Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Stuff to Read
One of the most celebrated books of recent months is John Lewis Gaddis' long-awaited biography of George Kennan, which came out at the end of the year and will stand as a landmark work for the next generation. Of the many reviews of the book that you will want to read (reviews being vital to larger conversation that books should inspire) put Lon Hamby's Wall Street Journal review at the top of your list.
And since you're in a reading mood, go read Tom Bruscino's excellent Claremont Review of Books essay on Vietnam War historiography. You'll find much to agree with and possibly as much to dispute, the sign of a provocative argument. (Hint: He's not a fan of the baby boomers.)
The end of the year produces more than enough best-of lists to fill up your time. I thought Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2011 would have a little something for everyone -- loads of pretentious rock-crit scribbling for those of you not inclined toward quite so much obscurantism, and a pretty good list of stuff to track down for those on the other side. I feel as if I buy loads of music and try to keep up on as much new stuff as possible and I only own 6 of the top 50. I'm sure I'll catch up (I'm sometimes a somewhat late adopter) but I like lists like this because I get sick of hearing those regular pronouncements about the death of music.
Finally, when does a writer become a writer? It's a good question, especially for those of us who consider ourselves writers and who don't fully earn money from our publications. Seek solace in the fact that the majority of us have to bring in dirty cash money through more than the power of our words.
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Freedom's Main Line in Paperback! (Self Indulgence Alert!)
Monday, June 06, 2011
The 75 Books Every Man Should Read
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Barone on Bruscino
Sunday, March 20, 2011
American Busboy
Monday, January 10, 2011
A Choice Review
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
FML in "A Merry Claremont Christmas" (Self Indulgence Alert)
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Christmas Books (Self Indulgence Alert!)
Tom's book would make an excellent Christmas gift. And while we're at it, since 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides I hope you'll consider giving Freedom's Main Line as a gift (or buying it for yourself if you have not yet done so.) It's even available on Kindle.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Goodnight Consensus
(By the way, put me in the column of those who loathe the so-called "democracy" of anonymous, unfiltered Amazon reviews. Yeah, yeah, I'm an elitist. Since when is "elite" a bad thing?)
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Herf at a Celebratory TNR
The Arabs and the Holocaust has elements of candor and courage. It is a salutary development that someone with Achcar’s political views acknowledges the realities of the Nazi-Islamist wartime collaboration. It is important to be reminded of the history of a secular Arab leftism and liberalism that opposed fascism, Nazism, as well as Zionism. Yet Achcar undermines these virtues of his book with superficial, unfair, and unreliable readings of those with whom he disagrees, above all those who fought fascism and Nazism on the basis of secular, liberal, and even leftist values yet still support Zionism. His attack on these scholars is neither a contribution to scholarship nor a contribution to moderation.Speaking of TNR, the venerable bastion of center liberalism is celebrating its 96th birthday.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Friday Nitpicking
Ok, so this criticism is pretty picayune, but in his recent review of Tony Blair's new memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, Fareed Zakaria writes the following sentence: "The fact is that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were the two most successful political figures in the post-cold-war world because they understood the essential truth of economic policy in our times, which is centrist pragmatism."
Here is a one-question exam:
In fifty years, which of the following political figures will loom largest in the history of the post-Cold War era:
A) Tony Blair
B)Bill Clinton
C) Nelson Mandela
Even using Zakaria's own standard of centrist economic pragmatism, and even ignoring the decades before 1990, the answer is C.
[Crossposted]
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Insight Into a Failing Business Model
The single issue price for 'Soccer and Society,' Issue Numbers 1-2 is:
Institutional Rate: $200
Personal Rate:$60
Yes, you read that correctly. For one issue (and yes, it appears to be a "double issue," but seriously now) of a journal of which you have probably never heard (and that I was only vaguely aware existed) they want to charge an individual $60. I can live with higher institutional rates, though journals have skyrocketed those costs as well, passing the expense on to rich institutions, yes, but also pricing less rich institutions -- which is to say, the vast majority of institutions -- out of the market.
And I guess this pricing model is an ingenious idea because Routledge has actually turned the double issue into a book. And is selling it for $125. Because apparently they want no one reading their journals and books. Cunning.
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
University Life Roundup
Here is a pretty good defense of tenure, aimed at parents of future and present college students, which may not be perfect but is still pretty important. One issue the author does not address is the fact that not only does tenure protect certain types of potentially controversial work, it also protects the ability to do long-range research. It is not uncommon for a historian to take a decade or more to write a book, especially a big, ambitious one. We should embrace that sort of commitment to quality. And if that holds true in the humanities, it is even moreso in some of the sciences -- imagine telling a cancer researcher that they must work on the timetable of a three year contract.
Inside Higher Ed recently published two defenses of something that ought to need no defending (here and here) -- the liberal arts education. The goal of any college or university ought to be to teach students how to think, how to reason, and how to engage with ideas. If students can do that, they will be able to succeed in any range of jobs and careers (which they will change multiple times anyway) where there will be training in any case.
Here is a decent, if too tepid, defense of the professoriate from the onslaught from the outside. Academics are an easy target, but most of the criticisms barely withstand even the minutest scrutiny.
I oftentimes toy with declaring my classes to be a no-laptop zone. The vast majority of students do not use them to take notes, or even to look things up relevant to the class. And yes, sometimes classes can be "boring," I suppose, as dealing with unfamiliar or challenging material often is. But while I hope my classes are entertaining, my job is not first and foremost to entertain them. And if they are on Facebook or ESPN or sending emails, it is a distraction for people around them and it is a waste of time for them and for me. I have also toyed with the equivalent of pop quizzes: "Show me your laptop now." But I'd prefer that my classroom not be a place for "gotcha" moments even if some students deserve to get got. In any case, two recent articles agree with me, here and here. I'm not certain if I'll enact such a policy. But I'd be wholly justified in doing so.
The New Republic's Book has recently published a couple of justly tough reviews of new books on higher education, including Richard Kehlenberg's critical look at Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus' Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It and David A. Bell's completely warranted hammering of (former Williams professor) Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities.
Finally, can technology help reform (or overhaul) peer review? It will help. But technology is not a panacea. And while a wiki approach to scholarly publishing certainly might have some merit, as a historian, I still believe the craft of writing matters. We are not mere compilers of fact and dossiers for interpretation. History is as much art as science (moreso, I'd argue) and there is pleasure as well as knowledge to be gained from a well crafted book or article in my discipline and in many others.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
On Negative Reviews
My favorite paragraph:
I was not aware that it is a heresy to hold that Freedom is not a masterpiece. There is something churlish about my friend’s insistence upon critical unanimity. Franzen’s book, after all, is fantastically popular. It is commercially immune from literary criticism. I am pleased that Franzen’s profits will accrue to a company that may be counted upon to apply them to the production of serious books by serious writers that will not attain similarly to the proportions of a pandemic. But if it is indeed a heresy to differ about Freedom, then I confess to being inclined against it. In his slyly invigorating essay on “the pleasure of hating,” Hazlitt complained that “the reputation of some books is raw and unaired,” and noted that “the popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them.” Celebrity is not a literary value, and I do not believe in the wisdom of crowds. I think that crowds—well-read ones, too—are foolish and fickle. They are especially foolish when they regard themselves as a coterie. Their tastes need to be scrutinized with a hermeneutical hostility, because they are so easily invented and so easily manipulated. This is especially the case in a society consecrated supremely to promotion—that swoons over the pseudo-sagacity of Malcolm Gladwell, and regards people and the expressions of their souls as brands, and confuses techniques for marketing with techniques for living. The sales of Freedom say nothing about the qualities of Freedom. Has the book struck a chord? Of course. But that is anthropology, not literature; and nothing is more forgiving than anthropology.
I tend to write a whole lot more positive reviews than negative ones at least in part because there really are a lot of books that warrant more attention than they get. There is a myth that academic historians do not write well and that they focus only on arcane topics. This is silliness, but it is silliness that has not been able to puncture the myth. I avoid gratuitous negativity (in book reviews and also, more importantly, in the blind peer review process, which is riddled with flaws and ought to be reconsidered). And if I'm going to be more critical than not it is going to tend to be toward books that have gotten too much attention and thus have become overrated (see here for my personal favorite example).
Book reviewing is still important and books still matter and I suspect that even in a culture of handwringing about the alleged demise of both they will continue to flourish albeit in shifting mediums in the future. I'll happily place a bet that books, actual books with printed pages and alluring covers, will continue to endure even as other options emerge for consuming them in the much inferior downloaded form.
[We are off to Dallas for this. Hope to see some of you there.]
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
In Defense of Amazon
If we had a great independent bookstore in the area I would surely provide it with my custom occasionally, but when I am working on a book or article there are times when I will need to get a number of books and will not want to use the library, especially if these are books I'll use again and again for current and future projects. Amazon is a lifesaver for those of us not surrounded by myriad bookstores that compete with one another for price and variety, and for those millions of readers who live in places much smaller than I do Amazon has surely transformed their options. Amazon is not ideal. But I'm sure glad that it exists.
Friday, June 04, 2010
A Nation Forged in War
And would it kill you to have all of those books in your library? I think not. After all, I give you freeloaders free content on a semi-regular basis.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Link Linkity Link Link
Kelefa Sanneh recently had an interesting essay on the idea of whiteness in The New Yorker. Oddly Sanneh has one important gap, the World War II era, which is why you should all be reading (and thus buying) this.
Independent historian Ed Sebesta has put together this site on the Citizens' Councils, which includes access to copies of the Councils' newspaper. This will prove invaluable to my work on a number of projects, so for that I am very thankful. The Citizens' Councils were all kinds of crazy, but no less important for being so.
Finally, since I will be traveling tomorrow (for this, remember) I would like to second the idea of the airlines that have taken so very much from us being asked to give something back, or at least to stop seeing those of us who fly as wallets with legs.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Conflicts in American History (Self Indulgence Alert)
Friday, April 16, 2010
Prize Winners! We've Got Prize Winners!
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Links Deluge
Jane Mayer's absolute hammering of the insufferable Mark Thiessen's new book is a thing to behold. The review is all the more damning because The New Yorker tends not to traffic in withering reviews.
A couple of weeks back the New York Times Book Review had an essay on the venerable presidential election campaign book, which seems to have made a comeback just a few years after having been left for dead. I may as well use this time to point you all to the University Press of Kansas' fantastic new series on presidential elections. There are a dozen or so books already out. I have used the ones on the 1980 and 1912 campaigns in classes with a great deal of success. This is one of the rare series (including the one that Freedom's Main Line is in) for which I plan to own every single book, and I hope they eventually cover every presidential election in US history.
Recent events (and the tone of some political discussion) should remind us of the long strand of anti-government (generally) right-wing violence that too many people conveniently elide in discussions about terrorism.
Ezra Klein reminds us that the recent health care legislation is not especially left-wing and uses that to pivot to the point that the current Republican stance has been politically driven, not policy driven. The Republicans have decided that being the party of no is their path back to power. I suppose we'll see if that works. It might be the path to power. It is definitely the path of irresponsible governance.