American History on sale

A number of new and recent titles in American history are on sale for 20 percent off on the Cornell University Press website: Special Offers

Awaiting the Heavenly Country in the New York Review of Books

The April 17, 2008, issue of the New York Review of Books features a review article by James M. McPherson in which he considers Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death by Mark S. Schantz alongside This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. Here’s a quote: “[Schantz] write[s] about that harvest of death . . . with insight and sensitivity—even eloquence.”

Background on East Timor

CNN reports that East Timor has declared a state of emergency (2/12/0 after a new wave of violence, including a brace of assassination attempts on President Jose Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao; Australia is sending security forces to the country. A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor by Joseph Nevins is a definitive and chilling account of East Timor’s terrible struggles for independence from Indonesia. In the Japan Times, Jeff Kingston wrote of this book:

“This is a gripping and powerful saga rooted in the horrible atrocities and deprivation endured by the East Timorese following Indonesia’s invasion in 1975. Indonesian security forces ruled ruthlessly until 1999, causing nearly 200,000 conflict-related deaths, imprisoning and torturing thousands more, while raping and plundering with abandon. A generation of East Timorese grew up where the rule of law was a distant rumor and human rights were routinely violated. Joseph Nevins briefly recapitulates this history, focusing on international complicity in these crimes against humanity, but mostly dwells on the troubling failure to secure justice.”

Another Cornell University Press title that puts this conflict into context is In the Shadow of “Just Wars”: Violence, Politics, and Humanitarian Action, by Médecins sans Frontières (edited by Fabrice Weissman). In the Virginia Quarterly Review, Patrick LaRochelle wrote:

“With insightful case studies of conflicts ranging from East Timor and Afghanistan to Sudan and Colombia, and thoughtful considerations of issues such as the responsibility of humanitarian aid workers in war crimes trials and the growing tension between Islamic, Christian and secular humanitarian NGO’s, In the Shadow of ‘Just Wars’ is a significant and sobering work that should be engaged by humanitarians, politicians, and responsible global citizens alike.”

Birds as a source of “Winter Interest” in the garden

Plenty Magazine features an article today (1/9/200 on birds in the winter garden. Susan Brackney writes: “I’m planning to add even more bird-friendly shrubs and flowers — think viburnums, sunflowers, and zinnias — in hopes that I’ll see an increase in the numbers of rare birds flitting from stem to stem over the coming years.” For advice on how to similarly liven up your own property, please turn to The Audubon Society to Attracting Birds, Second Edition by Stephen W. Kress.
Gardening: The Real Source of “Winter Interest” (Plenty)

North to Alaska: Chabon and Cohen by way of Tsuk Mitchell

Several of us here in Sage House have read and enjoyed Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—perhaps you have, too. If you are fascinated by Chabon’s imagining of a parallel history in which the focus of Jewish resettlement was not Israel, but rather Alaska, you may be interested in our recent book Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism by Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, which recently won the American Historical Association’s 2007 Littleton-Griswold Prize. Cohen, who is best known for his work with the Department of the Interior in the 1930s and 1940s, was a major voice in support of the real Alaska Development Program, which was intended to provide northern refuge for the Diaspora.

Tsuk Mitchell’s book provides a detailed and concise account of the program and its eventual nonimplementation. Two samples:

“Cohen believed that bringing various occupations and talents to Alaska would be a foundation for strengthening Alaska’s economy and for promoting American values and culture. In a letter to Warner Brothers Pictures, discussing the possibility of a documentary on the Alaska Development Program, Cohen stressed the similarities between Alaska and the Western frontier in the late nineteenth century. ‘As the West was built through the pioneer spirit of persecuted and poor immigrants from Europe, so can Alaska be transformed into one more industrial and cultural star on the American shield,’ he explained.”

“Editorials in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner asserted that Alaska could not ‘afford to carry on with a mass of misfits’ and that German-Jews are unsuited for Alaska settlers.’ ‘They are not the type of hardy Scandinavians who have had so much to do with the development of Alaska.’ . . . Even the Alaska Weekly, which condemned ‘opposition to Jewish refugees based on racial antipathy,’ declared that ‘Jews would be the least desirable of immigrants because of being the least adaptable.’”

***

Listen to an interview with Michael Chabon about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union on the nextbook site here: Land of the Lost

New York Times article about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: The Frozen Chosen

Q & A with Chabon in the Seattle Times.

The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach

On NPR’s Weekend Edition (December 8, 2007), there was a story about the importance of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the U.S. economy and the efforts that are being taken to secure the complex: Balancing Security and Commerce at L.A. Port. Our recent book Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution by Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson is an in-depth look at the logistics, economics, and labor issues surrounding the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Mike Davis says that Getting the Goods is “a stunning, behind-the-scenes account of the largely invisible workers who make our big-box, just-in-time world possible.”

Laura Palmer in St. Petersburg

With the DVD release of Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition, fans of the show can relive every twist and turn of the landmark television series that asked (and, unfortunately, answered) the most important question of 1990–1991: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” What many American fans of the cult show probably don’t realize is how popular the show was in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Amidst the extreme homegrown Russian entertainment he surveys in his new book, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture, an unflinching tour of the dark underbelly of post-Soviet culture, Eliot Borenstein also highlights the impact of American popular culture (not to mention Mexican telenovelas) on Russia’s media industry. “For the Russian audience,” Borenstein writes, “Twin Peaks, despite its iconoclasm, is a case study in the strengths and pitfalls of the American serialized drama.” He also takes note of the the series’ appearance as an artifact in Russian popular culture itself: “In Maks Frai’s Chronicles of Echo fantasy series, when Frai returns to the otherdimensional land of Ekho from an extended sojourn in our world, he brings back his video library and his ex-girlfriend’s VCR to introduce film and television to a land that has never seen it. His boss immediately takes several days off from work so he can watch Twin Peaks nonstop.”

The Devil(s) you say

BoingBoing linked to an intriguing Fortean Times piece about the Devil Museum in Lithuania. As Halloween approaches, perhaps it’s time for you to brush up on the many faces of the Devil. As always, Cornell University Press is ready to help, this time with an acclaimed series of books by Jeffrey Burton Russell:

Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages
Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World
Satan: The Early Christian Tradition
The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity
The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History

Margaret Fuller: Her letters, collected

In the October 19, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlino Romano makes a case for the centrality of Margaret Fuller as a Transcendentalist thinker. Cornell University Press has played a crucial rule in bringing Fuller’s work to light by publishing Robert N. Hudspeth’s editions of her letters. You might wish to start with “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller. In the New York Review of Books, Caleb Crain wrote: “In My Heart is a Large Kingdom: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, Hudspeth has carved an elegant single volume of letters out of the complete and authoritative six that he has already edited. Hudspeth is a scholar’s scholar: meticulous, unobtrusive, indefatigable. And in My Heart is a Large Kingdom, he reveals that he also has a novelist’s eye. . . . Thanks to Hudspeth’s scrupulous edition, it is easier to meet the private Fuller than ever before.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The Fuller Brushoff—Margaret Fuller as Transcendentalist

London Underground: New Game Mines Territory Explored in Two Cornell Titles

David L. Pike’s books—2005’s Subterranean Cities and the just-published Metropolis on the Styx—explore the cultural history of underground spaces in the modern city and the role of these forbidding places in the modern imagination.

Focusing on London and Paris, Pike’s books guide readers through the labyrinths, both physical and psychical, that lurk beneath the sidewalks and present, according to novelist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, “a considerable work of urban archaeology, textual burrowing, and headlong epiphany. . . . [in which] cities of metaphor are mapped from clues found in lost libraries, on excursions to catacombs, movie houses, sepulchres, and sewers.”

Tapping into this same fascination with the chthonic, the creators of the highly anticipated PC/online game Hellgate: London set their adventure in a post-apocalyptic London that has been overrun by hordes of terrifying demons, leaving the city desolate and forcing the unlucky survivors to the only sanctuary left, the Underground, banded together in order to gain a foothold against the minions of darkness and ultimately save the bloodline of humanity.

While we can’t guarantee gamers that these books will help them defeat their virtual opponents, they do offer a larger cultural, historical, and imaginative context in which to think about the game’s setting.