Yale Press Log

New York Magazine calls Superheroes a "genuinely cool book"

New York Magazine got their hands on an advance copy of Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton. They decided to do an early preview of the exhibition, which premiered at the Met this past Wednesday.

New York Magazine called Superheroes a "genuinely cool book," and found it an eye-opening companion to the opening gala gossip: "For all the jokes one can make about the gala's red carpet being graced with celebrities awkwardly decked out in Catwoman leather or Captain America capes (per hostess Anna Wintour's request that attendees take the theme seriously), a look at what's actually being shown at the exhibit is rather illuminating." Read the entire preview here.

And the blog mblankier.com reviewed Superheroes, noting the "very provocative and interesting parallel" between superheroes and fashion. "All the essays, costumes, and clothing in the book," the blogger writes, "are really fantastic and really inspiring." Read the full review here.

Featuring designers including John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier, and many more, this innovative book examines how the style of superheroes’ dress has influenced street wear and high fashion.

Books on the beauty of nature and the nature of humanity

Two reviews of Yale Press titles appeared in the April 17th edition of the New York Review of Books.

Andrew Butterfield reviewed Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen. Butterfield praises the "ravishingly beautiful exhibition, ... one that attempts to renew our understanding of the artist." He particularly admires the essay by Willibald Sauerländer, calling it "brilliant." Read the entire review here.

This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin’s landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist’s early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter’s visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon.

Heckscher's Creating Central Park discusses the creation of recreation

The New York Sun and the New York Observer, both running pieces on Creating Central Park by
Morrison H. Heckscher, have decided to emphasize different parts of the story: one real estate, the other art.

The Real Estate section of the New York Observer contained a Q&A with Heckscher about the book.  Heckscher begins, "I would like to start by saying that the whole issue of the park has to do with open space in Manhattan. Central Park is, shall we say, the conclusion of 50 years of political machinations of how to provide, for the city and Manhattan, open space mostly for health reasons—for air and space for the health of the public, and recreation." Read the entire interview here.

And the New York Sun ran a piece, "Creating Central Park," in their Arts section, with Heckscher discussing the great minds behind the creation of Central Park.

The year 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the design of Central Park, the first and arguably the most famous of America’s urban landscape parks. In October 1857 the new park’s board of commissioners announced a public design competition, and the following April the imaginative yet practicable “Greensward” plan submitted by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted was selected.

This book tells the fascinating story of how an extraordinary work of public art emerged from the crucible of New York City politics. From William Cullen Bryant’s 1844 editorial calling for “a pleasure ground of shade and recreation” to the completion of construction in 1870, the history of Central Park is an urban epic––a tale not only of animosity, political intrigue, and desire but also of idealism, sacrifice, and genius.

Technology's future and past: The Internet and The Railway

The Technology Liberation Front's Adam Thierer reviewed Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. Finding the book interesting, he recommended--and later, implored--his readers to pick up a copy. Zittrain's provocative ideas about "generative" and "sterile" appliances inspire Thierer's extensive response and the comments that follow. "It’s an important and enlightening book about one possible vision of the Net’s future," Thierer says. Read the entire review here.

North Korean radios that are altered to receive only the official stations. Cars that listen in on their owners’ conversations. Digital video recorders ordered to self-destruct in viewers’ homes thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. Jonathan Zittrain’s extraordinary book pieces together the engine that has catapulted the Internet ecosystem into the prominence it has today—and explains that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of consumers, the Internet is on a path to a lockdown, a closing off of opportunities and innovation.

Meanwhile, the Kansas City infoZine News previewed the "major international exhibition" at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, "Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway, 1830-1960." They said, "'Art in the Age of Steam' is the most wide-ranging exhibition ever assembled of American and European works of art responding to the drama of the railroad.... [It] will capture the excitement and range of emotions that steam-powered trains elicited as railroads reshaped culture around the world." Yale University Press is publishing The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, the catalog for the exhibition; the infoZine staff said that the catalog "is directed at both art lovers and railroad enthusiasts." The catalog will be available next month.

Through vivid illustrations and engaging texts, The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam captures both the fear and excitement of early train travel as it probes the artistic response to steam locomotion within its social setting. Featuring paintings, photography, prints, and posters, the book includes numerous masterpieces by 19th- and 20th-century artists, including J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Hopper.

Congratulations to three award-winning YUP titles

The announcement came out this week that three Yale Press titles won awards. Two of them, The Arts in Latin America and Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, will share the Eleanor Tufts Book Award of the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies

The Arts in Latin America by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt and Joseph Rishel was "selected for the strength of its scholarship, the breadth of its coverage, and the beauty of its presentation." This book is a magnificent survey of the rich and varied arts in Latin America from 1492 to the end of the colonial era.

Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War by Robin Adèle Greeley was chosen "for the quality of its scholarship, its excellent production as book, and its thoughtful consideration of an under-studied aspect of art history."

This book scrutinizes a wide range of artistic responses to the Spanish Civil War to illuminate the relation between art and politics during a period of social crisis. Through the works of Miró, Dalí, Caballero, Masson, and Picasso the author investigates how Surrealism served to bridge the divide between political thought and political act.

The third book to win an award is Angela Rosenthal's Angelica Kauffman. It won this year's book prize in the pre-1800 category from the Historians of British Art.

This major new study of one of the most internationally celebrated artists of the 18th century considers the artist’s pictorial strategies, significant contributions to portraiture, and role as a woman in shaping European visual culture.

Hartley paints the "psychic geography" of the West

In Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism, Heather Hole examines the artist's relationship with the American West. Hartley's connection to the West increases to this day as MetroActive, an online weekly newspaper based out of California's Silicon Valley, favorably reviewed Hole's recent book. The reviewer said, "The exceptional examples in Heather Hole's beautiful study reveal an artist who wedded considerable technique to a deep exploration of both his sexual longings and his project to adapt modernism to a homegrown art tradition."

Considered to be among the greatest early American modernists, the painter Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) traveled the United States and Europe in his search for a distinctive American aesthetic. His stay in New Mexico resulted in an extraordinary series of landscape paintings—created in New Mexico, New York, and Europe between 1918 and 1924—that show an evolution in style and thinking that is important for understanding both Hartley’s oeuvre and American modernism in the postwar years.

Marsden Hartley and the West examines this pivotal stage of the painter’s career, drawing upon his writings and providing illustrations of rarely seen and previously unpublished works. The author considers Hartley’s involvement with the Stieglitz circle and its “soil-and-spirit” philosophy, the Taos art colony, New York Dada, and the impact of historical events such as World War I. Within this setting she analyzes the pastels and oil paintings that suggest Hartley’s increasingly ambivalent response to the land. Beginning with optimistic, naturalistic views, the New Mexico works grew progressively darker and more tumultuous, increasingly reflecting a sense of loss brought on by war. The paintings become a site where the landscapes of memory, self, and nation merge, while reflecting broader modernist debates about “American-ness” and a usable past.

Library Journal reviews recent Yale Press titles

The February issue of Library Journal features a slew of reviews for Yale Press books. Here's an idea of what they're saying.

On Eloquence by Denis Donoghue struck Library Journal as "a well-written and engaging exploration of eloquence in literature." They recommended this book as "an enlightening read."

In this highly enjoyable reminder of why we should care about eloquence in literature and speech, Denis Donoghue insists that eloquence is not just a rhetorical tool, but an intrinsically valuable “upsurge of vitality for its own sake.” He offers many instances of eloquence in words and suggests the forms our appreciation of them should take.

Library Journal said that Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, edited by Susan Earle, "attests to the undeniable significance of Douglas's artistic achievements." They give this "well illustrated" book the "highest recommendation for any library with an interest in art or African American history."

This book is a major new study of the life and career of Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas––the “father of Black American art”––and his significant role in the evolution of American modernism.

"Jasper Johns: Gray" is a "marvelous show"

Yale University Press is publishing the catalogue for the recently opened Jasper Johns retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Jasper Johns: Gray." New York Times art critic Roberta Smith praises the show in her review, calling it "moody, opulent and eloquent." She says that "scores of museum exhibitions have visited and revisited Mr. Johns's prolific and complex career.... [but "Jasper Johns: Gray"] is among the best."

She goes on to compliment the "supremely clear account of Mr. Johns’s maturation from brilliant, methodical young artist to a deeper, more lyrical, less predictable one." Smith ends by saying that "this is a marvelous show, a shadow retrospective of a career within a career. It amplifies gray into a color spectrum all its own. And it illuminates 50 years of a life saved by, and lived for, the incessant pursuit of art."

To read the entire article, click here. For more information about the show, which runs through May 4th, click here.

Johns article in NYT, while Johns artwork exhibits at Met

Jasper Johns: Gray is an intriguing and elegant look at Johns’s sustained exploration of the color gray in paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture over the past 50 years. This book is the companion to the Johns exhibition which opened yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, running until May 4.

Carol Vogel of the New York Times interviewed the artist and the show's curators in anticipation of the show's opening. Here are some excerpts from that article:

For decades now [Johns's] interpretation of flags and targets, numbers and letters — things, as he has often said, “the mind already knows,” “things that were seen and not looked at, not examined” — have become as embedded in the contemporary American art psyche as Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Jackson Pollock’s drips.

Yet until this exhibition was organized, his use of gray — as a pigment, a stenciled word, a section of crosshatching — had not been singled out for sustained attention. The show, which began at the Art Institute of Chicago, insists that attention must finally be paid to what Mr. Johns once said was his “favorite color.” ...

"It was a eureka moment," Mr. [Douglas] Druick said. "It was then we thought by tracing an idea like gray, we could look at his entire career afresh." ...

"A show as luscious and challenging as Jasper’s gray works definitely belongs here [at the Metropolitan Museum of Art]," [curator Nan] Rosenthal said.

To hear more from these and others involved with the exhibition, check out Jasper Johns: Gray, by James Rondeau and Douglas Druick. For more information on the exhibition, or to view images from it, click here.

Read the entire New York Times article by clicking here.

February is...

National African American History Month! Yale Press has a wide range of books covering this topic for you to check out. Here's just a sample:

Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, edited by Susan Earle

In paintings, murals, and book illustrations, Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) produced the most powerful visual legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, prompting the philosopher and writer Alain Locke to dub him the “father of Black American art.” Working from a politicized concept of personal identity and a utopian vision of the future, the artist made a lasting impact on American art history and on the nation’s cultural heritage. Douglas’s role, as well as that of the Harlem Renaissance in general, in the evolution of American modernism deserves close scholarly attention, which it finally receives in this beautifully illustrated book.

Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart

Approaching a wide range of transnational topics, the authors ask how conceptions of slavery and gendered society differed in the United States, France, Germany, and Britain; how women’s activism reached across national boundaries; how racial identities affected the boundaries of women’s activism; and what was distinctive about African-American women’s participation as activists. Their thought-provoking answers provide rich insights into the history of struggles for social justice across the Atlantic world.

Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War, by David L. Lightner

Despite the United States’ ban on slave importation in 1808, profitable interstate slave trading continued. The nineteenth century’s great cotton boom required vast human labor to bring new lands under cultivation, and many thousands of slaves were torn from their families and sold across state lines in distant markets. Shocked by the cruelty and extent of this practice, abolitionists called upon the federal government to exercise its constitutional authority over interstate commerce and outlaw the interstate selling of slaves. This groundbreaking book is the first to tell the complex story of the decades-long debate and legal battle over federal regulation of the slave trade.

Coming soon in paperback:

The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, by Allen Dwight Callahan

The Bible has profoundly influenced African Americans throughout history. From a variety of perspectives this wide-ranging book is the first to explore the Bible’s role in the triumph of the black experience. Using the Bible as a foundation, African Americans shared religious beliefs, created their own music, and shaped the ultimate key to their freedom—literacy. Allen Callahan highlights the intersection of biblical images with African-American music, politics, religion, art, and literature.

Coming soon:

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
This book is the first to chronicle the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic. A Fragile Freedom investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the precarious status of “free persons” in the decades leading up to the Civil War and examines comparable developments in the cities of New York and Boston.

And for more Yale Press books on African American history, click here.

National Jewish Book Award names Eva Hesse finalist

Congratulations to Elisabeth Sussman and Fred Wasserman, authors of Eva Hesse: Sculpture, which is a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the Visual Arts category.

Each year, the National Jewish Book Awards honor some of the best and most exciting authors in the field of Jewish literature. After more than fifty years of presenting these awards, hundreds of books have received the prestigious National Jewish Book Award, including titles by the top authors on the American Jewish literary scene.

The work of Eva Hesse (1936–1970), one of the greatest American artists of the 1960s, continues to inspire and to endure in large part because of its deeply emotional and evocative qualities. Her latex and fiberglass sculptures in particular have a resonance that transcends the boundaries of minimalist art in which she had her roots. Hesse’s breakthrough solo exhibition—Chain Polymers at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1968—was a turning point in postwar American art.

Eva Hesse: Sculpture focuses on the artist’s large-scale sculptures in latex and fiberglass and provides a rare opportunity to look at Hesse’s artistic achievement within the historical context of her life in never-before-seen family diaries and photographs. Essays consider Hesse’s art from a variety of angles: Elisabeth Sussman discusses the sculptures shown in the 1968 solo exhibition; Fred Wasserman delves into the Hesse family’s life in Nazi Germany and in the German Jewish community in New York in the 1940s; Yve-Alain Bois examines Hesse’s works within the context of the art and aesthetic theories of the 1960s; and Mark Godfrey analyzes the importance of Hesse’s celebrated hanging sculptures of 1969–70. In addition to color reproductions of the artist’s sculpture, the book features a copiously illustrated chronology of the artist’s life.

For the full list of winners and finalists, click here.

The New Republic salutes Kitaj and Calder books as "remarkable"

Writing for The New Republic, Jed Perl lists "half a dozen remarkable books about the visual arts published during the year." Two of his six favorites were published by Yale University Press this past year: Second Diasporist Manifesto: A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses by R. B. Kitaj, and Calder Jewelry edited by Alexander S. C. Rower and Holton Rower. "Each is a book," says Perl, "that I expect I'm going to be returning to in 2008--and in the years beyond."

Perl calls Kitaj's Second Diasporist Manifesto "a wonderfully idiosyncratic book." He goes on to say that "the book is niftily laid out, with Kitaj's drawings and paintings reproduced in a black-and-white that suggests the brevity of tabloid imagery, and shots of red ink added to underscore the vehemence of Kitaj's drumroll pronouncements."

This book, a follow up to Kitaj’s influential First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), is a personal reflection on the Jewish Question in contemporary art as it is lived and painted and imagined by one of today's most innovative and controversial artists. In 615 distinct propositions that deliberately echo the Commandments of Jewish Law, Kitaj here channels his ideas for a new Diasporist art in a daring stream of consciousness. Including 41 images of the artist’s work chosen by him to accompany the text, this beautifully crafted volume is a unique and fascinating look into an artist’s unusual life and work.

Calder Jewelry, says Perl, "adds yet another level of delightful complication to our understanding of an American artist whom too many people still take for granted." He calls the book an "opulent volume," and praises Maria Robledo's photographs, which "bring us very close to the jewelry, until we feel as if we are actually touching these miniaturized fantasies, taking them in our hands, trying them on."

Calder Jewelry features around 300 bracelets, brooches, necklaces, and rings, all of which are exquisitely reproduced in newly commissioned photographs. Also included are examples of Calder's inventory drawings; the boxes he made to store the jewelry; historic photographs of his jewelry worn by notable patrons, art collectors, and artists (for instance, Peggy Guggenheim and Georgia O’Keeffe); and a chronology. Essays by Mark Rosenthal and Jane Adlin discuss the relationship of these objects to the artist’s other endeavors and in relation to the history of jewelry.

Click here to read the rest of Perl's article.

Met blog invites dialogue for catalogue

Yale University Press will publish a unique exhibition catalogue for "blog.mode: addressing fashion," an exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent fashion acquisitions. The curators are inviting visitors to comment on the exhibit's blog, creating a dialogue with the public about the art. The best of these comments will be selected for the exhibition catalogue, to be released next year.

In an article for the San Francisco Chronicle, curator Harold Koda says, "If it's a success, we think it will be like being part of a really nice dinner party. We want to know what people think about thigh-high hooker boots from the 1920s, or an 18th century dress. We all become one conversation, which is very intimate."

The exhibit opens tomorrow, December 18th, and will run until April 13th, 2008. For more information, click here. To visit the exhibit's blog, click here.

Art and architecture books featured in NYT

In an article on "their favorite books of 2007," New York Times art and architecture critics write "there is more to art books than gorgeous illustrations."

As an example of a book that is more than just "gorgeous illustrations, they name Yale's The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece, edited by Gary M. Radke. Art critic Roberta Smith calls the book "a handsome and unusually handy (because narrow) catalog that may be the first book in English devoted exclusively to this masterpiece." She praises The Gates of Paradise, saying that it "brims with research gleaned from a newly completed 25-year conservation process and has essays by a dozen American and Italian scholars, leading off with an especially inspired one by Andrew Butterfield, a writer and Renaissance sculpture expert." Read more about this favorite and others here.

In an article for the Holiday issue of the New York Times Style Magazine, Carol Kino praises another art book recently released by Yale Press, Calder Jewelry, edited by Alexander S. C. Rower and Holton Rower. Kino says that "leafing through the book feels like taking a trip through art history." You can read more from this beautifully illustrated article, or see more images from the book.

Featuring around 300 bracelets, brooches, necklaces, and rings––along with inventory drawings and historic photographs––this stunning book examines Alexander Calder’s captivating jewelry.

Benjamin Genocchio of the New York Times reviewed Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds as a "fine exhibition," for which Yale Press released the catalogue by Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez Ruiz. Genocchio went on to call it "undoubtedly the largest exhibition at the [Yale Center for British Art] in some time" and noted that "the displays and research yield fascinating stories, not only about art’s relation to history but also about the appalling cruelty that humans inflict upon one another." Read the entire review here.

And Edward Rothstein wrote an article on the opening of the Museum at Eldridge Street, after 20 years of reconstruction. He talked to the "knowledgeable" Annie Polland about what used to be the Eldridge Street Synagogue. Polland's YUP-released book, Landmark of the Spirit, is forthcoming.

2007 top picks, part 2: Yale books in holiday gift lists

Here is just a sample of some titles that editors and websites have picked in their year-end lists.

William Grimes at the New York Times assembled a gift guide of 15 perfect books for this holiday season, including Bears: A Brief History by Bernd Brunner. Grimes warmly recommends "this little gem."

The Washington Post put out their list of the best books of 2007, featuring four YUP titles. They called Hugh Brogan's Alexis de Tocqueville a monumental achievement. West from Appomattox, an "engaging" book by Heather Cox Richardson, also made the list. Ali A. Allawi brings "a valuable new voice to the ongoing debate" in The Occupation of Iraq, they said. And they praise Janet Malcolm's Two Lives as a "lucid and elegant meditation on literature and morality."

In addition, the Washington Post rounded up a list of art gift books. Among them are Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art by Jeffrey Spier, and George Stubbs, Painter, the catalogue raisonne by Judy Egerton.

Library Journal has named Hotel: An American History, by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz a December Best Book Pick. Along with having a "sound historical method," Sandoval-Strausz writes with "that rare blend of erudition and clarity that most of us can only dream of possessing."

Also, the Yale Holiday Sale has been extended. Free shipping is available for all web orders through December 31, 2007, and select titles are 50% off. And don't forget to check out our Holiday Selections.

Top picks, part 1: Yale books make Amazon.com's Top 100

If you're looking for the best books of the year or the perfect gifts for the season, Amazon.com, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others have put together some year-end book lists. Yale University Press books have ranked highly on many of those lists, from arts to science to current events. Here is just a sample of some titles that editors and websites have picked.

Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games by Tennent H. Bagley made the Amazon.com Editors' Picks: Top 100 Books, coming in at number 76. Also, YUP titles made strong showings in a number of the editors' category-based Top 10 lists.

• In the Arts and Photography category, the #1 book of the year is The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson, edited by Brooke Kamin Rapaport. In addition, Balenciaga and His Legacy by Myra Walker was #9.
• Janet Malcolm's Two Lives ranked #4 in the Gay and Lesbian category, as well as #5 in Biography.
• In the Current Events category, The Occupation of Iraq by Ali A. Allawi was listed as #9.
• And in the Science category, The Last Human by G. J. Sawyer and Viktor Deak ranked as #8.

See the rest of the Amazon.com Editors' Picks.

Also, the Yale Holiday Sale has been extended. Free shipping is available for all web orders through December 31, 2007, and select titles are 50% off. And don't forget to check out our Holiday Selections.

James Prosek in print and in studio

James Prosek, author and illustrator for Yale University Press' recently released Tight Lines: Ten Years of the Yale Anglers' Journal, wrote a short essay for the Outdoors section of the New York Times. The piece, published on November 28th, describes in painterly prose his trip to Alaska with an old mentor:

When I was 14, I was caught fishing illegally in a drinking-water reservoir by a game warden named Joe Haines. Instead of giving me a ticket, he took me under his wing.

I learned a lot of things from Haines: how to find edible mushrooms in the woods or four-leaf clovers in the yard; how to catch blue crabs and find razor clams; and how to spear, skin and cook eels.

To continue reading the piece, click here.

In addition, Prosek and Alexis Surovov came on WNPR's Where We Live to talk about fly fishing, the Yale Anglers' Journal, and Tight Lines. To listen to that show, click here.

Prosek also came into the studio for the Yale Press Podcast, which you can hear by clicking here.

Yale Press Podcast, Episode 11

Episode 11 of the Yale Press Podcast is now available.
Download Episode 11

In Episode 11, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) A.K. Sandoval-Strausz who explores the idea of American hospitality and the modern hotel as an uniquely American invention, and with (2) Claudia Nahson about the art of William Steig — the well-known cartoonist and cover artist for The New Yorker.

Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.

Comments are welcome.

Show Notes for Episode 11 of the Yale Press Podcast

Posted by Chris Gondek, Producer/Host of the Yale Press Podcast.

One year ago today, Yale University Press posted the first episode of the show. 12 months, 11 shows and 32 interviews later, and here we are. I wish I could convey in words how much I enjoy doing this show, and how much fun I have had interviewing these men and women. I can only hope for many more anniversaries.

No particularly funny stories in this episode, though I must say that I now have a bit of a William Steig obsession after reading the Steig book. It is currently on the top of my bookshelf, waiting for some other Steig books to keep it company.

Since I won't be posting again until 2008, have a very happy holiday season and thanks for listening.

Chris

James Prosek at the Peabody

From the Yale Peabody Museum's website:

Fly Fishing at the 41st Parallel

Realizing that he had happily fished his entire life only around his home of Easton, Connecticut, James Prosek decided to take a fishing trip around the world along the 41st parallel — that’s where trout thrive.

He headed east, traveling through southern Europe, the Balkans, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Japan, and returning through the western United States, stopping frequently along the way to indulge his passion for fishing.

Come hear about this grand adventure and pick up a copy of the newly released Tight Lines: Ten Years of the Yale Anglers’ Journal, illustrated by Prosek.

Thursday, November 15 at 5pm. Yale Peabody Museum, 170 Whitney Ave & Sachem St., New Haven, CT

Listen to a Yale Press Podcast with James Prosek

Tight Lines, illustrated by James Prosek; Edited by Joseph Furia, Wyatt Golding, David Haltom, Steven Hayhurst, Joseph Kingsbery, and Alexis Surovov; With a Foreword by Nick Lyons; With a Preface by James Prosek and Joseph Furia

Since the first copy of the Yale Anglers’ Journal appeared in 1996, readers with an interest in fish and fishing have opened the pages of each issue with anticipation and delight. YAJ’s founders suspected that others would share their passion for literature and art...

November is...

Aviation History Month! Check out some of the Yale University Press books that just fly off the shelves.

A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918, by Robert Wohl

This elegantly written, copiously illustrated book presents the first cultural history of the pioneering phase of aviation. Robert Wohl's fascinating story describes Wilbur Wright and other colorful early aeronauts, aces such as Baron von Richthofen, and the enthusiastic responses to the implications of aviation by such writers and artists as H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Delaunay, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Emile Driant.

The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950, by Robert Wohl

This extraordinary account of the development of aviation takes us from Charles Lindbergh’s dramatic New York-Paris flight to the horrifying bombing campaigns of World War II. Robert Wohl recaptures in words and illustrations an era when a wide-ranging cast of characters—among them millionaire Howard Hughes, Italian dictator Mussolini, and architect Le Corbusier—fell under aviation’s spell.

The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons, by Alvin Kernan

What really happened at the Battle of Midway, one of the greatest naval victories of the Second World War? This wrenching book, told by a survivor of the battle, provides the first accurate account and explanation of the devastating losses to America’s torpedo squadrons: only 7 of 51 planes returned, only 29 of 127 crewmen survived, and not a single torpedo hit its target.

Read an excerpt or view the table of contents.

Spine-tingling books from YUP

In honor of the Halloween spirit, check out these spooks--I mean books--from Yale University Press.

Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber

In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires, his book is fascinating reading.

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity by J. E. Lendon

What set the successful armies of Sparta, Macedon, and Rome apart from those they defeated? In this major new history of battle from the age of Homer through the decline of the Roman empire, J. E. Lendon surveys a millennium of warfare to discover how militaries change—and don’t change—and how an army’s greatness depends on its use of the past.

The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult by Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit

This fascinating book assembles more than 250 photographic images from the Victorian era to the 1960s, each purporting to document an occult phenomenon: levitations, apparitions, transfigurations, ectoplasms, spectres, ghosts, and auras. Drawn from the archives of European and American occult societies and private and public collections, the photographs in many cases have never before been published.

Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle by Robert McNab

This book tells the story of a secret journey made by three significant figures in the Surrealist movement—the painter Max Ernst, Paul Eluard (cofounder of Surrealism), and Eluard’s wife Gala—exploring their ménage à trois and the impact of the trip on their work.

Whether you're hiding under the covers or hiding under the hardcovers, Yale University Press wishes you a Happy Halloween!

R.B. Kitaj remembered

Artist R. B. Kitaj, who The New York Times says "became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the Royal Academy," passed away at his home in Los Angeles on Sunday, October 21, 2007. Martha Schwendener of The New York Times writes that Kitaj "became influential in Britain with figurative and Pop Art paintings that ran against the grain of 1960s and '70s abstraction."

"He draws better than almost anyone else alive," wrote art critic Robert Hughes. Kitaj also wrote books about his connection with Judaism, one of which, The Second Diasporist Manifesto, was published recently by Yale University Press.

This book, a follow up to Kitaj’s influential First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), is a personal reflection on the Jewish Question in contemporary art as it is lived and painted and imagined by one of today's most innovative and controversial artists. In 615 distinct propositions that deliberately echo the Commandments of Jewish Law, Kitaj here channels his ideas for a new Diasporist art in a daring stream of consciousness. Including 41 images of the artist’s work chosen by him to accompany the text, this beautifully crafted volume is a unique and fascinating look into an artist’s unusual life and work.

Read the entire article.

NYT: Tapestry in the Baroque is "stupefying" and "awesome"

In today's New York Times, Holland Cotter lauded "Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor," a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cotter called the exhibition "awesome in its exacting detail" and "a demonstration of beauty of a very particular and surprisingly personal kind." The epic tapestries, she says, are "a form of art you can care about in some personal way."

Thomas P. Campbell, who curated the show at the Met, also edited the catalog raisonne, Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, recently released by Yale University Press. In her review, Cotter calls the exhibition catalog "seven pounds of pure information."

Conceived as a sequel to the critically acclaimed Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002), this lavishly illustrated volume is the first comprehensive survey of 17th-century European tapestry available in English. From the Middle Ages until the late 18th century, European courts expended vast sums on tapestries, which were made with precious materials after designs by the leading artists of the day. Yet, this spectacular medium is still often presented as a decorative art of lesser importance. Tapestry in the Baroque challenges this notion, demonstrating that tapestry remained among the most prestigious figurative mediums throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, prized by the rich for its artistry and as a propaganda tool.

The book features forty-five of the finest surviving examples from collections in more than fifteen countries, as well as a number of related designs and oil sketches. Through these it examines the stylistic developments of tapestry between 1590 and 1720, when such masters as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Simon Vouet, Charles Le Brun, Pietro da Cortona, and Giovanni Romanelli responded to the challenges and opportunities of the medium in the context of contemporary artistic developments.

Read the full New York Times Review.

Yale Press Podcast, Episode 9

Episode 9 of the Yale Press Podcast is now available.

In Episode 9, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) Trita Parsi about about his behind-the scenes revelations about events in the Middle East and the geopolitical competition between Israel, Iran, and the United Staes, and with (2) James Prosek, author, watercolorist, and musician about the Yale Anglers' Journal tenth anniversiary as well as its rise as one of world's premier literary journals devoted to the sport.

Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.

Comments are welcome.

Yale Press authors in the news

A few Yale Press authors have recently been in the news...

Michael Makovsky, author of Churchill's Promised Land recently wrote an op/ed piece for The Wall Street Journal called, "Protecting Iraq's Oil". (Subcription required)

Makovsky's book is the first to explore fully the role that Zionism played in the political thought of Winston Churchill. Tracing the development of Churchill’s positions toward Zionism and the Jewish people throughout his long career, the author offers a fresh and balanced insight into one of the twentieth century’s greatest figures.
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