Short review of Acid Rain in the Adirondacks in American Scientist (May–June 2008):
“Acid Rain in the Adirondacks chronicles everything that can go wrong when attending to environmental problems is put off for too long, but it also offers evidence that dangers can be addressed successfully through scientific research, public awareness and government regulation.” Read the whole review here.
In old but still interesting news, Episode 6 of Season 1 of House M.D. featured a guest appearance by the Cornell Yeats edition of The Wild Swans at Coole (Manuscript Materials). (Our sales manager provides a screencap as proof.) Coincidentally enough, there is a graffito of Hugh Laurie as House on a utility box next to the Press’s driveway.
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.
Carne Ross, author of Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, is featured in Time Magazine with regard to his firm’s work with Kosovo.
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)
The April 2008 edition of the Fortean Times features a 9/10 review of John Warne Monroe’s Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France. An excerpt appears below:
“A mesmerizing overview of a foreign field. Monroe has immersed himself in the ferment of ideas going on in this period and analyzes what they meant to people then, however naïve they may now seem. He stresses just how widely read the publications of some of the figures that he discusses were, making them a crucial factor in any balanced assessment of French intellectual life.”—Tom Ruffles, Fortean Times, April 2008
Just received this announcement for an event featuring the author of The Audubon Society Guide to Attracting Birds: Creating Natural Habitats for Properties Large and Small:
Chats in the Stacks book talk at Mann Library
Stephen Kress
The Audubon Society Guide to Attracting Birds: Creating Natural Habitats for Properties Large and Small
March 12, 4:00 pm
Albert R. Mann Library
Room 160
Landscapes rich in native plants are not only beautiful, they also attract large numbers and many different kinds of birds. A book talk by Cornell Lab of Ornithology author Stephen Kress will provide tips on how to foster native plant communities that yield a variety of foods and shelter for birds across the seasons. Gardeners, land stewards and owners of properties large and small are invited to come learn more about creating thriving natural landscapes filled with color and bird song the whole year through. Refreshments and book signing to follow talk (books will be available for purchase from The Cornell Store).
Think you might have to miss this talk? No worries—just catch it via pod- or webcast at http://mannlib.cornell.edu/podcasts/ Expected availability: March 31.
Great Library Journal review (in the February 15, 2008 issue) of Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death by Mark S. Schantz:
“Schantz makes a compelling case that Americans’ experiences with, and ideas about, death before the Civil War made it possible for them to understand—and even celebrate—death caused by the war. By closely reading landscapes, images, and all manner of writings on the ‘culture of death,’ Schantz discovers that Northerners and Southerners alike came to believe that how one approached death and how a people honored the dead revealed, even decided, matters of faith, community, and national identity. Schantz is especially perceptive at describing mourning rituals, the literature on heaven as a place of family reunion with full bodily restoration, the rural cemetery movement, and the illustration of death in lithographs, photography, and painting. He finds a strong strain of Greek revival and ancient mythology in Americans’ representation of what death demanded of men and women. When read in tandem with Drew Gilpin Faust’s recent This Republic of Suffering, we learn that for 19th-century Americans the ‘unifying power of death’ defined how one must live, and when the war came, it also made it easier to kill and to die. A sobering assessment for anyone who imagines war as a purifying process.”
