Suzanne Gordon, coauthor of Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care, spoke at the Miami Dade College Medical Center Campus this week and the Miami Herald has some good coverage:
Emily Monosson, the editor of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory, has established a blog in support of the book—and of the parent/scientists to whom the book gives a voice! Pay her a visit at sciencemoms.wordpress.com.
The “John Talbott’s Paris” blog features a review of Why France?: American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination, edited by Laura Lee Downs and Stéphane Gerson.
We would like to congratulate the Cornell University Press authors just named Guggenheim Foundation Fellows:
Edward Fowler (author of San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo and translator of A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer)
Samuel Moyn (author of Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics)
Kathryn Sikkink (author of Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America and coauthor of Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics)
Li Zhang (coeditor of Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar)
Richard J. Cox, Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, features three Cornell University Press books on his blog “Reading Archives“:
Holocaust Witnesses, a review of Annette Wieviorka’s The Era of the Witness,
Studying Medieval Manuscripts, a review of Introduction to Manuscript Studies by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham,
and
a review of The Iron Whim by Darren Wershler-Henry
Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 by Jeff Lipkes is the first book to provide a detailed narrative history of the German invasion of Belgium as it affected civilians. Rehearsals is receiving some good attention from the media:
Books by Nicholson Baker, Jeff Lipkes Keep History Lively (LA Times)
Author Traces ‘Invented’ WWI Atrocities (Tampa Tribune)
Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge featured Richard Cullen Rath, the author of How Early America Sounded, on their March 2, 2008 show (titled “Touching the Sound”). If you don’t already subscribe to the podcast of To the Best of Our Knowledge, you can listen to this episode on the show’s archive page, here.
Leland de la Durantaye, the author of Style is Matter, took part in a radio discussion with Brian Boyd and Ron Rosenbaum regarding Nabokov’s “final, unfinished, unpublished, flame-menaced book ‘the Original of Laura.’” The discussion took place on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Book Show on February 15, 2008, and the whole thing is available online, along with a transcript: Should Nabokov’s unpublished manuscript be burned?
Nicolas Véron, author of Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, and Thomas Philippon have an editorial in the February 12, 2008 edition of the Financial Times: Europe’s Saplings Need Financial Fertiliser.
For the past week or so, the litblogs have been abuzz with discussion about the final disposition of Vladimir Nabokov’s manuscript The Original of Laura—will VN’s son Dimitri publish or destroy this work, written on fifty notecards? Ron Rosenbaum’s essay Dimitri’s Choice at Slate is the focal point of this discussion, but Rosenbaum has been on the case for a few years now—see his New York Observer article Dear Dmitri Nabokov: Don’t Burn Laura! Let Draft Gather Dust, from November 2005. And, wouldn’t you know it, a Cornell author started all the fuss. In 2005, Rosenbaum wrote,
“I came across an essay by Harvard professor Leland de la Durantaye [author of Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov] on Lolita in The Village Voice, in which he mentions the existence of The Original of Laura:
‘When Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Original of Laura. His express wish was that it be destroyed upon his death. Before him, Virgil and Kafka had left similar instructions [to destroy their work]; neither was obeyed. Nor was Nabokov. His wife, Véra, found herself unable to carry out her late husband’s wishes, and when she passed away in 1991 she bequeathed the decision to their son. The manuscript’s location is kept secret.’”
Here is de la Durantaye’s Village Voice piece: The Original of Lolita
