Illinois Press Book Blog

Erika Falk’s timely new book Women for President: Media Bias in Eight Campaigns just landed on my desk.  The official publication date is January 21, 2008, but it is available now from the warehouse.  Professor Falk will be speaking and signing books at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, on February 21, 2008.

Katherine H. Adams is William and Audrey Hutchinson Distinguished Professor in the department of English at Loyola University, New Orleans, and is coauthor of the new book Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign.

When I left New Orleans at 1:30 on the day that Katrina struck, I expected to be back in a day or two.  I left with my son, my beagle, a couple of t-shirts, and the laptop computer that had been in my Jeep—luckily.  I did not get back for several months; I did not know for a long time if I had a house or office. But my brother-in-law in Jacksonville helped me print my co-authored book on Alice Paul and the American suffrage campaign, the only accessible copy of which was right there on that computer, and mail it to Champaign. 

In that UPS Store, I felt a sense of triumph over adversity, not equal to the suffragists’ survival of hunger striking and forced feeding in American jails, but nice indeed. Better yet, this week I was standing in my recovering university when this fine looking book came in the mail.

Willis Regier, Director
Favorite Book:   Joe Sacco, PALESTINE:  THE SPECIAL EDITION
Favorite CD:   Arcade Fire:  NEON BIBLE
Favorite Movie:   CASINO ROYALE
Favorite Live Performance:   Moises Kaufman, DIABELLI VARIATIONS, University of Illinois Theatre Workshop

Lisa Savage, Journals Production Editor
Favorite book: Falling Man, by Don DeLillo
Favorite CD: Sondre Lerche’s Phantom Punch
Favorite movie: Into the Wild
Favorite live performance: Sondre Lerche at the Metro in Chicago

Denise Peeler, Advertising Manager
Favorite book read this year: English translation of Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (not a 2007 pub date)
Favorite movie seen this year: Eastern Promises
Favorite blog: There are two: Apophenia and Words & Pictures
TV Show: Boston Legal

Rebecca Schreiber, Assistant Editor
Favorite Book: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Favorite CD: Live from Austin, TX by Neko Case
Favorite Movie: Children of Men
Favorite live performance – Murray Perahia, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Breanne Ertmer, Assistant Editor
Favorite Book: Wrigleyworld by Kevin Kaduk
Favorite Color of the Season: chocolate brown
Favorite Movie first seen in 2007: Gigi
Favorite live performance: Andrew Bird, Krannert, University of Illinois

Lisa Bayer, Marketing Director
Favorite Book: anything, everything by the Irish mystery writer Ken Bruen
Favorite CD: Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs: Under the Covers, Vol. 1
Favorite Movie: Knocked Up
Favorite live performance – Woody Guthrie’s American Song, the Celebration Company at the Station Theatre, Urbana

Leslie DeLucia, Database Coordinator
Fav book: Liveship Traders trilogy, Robin Hobb
Fav CD: Pink Martini, “Hey Eugene!”
Fav movie: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Fav live performance: July 1972 Allman Brothers concert on Long Island (a year after Duane was killed in a motorcycle accident)

Heather Munson, Journals Production Editor
Favorite Book: The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
Favorite CD: Sky Blue Sky by Wilco
Favorite Live Performance: Billy Joe Shaver at the Highdive
 
Bonus answers, just because I feel like it:
Favorite Local Event: GCAP’s Artists Against AIDS
Favorite Meal on a Cold Day: special pho at Thara Thai Restaurant
Person Who Called More Often Than My Mother in 2007: Michael Hicks, editor of American Music (and each call was helpful, educational, and/or entertaining)

Angela Burton, Assistant Managing Editor
I couldn’t stick to only 2007 titles, because I am still trying to get caught up with my 2006 list of things to see and read.

Favorite Recent Book–The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries through the Unique Perspectives of Autism (by Temple Grandin and Sean Barron)–written by two adults with autism, who describe how they managed their social interactions throughout their lives.
Favorite CD– Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, Lifeline; M. Ward, Post-War (I loved both)
Favorite Movie–Brick (a film noir set in a high school)–this is from 2006, although it was at a film festival in 2005.
Favorite live performance – Los Lobos, Wall 2 Wall Guitar Festival, University of Illinois
Favorite New TV Show–Life

Barbara Horne, Assistant Marketing Director
My favorites of 2007 are not products of 2007 necessarily. Hence,
 
Books: An Unfinished Season (Ward Just); The Sorrows of Empire (Chalmers Johnson); City of Quartz (Mike Davis)
Rereading: The forging of the shield of Achilles, in The Iliad (read it and weep)
Movies: Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, L’armee des ombres, 1969); The Valley of Elah
Live Performances: Boneyard Jazz Quintet (Iron Post)

Tamara Shidlauski, Production Coordinator
Favorite Book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Favorite CD: Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare; Fratellis – Costello Music
Favorite Movie: A Good Year
Favorite live performance: Eagles of Death Metal and Joan Jett – The Vic, Chicago; Kaiser Chiefs – The Vic, Chicago

Kathleen Kornell, Rights & Permissions Manager
Favorite book – No One Belongs Here More Than You, stories by Miranda July
Favorite CD – The Reminder by Feist
Favorite Movie – Reprise
Favorite Live Performance – Of Mice and Men at the Cleveland Play House

Joseph Peeples, Copywriter
Favorite Book: The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
Favorite CD: American Girl Posse by Tori Amos
Favorite Bloated Blockbuster Sequel of Summer 2007: the sheer absurdity of Live Free or Die Hard
Finally, sadly, in 2007 the world lost one of my all-time, hands-down Favorite Authors: Kurt Vonnegut.  So it goes.

Lynda Schuh, Sales Manager
Movie – In the Valley of Elah – well acted, should be a wake up to the world of post Iraq war realities for many soldiers and their families
Book – River of Doubt by Candice Millard
CD – Ottmar Liebert – Christmas + Santa Fe – takes me back to childhood memories of living in the west

Michael Roux, Publicity Manager
Favorite Book – This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession – by Daniel J. Levitin (paperback)
Favorite CD – Amy Winehouse – Back to Black, Lily Allen – Alright, Still
Favorite Movie - Once
Favorite live performance –  Jose Gonzalez, University of Illinois’s Courtyard Café
Favorite TV Show – 30 Rock, The Unit, Countdown, The Daily Show

Kendra Boileau, Senior Acquisitions Editor
Favorite Book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot, Diaz
Favorite CD: Rolando Villazon:  Opera Recital
Favorite Movie: Stranger Than Fiction
Favorite live performance:  Leipzig Gewandhaus at Carnegie Hall, performing Mahler Symphony No. 5, 3/6/2007

Craig Havighurst’s Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning in a piece narrated by John Ydstie.

Jill Hills is a professor of communications policy at the University of Westminster, Harrow, United Kingdom, and author of the new University of Illinois Press book Telecommunications and Empire.

Research for Telecommunications and Empire took me to archives in the USA and Europe that I had never previously visited. Three stand out in the memory. In the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., the archives were an oasis of calm within a ground floor swarming with visitors queuing every day. It always seemed amazing that whatever the document requested it would be delivered by staff interested in the research. The U.S. National Archives in Maryland were quite different. They reminded me of the old British Public Record Office before its holdings were digitized. Searches involved an escort from one building to another and the tracing of documents through several paper based catalogues only for them to arrive in dusty cardboard boxes. It was a noisy and difficult place to work with some researchers wearing dust masks and staff controlling queues for the photocopiers with shouts of “15 minutes up.”

Quite different again, the Cable and Wireless archives are housed in a museum next to the company’s old submarine cable landing station at Porthcurno in Cornwall. Porthcurno is a sandy cove with cliffs each side below which the museum and hotel shelter. With rain lashing down in mid-March, it was a sad place still not recovered from the closure of the company’s training school at the turn of the century. Talk in the local pub was of emigration to Australia. Not much new there. In the mid-nineteenth century my own ancestors uprooted themselves from a village not far away and headed towards the industrial revolution in the North West. The archives themselves are small and intimate and together with the museum provide a focus for local history and community groups in a part of the UK where employment is low and the poverty of the locals contrasts with the wealth of incomers. Long may these archives provide a social as well as historical purpose.

I love year-end “Best of” lists and inevitably buy a handful of new CDs and books from my list trolling. UNCUT magazine recommended Voice of the Seven Woods so I checked out a YouTube clip and special ordered a copy. My favorite online magazine is out with its The Year in Books feature and it looks like I need to visit my local book retailer. Next week I’ll be posting the University of Illinois Press’s media faves of 2007.

Until then, if you’re interested in the 20 worst album covers of 2007, Pitchfork has some suggestions for you.

NPR’s The Story with Dick Gordon will air an interview today with University of Illinois Press author Jane Bernstein about her book Rachel in the World: A Memoir.  The program originates on North Carolina Public Radio – WUNC and can be heard on other stations across the U.S. including WBEZ in Chicago and KPCC in Los Angeles.

Thomas Hauser, writing for the boxing site SecondsOut.com, recommends four University of Illinois Press boxing titles for your holiday gift list, including Sweet William, Andrew O’Toole’s new biography of Billy Conn.

 ”The two Louis-Conn fights are the highlight of O’Toole’s work, but he also does a nice job of recounting the endless dysfunctional family struggles that plagued Conn throughout his life and the boxer’s sad decline into pugilistic dementia.”

Brian Dirck’s Lincoln the Lawyer was recently awarded the Barondess/Lincoln Award of The Civil War Round Table of New York.  The book, which focuses on Lincoln’s legal career prior to his presidency, has been praised by The New Yorker, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and is included in the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop’s “The Essential Lincoln Book Shelf.”

The following titles arrived on my desk in late November and early December.  The official publication dates are noted at the end of each listing.

Telecommunications and Empire – Jill Hills (Dec. 10, 2007)
The ÜberReader - Avital Ronell (Dec. 17, 2007)
Lincoln’s Legacy: Ethics and Politics – Edited by Philip Paludan (Jan. 7, 2008)
Bach Perspectives, Volume 7 – Edited by Gregory Butler (Jan. 7, 2007)
Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe – Richard G. Olson (Jan. 7, 2008)
Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947 – Sanjam Ahluwalia (Jan. 7, 2008)
Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign – Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene (Jan. 7, 2008)
Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia – Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten (Jan. 7, 2008)