New Books Network

The “rise” of the Tea Party has become one of the most exaggerated political stories in recent memory. The hullabaloo regarding the Tea Party reminds me of what a leading neo-conservative once said about the New Left, “What’s new isn’t new and what’s left isn’t left.” In other words, there isn’t much new about the Tea Party and their principles are not necessarily more conservative than orthodox Republicanism. Kevin Mattson’s new book, Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the ‘Rocking, Socking’ Election of 1952, (Bloomsbury, 2012) argues just that. According to Mattson, the infamous “Checkers Speech” established a rhetorical and political template for the New Right and today’s Tea Party. This book is funny, insightful and worth reading. Listen to the interview, buy the book, and tell a friend.

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy!

Joy Porter is the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011).  She has also written several other publications, including, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Land & Spirit in Native America (Praeger Press, 2012), and she co-edited a book with Kenneth M. Roemer, entitled The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005).  In her latest book, she carefully tells the fascinating story of an elusive subject that sparks many historical debates: the organizational history and inclusion of Native American freemasons in America.  She covers the broad chronology of freemasonry in general, from the British origins in the  sixteenth-century to freemasonry in America from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries. She explains how freemasonry is one of many institutions that exemplified the process of the transatlantic exchange of ideas from Europe to the Americas.  More specifically, she examines the Native American freemasonry from an interdisciplinary approach, such as using theories from performance studies and socio-psychological ideas of associationalism.  Furthermore, she examines Native American freemasonry from the lense of understanding the idea of “ornamentalism” (a concept borrowed from Edward Said’s work, Orientalism) to evoke the historical and racial perceptions of Native Americans from the colonial era, and how some of these ideas shifted over time.  Listen in.

Deborah R. Coen’s new book chronicles how the earthquake emerged and receded as a scientific object through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Half of the chapters in The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of Chicago Press, 2012) treat local experiments in planetary science in Scotland, Switzerland, imperial Austria, and California, all places that relied on networks of ordinary citizens in the course of developing modern seismology. The other chapters look at the international circulation of the stories of earthquake witnesses as evidence for an emerging global science of disaster. Coen’s book is both carefully argued and full of surprises. We learn of Kant producing what was essentially the first work of modern seismology. We learn of a geologist who studied both global tectonics and the ways that some neighborhood drinking-water supplies came from the drainage of cemeteries. We learn of the connection between evidence for earthquakes and ghosts in Britain. (I learned that my hometown of Closter, NJ was the site of an important earthquake observation in the nineteenth century.) The Earthquake Observers excavates a multilingual documentary archive that spans newspapers, seismographs, cartoons, philosophical tracts, romantic letters, and much more. It’s a fascinating multi-sited study of the changing nature of material and human instruments through which communities have understood modern disasters, and it is well worth reading.

Andra Gillespie is the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (NYU Press, 2012). She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University and earned her Ph.D. from Yale University. Her new book focuses on the rise of one of the most well-known mayors in the country, Cory Booker. Gillespie tracks Booker’s rise through the complex politics of the city of Newark, NJ. As one of the few US cities with a history of African American mayors, Booker’s story is unique, but also illustrative. By challenging long-time Mayor Sharpe James, Booker — a newcomer to the city — confronted a deep and protective political establishment. The strategies Booker used, some effective, others less so, help Gillespie explain a larger phenomenon of the “post-racial America”. The book’s clear and personal writing make this an engaging read for political scientists and those interested in urban politics.

Historian Stephen Hall passionately engages in the history of nineteenth-century African American intellectual life in his first monograph, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). This work traces the long nineteenth-century and how black historical writers evoked various themes at different moments, including ancient African history, biblical history, the paradox of American slavery, and challenges to black citizenship during the Reconstruction era.  He unearths of a plethora of black historical sources in the nineteenth century in various forms, including speeches, sermons, newspapers, and literary texts,  which each serve as precursors to the black historical writing of the twentieth century.  His work reveals the complexities of African American intellectual history, and would be a great inclusion for undergraduate or graduate course, or for a general audience of readers who would be interested in learning more about the important history he illuminates. Listen in.

Kevin Gray Carr’s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shōtoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) frames Shōtoku as a symbolic vessel. Part I of the book looks at the changing identities of the prince as objects of devotion and veneration, tracing his visual cult through the fourteenth century. In this context, the figure of Shōtoku, across multiple lives and associations with other religious figures, grounded a new sacred topography whose center had shifted away from India and China and toward the spaces of Japan. Part II of the book focuses on the visual culture that mapped the various identities of the prince onto the Japanese sacral landscape. It guides readers through the experience of the paintings in the Hōryū-ji Picture Hall and places them within a wider cultic landscape. Carr introduces the notion of “cognitive maps” that integrated the elements of time, space, and personhood into the many renderings of Shōtoku’s life that were simultaneously cartographic, narrative, and iconic. In addition to this fine-grained and innovative analysis of the time and space of visual materials, Carr also shows readers the centrality of stories and storytelling in helping us make sense of the world around us, and of our own place in it.

Audra Wolfe’s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science during the Cold War. Wolfe pulls together a rich and disparate literature to provide a thematic, chronological and accessible story about the distinctive ways that Americans wove science and government together for the five decades after WWII. Beyond the familiar story of physics, Wolfe shows not only how science prospered under federal patronage but how the federal government itself came to depend on science as it tried to deal with the problems it faced around the world and at home. The nature of American science, and the promise of american modernity, was put on display in works and institutions as varied modernization theory and the Apollo missions. Wolfe has written a delightful little book offering the historical state of the art for those interested in thinking about the characteristic relationships forged between science and the state during the Cold War and their lasting consequences.

Most people who listen to this podcast will have heard of Joseph McCarthy and HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities). His activities and those of HUAC were, however, only the tip of a very large iceberg. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government conducted something like a “purge” of federal employees with leftist pasts. Thousands of federal workers were invested and hundreds (at least) were terminated. In The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton UP, 2012), Landon Storrs tells this untold (and very disturbing) story. Listen in.

R.S. Belcher‘s first book, Six-Gun Tarot (Tor, 2013), has receive widespread praise in the online reviewing community. It tells the fantasy-western-horror story of a Nevada town, called Golgotha, that is home to an unusual assortment of men and women, spirits and angels, and Lovecraftian waiting to unleash havoc upon the world. Throughout the book, Belcher retains a light touch, but also manages to explore the nature of coexistence among different ethnicities, faiths, and ways of life. On top of this, he juggles the points of view of a wide variety of characters. You should give it a try.

In Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity Press, 2012), Nick Couldry provides a sweeping synthesis of his important media theory over the last decade. Couldry reassesses his work on media rituals, media power, and the “hidden injuries” of representation in light of cross-cultural diversity as well as the sudden eruption of social media. The book argues convincingly that these theories remain relevant to a social media age, in a rich, chapter-by-chapter engagement with contemporary social theory. Couldry makes a cogent case for a “practice approach” to media studies that treats a wide range of social activity—and not just production or consumption—as media-related and worthy of study. The book is concerned with big themes—social order, justice and power—but also furnishes a toolkit of mid-range theories that deserve to be applied, and wrestled with, in empirical research. Media, Society, World provides a nuanced verdict on the prospects of digital democracy, advances a de-territorialized notion of “media cultures,” and furnishes a theory of media power through a highly original rethinking of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. The concluding chapter asks readers to engage with a literature—and a set of questions—that media scholars rarely address: media justice in the context of moral and political philosophy. The book is a major statement from the leading media theorist working today.

In Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy (Viking Press, 2013), John Wood presents this big idea: you can change the world if want to. The nice thing about John’s book is that he doesn’t tell you the “theory” of world-changing (though he does discuss “social entrepreneurship”), he tells you how he did using his own experience. John saw that a lot of people around the world couldn’t read and created an organization to teach them. This involved building a dedicated team, fund-raising, finding out what his clients–illiterate, impoverished children–wanted, and giving it to them in a flexible way. John’s “Room to Read” has built thousands of libraries around the world and taught hundred of thousands of children to read. That’s something.

Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media’s breathless claims notwithstanding. Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made (Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within — but not necessarily of – the polity that surrounded them.

There is a long-standing debate in epistemology between internalists and externalists about justification.  Internalists think that a belief is justified in virtue of certain facts internal to the believer.  Externalists deny this; they hold that facts of some other kind must obtain in order for a belief to be justified.  In his new book, Justification and the Truth-Connection (Cambridge 2012), Clayton Littlejohn defends a novel version of externalism, one which holds that a belief must be true in order to be justified.  The cover of the book features an intriguing photograph by Sigurdur Gudmundsson that nicely captures Littlejohn’s view: In order to meet our epistemic obligations, we must fit ourselves, including our internal belief-forming and deliberative processes as well as our actions, to the world around us.  This view, Littlejohn contends, retains the virtues of justificatory externalism while also providing a compelling account of the concerns regarding epistemic normativity and responsibility that often lie at the core of internalist views of justification.  Littlejohn’s book hence is a work of contemporary epistemology that engages deeply with a range of concerns in value theory.

In the classic 1973 film The Sting, Robert Redford and Paul Newman lead a team of con men in an elaborate scam to take revenge on a dangerous crime boss and a corrupt cop.  The final play takes place in a high-stakes poolroom, an illegal parlor for the wealthy to bet on horse races, set up with a tapped Western Union wire connection to the tracks.  Just after the crime boss loses his money, a half million dollars, FBI agents storm the poolroom and hustle off the crooked cop and the unsuspecting mark.  But the feds are in on the scam as well, and the whole poolroom is phony.  The film ends with the supporting cast taking down the scene of the sting, while Redford and Newman walk off into the city. As we learn from Steven Riess’ book, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime: Horse Racing, Politics, and Organized Crime in New York, 1865-1913 (Syracuse University Press, 2011), the setting of The Sting was common feature in America’s big cities from the late 19th century onward.  Bookies, crime bosses, cops on the take, fixers tapping into the wire links to the tracks, and men with money looking for the thrill of a bet: they were all found in the poolrooms, places not for billiards but for betting.  All that was missing from the film were the politicians.  Steve explains that horse racing in America was a web of sport and entertainment, new and old money, political bosses and crime kingpins.  Racing exists for gambling.  It is a sport of the wealthy, those with money to own horses and bet on them.  But in order for the races to run, these rich men needed political connections for the tracks to be built and operate as spaces of legal betting.  From President Andrew Jackson to the Tammany Hall political machine that dominated the city and state governments in New York, elected officials were willing to work with the owners of tracks and horses.  In fact, the owners of tracks and horses were often elected officials themselves. But there were other politicians—do-gooders and reformers—who sought to shut down the tracks and especially the poolrooms.  Meanwhile, wherever bets were placed, there were shady people lurking in the background, looking to skim a few dollars.  All of these characters are found in the history of New York racing, and Steve’s book presents them in a revealing picture of big-city money, power, and sport.