Yale Press Log

NYT on professions and recessions: Sennett and Fraser

Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Lewis Hyde reviewed The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. He explains the book's ideas, saying that he enjoyed "the companionship of its inquiring intelligence." Hyde goes on to tell the readers, "There is much to learn here." Read the entire review here.

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than "skilled manual labor," Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman's work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

Click here to listen to an interview with Richard Sennett on the Yale Press Podcast. View the table of contents, or read an excerpt from The Craftsman.

In an article on Wall Street-bound graduates and their nervousness about the recession, Louise Story of the New York Times asked Yale Press author Steve Fraser. Fraser, author of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, also teaches an undergraduate seminar on Wall Street at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the beginning of the semester, Mr. Fraser noticed that students seemed to think the housing crisis was unrelated to their goals in finance and was caused mostly by irresponsible borrowers. But after the collapse of Bear Sterns, he said, they had "a great deal more sympathy for people who have already been affected by this crisis.

"There’s a sense in the class now that things are more worrying, that this may affect them."

Read the entire New York Times article here. Click here to listen to an interview with Fraser on the Yale Press Podcast.

Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power is "a measured, brilliant book"

"A pinch-mouthed, grave-digger's poetry," which remains "rich and allusive," with "passages of stunning beauty." This is how poet and critic William Logan describes Geoffrey Hill's recent collection, A Treatise of Civil Power, in a front-page review for the New York Times Book Review.

Logan goes on to say, "English has rarely possessed a poet who listens so closely to its whispers, or is as willing to expose its secret etiquettes.... Hill is the most glorious poet of the English countryside since the first romantic started gushing about flowers, his verse so radioactive in its sensitivities that his landscapes have been accused of cheap nostalgia." You can read the entire review by clicking here.

Geoffrey Hill's latest collection takes its title from a pamphlet by Milton of 1659 that attacks the concept of a state church as well as corruption in church governance. As Milton figures prominently here, so too must the Lord Protector, Cromwell, addressed in a memorable sonnet sequence. Also considered by Hill are other poets to whom he nods in gratitude, not just Milton and "my god" Ben Jonson, or Robert Herrick, or William Blake, but also Robert Lowell and, perhaps most interestingly, John Berryman, whose Dream Songs haunts this present collection.

Here we again confront the poet's familiar obsessions—language, governance, war, politics, the contemporary and classical worlds, and the nature of poetry itself. John Hollander writes of Hill's poems that they immerse themselves "in the matters of stones and rock, of permanence and historical change, martyrdoms and mockeries, and above all history and the monuments and residua of its consequences in places, things, and persons." A Treatise of Civil Power is the work of a major poet at the height of his powers.

"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.

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.

Kronman in the Yale Daily News

The Yale Daily News ran an article on Anthony Kronman's new book, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. The article, found here, discussed the impact of Kronman's ideas upon the Yale campus, including how Kronman "inspired" University President Richard Levin for his annual freshman address.

Education's End 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. Tony 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.

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.

Fukuyama on Neoconservatism

This March Yale University Press will publish a paperback edition of Francis Fukyama's America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and Neoconservatism, which has been selected as a CHOICE outstanding academic book for 2007.

This edition features a new foreword by the author, who argues that the neoconservatives have learned nothing in the last five years, as they are now fervently calling for an invasion of Iran although their actions in Iraq resulted in disaster.

In an excerpt of the preface published in The Guardian last week, Fukuyama writes:

What I find remarkable about the neoconservative line of argument on Iran, however, is how little changed it is in its basic assumptions and tonalities from that taken on Iraq in 2002, despite the momentous events of the past five years and the manifest failure of policies that neoconservatives themselves advocated. What may change is the American public's willingness to listen to them.

The full excerpt can be found here.

Show Notes for Episode 3, Yale Press Podcast

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

The famous baseball manager, Casey Stengell, once said that "There comes a time in every man's life, and I've had plenty of them." I had one of those moments during my interview with John Marzluff and Tony Angell, when Tony decided to cut loose with both a Raven and Crow call. I knew right then that I was going to have something fun for the opening segment.

As usual, the guest list was a very cool mixed bag. I thought that Sidney Kirkpatrick's statement on how his step-daughter's illness was the inspiration to write about Thomas Eakins was a nice moment. I now hope that Dr. Gerald Edelman, or someone else, might look more into the intersection of brain science and Eastern philosophy, which we got into just a bit on his extended interview. And I thought that all of the Gombrich family stories that Leonie Gombrich told were great. I now have both A Little History of the World and The Story of Art side by side on my bookshelf.

Please send me comments and questions. The Ask the Author segment has been running dry, and if I don't start getting some e-mails, I'll have to make up some of my own ;)

Stay warm,

Chris

NYTimes Holiday Book Review

Six books published by Yale University Press are featured in the annual New York Times Holiday Book Review, out this past weekend.

Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2006 by the Review’s editors.

Reviewer David Hajdu wrote of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction Cartoons, and True Stories, edited by Ivan Brunetti, “Now going under the name graphic fiction, no doubt temporarily, the comics are all grown up, and this anthology represents the most cogent proof since Will Eisner pioneered the graphic novel and Art Spiegelman brought long-form comics to early perfection.”

Joel Smith’s Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, was called a “smartly annotated miscellany of rare familiar sketches and finished tableaus . . . Smith’s informative text sheds more than superficial light, exploring Steinberg’s wide range of themes and techniques.”

Picasso and American Art, by Michael FitzGerald and John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874-1882 edited by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray were highlighted in Holiday Books: Art and America.

Palladio’s Venice by Tracy E. Cooper, was highlighted in Holiday Books: Venice.

Hannah Arendt and the Study of Evil

Listen to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of Why Arendt Matters, discuss Hannah Arendt, her examination of totalitarianism, and the "banality of evil," on NPR's All Things Considered.

Why Arendt Matters

Saturday, October 14, marks the centennial of the birth of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the German-born political philosopher whose analysis of the nature of power, totalitarianism, and the "banality of evil" still resonates powerfully in our own time. "So it is no accident," says Edward Rothstein in the New York Times, "that in discussing Arendt's importance more than 30 years after her death, Iraq and terrorism are often mentioned alongside her views of power and violence, statelessness and totalitarianism; her most solemn assessments of the traumatic past become warnings for the imminent future."

This point is driven home in a new book, Why Arendt Matters, written by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt's doctoral student in the early 1970s who wrote the definitive biography of her mentor in 1982 (Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, now in its Second Edition). Young-Bruehl considers what Arendt's analysis of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union can teach us about our own times, and how her revolutionary understanding of political action is connected to forgiveness and making promises for the future.

Arendt's birth centennial is also being commemorated by a host of conferences and lectures around the world. Click here for details.

Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist

"The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he." - Karl Kraus

If you've never heard of Karl Kraus, the Austrian satirist who inflicted withering and witty critiques on the mass media, the military-industrial complex, and German culture in the early decades of the last century, get in line. "For years, Kraus's work gathered dust, and he is now all but unknown in America," laments Jack Willoughby in Barron's. "Very little of his work has been translated into English because of the complexity of his rich German prose. But he is undergoing something of a renaissance, thanks in no small part to [Edward] Timms," author of the massively erudite two-volume biography, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist.

The second volume of the biography, subtitled The Postwar Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika, takes up Kraus's story in November 1918, when the satirist responded to the creation of the new republics with a defiant hope, invoking international law against the dual threat of reactionary politics and irresponsible media. Timms refutes the legend that Kraus responded with stunned silence to Hitler's seizer of power: His career culminated in Third Walpurgis Night, a harsh polemic of Nazi ideology that has proved enduringly influential. He concludes that Kraus's lifelong critique of the media, combining Orwellian political radicalism with Joycian linguistic playfulness, incisively anticipates the propaganda techniques of our own age.

In the Summer issue of BookForum, Marjorie Perloff calls Timms' two-volume biography of Kraus "a richly documented account of Kraus's brilliant and merciless exposure of political spin and moral hypocrisy in the early twentieth century; it provides, moreover, extraordinarily detailed information about the cultural and political life of modern Vienna."

The End Justifies the Green

What do The Godfather, The Cat in the Hat, and Machiavelli's The Prince have in common? According to Stanley Bing in this weekend's Wall Street Journal, they are among the five books that offer the soundest advice for proper business etiquette.

Before your eyes roll too far into the back of your head, consider what Bing has to say about Machiavelli's The Prince (1513):

Masquerading as a philosophical treatise in support of a strong senior executive, this book is actually a road map for ruthless narcissists -- the kind who do very well because their primary concern at all times is Numero Uno. Machiavelli discovered a central truth that leads to business success: Moral concerns have very little utility in the day-to-day conduct of successful management. No, it's not a nice book. It advises all kinds of pre-emptive murder and destruction of one's enemies and, when necessary, of one's friends. But an embrace of its world view has been at the center of virtually all executive success since the beginning of time. What Machiavelli did was to make the tactics of the big guys available to anybody who cared to consider them. A firm grasp of his tenets creates a business etiquette that is at once cool, polite, thoughtful, strategic and brutal.

On that note, Yale University Press would like ruthlessly to promote its recent edition of The Prince.  Angelo M. Codevilla offers a translation uniquely faithful to the original and especially sensitive to the author's use of verbal imprecision, including puns, double meanings, and the subjunctive mood. The translation is accompanied by three critical essays that explore some of the most important ways The Prince clashes with the other main branch of Western civilization, the Socratic and Judeo-Christian traditions.

Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism

An editorial in today’s New York Times states, “[President] Bush's decision after 9/11 that he had the power to put prisoners beyond the reach of the law at his choosing was the first attempt to suspend habeas corpus on American territory since the Civil War.” It continues:

The retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor observed in a recent speech that the framers created three separate and equal branches of government because they knew that preserving liberty requires that no single branch or person can amass unchecked power. According to NPR's Nina Totenberg, who heard the speech, Justice O'Connor cited Republican court-stripping efforts as an example of dangerous overreaching. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship," Justice O'Connor said, "but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

Bruce Ackerman’s new book Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in An Age of Terrorism, attempts to show us how. In the book, Ackerman presents an intuitive, practical alternative to the nation’s current inclinations in responding to terrorism and exposes the dangers lurking behind the popular notion that we are fighting a “war” on terror.

The following is an excerpt from the First Chapter,
THIS IS NOT A WAR:

“War on terror” is, on its face, a preposterous expression. Terrorism is simply the name of a technique: intentional attacks on innocent civilians. But war isn’t merely a technical matter: it is a life-and-death struggle against a particular enemy. We made war against Nazi Germany, not against the Blitzkrieg.

Once we allow ourselves to declare war on a technique, we open up a dangerous rhetorical path. During times of panic, indiscriminate war talk will encourage a shocked public to lash out at amorphous threats without the need to define them clearly. Who knows who will be swept into the net?

There is a second big flaw. By calling it a war, we frame our problem as if it involved a struggle with a massively armed major power, capable of threatening our very existence as a free country. But terrorism isn’t a product of overweening state power. It is a product of the free market in a world of high technology.

There have always been millions of haters in the world, but their destructive ambitions have been checked by the state’s monopoly over truly overwhelming force. Terrorists might assassinate a nation’s leader or blow up a building, but they could not devastate a great city or poison an entire region. These are things that only states could do. With the proliferation of destructive technologies, the state is losing this monopoly.

Here is where the logic of the free market enters. Once a technology has escaped a state monopoly, it’s almost impossible for government to suppress the lucrative trade completely. Think of drugs and guns. Even the most puritanical regimes learn to live with vice on the fringe. But when a fringe group obtains a technology of mass destruction, it won’t stay on the fringe for long.

The root of our problem is not Islam or any ideology, but a fundamental change in the relationship between the state, the market, and technologies of destruction. If the Middle East were magically transformed into a vast oasis of peace and democracy, fringe groups from other places would rise to fill the gap. We won’t need to look far to find them. If a tiny band of extremists blasted the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, others will want to detonate suitcase A-bombs as they become available, giving their lives eagerly in the service of their self-destructive vision.

Preventive measures will sometimes fail. Once the state no longer monopolizes a technology of destruction, the laws of supply and demand will inexorably put weapons in the hands of the richest and best-organized terrorists in the marketplace, and government will be playing catch-up. The only question is how often the security services will drop the ball: once out of ten threats, once out of a hundred, once out of a thousand?

These basic points are obscured by the fog of war talk. Real wars don’t come out of nowhere because the government has dropped the ball. They arise after years of highly visible tension between sovereign states, and after the failure of countless efforts at diplomacy. They occur only after the public has reluctantly recognized that the awesome powers of warmaking might be justified. Even sneak attacks, as at Pearl Harbor, are preceded by years of escalating tension that put the public on notice that a powerful nation-state, with an aggressive military force, threatens overwhelming harm to all we love.

But when terrorists strike, all we really know is that they managed to slip through a crack that the government failed to close. Given the free market in destructive technologies, we don’t know whether we face a tiny group of fanatics, with a couple of million dollars, which happened to get lucky, or a more serious organization with real staying power. By lapsing into war talk we trigger a set of associations that are often false and frequently encourage the worst of panic reactions. We head down a misleading path suggesting that not only are “the terrorists” numerous and well organized, but they are somehow capable of wielding the earth shattering forces mobilized by major nation-states. This is very unlikely: Osama in his cave doesn’t remotely represent the totalizing threat of Hitler in his Chancellery. And yet in the aftermath of a sneak attack, our expansive war talk invites us to suppose that we should confide to government the awesome powers that might well be appropriate when fighting a Third World War.

Manliness

"This book is about manliness," begins the preface of a provocative new book by Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University.

What is that? It's best to start from examples we know: our sports heroes, too many to name; Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who is the mightiest woman of our time (What! a woman, manly?); Harry S. Truman, who said "the buck stops here"; Humphrey Bogart, who as Rick in Casablanca was confident and cynical--cool before "cool" was invented; and the courageous police and firemen in New York City on September 11, 2001. Manliness seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk. Manliness brings change or restores order at moments when routine is not enough, when the plan fails, when the whole idea of rational control by modern science develops leaks. Manliness is the next-to-last resort, before resignation and prayer.

Here, Mansfield answers a few questions about his new book:

Q: Why did you decide to write a book on manliness?

A: We today have embarked, not fully realizing what we are doing, on a radical experiment to make a society never before seen in history--a gender-neutral society in which your sex matters as little as possible and does not give you your rights, your duties, and your place. Manliness, a quality that prevails in one sex, stands in the way of this aspiration. Is it obsolete? My book shows what manliness brings to a free society: confidence in the face of risk and trouble from those who love to risk too much.

Q: You identify "educated women" as the primary target audience for your book. Why?

A: Women are better listeners than men, and I want to persuade them of the need to make room in their lives and thoughts for manliness. Even if they don't agree, they will be interested to see what I make of manliness and of differences between the sexes. I assume men will want to learn about manliness. Anyway, they ought to.

Q: What is the difference between "manliness" and "masculinity"?

A: "Masculinity" collects traits that are common to all or almost all males; these are close to the male body. "Manliness" is a quality of the soul only a few men have, and they typically look down on most men for not being manly. Nowadays "masculinity" is sometimes used to depreciate manliness by critics who don't care for it.

Q: Who's manly and who's not?

A: Among actors John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are manly, Alan Alda and pretty boys like Leonardo DiCaprio and Jude Law are not. Harry S. Truman was manly, Jimmy Carter is not. Any novel by Elmore Leonard revolves around a manly man, usually a criminal. But my point is not to provide criteria for judging who is manly. Most people know that already. They don’t know how to judge what is manly. What do manly men do for us? Are they more trouble than they are worth?

Click here to read an interview with Dr. Mansfield that appeared in The Wall Street Journal (March 4).