New Books Network

The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains.  For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams, while other foreign cricketers were withdrawn by their national boards at various points in the tournament for service in international matches.  Political and ethnic tensions in the state of Tamil Nadu required a change in host cities, from Chennai to Delhi, for playoff matches.  After a dispute over franchise fees and three unsuccessful campaigns on the field, the franchise in Pune folded at the season’s end.  And most significantly, the playoff rounds took place under the cloud of a spot-fixing scandal, as three players for the Rajasthan Royals and eleven bookies were arrested in Delhi in May.  Following upon previous scandals, the fixing arrests brought another blow to the IPL’s integrity.  Observers point to the flood of cash that has overwhelmed Indian cricket in such a short time, rendering franchise owners, administrators, and players unable to withstand its force.  The question arises, as the IPL aspires to build a structure that will tower alongside the world’s other great sports brands, will it manage to establish solid footings? Plenty of cricket fans take a good measure of satisfaction in watching the IPL’s problems.  In its short life, the league has upended the game from its time-honored traditions.  Samir Chopra is among those who lament some of the changes that the IPL and T20 have brought to the sport.  But he also recognizes that the Indian Premier League offers a model that can potentially improve cricket.  A philosopher at Brooklyn College and a regular contributor to ESPN Cricinfo, Samir is alert to the profound identity crisis in which world cricket finds itself.  He plumbs various aspects of this current turmoil in his thoughtful and eloquent book Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket (HarperCollins, 2012).  But rather than denouncing the IPL and all its vulgar wealth as the cause of the crisis, he points to a franchise-based form of international cricket, with players treated as professionals rather than servants indentured to national boards, as something that can potentially benefit all forms of the game.

Shannon Gleeson is the author of Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston (Cornell University Press, 2012). Dr. Gleeson is assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. San Jose, CA and Houston, TX are two of the country’s largest gateways for immigrants, and these cases used to explain how immigration policy is implemented at the local level. Gleeson unearths the varied ways political institutions and civic actors accommodate the large number of newcomers and enact worker rights laws. While deeply rooted in theories from sociology, the book’s success in mapping the political players and local politics makes it an important read for political scientists, particularly those interested in interest groups and civil society. Gleeson also draws in the role foreign consulates increasingly play in protecting the rights of migrants.

It is fair to say that philosophy of mind and the sciences of the mind quite generally adhere to an information-processing model of cognition. A standard version holds that there are events going on in the brain that represent the world, and that familiar psychological terms are used to refer to these events. In Rules, Reasons and Self-Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2012), Julia Tanney, Reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Kent, mounts a sustained attack on this dominant view. Taking her cue from Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tanney argues that reasons for action are not content-bearing mental states, and being rational is not learning certain rules. Instead, mental state ascriptions, in particular those of propositional attitudes, have the function of encapsulating or “marking” sense-making patterns of thoughts, actions, and sayings that are learned through acculturation. Understanding the mind starts from the perspective of reasons-explanations, which invoke these sense-making patterns: to ascribe a mental state to others and ourselves is to indicate a particular pattern, not refer to an event in the brain.

You sometimes see bumper stickers that say “What would Jesus do?”  It’s a good question, at least for Christians. You don’t see bumper stickers that say “What would Washington do?”  But that, Logan Beirne says, is a question Americans should be asking. In Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency (Encounter Books, 2013), Beirne shows that the American presidency was born as much out of the personality of one man–George Washington–as it was out of the political philosophies of the founding fathers. After all, the framers had never seen a presidency before–almost all previous states were led by monarchs, and that was not an option for the new American Republic. So they looked at Washington, what he had done during the Revolutionary War, and modeled the presidency after him. Not surprisingly since Washington was a military man, they got a presidency that was, well, rather martial. Listen in and find out why.

When we think of the stuff that dreams are made on, we might think of the spirits that Shakespeare’s Prospero conjures up in “The Tempest”; we might think of stars, rainbows, maybe even wishing wells, but what probably doesn’t leap to mind is a loaf of Wonder Bread. And yet, ever since the invention of the mass-manufactured loaf of white bread in the 1920s, that spongy tasteless loaf has been a way in which Americans have defined themselves and one another. In his new book, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Beacon Press, 2012), Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us how that familiar slice of white bread is much more than a food. It’s a symbol, one that in its nearly hundred-year-old existence has come to represent “the apex of modern progress and the specter of physical decay, the promise of a better future to come and America’s fall from small-town agrarian virtue.” The history Bobrow-Strain tells us ranges from the immigrant bakeries of turn-of-the-century America to the Cold War to the rise of yuppie and “locavore” eating habits. It’s a history, as he writes, “of the countless social reformers, food experts, industry executives, government officials, diet gurus, and ordinary eaters who have thought that getting Americans to eat the right bread (or avoid the wrong bread) could save the world—or at least restore the country’s moral, physical, and social fabric.

I’m Al Emid and I’m back here on New Books Network after a long absence. I had a good excuse though – I was finishing up the book entitled Investing in Frontier Markets, to be released this Fall by John Wiley & Sons and co-authored with Gavin Graham. Barring unforeseen circumstances I will be back here regularly with reviews of timely books in the investing and business categories, which I’ve covered for years as a journalist. And in the business news category, firings, layoffs and forced resignations have occurred frequently for the past five years. Anyone who has recently lost what seemed like a secure job can be forgiven for wondering where he or she went wrong – but in many cases the fault did not lay with the terminated employee. And we can understand how any individual who has fulltime employment might wonder how long that will last. In the past year, blue-chip employers have terminated thousands of employees: 2400 at Dow Chemical, 5400 at American Express, over 4300 at Bank America and even 4000 at Google. The list goes on: United Technologies, Thomson Reuters, Proctor & Gamble and others. And declining revenues don’t always explain the layoffs. In late May ESPN confirmed plans to lay off 400 employees despite an increase in operating income of 8%. ESPN had not had any layoffs since 2009. And we know that positions in the executive suite have become equally uncertain. So in the face of all of this how does one survive? Suzen Fromstein offers some clues in her book Suits and Ladders: Ten Proven Ways to Keep Your Job Safe (Carrick Publishing, 2013) and it contains what she describes as universal survival strategies. Her book is on Amazon Kindle in ebook and paperback versions. Suzen fesses up and says that her own failure to keep her job inspired her book.

I like to think of Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh’s new book as Downton Abbey: Shanghai Edition. It is that gripping, and will keep you turning the pages that eagerly. At the same time, The Lius of Shanghai (Harvard University Press, 2013) is also an important, innovative, and timely intervention into the historiography of families, institutions, and the politics of modern China. The book is a family history of an exceptionally prominent (and exceptionally fascinating) business family in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Emerging from a cache of letters written between the late 1920s and early 1950s and held at the Center for Research on Chinese Business History in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the project ultimately expanded to incorporate an archive of roughly 2,000 family letters that chronicle the relationships, educations, careers, romantic and political entanglements, and physical and emotional health of all of the members (literate and not) of this large and growing family. Sherm and I talked about the arc of the story in the context of the broader political transformations of modern China, his own narrative choices in structuring the book, and the larger significance of the book for reshaping the way we think about power relationships and the history of Chinese families. It is a wonderfully gripping and masterfully written model of the historian’s craft, and I hope you enjoy the conversation and the book as much as I did!

What can be gained from another biography of Abraham Lincoln? A lot, it turns out. Michael Burlingame has been researching the life and times of Abraham Lincoln during his entire career as a historian. As he explains in this interview, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Paperback; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is based on decades of archival research, much of it stemming from the observations of personal secretaries, journalists, colleagues, and other people who knew Abraham Lincoln personally. Burlingame does not hesitate to make bold assessments about Lincoln’s personality, his relationship with his wife and father, and his evolution as a war leader.  Those interpretations, combined with new source materials and a highly readable style, will make this new biography the definitive one for Lincoln studies for years to come.

James Longenbach‘s The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2013) is not interested in the vices or failures found in some poems, so his concerns are not necessarily moral ones, but instead, as the title of the book suggests, he is interested in understanding what makes a particular poem (and poet for that matter) flourish, and therefore what makes a reader flourish. And it is this relationship – the one between reader and poem – that James Longenbach’s book honors through his ingenuity of reading poetry through the framework of virtues, such as boldness, compression, dilation, excess, restraint, and shyness to name just a few he identifies, and he unearths these virtues by focusing on a poem’s prosody and diction and syntax and even the poet’s life – apprehended through letters – as well. The Virtues of Poetry is a joyous book of criticism, written by a poet and critic who does not seek to reprimand poems – which is usually the result of someone mired in taste – but to identify why certain poems can be considered achievements and also to celebrate the paradoxical nature of poetry itself – that poems, no matter when they are written, embody the impulse to clarify the world, while also wrestling with the world’s unsettling mysteries. During our chat, we discuss how poetry found him, the creative similarities between writing poetry and prose, and of course, the virtues of poetry and so much more. I hope you enjoy our discussion as much as I did.

“Paula Huston wrote literary fiction for more than twenty years before shifting her focus to spirituality. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Daughters of Song (Random House, 1995), which the Baltimore Sun called “far and away the best book yet” about life in the classical piano world at Peabody Conservatory. Nominated for the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco’s Gold Medal for Best First Novel, it was also chosen by the Christian Science Monitor for its first “Novelist’s Debut” review and selected by the Music Book Society and Performing Arts Book Club. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary quarterlies, including American Short Fiction, North American Review, Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Story, MSS, and Image, and were twice selected for the Best American Short Stories list.” I had the pleasure of interviewing Huston for over an hour about her new book A Season of Mystery: 10 Spiritual Practices for Embracing a Happier Second Half of Life (Loyola Press, 2012). We discussed the importance of purpose vs. the never-ending search for happiness, the importance of spiritual practices for deepening into the second half of life, and what monastics have to teach us about living a fulfilling life. Huston’s words are filled with gratitude and hope. You’ll fund Huston’s honesty and humility to be very touching and very inspiring.

Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has been, albeit perhaps implicitly, a theory of masculinity. Freud’s Oedipus Complex, for example, charts the development of masculine identity in the boy while leaving the girl’s pathway to femininity less fully explicated. And let yourself recall that Freud’s immortal question was not “what do men want” was it? Nevertheless, according to Donald Moss, contemporary psychoanalysis has many glaring blind spots when it comes to thinking about men. Part of what Moss addresses in this interview is the experience of being a male analyst looking at and listening to men. He argues that this kind of male-male analytic pairing has ended up somehow sidelined and so remains under-thought and under-theorized by analysts. His book is an attempt to open an apparently tightly shut if not hidden door, (think “The Cask of Amontillado”) in the hopes of both shedding light and broadening our conceptual frameworks for thinking about manhood, masculinity and maleness. Moss draws our attention to some uniquely masculine dilemmas, He argues that on the road to manhood, the boy must pass through the feminizing process of identification. In a sense he is enlarging the popular idea put forth by Greenson, Stoller and Chodorow, each separately, that boys must peel away an initial feminine identification with their mothers in order to become men. Moss argues that to become a man, a man needs a man. “We ‘know’ we are ‘men’,” writes Moss, “when we ‘know’ we are, in some way, fashioning ourselves in the likeness of a predecessor.” This need for a predecessor demands that the boy be receptive and open to the influence of the man he most wishes to resemble.  Thus the process of being masculinized demands the boy assume a feminine position. Moss asks us to consider then the impact of internalized homophobia on all men. He wonders if, under the influence of homophobia, many boys defensively turn away from the men they need? And how does this turn away impact the development of a masculine identity? When considering these and other questions, Moss identifies a certain vexatiousness seemingly at the heart of manhood. Somehow, as well, masculinity is often enough a source of disappointment. We hope it will be an incredible resource, a fount of strength, protectiveness and security yet, given our expectations, it often falls far short. Moss argues that, at some level, we had best get comfortable with that chasm. Following Lacan’s dictate to never give up on your desire, Moss suggests that we see masculinity as a site of aspiration. But we had also best keep in mind that masculinity can take on elements of a Riviereian masquerade, and by doing so, it reveals its feminine aspect once again.  Repeatedly in this interview, Moss deftly points out the plethora of paradoxes surrounding masculinity, and in so doing, invites the listener to rethink “common sense” notions of manhood and maleness.  Of course, it takes a certain kind of man to expose his own weaknesses–and listening to Moss, the strength and fortitude it takes to do so make for compelling listening–and so with his displays of candor and vulnerability, Moss returns us again to the paradoxical nature of masculinity.

It’s tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round after round of bloody internecine strife. For better or worse, as Patrick Hanks makes clear in Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (MIT Press, 2013), this is no longer true: lexicographers must respond to theoretical and practical pressures from lexical semantics, and this lexicographer has very interesting things to say about that discipline too. Hanks’s central point is perhaps that the development of huge electronic corpora poses enormous problems, as well as exciting challenges, for the study of word meaning. It’s no longer tenable to list every sense of a word that is in common currency: and even if we could, it would be a pointless exercise, as the vast output of such an exercise would tell us very little about what meaning is intended on a given instance of usage. However, these corpora provide us with the opportunity to say a great deal about the way in which words are typically used: and the theory that Hanks develops in this book represents an attempt to make that notion precise. In this interview, we discuss the impact of corpus-driven work on linguistics in general and lexical semantics in particular, and discuss the analogy between definitions and prototypes. In doing so, we find for Wittgenstein over Leibniz, and tentatively for ‘lumpers’ over ‘splitters’, but rule that both parties are at fault in the battle between Construction Grammar and traditional generative syntax.

Cari Lee Skogberg Eastman is the author of Shaping the Immigration Debate: Contending Civil Societies on the US-Mexico Border (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2013). Eastman earned her doctoral degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This timely new book explores the border region of southern Arizona. Eastman provides an overview of the policy history of immigration in the US as a way to introduce the complexity of border policy and border politics. In particular, she writes about three civic organizations: Humane Borders, No More Deaths, and Minutemen Civil Defense Corps. Each has a different view of what US policy should be and they compete to attract attention to the region and address this problem. Eastman takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject that combines varied data collection and analysis. The book has a potentially wide audience, including scholars in political science, communications, and sociology, particularly those who study immigration, social movements, and policy.

Nature or nurture? Inborn or learned? Genetic or extra-genetic? Humans are so complicated that in many cases we can’t really know what is “in us” from the beginning and what is “acquired” as we learn. And even when we find something that is “in us,” we can often find a way to modulate or mask it. Given all this, sometimes the best–and certainly most convincing–evidence that some trait is inborn rather than acquired is simple, honest testimony. Such is the case, I think, with homosexuality. In Jonathan Rauch‘s remarkable and moving memoir Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul (The Atlantic Books, 2013) the author explores exactly what it was like to deny his own sexual orientation for over two decades. Actually, “deny” is not really the right word, at least for what Rauch did in his early years. To “deny” is to realize the possibility of something and reject it. For much of his early life, Rauch never even entertained the idea he was gay, so he couldn’t very well deny it. It just wasn’t possible. He thought he was just weird. But as he matured, it did dawn on him that maybe, just maybe, he might be gay. Not surprisingly given the prejudice against homosexuality at the time he was growing up, the very possibility frightened him. He did not want to be gay. Who would want to be gay? Why would you put yourself through that? So he denied it. Until there came a time when he met kind, loving people who told him that he really should and could be who he was. They would help him. And they did. Jonathan Rauch then became  what he had never really been–Jonathan Rauch.

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the state). That makes a lot of sense.