Illinois Press Book Blog

Willis Regier, Director
Favorite Book: Julian Barnes – Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Barnes’s book looks at old questions about how to live with death and dying.  He has short narratives on the deaths of the famous and forgotten, with thoughts about the various stances religion and philosophy have taken about death.   Barnes accepts death as final, thus more serious than it would be for those who think it is a door to an afterlife.

Favorite CD: David Byrne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
I was pleased by Blitzen Trapper’s Furr, Lucinda’s Little Honey,  and (thanks to Steve Lehmann) Christian Tetzlaff’s re-release of Bach, Sonatas & Partitas.   But after all, Everything that Happens Will Happen Today is brand new and got the most play at my place.  It is Byrne’s best since Stop Making Sense (way back in 1984), and makes me think better of Eno.  The CD is smart, brisk, tuneful, and full of homages to gospel in all its varied splendor.

Favorite Movie: Ironman
I expected The Dark Knight or Quantum of Solace would triumph, but both disappointed me.  Three demerits for The Dark Knight :  the casting of Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes; the somnambulist performance of Christian Bale; and the stupid twist of the story line at the end, announcing that Batman must be perceived as a villain in order to do good.  I’ve nothing to add to criticisms of Quantum of Solace :  good but not great.  Ironman wins for plot, dialogue, special effects, and wit.  No other movie was as well balanced as this was.

Favorite TV Show: The Daily Show
Honestly the best.  So good when it’s good that its many mediocrities don’t matter.

Favorite live performance, theater/music/comedy/etc.: MET Live, performing Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, via satellite, Savoy Theaters.

Robert Lepage’s production is visually stunning, not only because every scene shouts “I AM EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE.”   It featured a passable Faust (Marcello Giordani), but superb Marguerite (Susan Graham), and Mephistopheles (John Relyea).

Lisa Savage, Journals Production Editor
Favorite Book: Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
Favorite CD: The Watson Twins, Fire Songs; Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend
Favorite Movie: The Dark Knight; Young@Heart
Favorite TV Show: 30 Rock, The Office, Mad Men, The Daily Show, Flight of the Conchords, Top Chef
Favorite live performance, theater/music/comedy/etc.: Wicked, Oriental Theatre, Chicago
Favorite local event: The Esquire’s “12 Beers of Christmas”
Favorite moment of the 2008 presidential election: Tina Fey’s brilliant impression of Sarah Palin. “Are we not doing the talent portion?”
Person I most wish would disappear into oblivion in 2009: A certain former beauty queen from Alaska.

Cope Cumpston, Art Director
Favorite Book: Elizabeth Hay – Late Nights on Air
Favorite CD: Nellie McKay – Hungry Mouse
Favorite Movie: The Fall
2nd Favorite Movie: Man on Wire – I saw both of these movies twice in one week, which is first in a lifetime for me . . .
Favorite live performance – Dottie and the Rails (local country band, Angela Burton’s husband plays guitar, the age span is something like 30 – 75)

Clydette Wantland, Journals Manager
Favorite TV Shows: Project Runway, Criminal Minds
Favorite Sport to Watch:  NCAA Basketball
Favorite College Basketball Team: Duke
All Time Favorite Movie:  A Star is Born (Streisand version)
Favorite Live Performance: REO Speedwagon (all 7 times!)

Will Ridenour, Programmer, Electronic Publications
Favorite Book: Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks
Favorite CD: Four Vagabonds, Vol. 1: 1941-1951
Favorite Movie: The Visitor
Favorite TV Show: Boston Legal
Favorite Live Performance: The Lieutenant of Inishmore at Urbana’s Station Theatre

Jim Proefrock, Media/Communications Specialist (Stealth Mode)
Favorite Book(s): J. Maarten Troost – The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (2004) and Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (2006). These are best enjoyed back-to-back. I don’t read much, so I feel fortunate to even be able to respond to this category.

Favorite UIP Book: Steven K. Ashby and C.J. Hawking – Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement (2009). I’m certainly not in the habit of reading books while in the process of typesetting them, but this one kept pulling me in. Fascinating. I hope it does well for us outside of Decatur.

Favorite CD: I haven’t bought a CD since iTunes was invented. In lieu, some favorite singles: The Ting Tings – “Great DJ”; Santogold – “Lights Out”; Heiruspecs – “Get Up.” No, wait, these are my 8-year-old’s favorite songs! Ok, ok, they’re mine, too.

Favorite TV Show: Chuck

Favorite Live Performance: X at the Cabooze in Minneapolis. This was called the “13-31 Tour,” but a better name would have been the “401k Tour.” These oldsters can still bring it. Truly inspiring.

Favorite Fishin’ Hole: Little Falls Lake, Willow River State Park, Hudson Wisconsin.

Barbara Evans, Assistant Production Manager
Author: Ken Bruen
CD: The Bach Cello Suites, Pablo Casals (perennial favorite)
Live Performance: Preservation Hall Jazz Band (KCPA); Hot Club of Cowtown (Shady Nook)

Rohn Koester, Journals Production Editor
Favorite thing I read: Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day
Favorite music podcast: Tom Waits’ Glitter and Doom concert
Favorite movie: Tarsem Singh’s The Fall
Favorite documentary: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure
Favorite PSA: Errol Morris’ Standing Up to Cancer
Favorite lecture: Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight
Favorite story: Edgar Oliver’s “Revisiting Savannah”
Another favorite story: Jonathan Mitchell’s “City X”
Favorite Radiohead covers: “Creep” by Scala and the Kolacny Brothers; “15 Stepz” by AmpLive featuring Codany Holiday; and “Nude (Popularity Contest Remake)” by Son Lux

Roberta Sparenberg, Sales & Marketing Assistant
Favorite Book:  Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (haven’t finished it yet, but loaned to me by Heather)
Favorite CD: On Fire, David Syme, Piano   
Favorite Movie:  Get Smart
Favorite TV Show:  Monk, Psych and Burn Notice
Favorite Live Performance:  Wasn’t able to attend anything live this year, except life itself, and sometimes it’s is pretty dramatic.

Margo Chaney, Exhibits Manager
Favorite Book:  Barbara Kingsolver — Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Favorite Movie:  toss-up between Young at Heart and Mama Mia
Favorite TV Show:  Brothers & Sisters
Favorite news story:  Election Night coverage!!
Favorite live performance:  Amasong December concert

Breanne Ertmer, Assistant Acquisitions Editor
Favorite Book: Firoozeh Dumas – Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad
Favorite Movie: Burn After Reading
Favorite TV Shows: 30 Rock and My House Is Worth What?
Favorite Live Performance: Pink Martini at The Chicago Theatre 

Rebecca McNulty, Assistant Editor, Acquisitions
Favorite Book: Property, Valerie Martin
Favorite CD: Tift Merritt, Another Country
Favorite Movie: Wall-E
Favorite TV Show: Top Chef, (special) A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All
Favorite knitting project: Devil Baby Blanket from Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair by Laurie Perry

Lisa Bayer, Marketing Director
Favorite Book: fiction: Joseph O’Neill, Netherland; nonfiction: Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
Favorite CD: Michael Roux’s iTunes library
Favorite Movie: Quantum of Solace
Favorite TV Show: Mad Men, Meet the Press, The Rachel Maddow Show (and, yes, Stewart and Colbert)
Favorite live performance, theater/music/comedy/etc.: Yo La Tengo, Pygmalion Music Festival

Leslie DeLucia, Database Coordinator
Favorite CD: Beck, Modern Guilt
Favorite TV Show: Sons of Anarchy, Fringe, Lipstick Jungle
Favorite Young Adult Book: OK, I ‘ll admit it. I enjoyed Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.
Worst Movie: Twilight

Heather Munson, Journals Production Editor
Favorite book: Mark Sarvas – Harry, Revised
Favorite album/CD: Gary Louris – Vagabonds
Favorite movie: Young at Heart (a 2007 release that didn’t make it to C-U till May 2008)
Favorite live music performance: Bottle Rockets 15th anniversary show at the High Dive, with opening performance by Otis Gibbs
Favorite tv show that’s been cancelled: Dirty Sexy Money

Angela Burton, Assistant Managing Editor
Favorite Book: David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography–I was in the mood for biography this year, and this book has it all. Great writing, great research, great method, and a great subject.

Favorite CD: TV on the Radio, Dear Science

Favorite Movie: Ironman. I’ll see Robert Downey Jr. in anything. If you haven’t seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, do so. Downey is sublime in it.

Favorite TV Show: Burn Notice, Life

Favorite live performance, theater/music/comedy/etc. – Angie Heaton, Dottie and the ‘Rail, and the Hathaways at Mike ‘n Molly’s in the beer garden. It rained in the middle, but everybody covered up the equipment and then when the rain passed, the musicians came back and played. Fun night.

Tamara Shidlauski, Production Coordinator
Favorite Book: a three way tie: The Thirteenth Tale – Diane Setterfield; The
Painter of Battles – Arturo Pérez-Reverte; The Somnabulist – Jonathan Barnes
Favorite CD: Project Jenny, Project Jan – Xoxoxoxoxo (although this year
I’ve been more of a singles girl than an album girl, which leads to . . .)
Favorite Singles: “Sour Cherry” – The Kills;  “Kid On My Shoulders” – White
Rabbits
Favorite Movie: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Favorite TV Show: a two way tie: Supernatural; Lost
Favorite live performance, theater/music/comedy/etc.: Flogging Molly (even though I had to endure the awfulness of the House of Blues in Chicago to see them)
Favorite Character in a TV Show Watched Only By Me: Chuck Bass – Gossip Girl

Kathleen Kornell, Rights & Permissions Manager
Favorite Book: John Gregory Dunne – Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season
Favorite CD: The Kills – Midnight Boom
Favorite Movies: Wall-E, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Favorite TV Shows: Pushing Daisies, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother, Top Chef, Mad Men
Favorite Restaurants: Saigon in Savoy, Pink’s Famous Hot Dogs (Los Angeles), Fast Eddie’s in Alton, IL

Kendra Boileau, Senior Acquisitions Editor
Favorite Book: Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature
Favorite CD: Soundtrack to the Movie Once
Favorite Movie: Once
Favorite TV Show: House
Favorite live performance, theater/music/comedy/etc. – Massenet’s Manon at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, featuring Natalie Dessay and Jonas Kaufmann, October 31, 2008

Laura Asbury, Marketing Assistant
Favorite Film: Thus far, The Dark Knight.  However, most of the best films of 2008 will not be in theaters until late December. 
Projected Favorite Film: Revolutionary Road, Doubt
Favorite Book: David Sedaris – When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Favorite Website Discovery: InContention.com
Favorite Television Program: The Office, Project Runway
Favorite Song: Adele – “Chasing Pavements”
Favorite Live Performance: RENT, Spring Awakening, and In The Heights on Broadway

Michael Roux, Publicity Manager
Favorite Book: David Servan-Schreiber – Anticancer: A New Way of Life
Favorite CD: The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age of the Understatement, Beaujolais – Love at Thirty (a harrowing “breakup” album)
Favorite Movie: The Visitor
Favorite TV Show: The Unit, 30 Rock, Countdown, Daily Show, Colbert Report
Favorite live performance, theater/music/comedy/etc.: Beaujolais at Mike ‘n’ Molly’s, Champaign, IL

Paula Kaufman, Dean of the University of Illinois Libraries, measures the ROI of the University of Illinois libraries based on grants received by the University written with references to university library resources (to paraphrase the academic paper).

And I thought the correct response was, “They’re invaluable!”

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle includes Benjamin Ivry’s review of the new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary.

“In 1991, Such a Sweet Occupation by Gilbert Joseph pointed out that Beauvoir and Sartre, far from deserving the reputation they were granted as heroic wartime resisters, were exclusively concerned with the advance of their own literary careers. Wartime Diary confirms this (if we add sex and food as other obsessions), in a fluent translation by Anne Deing Cordero, professor emerita of French at George Mason University.”

Wartime Diary is the third in our Beauvoir Series following Philosophical Writings (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27 (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Most mainstream newspapers and journalists are comfortable drawing connections between today’s financial crisis and the one we call the Great Depression. They also like to comment on the similarities between Obama’s “pragmatism” (and that of his cabinet picks) and the pragmatic economic policies and picks of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  With the release of Red Chicago in paperback, I too am thinking about comparisons between the 1930s and today.  Unlike those who are absorbed with presidential politics and questionable Wall Street bailouts, I am closely following workers’ reaction to our troubling times.
 
Crisis in the auto industry and the closing of Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors have been my two recent obsessions. In considering an auto bailout, several southern senators went on a full-on frontal assault against the UAW and organized labor, in essence blaming the unions for the industry’s current plight.  In Chicago, Republic Windows and Doors employers thought they’d be able to close their plant without providing their unionized UE workers adequate notice or their appropriate and negotiated severance. Rather than take these knocks quietly, the UAW and Republic’s UE workers pushed back.  UAW leaders are standing up to union bashing and the threat of give backs and UE workers skillfully and peacefully accomplished a sit in. While the auto situation is still in flux, Republic workers won their demands. 

In light of these developments, we may have more to compare between today and the 1930s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies and speeches convinced working people that they had the federal government’s support to organize labor unions. A flurry of labor activity and activism in industry throughout the country resulted. Of course, today’s times are different. Whereas Obama publicly supported Republic workers’ rights to what they had been promised, Republic workers fought over the conditions of their severance – not union recognition as workers had in the1930s. Today our manufacturing sector has been gutted and public unions are decidedly on the defensive. Yet these two signs of life among organized workers begs a larger question. Will the promise of Obama’s support for labor result in a resurgence of labor militancy?  I for one, certainly hope so.

*****

Randi Storch is an associate professor of history at the State University of New York College at Cortland and author of the newly available paperback Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35.

(Thank you to SUNY Cortland for the author image.-Ed.)

I am pleased that there is enough interest in Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai to publish a paperback version.  Frankly, I’m also a little surprised by the positive reaction to the book.  After its publication (1999) I was invited to speak about the book and the Shanghai Jewish refugee community many times both locally and in other parts of the country, and speaking requests continue to dribble in to this day.  Partially as a result of writing the book I was asked to participate in two films. The first, Shanghai Ghetto, came out in 2002 and played in both New York and Los Angeles for a month and had shorter runs elsewhere.  CDs of the film are available from commercial lending outlets.  The documentary’s reception was surprising for a very low budget film filled mainly with talking heads, backed up by archival photographs and film clips.  I received a new round of speaking invitations about the Jewish refugee community in Shanghai during the Second World War as a result of Shanghai Ghetto’s release.

The second film, The Last Refuge—The Story of Jewish Refugees in Shanghai did not attain wide distribution.  However, an interesting sidelight of this documentary was Rabbi Morris Gordon’s appearance as an interviewee.  He had been a Chaplain, with the rank of Captain, in the U.S. army and, as described at length in the book, surprised us by showing up unexpectedly at my Bar Mitzvah in Shanghai after the War’s end in 1945.  Rabbi Gordon’s interview in The Last Refuge revolves mainly about having accidentally stumbled on my Bar Mitzvah during his brief stay in Shanghai prior to being repatriated to the U.S.  The student filmmakers were unaware that he was speaking about my Bar Mitzvah, one of his fellow interviews in the film.  Once I told them about the coincidence, the film could no longer be altered to include that information. (more…)

Inside Higher Ed refers readers to a story in The Albany Times Union on layoffs at SUNY Press.

“The cuts, made earlier this month, represented nearly 15 percent of what was a 34-member staff. The business manager’s office overlooking Lark Street is now empty. A publicist, a clerk, an editor and a production manager also lost jobs.”

A load of new books landed on my desk in the past few weeks:

-African Women Playwrights edited and with an Introduction by Kathy A. Perkins (Dec. 8, 2008)
-Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire edited by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Dec. 8, 2008)
-Wartime Diary by Simone de Beauvoir (Dec. 15, 2008)
-Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture by Lisa Woolfork (Dec. 15, 2008)
-Migration, Class, and Transnational Identities: Croatians in Australia and America by Val Colic-Peisker (Dec. 22, 2008)
-Critical Theory: The Major Documents by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine
(Dec. 22, 2008)
-Ancient Rome in Early Opera by Robert C. Ketterer
(Dec. 29, 2008)
-Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s by Amy Koritz (Dec. 29, 2008)
-Chinese Street Opera in Singapore by Tong Soon Lee
(Jan. 5, 2009)
-Sufficiency of the Actual by Kevin Stein (Jan. 5, 2009)
-An American in Hitler’s Berlin: Abraham Plotkin’s Diary, 1932-33 edited and with an Introduction by Catherine Collomp and Bruno Groppo (Jan. 5, 2009)
-Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-69 by James Schwoch (Jan. 12, 2009)
-The Legacy of Edward W. Said by William V. Spanos
(Jan. 12, 2009)
-Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology by Ernst Bertram, translated by Robert E. Norton (Jan. 12, 2009)
-The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law by A. Cheree Carlson (Feb 2, 2009)
-Golf in America by George B. Kirsch  (Feb. 2, 2009)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

An interview with Corey D. B. Walker, assistant professor in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University and author of the new book A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America.

by Scott Poulson-Bryant

What inspired you to write A Noble Fight:  African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America?

I wrote A Noble Fight to challenge the uncritical, and often unqualified, praise of voluntary associations and other civil society groups in our public conversations about the challenges confronting the present condition of democracy in America.  So often these conversations perpetuate the myths of American democracy while papering over the deep fractures and cleavages that continue to arrest the development of a robust democratic society.

According to your book, Freemasonry is a good metaphor for understanding American democracy.  How so?

Early in A Noble Fight, I write that Freemasonry is democracy in full conceptual and symbolic regalia because its language of universality, equality, and morality echoes so much of the political language of modern democratic theory.  Of course, it also embodies so many of the contingencies and contradictions that characterize the politics and the idea of the political in the modern world.

How important is ritual in the African American culture?

Just as it is for all cultures, ritual is very important in African American culture.  A Noble Fight charts how the rituals of democracy are not only reinforced by the very mundane acts of the everyday, but also how African Americans have challenged and developed alternative meanings of these rituals by drawing from the deep theoretical and material wells of Freemasonry in promoting new conceptualizations of the meaning of democracy in the America.

Is it hard to balance writing with teaching?

I find that writing and teaching critically inform one another.  The key question is the arbitrary deadlines imposed on the two that sometimes have them working against one another. 

Has being at Brown influenced your writing/researching work?

I am glad to be at Brown and to be a member of a premier department of extraordinary intellectuals.  To engage in the conversations, debates, and probing inquiries that are so much a part of the everyday culture of Churchill House is a gift that continues to critically inform my work as a scholar and, most importantly, a teacher.  In many ways, this department has been very influential on A Noble Fight.

*****

Scott Poulson-Bryant, an adjunct professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, was a founding editor of VIBE Magazine. His books include HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men In America and The VIPs, a novel scheduled for release in 2009.

(Thank you to Scott Poulson-Bryant and Brown University.–Ed.)

The Chronicle highlights the growing number of campus support staff who advise faculty on best practices in getting from manuscript to book. Surely some will miss out on the adventure of the old days:

“We’ll drop you from the helicopter naked with a Bowie knife in the middle of the wilderness, and if you come back within seven years wearing animal skins and dragging an elk behind you, you get tenure.”