New Books Network

A problem with doing linguistics is that once you start, it’s kind of inescapable – you see it everywhere. At some point a few months back, I was watching a DVD of a comedy series and came to the conclusion that its distinctiveness was all about the way in which expectations about dialogue act type were generated and violated. Then I came to the conclusion that I was watching comedy too hard and had to give up for the day and go and do some work instead. However, despite the dangers, comedy is a very useful tool in explaining linguistics, as this engaging book makes clear. In Understanding Language Through Humor (Cambridge UP, 2011), Stanley Dubinsky and Chris Holcomb draw upon a rich set of examples, acquired over many years’ diligent study, that illuminate every level of organisation from phonetics up to discourse structure, as well as covering some topics that cut across these boundaries (acquisition, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and the nature of communication in general). But as well as being systematic, it’s also very relatable – it tends to underscore the idea that, for all the complicated terminology, linguistics is essentially the study of something we all do and of capabilities that we all have. In this interview, we talk about how the book came to be written, and how it can be and is being used. We see how the nature of humour changes as we go through the levels of linguistic organisation; and we explore how personal experience informs our language awareness.

S. Laurel Weldon is Professor of Political Science, Purdue University, and Director of the Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion. She is the author of When Protest Makes Policy: How Social Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups (University of Michigan Press, 2011). The book provides a theoretical and empirical case for the relationship between women’s movements and social change. In a manner similar to Clifford Bob’s work on the Global Right Wing, Weldon’s expands the conversation about social movements to the international arena. She weaves together both cross-national and 50-state data to argue for ways to think about social movements that move beyond narrow studies of interest groups. The dot-connecting effort to bridge her strong theoretical arguments with these data, make the book a major contribution to the field of public policy. Weldon’s incorporation of social movement literature also is a contribution to political science literature, which has tended to shy away from engaging deeply in social movements.

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can’t be explained scientifically, and others have argued that it will always remain a mystery. But most consider some sort of explanation in physical, specifically neural, terms to be possible. In The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), Jesse J. Prinz — Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center — synthesizes scientific data and hypothesis with philosophical theory and insight to argue for the AIR theory of consciousness. On his view, consciousness is Attention to Intermediate-level Representations, attention is availability to working memory, and availability to working memory is realized by synchronized neural activity in the gamma frequency range. In this deftly written book, Prinz also provides novel arguments against competitor theories, argues against the idea that there is a phenomenal self, and proposes a mind-body metaphysics that draws on insights from both non-reductive and reductive physicalism.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Math] You may well have seen “Numb3rs,” a TV show in which mathematicians help solve crimes. It’s fiction. But, as Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez show in their eye-opening new book Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Court Room (Basic Books, 2013) math does play a role in criminal prosecution.  Alas, it’s often bad math and, as such, often leads to bad outcomes: people get off who shouldn’t and others get convicted who shouldn’t. Schneps and Colmez show how math has been misused in ten interesting (and disturbing) cases. In some instances the errors are trivial; in others rather complex. But they all add up (excuse the pun) to injustice. Listen in and find out how and why.

The Spanish Civil War is one of those events that I have always felt I should know more about. Thanks to Stanley Payne’s concise, lucid new work on the subject, I feel less that way. I do not exaggerate when I say that Payne, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, is the nation’s foremost expert on Spanish history and on historical fascism in general. That expertise shines in this book and really comes to the fore in this interview. Published by Cambridge University Press as part of its Essential Histories series, Payne’s work synthesizes a lifetime of study in Spain, laying out the origins of the civil war in Spain’s deeply fractured political culture, and tracing the international and military developments that led to Francisco Franco’s eventual triumph in 1939. As Payne points out, the Spanish Civil War has been mythologized for political purposes since the day it began, much to the detriment of our understanding of the real story. The details of how and why the war began, how it was fought, and what was at stake have too-often been lost in a public effort to assign blame or capture the war’s legacy for political purposes. Payne revels in debunking some of these myths while carefully balancing conflicting arguments and accounts. Enjoy.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] Is there an “American Empire?” A lot of people on the Left say “yes.” Actually, a lot of people on the Right say “yes” too. But Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman says “no.” In her stimulating new treatment of the history of American foreign policy American Umpire (Harvard UP, 2013), Hoffman lays out the case that America have never been an “empire” in any real sense. Rather, she says America has been and (for better or worse) still is an “umpire,” making calls according to an evolving set of rules about what makes a legitimate state. She points out that not all of the calls have been good ones–Vietnam and Iraq II being the most obvious examples. Nonetheless, America has long served the world as a kind of fair broker. Whether America should continue in this role is, as she says, an open question. Listen in.

Many people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high school student murders several of his classmates, it’s going to be “all over the news.” But it’s hard to blame the press, exclusively at least. Joy Wiltenburg‘s Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany (University of Virginia Press, 2012) suggests (to me at least), that those who criticize the press for sensationalism have cause and effect reversed: the press doesn’t cause demand for sensational stories, the people who buy the press do. When the “press” first emerged in the sixteenth century, “demand” for “if it bleeds, it leads” style reporting seems to have been already quite developed. There’s just something emotionally compelling about a man who chops up his family. The early modern Germans wanted to read about and so do we. Joy explains why.

In Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Duke University Press, 2011), Vicki Mayer provides a major theoretical contribution to media production studies. The book self-consciously challenges the idea of the “TV producer” that industry figures and scholars alike often assume. Mayer traces how the “TV producer” category came to be associated with—indeed defined by—creativity and professionalism. Below the Line upends this definition, through four empirical case studies of largely invisible television production: (1) television set assemblers in Brazil, (2) soft-core video cameramen in New Orleans, (3) reality TV casters, and (4) local cable television citizen regulators. The book weaves a theoretical thread through these ethnographic portraits that are themselves framed by political economic analysis of the industry and the broader economy. What once seemed stable—the idea that TV producers are above-the-line creative professionals—lies in elegantly written tatters by the book’s conclusion.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Who is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released records with a number of different labels over the next twenty-six years, and finally received a paltry $100,000 from a law suit she filed against Motown in the late eighties. Whatever the case, Benjaminson shows well how Mary Wells star still shines bright. Her songs are known by most everyone, they are ingrained in the American popular psyche. Peter Benjaminson is the author of The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, The Story of Motown, and co-author of Investigative Reporting. He has written numerous articles for the Detroit Free Press and Atlanta Journal-Constitution among others.

If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead This is the unifying idea of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, 2013) Those six words – If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead – appear on the back cover, on the inside jacket, and in the very first paragraph of the book’s introduction. The authors focus on the new currencies of media, including user engagement and the rapid flow of information, while debunking the terms we’ve all learned to know and dread, such as “viral” and “Web 2.0.” Jenkins, Ford, and Green set an ambitious agenda, targeting not one but three audiences: media scholars, communication professionals, and those who create and share media and are interested in learning how media are changing because of it. “Perhaps the most impactful aspect of a spreadable media environment,” the authors write, “is the way in which we all now play a vital role in the sharing of media texts.”

Every time I fly into Chicago at night, I’m amazed by the grid I see out of the portal: those hundreds of thousands of almost identical lots, 25 by 125 feet, that are made visible by the city’s 250,000-odd street lights, block after block, all sprawling westward out of the darkness of Lake Michigan like a dream of Euclidian order. I’m amazed because it’s so unnatural, so not the way we make sense of the places where we live our everyday lives. The grid is the living image of an abstract ideal: that a place can be quantified, cut up, understood, and settled. The truth is very different, especially in a city like Chicago. Places are wild. Their pasts rear up and reveal themselves; their foundations give way. In all their layered complexity, contradiction, and intractability, places are about as quantifiable as people, a fact Barrie Jean Borich makes explicit in her new book, Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Borich sets out to map not only the city of Chicago and the other places she and her family have lived, but also to discover the hidden geographies in her own skin—the personal and collective histories, the experiences and desires, that make her who she is. The result is a book that’s insightful, lyrically beautiful, and uncompromising in its search for a self as rich as the cities in which she lives.

There are some books that are so fundamental to work in an academic field that practitioners refer to them simply by the author’s last name. Many of us had respectfully and affectionately referred to Endymion Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged (2000) simply as “Wilkinson” (or, “The Yellow Book,” as opposed to an earlier blue-covered version of the text), and have had well-worn and dog-eared copies of it on hand at all times. I purchased my own copy shortly after beginning my doctoral program, and immediately understood why the encyclopedic guide to research in Chinese history had been so formative and so indispensible for so many people. It was in every way an essential text for anyone studying or practicing the history of China. The recent publication of Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A New Manual (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) was and remains a major event. The manual quickly sold out (within a month of its publication!), and Wilkinson has already submitted revisions for a second printing. Chinese History: A New Manual is in many ways an entirely new organism that is quite different from its predecessors. It incorporates a million new words of text and substantially new material on everything from Chinese archaeology to environmental history. Its seventy-six chapters range from the basics of the Chinese language to the nuances of historical bibliography, incorporating detailed accounts of topics that are fundamental to understanding China and its culture (geography, literature, food and drink, etc.), as well as chronologically-organized research guides to individual periods of Chinese history. Scattered throughout the text are insets on a wide range of material, from nonverbal salutations to the mariner’s compass, that together comprise a wonderful kind of miscellany. The book is, in every way, absolutely indispensible to work in Chinese history. In the course of our conversation, we talked about many aspects of the genesis of and research strategies that produced Wilkinson’s project. We also talked about the present state and possible futures of Chinese history, and the qualities that might make a work into a lasting contribution to that field. Enjoy!

Arend Lijphart is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the American Political Science Association. In this interview, we discuss his book Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (Yale University Press, 2012), now in a newly updated edition. The book is an empirical study of power-concentration and power-sharing in 36 democracies around the world during the period 1945 to 2010. Professor Lijphart finds strong correlations between institutional arrangements, such as a country’s electoral system, and quantifiable aspects of democratic quality, including political and economic equality, governmental accountability, rates of incarceration, and gender equality. Patterns of Democracy has been called “controversial,” “magnificent,” and “the best-researched book on democracies in the world today.”

[Cross-posted from New Books in Terrorism and Organized Crime] The violence in Mexico is receiving a lot of media attention internationally. Paul Rexton Kan has produced a book that provides us with a comprehensive and comprehendible introduction to the background to the conflict and its effects. Cartels at War: Mexico’s Drug-Fueled Violence and the Threat to US National Security (Potomac Books, 2012) is a relatively short book packed with detailed information. The book covers the nature of the drug war, the cartels involved, the national and international responses and the effects of this war on the local and international communities. But this is not just a descriptive work. Kan provides us with his recommendations for solutions and predictions about the future of the conflict. In particular, he draws comparisons between treating this as an insurgency and spells out how a counter-terrorist response would not be the correct way to deal with the issue. This is high intensity crime and requires a high intensity policing response. Overall the book is an excellent introduction to the very complex drug war in Mexico, as well as being a source of practical and realistic policy options for addressing a conflict this large.

Anyuan was a town of coal miners. It was a place where local secret societies held power, where rebellion and violence were part of the life of local laborers, and where the Chinese Communist revolution was experienced especially early and particularly intensely. In her meticulously researched and elegantly narrated new book, Elizabeth J. Perry explores the significance of Anyuan both as a cornerstone of Mao’s revolutionary mobilization efforts, and as an emblem that was appropriated and re-appropriated by different groups with different agendas after Mao’s death. Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (University of California Press, 2012) carefully traces how Communist leaders deployed a range of cultural tropes and resources in the service of political persuasion. As a result of a sustained and successful effort at cultural positioning in Anyuan via the visual, verbal, ritual, and performance arts, Communist leaders like the charismatic Li Lisan and the disciplined Liu Shaoqi translated the social resources and labor infrastructure of China’s “Little Moscow” into an engine of revolution. Perry takes readers into the classrooms, textbooks, and discussion groups that helped make this possible. She also chronicles the changing significance of Anyuan in the context of the transformation of the Chinese Communist revolution from a proletarian to a peasant movement, exploring the very different roles that militarization and violence played in this new revolutionary environment, and the later role of Anyuan as an emblem variously wielded by authors, painters, filmmakers, and others who constructed very different versions of a revolutionary tradition. It is a book well worth reading, both as a window into a crucial period and space of Chinese history and as a model of careful narrative argument.