Yale Press Log

Yale Press authors on nuclear war and black holes

Foreign Affairs, published by the Council of Foreign Relations, asked Lawrence Freedman to choose his five favorite books of the past year about military, science, and technology. He chose Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez as one of the year's best books. Read the entire list here.

This groundbreaking history shatters many assumptions about the Six-Day War of 1967. New research in Soviet archives and testimonies from participants in the Israeli/Egyptian conflict reveal the extent of the Kremlin’s involvement, plans for the use of nuclear weapons in the Mid-East, and willingness to precipitate a global crisis.

Click here to listen to an interview with Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez on the Yale Press Podcast.

And Fred R. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, corrected the Times on the history of the term "black hole." Read his explanation on the Times Online.

Click here to listen to an interview with Fred Shapiro on the Yale Press Podcast.

Shapiro blegs for the Freakonomics blog

Stephen J. Dubner of the New York Times' Freakonomics blog invited "blegs" from the readers--or, "questions that the Freakonomics readership could collectively answer well." The inaugural bleg--did Clint Eastwood's ever say "Read my lips"--was answered with the help of Yale Press' own Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the "wonderful" Yale Book of Quotations. Shapiro began by explaining the methodology of his work.

“Quotations research” is probably a new concept to most readers, but I have become one of the few people in the world who conducts extensive research about famous quotations. Even standard quotation books like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations are based on surprisingly minimal research, but I set out eight years ago to create a new quotation book that would use state-of-the-art research methods — as well as extensive networking — to track down the accurate origins of well-known quotes.

Check back on the Freakonomics blog every Thursday to see Shapiro's future blegs.

This reader-friendly quotation book is unique in its focus on modern and American quotations.  It is also the first to use state-of-the-art research methods to capture famous quotations and to trace sources of quotations to their true origins.  It contains more than 12,000 entries not only from literary and historical sources but also from popular culture, sports, computers, politics, law, and the social sciences. With fascinating annotations, extensive cross-references, and a large keyword index, the book is a curious reader's delight.

Read the rest of the blog post, including a lively conversation in the comments section.

Choice annual list includes 26 Yale Press books

A publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries, Choice, recently announced its list of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2007. This list, released on January 1, "reflects the best titles reviewed by Choice in 2007 and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community." Yale University Press appears on this prestigious list 26 times among the 646 titles in 54 disciplines and subsections. Here is a list of the titles chosen from Yale Press:

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, by Arthur H. Cash

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, by David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden

Britannia and Muscovy: English Silver at the Court of the Tsars, by Natalya Abramova and Irina Zagarodnaya

On Political Equality, by Robert A. Dahl

Art in the Making: Rembrandt, by David Bomford, Jo Kirby, Ashok Roy, Axel Rüger, and Raymond White

Caesar: Life of a Colossus, by Adrian Goldsworthy

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

The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. by Fred R. Shapiro

Fred Shapiro names year's top 10 quotes

As 2008 approaches, Fred R. Shapiro, the editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, looked back on all of the quotes, soundbytes, and catchphrases that made an impact in 2007. Now, Shapiro has prepared a top ten list of the most memorable quotes, Reuters reports.

Shapiro's number one for 2007 was "Don't tase me, bro!" from University of Florida student Andrew Meyer. According to Reuters, Shapiro sees this quote as "a symbol of pop culture success. Within two days it was one of the most popular phrases on Google and one of the most viewed videos. It also showed up on ringtones and T-shirts."

Shapiro's list was also featured on NBC's TODAY show. On Meyer's quote, Shapiro told MSNBC, "It's not Shakespeare, but there is a kind of folk eloquence in that. It wouldn't be a quote if he didn't say 'bro'.... That had just the right rhythm to make it memorable."

To read Reuter's article on the entire list, click here. To see TODAY's segment on it, launch the video found here.

This reader-friendly quotation book is unique in its focus on modern and American quotations.  It is also the first to use state-of-the-art research methods to capture famous quotations and to trace sources of quotations to their true origins.  It contains more than 12,000 entries not only from literary and historical sources but also from popular culture, sports, computers, politics, law, and the social sciences. With fascinating annotations, extensive cross-references, and a large keyword index, the book is a curious reader's delight.

Read an excerpt from the book, or listen to an interview with Fred Shapiro on the Yale Press Podcast.

Book Review Call for Quotation Submissions

This weekend's New York Times Book Review devoted the "TBR: Inside the List" column to discussing The Yale Book of Quotations, specifically the relative dearth of quotations from recent literature. Dwight Garner says, "A lot's been written already – most of it deservedly positive – about the new 'Yale Book of Quotations,' edited by Fred R. Shapiro. It's an attractive book: clean, tart, concise. And Shapiro's got a nice eye for recent bits of pop flotsam." Garner invites readers to send in their favorite short fiction and non-fiction quotations from writers born in 1950 or later to quotes@nytimes.com.

If enough contributions are sent in, the Book Review will print the best on the back page of a forthcoming issue.

Most Quoted Authors in Yale Book of Quotations

Posted by Fred R. Shapiro, Editor of The Yale Book of Quotations:

I am often asked about who are the most-quoted authors in The Yale Book of Quotations.  The first two are, unsurprisingly:

• William Shakespeare . . . 455 quotations
• Bible . . . 400

The next two on the list are less conventional for quotation dictionaries:

• Mark Twain . . . 153
• Ambrose Bierce . . . 144

The high ranking of these two suggests the American and, perhaps, iconoclastic emphases of the book.

Where I diverged even further from the "most-quoted" rankings in the standard quotation dictionaries is in the representation of modern figures, such as the following:

• Winston Churchill . . . 55
• F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . 52
• Groucho Marx . . . 51
• George Orwell . . . 51
• Dorothy Parker . . . 49
• H. L. Mencken . . . 46
• W. H. Auden . . . 44
• Woody Allen . . . 43
• John F. Kennedy . . . 41
• John Lennon/Paul McCartney . . . 39
• Albert Einstein . . . 38
• Ernest Hemingway . . . 36
• Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . 35
• Ezra Pound . . . 30
• W. C. Fields . . . 29
• James Joyce . . . 29
• Bob Dylan . . . 27
• Oscar Hammerstein II . . . 27
• Robert Frost . . . 26
• Cole Porter . . . 26
• Mae West . . . 24
• Sigmund Freud . . . 24
• George W. Bush . . . 23
• Richard M. Nixon . . . 22
• Dylan Thomas . . . 22
• Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . 21
• Virginia Woolf . . . 21
• George H. W. Bush . . . 20
• e. e. cummings . . . 20
• Ronald W. Reagan . . . 20

"The Dismal Science" in The Yale Book of Quotations

Posted by Fred R. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations:

Among the more than 12,000 quotations in The Yale Book of Quotations, many have stories to tell transcending the quotation itself.  The famous epithet for the discipline of economics, "the dismal science," is said by some standard reference works to have originated in Thomas Carlyle's 1850 work, Latter-Day Pamphlets.  The Yale Book of Quotations, however, documents that Carlyle in fact used "the dismal science" earlier, in "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (1849).

The context of first use is of more than trivial interest here, as Carlyle coined "the dismal science" to describe anti-slavery economists (Carlyle himself argued in this essay for the reintroduction of slavery into the West Indies).  Economists may therefore be proud to be associated with the object of Carlyle's disdain.

Yale Book of Quotations

Posted by Fred R. Shapiro, author of the newly published Yale Book of Quotations.

Yesterday Stephen J. Dubner had a posting on his Freakonomics blog, titled  "I Can't Wait to Get This Book":

Writing about The Yale Book of Quotations, Dubner asks, "I would like to know how their methodology differs, if significantly, from the folks who put out Bartlett’s."  This brings to my mind the line in Apocalypse Now where Marlon Brando asks Martin Sheen, "Are my methods unsound?"  Sheen responds, "I don't see any method at all, sir."

Seriously, Bartlett's is a wonderful anthology of classic literature, but has some pronounced shortcomings.  There are two primary differences between The Yale Book of Quotations and Bartlett's.  First, the YBQ, while including the best known quotations from older literary and historical sources, emphasizes modern and American materials and fully represents such areas as popular culture, children's literature, sports, computers, politics, law, and the social sciences.
Bartlett's emphasizes older and British materials and has relatively little from the areas just mentioned. 

Bartlett's does not include many of the most famous and beloved quotations of our culture.  Here are a few eye-opening examples (full citations not set forth here, but they're in my book):

"Sisterhood is powerful."
        Kathie Amatniek

"We must love one another or die."
        W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

"Let's go."
"We can't."
"Why not?"
"We're waiting for Godot."
        Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

"Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic."
        Arthur C. Clarke

"The state is not 'abolished,' it withers away."
        Friedrich Engels

"[A tie ball game is] like kissing your sister."
        Eddie Erdelatz

"Today I consider myself to be the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
        Lou Gehrig

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who's the fairest of them all?"
        Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Snow White

"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never
shrinks back to its former dimensions."
        Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table"

"Nuts!"
        General Anthony McAuliffe

"A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."
        Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

"They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace --
Christopher Robin went down with Alice."
        A. A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

"Don't ask, don't tell."
        Charles Moskos

"Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse."
        Willard Motley, Knock on Any Door

"Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger."
        Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

"The best government is that which governs least."
        John L. O'Sullivan

"Why is this night different from all other nights?"
        Talmud

"Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
        Mae West

"It's better to burn out
Than to fade away."
        Neil Young

The second big difference between the Yale Book of Quotations and Bartlett's is that the YBQ is the first quotation book to use state-of-the-art research methods to trace the sources of quotations to their true origins or earliest discoverable usages.  For a large percentage of the most famous quotations, evidence is provided that disproves the standard accounts of origins.  This research was made possible by searching the vast number of historical texts now available in electronic form, as well as making extensive use of an online network of over one thousand reference librarians around the world.  Traditional methods of library research, utilizing the resources of one of the world's greatest libraries, the Yale University Library, were also pursued to verify quotations and the origins of sayings.