The Lost Art of Presidential Decision-Making

 

You’ve got to ask the question, what caused me to want to win?” George W. Bush, during his oral history for The Last Card: Inside George W. Bush’s Decision to Surge in Iraq

How does a president decide to send troops into battle? How does he or she weigh the contradictory, even conflicting advice from national security officials, military advisers, and those outside of government? Variations across time, individuals, and problems mean that Presidents have approached wartime decisions more like artists than engineers. They have drawn on bits of history, their interpretation of the national interest, and consideration of their fellow citizen’s views in making choices and crafting strategy.

A TIME OF CELEBRATION AND RENEWED ENGAGEMENT: EVERYDAY TRANSGRESSIONS

In June 2019, I attended the annual International Labour Conference (ILC) convened by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland. This year was particularly special, as it marked the 100^th anniversary of the ILO. Through the establishment of international labor standards, the ILO has played a key – and often overlooked – role around the world to advance social justice and decent work for all.

Independence Day and America’s Efforts to Liberate Others

The Fourth of July is generally a time for Americans to get together, watch fireworks, and celebrate our nation’s independence.  But in the period since 1776, the United States has also repeatedly sought to help other nations achieve their own independence and liberty, sometimes through war. The recent 75^th anniversary of D-Day reminded us that the United States played a key part in dismantling fascism, and over subsequent decades, helped transform nations such as Germany and Japan into free, stable democracies. The United States has certainly had some important feats over its 243-year lifespan that helped free others from oppression.

Notes from an Outgoing Director, by Dean Smith

“…many worlds I’ve come since I first left home.”—Brokedown Palace, The Grateful Dead

I stopped by Sage House last Saturday evening to finish packing up some books and pictures. I played songs on the guitar there for the last time. The twelve-foot ceilings provide excellent acoustics.

I reflected on the last four years in this palace of knowledge creation. I loved every minute of being at Cornell University Press—the staff, the faculty, the university, the library, the hockey rink, the town, and especially the apples. I look forward to working with my new colleagues at Duke University Press as much as I will miss the people of Cornell.

150 Notable Books: Getting Acquainted with Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols

I suspect that many avid readers have a special book that becomes inseparable from themselves, part of their existence. Without this special book, what I call a “soul book,” a fulfilling life would be difficult. There are also books that are like family or friends—dependable, loving, present when you need them, always willing to provide help and support, but not necessarily consulted regularly or assimilated into one’s existential core. And then there are books that are acquaintances, that surface periodically at points in a reader’s life, often to exert a surprising force or influence that belies the infrequency of one’s association with them. For me, Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols has been an acquaintance, as I have had only three interactions with the book, each separated by a number of years. With its inclusion on CUP’s anniversary list of 150 notable publications,  I have the opportunity to remember these meetings and renew my acquaintance.

On Brand – the Fashion Choices of Hajj Amin al-Husayni

Yet again, the controversial Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni is making headlines. In May 2019, in a Washington post op-ed, Middle East studies scholar Dr. Maha Nassar addressed recent critics of US House Representative Rashida Tlaib, saying that ‘by citing the pro-Nazi propaganda of Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni to claim that “Palestinian leaders at the time sided with Hitler,” they conflate the statements and actions of a single individual with those of an entire people.’[1] This conflation is indeed a problem.

Notorious for siding with the Nazis during the Second World War and for his inclusion on the UN War Crimes Commission list, Husayni’s prewar career comes into focus in Statecraft by Stealth. When writing the book, I tried to address the Mufti’s prewar career without being unduly influenced by our knowledge of his collaboration with the Nazis. In fact, I argued that he showed little interest in the Nazis before the war. It is helpful to examine the beginning of Husayni’s career in order to better understand the events which led up to his disastrous choices of the 1940s.

Hiking Cascadilla Gorge with Ange

A few weeks ago, I received an email about the Cornell Library and Press Service and Recognition Awards. This is the first time we’ve participated in an official program like this.

A number of Cornell University Press staff nominated their colleagues. It was exciting to see staff appreciating each other in an open forum.

As we zero in on our second straight year of break-even performance, I nominate our entire staff. Their willingness to embrace change and innovation has produced outstanding results.

Everyone in Sage House has contributed to the Press’s success.

A Book Lovers Dream: First time at BookExpo

We boarded the bus soaking wet. I was clingy tightly to my two bags full of books, catalogs, and other goodies, trying to protect them from the rain. We had just walked several blocks in the pouring rain, feet sore from roaming the Javits Center for hours. A memorable experience for my first-time visiting NYC. Nevertheless, it was a great day!

If you’re wondering why we were boarding a bus soaking wet with bags full of books, well, BookExpo. My colleague Sarah and I spent last Thursday attending the biggest book trade show in North America, a nice change in scenery from our typical Thursdays spent at Sage House. Neither of us had been to BookExpo before so we were both thrilled when we were given the opportunity to attend.

BookExpo was a book lovers dream.

Booths upon booths filled with stacks of books in every genre, many available for you to take and read. The best booths were inviting and modern, with couches and chairs for you to sit, talk, read, or even charge your phones like we did in a cool poetry booth.

We spent some time talking with other university presses and looking at their catalogs, and the types of books that they publish. We also met authors, sales people, and fellow marketers; we even ran into old high-school acquaintances. This event was a great place to meet people, and listen to other people in the industry. As fairly new members of the publishing world, Sarah and I found this experience invaluable.

One-hundred fifty notable books: Literary studies (PART ONE)

From the emergence of the study of English literature as an academic discipline in Victorian England until the re-emergence of Cornell University Press in 1932, academic publishing had devoted itself principally to the production of scholarly apparatus: dictionaries of Old and Middle English, inventories of manuscript collections, and biographies, bibliographies, and variorum editions of great and minor poets. When Cornell revised its press under the directorship of Robert Patterson, it acquired rights from Yale University Press to all 17 volumes of the Cornell Studies in English, to which it added 26 more titles over the next 35 years. Volumes in this series included an index of names in Middle English poetry, Milton’s prose tracts and Latin poems, and several collections of the correspondence of Wordsworth and his circle. One of the most successful entries in this series Were Edwin Nungezer’s Dictionary of Actors and of Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England before 1642—still a useful reference, although if it were published today it would undoubtedly have been given a snappier title.

Much of this useful and interesting work still goes on at university presses, though much of it has been supplanted by searchable online databases.

Another successful volume in the series, Harold Wilson Blodgett’s Walt Whitman in England, was an early example of what would become a defining characteristic of Cornell titles: the exploration of a little-known aspect of a well-covered subject.

Commuter spouses: together, apart

More and more frequently, online dating apps are becoming the answer to the question, “so, how did you two meet?” The widespread appearance of Tinder and other dating apps have changed the way people find and interact with each other, both in a positive and negative way. And just as the communication and social dynamics have changed with the creation of dating apps, so they have with the movement towards a different kind of relationship: the long-distance love.

Danielle J. Lindemann’s Commuter Spouses: New Families in a Changing World explores how married couples cope when they live apart to meet the demands of their dual professional careers. Her book gives readers almost one-hundred in-depth interviews with current or former commuter spouses that demonstrate the reflection, embodiment, and sometimes disruption of large-scale developments in the ways we think about gender and marriage, the ways we communicate, and the ways we conceptualize family.

BUNDLE WEEK: Scott Levine’s bundle on Photography (and birds!)

Since last Fall I have gotten more heavily involved in photography. It’s become my passion. I have been exploring it all, macrophotography, astrophotography, portraits, landscapes, and wildlife. Living in Upstate New York offers many opportunities to photograph birds. You’ll find countless bird boxes and feeders in our yards and an abundance of state parks, lakes, and protected lands that provide a sanctuary for more exotic species like bald eagles and great blue herons. I have really enjoyed capturing them in action and being able to show them in ways we don’t normally get to observe them.

It should be no surprise then that my bundle includes books on photography and birds. If you are curious to see more of my photos you can find them at www.scottelevine.com, but before you do, you should check out the books that I have bundled.

BUNDLE WEEK: Sarah Noell’s bundle of her TOP 3 #CornellPress books!

Books belong together. Whether they topically complement each other, creating a well-rounded reader, or they create a variety filled reading list that excites and challenges, you’re made up of more than just one title.

Here’s another recommendation for #BundleWeek , coming at you from the Marketing Department:

1. America The Fair: Using Brain Science to Create a More Just Nation
2. No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class
3. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

(30% off this bundle with promo code O9BUN1)

The Publisher’s Publisher

On the morning after the University of Virginia basketball team won the national championship, I was on the phone with Mark Saunders, the director of UVA Press about a book that would celebrate the incomprehensible journey the Cavaliers had just completed.

We had previously agreed to table all discussions until the game was over.

“Let’s talk tomorrow so we don’t jinx anything,”  Mark said.

After the victory, Mark celebrated by leading the school’s Auld Lang Syne inspired mantra, “The Good Ole Song.”  It’s preserved here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXjTmSXL6Ik

He and I shared texts over the last two seasons wherever we happened to be watching. He might be in John Paul Jones arena when I was at a hockey tournament in Buffalo.  Weeks of silence went by and then possession by possession critiques of the team would cascade down the screen.

BUNDLE WEEK: Ange Romeo-Hall’s inspired bundle on human life

1. Nobody’s Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide
2. To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves
3. Stanley’s Girl: Poems
4. A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer
5. Missing: Persons and Politics
   

   

   

   

   

I’ve worked on hundreds of exceptional Cornell books over the years, but these stand out mostly for the way they have so vividly shared worlds I wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

BUNDLE WEEK: Kitty Liu’s 4 nature bundles!

ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT BUNDLE

Can the efforts of local environmental stewards impact resource management, environmental governance, and even social movements? What are the impacts of citizen science? How do we build resilient communities? This bundle includes resources for a broad transdisciplinary audience of researchers, educators, and practitioners who are interested in improving existing programs or developing new ones.

1. Citizen Science: Public Participation in Environmental Research
2. Grassroots to Global: Broader Impacts of Civic Ecology
3. Communicating Climate Change: A Guide for Educators
4. Connecting the Drops: A Citizens’ Guide to Protecting Water Resources

BUNDLE WEEK: Michael McGandy’s bundle on the history of United States engagement in the Pacific

For readers interested in the history of United States engagement in the Pacific, this is a good time to get caught up on the Cornell University Press backlist!

In recent months, I have signed a tide of wonderful—deeply researched, fluidly written, smartly argued—new books on U.S. foreign policy and military engagement in East Asia and Southeast Asia in the post-World War II era. New books are coming in fall 2019 and spring 2020 from Oliver Charbonneau, Sangjoon Lee, Katherine Moran, Thomas K. Robb and David James Gill, Nancy Shoemaker, and Colleen Woods. Their work will change how we look at the U.S. role as a Pacific power in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and so got me to thinking about trends in our historical analysis of events like World War II, Bandung Conference, and the Vietnam War. The bundle of backlist books I have selected is a wonderful mix of histories of U.S. strategy, foreign policy, civilian engagement, and military action in the Pacific.  These are the books which the new wave of works if carrying forward, and so are necessary reading for everyone who follows the influence of the U.S. in the broad Pacific region.

BUNDLE WEEK: Fran Benson’s bundles of ILR books!

Fran Benson’s bundles of ILR books:

 

The World through the Lens of Class

1. No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class
2. Class Lives: Stories from across Our Economic Divide
3. Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures
4. Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America
5. The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret
6. What’s Class Got to Do with It: American Society in the Twenty-first Century
7. Class and Campus Life: Managing and Experiencing Inequality at an Elite College
8. New Working Class Studies

BUNDLE WEEK: Roger Haydon’s bundle on nationalism and ethnic studies

Acquisitions editors generally bring in books one by one, looking for the smartest, best, most interesting books we can find.  We see the links among them, eventually, but sometimes an outside body provides that recognition.

Each year the Association for the Study of Nationalities gives an award for the year’s outstanding book on Russia, eastern Europe, or Eurasia “in which substantial attention is paid to questions of ethnicity and/or nationalism.”  Since 2011 Cornell books have won five times and received four honorable mentions.  These nine titles explore nationalism and ethnicity in different ways, different locations.

A Tank in Prague

Monuments have recently become focal points for debates about history, politics, and social justice. In the United States, protestors have called for the removal of statutes of Confederate leaders. In South Africa, students advocating for the “decolonization of education” have succeeded in having a statute of Cecil Rhodes removed from the University of Cape Town. In Ukraine, a law about communist monuments has led to what Ukrainians dub “Leninopad”—the “Lenin fall”— most of the statutes of the Soviet leader have now been dismantled.

My new book, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia, begins and ends with a monument in Prague. The monument was a Soviet tank: it was erected in July 1945 by Soviet and Czechoslovak leaders to honor the Soviet army’s liberation of Prague from German occupation in World War II.

A tank on the streets of a Central European city is the paradigmatic symbol of the Soviet Union’s oppression of its Eastern bloc satellites during the Cold War. A Soviet tank in Prague on a summer’s day remains an especially indelible image of the USSR’s violent efforts to maintain control over its socialist empire in Europe. It calls to mind the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which crushed the country’s experiment in reform communism, known as the Prague Spring. In this familiar narrative of the superpower’s use of force against its satellite states, the 1945 monument to the Soviet Tank Crews in Prague is the foundation of Soviet hegemony in Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe.

Yet long before the tank monument became a quintessential symbol of Soviet hard power in Czechoslovakia and the rest of the Eastern bloc, it was part of an audacious but less well-known experiment in power of a different kind: the attempt by Soviet and Eastern European officials to use transnational “friendship” to create a cohesive “socialist world.” This experiment, which involved cultural diplomacy, interpersonal contacts, and the trade of consumer goods across national borders behind the Iron Curtain, linked citizens of the superpower and its satellites in an “empire of friends” that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Empire of Friends tells the story of the rise and fall of this friendship project between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. The book’s central argument is that Soviet power in Czechoslovakia and the other Eastern bloc countries constituted a new type of empire—an empire of friends. I use this term to highlight the paradoxes of the relationship: between high politics and the realm of everyday life, amity and violence, cultural exchange and authoritarianism, and hard and soft power. The Monument to the Soviet Tank Crews in Prague illustrates this paradox. The monument employed a tank—a symbol of military force—to connote Soviet liberation and friendship. Over the course of the following four and a half decades, the tank monument became the most iconic symbol of friendship between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

Following the Soviet invasion in 1968, many Czechoslovaks came to see this symbol of soft power as a painful reminder of Soviet hard power. In the spring of 1991, in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, which brought an end to communism in Czechoslovakia, and not long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, a young Czech artist named David Černý undertook an act of political protest art. He painted the tank pink and stuck a giant model of a paper mache middle finger at its center. Protests that followed led the Czechoslovak government to move the offending monument to a military museum, where it remains today.

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Rachel Applebaum is a historian of the Soviet Union, communist Eastern Europe, and the global Cold War. Her first book, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia, is available for purchase, here. 

BUNDLE WEEK: Books Belong Together!

Cornell University Press is excited to bring books together with Bundle Week! We know that our readers live with a perpetual stack of books on their bedside tables, and it’s our job to help that pile grow. So May 20^th through May 24^th, bundle as many in-stock #CornellPress books as you want, and be rewarded for reading more.

Bundling 3 books gets you 30% off. Buy 4 books and you get 40% off, pick 5 or 6 books and the discount is now 50%. Need more books? No problem! Buy 7 to 9 books to get a 60% off discount, or go big and make it 10+ books, for a 70% off your total purchase.

Need ideas? Throughout this week, we’ll be sharing some suggestions of books to bundle direct from Cornell University Press’s staff. From new-this-season recommendations to all-time favorites, our staff will be sure to pick a diverse range of titles. With a backlist of over 12,000 books to choose from (remember we’ve been doing this for 150 years), the opportunities are endless! Read up on foreign policy this summer or explore the outdoors with our field guides. Tackle military history with the experts or investigate industrial labor relations while lounging by the pool.

Love to share? Tell us what books made your bundle, tagging @CornellPress and using the hashtag #BundleWeek on social, and we might just share them to inspire others.

Happy #BundleWeek!

*Promo valid in the U.S. only

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Sarah Noell is a Marketing Assistant at the Cornell University Press.