruing such credits under old laws, a number that dwindles each year as more are paroled or released.

Read more at statesman.com »

The Guardian :: A Natural History of Belize

2012-01-15T09:10:00.000-06:00

A Natural History of Belize

By Samuel Bridgewater

Buy It Now

Birdbooker Report 205
Compiled by an ardent bibliophile, this weekly report lists books about Belize's Mayan forests, venomous reptiles, deer and several insect field guides that are hot-off-the-presses in North America and the UK

SUMMARY: Belize's Chiquibul Forest is one of the largest remaining expanses of tropical moist forest in Central America. It forms part of what is popularly known as the Maya Forest. Battered by hurricanes over millions of years, occupied by the Maya for thousands of years, and logged for hundreds of years, this ecosystem has demonstrated its remarkable ecological resilience through its continued existence into the twenty-first century. Despite its history of disturbance, or maybe in part because of it, the Maya Forest is ranked as an important regional biodiversity hot spot and provides some of the last regional habitats for endangered species such as the jaguar, the scarlet macaw, Baird's tapir, and Morelet's crocodile.
A Natural History of Belize presents for the first time a detailed portrait of the habitats, biodiversity, and ecology of the Maya Forest, and Belize more broadly, in a format accessible to a popular audience. It is based in part on the research findings of scientists studying at Las Cuevas Research Station in the Chiquibul Forest. The book is unique in demystifying many of the big scientific debates related to rainforests. These include "Why are tropical forests so diverse?"; "How do flora and fauna evolve?"; and "How do species interact?" By focusing on the ecotourism paradise of Belize, this book illustrates how science has solved some of the riddles that once perplexed the likes of Charles Darwin, and also shows how it can assist us in managing our planet and forest resources wisely in the future.

IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A good general introduction to the Chiquibul Forest of Belize.

Read more at guardian.co.uk »

Austin Chronicle :: The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology

2012-01-06T13:50:00.002-06:00

Austin Chronicle Music Anthology
Edited by Austin Powell
and Doug Freeman
Buy It Now

The Year in Books
Thirty-one titles that got us talking this year
BY KIMBERLEY JONES, SARAH SMITH, JAMES RENOVITCH, CINDY WIDNER, MONICA RIESE, AND WAYNE ALAN BRENNER

It's no wonder so many food-related metaphors extend into our reading nooks: Good books are not mere entertainment; they sustain, nourish, and enrich. I gleefully devoured these books, the bread and butter of my bookshelf, which made serving up this recipe for reading success a piece of cake, no matter what your cup of literary tea. (I'll stop now.)

Feed your mind: My two favorite music writers, Austin Powell and Doug Freeman, unleashed The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology (University of Texas Press) this spring (see "Off the Record," Music, March 4, 2011). Despite having had this book for eight months and having lived in this fair town six-plus years now, I know there's always something else in those pages I can learn about our collective musical history. It's a beautiful volume, and the only one I know of in which Joan Jett and Jay-Z make appearances five pages apart.

Read the full list of books at austinchronicle.com »

Dallas Morning News :: West of 98 & Best of the West 2011

2011-12-23T13:29:00.018-06:00

West of 98
Edited by Lynn Stegner and
Russell Rowland
Buy It Now

Book review: West of 98 and Best of the West 2011
By Jenny Shank

“Westerners have been reminded … that we are interesting in some of the same ways that cavemen or headhunters are interesting,” writes Montana novelist Russell Rowland in West of 98, one of two new anthologies published by the University of Texas Press. But what’s clear from these collections, one of fiction and the other of essays, is that Westerners are curiosities to ourselves as much as we are to outsiders.

The 20 stories in the fiction collection, Best of the West 2011, display a wide range of styles and structures, with a few common themes recurring — the primacy of characters’ interaction with gorgeous, yet treacherous, Western landscapes; their penchant for road trips; and their frequent bouts of criminal behavior.

Best of the West 2011
Edited by James Thomas and
D. Seth Horton
Buy It Now

K.L. Cook vividly imagines a boy’s encounter with legendary outlaws in Depression-era Texas in the moving “Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard.” Meth addicts steal the identities of unsuspecting Nebraskans in Judy Doenges’ “Melinda.” A bereaved couple unknowingly enjoys a moment of respite amid the ongoing drug war in Nuevo Laredo in Peter LaSalle’s elegant “Lunch Across the Bridge,” while an Oklahoma couple reignites old sparks when they play chicken with oncoming traffic in Aaron Gwyn’s startling “Drive.”

In Ron Carlson’s “Escape from Prison,” an embezzling banker retreats to his Colorado cabin after his malfeasance is discovered. The narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins’ clever, epistolary “The Last Thing We Need” reveals a shooting that has haunted him his entire life. In Shawn Vestal’s innovative “Opposition In All Things,” Rulon Warren returns from World War I to the Idaho Mormon community where he grew up and is possessed by the spirit of a gun-toting pioneer forebear, who urges him to go down with his gun blasting.

The essayists featured in West of 98, which the novelist Rowland edited with Lynn Stegner, are of a more law-abiding sort than the characters in Best of the West. Fans of contemporary Western American literature will recognize most of the authors — the editors gathered contributions from many of the most eloquent writers in the region.

Read the reviews in their entirety at dallasnews.com »

Mother Jones :: Desert Duty

2011-12-23T13:22:00.001-06:00

Desert Duty
by Bill Broyles and
Mark Haynes
Buy It Now

Our Favorite Books of the Year
On dog cloning, cocaine smuggling, brain surgery, green technology, healthy farming, and much more. Read on!

This Studs Terkel-style oral history sets out to rebrand the US Border Patrol as more than just a political prop for the anti-immigration crowd. Through interviews with active and retired agents at a post in Arizona's scorching Sonoran Desert, the authors (one a former agent) cast the force not just as enforcers but humanitarians. One retired officer recalls holding impromptu funerals in the desert for migrants who didn't make it. The men in green, as the authors put it, "are the people you'd pray were on your trail and on their way." In spite of its one-sided view, Desert Duty brings to life a perspective on the border debate you rarely hear about.—Tim Murphy

See the full list at motherjones.com »

Writer's League of Texas Book Award :: Before Brown

2011-12-23T08:11:00.001-06:00

Before Brown
by Gary Lavergne
Buy It Now

Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice by Gary M. Lavergne was awarded the award for best work of non-fiction by the Writers' League of Texas. The Writers' League of Texas Book Awards recognize outstanding published books each year in five categories, Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry & Literary Prose, Children's books (long works) and Children's books (short works).

Find out more at writersleague.org »

Houston Chronicle :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

2011-12-21T12:26:00.001-06:00

Bookish picks: 2011 Texas Titles
Reviewed by Maggie Galehouse

We are encouraged to buy local and regional in grocery stores and farmers’ markets.

Why not buy books with the same philosophy — to support Texas authors, stories and presses?

All the 2011 books listed below have a strong Texas connection.

Happy reading!

100,000 Hearts
By Denton A. Cooley, M.D.
Buy It Now

100,000 Hearts: A Surgeon’s Memoir, by Denton Cooley, M.D. (UT Press) Cooley, who founded the Texas Heart Institute in 1962, grew up in Houston and attended the University of Texas. While in medical school at Johns Hopkins, Cooley assisted in an operation to help correct a congenital heart defect in an infant. This led him to specialize in heart surgery.

Crazy from the Heat

By James H. Evans

Buy It Now

Crazy From the Heat: A Chronicle of Twenty Years in the Big Bend by James H. Evans. (University of Texas Press). This photography book offers landscapes and panoramas — in both black and white, and color — of the biggest state park in Texas. People, plants, animals, objects, even an “exploded view” of ‘Shirley’s Fried Pie’ make this collection personal and universal.

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

The Trials of Eroy Brown, by Michael Berryhill. (UT Press) In 1981, a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville killed two white Texas prison officials. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered, claiming self-defense. The Trials of Eroy Brown focuses on Brown’s defense and is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown’s three trials, which ended in his acquittal.

See the entire list at chron.com »

Serious Eats :: Uchi: The Cookbook

2011-12-20T13:40:00.000-06:00

Uchi: The Cookbook
by Tyson Cole
and Jessica Dupuy
Buy It Now

5 of our Favorite Restaurant Cookbooks of 2011
Posted by Caroline Russock

The best restaurant cookbooks have the ability to capture a dining experience, not only through its recipes but through tone, design, and the chef's voice. In a way these cheffy cookbooks act as much as actual cookbooks as they do dining mementos, preserving a truly memorable meal after you pay the check.

This year we've seen some truly remarkable restaurant cookbooks. These five are as unique and beautiful as the restaurants that inspired them. They make absolutely fantastic gifts for friends, particularly the ambitious home cook-types who already have every other cookbook.

Read more at seriouseats.com »

Austin 360 :: Gael Stack

2011-12-20T10:44:00.000-06:00

Gael Stack
by Gael Stack
Buy It Now

Gael Stack gets a monograph from UT Press
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Layered with cryptic calligraphic symbols, fragmentary texts and half-hidden images, the richly imaginative paintings of Gael Stack read simultaneously as elegant palimpsests and frenetic narratives.

The latest addition to the Dunkerley Contemporary Art Series, “Gael Stack” (University of Texas Press, $60) is the first retrospective monograph on this respected artist’s career and makes welcome addition to the scholarship on Texas contemporary art.

Some 143 images luminously chart Stack’s four decades of paintings. Her canvases offer an intriguing visual exploration of memory and of how the past infiltrates the present. Exhibited widely, Stack, who for long time lead the art department at the University of Houston, rightly gets the catalogue raisonne that she deserves, and essays by noted critics Raphael Rubinstein and Alison de Lima Greene astutely examine Stack’s work in the larger context of contemporary art.

Read more at austin360.com »

The Houston Chronicle :: 100,000 Hearts

2011-12-19T13:25:00.020-06:00

100,000 Hearts
By Denton A. Cooley, M.D.
Buy It Now

Cooley writes about DeBakey feud, reconciliation
By Todd Ackerman
Photo: Melissa Phillip

Dr. Denton Cooley implanted the world's first artificial heart in a patient dying on the operating table after Dr. Michael DeBakey rebuffed the inventor's research project at Baylor College of Medicine, Cooley writes in a new memoir.

In his first in-depth discussion of medicine's most famous feud, the famed cardiovascular surgeon writes that a frustrated Dr. Domingo Liotta brought him the device at the Texas Heart Institute and they redesigned it for use as an emergency bridge to transplantation - an emergency that presented itself a few months later, in 1969, when surgery to remove a large part of patient Haskell Karp's diseased heart failed.

"I'd reached a critical point in the procedure," Cooley writes in 100,000 Hearts: A Surgeon's Memoir (University of Texas Press). "Was I going to let Mr. Karp die on the operating table or try to save his life by whatever means? I decided to proceed with implanting the total artificial heart."

Cooley's account conflicts with the conventional view that he stole the device from DeBakey's Baylor laboratory in a race to be the first to implant an artificial heart.

The subsequent feud, immortalized in an iconic 1970 Life magazine cover story, endured for nearly 40 years before the two giants publicly reconciled in 2007, less than two years before DeBakey died at 99. In the book, Cooley gives the backstory about the change of heart.

Read the full article at chron.com »

Austin American-Statesman :: The Albatross and the Fish

2011-12-17T13:12:00.000-06:00

The Albatross and the Fish
by Robin W. Doughty and
Virginia Carmichael
Buy It Now

Texas expert on saving the albatross
By Tara Haelle

The 22 species of albatross are the most threatened bird group in the world because of human activities, according to Robin Doughty, a geographer and ornithologist at the University of Texas.

But in the new book "The Albatross and the Fish: Linked Lives in the Open Seas," Doughty and his co-author, Virginia Carmichael, write that the international community is waking up to the need of preserving the iconic bird of the open sea.

"The albatross is like a bellwether of what we've done in exploitation," Doughty said in an interview. "What we've done to the albatross we've done to whales and to seals. We've basically cleaned out these populations on remote southern hemisphere islands."

Yet Doughty said that the book does not set out to demonize those responsible for the near-decimation of the species; rather, it attempts to show how an alliance of governments, conservation groups and fisherman worked together to institute provisions that would preserve the world's largest seabird.

"I don't want to look at this as gloom and doom," he said. "We need to look at this in a new way, as being part of the ecology rather than dominators of it."

The story of the albatross demonstrates how what happens in one part of the world can have far-reaching effects, said Robert Suryan, assistant professor of marine science at Oregon State University.

"Albatrosses are an excellent symbol of global conservation of a species," Suryan said. "They breed on these remote islands that few people ever visit and few people ever know about, yet they're impacted by human activities tens of thousands of miles away because they're such long-distance wanderers that travel the whole ocean basin."

Protecting the albatross is challenging because it requires cooperation across many countries. Yet, Suryan said, it also draws the sympathies of people across many countries.

Read more at statesman.com »

Photo-Eye Magazine :: From Uncertain to Blue

2011-12-16T13:44:00.001-06:00

From Uncertain to Blue

By Keith Carter
Buy It Now

The cover of From Uncertain to Blue jumps out at you. Keith Carter's reissue of his seminal early work of small-town Texas feels contemporary in design since Pentagram Austin's DJ Stout and Barrett Fry bring current touches to pictures that helped define Texas to a wider audience.

Horton Foote, in the original essay, sums up the work: "And here comes Keith Carter, with his lack of sentimentality, with not a trace of condescension or superiority, but with humor and a deep and honest respect and affection for what he has seen and observed, with his penetrating and ever-discerning eye, a poet's eye really, and makes us see all these familiar things—fresh." This essay adds to what we see in the clear-eyed images. Carter and his wife Patricia add an essay and notes from their times on the road. Few photographs are as well formed as this with the fleshed-out texts that bring depth to the work.

Read the full review at photoeye.com »

Women In Academia Report :: The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture

2011-12-16T13:22:00.000-06:00

The Spectacular City, Mexico,
and Colonial Hispanic
Literary Culture
By Stephanie Merrim
Buy It Now

Stephanie Merrim, the Royce Family Professor of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University, was announced as the recipient of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association of America. She will accept the award at the MLA’s annual convention in Seattle in January. She is being honored for her book The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (University of Texas Press).

Professor Merrim has been on the Brown University faculty since 1981. She is a graduate of Princeton University and holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Read the full article at wiareport.com »

Austin American-Statesman :: From Uncertain to Blue, Gael Stack

2011-12-10T13:04:00.019-06:00

From Uncertain to Blue
by Keith Carter
Buy It Now

Gael Stack
by Gael Stack
Buy It Now

From Lady Gaga to the Louvre, a roundup of holiday books

They're big. They're full of photos. And they can make wonderful doorstops.

They're this year's holiday books, which range from geography, art and politics to portraits of pop-culture icons.

The American-Statesman features staff has selected some of the best volumes to help guide people who have book lovers on their gift lists.

"From Uncertain to Blue," by Keith Carter ($55, University of Texas Press)

Keith Carter made a photographic splash when he first published "From Uncertain to Blue" in 1988. This year, the University of Texas Press has published a re-envisioned book that includes the photos as well as a new essay by Carter, who describes how he and his wife Patricia visited 100 small Texas towns in 1986 and 1987 and documented their travels on film. In the latest book, Carter includes some of his original contact sheets, showing how he selected the singular photo for each town in the first edition.

— Charles Ealy

"Gael Stack," by Gael Stack (University of Texas Press, $60)

Layered with cryptic calligraphic symbols, fragmentary texts and half-hidden images, the richly imaginative paintings of Gael Stack read simultaneously as elegant palimpsests and frenetic narratives.

The latest addition to the Dunkerley Contemporary Art Series, "Gael Stack" is the first retrospective monograph on this respected artist's career and makes welcome addition to the scholarship on Texas contemporary art.

Some 143 images luminously chart Stack's four decades of paintings. Her canvases offer an intriguing visual exploration of memory and of how the past infiltrates the present. Exhibited widely, Stack, who for long time lead the art department at the University of Houston, rightly gets the catalogue raisonné that she deserves, and essays by noted critics Raphael Rubinstein and Alison de Lima Greene astutely examine Stack's work in the larger context of contemporary art.

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

See the full list at statesman.com »

Bryn Mawr Classical Review :: Theater of the People

2011-12-07T12:30:00.018-06:00

Theater of the People
By David Kawalko Roselli
Buy It Now

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2011.12.19
David Kawalko Roselli, Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 288. ISBN 9780292723948. $55.00.

Reviewed by Marcel Lysgaard Lech, University of Copenhagen (marcelll@hum.ku.dk)

In this study, Roselli analyses the theatrical audiences from the fifth century to the early Hellenistic era. His “provincializing”(p.12, see my note 1) approach is interdisciplinary and takes its methods from Theatre Semiotics, Social History (topics such as gender, ethnicity and social status), Performance Studies and Reception Studies, all framed by an slight Marxist colouring (class, working-class are recurrent words).1 Roselli argues against the “Athenocentric” readings of the dramatic texts which focus on drama as an ideological (viz. democratic) tool “validating Athenian civic society (p. 7),” and against a “Hellenocentric” view that while seeing drama within a wider cultural frame as the Attic drama was disseminated throughout the Mediterranean world, nonetheless ignores the non-Greek spectator.

This book is of great value to the study of classical theatre, but I have certain reservations regarding some of the methods and conclusions of the book. Some are matters of simple disagreement, but on others matters, it seems to me that as consequence of his interdisciplinary approach, Roselli becomes too superficial. This results in expressions like “doubtless” where doubt ought to be present, e.g. by which eisodos a dramatic chorus would exit.2 Here he follows Revermann’s hypothesis,3 which belittles the fiction of the play in comparison with the metatheatrical effect (the final exit in Plutus seems to counter that thought). At p. 54 he claims that “comedy did embody the values of the urban poor,” which is an unnecessary simplification of the comic worlds; Dicaeopolis is not urban (his household must be extra mural in order to celebrate the Rural Dionysia there) and is nowhere depicted as outright poor. Roselli simplifies not only the many voices in the comedies, but also the social hierarchies of fifth- century Athens. If the ideologies and values are so clear cut as Roselli claims, why would Critobulus, an elite youngster, love comedies so much?4 Nonetheless, I welcome his attempt to get rid of the dogma of the civic body.

Roselli analyses the admittedly sparse evidence available to us and argues for a better use of the anecdotal evidence, since “the merits of individual testimony, no matter how late, have to be weighed against the broader set of evidence on a case by case basis.” (6) This approach, in my view, is jeopardised by the fact that, as Roselli himself shows, a certain part of the evidence concerning the ancient theatre is basically “anti-theatre.” Nothing suggests that the Athenians as a collective ever thought likewise. Of course, some did not care about theatre, while others such as Plato came to disdain theatre for philosophical reasons.

The book consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, Roselli establishes the theatrical dialogue between audience and performers. There are some good comments on the judges and their relationship with the spectators, but I find it hard to see how Roselli has countered any of the approaches, which he criticises, when he claims that “the exercising of the audience’s role as arbiters in political gatherings and more informal social contexts was closely related to the role it played in the theater.” This seems to me to echo the famous Nothing to Do with Dionysus publication’s view on the “civic body,” and I find it difficult to believe that the spectators could not differentiate between the different social events. Furthermore, if the audience was as heterogeneous as Roselli argues (e.g. p. 81), his politicising of the theatrical event and the audience’s authority seems unwarranted.5 Since Roselli argues that a satyric chorus somehow reflects the audience, which is drinking at the festivals, it is odd that he does not discuss Philochorus’ testimony on drunken audiences (FGrHist 328 F171= Athen. 11. 464F).6 This evidence, together with the apolitical fact that the audience pays for admission (p. 101), speaks against this notion of a “heavily politicized” (p.192) audience.

Read the entire review at bmcr.brynmawr.edu »

LA Weekly :: Oaxaca al Gusto

2011-12-05T08:45:00.000-06:00

Oaxaca al Gusto:
An Infinite Gastronomy

By Diana Kennedy
Buy It Now

Author Interview: Diana Kennedy

Let me start this off by telling you that I can’t talk about Diana Kennedy without being extremely biased. Put simply, Diana Kennedy’s cookbooks are what got me excited about cookbooks. She is why I spend so many hours reading them, and even more hours cooking from them. She is, ultimately, why I have a cookbook blog.

I grew up cooking a lot of Italian food. I’ve probably made a couple hundred gallons of marinara sauce in my life. Other cuisines were regularly consumed and often adored, but rarely ever cooked. Sure, I could throw together some gringo fajitas — but that was about as far as it went. But then, I was told about Diana Kennedy (by a person whose opinions I value greatly). So I bought a book, did some reading, and eventually prepared a recipe for pollo en salsa de fresadilla y chipotle (chicken in tomatillo-chipotle sauce). I was hooked, and immediately bought the rest of her cookbooks.

The more I cooked and the more I read, the more fascinated I became. All of a sudden, I was cooking Mexican food I had never heard of before, and preparing dishes with the freshest and best ingredients I could find (or afford). It was an exciting time for me, and it changed my perceptions of Mexican cuisine, as well as my own cooking. I realized that I could pull off more in a kitchen than I had ever expected.

But I also stumbled into some truly great cookbooks, written by a marvel of a human being. Diana Kennedy became, for me, a hero. But then, I find great heroics in 88 year-old British women who live in Mexico, and have devoted the majority of their life to uncovering and cataloging the recipes and cultures of the many diverse states of Mexico. Since publishing her tenth cookbook cookbook last year (Oaxaca al Gusto), Mrs. Kennedy is now focusing most of her time on teaching, and working to preserve the vanishing ingredients and recipes of Mexico.

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with Mrs. Kennedy by phone. She took the call from her eco-friendly home in Michoacán, where a looming thunderstorm threatened our already shaky phone connection. Here is what transpired:

Read the interview at blogs.laweekly.com »

Los Angeles Timess :: From Uncertain to Blue

2011-12-04T11:47:00.001-06:00

From Uncertain to Blue

By Keith Carter
Buy It Now

Coffee-table books

The bold and the beautiful: Tomes brimming with images that captivate the imagination.

From Uncertain to Blue

Photographs

Keith Carter

University of Texas Press, $55

Keith Carter's classic photographic look at small-town life in America is reenvisioned along with a new essay, contact sheets and an amplified travel journal.

See the full list at latimes.com »

Houston Chronicle :: From Uncertain to Blue

2011-11-30T17:00:00.002-06:00

From Uncertain to Blue

By Keith Carter
Buy It Now

Coffee-table books worthy of conversation
By Steve Bennett

Betting money says the advancement of the Kindle and the iPad spells the death of the printed book. That could well be. Even though an iPad can link a paragraph on why a cheetah has spots to a video of a cheetah taking down a gazelle, it can't do what a coffee-table book does, which is announce to visitors that you are a civilized human being and that your living room is a center of culture.

Even though bookstores are failing, there is still room in the world for the big, bold, beautiful coffee-table book.

Here are a few recent editions worth their heft.

Photographer Keith Carter is a Texas treasure. He shows us what life is like - in black and white. In 1986, Carter and his wife, Pat, eschewed an exotic vacation to Morocco and bought a $3 Texas map. They circled small towns with names like Diddy Waw Diddy and Noodle, then drove to these dips in the road, and Carter made one photograph for each town. The project became his first book. Twenty-five years later, Carter has "re-envisioned" From Uncertain to Blue (University of Texas Press, $55), with a new essay and an introduction by Horton Foote, into a chronicle of the state and its people. You can look at these images - the bullet-riddled deer target in Mount Calm, worshipers painting the church in Lovelady - for hours.

Read more at chron.com »

Wall Street Journal :: Greenback Planet

2011-11-28T10:23:00.010-06:00

Greenback Planet

By H. W. Brands
Buy It Now

How the Dollar Rules by Fiat
How did the dollar become the world's principal currency and what is its future?

The Founders defined the dollar as a weight of gold or silver. We moderns have undefined and disembodied it. The 21st-century greenback is neither connected to nor—as they say on Wall Street—collateralized by anything tangible. You can materialize it on a computer, like a tweet.

"Greenback Planet" is the story of this amazing monetary transformation. The narrative begins in the 18th century and races to the present, pausing to catch its breath at some of the great American monetary landmarks: Andrew Jackson's veto, in 1832, of legislation rechartering a predecessor to the Federal Reserve; Abraham Lincoln's recourse to greenbacks, or fiat currency, to finance the Civil War; resumption of the gold standard in 1879, with which it once more became possible to exchange gold for paper and vice-versa at a fixed and statutory rate; J.P. Morgan quelling the Panic of 1907; the Federal Reserve not quelling, never mind preventing, the Great Depression; the crazy-quilt monetary improvisations of the 1930s; the halfway gold dollar of the post-World War II era; and the creation, in 1971, of the pure paper (later digital) model of today.

Mr. Brands is a paper-money man, though the subtitle of his book—"How the Dollar Conquered the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It"—seems to betray some reservations. It betrays, as well, the author's zest for provocation. The American currency, he extravagantly claims, has "made America rich," "defeated communism" and "knitted the planet into a single economy more fully than any currency before." I would say that enterprise made America rich and that communism, rotten from the start, defeated itself, with a timely push from Ronald Reagan. And I would say that the British pound "knit" the world economy together long before the birth of Ben Bernanke, while the golden solidus of ancient Byzantium circulated as global money ages before the reign of Queen Victoria. Without an over-scrupulous regard for history, the historical narrative zips along.

Mr. Brands has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He has written diplomatic history, political history and business history. Some academics—"one book men," as Samuel Flagg Bemis, the prolific Yale diplomatic historian, contemptuously called them—write hardly at all. Mr. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas, seems to do nothing but.

Read the full review at wsj.com »

San Antonio Express-News :: From Uncertain to Blue, Timeless Mexico

2011-11-27T09:01:00.003-06:00

From Uncertain to Blue
by Keith Carter
Buy It Now

Timeless Mexico
by Susan Toomey Frost
Buy It Now

Picture books hook the eye
Coffee-table tomes offer wonderment, hilarity, insight.
By Steve Bennett

Betting money says the advancement of the Kindle and the iPad spells the death of the printed book. That could well be. Even though an iPad can link a paragraph on why a cheetah has spots to a video of a cheetah taking down a gazelle, it can't do what a coffee-table book does, which is announce to visitors to your fine home that you are a civilized human being, and that this — your living room — is a center of culture. (Perhaps it says something about your personal economy as well.)

Like a coffee table, you have to get out the Pledge and an old T-shirt and dust off the coffee table book every month or so. Sometimes, you'll find yourself lingering, returning to those paintings by Picasso or those photos of the Beatles.
Even though bookstores are failing, there is still room in the world for the big, bold, beautiful coffee-table book.

Here are a few recent editions that are worth their heft.

Photographer Keith Carter is a Texas treasure. He shows us what life is like — in black and white. In 1986, Carter and wife Pat eschewed an exotic vacation to Morocco and bought a three-dollar Texas map. They circled small towns with names like Diddy Waw Diddy and Noodle, then drove to these dips in the road where Carter made one photograph for each town. The title of the photograph is the name of the burg, although Carter didn't get cutesy and try to make visual poetry out of Poetry — “which,” he says, “was mostly goat ranchers.” The project became his first book. Twenty five years later, Carter has “re-envisioned” “From Uncertain to Blue” (University of Texas Press, $55), with a new essay and an introduction by Horton Foote, into a chronicle of the state and its people that is timeless and universal.

For decades, we saw the world through the lenses of Life magazine's photographers, whether it was the summit of Mount Everest or Marilyn Monroe in a party dress. “Life 75 Years: The Very Best of Life” (Time Home Entertainment, $36.95) captures the moments that have shaped our lives for generations — Robert Capa's “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War, the Mercury astronauts — in a big (13-by-16-inch) book that lets the images speak for themselves. It also features a keepsake reproduction of the first issue of Life, ads and all, from Nov. 23, 1936. Cover price: 10 cents.

On the family tree of Mexican photography hang the names of master such as Garduño, Bravo (both Manuel and Lola) and Iturbide, not to mention foreigners such as Strand and Weston. At the base of that tree stands Huge Brehme. As San Antonio collector and writer Susan Toomey Frost points out in her gorgeous new book “Timeless Mexico: The Photographs of Hugo Brehme” (UT Press, $55): “Hugo Brehme mentored Manuel Álvarez Bravo in mastering composition and darkroom discipline. His strict training with Brehme served as a springboard for Álvarez Bravo's future work.” Which not only included becoming “the Mexican master of dreams, death and symbolism” but teaching a succession of subsequent great lens men and women. Brehme emigrated to Mexico from Germany just before the revolution exploded and ran his tight-ship studio, producing portraits and postcards, for 50 years, forging a singular vision of a country he came to call home.

Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. traces African American history from 16th century slavery through Jim Crow and the Great Migration to the election of Barack Obama in the sumptuously illustrated “Life Upon These Shores” (Knopf, $50). One critic has called the book “a tour de force of the historical imagination.”

Read more at mysanantonio.com »

American Anthropologist :: Viewpoints

2011-11-25T13:40:00.000-06:00

Viewpoints
Mary Strong, Text Editor
Leana Wilder, Visual Editor
Buy It Now

Visual Anthropology Book Review
Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work edited by Mary Strong and Laena Wilder

Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work provides a readily accessible survey of the types of work conducted by visual anthropologists. Admirably showcasing practitioners’ struggles and successes alike, this volume is organized into four major sections and serves well as an introductory survey text. Particular strengths include a highly accessible layout comprised of large glossy pages, numerous images with extensive captioning, and broad margins for annotation. Also noteworthy, most chapters conclude with suggested exercises, projects, and assignments for practicing different approaches to visual anthropology. Indeed, several such projects could easily be linked to form the backbone of a visual anthropology course or lab. Particularly strong chapters include chapters 1–4, which provide a rich survey of the possibilities of anthropological photography; chapter 6, which excels in unpacking the construction of ethnographic film; and chapter 7, which explicates film and multimedia's evocative potentials. Less mainstream approaches are particularly well served by chapters 9 and 10. The glossary of terms (pp. 388–397) and persons (pp. 397–405) provides helpful references and resources for students.

The first and strongest section, “Photography Now,” provides three perspectives on creating and working with still images. Chapter 1, by Malcolm Collier, explores photography as a “formal tool for social and cultural research” (p. 13). This includes making and analyzing photographs, photo elicitation, and integrating words and images. Chapter 2, by Laena Wilder, highlights photography's evocative potential, the importance of rapport with those photographed, and the photographer's responsibility to those photographed. Rounding out this section, in chapter 3 Richard Freeman uses text and image to persuasively and beautifully illustrate photography's narrative potential.

Whereas section 1 focuses on photography, section 2, “Images from the Past,” provides two perspectives on working with extant photographs. In chapter 4, Joanna Cohan Scherer uses photographs of North American Indians from the Smithsonian to draw attention to the importance of critically evaluating archival images. In contrast, chapter 5, by Julie Flowerday, highlights the potential of historical images for facilitating historical comparisons.

Read the review in full at onlinelibrary.wiley.com »