“Celebrate life” with our #CCAM Cancer Crossings giveaway!

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month (#CCAM), and both politicians and healthcare professionals are calling for a “Cancer Moonshot.” Thanks to exciting work in checkpoint inhibitors, anti-cancer vaccines and immunotherapy, we’re making major inroads against a disease that impacts 14 million people across the globe every year.

Yet to have real progress, we need to remember the lessons of a small team of doctors who reached the pinnacle of cancer research a half-century ago. Nicknamed the “Cancer Cowboys,” this extraordinary group of doctors took acute lymphoblastic leukemia from a 100 percent death sentence to the 90 percent survival rate it has today.

Not that long ago few in the medical community dared to take on cancer. In the 1960s, pediatric handbooks had little to offer about possible care and treatments. The Cancer Cowboys decided this was unacceptable.

Even though they were sometimes ostracized by their peers, these doctors developed modern-day chemotherapy practices and invented the blood centrifuge machine, helping thousands of children live longer lives. And despite being at hospitals scattered across the country – Buffalo, Memphis, Houston and Washington, D.C. – these doctors gathered every few months, often after-hours at each other’s homes, to discuss their latest clinical trials and findings.

“Of course, this was before cellphones and video conferencing,” says Dr. Donald Pinkel, who founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “So, it wasn’t easy. But we made sure we always knew where we stood with each other.”

The patients and their families benefited greatly from such efforts. My younger brother, Eric, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1966. Soon after he was admitted to Roswell Park in Buffalo, New York, my mother was told she was now part of his medical team. That this team extended from the doctors to the nurses to the families themselves. “I appreciated that we were all in it together,” she says. “That we needed to be to make any real progress.”

Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to write about many successful teams and organizations, including the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey squad, the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers. But none was as impressive as the Cancer Cowboys.

Today, many more hospitals and healthcare systems have joined the efforts to stand up to cancer in all its forms. Yet in touring the country in support of Cancer Crossings -my book that’s part family memoir, part medical narrative-, I wonder if today’s health-care community can be as united, as determined, and as accessible as the Cancer Cowboys once were. In the end, our hopes for another Cancer Moonshot may well depend upon it.

Click here to start reading Cancer Crossings FOR FREE, with our “Celebrate life” on #CCAM GIVEAWAY, and for the month of September only!

 

 

 

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Also of interest: Check out author Tim Wendel’s interview on our #1869podcast for more information on Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors, and the Quest for a Cure to Childhood Leukemia, and the story behind this wonderful book:

https://soundcloud.com/user-972332815/1869-episode-36-with-tim-wendel-author-of-cancer-crossings

 

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About the author of this blog post: Tim Wendel is the author of “Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors and the Quest to Cure Childhood Leukemia.” Part family memoir, part medical narrative, his latest work is a valuable voice in Cancer Awareness Month.

 

On this #ElectionDay, WOMEN WILL VOTE

Today’s the day. It’s Primary #ElectionDay in seven American states, and this election season, it seems that no one is willing to sit on the sidelines. Women will vote, and make sure their voices are heard. But as we all know, this wasn’t always the case.

In their book Women Will Vote, Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello explain how the 1917 referendum that marked women’s right to full suffrage in New York State was a turning point in history. The victory at the polls signified the coming together of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women. And, also, a victory for the male suffragists that supported it.

As Goodier and Pastorello point out, only when upper-class women convinced the majority of men to support them, did suffrage succeed. After all, at the time only men made political decisions, and only with men on board did women finally have the power, and the number of voters needed, to get the legislation passed.

Moreover, the authors argue that the popular nature of the women’s suffrage movement in New York State, and the resounding success of the referendum at the polls, relaunched suffrage as a national issue. If women had failed to gain the vote in New York, they claim, there is good reason to believe that the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment would have been delayed. Today many, if not most, political battles start at the state level; and the activism behind New York women’s victory in 1917 is clear proof that local efforts spur social change. As mentioned in our #1869 podcast celebrating the 2017 centenary of the referendum, we should remember that New York State was the tipping point in the national movement that finally gave women a political voice and vote.

Today #NYCvotes and polls will be open through 8:00 PM. Reflecting on the story of Women Will Vote let’s try to bring back the notion of coalition the women who fought for suffrage embodied, and remember that by coming together in spite of our differences we’ll be better citizens, ones able to focus on common goals, and to act for the common good of our society.

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Featured upcoming event:

“The Greatest Victory: Women Will Vote” presentation by Karen Pastorello, on Friday July 6^th, from 6pm to 7pm. More details here: https://thehistorycenter.net/calendar

About the author of this blog post: Adriana Ferreira is the Social Media Coordinator at Cornell University Press. She admires women like her grandmother Delia, doctor and poetry writer, who advocate and stand for women’s rights.

Won’t you celebrate with me? 31 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month

It’s National Poetry Month and the Academy of American Poets have come up with 30 different ways to celebrate it. The ideas are creative and include subscribing to a daily digital poetry series featuring more than 200 previously unpublished poems, chalking a poem on a sidewalk or memorizing one, and listening to Mark Doty’s talk, “Tide of Voices: Why Poetry Matters Now.” NPR has claimed that “you can bet we’re not letting April slip by without a nod to the art of the verse,” inviting listeners to submit a 140-character poem on Twitter together with the hashtag #NPRpoetry, and at Cornell University Press, we feel the same.

Our 1869 podcast interviewing author Susan Eisenberg on her latest book, Stanley’s Girl, a collection of touching poems about gender inclusion, sexual violence and women in the workplace, has inspired us to add one more idea to the list. And for that purpose, we have invited two women at the Press to contribute their own poetic visions of the world. The result is insightful and exciting, and together with our selection of fine poetry books, they make us part of what has become the largest poetry celebration in the world:

 

Baltimore, You Are a Pocket Full of Copper Nails

by Cheryl Quimba

A lot of the time I want to push people

into giant manholes then fly down

to save them, introduce myself as their

long-lost sister who has finally sold everything

to come home. They would be confused but then

so happy for having found something they didn’t know

was lost, and it would feel like a piano playing

beams of colored light against the wall.

In your poems I’m always sad and saying

sad things but in real life I say I am the mountain

sitting on this park bench, so small a microscope needs

binoculars to find me. Baltimore is filled with dirty bathrooms

but no one cares because fun is happening.

Where I live the places where

people die are marked with stuffed animals tied

to lamp posts. There is a store called Hair Strategies

and little kids push strollers filled with

cans of soda up and down the medians.

I like to cross the street like

I’m walking through a casino.

The bells are ringing and ringing

and ringing goodbye.

Quimba, Cheryl. (2015). Nobody Dancing. Publishing Genius Press

 

Meticulous Landscaping

by Ana Carpenter

Here in the passenger side lie Wendy’s bags crumpled by boots

The gentle pungent mulch compacts beneath each nail

Picking at the leather seats to stroke the tattered brail

And decode Dad’s lesson of the day like stringed stray roots:

The ones you mulched over the mornings of summer through July.

Disembarking the diesel F450 with silver smokestacks,

You’re mapping on your hands the clay-dried, thorn-bruised cracks

Wiping the Wendy’s grease on your sister’s off-brand “Nike” slacks

Step out into the cicada-thick air where, like Wendy’s, you fry.

You let the grass prick your bare calves and adjust in the sticky bed

Wiping soil across your forehead, swatting away flying things

And quietly recoiling from the grubs unearthed as dad sings,

Something he beat-boxed under his breath about marriage and rings-

Wash your hands in the cold hose-water until they turn Wendy-hair red.

 

Order Stanley’s Girl here

 

Other suggested media for our readers on #NationalPoetryMonth:

 

Cheryl Quimba is the Publicity Manager at CUP. She eats, sleeps, and breathes books (but loves a good movie or music debate any day). Follow her on Twitter @ cheryl_quimba.

Ana Carpenter is a member of the Cornell University Class of 2019 and Student Publishing Associate at Cornell University Press. In her free time she likes to sing, salsa, be in the company of dogs of all shapes and sizes, and collect mugs to home-brew cheap coffee.

 

Listening to People Talking About Books

Just under a year ago, we started the 1869 podcast. We’ve published 27 episodes so far and we’ve had modest but pleasing success in terms of listens and feedback. The most recent episode took on the cost of medicines in the wake of President Trump’s State of the Union Address and the two authors interviewed tagged Trump and Prime Minister Trudeau in their tweets about it. I would just love it if either one listened!

Of course, I knew we weren’t the only university press in the podcast world so I put a request out recently to see which other presses have taken the plunge and started using the ever-growing podcast trend to help market their books and their brand. Here’s what I have so far. If you know of more let me know.

Women’s Suffrage: The Centennial

Originally published by From the Square, the NYU Press blog. Reprinted with permission. 

2017 marks the centennial of women gaining the right to vote in New York. Did you know that our great state was a paramount player in the national movement for women’s suffrage? From Woodstock to Williamsburg, Seneca Falls to Chinatown, Buffalo to Battery Park, women in New York were leaders in the movement for sixty-nine years, until suffrage was legalized in 1917. In the city, the women who really changed the course of the cause were a group of elite socialites with names like Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt. In Gilded Suffragists Johanna Neuman brings these high class and high power ladies to life, illustrating how they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning the women’s right to vote into a fashionable cause. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, that led to the positive outcome of the 1917 referendum. In Women Will Vote they convincingly argue that the agitation and organization that led to New York women’s victory in 1917 changed the course of American history.

Patrice McMahon gives us the lowdown on NGOs on the latest episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast

In episode 14, Patrice McMahon, associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, talks about the role of NGOs in post-conflict peacebuilding. She gives us the history of NGOs as an international force, explains the role they played in the Balkans after the conflict there, and indicates how NGOs have had to professionalize and globalize since then in order to remain relevant.

You can subscribe to 1869 on iTunes and SoundCloud.

And, for easy access, here’s the full list of episodes so far:

Episode 1: Peter Conners talks Dead Heads and the 40^th anniversary of the (probably) greatest Grateful Dead concert ever
Episode 2: Glenn Altschuler looks at the history of Cornell University
Episode 3: Suzanne Gordon dives into the issues surrounding veterans’ health care
Episode 4: Gordon Lafer warns us about the power of corporate lobbying
Episode 5: Keith Bildstein waxes lyrical on the beauty of birds of prey
Episode 6: Rosemary Sekora discusses BookExpo and BookCon
Episode 7: Michael McGandy launches Three Hills, our new trade imprint
Episode 8: Jim Lance explains what he wants to acquire and why
Episode 9: Alan Bernstein goes to Hell (well, he gives us some context and history, anyway)
Episode 10: Greg Britton and Zach Gresham reveal what really happened at AAUP17
Episode 11: Sean Malloy breaks down the Black Panthers as an international force
Episode 12: Julia Azari provides the background on presidential mandates
Episode 13: Brandon Keim gets anthropomorphic on us
Episiode 14: Patrice McMahon shows how NGOs got to be so important

If there’s someone you’d like to listen to on an episode let us know by emailing Martyn Beeny or tweeting at the Press.

Learn more:
The NGO Game: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in the Balkans and Beyond
by Patrice C. McMahon
$24.95 paperback

Interview with Gordon Lafer

This week in “1869,” Cornell University Press Marketing Director Martyn Beeny interviews Gordon Lafer, author of The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time. Unbeknownst to most Americans, highly organized corporate lobbies have systematically infiltrated state legislatures to advance their agenda, which may or may not be aligned with the interests of the populace at large. Fully one quarter of U.S. state legislators are currently members of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and partner with corporate lobbyists to write state laws that affect policies regarding minimum wages, paid sick leave, gun laws, and other areas of concern to citizens.

Learn more:
The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time
by Gordon Lafer
$29.95 hardcover | ILR Press