Yale Press Log

Israel's Independence and Churchill's Zionism

As Israel, and its millions of supporters world-wide, celebrate its 60th birthday, few realize the important role that Winston Churchill played in the establishment of the State of Israel and the shaping of the modern Middle East.

Michael Makovsky’s groundbreaking Churchill’s Promised Land, brings this and much more to light in his careful and nuanced examination of Churchill’s complex relationship with Zionism.

In exploring Churchill’s evolving and ultimately romantic interest in Zionism, Makovsky offers a fresh, more complete and revealing understanding of this great statesman’s worldview. 

Churchill’s Promised Land won the National Jewish Book Award for History (2007) and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature (2008).

Read an excerpt, or view the table of contents. Click here to listen to an interview with Michael Makovsky on the Yale Press Podcast.

May Day and National Hamburger Month

In honor of May Day, Slate ran an article on the best recent books about Communism. After reviewing some basics like the Communist Manifesto, they recommend the Annals of Communism series:

...Once you've got the surveys under your belt, you can turn to Yale University Press' Annals of Communism series, a unique publishing venture designed to make use of Soviet archives. Whether you want Andrei Sakharov's personal files, Stalin's correspondence with Molotov, or documents explaining the Katyn massacre, they're all available in beautifully edited and annotated translations. Don't miss John Haynes and Harvey Klehr's history of the American Communist Party (also a Yale book, also based on Soviet archives), either.

Read the entire article here.

May 1 is also the beginning of National Hamburger Month. Hamburger expert and Yale Press author Josh Ozersky reviewed New York's best burgers for the Daily News. Here is what the Daily News had to say in return about Ozersky and his new book, The Hamburger: A History:

If the city has a professor of patties, it's probably Josh Ozersky, the online food editor for New York magazine.

Not only does he test out several specimens a week, but he has just written a sexy little volume on the history of the patty from its 18th-century beginnings to its postwar boom thanks to White Castle.

Read the entire article here.

Yale Press wraps up Nat'l Poetry Month with awards and readings

At their annual awards ceremony last night, The Publishing Triangle announced Janet Malcolm, author of the critically acclaimed Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, as winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. View the complete list of award winners here.

This remarkable work of literary biography and investigative journalism, 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.

For those poety lovers in the New Haven area, the five most recent winners of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition will read from their work on Friday, May 2nd.  Free and open to the public, the event will take place at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, Room 208, at 4:00 p.m.

Awarded since 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the most prominent new American poets by bringing the work of previously unpublished artists to the attention of the larger public.  Previous winners of the prize include such talents as Adrienne Rich, John Ashberry, and Robert Hass.  It is the longest-running poetry prize in the United States. More information on the event after the jump.

Happy 444th Birthday, Will!

"When we are born we cry that we are come... to this great stage of fools," William Shakespeare once wrote. Well, 444 years ago today, Shakespeare entered this great stage of fools and made a little more sense out of it. To learn about how he did this, check out the wide array of Yale Press titles about the Bard, including Shakespeare the Thinker by A. D. Nuttall.

Nuttall’s profound and elegantly written study of Shakespeare’s thought is a literary tour de force, a marvelous inquiry into the questions that engrossed the playwright throughout his life. Nuttall investigates the dynamic nature of Shakespeare’s evolving answers and provides for twenty-first-century readers an unparalleled guide to Shakespeare’s plays.

Click here for an extended question & answer discussion with Nuttall. View the table of contents or read an excerpt.

To read Shakespeare's words as they should be read, Yale Press offers the Annotated Shakespeare series. Judith McGowan from the American Association of School Librarians says, "The volumes in this series will enrich any library that stocks editions of individual Shakespeaean plays."

Through the Annotated Shakespeare series, today’s readers have immediate access to the tools they need to help them better comprehend the plays of Shakespeare and explore their many possible interpretations. Each volume includes an informative introduction by the editor, Burton Raffel, a critical essay by Harold Bloom, and comprehensive on-page annotations that assist with vocabulary, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. Handsome and affordable, these paperback editions invite every reader to get to know—or become reacquainted with—the genius of Shakespeare.

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.

Yale Press continues Nat'l Poetry Month celebration

Fady Joudah, author of The Earth in the Attic, was featured on Tuesday by the online anthology of contemporary poetry, Poetry Daily. The site also shared two of Joudah's poems, "Atlas" and "The Tea and Sage Poem."Those poems, both from The Earth in the Attic, can be read here. Also, you can click here to listen to Fady Joudah read "In the Calm" from his poem, "Pulse."

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He lives in Houston, TX. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poetry The Butterfly’s Burden.

As part of their celebration of National Poetry Month, CBC Radio's Writers & Company invited Yale Press author John Felstiner to talk on Monday about his book Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Click here to hear that interview in RealAudio format--and to hear Celan himself read from his most famous work, Deathfuge.

This book is the first critical biography of Paul Celan, a German-speaking East European Jew who was Europe’s most compelling postwar poet. It tells the story of Celan’s life, offers new translations of his poems, and illuminates the connection between Celan’s lived experience and his poetry.

Felstiner's biography has received many accolades: nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; chosen as a best book of 1995 by Choice magazine, Village Voice, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Philadelphia Inquirer; and winner of the 1997 University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.

Hartford Courant profiles Brent and YUP's digital Stalin archive

The Hartford Courant profiled Jonathan Brent, editorial director of Yale Press' Annals of Communism Project, and interviewed him about the Press's $1.3 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to develop a digital documentary edition of Stalin's Personal Archive.

After sharing a story of Stalin's correspondences with director Sergei Eisenstein and novelist Upton Sinclair, the Courant said, "It is documents like the dispatch to Sinclair that distinguish Yale's Stalin archive." Read the entire article here.

The article in the Courant was picked up by the History News Network, as well as by RussiaTrek and cafe historia, who said, "This is surely what the web was designed to do. If only other institutions would follow suit."

The digitization of Stalin's Personal Archive is a new initiative of Yale University Press' acclaimed Annals of Communism series, begun in 1992.  The digitized documents from this archive will become the basis for future scholarly research, while expediting traditional book publications on topics of great importance in understanding Soviet and twentieth-century world history.

NY Sun: Yale Press books explain and enchant

Writing for the New York Sun, John Merriman reviewed Philip Dwyer's Napoleon: The Path to Power, finding it "an excellent history and a very good read." He says that many sections were not only "compelling," but also finds them pertinent to current militaristic and political events. Read the entire review here.

A groundbreaking biography focusing on the young Napoleon and his improbable rise to power. Debunking many of the myths that Napoleon himself promulgated as an early manipulator of the media, Dwyer's book sheds new light on Napoleon's inner life and character, and on the twisting path that led from his boyhood in Corsica to the coup that gave him leadership of France at the age of thirty.

Elsewhere in the NY Sun, Eric Ormsby reviewed The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, in which "the well-known historian of books and reading lovingly explores the nooks and crannies of this enchanted domain." Ormsby later states that "there seems to be nothing Mr. Manguel has not read," although he is "never narrowly bookish." Read the entire review here.

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. "Libraries," he 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 this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.

Jeal wins NBCC award for Biography!

The National Book Critics Circle awarded Tim Jeal first place in the category of Biography for Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer. The NBCC blog Critical Mass liveblogged the award ceremony:

7:06 p.m.: Art Winslow announces the winner for Biography. It's...

TIM JEAL, FOR STANLEY: THE IMPOSSIBLE LIFE OF AFRICA'S GREATEST EXPLORER!

7:10 p.m.: Tim Jeal takes the mike, and is "deeply grateful" to his wife for putting up with him. Says "gobsmacked," which is the best reason for putting anyone from the UK near a mike.

Read more about the award here.

Jeal's been having a great week. Last Thursday he was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the category of Biography. The winner of that award will be announced in late April at the LA Times Festival of Books.

Tim Jeal is the author of two previous biographies, Livingstone and Baden-Powell: Founder of the Boy Scouts, both published by Yale University Press and both chosen as Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Abert's Mozart tops WSJ list

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, music critic James Penrose listed the five best books to "sound the depths of composers' lives." The number one book on that list is Hermann Abert's W.A. Mozart. Here's what Penrose had to say about the book:

Modern Mozart scholarship is indebted to Hermann Abert's groundbreaking biography, and little wonder. When it appeared in German almost 90 years ago, this engaging work was the last word on Mozart's life (1756-91) and music, offering penetrating analysis and wonderful accounts of his travails and triumphs and of his operas, concertos, church music and symphonies. But until last year, the book had never been translated into English. Stewart Spencer admirably executed the task for Yale University Press, and editor Cliff Eisen, a distinguished Mozart scholar, updated the text with scrupulous and marvelously perceptive annotations. Abert's study is a model of musical biography.

Penrose is not alone in his praise for W.A. Mozart. H.C. Robbins Landon calls it "indispensable. There is no doubt that Abert’s biography of Mozart is the most distinguished and best informed ever written, and it is incomprehensible that it has never been translated into English." Laurence Dreyfus of Magdalen College, Oxford agrees, finding W.A. Mozart to be "a very useful book. Nothing else does the job."

Read from the rest of the WSJ list.

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.

Remembering William F. Buckley, Jr.

The New York Times reports, "William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn."

The "scourge of liberalism" may have become famous for criticizing Yale's academics, but Buckley lauded Yale University Press for the Annals of Communism series. Buckley helped raise money for the research, which he called "a historical juggernaut capable of refashioning the trendy history in which so many American scholars were once ensnared."

The Annals of Communism presents selected documents concerning the history of Soviet and international communism from Russian state and party archives. Virtually all the material contained in these archives has never before been available to Western or even Russian scholars. For more information, visit the series website here.

More of Buckley's writing can be found in Bright Pages: Yale Writers, 1701-2001, edited and with an introduction by J.D. McClatchy.

Inspiring teachers, colliding ideas, great literature--such college experiences can stamp a young writer for life. This dazzling book contains the work of dozens of writers whose education at Yale over the last three centuries exerted a powerful force on their writing lives. The galaxy of authors ranges from Noah Webster to Gloria Naylor, and a bounty of their sermons, poems, essays, passages from novels, and short stories fills these bright pages.

Khrushcheva’s Imagining Nabokov tops reading lists

Andrew Nagorski, award-winning journalist and senior editor at Newsweek International, is a fan of Nina Khrushcheva’s Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics. When asked by the blog "Writers Read," Nagorski said, "At a time when Putin’s Russia is once again claiming a special status and scorning the West and its concept of democracy, Nina Khrushcheva has written an extended meditation on one of that country’s great writers: Vladimir Nabokov.... Nabokov was a truly modern man, someone who offers a much-needed antidote to the increasingly narrow outlook of Russia’s current rulers."

This book offers the original hypothesis that the novels of Russian-turned-American writer Vladimir Nabokov are highly relevant to the political transformation underway in Russia today. Nina Khrushcheva suggests that Nabokov’s fictional Western characters can be useful guides for acquiring new skills that the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders requires.

You may have seen Khrushcheva in her appearance on the Russia Today network yesterday, talking about the upcoming Russian elections. If you missed it, be sure to tune in to CBC Radio (Canada) on Feb. 29th. She will appear on As It Happens to discuss both the elections and Imagining Nabokov.

If you want to see Khrushcheva in person, then go to the New School on March 7th, where she'll appear with Jack Matlock and Ian Buruma. For more information on that author event, click here.

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.

Who was the real Fidel Castro?

In the wake of his resignation, many are asking who Fidel Castro really was, and what really happened in Cuba during his tenure as President. The answer to these questions--and more--can be found in two Yale Press titles, both available in paperback.

The Real Fidel Castro by Leycester Coltman

Published on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, this timely book, the most intimate and dispassionate biography of Fidel Castro to date, offers a fresh assessment of the revolutionary leader. Written by the British ambassador to Cuba in the early 1990s, it chronicles the events of Castro’s extraordinary life and explores the contradiction between the private character and the public reputation.

Cuba: A New History by Richard Gott

In this acute and profoundly engaged exploration of Cuban history, British journalist Richard Gott illuminates the island’s entire revolutionary past, from pre-Columbian times to the present. He emphasizes little-known aspects of Cuba’s early centuries and provides an extraordinary account of Castro’s regime, its lonely survival in the post-Soviet years, and its expected future. View the table of contents by clicking here.

"Elegant and erudite," Harkness' Jewel House is a gem

In an enthusiastic review in the American Scientist, history professor Anthony Grafton praised Deborah E. Harkness and her book The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. Grafton says, "She has charted the local and cosmopolitan worlds of science in Elizabethan London with a learning, precision and intelligence that compel admiration. Like the instrument makers who nested near St. Paul's, moreover, she has crafted a shiny, complex and effective new analytical mechanism—one that may well transform the practices of historians of early modern science, if others can muster the courage and energy to follow her example and analyze in similar depth and detail the scientific worlds of Florence, Nuremberg, Antwerp and Paris."

This captivating book is the first to focus on the array of ordinary men and women who shared a keen interest in nature and scientific inquiry in Elizabethan London. Throughout the vibrant city, lawyers, prisoners, midwives, merchants, and others developed the tools and techniques, as well as the collaborative yet contentious culture, that became the hallmarks of the Scientific Revolution.

Read an excerpt, or view the table of contents.

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.

Kazin biography is "rich," "absorbing," and "truly resonant"

Reviewers are praising Richard M. Cook for his recent Yale Press release, Alfred Kazin: A Biography. Here's just a sampling of what they have to say.

In a February 7 review, San Francisco Chronicle complimented Cook on "a fine job in recounting and interpreting his subject's life." They applaud Cook's ability "to produce a much fuller and rounded portrait" than in all three of Kazin's autobiographies. Cook is a "very sympathetic biographer," with a "sure grasp of the issues at stake" in Kazin's life. They especially admired Cook's "sensitive exploration of the touchy topic of Kazin's Jewish identity.... Cook handles this difficult subject with exemplary finesse." Read the entire review here.

The Chicago Tribune's February 2 review similarly commends Cook's biography, saying that "thanks to Cook's exhaustive research -- synthesizing scores of interviews, distilling the thousands of words from the archive of Kazin's journals -- we now have a vivid chronology of the life of a major literary figure in the 20th Century." Read the entire review here.

Bookforum in their review that Cook's work is "fine, able, and intelligent." They compliment "the way Cook lets Kazin speak and think for himself." Later, they say that "Cook's account of Kazin's mature years is rich and laden with anecdotes." Read the entire review here.

Alfred Kazin, the son of barely literate Jewish immigrants, rose from near poverty to become a dominant figure in literary criticism and one of America’s last great men of letters. This book provides the first complete portrait of Kazin, his troubled personal life, his relationships with such figures as Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt, and his prodigious contributions as a public intellectual.

Yale Press authors explore Broadway, investigate Roswell, and report on Latin America

Especially in these winter months, it's hard to imagine a world without "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and other classic Frank Loesser tunes. Mark Steyn, reviewing Thomas L. Riis' Frank Loesser for the Wall Street Journal, realizes that "a world without Frank Loesser and 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' would be very cold indeed." Steyn calls Frank Loesser by Yale Press author Thomas L. Riis "a solid overview of an underappreciated talent." Steyn not only praises this "invaluable" book, but also Yale University Press as a whole for the "important and valuable Broadway Masters series of musicological studies." You can read the entire review here.

Frank Loesser, most famous for composing the ever-popular musical Guys and Dolls (1950), also wrote the music and lyrics for the Pulitzer prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and other hits. This book is the first to bring the full story of Loesser’s life and creative achievement in Hollywood and on Broadway into the light.

Elsewhere in the Wall Street Journal, Max Holland listed the "Five Best" books on untangling the rise of conspiracy theories. Number 2 was Yale Press' Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America by Robert Alan Goldberg, which Holland called "unrivaled" for books published within the past decade. You can see Holland's entire list here.

In this enthralling book Robert Goldberg focuses on conspiracy theories in post-World War II America, examining how they became popular and why they remain so. He investigates conspiracy theories surrounding the Roswell UFO incident, the Communist threat, the rise of the Antichrist, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the Jewish plot against black America. Those who suspect conspiracies are not confined to the lunatic fringe, Goldberg shows. In fact, paranoid rhetoric and thinking are disturbingly widespread and have become an integral part of American political culture.

You can tune in tomorrow to KERA Texas public radio to hear Michael Reid, author of Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul. His hour-long interview for Think with Krys Boyd will start at noon, February 12, and can be heard online here.

Latin America, home to half-a-billion people, the world's largest reserves of arable land, and 8.5 percent of global oil, is in the midst of a vast transformation. Michael Reid, a journalist with many years of experience in the region, explores Latin America's current shift to the political left, its struggle to compete economically, and the potential for democracy to flourish there.

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.

Malcolm's Two Lives makes NBCC's Good Reads List

Two Lives by Janet Malcolm made the National Book Critics Circle's Good Reads Long List for Nonfiction. The list is comprised of "the nonfiction titles which received multiple votes" from the NBCC. It was announced this morning on the NBCC blog here, where you can find the entire list, along with other NBCC Good Reads lists for Fiction and Poetry.

Malcolm’s Two Lives, a remarkable work of literary biography and investigative journalism, 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. 

The New York Times Book Review named Two Lives an Editors' Choice and said, "Sharp criticism meets playful, absorbing biography in this study of Stein and Toklas."

Read an excerpt, or view the table of contents.

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.

Cook's Alfred Kazin a complex, fascinating subject

Richard M. Cook's Alfred Kazin: A Biography, about one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century, has in turn become the subject of articles by literary critics from The New York Sun, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New York Times Book Review.

In his Jan. 23 review for the New York Sun, Adam Kirsch praised Cook's biography, despite Kazin's complex character: "Mr. Cook has a judicious appreciation of Kazin's work as a memoirist and literary critic, and he has mastered the tempestuous literary-political milieu of the New York intellectuals to which Kazin uncomfortably belonged." Kirsch found especially interesting the period of Kazin's life in the 1920s and '30s.

On the other hand, Richard Eder, writing a review for The Los Angeles Times Book Review, delighted in "the complications of this genial, acerbic figure." He finds it admirable that what "Cook brings out, appealingly, is his subject's mix of brashness and humility." He finds that "Cook is best at tracing Kazin's growing use of his Jewishness in his books."

William Grimes, in his Jan. 2 review for the New York Times Book Review , would agree with Eder, finding that "Cook amply documents" Kazin's life with an "even-tempered, judicious biography of this notoriously prickly critic." With a "discerning eye" and a "deft hand," Cook "introduces... hundreds of illuminating passages from Kazin’s unpublished journals to round out the picture.... In Mr. Cook’s hands Kazin emerges as an arresting hybrid."

Novelist Brian Morton wrote on the book as well for the Jan 27 New York Times Book Review. Morton, when he met Kazin, "could only envy the astonishing vitality of his mind." He thinks that "Cook’s biography, the first that has appeared of Kazin, is a respectable effort, well written and well researched."

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.

Jeal's Stanley named finalist by NBCC

On January 12, Tim Jeal received a nomination from the National Book Critics Circle for their annual award. Jeal's recent book, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer, was one of 5 biographies from 2007 named as finalist. Winners will be announced on March 6, 2008.

Henry Morton Stanley, so the tale goes, was a cruel imperialist who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in horrific crimes against the people of the Congo. He also conducted the most legendary celebrity interview in history, opening with, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

But these perceptions are not quite true, Tim Jeal shows in this grand and colorful biography. With unprecedented access to previously closed Stanley family archives, Jeal reveals the amazing extent to which Stanley's public career and intimate life have been misunderstood and undervalued. Jeal recovers the reality of Stanley's life—a life of almost impossible extremes—in this moving story of tragedy, adventure, disappointment, and success.

Founded in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle is a non-profit organization consisting of nearly 700 active book reviewers. Read more about the National Book Critics Circle or about their award.

Janet Malcolm at a Chelsea reading

BandofThebes.com has put up this excellent picture of Yale Press author Janet Malcolm at a reading for her book Two Lives in Chelsea on Wednesday night.

Stephen Bottum, the blogger behind BandofThebes.com, likes Two Lives for the "many fascinating revelations in the slim book, which manages to say something new and important about the nature of biography, the quirks of writing, the work of reading, the unknowability of human actions, the ways in which biographers 'use' their minor characters, and how a scholar's overwhelming fear of not living up to early promise can ultimately prevent him from completing any work." He called the book "always engaging."

You can read his entire blog post here.