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Finkin and Post on the tenets of academic freedom

Though the nation's college students may be contemplating a different kind of academic freedom at this time of year, Professors Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post have published a new book that outlines the rights of professors in the American university. That work, For the Common Good, served as the subject of a recent interview with the authors in Inside Higher Ed.

The pressures of funding sources, tenure, and free speech certainly all play a role in defining academic freedom; however, Finkin and Post believe that debates about educator rights often neglect to define terms and tenets with enough specificity. Their book aims to solve that problem.

For further reading on the role of the academy, check out Yale President Richard Levin's The Work of the University.

Celebrate Earth Day with the Yale Press

There are lots of great ways to celebrate Earth Day. Bike to work, recycle, or show off your green thumb and plant a tree, like our commander-in-chief. But, in our minds, there's no better way to celebrate Mother Earth than learning more about her through a good book.

When it comes to saving the planet, few people know more than James Gustave Speth, co-founder of the NRDC and dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. In his book The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Speth argues that modern capitalism's obsession with consumption and GDP growth has gone too far, now causing more harm—to environment, social fabric, and world security—than good. His bold plan is laid out in this inspired book, which is now available in paperback. And fear not, defenders of poor, defenseless trees! Speth's book is printed on acid free recycled paper with vegetable based ink.

Though environmental appreciation through the written word is all well and good, a picture contains a thousand words, or in Robert Poole's case, an entire book. Poole's book, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, takes the iconic "blue marble" photographs from NASA's Apollo missions as a starting point and tells the elaborate and surprising story of how these images came to be. From an environmentalist perspective, the photographs of Earth represented a turning point, Poole contends. In a strange way, we had to leave the planet to turn our focus back toward Earth, our beautiful and fragile home.

Happy (belated) National Library Week!

Last week was National Library Week, and though we're a little late to the party, Yale Press has a number of titles to help bibliophiles continue exploring this year’s theme: “Worlds connect @ your library.”

“Libraries,” Alberto Manguel says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” In The Library at Night, Manguel takes readers on an idiosyncratic tour of libraries from Ancient Egypt to Nazi Europe, from Count Dracula’s imaginary collection to the author’s own childhood bookshelves. Washington Post Book World calls his work “a richly enjoyable book, absolutely enthralling for anyone who loves to read and an inspiration for anybody who has ever dreamed of building a library of his or her own."

Libraries in the Ancient World begins at the beginning—with clay tablets and the invention of writing—to tell the story of the library. Along the way, author Lionel Casson considers buildings, holdings, and acquisition processes, as well as the connections between libraries, literacy, and education. This book offers readers a fascinating and unexpected perspective on our relationship with books.

Matthias Corvinus, Hungary’s fifteenth-century "Raven King,” was a warrior and art patron who amassed the most magnificent library in Christendom over the course of his reign. But after his death, a Turkish invasion scattered Matthias’s two thousand volumes across Europe. In The Raven King, author Marcus Tanner follows the generations-long quest to recover the lost Hungarian library—it’s an absorbing account of library as treasure and national symbol.

And, this November, just in time for the holidays, the Press will release Jo Steffens’s Unpacking My Library—a photographic examination of fourteen leading architects’ book collections. It promises to be a treat for book lovers and architecture enthusiasts. So, until then, keep searching the shelves.

YUP named a top academic publisher in law

In a recent poll conducted by the Law Professors Blog Network, the Yale University Press placed fourth among the top five academic publishers in law. It's an elite bunch, and we're proud to count ourselves among their number.

By publishing titles like James Boyle's Public Domain, the Press has striven to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of legal debate. In his book, Boyle explores the frontiers of intellectual property in a digital age and posits that public domain is as vital to innovation and culture as material protected by intellectual property law. Boyle argues that open culture should be protected as fiercely as open land is conserved by the environmental movement. True to his commitment, Boyle has made a copy of Public Domain available free online.

In the newly released Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, editor Roger K. Newman has cast a wide net to include more than 700 key figures in the history of American Law. The only single-volume reference of its kind, the Biographical Dictionary features entries from Madison to Simpson (yes, that's O.J. Simpson), written by over 600 expert contributors. A comprehensive work that we're happy to see bearing the Yale name, this volume belongs on the shelves of any committed legal scholar.

In their recent book, The Unitary Executive, professors of law Steven G. Calabresi and Christopher S. Yoo turn their attentions to the power of the president, from Washington to Bush. In exploring one of the oldest debates in constitutional law, the two analyze not only the constitutional basis for executive powers but also the rather intriguing recent controversies involving presidential legal missteps in the Clinton and Bush administrations.

For more Yale books on law, head on over to our online catalog, or browse the whole list by subject.

Celebrate National Poetry Month with the YUP

April is National Poetry Month, and the Yale University Press is prepared to celebrate with an outstanding selection of new titles related to the fine art of verse.

In her foreword to Arda Collins' It is Daylight, the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, contest judge Louise Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.” A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Collins has previously published her work in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and A Public Space, among other magazines and journals. Both tender and sly, It is Daylight is a disarming and highly original debut, available now in paperback and a cloth limited edition.

Geoffrey Hill has been called “England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize.” In a new selection of his work, readers will now be able to appreciate the arc of his more than 50-year career in a single volume. Beginning with Hill's striking debut For the Unfallen and concluding with selections from his acclaimed Without Title, also published by the Yale University Press, Selected Poems presents an authoritative collection of work by a poet who is not afraid to face his work head on.

Finally, the poet Taha Muhammad Ali may not be a household name; however, after reading Adina Hoffman's vividly written My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness, readers will no doubt feel a great connection with the man and his work. Born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya, Muhammad Ali was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into a writer whom National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed “perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today.” To see Muhammad Ali read his poem "Revenge" with translator Peter Cole at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival, please click here.

Paul VanDevelder on Smithsonian.com

Paul VanDevelder is a featured author on Smithsonian.com's History and Archeology page this week, giving readers a sneak peek at his new book, Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire through Indian Territory. His latest post sets the scene on what the tribes called "The Great Smoke", "a month-long spectacle of feasting and negotiating" that took place in 1851 at Horse Creek in the Nebraska Territory. The treaty drafted there established peace along the Oregon Trail and political boundaries on a dozen new tribal homelands and was later ratified by the United States Senate. Unfortunately, this moment of peaceful alliance wouldn't last long.

The 1851 treaty at Horse Creek plays a key role in VanDevelder's history of the American government's fraudluent dealings with native tribes. Those taken by VanDevelder's rollicking style of writing can look forward to further posts on Smithsonian.com and Powells.com. In the meantime, head over to yalebooks.com to check out another excerpt.

Hamalainen wins Bancroft Prize

Congratulations are in order for Pekka Hamalainen, author of Comanche Empire and winner of the 2009 Bancroft Prize. One of the most prestigious honors in the field of history, the Bancroft Prize is awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University to the authors of exceptional works in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy.

Hamalainen's book, which shared the honor with a study of the 1914 massacre of striking coal miners in Colorado and an analysis of the impact of death and dying in the Civil War, challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and posits that the Comanche tribe had built up a truly imperial force in the Southwest borderlands. Hamalainen is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is his first book.

During the past five years, the Yale University Press has won two other Bancroft Prizes for The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 and Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Comanche Empire is now available in paperback.