We Have Moved

Anthony T. Kronman tells Inside Higher Ed why great books are still great

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Anthony T. Kronman, author of Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, discussed higher education's movement away from from the most important questions in life.

Read the entire interview.

Kronman's book makes a passionate plea to revive the humanities’ lost tradition of preparing young people to address life’s most important question, what living is for. Kronman explores how political correctness and the research ideal have led the humanities astray, and he argues that the study of life’s meaning is an essential component in higher education.

Here's what others have said about Education's End:

• President Emeritus of Williams College Francis Oakley says, "Kronman unfolds here a sustained argument marked by subtlety, force, nuance, and considerable appeal."
• A "bold and provocative book" written with "eloquence and passion," says Michael J. Sandel, author of The Case against Perfection and Public Philosophy.
• "A brilliant, sustained argument that is as forthright, bold, and passionately felt as it is ideologically unclassifiable and original.," says Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World:  Power Nonviolence and the Will of the People. He goes on to say that "although Kronman’s specific area of concern is higher education, his argument will reach far beyond campus walls."
• Alvin Kernan, author of In Plato's Cave, applauds Kronman for his "carefully reasoned position of what happened, why it did, and what needs and can be done about it."

Anthony T. Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Since stepping down as Dean of the Law School in 2004, he has been teaching in the Directed Studies Program at Yale and devoting himself to the humanities.

Yale Rep gives free staged reading of John Austin Connolly's The Boys from Siam

Yale Repertory Theatre will present a free staged reading of John Austin Connolly's new award-winning play, The Boys from Siam, on Monday, October 1 at 7:30pm at The New Theater (1156 Chapel Street) in New Haven, Connecticut.

The Boys from Siam won the The Yale Drama Series' first David C. Horn Prize, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee from more than 500 submissions from the US, UK, Canada, and Republic of Ireland. In addition to the reading, John Austin Connolly was awarded $10,000 and publication of his play by Yale University Press.

Connolly's The Boys from Siam is based loosely on the lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the original so-called "Siamese twins," joined at the sternum.  Much of the action of the play takes place on the day of the twins' deaths. Under the direction of Yale Repertory's resident director Liz Diamond, Broadway's Francis Jue ("Thoroughly Modern Millie") and Jason Ma ("Miss Saigon") are set to star as Siamese Twins Pigg and Pegg.

Admission is free on a first-come, first-served basis. Reservations, made by calling 1-800-YSD-CUES (1-800-973-2847) are strongly recommended. Seating is limited.

Click here to listen to a podcast of the The Yale Drama Series ceremony, held earlier this year.

BREAKING NEWS: Yale University Press Acquires Anchor Bible Series from Doubleday

For Immediate Release: September 25, 2007

Yale University Press Acquires
Anchor Bible Series from Doubleday

New York and New Haven— The Anchor Bible Series, a prestigious collection of more than 115 volumes of biblical scholarship, has been acquired by Yale University Press from Doubleday.  Yale University Press will publish all backlist and new volumes in the series, to be renamed Anchor Yale Bible, going forward.  Stephen Rubin, President and Publisher of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, and John Donatich, Director of Yale University Press, jointly announced the deal today.  Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

This sale will enable Doubleday to enhance its existing focus on publishing general religious titles for the trade market.  Yale University Press will be adding a highly-regarded line of books that strengthens its existing publishing program and serves its mandate to publish serious works that further scholarly investigation and advance interdisciplinary inquiry.  Yale Press plans to develop the series with new interdisciplinary ways of studying the bible while taking advantage of the new technologies within digital platforms.

Malcolm's new book is "...a page turner..." says NY Times Book Review

The New York Times Sunday Book Review of Two Lives, opens with the statement: "One would not naturally pair Janet Malcolm, a clear, analytic writer, with Gertrude Stein and her modernist shenanigans."

Reviewer Katie Rophie goes on, "Malcolm's writing in Two Lives is brilliant, penetrating and playful.  There is in her cleverest, most arcane intellectual analysis a grace, a lightness of touch, that one rarely finds in a work of scholarship . . . Here in this slender, elegant book is much wisdom, not only about Stein and Toklas and their peculiar menage, but also about the creation of personal mythologies in general.  If Two Lives has a weakness, it is that one wishes, at the end, for more."

Read the entire review.

Recently published by Yale University Press, Two Lives is a remarkable work of literary biography and investigative journalism, which turns on the mysterious survival of Stein and Toklas, as Jewish lesbians in Occupied France. Also a fascinating illumination of the world of Stein scholarship, and a stunningly perceptive work of criticism. 

Read an excerpt.
View the table of contents.

Ben Kiernan speaking engagement Saturday

Ben Kiernan, author of the recently published book, Blood and Soil, will be speaking this Saturday at 2 pm at the Queens Public Library, Flushing Branch in New York. For more details and information on the event, click here. For a listing of all library events, visit QueensLibrary.org

For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements.

Blood and Soil examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.

Janet Malcolm's Two Lives news and reviews

Her first book in over five years, Janet Malcolm's Two Lives is reaching readers -- and listeners -- with more reviews to come.

Here is just a sampling of the current attention around this new release:

• Entertainment Weekly gives Two Lives an "A" calling the book, "a fascinating portrait...and hard to put down...."
• NPR's Maureen Corrigan reviewed the book in a recent program segment on Fresh Air. Listen to it here.
• BookLoon reviewer Tim Davis called the book, "wonderfully perceptive...fresh look at Stein and Toklas....Two Lives is an absolute must read book." Read the entire review.
• Charlotee Abbot of The Advocate, "A deliciously bitchy study of the modernist writer and her partner—and a disquieting biographical hit-and-run."

Two Lives was also featured in The Washington Post's Fall Preview column "The Most Anticipated Books of the Season" (entire list) and The San Franscico Chronicle's "Fall Books Preview" (entire list).

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism.