The International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on the Structure of Governance (SOG) recently honored PUP authors Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods for The Politics of Global Regulation with Special Recognition, the 2010 Levine Prize.

The Levine Prize is given to a book in the field of public policy and administration that “makes a contribution of considerable theoretical or practical significance,” “takes an explicity comparative perspective,” and “is written in an accessible style.”

According to the award committee, The Politics of Global Regulation “critically reflects upon the increasing voice among countries to tighten up regulatory control at the national and global levels. Will we see the rise of ‘regulatory states’ of a new kind? This book serves as a timely caution that regulatory capture or hijacking could take place in this newfound enthusiasm for regulation.”

This is certainly well-deserved praise for Walter and Ngaire!

Find out more about the Levine Prize here.

For a complete list of recent award-winning Princeton University Press books, please click here.

According to this interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a new reivew publication called The Los Angeles Review of Books (now known affectionately by publicists as LAROB) will launch this Fall which lists a very impressive lineup of writers, including T.C. Boyle, Jeffrey Eugenides, Carolyn See, Antonio Damasio, and Jane Smiley.

Interviewed for the piece was LAROB editor Tom Lutz, chair of the creative writing department at University of California at Riverside and author. Under his direction, the Review will offer a different perspective than other East Coast reviewing media. It will initially be launched as a multiplatform site for book reviews, author profiles, Skype interviews, and readings as well as critical essays on classic authors. However, there are plans to bring out a possible “annual” print edition and, if all goes well, a monthly issue.

In the interview with Lutz, one comment stood out from the others. When asked about the coverage of University Press titles, he offered just three words: BRING ‘EM ON. We like that. We like that a lot.

Heavenly Merchandize by Mark Valeri
The introduction is now online: http://bit.ly/bQrdkw

Heavenly Merchandize offers a critical reexamination of religion’s role in the creation of a market economy in early America. Focusing on the economic culture of New England, it views commerce through the eyes of four generations of Boston merchants, drawing upon their personal letters, diaries, business records, and sermon notes to reveal how merchants built a modern form of exchange out of profound transitions in the puritan understanding of discipline, providence, and the meaning of New England.

Heavenly Merchandize:
How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America
By Mark Valeri

I have a confession–I am the publicist for the most dangerous woman in America.

Well, at least, I am the publicist for her book, When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them. When we first discussed the promotion for this book, we did not anticipate a huge backlash against Teresa Ghilarducci’s proposal for Guaranteed Retirement Accounts. And yet, here we are, two years later, and still seeing vitriolic responses to GRAs and personal attacks on Teresa. But, a big question for me has always been, how many of these naysayers have actually taken the time to read Teresa’s book (bear in mind I know the sales figures for her book, so I know it can’t possibly be all of them!)?

I recently read Teresa’s thoughtful opinion piece in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (where they also featured her earlier this month in a Retirement planning feature), but I also read a horrible online petition that accused Teresa of wanting to “steal our 401(k)s,” so I asked Teresa if she would help clear the air with a quick Q&A (though really, you should still read her book –or try this excerpt first — where she presents the most complete argument for a GRA plan).

Q: Teresa Ghilarducci, do you want to steal my 401(k)?

I do not want to steal anyone’s 401(k). In fact, the idea that people want and deserve more choice in their retirement planning is what inspired me to create the Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRA) plan.

The disappearance of pensions leaves individual retirement accounts as the only option left, whether in the form of IRAs administered by banks or 401(k)s administered by employers. These policies may be the ‘last man standing’ in retirement accounts, but that doesn’t mean they are effective in providing Americans with a safe and secure retirement.

In reality, these policies – which cost American taxpayers $193 billion each year in lost revenue from tax breaks – are ineffective and regressive. For example, the vast majority of participants put less than $5,000 per year in their 401(k) and IRA accounts. Only the most wealthy individuals contribute the maximum – up to $42,000 per year over age 50. It follows that these individuals receive the maximum benefit from the plan; over three fourths of the tax breaks go to the top 20% of households. What makes these tax breaks especially wasteful is that these higher-income families are the most likely to save, even without the incentive of a tax break.

I think we can do better with our taxpayer dollars. That’s why I propose limiting the tax break to $5,000 per year and giving the remaining money – over $100 billion – to all Americans in the form of a $400 contribution toward a Guaranteed Retirement Account.

More after the jump.

What does Duane W. Roller (Eratosthenes’ Geography: Fragments collected and translated, with commentary and additional material)read when he’s not collecting, translating, or commenting on ancient Greek texts (it’s a hard job, but someone has to do it)? Find out below:

Duane says, “I’ve enjoyed reading the volume Agatha Christie and Archaelogy, edited by Charlotte Trümpler. It is an outstanding discussion of Agatha Christie’s role as an archaeologist (an assistant to her husband, Max Mallowan), and how this affected her writing of mysteries. Fascinating!”

Duane says, “I’m also working my way through the Geography of Strabo of Amaseia. Written in the first century AD, it is the earliest work we have on the geography, with many fascinating details, such as some of the first theories on how the earth was formed, the depth of the oceans, and a vast amount of ethnology.”

While Duane is probably plowing through the latter in ancient Greek, you can find an English Translation here.

What say you? Share your recommendations with us via the PUP Blog, Facebook, or Twitter!

Every year, the American Political Science Association’s Qualitative Methods section, through the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, grants the Giovanni Sartori Book Award to the book that exemplifies “outstanding new research within the qualitative tradition.” This year’s winner is PUP author Evan S. Lieberman’s Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to AIDS.

According to the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods, “This award honors Giovanni Sartori’s work on qualitative methods and concept formation, and especially his contribution to helping scholars think about problems of context as they refine concepts and apply them to new spatial and temporal settings.”

Great work, Evan!

Read chapter 1 of Boundaries of Contagion here.

For a complete list of recent award-winning Princeton University Press books, please click here.

Of all of the “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” shot-by-shot parodies that have been cropping up after Old Spice’s breakup with Twitter, this is by far my favorite. The spoof was filmed and produced by the Multimedia Production unit at the Harold B. Library at Brigham Young University. BYU senior and Humor U. member Stephen Jones stars.

The video went viral last week, but here it is again if you missed it, or were in a cave or the shower instead of online:

We invite you to follow us on Twitter for our next book giveaway, The New Quotable Einstein.
All @PrincetonUPress followers on Twitter are automatically entered into our random drawing on Friday.
http://twitter.com/princetonUpress

“I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously.”
-Albert Einstein

Through well-documented quotations and supplementary information, The New Quotable Einstein provides a bigger and better biographical account of this multifaceted man-as son, husband, father, lover, scientist, philosopher, aging widower, humanitarian, and friend. It shows us even more vividly why the real and imagined Einstein continues to fascinate people across the world into the twenty-first century.
The New Quotable Einstein
Collected and Edited by Alice Calaprice
With a Foreword by Freeman Dyson

The tea party, that is.

PUP is pleased to announce an A-list addition to the fall 2010 catalog. Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer and professor of American History at Harvard University, has written the definitive book on the political right and its evolution from the Revolution. THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES is slated to pub on October 6. For more info, check out the book page. Jill will kickoff tour season with an October 2 appearance at the eleventh annual New Yorker Festival.

The Singing of National Anthems in International Soccer

Andrei S. Markovits

co-author with Lars Rensmann of the recently published Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture

The World Cup ended on Sunday, July 11th. Many of us delighted in this tournament not only as inveterate soccer fans, but also as witnesses to a unique event that unified the globe for more than a month. And yet, the potentially divisive forces of nationalism have not vanished. Clearly, in competitions in which teams appear solely based on the commonality of their players’ passports, any and all rooting interests express by definition some kind of nationalism, no matter how muted. The “us” and “we” means ipso facto a nation. This is markedly different in such top-level competitions like the Champions League in Europe and the Copa Libertadores in South America where the “us” and “we” is decidedly non-national and accentuates at the same time the global and the local. Having attended five World Cups since 1966 and experienced all with some degree of knowledge and consciousness since the 1954 tournament in Switzerland, I have witnessed the ever-increasing singing of national anthems by players and fans in the more recent cups.

Indeed, the singing – or not singing – of the anthem by players led to major discussions in their home countries pertaining to the degree of their patriotism and their commitment to playing for their country. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in France where players’ singing of the Marseillaise was judged in terms of its quality, demeanor, projection, and acquaintance with the text as proper measures of their extant national allegiance to France and thus their commitment to play for the national team. Clearly, the volume of the criticisms escalates proportionally to the team’s failures on the field.

More after the jump.

The winners of the 22nd Annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced on May 27, 2010 at the School of Visual Arts Theater in New York City. Among the winners was Margot Canaday, whose The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America topped the LGBT Studies category. Congratulations Margot!

The 2010 ceremony honored books published in 2009. According Lambda Literary,

“The first Lambda Literary Awards were presented at a black-tie gala ceremony in 1989. Every year since then they have been awarded to the finest lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans literature available in the United States. The ‘Lammy’ is the most prestigious, competitive, and comprehensive literary award offered specifically to LGBT authors. For more than two decades the Lambda Literary Awards has brought attention to and honored exceptional writing about queer lives across multiple genres published by large and small presses.”

The Straight State is also the winner of the 2010 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, awarded by the Organization of American Historians.

Find out more about the Lammys, including finalists and winners in other categories, here.

For a complete list of recent award-winning Princeton University Press books, click here.

What exactly makes up the aura of grandeur that we so often associate with Ancient Rome? Is it the spectacular war sagas? The magnificent empires? The legendary heroes? The infamous villains?

Adrienne Mayor might agree with the last option, given that she is the author of The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy.

After massacring eighty thousand Roman citizens in 88 BC, Mithradates seized Greece and modern-day Turkey. Fighting some of the most spectacular battles in ancient history, he dragged Rome into a long round of wars and threatened to invade Italy itself. His uncanny ability to elude capture and surge back after devastating losses unnerved the Romans, while his mastery of poisons allowed him to foil assassination attempts and eliminate rivals.

Sounds fascinating, right? No wonder this book was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award, Nonfiction!

On Thursday, July 22, Adrienne will be appearing at the Kansas City Public Library to discuss The Poison King. the event is scheduled to begin at 6:30 PM at the Central Library, where copies of the book will be available for purchase. Please note that you must RSVP for the event. Click here for more details.

We hope to see you there on Thursday! Before you go, read Chapter 1 online!