Strothman Agency Clients in the News

Kathryn Miles, author of ADVENTURES WITH ARI, featured on WCSH 6

2009-05-05T14:32:00.003-04:00

Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM reviewed in the Boston Globe

2009-04-28T13:08:00.002-04:00

Three score and 10 years ago, a concert emancipated a dream

By Saul Austerlitz
April 26, 2009; Boston Globe

"The crowd condenses. It's standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky." The date is April 9, 1939, the setting is the Lincoln Memorial, and the assembled audience is gathered prayerfully to hear Marian Anderson sing. Delia Dailey, proud scion of a "Talented Tenth" family, is about to meet the love of her life, physicist and German Jewish émigré David Strom. Black and white, African and European, intersect and commingle, and the dream of a race-blind, mulatto future is, if only for a brief hour, attained.

Delia and David are only figments of the imagination of novelist Richard Powers in his masterful 2003 work, "The Time of Our Singing," but his choice of Anderson's concert as heady symbol of racial integration is deliberate, and in its own way perfect. The story of how Anderson ended up on the steps of the memorial, performing before a crowd of tens of thousands that included her most prominent champion, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, is a tangle of the miraculous and the enervating and is well told, if overly padded, by Raymond Arsenault in "The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America."

It all began with little thought for posterity. Anderson - acclaimed by conductor Arturo Toscanini as "a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years" - was planning an American tour, after a triumphant European season. Washington, D.C., an important concert stop both for its status as the nation's capital and because of its large African-American community, was the largest city in the country without a municipal auditorium. In fact, the only venue of any size was Constitution Hall, owned and run by the Daughters of the American Revolution, a conservative women's organization.

The DAR flatly refused to book the black artist to play their whites-only hall. "No date will ever be available for Marian Anderson in Constitution Hall," her manager Sol Hurok was informed. The hideous irony of a group devoted to the ideals of the American Revolution turning an African-American performer away from a venue named after the document that guarantees freedom and equality to all was not lost on anyone. "I don't know what Constitution Hall will be used for that night," the Washington Post acidly observed. "Probably for a lecture on how everybody is free and equal in the United States."

For the full review, click here.

Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM featured in The New Republic

2009-04-28T13:01:00.004-04:00

April 26, 2009; The New Republic

The Civil Rights Struggle Was Not So Long

I am not doctor tout va bienovich. But a review in Sunday's Globe of The Sounds of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America by Raymond Arsenault makes a tonic historical point. I know that many of our young readers (and some of our middle-aged readers, too) don't know who Marian Anderson was. She was an ear-riveting gospel singer and truly amazing operatic soprano (permitted on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera only near the beginning of her decline) who in 1939 was denied the rental of Constitution Hall which was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Oh, yes, before I forget, Anderson was a Negro when "negro" was an advance on colored.

The D.A.R. was not, as we always knew, committed to the ultimate principles of our revolution but to the narrow and confining habits of racial disdain. In any case, Franklin D. Roosevelt heard about this travesty--or perhaps it was Eleanor--and offered Anderson's impresario, Sol Hurok, the Lincoln Memorial as a venue for the singer's concert.

It is seventy years now since Marian Anderson sang to a mixed crowd on the Washington Mall. Close to that anniversary, the American people marked the first hundred days of Barack Obama's presidency which, of course, was inaugurated on that very mall. History crawls slowly, and its achievements never come fast enough. But, on reflection and even accounting for the bravery and pain experienced in the civil rights struggle, the journey to the end, which is also the journey to the beginning, was not so long.

Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING reviewed in Inkweaver

2009-04-28T12:52:00.002-04:00

Posted by NathanKP
April 2, 2009

“Snow Falling in Spring,” is a historical biography by Moying Li, about her life growing up during the tumultuous Chinese Cultural Revolution. Moying Li begins her book with a description of her innocent childhood before the Cultural Revolution, playing in the courtyard of her family home with her friends and the family pets. Then she describes the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and its first manifestation in her childhood world: a large furnace for producing iron and steel. This furnace was erected in the courtyard where she liked to play.

During the Cultural Revolution the Chinese government announced that China could catch up to Western countries in one Great Leap Forward, if every citizen worked hard to increase the output of goods, food, etc. The Chinese eagerly embraced this bold plan. Moying Li describes how her initial apprehension about the steel furnace turned into wholehearted approval. She even went to the kitchen to pull out pots and pans to melt in the furnace. Despite the energy and enthusiasm put into the furnace project, though, the result is failure:

In the courtyard, Da Jiu and our neighbors sat on the woodpile, their heads bowed like those of defeated soldiers. The fire in the furnace had died, leaving a lingering smell of burned wood.

“What happened, Da Jiu?”

“The iron and steel we made was not good enough.” He sighed. I stared at him in disbelief. “We simply did not know enough to make it right,” he added.

Now I was sad, too. Climbing up the woodpile to sit next to him, I leaned my head against his shoulder, as crestfallen as he and our neighbors.

“But we tried so hard.”

“Yes,” he said. “We did.”

The failure of the furnace sets the tone for much of the rest of “Snow Falling in Spring.” Although the Cultural Revolution had grand goals, carrying out the plans was more difficult than it seemed and often had unanticipated results. For example, Moying Li mentions another government plan: to eliminate the sparrow. The idea was that this small bird ate seeds and crops, so by killing off the species in China food production would be boosted. Although the war against sparrows was highly successful and millions were killed, the next year saw crop failure as insects that would have normally been kept in check by the sparrows ravaged the fields.

Perhaps the most memorable statement in “Snow Falling in Spring” is found at the beginning of the fourth chapter.

Most people cannot remember when their childhood ended. I, on the other hand, have a crystal clear memory of the moment. It happened one night, in the summer of 1966, when my elementary school headmaster hanged himself.

Moying Li starts by describing her early days in school. She paints a vivid picture of caring, fun loving, teachers and interesting assignments that kept her busy and happy. But the atmosphere in Moying Li's school changed when the Red Guard movement began to gain momentum. Basically the Red Guard was a vast student group that developed as a backlash movement in response to Western ideology being taught in Chinese schools. The Red Guard felt that much of the instruction in Chinese schools was really propaganda designed to corrupt Eastern minds and turn young students away from Communism, toward Democracy. Whether this was the case or not, the Red Guard made it their job to expose school officials that they felt were not showing enough support for the Communist government.

Moying Li does an excellent job of showing the steps that led the Red Guard from watchdog status to full fledged militant terrorism. Then she shows how Red Guard violence touched people progressively closer to her, first her favorite teachers, then the school headmaster, and finally her own family.

For the full article, click here.

Robin Abrahams, author of the forthcoming MIND OVER MANNERS, featured on the Today Show

2009-04-28T11:53:00.006-04:00

Robin Abrahams, author of the forthcoming Mind Over Manners, was featured on the Today Show to discuss unemployment etiquette.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Walter Lewin, author of the forthcoming FOR THE LOVE OF PHYSICS, featured in Time

2009-04-21T12:41:00.003-04:00

College Too Expensive? Try YouTube

By AP/JAKE COYLE
April 9, 2009; Time

In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT OpenCourseWare with the plan to make virtually all the school's courses available for free online.

As a visitor, one almost feels like you've somehow sneaked through a firewall. There's no registration and within a minute, you can be watching Prof. Walter Lewin demonstrate the physics of a pendulum by being one himself. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Last December, MIT announced that OCW had been visited by more than 50 million people worldwide. But why would institutions that charges a huge price for admission give away their primary product?

Ben Hubbard, program manager of the webcast project for the University of California, Berkeley, believes it has always been a part of a university's vocation. "The mission of the university has been the same since our charter days back in the 1800s," said Hubbard. "It's threefold: there's teaching, research and community service. Probably in the 1800s they weren't thinking of it as the globe, but technology has really broken down those barriers of geography."

In 1995, Berkeley launched its webcasts with video and audio webcasts of classes.

In 2007, Apple created iTunes U, a service that allows schools to make material accessible only internally by students or externally by anyone. Most schools do a little of both.

To read the full article, click here.

Ramin Ganeshram, author of the forthcoming CURRY CHRONICLES, featured in Forbes

2009-04-21T12:32:00.002-04:00

Trinidad: The America Of The Caribbean

With a three-year economic lag behind the U.S., Trinidad should be preparing for the worst.

By Ramin Ganeshram
April 20, 2009; Forbes

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad -- When I was a child visiting my father's country of Trinidad, where progress, it was often said, was roughly about 20 years behind the States, I could see this was true. By 1980, we had two color television sets in our home in New York, but the small 12-inch black and white TV my father brought to his family in Chaguanas was the only one on the block. The cases upon cases of beer and soda he bought to stock the kitchen when we visited were a wonder of excess to the neighbors, and our American clothes and shoes were a source of endless fascination to the local kids. Except for Coca Cola, Pepsi and some Nestle products, there were few American conveniences to be had at the local supermarket, which was little more than what would be called a corner shop in New York.

By the 1990s, progress had leaped to being just 10 years behind the States. My father's village had become a bustling metropolitan area in its own right. American jeans, T-shirts and sneakers jammed shops vying for space with locally made Panama suits and East Indian clothes. Major American health and beauty companies peddled their locally branded lotions and cosmetics on the shelves of the local chemist shops. Bootlegged CDs sold on the street featuring both American pop music and as-yet-unreleased soca and calypso tracks.

When I was there in 2005, the gap had reduced to five years. Malls had popped up around the country, mostly featuring Trinidadian versions of American products. "Bling" abounded: cellphones, baggy pants and thick gold chains on young men; girls with belly shirts and cleavage, a far cry from the socially conservative society I knew, influenced by Hindu, Muslim and conservative Christian mores, carnival-time being the only exception.

To read the full article, click here.

Deborah Cramer, author of SMITHSONIAN OCEAN, to speak at Newburyport Literary Festival

2009-04-21T12:19:00.002-04:00

Deborah Cramer will speak at the Newburyport Literary Festival on April 25th, in Newburyport, Mass.

In addition to Cramer, on the roster for this year's festival are literary luminaries from every genre. To name just a few, this includes Anita Shreve, Julia Alverez, Elinor Lipman, Richard Bausch, Peter Orner, Lewis Turco, Anne Easter Smith, David Crouse, Junot Diaz, and Andre Dubus III.

To get more information about the festival, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE selected as BookBrowse's Editors Choice

2009-04-21T12:07:00.002-04:00

Featured Book for April 18th

Passing Strange, by Martha A. Sandweiss

Passing Strange was featured on BookBrowse's homepage as the "Editor's Choice" book for three days, until April 18th.

BookBrowse is currently serving about 1.5 million page views to 360,000 unique visitors each month.

To learn more about the author, read an excerpt or a review, click here.

Raymond Arsenault, author of THE SOUND OF FREEDOM, featured in Associated Press Article

2009-04-17T15:47:00.003-04:00

Concert pays tribute to Marian Anderson

By Natasha T. Metzler, Associated Press Writer
April 13, 2009; AP

More than 2,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for a concert honoring the 70th anniversary of Marian Anderson's historic performance there in 1939.

Because of the color of her skin, Anderson was denied the opportunity to perform at nearby Constitution Hall and local high school. So, instead, the opera singer sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in April 1939 to a 75,000-person crowd of blacks and whites standing together.

In the Sunday afternoon sunshine, African-American opera star Denyce Graves performed three of the same songs Anderson sang 70 years ago: "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)," "O, Mio Fernando" and "Ave Maria."

Wearing one of Anderson's old dresses, Graves called her predecessor "one of my greatest heroes."

"It is the honor of my life and my career to be celebrating this day of freedom with you," she told the audience.

She joked that when she looked over Anderson's performance list and saw "O, Mio Fernando" she thought "my God she sang that song; that's really hard."

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell recited excerpts from President Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address. Afterward he remarked on Lincoln's famous call to heal the nation's wounds after the Civil War, "with malice toward none, with charity for all," telling the audience they should aspire to those words.

The Chicago Children's Choir, women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock and the U.S. Marine Band also performed at the concert.

Introducing a number called "Would You Harbor Me," a member of Sweet Honey in the Rock said the song was "written because this country has been a harborer to so many, but at the same time it has rejected so many."

Those words highlight Anderson's own story. She grew up in poverty in South Philadelphia, but became famous in the 1930s, performing for royalty and in major concert halls in Europe, New York and Philadelphia.

When her manager tried to book Anderson at Constitution Hall, the largest venue in segregated Washington at the time, she was rejected by the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the hall and prohibited African Americans from performing there. The district's school board also turned her away from singing at a school's auditorium.

"To me, it's just very dramatic," said Josephine Pesaresi, 75, the daughter of Justice Hugo Black, who attended the 1939 event. "People are younger, they don't realize what huge things have happened and how far we have come. It makes me weep, I'm so happy."

Pesaresi, who sat near the stage at Sunday's concert, said in an interview Saturday that the anniversary made her recall how her father had grown in his racial outlook. Black, once a member of the Ku Klux Klan, later joined an unanimous Supreme Court in outlawing segregation in public schools in 1954 and often voted with the court's liberal wing on civil rights cases.

"He and my mother went to that concert, because he so firmly believed in equality," she said.

Sunday was a time to reflect "where we were then, where we are now, and how far we have to go," said Raymond Arsenault, who has written a book on Anderson's concert and has consulted with the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. The commission and the National Park Service are sponsoring the event.

According to Arsenault, the 1939 event wasn't just a concert. "It was this sort of crack in the mold; it just showed people this alternative vision of what America might be like if it lived up to its goals of liberty."

To read the full article, click here.

Raymond Arsenault, author of THE SOUND OF FREEDOM, featured in WHYY

2009-04-17T15:34:00.005-04:00

Marian Anderson remembered for Lincoln Memorial Easter performance

By: Elizabeth Fiedler
April 12, 2009; WHYY

A Philadelphia native who once sang on the streets for nickels and dimes is being remembered for a concert she gave 70 years ago. On Easter Sunday 1939, Marian Anderson performed for a crowd of at least 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The historic concert is considered by many to have been a pivotal moment in American race relations.

Marian Anderson was said to have “the voice of the century.”

(Scroll down for audio version of this story, which includes sample of Marian Anderson singing My Country ‘Tis of Thee)

Even with that voice, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Anderson sing in Constitution Hall because of the color of her skin.

Historian Raymond Arsenault says the snub rallied many people who’d never really spoken out before to band together to find somewhere for Anderson to sing.

Arsenault: It seemed so gratuitous, such an insult. She’d been able to sing in all the capitals of Europe but not in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. And so this inspired kind of an interracial, nascent civil rights struggle.

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt dropped her membership in the DAR and helped arrange the emotional and historic open air concert.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

To listen to Anderson's performance, click here.

Raymond Arsensault, author of THE SOUND OF FREEDOM, featured on Weekend Edition

2009-04-17T15:28:00.003-04:00

Marian Anderson's Big Moment: A Look Back

Weekend Edition Sunday
April 12, 2009; NPR

Seventy years ago, a concert took place on Easter at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. At least 75,000 people attended the performance, which was heard across the country on NBC Radio. The performer was opera singer Marian Anderson.

The location for the concert was not chosen for its audience capacity. Anderson had tried to book Constitution Hall, but the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the hall, refused to let her perform there because she was black.

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt interceded and arranged for the alternate venue.

In his new book The Sound of Freedom, Raymond Arsenault argues that standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Easter, Anderson set in motion events that would change the country.

"It was really against her nature to be an activist," he says. "For her, it was all about the music."

But Anderson didn't just touch people musically that day — she touched them culturally, as well.

"She confounded the expectations and she forced people to reshuffle the deck," Arsenault says. "It didn't make them racial integrationists overnight, but it gave them at least a glimpse of another world."

To listen to the interview, click here.

Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM reviewed in Library Journal

2009-04-17T15:22:00.008-04:00

April 1, 2009; Library Journal

History

Marian Anderson rose from humble beginnings in Philadelphia to become a world-renowned contralto and one of the most prominent African American women of her time. Arsenault (John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, Univ. of South Florida; Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice) adds to the large body of literature on Anderson with a book focusing on her iconic 1939 Easter concert. Having been denied the right to perform in Constitution Hall because of its white-performers-only policy, Anderson sang for 75,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Arsenault writes that this was the "first time anyone in the modern civil rights struggle had invoked the symbol of the Great Emancipator in a direct and compelling way," with Anderson striking a historic blow for civil rights. While readers should be aware of Allan Keiler's more general Marian Anderson or Anderson's own autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning, Arsenault's book is a good one for serious students of the civil rights movement.—Jason Martin, Univ. of Central Florida Libs., Orlando

Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM reviewed in Publisher's Weekly

2009-04-17T15:14:00.002-04:00

Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 4/06/2009

April 6, 2009; Publisher's Weekly

Commemorating the 70th anniversary of African-American contralto Marian Anderson’s culture-shifting 1939 Easter Sunday performance at the Lincoln Memorial, the story of this underappreciated Civil Rights milestone resonates even louder in the wake of President Obama's election. Civil rights historian Arsenault (Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice) paints a detailed portrait of America's struggle for racial equality through one of the 20th century's most celebrated singers (of any color). Despite a 40-year career as a world-class entertainer, performing around the globe, Arsenault suffered innumerable racist indignities in her homeland, culminating in the controversial declaration by the Daughters of the American Revolution that barred her from performing in Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall. In defiance, Anderson and her entourage arranged for the free, open-air Easter concert, which drew an estimated crowd of 75,000. The peaceful demonstration struck a vital blow for civil rights, and in particular for integration at Constitution Hall, nearly 25 years before Martin Luther King's march on Washington. Arsenault relies heavily on historical manuscripts and newspaper articles, but his vivid understanding of the players keeps the narrative fresh and insightful. Anderson died in 1993, at age 96, but this vivid tribute to her work and times does her memory a great service. (Apr.)

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the St. Petersburg Times

2009-04-14T13:17:00.002-04:00

Review: 'Passing Strange' by Martha A. Sandweiss answers questions about geologist Clarence King

By David L. Beck, Special to the Times
April 12, 2009; St. Petersburg Times

You've probably never heard of him, but Clarence King was famous once. As a geologist, he helped map the American West, and he organized the United States Geological Survey as its first president. As a writer, he had a bestseller, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.

He dined at the White House and had a genius for friendship; among his intimates were writer and diplomat John Hay, historian Henry Adams and novelist Henry James. Hay, who in his youth was Lincoln's secretary and who in the fullness of his years was McKinley's secretary of state, thought King the best man of his time and was puzzled by the fact that King's talents did not make him rich.

"I fear he will die without doing anything," Hay wrote to novelist-editor William Dean Howells, "except to be a great scientist, a delightful writer, and the sweetest-natured creature the Lord ever made.''

The answer to the puzzle, Martha A. Sandweiss believes, lies in a duplicity of character so deep that it prevented King from focusing his energies and eventually sapped them. The sweetest-natured creature the Lord ever made was also a world-class liar.

He had to be. His friends always knew of his not-quite-kidding admiration for women of what he called "archaic" races — Mexican, Indian, Hawaiian. But they didn't know that as "James Todd" he courted, married and had five children with Ada Copeland, who was born a slave.

King died in Phoenix in 1901 of tuberculosis. He was 59. Ada Copeland Todd King died in Flushing, N.Y., in 1964, at 103, in the house that John Hay had bought for her anonymously.

To read the full review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Houston Chronicle

2009-04-14T13:08:00.003-04:00

Passing Strange's love story is a black and white issue

By STEVE WEINBERG
Houston Chronicle
April 10, 2009; Philadelphia Daily News

A few years ago, historian Martha A. Sandweiss read in passing that Clarence King — a Caucasian male famous in the 19th century as a surveyor of the vast frontier and a best-selling author about the land west of the Mississippi River — lived a double life as a self-proclaimed African-American male.

During an era when many light-skinned blacks hoped to pass as white, King, who lived from 1842 to 1901, moved the other direction, passing as black for some of each year without the knowledge of his white friends.

The cause of the reverse passing? Love.

In 1888, King had met and married an African-American woman named Ada Copeland, 18 years his junior. Copeland, who had made her way to New York City from rural Georgia and found a job as a domestic, knew nothing about King’s fame in white high society. Instead, she knew him as James Todd, a name he had concocted. King/Todd, who was known for his brilliant conversation in high society, told Copeland he worked as a Pullman porter, with the long train trips accounting for his long absences. Although King did not look like somebody with even the remotest amount of African-American heritage, Copeland and her friends believed he must be black. Furthermore, why would any successful white male want to pass as black?

So for 13 years, until his death at 59, King carried on the deception as Copeland’s common-law husband and father of their children. He revealed the truth to Copeland near the end of his life. The revelation apparently did not shake Copeland’s love for her husband but, naturally, complicated matters during a struggle over his estate. The complications never dissipated completely for Copeland, who lived another 63 years, finally dying in 1964 at 103.

Sandweiss’ sleuthing has produced a fascinating dual biography of a man who left behind lots of evidence about his life, and a woman born into slavery who left behind little. Those same sleuthing skills led Sandweiss, a historian who specializes in researching the American West, to produce essentially a second book between the same covers, a contextual treatise about race and class in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

To read the full review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE selected as Amherst College Book of the Month

2009-04-14T13:01:00.002-04:00

Featured Book for April 2009

Passing Strange, by Marni Sandweiss, Professor of American Studies and History

The Amherst Reads featured book offers readers an opportunity to engage more actively with books by Amherst authors. Between interviews, online discussions, full reviews and appearances by authors at Amherst Association events, we hope readers come away with a better sense of connection to the College and the wealth and breadth of its intellectual life.

To learn more about the author, read an excerpt or a review, click here.

Raymond Arsenault, author of THE SOUND OF FREEDOM, featured in the Philadelphia Daily News

2009-04-09T14:17:00.003-04:00

'To thee we sing': Historic Marian Anderson concert will be re-created on Independence Mall

By TOM DI NARDO
Philadelphia Daily News
For the Daily News
April 7, 2009; Philadelphia Daily News

The Anderson legacy

Perhaps no one knows more about the impact of Anderson's 1939 concert than Raymond Arsenault, author of the just-published book "The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America" (Bloomsbury Press, $25). Arsenault will discuss the book and Anderson's legacy at the Constitution Center tomorrow night.

"In 1939, Lincoln wasn't yet considered the great emancipator," explained Arsenault, "and the memorial wasn't sacred ground until then. Of course, Dr. King's 'I Have A Dream' speech was given there in 1963, and certainly that's why President Obama insisted on that location for his pre-inaugural concert. No one thought it unusual today that Aretha Franklin sang 'My Country, 'Tis Of Thee.'

"Anderson had faced all kinds of racism in the South. And singing at the Salzburg Festival in 1935, where Arturo Toscanini called hers 'a voice such as one only hears once in a hundred years,' the Nazis wouldn't even allow her name on the program. She wouldn't sing where blacks were segregated in balconies or back seats, but would allow what she called 'vertical integration,' where whites and blacks could sit on either side of the aisle."

Anderson almost canceled the Lincoln Memorial concert, never imagining she would become a civil rights icon. The concert made it evident that racial problems were of national consequence - not just a Southern problem but a stain on the national honor at a time when totalitarianism was sweeping through Europe.

"Anderson was . . . the first to enter into what was a white province - not jazz, blues, minstrelsy, vaudeville, or juke joints," said Arsenault. "Without her, we might not have heard of Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman or Denyce Graves. She confounded the stereotypes, beating them at their own game with poise, reserve and stature."

Anderson left an example of musical royalty, demonstrating the power of grace, determination and colorblindness. She once wrote:

"When I sing and see a mass of faces turned up to me, it never occurs to me that most of them are white. They are the faces of human beings. I try to look through their faces into their souls, and it is to their souls that I sing."

For the full article, click here.

Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM reviewed in BookPage

2009-04-09T14:03:00.002-04:00

Easter Sunday, 1939

REVIEW BY RON WYNN
April 9, 2009; BookPage

Art's ability to entertain is readily acknowledged, but its motivational and inspirational qualities aren't always recognized. Those aspects are celebrated in award-winning author and historian Raymond Arsenault's outstanding new book The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America.

This volume shows how reaction and response to one concert, Anderson's historic Easter Sunday performance at the Lincoln Memorial 70 years ago, energized the movement against racism and injustice. Long before that, Anderson had spent the professional equivalent of a lifetime breaking barriers and shattering stereotypes. Though not the first black vocalist operating in the classical/operatic arena, Anderson's thundering, spectacular contralto won praise from Europe's toughest critics and finest conductors. Arsenault shows how she took techniques mastered in the black church to a different musical setting, proving equally masterful with opera and spirituals.

But Anderson's amazing 1939 concert is Arsenault's primary focus here. The Daughters of the American Revolution was then among the nation's foremost political and social organizations and its leaders had previously opposed Anderson's appearance at Constitution Hall because she was black. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the group in protest and convinced Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to let Anderson perform at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson's singing not only solidified her reputation, it electrified the 75,000 in attendance, and garnered the good will of people around the world. Arsenault equates this with subsequent milestones like Jackie Robinson's integration of major league baseball and Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus.

Anderson achieved other firsts, like breaking the Metropolitan Opera's color bar in the 1950s. Still, for the generations who aren't well acquainted with her career, The Sound of Freedom provides critical perspective on her most significant achievement.

Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM featured in The New Yorker

2009-04-09T13:55:00.002-04:00

Voice of the Century
Celebrating Marian Anderson

By Alex Ross
April 9, 2009; New Yorker

On Easter Sunday, 1939, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall, Washington’s largest concert venue, because of the color of her skin. In response, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R., and President Roosevelt gave permission for a concert on the Mall. Seventy-five thousand people gathered to watch Anderson perform. Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, introduced her with the words “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.”

The impact was immediate and immense; one newsreel carried the legend “Nation’s Capital Gets Lesson in Tolerance.” But Anderson herself made no obvious statement. She presented, as she had done countless times before, a mixture of classical selections—“O mio Fernando,” from Donizetti’s “La Favorita,” and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”—and African-American spirituals. Perhaps there was a hint of defiance in her rendition of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”; perhaps a message of solidarity when she changed the line “Of thee I sing” to “Of thee we sing.” Principally, though, her protest came in the unfurling of her voice—that gently majestic instrument, vast in range and warm in tone. In her early years, Anderson was known as “the colored contralto,” but, by the late thirties, she was the contralto, the supreme representative of her voice category. Arturo Toscanini said that she was the kind of singer who comes along once every hundred years; Jean Sibelius welcomed her to his home saying, “My roof is too low for you.” There was no rational reason for a serious venue to refuse entry to such a phenomenon. No clearer demonstration of prejudice could be found.

One person who appreciated the significance of the occasion was the ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. Five years later, King entered a speaking contest on the topic “The Negro and the Constitution,” and he mentioned Anderson’s performance in his oration: “She sang as never before, with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America.” When, two decades later, King stood on the Lincoln Memorial steps to deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech, he surely had Anderson in mind. In his improvised peroration, he recited the first verse of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” then imagined freedom ringing from every mountainside in the land.

For the full article, click here.

SHYNESS author Christopher Lane interviews Philip Dawdy in Psychology Today "Side Effects"

2009-04-09T13:45:00.002-04:00

"The bipolar child is a purely American phenomenon": An interview with Philip Dawdy

By Christopher Lane, Ph.D.
April7, 2009

Philip Dawdy, a prize-winning investigative journalist, has for several years written a powerful, well-researched, and well-regarded weblog, Furious Seasons, which focuses on American psychiatry, mental health, and the way we think about treatment options. Given his intensive work on the issues, I wanted to ask him several burning questions about ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other controversies in American psychiatry.

You've written extensively about the psychiatric diagnosis of teens and preschoolers. How do you account for the astonishing rise in the number of diagnoses we're seeing in these age groups, especially with regard to ADHD and bipolar disorder?

To me, you can lay all of this squarely at the feet of the pharma companies, which had a slew of newish drugs come online in the 80s and 90s and wanted them taken by as many humans as possible—consequences for the patients be damned—and a crew of child psychiatrists at Harvard/MGH who see deeply-flawed, ill-for-life children where other psychiatrists might see personality disorders and issues that will burn out over time. The pharma companies and the Harvard crew worked hand-in-hand to bring America a generation of ADHD kids and bipolar children, and their profound influence can be seen in the millions of children and teens who now carry lifetime diagnoses and take gobs of psychotropic drugs each day, often to their detriment.

That may sound extreme to some people, but it's worth noting that the rest of the world has not embraced these diagnostic and treatment paradigms—except Britain, where there was an initial embrace of ADHD and stimulants, but where there's now a significant backlash. Meanwhile, in France and Italy ADHD is rarely diagnosed and it's difficult to see where French and Italian culture have suffered as a result. As for bipolar disorder in kids (meaning pre-teens and younger), it's simply not an issue in the rest of the world. The bipolar child is a purely American phenomenon, as big a metaphor of our times as credit swaps, subprime loans, and government bailouts.

Why do you think so many more teenage and younger boys than girls are being diagnosed with ADHD, and what does that say about our culture, education system, parental expectations, and so on?

The data I'm familiar with pegs the boy-to-girl ADHD ratio at 3 to 1, which is pretty dramatic. I suspect that boys get pegged with the diagnosis more than girls do for two reasons: One, boys have always been far more energetic and physically exuberant than girls, a point going back through history, perhaps because they are developing their hunter-gatherer beings. And, two, the hyperactivity piece of ADHD is quite easy to spot and probably leads to greater pressure for kids to be diagnosed because hyperactive boys can be disruptive, especially in school environments.

As out there as this may sound, I think we are as a culture cheating boys of their inherent natures and I have real questions about how that affects their psychosocial development long-term and what it will all mean for manhood a couple of generations down the road (I'm concerned about comparable issues with girls as well). What's more, I think the educational system places too much emphasis on having quiet, compliant kids—far more so than in the past. When I was a kid in the 1970s, boys were pretty much allowed to engage in all kinds of wildness at recess in elementary school and after school, but from what I hear that's being discouraged today. Why the change I couldn't say, but I do know that there's been a real push in our culture to silence outward signs of male aggressiveness, both in kids and adults.

As for parents, I think they are under a lot of self-imposed pressure to have perfect kids with high grades who get into top universities or they've somehow failed as parents. The ADHD drugs and the diagnosis itself have been foisted on them as a way to have their kids better liked among school peers and to achieve higher grades and perform better on the many, many standardized tests kids must take these days. What's interesting to me is that parents and our culture may well have been sold a bill of goods here, as the recently released MTA study (a long-term tracking study of kids through teens with ADHD, both on and off-meds) showed that long-term treatment with stimulants didn't appreciably improve GPAs and other test scores.

For the full interview, click here.

Martha Sandweiss featured in Ta Nea Magazine

2009-04-09T13:25:00.004-04:00

Ta Nea Magazine Online
Thursday, March 9, 2009; Ta Na Online

To watch the video, click here.

ITa Nea (Greek: Τα Νέα, Translation: The News) is a daily newspaper published in Athens, owned by Lambrakis Press Group that also publishes the newspaper To Vima.

Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM reviewed in the New York Times

2009-04-03T14:10:00.003-04:00

‘Voice of the Century’ Broke Racial Barriers

By DWIGHT GARNER
April 2, 2009; New York Times

In the early 1930s, years before the concert at the Lincoln Memorial that made her an international symbol of the American civil rights movement, Marian Anderson, the great Philadelphia-born contralto, was probably better known overseas than she was in the United States.

Anderson’s concerts, which combined opera arias and German lieder with black spirituals, won over not just crowds and critics but also Europe’s classical music luminaries. After she performed at the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s country house in 1933, singing his compositions in his native language, he called out for “not coffee, but champagne.”

When Anderson (1897-1993) was smuggled in to sing at the 1935 Salzburg Festival after non-Aryans were banned by the Nazis, Arturo Toscanini was in the audience. “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years,” he told her. His words stuck. For the rest of her life Anderson would be referred to as “the voice of the century.”

In his new book, “The Sound of Freedom,” Raymond Arsenault delivers not a proper biography of Anderson — there have already been a couple of those, in addition to her 1956 autobiography — but a tightly focused look at the political and cultural events that led up to and came after her famous 1939 concert. It’s a story that’s well worth retelling.

For the full review, click here.

Laurent Dubois featured in NEW YORKER ROUNDTABLE

2009-03-31T15:20:00.003-04:00

March 24, 2009; The New Yorker

Roundtable: Haitian Music

The idea for this roundtable started with Madison Smartt Bell, and a post he wrote about Haitian music for the New York Times’s Paper Cuts blog.

I knew Wyclef’s music and a few other names on Bell’s list, but I found myself feeling woefully short on context. I wanted to know what’s going on now in Haiti. What are the big struggles within and behind Haitian music? What should people be listening to? To answer these questions, and others, I enlisted the help of music scholar Garnette Cadogan and brought together Bell with:

Laurent Dubois, who is the author of “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,” and is working on a history of the banjo.

Elizabeth McAlister, who writes about Haitian music and religious culture. She is the author of “Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora,” and produced the Smithsonian Folkways CD “Rhythms of Rapture: Sacred Musics of Haitian Vodou.”

Ned Sublette, the author of “The World That Made New Orleans,” “Cuba and Its Music,” and the forthcoming “The Year Before the Flood.”

Edwidge Danticat, a novelist and author of the memoir “Brother, I’m Dying.”

Garnette Cadogan himself, who is at work on a book about rock-reggae superstar Bob Marley.

The conversation is theirs. I’m here only as student and moderator.

Laurent Dubois:

Last year, researching the history of music in Haiti, I came across a description of a big dinner organized on a plantation a decade before the Haitian Revolution. The M.C. was a plantation slave, the mistress of the white manager, and the invitees were slaves from neighboring plantations. The entertainment was provided by two men, described as “public singers,” playing banjos. One of them had a name I found startling: “Trois Feuilles” (“Twa Fey”), or “Three Leaves.” When I told Madison about this, he had the same sharp reaction I had—“Twa Fey” is an anthem in Haitian Vodou music, a kind of charter that describes exile, survival, and remembrance. I have no idea what to make of the fact that the singer took on this name, but I start here to suggest that part of the intensity of much Haitian music—and I share Madison’s feelings about many of the songs on his list—has to do with the way it offers up some very deep roots. Haitian music keeps reworking a long history of intense exchange even as it carries on and confronts cycles of exile.

To read the full article, click here.

Jessie Gruman featured on Martha Stewart

2009-03-31T15:12:00.005-04:00

Dealing with a Devastating Medical Diagnosis
Martha Stewart.com, 31 March 2009

What would you do if you were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness? How would you handle this news? While shock, fear, and even hysteria might be normal reactions, it's helpful to have a guide for what's often a very tumultuous road ahead.

When you're given the news that you have cancer, HIV, or another serious diagnosis, it may feel as if your world has shattered and all of your plans for the future have vanished in a flash. You feel fear, despair, anger, sadness -- often all at once. It's understandable; a serious diagnosis is a crisis, and you should treat it as one. Don't force yourself to go to work or make big decisions while you're really upset. Give yourself time to pull it together: Spend time with loved ones; don't forget to eat; nap if you can; cry if you feel like it. There are no rewards for being tough. It's a tribute to human resilience that as you learn more and adjust to the shock, you'll find you regain some focus and are able to take the important next steps.

Finding a good doctor is really important -- begin by looking for a specialist who has extensive experience treating the exact disease you have. Finding that person can be a puzzle. There are many referral sources, and none of them will tell you everything you need to know. The tried and true way is to ask a physician you know and like to refer you to another physician that he or she has worked with before.

Guides such as "America's Top Doctors" and New York magazine's best doctors list are good sources as well. Also keep in mind that different people have different preferences: Some want doctors who are all business, or who do research, or who are really warm and personable. Once you find a doctor who has the technical competence, schedule to meet with him or her and use your own judgment -- can you trust this person to work with you and do his or her best for you?

It is also important to get a second and sometimes even a third opinion. This can be tough; after a serious diagnosis, it's common to feel a sense of urgency to get started on treatment immediately. This is not wise. Get at least one additional opinion before you proceed.

To read the rest of the article and watch the video, please click here.

SHYNESS author Christopher Lane ask Psychology Today "Side Effects"

2009-03-26T12:51:00.003-04:00

Should overuse of the Internet become a mental disorder?

By Christopher Lane, Ph.D.
March 25, 2009

The next time your son begs to continue playing Nintendo Wii over dinner, your daughter texts her friends for the umpteenth time that day, or you find yourself lost online, madly pursuing links to new websites, consider this: American psychiatrists are busy debating whether such activities should soon be known as "Internet addiction."

One year ago, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial calling for recognition of internet addiction as a "common disorder." A crop of almost surreal newspaper articles followed, with titles such as "Net Addicts Mentally Ill, Top Psychiatrist Says."

But the response from our medical and mental-health communities was closer to a collective yawn. True, a skeptical reply came from the Harvard Mental Health Letter, whose editor, Michael Craig Miller, warned that it's "probably not helpful to invent new terms to describe problems as old as human nature." Other than him, few experts seemed to notice—much less mind—that the flagship journal of American psychiatry was arguing quite seriously that overuse of the internet might be a psychiatric illness, on a par with, say, schizophrenia.

The anniversary of the editorial seems like a good moment to revisit its controversial claims and see whether they have any merit.

Jerald J. Block, the Portland-based author of the piece, argued that the disorder presents three subtypes: "excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, and email-text messaging." Given the opening scenario I described of mayhem at dinnertime, it's not a wild guess to say that the last one applies to quite a few teenagers. Nor is it a surprise to news junkies like me that the middle one turns out to apply to a sizable number of former senators, governors, and mayors.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Kathryn Miles, author of ADVENTURES WITH ARI shares "5 Lessons for Embracing Your Inner Techie" at Editor Unleashed

2009-03-20T14:10:00.002-04:00

March 20, 2009; Editor Unleashed

When my agent suggested I build a digital platform to support my book, Adventures with Ari: A Puppy, a Leash, and Our Year Outdoors, my heart sank. The manuscript had recently made it to the final round of decision-making at two national presses. In both cases, editors liked the book, but their sales teams were reluctant: could the editors promise sales exceeding 50,000? No one knew for sure. As a result, both publishing houses passed on the manuscript.

These polite rejections got my agent thinking about a web presence for the monograph. Anything, I responded, but new media. I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t even want to know about it. But she remained resolute. And, because I trust her, I eventually agreed. I built a blog and Wiki; I learned the difference between an icon and an avatar; I embraced the idea that ‘friending’ was not only a legitimate verb, but also a useful way to spend one’s time. And, in the end, our efforts paid off: Ari found a good home at a great publishing house, and I learned some valuable lessons about pitfalls and promise of new media.

Lesson #1: People really love their dogs. And their cars, spice racks, bowling balls, and Manolo Blahniks. Not only do they love their hobbies, but they are passionate about finding others who do, too. Facebook has groups for everything from Aristotle admirers to zookeeper support groups. You can also find discussion boards and blog circles for civil war aficionados, Francophiles, and Beatles buffs. All of these people are keen to hear from others who have an interest in their subject, and they make a powerful readership base.

Lesson #2: These people also spend a lot of time on the web. Take it from me. I spent an entire day watching clips of talking cats on Youtube. I spent weeks gawking at My Space and Twitter pages. And, after Ari lost her first battle on “Puppywars,” I became the kind of hovering stage mother I like to mock at parties. That scorn didn’t keep me from checking the website 15 times a day, however. Nor did it mitigate the outrage I felt whenever someone thought a schnauzer was cuter than my very perfect dog. None of these things helped with my writing or my platform. If you’re like me, you are going to need to create strict limits. Try 30 minutes a day. Or even less.

For the full article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE Book of the Week at Wonders & Marvels

2009-03-19T14:49:00.002-04:00

Book of the Week: PASSING STRANGE

Wonders & Marvels most often profiles history and historical fiction on pre-1800 topics. But Martha A. Sandweiss' Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Decption Across the Color Line is just too good to pass up. And it's always a treat to help spread the word about well-written books by fellow academics. (Sandweiss is a Professor of History at Princeton.)

Passing Strange tells the story of Clarence King who is best known for his work as a geologist and writer. But King had a secret--a big one. In order to marry the woman he loved, he lived a double life as a black man. Sandweiss' book presents King's work, love, and life, in the context of racial politics from the late 19th century into the 1960s. An extraordinary story told by a writer with a keen historical eye and deep respect for her subjects.

For the full post, click here.

To read Wonders and Marvels' brief interview with the author, click here.

Gary Reback, author of FREE THE MARKET, featured in the San Francisco Chronicle

2009-03-17T13:02:00.003-04:00

Author favors stronger antitrust enforcement

By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
March 8, 2009; San Francisco Chronicle

Antitrust attorney Gary Reback stirred up Silicon Valley in the 1990s when he asked the Justice Department to protect Netscape and its Web browser from the machinations of mighty Microsoft Corp.
Netscape has since disappeared and the browser wars have been forgotten. But Reback has returned with a book, "Free the Market," in which he argues that government must do more to protect innovation and fair play.

"The hardest thing to get across to my libertarian and conservative friends in the tech industry is that we owe a lot of what we've got to the government," said Reback, 59.

"In earlier decades when government was more vigilant about antitrust, it created the openings that allowed Silicon Valley to exist," he said, citing one anecdote from his book.
Reback writes that, long before its breakup, AT&T settled one in a series of government antitrust cases with a deal that included licensing its transistor technology. One licensee was scientist William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor. Shockley opened a chipmaking laboratory in Mountain View. It failed, but several of his employees later founded famous Silicon Valley firms, including Intel Corp.

"And that's why we're sitting here today," Reback said.

In "Free the Market," Reback quickly sketches the activist period of antitrust law from the 1911 break-up of Standard Oil to the 1984 break up of AT&T.

"The rules were populist, they were set up to aid small businesses," he said.

Since the 1980s, however, he says antitrust policy has taken the hands-off, free market approach identified with Ronald Reagan.

Reback says former federal judge Robert Bork laid the intellectual groundwork for weaker antitrust enforcement. Bork is best remembered because his 1987 appointment to the Supreme Court was rejected in a controversy involving his views on abortion.

Bork's 1978 book, "The Antitrust Paradox," said big companies could be efficient in ways that benefited consumers and that market forces protected competition better than government regulators.

"For 20 years starting in the late 1970s, the Supreme Court took one chapter after another of Bork's book and made it into law," said Jonathan Baker, a law professor and antitrust expert at American University.

For the full article, click here.

Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING nominated for IRA Children's and Young Adult's Book Award

2009-03-17T12:46:00.004-04:00

Moying Li's Snow Falling in Spring has been nominated for the International Reading Association's 2009 Children's and Young Adult's Book Award. Last year's winners include Constance Leeds and Lita Judge. Children’s and Young Adult’s Book Awards are given for an author’s first or second published book written for children or young adults (ages birth to 17 years). Awards are given for fiction and nonfiction in each of three categories: primary, intermediate, and young adult. Books from any country and in any language published for the first time during the 2008 calendar year will be considered. Each award carries a monetary stipend.

To get the latest updates or learn more about the IRA, click here.

Kathryn Miles' ADVENTURES WITH ARI: A PUPPY, A LEASH, & OUR YEAR OUTDOORS reviewed in Library Journal

2009-03-17T12:40:00.003-04:00

March 15, 2009; Library Journal

At last, a canine memoir that is unique and irresistible; more reminiscent of Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog than John Grogan's Marley & Me, this book goes beyond telling the familiar story of a dog and its owner. Allowing her shelter puppy Ari (labeled a husky and Jindo mix) to be her "green" guide, Miles (writing, Unity Coll.) and her husband cast Ari's leash aside and learn to see the world through the eyes of a shy puppy as they explore the outdoors surrounding their Maine town. Lest any reader think Miles an irresponsible dog owner, much to her credit she read extensively and set ground rules for acceptable canine behavior both in and out of the home. A sizable chapter-by-chapter bibliography is included. Written in a clear and vivid prose style, this is strongly recommended for all public libraries.—Edell M. Schaefer, Brookfield P.L., WI

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Seattle Times

2009-03-17T12:30:00.002-04:00

"Passing Strange:" racial deception in the name of love

"Passing Strange" is historian Martha Sandweiss' strange but true tale of an accomplished 19th-century white man who "passed" for black so he could marry his true love, a black woman.

By Bruce Ramsey
Special to The Seattle Times
Thursday, March 12, 2009; Seattle Times

In the late 1800s, Clarence King was a figure of public renown. He was a mining consultant with jobs all over North America. He had founded the U.S. Geological Survey, mapped part of the Sierra Nevada, argued in journals of geology about the age of the Earth, hobnobbed with the secretary of state and dined in the White House. He was also a white man who had a secret life in which he pretended to be black.

In "Passing Strange," Martha Sandweiss, professor of history at Princeton University, undertakes to tell the story of King's secret marriage to an African-American woman.

A modern reader will ask how a white man with light hair and blue eyes could pass as "colored" for 13 years. A reader of Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson," written in 1894, will know: Anyone with one drop of "African blood," no matter what he looked like, was considered colored. Such a person might pass as white, but he was breaking the "one-drop rule."

King undertook to pass as black. At 47, he met Ada Copeland, 28, a nursemaid, telling her he was a Pullman porter named James Todd. He married her and they became Mr. and Mrs. Todd, while his associates continued to know him as the famed geologist Clarence King, resident of a Manhattan hotel.

In an age with no TV, few published photographs and no worry about driver's licenses, bank cards or computer databases, he could get away with it. The America of that time offered less racial tolerance but more privacy.

For the full review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail

2009-03-17T12:21:00.003-04:00

A Different Sort of Romeo, Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

By Nicholas DeRenzo
March 8, 2009; Brooklyn Rail

Clarence King (1842-1901) was a well-to-do, Newport-born, Yale-educated geologist famous for mapping the Western United States after the Civil War. He drank tea with Queen Victoria, collected fine art, and counted the novelist Henry James as a close personal friend. But these worldly details function as a mere backdrop for Martha A. Sandweiss’s engrossing biography Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, which follows King’s extreme measures to attain true happiness.

For thirteen years, King led a double life as James Todd, a black Pullman porter. Under this assumed identity, he married a former slave from Georgia named Ada Copeland, avoiding the stigma of interracial marriage by inventing a life that placed husband and wife on the same side of the racial divide. And strangely enough, despite his blue eyes and fair complexion, his secret life was left undiscovered by everyone, including Ada, until his death-bed confession. It is a classic Romeo and Juliet tale of love overcoming all obstacles and bridging all divides—that is, if Romeo forgot to tell Juliet he was actually born a Montague.

The logistics of such deception are mind-blowing. The fact that King appeared unambiguously white only exacerbates an already labyrinthine tale of racial politics. How could a man with blue eyes and fair skin convince his wife that he was actually African American? As Sandweiss explains, the “one drop rule”—which stated that even one black great-grandparent defined someone as black—meant that the color line was surprisingly porous. By simply identifying himself as a Pullman porter, which was then an all-black career, “James Todd” could lead others to believe he was black without ever saying so directly. Though Passing Strange is essentially the legend of a world-class con-man, Sandweiss imbues the tale with so much pathos that we forgive King’s indiscretions. He is forced into the lie not for his own gain or self-interest but to avoid scorn for himself and the woman he loved.

For the full review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Providence Journal

2009-03-17T12:13:00.002-04:00

‘Passing Strange’: A Victorian love that crossed the color line

By MARK DUNKELMAN
Sunday, March 8, 2009; Providence Journal

Clarence King (1842-1901) was a distinguished geologist, famous as the leader of an exploration of the 40th parallel, “the man who mapped the West,” the first director of the U. S. Geological Survey. A son of Newport society (he is buried in Island Cemetery), he returned from his frequent rambles around the continent to lodgings in private clubs and residential hotels in New York City, where he charmed a wide circle of admirers and led the high life of a celebrity. With his intimate friends, John Hay and Henry Adams and their spouses, he bonded to form the Five of Hearts, and he wrote a classic account of mountaineering in California that earned him a reputation as a man of letters.

Ada Copeland (1860-1964), born a slave in western Georgia, emigrated to New York circa 1884 and took a job as a nursemaid in the downtown home of a white family. At some point, under unknown circumstances, the black domestic worker and the celebrated white scientist met and fell in love.

King had long lauded the attraction of dark-skinned women to his friends. But he knew that his relationship with Copeland would destroy his career and alienate his family if it became known. So he adopted an alternate persona. Presenting himself as James Todd, a black Pullman porter from Baltimore, he wed Ada in 1888. Todd installed his wife in a succession of homes in Brooklyn and Queens, far from King’s Manhattan haunts, and the couple had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood.

For the full review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in the Ottawa Citizen

2009-03-17T12:01:00.003-04:00

A strange double life

Famed 19th-century author and explorer Clarence King secretly passed himself off as a black Pullman porter -- even to his wife

By James Macgowan
March 8, 2009; Ottawa Citizen

When Martha Sandweiss sat down to research the life and times of Clarence King, it took her 10 minutes to find out she had struck gold. She knew going in that King, a prominent 19th-century Ivy League-educated geologist, author and explorer, who counted U.S. Secretary of State John Hay and the writer Henry Adams among his friends, had an enormous secret he was keeping from his high-society friends.

What she didn't know, but quickly found out, was that this secret prompted him to live two lives: the first, as the first director of the United States Geological Survey, a gregarious friend of powerful people, who occasionally dined at the White House; the second, as a black Pullman porter named James Todd who was married to a black woman named Ada Copeland.

"I'm the first person to figure that piece of it out," Sandweiss says from her Amherst, Massachusetts home. "What people knew before was only that the famous Clarence King had a 13-year relationship -- whether it was a marriage or not -- with this African-American woman and that they had several children together."

Sandweiss, a professor of American studies and history at Amherst College, had been urging her students to look into the story of King's secret marriage, propelled by the indignity she felt upon reading a 1958 biography of King that barely mentioned Ada, or dismissed her as an undignified aberration. None of her students took her up on it, and this aspect of King's life kept gnawing at her. When she finally sat down and discovered his dual identity -- thanks to the recent digitization of American census records -- she decided this was a story she would write herself.

The result, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line , is a staggeringly researched, absorbing and page-turning account of a stunning deception carried out by a complex man who believed that miscegenation was where the future of the white race lay. As Sandweiss writes, King believed mixing the races "would improve the vitality of the human race and create a distinctly American people."

For the full article, click here.

James Galbraith, author of THE PREDATOR STATE, featured in the New York Times

2009-03-05T12:35:00.003-05:00

Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, March 4, 2009

For years economists who have challenged free market theory have been the Rodney Dangerfields of the profession. Often ignored or belittled because they questioned the orthodoxy, they say, they have been shut out of many economics departments and the most prestigious economics journals. They got no respect.

That was before last fall’s crash took the economics establishment by surprise. Since then the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has admitted that he was shocked to discover a flaw in the free market model and has even begun talking about temporarily nationalizing some banks. A Newsweek cover last month declared, “We Are All Socialists Now.” And at the latest annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said, “The new enthusiasm for fiscal stimulus, and particularly government spending, represents a huge evolution in mainstream thinking.”

Yet prominent economics professors say their academic discipline isn’t shifting nearly as much as some people might think. Free market theory, mathematical models and hostility to government regulation still reign in most economics departments at colleges and universities around the country. True, some new approaches have been explored in recent years, particularly by behavioral economists who argue that human psychology is a crucial element in economic decision making. But the belief that people make rational economic decisions and the market automatically adjusts to respond to them still prevails.

The financial crash happened very quickly while “things in academia change very, very slowly,” said David Card, a leading labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1960s, he recalled, nearly all economists believed in what was known as the Phillips curve, which posited that unemployment and inflation were like the two ends of a seesaw: as one went up, the other went down. Then in the 1970s stagflation — high unemployment and high inflation — hit. But it took 10 years before academia let go of the Phillips curve.

James K. Galbraith, an economist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, who has frequently been at odds with free marketers, said, “I don’t detect any change at all.” Academic economists are “like an ostrich with its head in the sand.”

“It’s business as usual,” he said. “I’m not conscious that there is a fundamental re-examination going on in journals.”

For the full article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in The New Yorker

2009-03-05T12:28:00.003-05:00

Thursday, March 5, 2009; The New Yorker

By Martha A. Sandweiss
(The Penguin Press; 370 pages; $27.95)

This post-Civil War history examines the boundaries of race through the remarkable story of Clarence King, a celebrated scientist of the Gilded Age who crossed the color line in reverse. Shortly after becoming famous for surveying the Western frontier, King fell in love with a former slave named Ada Copeland. For thirteen years, until his death, in 1901, King lived a double life—as a black Pullman porter named James Todd, married to Copeland, and as a prominent society man and a mining consultant. Sandweiss is a gifted historian, but there is a dearth of reliable documentation about Copeland, and, sadly, because King destroyed all of Copeland’s letters (urging her to do the same with his), his voice weighs heavier in the retelling.

Kathryn Miles' ADVENTURES WITH ARI: A PUPPY, A LEASH, & OUR YEAR OUTDOORS reviewed in E Magazine

2009-03-05T12:04:00.004-05:00

By Jessica Rae Patton
Thursday, March 5, 2009; E Magazine

Kathryn Miles is a great writer. From page one, this sets Adventures with Ari: A Puppy, a Leash, & Our Year Outdoors (Skyhorse Publishing, $24.95) above the pack of everything-I-know-about-life-I-learned-from-my-dog memoirs out there. Her premise is to see her world anew through the light-blue eyes of her shelter mutt adoptee, Ari, during their daily walks. This may seem a mundane proposal, and some of the scenarios are well known (and well worn) to anyone who has welcomed a dog (especially a puppy) into their home—books are chewed, floors are soiled, dead creatures are ecstatically rolled upon, dogs reeking of death are bathed, and bathed, and bathed, the peace of other animal companions is disrupted. The twist is that Miles is a naturalist by trade, a professor of environmental writing at Unity College in Maine, or as it bills itself, “America’s Environmental College.”

For the full review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle

2009-03-03T11:56:00.002-05:00

By Roger K. Miller
Tuesday, February 24, 2009; San Francisco Chronicle

Passing Strange
A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
By Martha A. Sandweiss
(The Penguin Press; 370 pages; $27.95)

For a book on a serious subject, Martha A. Sandweiss could hardly have chosen a more appropriately clever title than the slightly archaic phrase "Passing Strange." Its story of a white man strangely choosing, in our race-riven society, to pass as a black man is passing - that is, exceedingly - strange from beginning to end.

Clarence King, born in Newport, R.I., in 1842, was a Western explorer, a geologist of wide renown, a tremendous wit and an accomplished writer who moved in the highest societies of his day. Secretary of State John Hay and historian Henry Adams were among his closest friends; Hay called King "the best and brightest man of his generation."

But King, a bachelor, lived a secret double life as the husband of a black woman. His wife, Ada, was probably born into slavery, most likely in 1860, somewhere near West Point, Ga. Her last name, if she had one, might have been Copeland. Somehow she migrated to New York City, possibly in 1884, where she might have gotten work as a domestic.

As the previous paragraph indicates, much about their lives remains unknown and unknowable, mostly because of King's herculean efforts at secrecy, but in part due to Ada's humble origins. No stories or records of her early years survive. What her life might have been like can only be guessed at from research into others in similar situations.

The author's effort is well done and well worth it, and not simply because the story is compelling in itself. King, though no longer a high-profile historical figure, nevertheless has been the subject of several biographies, and all of them have ignored or given short shrift to this central aspect of his life. Sandweiss, a professor of history at Amherst College and author of other histories, has brought a lot to light through diligent digging.

For the full review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in USA Today

2009-03-03T11:42:00.002-05:00

By Bob Minzesheimer
Monday, February 23, 2009; USA Today

In February, Black History Month, publishers release a flood of books about or by African Americans. USA TODAY recommends a dozen new titles for all ages.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin, $27.95) by Martha Sandweiss is a fascinating slice of history: the double life of a socially prominent white geologist and explorer, Clarence King, who worked as a black Pullman porter so he could marry the black woman he loved.

For the full article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Washington Post

2009-02-27T13:04:00.002-05:00

Reviewed by Annette Gordon-Reed
Wednesday, February 22, 2009; Washington Post

PASSING STRANGE

A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

By Martha Sandweiss

Penguin Press. 384 pp. $27.95

If you drop the name Clarence King to almost any group of Americans today, it is unlikely they will have heard of him. This was not always so. During the final decades of the 19th century, King strode across the national scene as the scion of a prominent family and a Yale-trained geologist who mapped the American West. When he published a collection of vivid essays about his exploits, "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada," the book was an instant hit. King gained further fame when he exposed a fraudulent scheme to sell interests in diamond fields whose purported value was greater than all the silver and gold in Nevada's celebrated Comstock Lode. By proving that the fields had been artificially "salted" with precious gems, he halted investments in the project, forestalling the economic bubble that would certainly have formed around it. For this he was nicknamed the King of Diamonds. "We have escaped, thanks to God and Clarence King, a great financial calamity," one newspaper editorial said.

King often inspired such talk. He was a close friend of the writer Henry Adams and the diplomat John Hay, both of whom thought him the most talented man of their generation. Although he was born in Newport, R.I., to an old and distinguished family -- a paternal ancestor came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 and his mother could trace her ancestry back to signers of the Magna Carta -- King had little money for most of his life. Instead, he cobbled together income from government appointments, writing projects and loans from rich friends to support himself as a gentleman scientist.

But there was another side to King that neither the public nor his glittering friends knew, a side that Martha A. Sandweiss explores with great sensitivity, insight and painstaking research in "Passing Strange." The title of this immensely fascinating work provides a broad hint: King lived a racial double life. It would be hard to imagine a man more "white," meaning a man who was more thoroughly steeped in the privileges available only to whites of his class during the Gilded Age. But he was also secretly married to Ada Copeland, a black woman who had been born a slave in Georgia. Even more astounding, she knew nothing of his life as Clarence King. Indeed, she did not even know that he was Clarence King. From the day they met in Manhattan in 1887 or 1888 until 1901, when King died, she knew him as "James Todd." When they married in 1888, she became Ada Todd. And when their five children were born over the next 13 years, their last name was Todd, too.

For the rest of the review, click here.

Anthony Kronman, author of EDUCATION'S END, quoted in the New York Times

2009-02-27T12:54:00.002-05:00

In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth

By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, February 24, 2009

... Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said. But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown.

In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

For the full article, please click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in St. Louis Today

2009-02-19T15:24:00.008-05:00

'Passing Strange'

By Harper Barnes
February 19, 2009

Over the centuries, countless Americans have "passed" in one way or another. Indeed, as Martha A. Sandweiss suggests in "Passing Strange," her intriguing tale of lovers crossing racial lines in the late 19th century, the ability to become a new person is part of the promise of America. Usually, the move is to a higher social status.

What was remarkable about Clarence King was that he, in effect, "passed downward." A prominent Caucasian Ivy Leaguer from the Eastern establishment, he also pretended for 13 years to be an ordinary African-American Pullman porter, and apparently he did it for love.

It seems extraordinary in today's world of tabloid journalism and Google images that a man as prominent as King, a celebrated New York geologist, author, explorer and gadabout, could get away with the charade for so long, particularly in the same city where he dined at exclusive clubs with such celebrated friends as writer Henry Adams and statesman John Hay.

One reason, Princeton historian Sandweiss points out, is that newspapers and periodicals of the time were, on the whole, sparsely illustrated; King's relative celebrity did not extend to mass-market portraiture.

And it was a long way, in more ways than one, from Midtown Manhattan to the Outer Boroughs of New York. That is where "James Todd," the African-American identity that King assumed in order to marry slave-born nursemaid Ada Copeland, lived with his wife and their five children.

One of the book's more revealing aspects, at least for someone who has done historical research on African-Americans, is the wealth of biographical material available on King and the paucity of it for Ada Copeland. This underlines the fact that, for decades after emancipation, blacks were almost invisible to recorded American history.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Ronald Green, author of BABIES BY DESIGN, featured on Boston Today with Emily Rooney

2009-02-12T14:13:00.004-05:00

Ronald Green Discusses Babies By Design
February 12, 2009

To watch Ronald Green discuss his book, click here.

Op-Ed piece by David Blight, author of A SLAVE NO MORE, published in Boston Globe

2009-02-12T12:35:00.003-05:00

Lincoln and the former slave
By DAVID W. BLIGHT
Boston Globe, February 12, 2009

TODAY, on Lincoln's birthday, I will be in Cohasset - 98 percent white and mostly affluent - to honor the life of one of its own who was neither. John Washington was a former slave who settled in Cohasset long after the Civil War, and is buried in Woodside Cemetery. We might never have known who John Washington was were it not for the discovery of a narrative he wrote about his struggles to free himself from slavery, which came to light in 2003.

In this season of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, we would do well to remember the ways African-American slaves felt their own connections to the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln described that document as "the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the 19th century." John Washington could not have agreed more, and he played his own small part in bringing it about.

On April 18, 1862, in Fredericksburg, Va., Washington, an urban, literate 24-year-old slave, escaped across the Rappannock River to the safety of Union lines. In a scene that suddenly threw the meaning of the Civil War into bold relief, an officer asked Washington about Confederate forces and conditions in strategic Fredericksburg. Washington had "stuffed his pockets with rebel newspapers" and distributed them to his interrogators. They were puzzled at Washington's intelligence and his fervor; one asked him if he wanted to be free. Washington answered loudly, "by all means!" In his narrative, the intrepid Washington remembered the moment: "Dumb with joy, I thanked God and laughed!"

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE selected as New York Times "Book of the Times"

2009-02-12T12:22:00.003-05:00

New York Times Book of the Times
New York Times, February 4, 2009

Sometimes One Man Can Live Two Lives
By Janet Maslin

“Passing Strange” tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists’ imaginations. It exposes the bizarre secret life of a well-known historical figure, but that secret is its least sensational aspect. The secret was hidden in plain sight until Martha A. Sandweiss, the deductive historian who pieced together this narrative, happened to notice it. Her great accomplishment is to have explored not only how the 19th-century explorer and scientist Clarence King reinvented himself but also why that reinvention was so singularly American. Best of all are Ms. Sandweiss’s insights into what King’s deception and its consequences really mean.

Clarence King has often been written about by historians, but mostly in academic books about the mapping and geological exploration of the American West. He also turns up in biographies and literary histories, since he moved in glittering circles and was once widely held in high regard. He was called “the best and the brightest man of his generation” by one close friend, Secretary of State John Hay.

Hay went even further: “This polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.” Another admirer put it this way: “The trouble with King is that his description of the sunset spoils the original.”

King was a blond blueblood from Newport who distinguished himself at an early age. He traveled West in the 1860s, found work with the California State Geological Survey, helped to map the Sierras and became geologist in charge of the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar luminary in both New York and Washington. But his early years of roaming were just a prelude to what seems to have been a permanently rootless state.

Or so it seemed to his friends, who became used to his unexpected absences and thought of him as a perennial bachelor. Their impressions of him went no further. What they did not know was that when King was not living in various clubs and hotels, he was married and the father of five children. He was deeply devoted to his wife, Ada, a black woman 19 years his junior. This blue-eyed man, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, had successfully cultivated the impression that he was black too.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss, author of PASSING STRANGE, featured on the Diane Rehm Show

2009-02-12T12:13:00.003-05:00

Martha A. Sandweiss discusses Passing Strange

February 11, 2009

Clarence King was a famed explorer, scientist, and hero of late nineteenth century history. But the blue-eyed and fair-skinned King also led a secret double life passing as a black man. A historian examines the secret King only revealed on his deathbed to his black wife of thirteen years.

To hear the interview click here.

Martha Sandweiss, author of PASSING STRANGE, featured in Vanity Fair

2009-02-06T14:54:00.006-05:00

Martha A. Sandweiss Reads from Passing Strange

By Vanity Fair
February 6, 2009

For decades, Clarence King lived a charming, public life. The notable white geologist and writer, who had helped map the American West, divided his time between White House dinners and social gatherings at Manhattan's most elite clubs. But in this excerpt from the new book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (The Penguin Press), historian Martha A. Sandweiss reveals the riveting secret King kept from his family—and the world—and only disclosed on his deathbed in 1901: Clarence King lived a double life as a black man, James Todd.

To hear Martha Sandweiss read from her book click here.

James Galbraith, author of THE PREDATOR STATE, featured in Fortune Magazine

2009-02-05T13:00:00.002-05:00

James Galbraith picks up the argument for government intervention where his father left off. His prescription: Spend now, spend a lot, and spend some more.

By Pat Regnier
February 4, 2009

(Fortune Magazine) -- Until about Sept. 20, 2008, the day Henry Paulson asked Congress for a $700 billion blank check, most of us probably thought we had a decent layman's grasp of how the economy works and how it grows.

Something like this: Buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace and strike their best bargains. Those may not always turn out to be perfectly fair or wise, but consumers generally know better than the government. Growth comes from the efforts of savers and entrepreneurs, so taxes on them must be kept low. Few argued about this stuff. Liberals just wanted to put a bigger social safety net underneath the markets; conservatives, not so much.

Now that all hell has broken loose, none of that seems obvious anymore. Consumers and businesses know what's best for them? Allow us to introduce the erstwhile homeowners of San Diego and Las Vegas, and the MBAs of Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Lehman Brothers.

The conventional wisdom about economics is up for grabs right now. We're not speaking here of the conventional wisdom in the economics profession - that moves pretty slowly, and is anyway less wedded to a caricature of infallibly rational markets than most people think. We mean the assumptions that lawmakers, businesspeople, journalists, and educated voters use when they talk about economic problems. Ideas that had been banished to the dustbin are suddenly back on the table, and last year's gadflies now seem as if they were ahead of the curve. Exhibit A: James K. Galbraith, go-to economist of Nation magazine-style liberalism, unabashed market skeptic, and rock-ribbed Keynesian since before Keynesianism was cool (again).

For the rest of the article, click here.

Marlene Zuk, author of RIDDLED WITH LIFE, essay in New York Times

2009-02-05T12:45:00.002-05:00

The Evolutionary Search for Our Perfect Past
By MARLENE ZUK
New York Times, January 19, 2009

Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol.

Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like “10,000 B.C.” are popular because they appeal to our sense that life used to be more in sync with the environment. A recent cartoon shows one of those evolutionary progressions — ape to man walking upright to man slouched over a computer — with the caption “Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong.”

Maybe our woes arise because our Stone Age genes are thrust into Space Age life. That beer gut? It comes from eating too many processed carbohydrates; our bodies evolved to eat only unrefined foods, mainly meat, and we get out of kilter veering from our ancestral diet.

Food allergies and digestive woes? We, like other mammals, aren’t meant to consume dairy products after weaning. When politicians fall from grace after committing adultery, some commentator will always point out that such behavior has evolutionary roots: weren’t the best procreators alpha males with roving eyes?

In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called “paleofantasies.” She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to nostalgia for the very old days as a touchstone for the way life is supposed to be and why it sometimes feels so out of balance.

As an evolutionary biologist, I was filled with enthusiasm at first over the idea of a modern mismatch between everyday life and our evolutionary past. But a closer look reveals that not all evolutionary ideas are created equal; even for Darwinians, the devil is in the details. The notion that there was a time of perfect adaptation, from which we’ve now deviated, is a caricature of the way evolution works.

First, when exactly was this age of harmony, and what was it like? Scavenging, or eating the carcasses of dead animals left by (or stolen from) predators like lions, was probably replaced by active hunting and accumulation of wild plants about 55,000 years ago, and agriculture seems to have begun a mere 10,000 years ago. We did a lot of different things during each of these times.

How much of the diet during our idyllic hunter-gatherer past was meat, and what kind of plants and animals were used, varied widely in time and space. Inuits had different diets from Australian aboriginals or Neotropical forest dwellers. And we know little about the details of early family structure and other aspects of behavior. So the argument that we are “meant” to eat a certain proportion of meat, say, is highly questionable. Which of our human ancestors are we using as models?

But the difficulty with using our hunter-gatherer selves as icons of well-being goes much deeper. It is not as if we finally achieved harmony with our environment during the Pleistocene, heaved a sigh of relief and stopped.

Instead, evolution lurches along, with successive generations sometimes unchanged, sometimes better suited to their surroundings in some ways but not others. At any one point, adaptations take place: individuals who can endure heat or cold or famine leave more offspring than their less hardy counterparts. But there is no one point when one can say, “Voilà! Finished.”

Did our cave-dwelling forebears feel nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal? Were hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from a lion was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: after all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don’t get cancer.

You might argue that hunter-gatherers were better adapted to their environment simply because they spent many thousands of years at it — much longer than we’ve spent sitting in front of a computer or eating Mars bars. That’s true for some attributes, but not all. Evolution isn’t the creaky old process we used to think it was. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that the rate of evolution can be fast (sometimes blindingly so) or slow, or anything in between.

Marlene Zuk is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are.”

For the full article, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE nominated for New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009

2009-02-05T12:27:00.003-05:00

New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009: High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
New York Public Library, February 5, 2009

Alongside Jane Mayer and Robin Wright, Peter Gosselin's High Wire was selected by the New York Public Library as a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009. Winners will be announced on May 6, 2009 at a reception at the library.

To see latest updates, including other nominees, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in Columbia Journalism Review

2009-02-05T12:04:00.004-05:00

Reviewed by Elinore Longobardi
Wednesday, February 4, 2009; Columbia Journalism Review

PASSING STRANGE

A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

By Martha Sandweiss

Penguin Press. 384 pp. $27.95

Passing Strange is one of those books with precisely the right title. It is indeed a story about passing, in every sense of the term, and historian Martha Sandweiss tells it with a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s verve. More specifically, it is a story about a white. nineteenth-century scientist and explorer, famous in his day, who both hobnobbed with the most prominent figures of his era and created a second, secret identity for himself as a working-class black man. In a word: strange.

Shockingly—at least from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, with all of its peering eyes—the twain never met. Not, at least, until the prominent white man who passed as an obscure black one was on his deathbed. Knowing just this much, the reader will be asking a good many questions, chiefly variations on the basic How? and Why? Sandweiss rewards us with answers. Not to every question, of course, given the number of details that have slipped between the cracks of time. Still, the author builds the solid framework of two lives: that of Clarence King, the explorer, and Ada Copeland, the black woman he loved, married, and all the while deceived.

The story of King and Copeland, who lived together as James and Ada Todd, is a blessing for a curious, talented writer like Sandweiss. Not only are its details fascinating in and of themselves, but they advance a larger social understanding. By tracing the curves and improbable intersections of two extraordinary lives, Passing Strange offers a fresh look at the racial and cultural landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

For the rest of Elinore Longobardi's review, click here.

James Galbraith, author of THE PREDATOR STATE, guest on KCRW's Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future

2009-02-03T15:29:00.004-05:00

Thursday, February 5, 2009; KCRW News

Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future

Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future (12:07P)

The President and the Congress are prepared to break records for government spending, with consequences for America and the rest of the world. The stimulus package is supposed to move fast enough to have immediate impact, but not so fast that it's reckless or wasteful. The House bill calls for prohibiting foreign steel and iron from infrastructure projects. The Senate version being debated this week goes further, with few exceptions to the requirement for American-made goods and equipment. Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, call that "protectionism." Could such provisions lead to foreign retaliation? Do other elements advance the Democrats' social agenda, rather than focusing on creating jobs. What should be the long-term objectives? Can past levels of growth and prosperity be restored or will Americans have to tighten their belts permanently?

To listen to Stimulating the Economy, click here for the podcast.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN nominated for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award

2009-02-03T12:29:00.006-05:00

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Artists Awards 2008: The Book of Getting Even
Barnes & Noble, February 3, 2009

Alongside Zachary Lazar and Gin Phillips, Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even was selected by Barnes & Noble as a fiction finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award for 2008. Featuring notable judges such as Kate Christensen and Suzanne Finnamore, winners will be announced on March 4, 2009 at a private awards ceremony.

To see the full list, click here.

Check out PBS's EGALITE FOR ALL with author Laurent Dubois

2009-01-30T10:16:00.003-05:00

Friday, January 30, 2009; PBS

EGALITE FOR ALL:

Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution

It was the only successful slave insurrection in history. It grasped the full meaning of French revolutionary ideas — liberté, eqalité, fraternité — and used them to create the world's first Black republic. It changed the trajectory of colonial economics...and led to America's acquisition of the Louisiana territory from France. "It" was the Haitian Revolution, a movement that's been called the true birth moment of universal human rights. Vaguely remembered today, the Haitian Revolution was a hurricane at the turn of the nineteenth century — traumatizing Southern planters and inspiring slaves and abolitionists, worldwide.

Égalité for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution explores this history through music, voodoo ritual, powerful re-creations, and insightful writers and historians.

To watch Egalite For All, check your local listings.

Richard Thompson Ford Reviews WHAT OBAMA MEANS in Washington Post

2009-01-30T09:35:00.003-05:00

Reviewed by Richard Thompson Ford
Sunday, January 18, 2009; Washington Post

WHAT OBAMA MEANS

For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future

By Jabari Asim

Morrow. 223 pp. $21.99

Barack Obama's historic struggle to become the nation's first black president is over, but the fight over the meaning of his victory has only begun.

In What Obama Means -- one of what will certainly be many efforts to interpret and define the Obama phenomenon -- Jabari Asim argues that Obama's victory is the culmination of decades of black political struggle, social advancement and cultural achievement. Obama promises to continue this cultural transformation with a new style of racial politics: more productive and less antagonistic than that of the "charlatans and camera hogs with whom we are all too familiar" (a group in which the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson figure prominently) but no less committed to social justice. Asim, editor of the NAACP's journal the Crisis and former deputy editor of Book World, insists that Obama is the latest and most inspiring of a long line of "dedicated champions of black advancement." Because of Obama "it's becoming cool to be thoughtful, temperate and monogamous," writes Asim, and Americans "may come to associate blackness with brilliance, thoughtfulness, confidence, and radical optimism."
By contrast, Obama's detractors, left and right, have suggested that the new president inevitably will be limited by the racial politics of the past. Last year the conservative commentator Shelby Steele argued in A Bound Man that Obama was tethered, by his liberal ideology and racial loyalty, to a counterproductive politics of grievance that exaggerates white racism and denies the need for individual responsibility among blacks. By contrast, left-leaning black social commentators such as Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and Jesse Jackson have complained that, to win elections, Obama pandered to white voters, ignoring his responsibility to blacks.

For the rest of Richard Thompson Ford's review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE in Reader's Digest

2009-01-14T11:46:00.005-05:00

Readers Digest, February 2009

Great New Books of February 2009

Looking for a great new novel, short story or science read? Check out our picks for the best-bet books of February.

History
Her husband was not black. He was not from the West Indies. He was not a steelworker. Even his name, James Todd, was a lie. Ada Todd was in fact married to Clarence King, an acclaimed public figure and the person Secretary of State John Hay once called "the best and brightest man of his generation." … [But] not until he lay dying of tuberculosis in Phoenix in late 1901 … did James Todd write a letter to his wife telling her who he really was.
--Passing Strange: a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line by Martha A. Sandweiss (Penguin Press, $27.95)

For the rest of the reviews, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in Library Journal

2009-01-14T11:40:00.002-05:00

Library Journal, 1/15/2009

Sandweiss, Martha A. Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Penguin Pr.: Penguin Group (USA). Feb. 2009. c.358p. index. ISBN 978-1-59420-200-1. $27.95. HIST

American West historian Sandweiss (American studies & history, Amherst Coll.; Print the Legend) utilizes archival, newspaper, and a panoply of digitized resources to analyze the personal and social complexity of the life of noted surveyor and geologist Clarence King (1842–1901). King, the scion of a storied white New England family, passed as the purported Pullman porter James Todd in order to espouse his African American common-law wife, Ada Copeland Todd King. Unlike previous King biographers (e.g., Robert Wilson, The Explorer King), Sandweiss treats in detail the challenges and dilemmas that King confronted in post-Civil War America, even in relatively tolerant New York City. Balancing scholarly exploration with readability, she focuses on King's 13-year secret (until he was on his deathbed, King kept the fact of his actual race from his wife), which produced acute psychological strains. History learned of it with a legal claim for his trust fund in 1933. Sandweiss demonstrates just how racial identity and inequality circumscribes behavior, adding both general background and individual perspectives on the conundrum of race in America. Her literary references add to a historical narrative that should catch the attention of both specialists and the reading public. A welcome choice for both academic and public libraries.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress

For other reviews, click here.

Kaufman Field Guid Gets Lolz with Lolcats

2009-01-06T10:15:00.003-05:00

more animals
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/01/02/funny-pictures-dat-one-comes-in-four-flavorz/

Christopher Lane's SHYNESS in Chicago Tribune

2008-12-29T10:24:00.001-05:00

Psychiatric manual's update needs openness, not secrecy, critics say
Edition is being prepared with strict oversight, officials counter

By Ron Grossman | Tribune reporter
December 27, 2008

Whether revisions to the "bible" of mental illness should be carried out in secret might seem like an academic question.

But the issue carries real weight for parents desperate to address children's difficult behavior or people in distress over their mental state. It also speaks to citizens' concerns over news accounts of an overmedicated America and the troubling financial links between the pharmaceutical industry and some psychiatric researchers.

An update is under way for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, which defines the emotional problems for which doctors prescribe drugs and insurance companies pay the bills. Psychiatrists working on the new manual were required to sign a strict confidentiality agreement.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Christopher Lane's SHYNESS reviewed in the New York Review of Books

2008-12-29T10:19:00.002-05:00

Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009, The New York Review of Books
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption
By Marcia Angell

Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
by Alison Bass

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95
Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
by Melody Petersen

Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00
Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
by Christopher Lane

Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper)

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman's own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, "so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive."[1]

For the rest of the article, click here.

Marni Sandweiss, author of PASSING STRANGE, Q&A in PW

2008-12-22T11:22:00.003-05:00

Passing Strange
by Parul Sehgal -- Publishers Weekly, 12/22/2008

In Passing Strange (Reviews, Dec. 1), Sandweiss uncovers the double life of Clarence King, the renowned geologist who mapped the American West—and crossed color lines, passing as a black Pullman porter, James Todd, to marry Ada Copeland, a black nursemaid.

How did you come across this story?

I read Thurman Wilkins's spectacular biography of Clarence King in graduate school. It haunted me. Reading Philip Roth's wonderful The Human Stain got me thinking again, as did the Clinton scandal: Clinton messed up for 30 minutes and the story was spread around the world. King sustained a secret life for 13 years. So I sat down one day to see if there was anything I could do with the story. In five minutes I found the census document of King reporting to be black.

King's life reads like a Who's Who of the time: Henry Adams, Henry James, John Hayes—

James Weldon Johnson! Who would have thought? And Frederick Douglass. It's like six degrees of Clarence King. In the 19th century, he would have been on the cover of [the equivalent of] People magazine, but when the story came out in the 1930s, he had dropped out of public consciousness.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD a Slate Best Book of '08

2008-12-17T16:20:00.003-05:00

Pad Out Your Amazon Wish ListSlate picks the best books of 2008.
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2008, at 7:40 AM ET

Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor
Amid a flock of excellent legal books this year, two are really outstanding in my view. The first is Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. The second is my former law professor Richard Ford's The Race Card. Ford asks a simple question: How can claims of racism—in the courtroom, the media, and casual conversation—be so pervasive in America if so few of us are racists? His answers are provocative: Much of what we call racism is the result of racist decisions made decades ago with respect to housing, education, or urban planning. Cab drivers who refuse to pick up black men may be motivated by factors beyond racial hate—like not wanting to drop someone off in a bad part of town. The Race Card advances a debate that has been mired in reductive thinking for decades. You won't agree with Ford on everything. But you may find yourself thinking differently about everything. And that's my definition of a great book.

NYTs Book Blog: "My advice: buy Galbraith."

2008-12-17T16:16:00.001-05:00

The Return of John Kenneth Galbraith
By Barry Gewen
Papercuts, December 17, 2008

When Milton Friedman’s stock is high, John Kenneth Galbraith’s is low, and vice versa. These past few months, as the federal government has injected billions of dollars into the economy, with many billions more to come, Friedman’s free-market ideas have taken a beating. My advice: buy Galbraith.

The downfall of Friedmanism, I would say, came on the day Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke marched into the Oval Office and convinced President Bush that the financial crisis was so severe the government had no choice but to intervene, and in a massive way. Markets could not be allowed to clear, Friedman-style, without bringing the roof down on everyone’s head. And once the Republican party’s Wall Street establishment came on board, almost the only Friedmanites left — at least until the failure of the auto industry bailout — were rural outliers like Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, crying in the wilderness about “socialism.” (There were, of course, other critics of the Bush bailouts, but they were populists, not Friedmanites, distressed that all that taxpayer money was going to the top, not the middle and bottom. That’s a different story.)

For the rest of the article, click here.

Rachel Herz's THE SCENT OF DESIRE Recommended for Younger Readers by SCIENCE magazine

2008-12-08T11:17:00.003-05:00

Science Books for Fun and Learning—Some Recommendations from 2008
Science, December 5, 2008

Far from a prissy survey of perfumes and odor—it starts with the suicide of a rock singer who had lost his sense of smell—this book explores how and why smell is such a central component of our lives. Explaining basic neurobiological principles in clear language, Herz intermixes them with stories and personal accounts of her research and experiences. She describes olfactory technologies, such as the development of electronic noses, that are already beginning to be used in the food industry and might even help diagnose diseases. She also dreams of a gel that would boost olfactory receptor function and restore sensation to older individuals. Her account will stimulate readers' interests in psychology and neuroscience.

The full list of recommended books is restricted to magazine subscribers, but to see a summary, click here.

Deborah Cramer's SMITHSONIAN OCEAN excerpted in SCIENCE NEWS magazine

2008-12-08T10:34:00.005-05:00

Science Notebook: Scientific Observations
Science News, November 22, 2008

In a section excerpted from Smithsonian Ocean, Deborah Cramer observes how carbon—one of the building blocks of life—links us to the planet's past:

"Carbon is the foundation of life. It exists in every living organism, in every cell. While some is stilled, preserved in fossils over long stretches of time, most is continually recycled.... Humans are mostly water and, after that, carbon—carbon that has been passed down through the ages, from the flesh of a fish, the ear of an elephant, the leaves of a plant. Somewhere in each of us is a cell whose carbon elements may have nourished the planet's nascent life."

To check out the rest of the issue, click here.

Richard Thompson Ford's THE RACE CARD a NY TIMES Notable Book of 2008

2008-12-08T10:24:00.003-05:00

100 Notable Books of 2008
The New York Times, November 26, 2008

The New York Times selected Richard Thompson Ford's The Race Card, in which "Ford vivisects every sacred cow in 'post-racist' America", as one of their 100 Notable Books of 2008.

To see the full list, click here.

Anthony Lewis's FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE a Best Book of 2008 in THE ECONOMIST

2008-12-08T10:18:00.006-05:00

Pick of the Pile
The Economist, December 2, 2008

In this year's selection of best books, The Economist chose Anthony Lewis's Freedom for the Thought that We Hate for providing a "concise and wise presentation of the history and scope of freedom of thought in the United States, with conclusions that are well worth pondering."

To see the full list, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN a LA TIMES Favorite Book for 2008

2008-12-08T10:05:00.003-05:00

Favorite Books 2008: The Book of Getting Even
LA Times, December 7, 2008

Alongside Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison and National Book Award-winner Peter Matthiessen, Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even was selected by the LA Times as a Favorite Book of 2008.

To see the full list, click here.

Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING Selected as Best Book by Bloomsbury Review

2008-12-08T09:53:00.004-05:00

Editors' Favorites 2008: Snow Falling In Spring
The Bloomsbury Review

In this year's roundups of notable and favorite books, The Bloomsbury Review selected Moying Li's Snow Falling In Spring, an inspiring memoir of a girl's coming-of-age during China's Cultural Revolution, as a favorite book for 2008!

Deborah Cramer's SMITHSONIAN OCEAN a USA TODAY Critic's Pick

2008-12-04T11:11:00.004-05:00

Critic's picks: Coffee-table books for the holidays
USA Today, December 3

Holiday shopping got you anxious?

USA Today comes to the rescue with a handy gift guide that will satisfy all your bookworm friends, from the fashionista to the animal lover. For the environmentalist in your life, this holiday season's "it" book is Deborah Cramer's Smithsonian Ocean.

To check out USA Today's review and the full list, click here.

RACHEL HERZ on NPR's Talk of the Nation

2008-12-04T11:05:00.002-05:00

From Brain to Plate: Psychology of Holiday Meals
NPR, Talk of the Nation, November 28

Why is it so important to have turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving? A panel of psychologists, including Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire, discusses how mood, memory and sense of smell can influence what ends up on the dinner table.

To listen to the NPR clip, click here

Christopher Lane Op-Ed in the LA TIMES

2008-11-17T12:31:00.003-05:00

Wrangling Over Psychiatry's Bible
Christopher Lane
LA Times, November 16, 2008

Over the summer, a wrangle between eminent psychiatrists that had been brewing for months erupted in print. Startled readers of Psychiatric News saw the spectacle unfold in the journal’s normally less-dramatic pages. The bone of contention: whether the next revision of America’s psychiatric bible, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” should be done openly and transparently so mental health professionals and the public could follow along, or whether the debates should be held in secret.

One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Assn. and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder,” “Internet Addiction” and “Relational Disorder” will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.

This may sound like an arcane, insignificant spat about nomenclature. But the manual is in fact terribly important, and the debates taking place have far-reaching consequences. Published by the American Psychiatric Assn. (and better known as the DSM), the manual is meant to cover every mental health disorder that affects children and adults.

Not only do mental health professionals use it routinely when treating patients, but the DSM is also a bible of sorts for insurance companies deciding what disorders to cover, as well as for clinicians, courts, prisons, pharmaceutical companies and agencies that regulate drugs. Because large numbers of countries, including the United States, treat the DSM as gospel, it’s no exaggeration to say that minor changes and additions have powerful ripple effects on mental health diagnoses around the world.

Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, is the author of “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.”

To read the full commentary, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the New York Review

2008-11-13T11:36:00.003-05:00

Trapped in the New 'You're On Your Own' World
Robert M. Solow
The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008

When the Bush-Cheney administration proposed to replace Social Security with a system of individually accumulated, individually owned, and individually invested accounts, my first thought was that its goal was to take the Social out of Social Security. It took a few minutes longer to realize that it also intended to take the Security out of Social Security.

That attempt failed. In recent years, however, a mixture of public and private policy decisions and impersonal market developments has had the broad effect of shifting many financial risks from established institutions, including even society at large, to individuals who are unable to cope with them in an adequate way. Information may be impossibly difficult for citizens to process; or else the basic information may not be available to individuals or private groups. Sometimes the scale of the possible bad outcomes may be overwhelming. Sometimes the appropriate insurance market cannot function or just does not exist. The result is that individuals and families can be the casualties of situations that once would have been handled by a more centralized and more bearable allocation of risks.

The current turmoil in credit markets and the recession that is sure to follow are likely to drive this trend further. Banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions have seen too many risks go sour. They will be more determined than ever to push further risks onto those needy borrowers who are too weak and too ignorant to bargain hard. Families, small businesses, and other borrowers of last resort will be under great pressure.

Peter Gosselin's excellent and thoughtful book, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families, is not the first to explore this territory. Two others that come to mind are Louis Uchitelle's The Disposable American and Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift. Gosselin is like Uchitelle in combining social criticism with substantial stories of recognizable people who have been trapped by bad luck or bad judgment in this new you're-on-your-own world; he differs in covering a much broader variety of risks and risk-bearers than Uchitelle's focus on workers and job-related risks. Hacker's book also ranges over many issues, but does not have Gosselin's expert journalistic use of recognizable cases. (Professor Hacker is currently engaged in a Rockefeller Foundation–sponsored effort to construct a general "Index of Economic Security"—to show empirically how economic security varies over time and across social groups.)

Gosselin, who works in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, does a fine job of connecting the stories he tells to general ideas and to economy- wide statistical markers, some developed for his particular purpose. He has produced a readable and valuable book...

To read the full review, click here.

Ruth Butler's HIDDEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE MASTER in The Wilson Quarterly

2008-11-06T12:38:00.002-05:00

Married to the Muse
Kate Christensen
The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2008

The library of art history is rife with biographies of The Artist—whomever he might be—as a young, middle-aged, old, and immortal man. But rarely does a book deal primarily with the woman he painted over and over, the ordinary model-wife whose face an artist immortalized in paint or bronze. Rarer still is the book that focuses on three such women and reveals them as biographical subjects in their own right.

Hidden in the Shadow of the Master is Ruth Butler’s masterfully researched examination of the lives of Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, and Rose Beuret, the three women who modeled for, bore sons to, lived in poverty with, and eventually married three of the towering artistic geniuses of their time: Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin, respectively. All were ordinary girls plucked from the streets of Paris by their future husbands, handpicked, apparently, with an eye toward musedom. Though they figure prominently in their husbands’ paintings and sculptures, beyond these evocations of their changing expressions, modes of dress, settings, and periods of life, little of substance was known about any of them before now.

Butler argues convincingly that her subjects are important to the history of art, and not for their faces and figures alone. At the turn of the 20th century, traditional artistic subjects, taken from myth, the Bible, and history, were giving way to a more quotidian, social, realistic mode. That Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin chose as their models the women they lived with was a revolutionary shift: The domestic and aesthetic became connected in an entirely new way. “These women,” Butler writes, “weren’t just models; they brought a whole spectrum of feelings with them, giving their husbands’ art emotional texture and substance, contributing elements for art as important as the light in which a scene is bathed, the space where an object sits, or movements that provide real character in a scene or to a figure.”

To read the full review, click here.

Documentary based on Ronald Florence's THE PERFECT MACHINE to air on PBS

2008-11-06T12:30:00.004-05:00

"The Journey to Palomar," a documentary based on Florence's book The Perfect Machine (HarperCollins), will be broadcast nationally on PBS stations on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 10 pm. Be sure to check your local PBS station listings! To view a trailer, visit www.JourneyToPalomar.org.

BU Panelists Debate the Future of Publishing

2008-11-06T11:53:00.003-05:00

The theme for the afternoon session of BU's conference on non-fiction book publishing was the impact of the digital revolution. Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs Books, championed newer technologies that faciliate smart inventorying and distribution, which prompted a spirited discussion with Helene Atwan, director of Beacon Press, and Wendy Strothman on the current state and direction of publishing. For an excerpt of the day's discussions, click here.

James Galbraith discusses THE PREDATOR STATE with The New York Times Magazine

2008-11-06T11:32:00.004-05:00

The Populist
Deborah Solomon
The New York Times Magazine, October 31

The progressive economist talks about why economics is useless, why Henry Paulson’s bailout fell short and how the Bush administration replaced free markets with a “predator state.”

To read the interview, click here.

Forrest Church's LOVE AND DEATH on NPR's Fresh Air

2008-10-30T10:58:00.002-04:00

The Rev. Forrest Church, Living 'Love and Death'
Fresh Air from WHYY, October 27, 2008

Unitarian minister Forrest Church was diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer last February. He has written and edited over 20 books since 1985. His latest, Love and Death, is a memoir that confronts the prospect of death and, in the process, offers readers a meditation on the end of life...

To listen to the interview, click here.

Wendy Strothman to Moderate Nonfiction Panel at BU

2008-10-21T10:58:00.005-04:00

The conference, which is free and open to the public, will be held at the Howard Thurman Center, in BU’s George Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Avenue. For more information click here.

Susan Fox Rogers' ANTARCTICA: LIFE ON THE ICE honored by the Society of American Travel Writers

2008-10-20T10:28:00.004-04:00

Antarctica: Life on the Ice awarded Silver medal for Best Travel Book
Houston, October 18, 2008

Founded in 1985, the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation seeks to improve and reward excellence in the field of travel journalism. In its 24th annual Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition, the SATW Foundation honored Susan Fox Rogers' Antarctica: Life on the Ice with a silver medal in the Best Travel Book category.

A "well-edited collection of Antarctica tales," said judges, the best part of Antarctica is that the stories—that range from "harrowing" to "goofy"—are not "written by travelers looking for adventure but by the people who live in this most remote spot."

For a full list of the winners, click here.

To read the judges' comments, click here.

Deborah Cramer's SMITHSONIAN OCEAN: OUR WATER, OUR WORLD in the Library Journal

2008-10-16T16:07:00.003-04:00

"Recommended for high school and public libraries."
Margaret Rioux
Library Journal, October 15, 2008

Commissioned as a companion to the National Museum of Natural History's new, permanent Ocean Hall, this book is much more than a souvenir. Beautifully and copiously illustrated and featuring extensive easy-to-understand, well-written text, it tells the full story of Earth's oceans, within which life developed and upon which all life still ultimately depends. Cramer (Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage) follows a time line from the beginnings of the earth to the present day and explains what we must do to preserve the ocean's resources. Twenty-eight ocean and themed maps (including coral reefs and hydrothermal vents) are included; the bibliography lists both journal articles and books and is extensive enough to keep an interested reader busy for years.

For the full review, click here and look under the "Science" heading.

Philip and Alice Shabecoff's POISONED PROFITS in the San Francisco Chronicle

2008-10-16T13:35:00.004-04:00

'Body Toxic' and 'Poisoned Profits'
Steve Heilig
San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2008

In "Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children," veteran journalists Philip and Alice Shabecoff focus on a particularly troubling biological fact: that the younger we are, the more vulnerable we can be to chemical impacts. "Developmental" exposures of fetuses and young children can influence their health for a lifetime. "As we looked around, we found that a surprisingly large number of children were suffering from chronic illnesses," they begin, and then proceed to marshal moving examples of tragic impacts and to summarize the vast scientific evidence that chemicals are contributing to many illnesses. Although thorough and detailed in their writing, the Shabecoffs don't mince words about how they feel about their story: Chemically affected kids "are victims of a crime."...

Most helpful to the average concerned reader might be the appendices here, which include practical tips on reducing children's exposures and extensive resources for learning more about this complex arena. Regarding broader preventive efforts, they also explore the emerging field of "green chemistry" and the concept of other preventive approaches. Their exploration of the missing but emerging voice of religion in environmental protection is also very welcome.

To read the full article, click here.

David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE wins 2008 Connecticut Book Award for Non-Fiction!

2008-10-16T12:57:00.003-04:00

Hartford, CT September 25

Held up against compelling works by the likes of Susan Eaton, David Blight's A Slave No More was selected by the judges as this year's winner of the Connecticut Book Award for Non-Fiction.

The Connecticut Book Awards are an annual event for the Connecticut Center for the Book, which is paneled by 35 judges distinguished in the fields of writing, librarianship, book arts, academics, journalism and publishing. All finalists are current or former state residents or authors whose work had a Connecticut setting.

Other award recipients include Philip Roth in Fiction for his book Exit Ghost.

To see all of this year's winners, click here

Deborah Cramer's SMITHSONIAN OCEAN: OUR WATER, OUR WORLD in the New York Times

2008-09-29T16:56:00.006-04:00

Diving Into a New World
Edward Rothstein
New York Times, September 26

The Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which opens on Saturday, isn’t just about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. It is the largest renovation in the museum’s century-long history and a transformation of its largest exhibition space, making it as much about the museum’s future as about the ocean’s.

Yes, of course, water takes center stage. When you enter the new hall off the Beaux Arts rotunda, the dimmed, atmospheric lighting is meant to suggest the sea; an illuminated blue panel coaxes: “Dive in. Discover it with us.” And well above floor level are eight giant video screens showing schools of fish and sea creatures near Belize, the Galápagos Islands and other aquatic utopias pulsing with oceanic life. It is as if the entire 23,000-square-foot exhibition space were submerged in a giant natural aquarium...

There is room for improvement, of course. In some galleries explanations could be clearer. And the museum could have been more imaginative in some expositions, the way Deborah Cramer so often is in her inspiring companion volume to the hall, “Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World.”

But so much can be learned here, and the new model of the museum is so well integrated with the valuable parts of the old that the Ocean Hall makes the sea change in museum life look promising.

For the full article, click here.

Ben Taylor Interviews Philip Roth

2008-09-29T14:57:00.008-04:00

Featured September 19 as PW Daily's "Picture of the Day," Ben Taylor, author of The Book of Getting Even and Tales Out of School, relaxes with Philip Roth and his publicist before a live broadcast interview of Roth and his new novel, Indignation.

James Galbraith and THE PREDATOR STATE on NPR's On Point

2008-09-29T12:39:00.003-04:00

The Super-Bailout
NPR, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, September 22

George W. Bush pushed what he and others called the “ownership society,” the privatization of nearly everything.

Now, instead, what the country is getting may be the biggest public bailout of private industry in American history.

Seven hundred billion dollars would be on the line, says Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. It may be a trillion. Public money. To staunch private losses.

It may save the economy, but the economy — and financial facts of life — will be different on the other side. And what should taxpayers get for stepping up?

This hour, On Point: The mother of all bailouts for Wall Street — and what comes with it...

Guests:
Dennis Berman, editor and reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He also writes for the paper’s Deal Journal blog.

James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His new book is “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals should Too.”

Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard University. He was chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003.

To listen to the clip, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE on NPR's Talk of the Nation

2008-09-29T12:26:00.003-04:00

U.S. Finances Precariously Perched On A "High Wire"
NPR, Talk of the Nation, September 18

American families are nervous about the stability of their finances — and Peter Gosselin says that they should be. In his new book, High Wire, he writes that an increasing number of families are only one mortgage-, doctor-, or emergency- payment away from financial ruin.

To listen to the NPR clip and read an excerpt of High Wire, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's TALES OUT OF SCHOOL on KUHF FM's The Front Row

2008-09-18T12:35:00.004-04:00

Tales Out of Ike
St. John Flynn
KUHF FM 88.7 Houston, September 13

Holed up at the station as KUHF deals with Hurricane Ike and we work to get as much information about what's happening where out to our listeners, I've got some down time and want to put it to good use.

Ike has been my first experience of a hurricane, and obviously in such a situation our regular concerns get swept away with the first elevated winds of the storm. But now that the eye has passed us by and left its indelible mark, I can write a blog entry that has some cultural relevance.

It occurred to me as the winds reached hurricane force last night and prepared to make landfall at Galveston that about 10 years ago I read an excellent novel set against the backdrop of the infamous hurricane of 1900 that completely devastated the coastal city.

Galveston, Texas, was struck on September 8th, 1900, by a Category 4 storm that packed winds of 135 mph. Official reports state that 8,000 people lost their lives making the "Great Storm" (this was before authorities began assigning alphabetical names to tropical storms) the U.S.'s deadliest natural disaster to date.

At the end of the 19th century, Galveston was a boomtown with a population of 42,000. It was the biggest city in Texas, and it's trade center. The Great Storm put paid to Galveston's pre-eminence, and Houston grew to fill the void.

The hurricane significantly changed the course of Texas history.

Benjamin Taylor's debut novel, Tales Out of School (Grand Central Publishing, 1997) is set against the Great Storm and the havoc it wreaks on the Mehmel family. The year is 1907, and Felix Mehmel, whose father died in the hurricane, is coming of age in Galveston among the members of his German-Jewish family, a family that seems to be disintegrating.

For the full post, click here.

To hear the interview with Benjamin Taylor, check out KUHF's website.

James Galbraith's THE PREDATOR STATE in USA Today

2008-09-11T11:54:00.004-04:00

'Predator' Urges Change in Definition of 'Free Market'
Steve Weinberg
USA Today, September 8, 2008

James Galbraith used to work inside Congress, as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee. Then he settled in as a professor at the University of Texas.

Like his renowned father, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, James is an iconoclast. In previous books, polemics for national magazines and research studies for academic journals, he questions the central tenets of economic policy and the underpinnings of waging imperialistic wars on behalf of capitalism and democracy.

In a book published two years ago, Galbraith showed what he considered the intellectual dishonesty of Republican Party — and supposedly, "conservative" — economic policy. That book, Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire, sought to demonstrate the devotion of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and then-Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan to helping the wealthy (including themselves) at the expense of equity (or at least a semblance of fairness) in American society.

Galbraith's new book, The Predator State, takes plenty of well-aimed, well-deserved shots at Republicans and conservatives, Democrats and liberals. Mostly, though, as the subtitle suggests, it is a denuding of an idea — the idea of how vital "free markets" are to a capitalistic, democratic nation.

For the full article, click here.

Philip and Alice Shabecoff's POISONED PROFITS in Rocky Mountain News

2008-09-11T11:39:00.007-04:00

Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children
Verna Noel Jones
Rocky Mountain News, August 21 2008

Nonfiction. By Philip Shabecoff and Alice Shabecoff. Random House, $26. Grade: A

Book in a nutshell: Rachel Carson first warned of the harmful assault of pesticides on the environment in her 1962 book Silent Spring. At that time, about 200 pesticide products were on the market. Now some 900 pesticide ingredients formulated into 18,000 different pesticide products are actively being used nationwide, causing disease, disability and dysfunction to one of every three of America's 73 million children, warn authors Philip and Alice Shabecoff.

Philip, chief environmental correspondent for The New York Times for 14 years, and Alice, a freelance journalist, present detailed evidence showing that children are 10 times more vulnerable than adults to cancer-causing chemicals and accumulate half of their lifetime risk of cancer by age two.

Since the 1970s, brain cancer in kids is up about 35 percent and acute lymphocytic leukemia is up 47 percent. Long-term studies, they say, have shown that the five most popular varieties of weed and seed garden herbicides are associated with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Pollutants also have been linked to many birth defects.

The authors name names in providing evidence of harm to our children, and show how the U.S. president, Congress and scientists-for- hire (who create "purposely flawed studies") aid and abet the polluters.

For the full article, click here.

Ruth Butler's Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin in NYT

2008-09-04T10:43:00.003-04:00

Author Gives Voice to Artists’ Silent Muses, Their Wives
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, September 3, 2008

Years ago Ruth Butler was walking through the Musée Rodin in Paris when she glimpsed a small oil painting of a woman with short brown hair, intense eyes and pursed lips. It was labeled a portrait of Rodin’s mother.

“I said, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ ” recalled Ms. Butler, who was on the museum’s board and is now professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and the author of a Rodin biography. She recognized the portrait as that of Rose Beuret, Rodin’s model and later his wife.

“I thought that if even the Musée Rodin doesn’t care about Rose, then I should write about this,” Ms. Butler said as she sat sipping a cappuccino in the Petrie Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gazing out at Central Park.

The book is “Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin,” recently published by Yale University Press. In it Ms. Butler tries to rescue from obscurity the women who she argues were so much a part of the triumphs of these visionaries.

“These artists would find people whose body and face make a statement that they could not otherwise make,” Ms. Butler said, arguing that the models have never been given their due. The women “made a contribution,” she added. “They deserve to be seen, not just visually but biographically.”

As artists in the second half of the 19th century shifted from painting historical, mythological and religious subjects to everyday life, they looked for a new kind of model. For the first time, Ms. Butler said, artists used the same model — often a wife or lover — over and over and over again in different paintings and in different scenes.

The switch was related in part to the end of official patronage, which centuries of artists had depended upon for support. The collapse of this system of sponsorship and the beginnings of an art market set off a series of changes for artists, not the least of which was often poverty.

The three artists that Ms. Butler focuses on — Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne — all spotted their models on the streets of Paris, drawn to something unique in a face or manner. All later married and had sons. But the women were often treated badly.

Ms. Butler “provides good reason to look at these artists’ work again,” a reviewer in the British magazine The Spectator wrote, because “each look brings a lost soul back to life.”

Very little is known about Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s model and wife, who sat for 27 oil portraits and numerous drawings. Ms. Butler said she tried to get information from their descendants, but they either snubbed or misled her. The feeling in the family, she said, was that Hortense “was a lowlife, that she spent his money.”

“They didn’t like her,” she added.

For the rest of the article, and an excerpt of the book, please click here.

Marlene Zuk's RIDDLED WITH LIFE reviewed on Bitter Grace Notes blog

2008-08-25T10:48:00.002-04:00

Book Rec
Monday, August 11, 2008.

Seems like ages since I've posted here about a book I didn't review for money, but this one deserves all the readers it can get. Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are is the best kind of popular science writing. It's witty, Marlene Zuk's prose is graceful, and it's perfectly accessible without seeming a bit dumbed down.

Zuk's basic message is "Stop worrying and learn to love pathogens." Or at least accept that they are an inescapable fact of our existence. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're both--kinda like every lover you ever had, right? In fact, you could read this book as a sort of human-microbe relationship manual. Chapter headings include "When Sex Makes You Sick" and "Parasites and Picking the Perfect Partner." There's a danger here of excess drollery, but the science is substantial enough to keep the jokes from getting tiresome. When Zuk lets herself get a little poetic, the book really soars. Here's a great passage from the introduction:

Life is naturally tattered, infested, bitten off, bitten into. The stem with a broken leaf, like an animal with lesions on its internal organs or less-than-glossy feathers, is more normal than its unscarred counterpart. An unblemished animal--or person--is idealized and fictional, like the advertisements showing a solitary traveler at the Eiffel Tower. It doesn't really exist except in our imaginations. Disease is part and parcel of how we are supposed to look, of how we are supposed to live.

Beautiful stuff. The whole book is like that, only funnier, and occasionally creepier--especially when she writes about how pathogens may actually guide our behavior. The book came out last year, but it was just released in paperback this spring. It's well worth the $14 investment. Plus, it may save you a fortune in hand sanitizer.

For the full blog entry, click here.

A SLAVE NO MORE, David Blight, and Julian Houston in the Boston Globe

2008-08-25T09:59:00.005-04:00

An ex-slave in Cohasset
Town largely unaware of late resident's memoir

A family photo taken between 1913 and 1918, in Cohasset. From left: Annie Washington, John Washington, their son James (standing), and his wife, Catherine. (Courtesy of The Alice Jackson Stuart Family Trust)

By Megan Woolhouse
Globe Staff / August 25, 2008

COHASSET - John Washington may be one of the most illustrious residents of this swank seaside town, albeit one few people have heard of.

At the Cohasset Farmers Market last week, Charlie Field had his own guess as to Washington's claim to fame.

"Is he George's brother?" he asked as he pushed his granddaughter in a stroller.

No. John Washington lived in Cohasset as a retired sign painter, a life far removed from his younger years as a Virginia slave. Washington fled Virginia in the chaos of the Civil War, helped the Union Army, and later migrated to Washington, D.C., and ultimately Cohasset, where he died and was buried 90 years ago this year. But what makes Washington's emancipation story unique is that - unlike the millions who endured slavery - he wrote it down.

The manuscript, one of only 120 that have surfaced since the Civil War, was the subject of the 2007 book "A Slave No More" by Yale University professor David Blight. The original manuscript, extremely rare and penned on loose-leaf paper, sits in a locked vault at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston alongside the papers of Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Yet in Cohasset, once a rich haven for the Yankee elite, where a replica water spigot in the town center gets special historic recognition, Washington's story is a historical footnote, if that. The Cohasset Historical Society does not keep a copy of Blight's book, which examines narratives by Washington and another former slave.

"I don't think the town knows anything about John Washington," said Cohasset Historical Society curator David H. Wadsworth, 78. "There isn't much when it comes to black history in Cohasset."

For decades, the craggy, majestic shoreline of Cohasset drew Boston's wealthy leather barons, who built mansions overlooking the water. And the Bancroft family, former owners of the Wall Street Journal and Barron's Weekly, has deep roots in the community.

Historically, the South Shore town has been so exclusive that it shunned the likes of Joseph P. Kennedy, who unsuccessfully sought membership at Cohasset Golf Club before his son became president. Today, the community remains nearly exclusively white. In the 2000 census, 13 of the town's 7,200 residents were African-American. All of which makes Washington's life there that much more remarkable.

For the full article, click here.

Marlene Zuk's RIDDLED WITH LIFE in Nature

2008-08-21T13:35:00.003-04:00

Nature, the international weekly journal of science, recently included Riddled With Life in their Summer Books Opinion section.

Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are
by Marlene Zuk
(Harvest, $14, £8.99)

An evolutionary biologist enthusiastically argues
that parasites are a driving force behind evolution
and that their effects still mould us today. Parasites
have shaped us physically and culturally, and affect
our minds on a daily basis.

Anthony Kronman on C-Span

2008-08-21T09:45:00.003-04:00

ANTHONY KRONMAN'S C-SPAN AFTER WORDS INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES MURRAY

Monday, August 18th, 2008.

In Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, Yale Law Professor Anthony Kronman writes that universities no longer emphasize educating students about what the great thinkers have written about the meaning of life, instead concentrating on a curriculum fueled by political correctness. Charles Murray was the guest interviewer.

Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is a former Dean of the Law School and currently teaches in the university's Directed Studies Program.

Charles Murray is the author of Read Education.

To watch the video, click here.

Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING reviewed in the New York Times

2008-08-18T09:53:00.005-04:00

Mao’s Little Helper

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: August 15, 2008

Life in Mao Zedong’s China is so exciting for little Moying Li. The grown-ups talk of a Great Leap Forward that will allow China to overtake Britain. Her family even gives over their lovely courtyard to a belching, smoky furnace so that the neighborhood can supply steel for the Great Leap. Neighbors contribute their cooking pots and cutlery for the cause. When Li’s grandmother asks if anyone has seen her cleaver, the little girl proudly responds, “Yes, I helped our country with it.” The family retrieves the big kettle and some spoons from the pile, but the cleaver, as she recalls, “had joined its comrades in the burning fire, doing its share for China.” Everyone has a good laugh over that one.

Then there is the war on the sparrows, a crusade to eliminate the accused scourge of crops. Li and her brother, Di Di, cheer lustily as her father’s pellet gun fells one feathered threat after another.

But things do not go as hoped. Making good steel, it turns out, is more difficult than it looks, and the government rejects the lot, leaving the neighbors downhearted and decidedly less well equipped in their kitchens.

As for the sparrows, well, the government had not considered the fact that sparrows eat insects. Crops are ravaged. In coming years, as a result of natural and man-made disasters, millions die.

And then things really begin to get bad.

Small tragedies are the prelude to great ones in “Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution,” a memoir of the wrenching years of Mao. With the Olympics bringing renewed attention to China, it can be easy to forget the pain that went before, pain that occurred in living memory. But this memoir makes those times unforgettable. Simply and hauntingly told, the book is written for young readers, but adults can learn a great deal from it as well.

For the full article, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the Washington Post

2008-08-18T09:41:00.005-04:00

Risky Business -
Two books map the economic perils facing American families.

Reviewed by Martha M. Hamilton
Sunday, August 17, 2008.

HIGH WIRE: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
By Peter Gosselin

THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: Reports from a Divided Nation
By Barbara Ehrenreich

The recent economic downturn, with the collapse of the housing bubble and the tightening of credit, has revealed a world of financial risk that had been there all along, unnoticed by most of us. Two new books examine other financial perils and inequities that put us further at risk.

You might not expect a book on economic policy to be a page-turner, but Peter Gosselin's High Wire is just that. Gosselin, a national economics reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has written a systematic investigation of the many ways financial risk has been transferred from employers, the federal government and insurance companies to individuals and families. Gosselin shows, in frightening detail, how our lives as Americans have become riskier over the last few decades. Instead of believing that we are mutually responsible for each other, we now rely on markets that have repeatedly demonstrated that they are distorted by greed, corruption and irrationality.

Gosselin makes his case using statistics and stories of real people, such as Debra Potter. Potter was a stay-at-home mother until the late 1980s, when she became an insurance agent to supplement the modest income of her husband, a Presbyterian pastor. In 2001, she earned more than $250,000. But by the end of May 2002, she had become so disabled by symptoms of what was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis that she had to give up her job. Her insurer, whose policies she had previously sold, tried to reclassify her disability to reduce her benefits substantially.

Despite continued appeals, the insurance company stood by its decision, and Potter's condition worsened. As a result, the Potters spent almost all of their savings on Debra's treatment and living expenses and were forced to pull their son out of college. In August 2003, her diagnosis was definitive, and Social Security began disability payments. Nearly two years after the definite diagnosis, Potter's insurer finally began paying benefits. A check for the benefits previously denied arrived three years later, but the damage was done.

For the full article, click here.

Paul Goldstein's INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY reviewed in the Law Library Journal

2008-08-11T13:06:00.004-04:00

Goldstein, Paul. Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business.
Reviewed by Ryan Saltz

Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business offers a thorough analysis of intellectual property issues for the nonlegal professional. Author Paul Goldstein, who is also responsible for giving us Goldstein on Copyright,2 has done a good job of presenting exceptionally dry material in an easy-to-read format. Each topic within the intellectual property (IP) realm has been broken down into its own chapter, which makes the book’s legal concepts easy to follow for even novice readers.

Intellectual Property is divided into seven chapters plus an introduction, and separate acknowledgments, sources, and index sections. In the first chapter, Goldstein presents the case of Polaroid Corp. v. Eastman Kodak Co.3 to illustrate the importance patents hold for companies. The case also illustrates what Goldstein frequently refers to as the “intellectual property paradox,” which is that “without property rights [intellectual] assets will be under produced, but with property rights they will be under used” (p. 36).

Chapters 2–5 are devoted individually and respectively to patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, and provide a concise, easy-to-understand overview of each topic. Chapter 6, “Intellectual Assets on the Internet,” examines IP law as it applies to Internet technologies. Comparisons are drawn between the freedom of access provided by the Internet and the dilemmas faced by the motion picture studios when the VCR was introduced, illustrating that “once habits of free use become entrenched, they cannot be reversed by legislation” (p.152). The Internet’s rapid evolution has created the need for IP law to evolve at a similarly rapid pace.

This discussion of Internet issues provides a perfect segue into the final chapter, “Intellectual Assets in International Markets.” The Internet opened the floodgates to globalization. The fact that different countries developed different laws governing IP rights necessitated treaty agreements to iron out these issues. This chapter follows the evolution of various treaties, including the Berne Convention4 and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement.

This book would be a perfect addition to any legal or business academic collection. It provides for the enthusiastic novice a great introduction to the IP field, presenting legal case analysis in plain English and providing just enough information to assist business owners with protecting and managing their own intellectual assets. With a price of only $27.95, Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business is a must read.

Rachel Herz's SCENT OF DESIRE in the New York Times

2008-08-07T10:37:00.004-04:00

The Nose, an Emotional Time Machine

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: August 5, 2008.

Here is a fun and easy experiment that Rachel Herz of Brown University suggests you try at home, but only if you promise to eat your vegetables first, floss afterward, and are not at risk of a diabetic coma. Buy a bag of assorted jelly beans of sufficiently high quality to qualify, however oxymoronically, as “gourmet.” Then, sample all the flavors in the bag systematically until you are sure you appreciate just how distinctive each one is, because expertise is important and you may never get another excuse this good.

Now for the meat of our matter: pinch your nostrils shut and do the sampling routine again. Notice the differences? That’s right — now there are none. Every bean still tastes sweet, but absent a sense of smell you might as well be eating sugared pencil erasers. And if in midchew you unbind your nose, what then? At once the candy’s candid charms return, and you can tell your orange sherbet from a buttered popcorn.

We’ve all heard about the mysterious powers of smell and its importance in love, friendship and food. Yet a simple game like What’s My Bean, and our consistent surprise at the impact of shutting down our smell circuits, shows that we don’t really grasp just how deep the nose goes. At the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco late last month, Dr. Herz and other researchers discussed the many ways our sense of smell stands alone. Olfaction is an ancient sense, the key by which our earliest forebears learned to approach or slink off. Yet the right aroma can evoke such vivid, whole body sensations that we feel life’s permanent newness, the grounding of now.

On the one hand, said Jay A. Gottfried of Northwestern University, olfaction is our slow sense, for it depends on messages carried not at the speed of light or of sound, but at the far statelier pace of a bypassing breeze, a pocket of air enriched with the sort of small, volatile molecules that our nasal-based odor receptors can read. Yet olfaction is our quickest sense. Whereas new signals detected by our eyes and our ears must first be assimilated by a structural way station called the thalamus before reaching the brain’s interpretive regions, odiferous messages barrel along dedicated pathways straight from the nose and right into the brain’s olfactory cortex, for instant processing.

Importantly, the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That’s why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled, and why the simple act of washing dishes recently made Dr. Herz’s cousin break down and cry. “The smell of the dish soap reminded her of her grandmother,” said Dr. Herz, author of “The Scent of Desire.”

For the full article, click here.