U. of Virginia Press
The afterlives of animals; a museum menagerie.
This collection of thirteen articles on famous animals in natural history examines the relevance of particular animals, often taxidermied and residing in some of the world's great collections, on the broader narrative of natural history and humans' relationships with other animals through the ages. The contributors, representing a variety of fields from biology to fine art and journalism, examine subjects such as Balto the Dog and Queen Charlotte's zebra to discuss the enduring legacies of these specimens and the diverse meanings of animal icons in history. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
At home with apartheid; the hidden landscapes of domestic service in Johannesburg.
Ginsburg (landscape architecture, U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), who lived in Johannesburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, saw black women employed as domestic workers everywhere in suburban neighborhoods. In this ethnographic study, she presents an interview-based picture of the realities of life under apartheid policies for these domestics. Reminiscent of the popular book and film The Help about black domestics in the US South, the book includes photographs of the back rooms in which they lived to provide services "invisibly" in their white employers' homes. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Belzoni; the giant archaeologists love to hate.
"Here is a story of naiveté, ambition, duplicity, avarice, and poverty...." So states Noël (former director, Colonial Williamsburg's archaeological research program) in his prologue. Belzoni (1778-1824) was, indeed, physically a giant; he also was a giant in terms of his impact on the Egyptian collections at the British Museum. This study explores his life and work as an artifact hunter, the context of his activities, and his fall from grace. The volume is attractively designed and includes numerous plates. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Caribbean literature and the public sphere; from the plantation to the postcolonial.
Drawing on Jürgen Haberman's theory of the "public sphere" as a framework for a literary/cultural history of the Caribbean, Dalleo (English, Florida Atlantic U.) points out the challenges of a unified narrative for a region formerly ruled by the Spanish, French, and British. He discusses correspondences in how representative writers responded to, and shaped, the literary public sphere across the region in three periods: the decline of plantation slavery and rise of abolitionist discourse (e.g., Afro-Cuban Juan Francisco Manzano), modern colonization and anti-colonization (Cuban poet/revolutionary Jose Martí), and decolonization and postcolonalism/postmodernism (the West Indian literary renaissance). (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Chesapeake; the aerial photography of Cameron Davidson.
Cameron Davidson is a Virginia-based photographer with diverse interests, and one of them is being up in the air in a plane with his camera pointed downward. His photos of the Chesapeake Bay Area are presented full-page in a horizontal format (12.5x9.5 inches). Complementing the arresting visual presentation is text by David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post, who writes about local and national environmental issues. The combination of text and aerial photos invites a vivid appreciation of the landscape — what's there and what's at risk. The volume is distributed by the University of Virginia Press. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Community-based collaboration; bridging socio-ecological research and practice.
The authors writing in this book provide answers to a primary question that seems to come up whenever place-based movements that focus on environmental issues are being considered: Do such movements have any real value? While environmental issues certainly aren't the only cores around which community-based groups coalesce, they appear to be among the most common. The authors do not recommend a yardstick or strategy for determining when a community-based collaborative approach is the right one, but examine why people seem to want more collaboration to deal with environmental issues, the movement's social and political drivers, whether the processes are useful and effective, and more. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Disaster writing; the cultural politics of catastrophe in Latin America.
Anderson (Latin American literature and culture, the U. of Georgia) draws on ideas such as social marginalization, political and cultural geography, and the social construction of risk to analyze the political implications of the response to four natural disasters in Latin America from 1930 through the present. An introduction addresses general theoretical issues of the conceptual relationship between nature and disaster, how disaster is defined through narrative, and why disaster narratives have powerful political implications. Separate chapters are devoted to four natural disasters and responses: Cyclone San Zenón of 1930 and Trujillo's rewriting of the Dominican Republic; drought and the literary constructions of risk in northeastern Brazil; explosive nationalism and the disastered subject in Central American literature on volcanic eruptions; and the politics of the narration of Mexico's 1985 earthquake. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Early modern Virginia; reconsidering the Old Dominion.
This collection of ten essays on the early modern history of Virginia showcases the work of young historians and highlights new directions in research, challenging and building on the popular canon of works on the era and the region. Papers address a wide range of topics including settler-Indian relationships, the waxing and waning of individual colonial powers, origins of Virginia slavery, economics, and community building in the Chesapeake region. Contributors include historians from a variety of US universities. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Ecocritical theory; new European approaches.
Scholars of English and comparative literature and philosophy draw on traditions of thinking about nature and culture, and about the role of literature and the arts in shaping this thinking, that arose in European Romanticism, but focus primarily on thinkers of the 20th century as they explore European dimensions of a school of thought that began in the US. They cover memory and politics; culture, society, and anthropology; phenomenology; ethics and otherness; and models from physics and biology. Among the topics are avant-garde nostalgia and hedonist renewal, the social theory of Norbert Elias and the question of the nonhuman world, Merleau-Ponty's ecophenomenology, the ecological Irigaray, and cybernetics and social systems theory. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Frank Batten; the untold story of the founder of the Weather Channel.
In 1983, only a year after Frank Batten launched the Weather Channel (an idea that was deemed "preposterous" by his colleagues, it was on the brink of being shut down. Instead, it became a billion dollar success and cultural icon. This book is about his contributions to the media world, his ethical and philanthropic practices, and about his own personal challenges. As a young child, Batten knew first-hand what dangers being unprepared for weather changes could pose. It was this experience, and his inheritance of a family newspaper business that eventually led to the concept of 24 hours per day weather. In the interim, Batten's business prowess made him one of the 400 richest men in America. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
High Rock and The Greenbelt; the making of New York City's largest park.
Mitchell (1932-2007) was science editor for Newsweek and environmental editor of National Geographic. His 1976 environmental classic, High Rock: A Natural and Unnatural History was instrumental in the preservation of the High Rock natural area on Staten Island, which was the first step in connecting 2,800 acres of natural areas to create the Staten Island Greenbelt. Part 1 of this work presents the original 1976 book, including the original edition's b&w illustrations by Staten Islander Marbury Brown. Part 2 reviews the current status of High Rock and the Staten Island Greenbelt and presents a moderated discussion between park administrators, government officials, academics, and citizen conservationists, edited from a September 2008 meeting. There is also a directory describing Greenbelt nature centers, trail systems, museums, and other resources. Part 2 also includes contemporary color photos of the park by Dorothy Reilly, a member of the Staten Island Greenbelt Foundation. There is no subject index. Editor Little is an environmental writer. The book is distributed in the US by the University of Virginia Press. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Liberal epic; the Victorian practice of history from Gibbon to Churchill.
The war histories of Winston Churchill, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, were heroic histories in the tradition of the liberal epic that extends back through Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England (1846-61), Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), and Alexander Pope's commentary-translation of Homer's Iliad. So argues Adams (English, Washington and Lee U.), who further seeks to show where Churchill shared the distinctive features of all liberal epics; apologetic strategies for justifying wars as worthy exceptions to a general rule and concerted efforts to limit or sanitize the public's access to graphic representations of soldiers' acts of violence and domination (although in places Churchill departs from these features). Another goal of Adams is to rescue the genre of the liberal epic from what he describes as critical neglect. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The limits of optimism; Thomas Jefferson's dualistic enlightenment.
This investigation of the philosophy and writings of Thomas Jefferson provides an in-depth analysis of the enlightenment foundations of his political thought. The work seeks to dispel popular impressions of contradictions in the statesman's belief system by exploring key principles, such as his enlightenment stance that worked against undue optimism and hubris, and his historical knowledge that political experiments failed as often as succeeded, to present a view of Jefferson as a pragmatic statesman who understood the value of dialectic growth and the ability to shift positions as experience dictated. Valsania is a professor of history at the University of Torino, Italy. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
On endings; American postmodern fiction and the Cold War.
How did the way we think of time change during the Cold War, when mutually assured destruction by nuclear bombardment brought into question like never before, the possibility of the future, and specifically how did writers register this in narrative experimentation? These are the central questions of Grausam's (English, Washington U.) historicist study of temporality in, and the very specific influence of, nuclear weapons on postmodern fiction during the Cold War. In taking time as such a relevant category in postmodern fiction, he departs from Fredric Jameson's influential formulation of the postmodern as "a present unable to think of itself historically," while casting doubt on Einstein's suggestion that "the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking." His subjects include the writing of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, David Foster Wallace, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo and Richard Powers. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Postcolonial Francophone autobiographies; from Africa to the Antilles.
Using reception theory as an analytical framework, Sankara (French and Francophone studies, U. of Delaware) contributes to the rather unexplored field of comparative Francophone studies, juxtaposing works of literature from two colonized areas as they relate to the same colonizer. He considers autobiographies by Valentin Mudimbé from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Amadou Hampâté Bâ from Mali, Kesso Bary from Guinea, Patrick Chamoisear and Raphaël Confiant from Martinique, and Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The reason of the gift.
This collection of four essays derived from a lecture series held at the University of Virginia in 2008, provides students of philosophy and the history of philosophy with a valuable look at the recent work of the important French philosopher Jen-Luc Marion. A former student of Derrida, Marion explores the idea of givenness through discussions of the work of Levinas, Heidegger and the phenomenological lens. The volume is translated from the French by Stephen E. Lewis, a professor of English at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Salomé; a tragedy in one act.
Oscar Wilde's 1893 play Salomé, the only one of his works to be written in French, was subsequently translated into English by Wilde's friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, in a manner judged by Wilde to be marred by "schoolboy faults" and published accompanied by illustrations that sensationalized and mischaracterized the play, yet this translation has long remained the basis for English-language productions of the play, which perhaps not coincidentally has enjoyed far greater popularity in the non-English speaking world. Donohue (emeritus, English, U. of Massachusetts Amherst) seeks to redress this situation by translating Salomé into contemporary American colloquial ("yet spare") English. The new translation is also accompanied by new engraving illustrations by Moser (art, Smith College). (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Shaken wisdom; irony and meaning in postcolonial African fiction.
Nne Onyeoziri (U. of British Columbia) addresses the historical and cultural contexts behind the uses of irony in fiction by African authors. While the work of many African writers is surveyed, the book focuses on six works by authors Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Calixthe Beyala. The author's approach is based on pragmatics, which is a branch of linguistics that accounts for what utterances mean when they are used in actual situations. She demonstrates that irony is a common but little understood feature of African expression. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Talking shop; the language of craft in an age of consumption.
Betjemann (English, Oregon State U.) offers a many-faceted investigation of 19th- and early 20th-century discourse on the subject of craft (rather than labor). His study encompasses early roots in western civilization (Benvenuto Cellini), and in American culture (Nathaniel Hawthorne), as well as manifestations in literature, advertising, and design trends (e.g. Gustav Stickley). The subject has ramifications that will interest a wide audience — anyone who deals with art, design, or marketing and consciously or unconsciously taps into language that is deeply embedded in the culture pertaining to quality, originality, authenticity, integrity — and stuff. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Thomas Jefferson, the classical world, and early America.
This collection of essays is an investigation into Thomas Jefferson's writings and his position on using classical philosophies and teachings of the ancient world as a model for modern policies. Jefferson's classical education included fluency in Latin and Greek, which he advocated for as a core of American education; however, his contradictory opinion was that the ancient world should not be used to address contemporary issues. In papers presented at a conference at the American Academy in Rome in October 2008, these scholars offer competing views that fail to reach a consensus as they discuss the importance of classical antiquity in the founding of America. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Xu Bing; Tobacco Project, Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999-2011.
In the exhibitions of the Tobacco Project Duke 2000, the Tobacco Project Shanghai 2004, and the Tobacco Project Virginia 2011 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Chinese artist Xu Bing explored the history, materials, behavior, and signs and symbols of tobacco through his creations of art objects made of cigarettes, tobacco leaves, cigarette boxes, advertisements, and other tobacco and cigarette ephemera. Some examples include whole tobacco leaves printed with text, compressed blocks of dried tobacco embossed with cigarette slogans, and a tiger-print rug made of cigarettes. In addition to color photos of installations and art objects on every page, the book includes essays on the project and its context, the artist's life and career, the steps of the artist's research and production processes, and the role of Colonial Virginia in the global tobacco trade 1612-1776. The book also provides a timeline of the project and an artist's biography. Ravenal is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The book is distributed in the US by the University of Virginia Press. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
