Cover for caps: Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music. Click for larger imageThe Turner Classic Movies site has published a sparkling review of John Caps’s forthcoming book Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music.

“Caps traces Mancini’s collaborations with important directors and shows how he homed in on specific dramatic or comic aspects of the film to create musical effects through clever instrumentation, eloquent musical gestures, and meaningful resonances and continuities in his scores. Accessible and engaging, this fresh view of Mancini’s oeuvre and influence will delight and inform fans of film and popular music.”

Henry Mancini will be published in March 2012.

Cover for ramsay: Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Click for larger imageIn a January 23, 2012, New York Times Opinionator column on digital humanities, Stanley Fish explores Stephen Ramsay’s new book Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism.

“At times [Ramsay] argues that however alien algorithmic criticism may seem, it is really a technologically ramped up version of what literary criticism has always been. Although the rhetoric of traditional literary criticism emphasizes getting at the truth about a text as its end point, in practice what critics do is try out one hypothesis, and then another, and in the process re-characterize or deform the text.

Cover for tracy: Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Click for larger imageIn December 2011 we published Steven Tracy’s edited volume Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance, which covers a vast collection of subjects, including many important writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry as well as cultural products such as black newspapers, music, and theater.  Reviews have been very positive.

“A vigorous and seminal reassessment of an essential chapter in American culture.”–Booklist

“If Tracy’s intention in pulling together the contributions to this thorough book is to enlighten readers about this outstanding group of artists and this period in our country’s cultural history, he has succeeded remarkably. . . . A superb introduction to the Black Chicago Renaissance.”–Library Journal

“The authors written about here across some 30 essays and literary biographies led fascinating lives, and the essays serve as windows into a bygone era. . . . 4 stars.”–Time Out Chicago

Apple released a new version of iBooks today and, as Dan Nosowitz at Popular Science notes, it’s designed to replace the textbook with the iPad: “The new version of iBooks frees the app from its prior restrictions–now it can boast video, audio, interactive multitouch controls, and all kinds of new annotations. That’s key to Apple’s idea of the future of textbooks.”

Just three publishers control 90% of the K-12 textbook market in the U.S., and they’ve each signed agreements with Apple.

Link to PopSci article.

How to make a textbook cover out of a brown paper bag.

Cover for NETTL: Nettl's Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Click for larger imageThree University of Illinois Press books were selected for inclusion in Choice magazine’s annual Outstanding Academic Title list, which will appear in the January 2012 issue of Choice.

Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980 by Charles H. Martin, Nettl’s Elephant by Bruno Nettl, and Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic by David A. Gerstner are this year’s UIP honorees. 

Congratulations to Charles H. Martin, Bruno Nettl, and David A. Gerstner.

Cover for ALLEN: Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. Click for larger imageRay Allen’s book, Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival has been awarded a Certificate of Merit in the 2011 ARSC Awards in the category of Best Research in Recorded Country, Ethnic, or Folk Music.  Published in October 2010, Gone to the Country draws on extensive interviews and personal correspondence with band members to chronicle the life and music of this trio of city-bred musicians who helped pioneer the resurgence of southern roots music during the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Congratulations to Ray Allen on this Certificate of Merit.

Cover for jacobson: Squeeze This!: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America. Click for larger imageThe January 2, 2012, issue of Publishers Weekly includes a review of Marion Jacobson’s forthcoming book Squeeze This! A Cultural History of the Accordion in America.

“Jacobson … traces the instrument’s impact on early 20th-century America during its vaudeville era and its recent revival over the past two decades.  Using meticulous research, Jacobson not only touches on how topics as diverse as immigration, movies, war, and feminism have influenced the accordion’s popularity, but she also finds time to drop in countless little known pop culture nuggets about great accordionists.”

Squeeze This! will be published in April 2012.  Media outlets can read an e-galley via NetGalley.

Author Diane Diekman has followed up her 2007 biography of country music star Faron Young with a new book on Marty Robbins.  Here she discusses the research and writing of Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins, due out in March 2012 from the University of Illinois Press.

Q:  Why did you write the Marty Robbins biography?

Diekman:  In August 2005, doing research for Faron Young’s biography, I was watching a tape of the Marty Robbins Spotlight television show, when realization of Marty’s amazing talent hit me. He was already one of my favorite singers, which made me eager to learn more about his music. His NASCAR and Navy connections were additional topics I would enjoy researching. I decided he would be the perfect subject to write about after I finished Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story. No one had yet written a book on his life, and I wanted to be the one to tell his story.

Q:  In Marty didn’t you have a multi-layered talent to cover?

Diekman:  Oh, definitely, both in music and other facets of his life. He’s a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was a successful businessman who built publishing and recording companies and invested in real estate. Most of his hits were his own compositions. Love songs and western songs were his favorite to sing, and his passions were music and racing, “Ranger Doug” Green of Riders in the Sky says, “For anybody that sings western music, the Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs album is seminal. It’s part of Cowboy 101. It’s just a must listen.” Marty’s record albums included Hawaiian songs, rockabilly, teen ballads, western music, pop standards, and straight country songs. He hosted television shows and starred in movies about country music, cowboys, and stockcar racing. NASCAR’s Bobby Allison says Marty “started out being a singer driving a race car, but he became a race car driver who could sing.”

Photo by: April Diekman

Q:  In your research did you learn anything new about Marty?

Diekman:  A lot! I didn’t know much about him when I started, other than that he had many hit songs and drove in NASCAR races. I’d known from news reports about his heart attacks and his racing mishaps. I remember being shocked at his death because I thought he was too tough to die. Early in my research, and being used to hearing wild stories about Faron Young, I was surprised to hear only positive things about Marty. But no one is perfect, and I eventually learned about his hot temper and insecurities and standoffishness. Band member Jeff Chandler recalls, “I thought he was trying to rule us with an iron fist so we’d behave ourselves. Now that I look back on it, I think he was insecure and that was the wall he put up. Because he didn’t want to let you too close; he didn’t want you to see the real Marty. So that’s how he kept you at arm’s length. He was an intimidating and imposing figure. I was nervous around him.”

Q:  Speaking of research, didn’t you get to talk with Marty’s friends, former band members and family members? Who were some of them?

Diekman:  It was fascinating to meet all these people, and I’m grateful for the relationships we developed. I had several long visits with son Ronny Robbins and talked to daughter Janet on the telephone. I conducted telephone interviews with most of Marty’s surviving band members. I had lunch with Joe Babcock and Jim Glaser. Joe helped me arrange a band reunion in 2009. That’s where I met Jack Pruett, Earl White, Haskel McCormick, and bus driver Okie Jones. I already knew Joe Vincent from writing Faron’s biography, as he played steel guitar for both Faron and Marty. Ralph Emery gave me copies of taped interviews, Bill Anderson provided a photo for the book, and both described for me their interactions with Marty. Continue reading

Cover for GILL: Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry. Click for larger imageNPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Tiffany Gill, author of the University of Illinois Press book Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry on the December 28, 2011, edition of Tell Me More.

MARTIN: Well, you know, honestly, you have some fascinating nuggets in your book. You write, for example, that really up until the 1820s, you know, black men were prominent in the beauty industry until it became not acceptable for black men to start dressing white women’s hair. So then, kind of, black women took over. Tell us a little bit more about that.

GILL: Absolutely. Sure. I mean, we see that it’s around 1820 where there began to be sort of growing discourses about how African-American men were seen as dangerous, should not share spaces with white women, and so African-American women sort of transitioned very nationally to that. So we see African-American women in slavery caring for the beauty needs of those that they were forced to work for.

But also we see that, particularly in urban areas like New Orleans, that some of these enslaved women were able to actually hire themselves out and make some money in the process. So the beauty industry does provide opportunities for African-American women to earn a living.

Cover for HARDY: The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Edition. Click for larger imageIn the January 7, 2012, edition of the Wall Street Journal, Samuel Morris Brown identifies Grant Hardy’s The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition as one of the top 5 best books about Mormonism.

“Hardy’s thoughtful ‘reader’s edition’ eliminates the current official text’s knotty versification, clarifies the cast of characters, includes a useful introduction and provides signposts through the sometimes dense prose. . . . Essential for the full comprehension of Mormonism.”