Sage House News: The Cornell University Press Blog

New ebooks from Cornell University Press

sagehouse — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:54:27 +0000

The following gems from the Cornell University Press backlist are now available as ebooks from Amazon, Google, and Kobo:

The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon by Fouad Ajami
Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda by Michael Barnett
Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics by Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore
Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, edited by Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss
Nursing against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care by Suzanne Gordon
Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care by Suzanne Gordon, John Buchanan, and Tanya Bretherton
The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America by Elliott Gorn
The Complexities of Care: Nursing Reconsidered, edited by Sioban Nelson and Suzanne Gordon
Smartups: Lessons from Rob Ryan’s Entrepreneur America Boot Camp for Start-Ups by Rob Ryan

Francis of Assisi in Our Sunday Visitor

sagehouse — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:31:37 +0000

Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Augustine Thompson, O.P. is reviewed by Woodeene Koenig-Bricker in Our Sunday Visitor: A fresh look at a familiar saint: Francis of Assisi. Here’s an excerpt: “In this extensive work, based on all the existent original documents, including those written by Francis, the saint emerges as a much more complex and complicated man than previously believed, tormented by interior demons, nearly overwhelmed by the challenges of governing a religious movement and troubled by self-doubt, yet still a shining figure of the transforming power of an encounter with the living Christ.”

New releases

sagehouse — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:23:06 +0000

Recent arrivals in our warehouse include:

The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia by Simon Finger
Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 by Dean J. Franco

New releases

sagehouse — Thu, 03 May 2012 21:16:45 +0000

Recent arrivals in our warehouse include:

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation by Frank Ankersmit
No Family Is an Island: Cultural Expertise among Samoans in Diaspora by Ilana Gershon
She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America by Katherine West Scheil
Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America by Barbara Jensen
The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos by Seth Jacobs
The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 by Neslihan Senocak
Neotropical Birds of Prey: Biology and Ecology of a Forest Raptor Community, edited by David F. Whitacre
Housing the New Russia by Jane R. Zavisca
An Education in Politics: The Origins and Evolution of No Child Left Behind by Jesse H. Rhodes
Anglo-Saxon Art by Leslie Webster
Reforming Asian Labor Systems: Economic Tensions and Worker Dissent by Frederic C. Deyo
First, Do Less Harm: Confronting the Inconvenient Problems of Patient Safety, edited by Ross Koppel and Suzanne Gordon
The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley by Tom Arne Midtrod
Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages by Nicholas Orme
Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 by David Schuyler
Borders among Activists: International NGOs in the United States, Britain, and France by Sarah S. Stroup
The World Health Organization between North and South by Nitsan Chorev
Barns of New York: Rural Architecture of the Empire State by Cynthia G. Falk
J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War by John Sbardellati
Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale by Tom Wilber

Recent Award Winners

sagehouse — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:44:41 +0000

The past month brought a remarkable string of prizes for Cornell University Press books. Recent award winners include:

Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician by Elizabeth Eva Leach
Winner of the 2012 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize (Renaissance Society of America)

Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America by Alvin B. Tillery Cowinner, 2011 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book of the Year Award (National Conference of Black Political Scientists)

The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring by Paulina Bren
Winner, 2012 Council for European Studies Book Award

The Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma: Why Election Monitoring Became an International Norm by Susan D. Hyde
Cowinner, 2011 Chadwick F. Alger Prize (International Organization Section, International Studies Association)

Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions by Elizabeth N. Saunders
Winner, 2012 Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Best Book Award (International History and Politics Section, American Political Science Association)

The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America by Jason M. Colby
Honorable Mention, 2012 Ralph Gomory Prize (Business History Conference)

A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment by Carrie M. Lane
Finalist, 2012 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize

Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary by Kenneth J. Ruoff
Winner, 2012 Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction (Oregon Book Awards, Literary Arts Association)

Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia by Barbara Alpern Engel
Finalist (History Category), 2012 Colorado Book Award (Colorado Humanities Center for the Book)

Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne by Anne E. Lester
Winner, 2012 Best First Book of Feminist Scholarship on the Middle Ages (Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship)

Carolina Armenteros interview

sagehouse — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:34:30 +0000

Carolina Armenteros, author of The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854, has been interviewed at New Books in History. Listen here.

Publicity Roundup

sagehouse — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:55:01 +0000

An AP story about Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale by Tom Wilber is all over the press. Here’s the story as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal: Books, films chronicle Marcellus Shale gas rush

Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek cover story “Christianity in Crisis,” recommends reading Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Augustine Thompson O.P. as a valid first step toward understanding and reconnecting with pure Christianity.

Caitrin Lynch and her new book Retirement on the Line: Age, Work, and Value in an American Factory are featured in this recent Boston Globe story on the senior workforce at Vita Needle: Needham Firm Finds Success with Older Workers. A video is also available.

America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837 by Alasdair Roberts is reviewed in the April Library Journal.

Bitter Choices reviewed in the TLS

sagehouse — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:18:54 +0000

The March 23, 2012, issue of the Times Literary Supplement featured Donald Rayfield’s glowing review of Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus by Michael Khodarkovsky. Here’s an excerpt: “The Russian conquest of the Caucasus started around 1580; it is still under way. But even its acute phase, between 1790 and 1860, was a process of invasion, colonization, negotiation and genocide so complex, involving so many different indigenous nations, and witnessed by so many articulate participants, Russian and foreign, that to describe it in 200 pages requires considerable virtuosity. Michael Khodarkovsky takes as his thread the scantily documented life of Semion Atarshchikov, a Cossack whose father was Chechen and mother a Turkic Kumyk. A lieutenant and translator for the Russian army, he was so sickened by colonial war that he twice defected to the Circassian resistance. On the second occasion he was mortally wounded by another Russian defector who had decided to return. Michael Khodarkovsky has achieved a miracle of compression and shown us why the North Caucasus remains a live political volcano.”

J. Edgar Hoover goes to the Movies reviewed in Library Journal

sagehouse — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:15:52 +0000

J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War by John Sbardellati is reviewed in the March 23, 2012, edition of Library Journal XPress Reviews:

“Sbardellati (history, Univ. of Waterloo, Ont.) presents a convincing case for the important role of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in contributing to the Second Red Scare that followed World War II. To Hoover, communism not only ran counter to the American way of life but, when present in film content, also posed a threat to national security. Sbardellati draws upon FBI documents to detail how Hoover, beginning in 1942, directed his agents to undertake a massive, secret review of the Hollywood film industry. He pointed to the presence of communists in Hollywood to justify his fear that new film productions—particularly social-problem films—contained propaganda. When the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood in 1947, it used the FBI’s findings as the basis for targeting suspected ‘Reds’; this led to the creation of the Hollywood blacklist and a more conservative Cold War film culture. Verdict: Sbardellati’s thorough research on Hoover’s early investigations of Hollywood makes this a great choice for readers interested in 20th-century American cultural history.”—Chris Martin, Univ. of Dayton Lib.

Andrew Wedeman interviewed on WSJ blog

sagehouse — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:11:58 +0000

The “China Realtime Report” blog of the Wall Street Journal features an interview with Andrew Wedeman, author of Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China: Eight Questions: Andrew Wedeman, China’s Corruption Paradox