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Review: Ades, The Dada Reader

August 15, 2006
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Review: Ades, The Dada Reader

In the August 11 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education columnist Richard Byrne takes note of the recent “flurry of scholarly work” that “has opened up new vistas in the history of Dada.” Byrne reviews several new contributions to the subject including The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology. An excerpt from Byrne’s review follows: Expanding Dada’s reach and placing it in a wider context is the aim of another new collection, The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Dawn Ades, a professor of art history and theory at the University of Essex, The Dada Reader pulls together the key excerpts from the explosion of Dada journals between 1916 and 1924. Not only does the new anthology present dozens of texts that have never been available in English, but it also brings in journals far from Dada’s traditional loci in Switzerland, Germany, France, and the United States—including ones from the Netherlands and Yugoslavia. The revolutionary Dada movement, though short-lived, produced a vast amount of creative work in both art and literature during the years that followed World War I. Rejecting all social and artistic conventions, Dadaists went to the extremes of provocative behavior, creating anti-art pieces that ridiculed and . . .

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Review: Timmermans, Postmortem

August 12, 2006
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Review: Timmermans, Postmortem

Stefan Timmermans’s Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths recently underwent something of a medical examination itself. The August 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association features a review commending Timmermans, a professor of sociology, for his “perceptive, insightful, and revealing view of the profession.” A quote follows: Sociologists rigorously scrutinize as outsiders professions that they study and, consequently, are often received as excessively critical and naive. This is certainly true of medical sociologists. I noted that many of my colleagues viewed this work with skepticism and concern. However, Timmermans asks hard and penetrating questions that the forensic pathology community needs to be asking itself and that others are already asking in court and in budget committees. Timmermans speaks to professional and cultural components of a “forensic authority” for investigations of suspicious deaths, which derives from a societal need for “death-brokering,” from a legal mandate to investigate suspicious deaths, and from scientific expertise. In so doing, he does not merely describe the work of forensic pathologists or interesting cases but instead probes the foundations of forensic pathology practices. … Postmortem is a wake-up call to forensic pathology, and every practitioner should read it. The book should be . . .

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Review: Fields, Classic Rough News

August 12, 2006
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Review: Fields, Classic Rough News

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Review: Lewis, Cracking Up

August 9, 2006
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Review: Lewis, Cracking Up

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Review: Brown, Richard Hofstadter

August 7, 2006
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Review: Brown, Richard Hofstadter

Sam Tanenhaus has written a detailed four page review of David S. Brown’s Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography which ran in both the August 4 edition of the International Herald Tribune as well as the New York Times Book Review of August 6. Tanenhuas calls Brown’s work “intelligent and stimulating” citing Brown’s ability to “admirably balance his respect for his subject with a critical distance,” that allows Brown to achieve an unparalleled degree of authenticity in his account of the legacy of one of liberalism’s most celebrated and respected intellectuals. The author of The American Political Tradition and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Richard Hofstadter was one of the most important historians of twentieth-century America. His championing of the liberal politics that came out of the New Deal, his fierce opposition to McCarthyism and then the acolytes of Barry Goldwater, and the many ideas that he introduced to our nation’s political conversation shaped not only the way we think of the historian’s role in civic life, but steered the direction of American politics as well. David S. Brown’s Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography explores Hofstadter’s remarkable life story in the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. . . .

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Review: Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics

August 4, 2006
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Review: Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics

The economy is ubiquitous in modern life. From the choice of what type of automobile we drive, to where we live, and which books we read, the economy influences nearly every decision we make. Yet, despite its importance to our daily lives, economists have often struggled to define the organizing principles behind its unpredictable behavior. In a recent review in the Times Literary Supplement David Thorsby praises Margaret Schabas’s The Natural Origins of Economics for its detailed look at the historical struggle to gain an intellectual perspective on the economy. A quote from the review: Although early economic thinkers drew much inspiration from nature…the concept of the economy as an autonomous entity did not start to take shape until the first half of the nineteenth century. The transformation mirrored a transformation that was occuring in the political economy itself, from an intellectual discourse deriving its inspiration from the natural sciences to one oriented towards the behavior of individuals, in which nature was relegated to the sidelines. Margaret Schabas’s fascinating book, The Natural Origins of Economics, charts the progress of this transformation, beginning not with Bacon and Descartes but with the origins of formal economics in the moral philosophy of the . . .

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Review: Castronova, Synthetic Worlds

August 3, 2006
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Review: Castronova, Synthetic Worlds

If you’re reading this then you’re probably already aware of how much digital technology has insinuated itself into our daily routines. But just how much could we, or should we, devote to our online lives? The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal recently ran a review of two books about the increasing popularity of “virtual realities” including our own Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds: Mr. Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds argues that virtual reality is a thriving place with millions of inhabitants world-wide. And it bears close watching… Synthetic Worlds explains the trend, obvious to anyone who has dipped into the online subculture over time, that virtual worlds are populated differently now than they used to be: they began as the province of nerds and outcasts but are now approaching the mainstream—as reflected in recent media reports and the increasing share of quotes in such coverage drawn from the housewife and married-dad demographics. Read an interview with the author, or check out his blog. . . .

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Review: Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool

August 1, 2006
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Review: Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool

The July 28, 2006, issue of Financial Times ran a review of John Gennari’s Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics in which resident jazz critic Mike Hobart doesn’t hesitate to rain praise on Gennari’s latest work: This is a book about jazz in which the music is in the background, for John Gennari’s main concern is a critique of jazz criticism from the 1930’s to the present. Densley researched, broadly partisan and compiled with a wry sense of humor, Blowin’ Hot and Cool still manages to reveal much about jazz, and more about the lives of its musicians than many recent hagiographies.… His account opens in the 1930’s, with two patrician figures of great infulence: John Hammond and his English acolyte, Leonard Feather. Negotiating a racially segregated world of thrill seekers, jitterbugs, and the communist party’s popular fronts, they fought for racial integration and jazz as an art, yet fell out over the authenticity of modern jazz. In the process they discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, recorded Bessie Smith, and persuaded Benny Goodman to drop schmaltz. Our excerpt from the first chapter talks more about Feather and Hammond. Gennari also outlined a soundtrack for the book. . . .

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Review: Ebert, Awake in the Dark

July 31, 2006
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Review: Ebert, Awake in the Dark

Roger Ebert’s forthcoming book Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert; Forty years of Reviews, Essays, and Interviews, details almost a half century’s worth of cinematic expertise from a man the Library Journal calls one of American cinema’s “most respected and influential movie critics.” More from the LJ review: The book clearly summarizes Ebert’s pantheon of best films, or at least movies that have meant the most to him. Also included are appreciations and interviews with notable actors and filmmakers. Always alert to trends and defending film as an art form, Ebert never fails to connect with his readers. With Awake in the Dark, both fans and film buffs can finally bask in the best of Ebert’s work. No critic alive has reviewed more movies than Roger Ebert, and yet his essential writings have never been collected in a single volume—until now. The reviews, interviews, and essays collected here present a picture of this indispensable critic’s numerous contributions to the cinema and cinephilia. . . .

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Review: Smith, Reading Leo Strauss

July 31, 2006
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Review: Smith, Reading Leo Strauss

In the July 21, 2006, issue of the New York weekly Forward, Allan Nadler finds Steven B. Smith’s Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism a “book rich with delightful details” about Strauss’s life and thought; details which, Nadler argues, complicate the intensifying perception of Strauss as a figurehead for “a particularly nasty version of neoconservatism.” A short quote from Nadler’s review follows: A professor of political science at Yale and the author two previous books on Spinoza, Smith focuses on what Strauss called the “theologico-politico problem”—that is to say, the centuries-old unresolved conflict between the dictates of human reason and the doctrines of divine revelation.…In demonstrating the complexity of Strauss’s thinking, Smith succeeds admirably in rescuing the philosopher from what he calls “the hostile takeover” of the neoconservatives, particularly by disociating himself from President Bush’s simplistic view of the world. As such, this clear and lucid presentation represents an important corrective to the contemporary distortion of Strauss’s legacy—and not a minute too soon. We also have an excerpt from Smith’s book. . . .

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