Nothing says summer reading like a book about the last poems of some of the greatest American poets. That is, if you are Woody Allen. No Stieg Larsson for Mr. Allen this summer, as he was snapped staring intently into the pages of Helen Vendler’s latest, LAST LOOKS, LAST BOOKS. England’s Daily Mail featured pictures [...]

Read the complete article at Publishers Weekly, but here’s the opening paragraph:

It’s taken 50 years but Dorothy Jane Mills, formerly Dorothy Z. Seymour, wife of the late baseball historian Harold Seymour, has received long overdue acknowledgment as coauthor along with her late husband of three seminal books on the history of baseball that are considered the scholarly standard in the field. In a formal announcement by Oxford University Press executive editor Tim Bent, Mills was given formal credit and her name will now accompany her late husband’s on the books’ covers and title pages.

The most interesting aspect (at least to me) of this story is that Mrs. Mills asked her husband if she could be listed as a co-author and he said no and that was that.

She said, however, that that didn’t become a sore point in the marriage. “That’s how I was raised. In those days a girl was supposed to be a helper and an assistant.”

Thank goodness those days are now past. Congratulations to Mrs. Mills and Oxford University Press on this terrific news.

Believe me, you don’t want to miss out on tomorrow’s (Friday’s) PUP’s Facebook/Twitter book giveaway:
Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century: A Descriptive Catalogue by Sofia Kotzabassi & Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, with the collaboration of Don C. Skemer

What’s the big fuss? It’s difficult to put into words what an awesome book this is. I’ve been trying all week to capture the essence of this book, but I don’t think I did it justice. First time I saw a copy of the book was last Friday and it blew me away. It’s like each page was hand crafted–and the binding, well, you just have to see it for yourself. The Publications of the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, do things right. Let’s just say you probably will want to build your own private library to hold this tome (as Danielle, one of our FB followers, called the book.) Second best, if you have a sturdy coffee table, you could put it there, but the book weighs 7 lbs., so be careful.

How do you enter? Go to PUP’s facebook page and click on the “like” icon to become our fan. Once you’re a fan, then you are automatically entered to win our weekly book giveaways. Or are you into Twitter? If so, go to PUP’s Twitter Page and click on the “Sign Up” button. Tomorrow afternoon, 3:30 ET, we will be picking the lucky winner. You have until then to become part of the draw. So if you “like” what we’re doing with our PUP book giveaways, let us know by becoming a PUP fan.

Last chance. Are you entered to win?

At Princeton University Press, we have the privilege of getting our intellectual feet wet with some of the best comparative literature academia has to offer, but unless you count Carnegie Lake, Princeton offers few opportunities for exercising one’s sea legs.

Fortunately, we will be able to combine our loves of navigating waters and words later this fall with the forthcoming release of Stanford comparative literature scholar Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea, which explores the rise of the popular prose form through seafaring works by the likes of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Conrad.

Until the book is published this November, literary landlubbers and sea folk alike might enjoy getting more background information by visiting an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library called “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750″, recently reviewed by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times.

The show runs until September 4th, but if you would rather explore the topic from your computer screen or the printed page, you can learn more about The Novel and the Sea and Margaret Cohen’s other Princeton titles here.

It’s not often that an author attempts to coin the name for an entire generation of writers, but that is exactly what Lawrence Jackson has done with The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. This group of writers exists somewhere between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights period and until now has been, as a group, unnamed.

I asked Jackson how he came up with the title of the book and it turns out he had another title in mind when the book was first underway.

“When I arrived at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in the fall of 2004 I had a title all ready for my book project, an epic literary history designed to fill the gap between the more plentiful works on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. The book title was A Song in the Front Yard, after a Gwendolyn Brooks poem,” says Jackson. “To Brooks the poem’s title was ironic, because the speaker in the poem hoped to claim not just the front yard but the back alley too. I loved the sound of it, and so did my fellow humanists in Tar Heel country. But no editors had any confidence in those words to lure an audience.”

Though poetic, A Song in the Front Yard soon gave away to Indignation, but Jackson had not quite arrived at title of the book as it stands now.

“Next try, and the handle for the subsequent four years, was A Renaissance of Indignation. Educated Americans knew about the American Renaissance of the 1840s and 50s and the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, so that word seemed worth its weight in gold. But when the chapters sailed out for review the balking began in earnest,” explains Jackson. “I learned that my title was contradictory, fussy and fractious. And by using a semi colon to clarify the work–’A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960′—I was guilty of writing the equivalent of War and Peace: A Novel.”

Though ‘renaissance’ was lost in the shuffle, ‘indignation’ stuck. Jackson describes the word as being like “a talisman, a fetish, a raven, an albatross.”

He further explains, “Indignation became the lingua franca that united my writers as a group, distinguishing them from the folk artists of the 1920s and the revolutionaries of the 1960s. In a letter detailing the power of Native Son, Ralph Ellison had praised the ‘indignant consciousness’ of Bigger Thomas, a shift in attitude among the lumpenproletariat that Ellison wagered would play a crucial role in making representative democracy in the United States a possibility. This kind of unapologetic defiance seemed to characterize the bunch, and, piggybacking a bit off of Tom Brokaw’s book title, The Indignant Generation was born.”

The Indignant Generation will publish in December 2010, but you might enjoy watching this video of Jackson describing the project and the research involved.

For the first time, a scholar representing the field of Islamic Studies has won the Gerda Henkel Prize presented by the Gerda Henkel Foundation – PUP author Gudrun Krämer is that scholar. Many congratulations, Gudrun!

Since its founding in 1976, the Gerda Henkel Foundation has been funding research projects in the historical humanities, more recently starting a program dedicated to studying “Islam, the modern state and transnational movements.”

Of their honoree, Chairman of the foundation Dr. Michael Hanssler says, “Krämer’s work helps us to obtain far deeper understanding of Islamic cultures and societies. Working from a sound historical basis, the winner of the 2010 Gerda Henkel Prize is then able to give us a more nuanced view of our everyday reality.”

With her incredible research and investigations, Gudrun has established herself as a leading scholar in the field of Islamic Studies and has built an impressive reputation with her written works including A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel.

You can find out more about Gudrun and about the Gerda Henkel Foundation by clicking here.

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

Just one of the 504 color illustrations in PUP’s book giveaway this week. They say a picture is worth a thousand words–then this illustration alone, is worth a gazillion words.

“[E]very book in this collection represents an arm stretched out across vast spaces of time. Gospel books, books of liturgy, anthologies of music and prayers, guides to holy places were there to make time itself stand still, in the eternal presence of God. This collection has many copies of such texts. They stretch over an expanse of time from the 6th to the 19th century. But the volumes that speak, perhaps, most poignantly to modern historians are those that show the reach of medieval Byzantines into the treasures of a past that was already centuries, even millennia, distant from them.”–from the Foreword, Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century: A Descriptive Catalogue

To be a part of tomorrow’s book giveaway, follow PUP on Facebook and/or Twitter. All followers are automatically entered to win.

“Google: Young Will Have to Change Names to Escape ‘Cyber Past.’ Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking… sites such as Facebook.”–The New Media Journal.us

Echoing those sentiments: “Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well.”–Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”

Want a visual? Check out the book trailer for “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age:

The Arthur Ross Book Award is given annually to the best book published on international affairs by the Council on Foreign Relations – on this year’s shortlist is PUP title How Wars End by Dan Reiter.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, this award “is a significant award for a book on international affairs. It was endowed by Arthur Ross in 2001 to honor nonfiction works, in English or translation, that merit special attention for bringing forth new information that changes our understanding of events or problems, developing analytical approaches that allow new and different insights into critical issues, or providing new ideas that help resolve foreign policy problems.”

Congratulations on this great achievement, Dan!

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

Dan Reiter has authored two groundbreaking works on war with PUP: Democracies at War (with Allan C. Stam) and How Wars End. With detailed analysis of over twenty major conflicts, Dan’s works bring clarity to the infinitely complex subject. His summer reading choices broaden the scope of war even further, dealing with the day-to-day life of a solider in Vietnam, and the struggles of a country in the aftermath of WWII.

“One of my more enjoyable reads this summer was Matternhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes. It’s a Vietnam War-era novel, written by a Vietnam veteran. The novel follows one Marine unit through several weeks of combat operations in a mountainous border region. It is one of the few Vietnam War era novels which primarily focuses on relatively conventional combat operations, rather than on things like pacification, counter-guerrilla strategy, and/or relations with South Vietnamese civilians. It is well-written, and filled with lots of gritty description of a soldier’s life that only a combat veteran would know. I also appreciated the depiction of race relations among Marines, which forms an important portion of the plot. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Vietnam War or in combat fiction. I would say it’s one of the better Vietnam War novels I’ve read, perhaps alongside The 13th Valley by John del Vecchio.”

“I am currently reading Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 by David Kynaston. It is a social and economic history of Britain during the immediate postwar period, describing the everyday life of the British population, as well as relevant domestic policies embraced by the government. The kinds of areas it covers include housing, food rationing, and popular culture phenomena like fashion, sport, and the emergence of television. I am getting a much better sense of how surprisingly difficult day to day life was for the British population during this period, and the lively nature of British government debate about what policies should be embraced to push forward British recovery. There was, for example, a quite open embrace of socialism by a number of politicians. I would recommend it to anyone interested in British history, or to anyone who enjoys getting a very textured feel of what day to day life is like at a particular place in a particular time. Regarding the latter, perhaps the kind of person who relishes the period authenticity of the television show Mad Men would enjoy this book.”

Let us know what you think in the comments, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Timothy Gowers, editor of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, is mentioned in today’s New York Times article “Step 1: Post Elusive Proof. Step 2: Watch Fireworks”. In an account of a recent attempt to solve what is known as the “P versus NP problem”—one of the most important unsolved problems in theoretical computer science and all of mathematics –reporter John Markoff explores how online collaboration, including analysis and commentary on blogs and wikis, is changing the way science is practiced. Gowers created the Polymath Project in 2009 to encourage collaborative mathematical research projects (see http://polymathprojects.org/about/ for more details).

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics explains the P versus NP problem in articles IV.20 (Computational Complexity, this is an excerpt from the larger article) and V.24 (The P versus NP Problem).

Another PUP book is receiving an honor from the American Sociological Association this year – Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities is the winner of the 2010 Pierre Bourdieu Book Award!

Penned by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michaels S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line is a groundbreaking book that gives us detailed insight into the crisis of college completion at America’s public universities, examining factors such as dropout rates and their relationships to various demographic groups. According to the ASA, it is the best book in the Sociology of Education published in 2008 or 2009.

Crossing the Finish Line has also received an Honorable Mention for the 2009 PROSE Award for Excellence – Education.

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