Princeton’s recent publication of Franz Kafka: The Office Writings has certainly inspired some thoughtful and interesting reviews. But this one, in particular, by a critic named Ben Kafka (that’s right), published in the April/May issue of Bookforum may take the cake. Read the review on Bookforum’s website here. Be sure to check out the first paragraph…
Senior Production Editor Ellen Foos takes on the question “Have you been to a good bookstore lately?”
I was recently in the small town of Johnson, Vermont, where Ebenezer Books has the market cornered for new books, with a nice children’s section. Owner Brad Fox brings books to sell when visiting writer’s come to read at the Vermont Studio Center. He is canny enough to bring exactly the right books for any particular audience. And he has also read many of them—a trait I find in most bookstore people (unlike the blank looks you get from sales staff in almost any other type of store these days).
Classics Used and Rare Books
117 S Warren St
Trenton, NJ 08608
(609) 394-8400
Ebenezer Books
2 Lower Main W
Johnson, VT 05656
(802) 635-7472
Amar Bhide has an excellent op-ed on the resiliency of venturesome consumption even in times of financial crisis over at the Wall Street Journal today. Click through to read the entire thing, but here’s a bit of silver lining:
The good news is that the cutbacks are likely to be more severe in the less productive kind of consumption. History suggests that Americans don’t shirk from venturesome consumption in hard times. The personal computer took off in the dark days of the early 1980s. I paid more than a fourth of my annual income to buy an IBM XT then — as did millions of others. Similarly, in spite of the Great Depression, the rapid increase in the use of new technologies made the 1930s a period of exceptional productivity growth. Today, sales of Apple’s iPhone continue to expand at double-digit rates. Low-income groups (in the $25,000 to $49,999 income segment) are showing the most rapid growth, with resourceful buyers using the latest models as their primary device for accessing the Internet.
Amar’s concept of the venturesome consumer is fully developed in his recent PUP title, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World.
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Matthew Hindman’s new book THE MYTH OF DIGITAL DEMOCRACY has drawn interest and fire from many in the media world and blogosphere. In the spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Matt Bai, author and regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, writes a review of Professor Hindman’s new book and discusses whether or not true digital democracy is a myth or a (potential) reality. Check out the article here at Democracy’s web site.
Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:
The answer briefly is that a) he wasn’t at Alcatraz most of the time and b) he only fed tame canaries in his cell. As Mynott tells us, a more accurate nickname for Robert Franklin Stroud, would have been the Birdman of Leavenworth. He was transferred to Alcatraz later and in spite of the pop culture image of him feeding wild birds from his prison window ledge, it turns out he mostly tended to tame canaries he was allowed to keep in his cell.
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Rob Tempio answers the question “Have you been to a good bookstore lately?” with a virtual walking tour of Lambertville, NJ and New Hope, PA with some diversions up to Montclair, NJ and NYC. Oh yes, and his cute beagle, Wendy, is along for most of the ride.
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Just to recap, we are posting trivia questions drawn from the book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience by veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott. We hope you will post your guesses and explanations below in the comments section. The official answer will follow by a day, so check back again soon!
Birdscapes Trivia, Question #5 -
PUP author Russ Roberts (The Price of Everything) and Arnold Kling discuss the current economic pickle. Can the government get us out of this mess? Watch it below!
Continued »The recipe of the month is CyberGoddess Ann Ambrose’s take on chicken chili–with special instructions for our neighbors to the North.
Continued »At the urging of Seth Ditchik– our economics editor — our staff has been considering the question: Have you been to a good bookstore lately?
This question can be bit of a political minefield for most publishers and while you may expect the staff at a publishing house to support local independent stores, we also heard stories about libraries, big box stores, and used books shops. The bookstores ranged from local shops in Lambertville, NJ and New Hope, PA, to New Orleans, Cambridge, and even Shanghai. And the timing of our visits range from the weekly trip while walking the dog, to a “love at first sight” in a library years ago, to a single impressionable moment 10 years ago.
The stories encompass both our favorite stores and libraries and our favorite experiences in those places. We hope you enjoy reading along with us. The inaugural post should be live on the site in a few hours.
Check out Bob Shiller in his very first talk about his new book, with Nobel prize-winning economist George Akerlof, ANIMAL SPIRITS: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Brad DeLong, economist and blogger, also took part in the festivities as did PUP’s very own Teresa Ghilarducci (author WHEN I’M 64) and Jeff Madrick (author of THE CASE FOR BIG GOVERNMENT).
Continued »Part of administering our blog is culling the good comments from the bad comments. And boy, are there an outrageous number of bad comments. We have a program that tries to flag and quarantine the spam comments, but I still read through them all to make sure a real comment has been accidentally thrown out with the bad.
So here, for your consideration in the Spam Hall of Shame is a particularly funny and poorly constructed comment:
“agree, really I have opinions of my own — strong opinions — but I don’t always agree with them”
Who among us can claim to always agree with their own strong opinions? Right?
Continued »Featuring commentary and interviews from Princeton University Press authors, the PUP Blog is a highly respected, timely and indispensable source for learning, understanding and reflection.
