PUP News of the World, February 14, 2014

NewsOfTheWorld_Banner

Each week we post a round-up of some of our most exciting national and international PUP book coverage. Reviews, interviews, events, articles–this is the spot for coverage of all things “PUP books” that took place in the last week. Enjoy!


With George Washington’s birthday approaching, it seems fitting that we start off this week with a look at good ol’ G.W. We depend on George Washington every day — on the front of the dollar, of course. For PUP author Eswar Prasad, it is all about the dollar. The U.S. dollar’s dominance seems under threat. The near collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008-2009, political paralysis that has blocked effective policymaking, and emerging competitors such as the Chinese renminbi have heightened speculation about the dollar’s looming displacement as the main reserve currency. Yet, as The Dollar Trap powerfully argues, the financial crisis, a dysfunctional international monetary system, and U.S. policies have paradoxically strengthened the dollar’s importance. This week, the New York Times ran a review of The Dollar Trap in the Sunday Business section. Want to preview the book? You can view the preface and Chapter One. Professor Prasad is also included in this week’s edition of BBC World Service Business Matters.

World News
Has the mindless skimming of your Facebook and Instagram feeds gotten you down? We have the perfect, stimulating read for you to begin this weekend. Bernard Williams was one of the most important philosophers of the last fifty years, but he was also a distinguished critic and essayist with an elegant style and a rare ability to communicate complex ideas to a wide public. Essays and Reviews is the first collection of Williams’s popular essays and reviews, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. In these pieces, Williams writes about a broad range of subjects, from philosophy and political philosophy to religion, science, the humanities, economics, socialism, feminism, and pornography.

The Shanghai Daily‘s Wan Lixin reviewed Essays and Reviews, saying of the book:

[A] stimulating read for anyone who cares about the condition of the world. With characteristic clarity, insight, and humor, the author tackles a wide range of topics as diverse as philosophy, religion, science, the humanities, and pornography.


“Start spreading the news…” We reading today. We know you’d like to be a part of it — our new book on old New York. We’re channeling our inner Sinatra as we present our next book in this week’s News of the World: The New York Nobody Knows.

As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called “Last Stop.” They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs–an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book.

Professor Helmreich wrote an op-ed for the Daily News this week. The piece, entitled “I was on your block; here’s what I learned,” addresses what he sees as the “often underappreciated norm” of New York City’s tolerance for differences. He writes:

How is it, I wondered, that immigrants from more than 100 countries speaking more than 170 languages can coexist in relative peace and harmony, while European cities like Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam have far greater difficulty integrating their racial, ethnic and religious groups?

Wonder what he has discovered about the Big Apple? Read Helmreich’s conclusions in the full Daily News article. You can read Chapter One here and tweet your thoughts to us using #NYNobodyKnows.

 

World News 2-14 b

 

In Princeton, our fingers are crossed for an end to the cold and a start to spring. With the return to the outdoors on our minds, we present one of our new titles, Ten Thousand BirdsThis new book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny & Bob Montgomerie provides a thoroughly engaging and authoritative history of modern ornithology, tracing how the study of birds has been shaped by a succession of visionary and often-controversial personalities, and by the unique social and scientific contexts in which these extraordinary individuals worked. The New Scientist has published a review of Ten Thousand Birds. Adrian Barnett calls the book “lovingly well-researched and beautifully written..” as well as “..definitive, absorbing and highly recommended.” You can preview this beautifully illustrated book here.

 


Looking for your weekly political science fix? We have a book for you. Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In The Confidence Trap, a wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Check out the reviews of The Confidence Trap in the the Sydney Morning Herald and the Tablet. John Keane, of the Sydney Morning Herald, writes that “Runciman is a good writer and brave pioneer….The picture he sketches is agreeably bold.” The Tablet‘s Chris Patten states that the book is ‘..excellent and interesting..’ as well as  ‘…admirable and very well written…’ Want to read more? You can view the introduction here.

 


If you have been following our News of the World series, then you are familiar with Angela Stent, a former officer on the National Intelligence Council and the author of The Limits of Partnership. This new book offers a riveting narrative on U.S.-Russian relations since the Soviet collapse and on the challenges ahead. It reflects the unique perspective of an insider who is also recognized as a leading expert on this troubled relationship.

 

New this week, Professor Stent sits down with PBS Newshour and the Economist to discuss her views of the tense relationship between the U.S. and Russia as well as her personal interactions with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Check out these two videos:

 

:

 

 
http://blog.press.princeton.edu/tag/birkhead/
blog.press.princeton.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-35
93810
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TRRPARMDTAUAXXTF3LQO7KMCHSREH75W
<urn:uuid:df7b7792-d341-4631-893c-6ae8fd9f065f>
2014-08-22T03:57:01Z
128.112.156.163
sha1:E23KBMW43CS6HPM2LPDFGL2F5BJRCG64
<urn:uuid:b9f98d07-6c4c-4465-9cac-0f5050e4cf5a>
http://blog.press.princeton.edu/tag/birkhead/
length
response
<urn:uuid:c759bcbd-2c05-48ea-850f-cc87b69d9e2e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for August 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf