While researching his biography of Ralph Ellison, Lawrence P. Jackson found a huge gap in African American literature–a gap in how it is studied and taught. Students of American literature are taught about the Harlem Renaissance, but what existed between this period and the later writers of the Civil Rights Period? Who were the writers of the in between years? Why haven’t they been studied as a cohesive group? With The Indignant Generation, Jackson finally gives voice to this generation of writers and their staunch supporters.

Emory University has recorded two podcasts with Jackson — one in which he discusses his new book The Indignant Generation, and the other in which he reads from the book. Click over to give them a listen.

This week’s book giveaway is The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan. All our Facebook fans are automatically entered to win and the random drawing will take place this Friday. The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results.

“Like a few recent best sellers–Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, The Wisdom of Crowds–The Myth of the Rational Voter unwraps economic theories and applies them to everyday life. Mr. Caplan’s thesis, though, lacks any semblance of a compliment: The ‘unwisdom of crowds’ is closer to his point. He believes that the American public is biased against sensible, empirically proved economic policies about which nearly all economists agree. Voters, he says, are not just ignorant in the sense of having insufficient information. They actually hold wrong-headed and damaging beliefs about how the economy works.”–Daniel Casse, The Wall Street Journal

“Poorly informed voters are a big problem in democracy, and Caplan makes the interesting argument that this is not necessarily a problem that can be easily fixed–it may be fundamental to the system. Caplan thinks that voting itself is the problem.”–Andrew Gelman, Columbia University

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition) by Bryan Caplan

Congratulations to Kathleen Graber, whose book, The Eternal City: Poems, has been declared a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry!

Graber’s book was one of five nominated for the NBA by poetry judges Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady, Linda Gregerson, Jeffrey McDaniel, and Brenda Shaughnessy. The winners will be announced at the 61st National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 17th.

Publishers Weekly praised Graber as “one of the most interesting, slippery and philosophical new poets to come along in a while. . . . [W]hat makes Graber’s poems so fresh and wild are the associative slips that happen between the distant past and the urgent present.”

Great job and good luck, Kathleen!

To see a list of other recent award-winning books from PUP, please click here.

The In a Nutshell series may sound like a cute branding idea, but as Ingrid Gnerlich, Senior Editor in Physical Sciences explains below, the books selected for this series are intended to be definitive textbooks for courses in physical science. That said, they are also terrific points of departure for anyone interested in these areas of study.

In a Nutshell is a new series of modern, concise, and well-priced textbooks on core subjects in the physical sciences. Meant for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, this high-profile series includes A. Zee’s Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, 2nd edition, Gerald Mahan’s Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell, Elias Kiritsis’ String Theory in a Nutshell, Carlos A. Bertulani’s Nuclear Physics in a Nutshell, and Dan Maoz’s Astrophysics in a Nutshell.

Released this month, our newest title in the series is Gerald Mahan’s Condensed Matter in a Nutshell. This excellent book focuses on an exciting, fast-moving area of physics that, over the past couple decades, has seen many new experimental advances, one of which was the focus of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics (the discovery of the remarkable two-dimensional material, graphene). Groundbreaking research in this field – from studies of the origin of high-temperature superconductivity to the properties and applications of graphene – has challenged accepted beliefs and raised deep questions about the emergent behavior of condensed matter systems.

Mahan’s premier textbook covers all the foundational topics of the field, as well the latest experimental advances, such as high-temperature superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, graphene, nanotubes, localization, Hubbard models, density functional theory, phonon focusing, and Kapitza resistance. Full of illuminating examples and problems, this is an excellent introduction to this hot area of physics and a great resource for a two-semester graduate course in condensed matter and material physics.

As Sidney Nagel put it, “This book is a great place to start learning about the vast array of phenomena that nature is able to produce around us in the form of materials. It hardly fits in a nutshell – it covers a great many topics, both traditional and current, in condensed matter physics. It is more akin to Hamlet’s assertion that he could be bounded in a nutshell, and count himself a king of infinite space. The prodigious knowledge of the author shines through in the choice of topics.”

Upcoming books in this exceptional textbook series include Christopher Tully’s Elementary Particle Physics in a Nutshell, Anupam Garg’s Electromagnetism in a Nutshell, and A. Zee’s Gravity in a Nutshell. Stay tuned for future In a Nutshell titles!

Many of the topics covered in The Princeton Guide to Ecology, edited by Simon Levin, appear regularly in the news. A good demonstration of how this indispensable resource can enhance our understanding of world issues is the Guide’s treatment of global climate change. In their article “Conservation and Global Climate Change,” Diane M. Debinski and Molly S. Cross explain some of the research methods scientists use to learn the effects of climate change, but also the questions they face in determining how to preserve biodiversity in changing conditions:

The Princeton Guide to Ecology Preface Table of Contents List of Contributors Sample Articles

“The science of managing for climate change is currently in its infancy, and the language of this field is still developing. Strategies include whether to manage for resistance options (e.g., those that delay the effects of climate change), resilience options (e.g., those that increase the ability of the ecosystem to return to previous conditions following a disturbance), or response options (e.g., those that facilitate ecosystem changes brought about by a changing climate). Monitoring to establish baseline conditions and quantify change is a first step in providing scientists with the tools to understand how ecosystems are responding to a changing environment. Adaptive management—modifying management approaches over time as the manager obtains a better understanding of the system—will be an important approach to dealing with climate change. For example, if wildfire frequency increases with warmer temperatures, a manager might want to modify the way that wood is harvested to maximize the placement of fire breaks or minimize the amount of standing dead trees that could provide fuel for a fire. However, even if a manager knows the current status of the system, there are several challenges inherent in dealing with climate change: (1) developing a baseline for comparison; (2) understanding time lags; and (3) consideration of entirely new management approaches.”

–from “Conservation and Global Climate Change” by Diane M. Debinski and Molly S. Cross, in The Princeton Guide to Ecology, edited by Simon Levin

Click the article title above to view the complete entry.

Wealth Matters writer Paul Sullivan writes about the first meeting of the Elites Research Network in his column today. Featured in the article are prominent scholars Sudhir Venkatesh, Dorian Warren, Jeffrey Winters, Olivier Godechot, D. Michael Lindsay, Michèle Lamont and Shamus Rahman Khan. Khan is one of the conference organizers and, more importantly for our purposes, author of the forthcoming Princeton University Press title Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

“It was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history,” writes Sullivan.

“In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.”

Later in the article he writes about Shamus’s experiences with St. Paul’s:

Shamus Rahman Kahn, a conference organizer and assistant professor of sociology at Columbia, seemed to be most at ease with the conflict. The son of a Pakistani father and Irish mother who both emigrated to the United States, he said he came from a wealthy but not elite family. His father, a successful surgeon, paid his son’s way to the St. Paul’s School, a top boarding school.

Yet when Mr. Kahn arrived there in the mid-1990s, he said he lived in the “minority students dorm.” He used that experience and a later teaching stint at St. Paul’s to write a book on the nature of advantage, called “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School,” which will be published by Princeton University Press in January.

“Is it morally responsible for you to get your kids into very expensive schools if it will advantage them?” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s hard not to do it. But by doing it, you’re not explicitly squirting some other kid in the eye with pepper spray. It’s more subtle.”

University of Pennsyvlania political scientist Michael Horowitz did a Q&A with the the popular blog Abu Muqawama on his new book THE DIFFUSION OF MILITARY POWER: Causes and Consequences for International Politics, hosted on the website of the Center for for a New American Security. The chat has generated quite hubub with lots of links to other blogs and purchases of the new book. Come join the discussion!

Congratulations to Margot Canaday, whose book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, has won the 2010 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize!

This award, given by the American Studies Association (ASA), honors the best-published first book in American Studies that highlights the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, and/or nation. According to the ASA website, it is named after Lora Romero, a “valued and long-active member of the American Studies Association, former Assistant Professor at Stanford University, and author of Home Fronts: Nineteenth Century Domesticity and Its Critics.”

The prize consists of a lifetime membership in the ASA, and will be awarded at a ceremony during the ASA convention in November, 2010.

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If you’re in the Seattle area, don’t miss this event featuring Jill Lepore, author of The Whites of Their Eyes!

From the Town Hall Seattle Events Calendar:

Civic Americans have always reshaped the past to their own political ends: The Union laid claim to the Revolution– and so did the Confederacy. Now Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and author of The Whites of Their Eyes, examines the far right’s battle to “take back America” and finds that The Tea Partiers embrace a narrative about America’s founding that is not only a fable but also a variety of fundamentalism– anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist. Presented by The Town Hall Center for Civic Life, with Elliott Bay Book Company.

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When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in their lives?

FACT: There are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a lifetime. Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age.

By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity. David W. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our understanding of art and its past.

We invite you to read chapter one online:
Old Masters and Young Geniuses:
The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity
By David W. Galenson

For more books in the online sale catalog, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/

The first bit of news is that today is the anniversary of the launch of Cassini/Huygens. I spoke with author and scientist Ralph Lorenz about his memory of launch day in 1997 and what might be next for this important space mission. We also look forward to another yearly experience — the trek to find The Perfect Pumpkin — with a fun little math article from mathematics editor Vickie Kearn. Drawing on the skills described in Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin by Lawrence Weinstein & John A. Adam, Vickie describes how to guess your pumpkin’s weight and cost before you break your back trying to lug one home. PGS continues to go to the dinosaurs this issue. We have the tail end of our daily dinosaur feature and a sneak peek at an exciting new book for Fall 2011 — Pterosaurs by Mark Witton. His illustration of a pteranodon taking flight would be at home in the world of George Lucas, and the video he recommends fleshes out the process. We anticipate the publication of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite by Robert Kurzban with a terrific book trailer produced by Brandon Baker. Want to create your own fun iPhone application buttons like those in the video? This Web site can help: http://www.quirco.com/iPhoneIcon/. We also shared sneak peeks at two new catalogs — Birds & Natural History (one of our most popular catalogs) and Cognitive Science (the inaugural catalog in this field).

Continued »

Today, we are celebrating a really important milestone in space exploration and planetary science: the anniversary of the launch of Cassini/Huygens in 1997. Wikipedia tells us that Cassini/Huygens is “a joint NASA/ESA/ASI robotic spacecraft mission currently studying the planet Saturn and its many natural satellites.” We are fortunate to have published a book by a scientist with insider knowledge of this mission, so I turned to PUP author Ralph Lorenz to answer a few questions. Dr. Lorenz has authored two books on the Saturn moon Titan drawing on information and findings from the Cassini/Huygens mission. The first, Lifting Titan’s Veil: Exploring the Giant Moon of Saturn, began the story by describing what we knew of Titan prior to the startling findings of the Cassini/Huygens mission. The second, Titan Unveiled: Saturn’s Mysterious Moon Explored, made full use of the data available to Lorenz and his co-author Jacqueline Mitton, to provide a behind the scenes tale of the mission itself and the startling new discoveries about Titan. Dr. Lorenz kindly agreed to a brief interview about the Cassini/Huygens mission and what we might expect in the coming years.

1.) Cassini/Huygens launched with the Huygens Probe on October 15, 1997. Were you involved with the launch? Do you remember what that day was like?

My experience at the launch site is described in my earlier book Lifting Titan’s Veil. Like almost all of the scientists involved in Cassini’s development, I was just an interested spectator at the launch. It was a spectacular event – the launch was very early in the morning, and the rocket lit up a cloud from inside as it ascended, like a Chinese lantern. Everyone was tired, too tense to sleep before (and the launch had been attempted – and aborted – two nights before) but the adrenaline kept us going. Seeing the rocket launch safely was a great relief – there is always a few percent chance of a launch failing.

2.) What were the initial hopes for the Cassini mission –What was it sent to Saturn to do? Did it accomplish its mission? What is the Huygens probe?

Anticipating what scientific discoveries will be made is always a challenge, but Cassini and the Huygens probe (which parachuted down to Titan’s surface in 2005) were designed to answer some specific questions – like what is the composition of Titan’s atmosphere, and what is the nature of the surface. And Cassini/Huygens has basically answered these. But of course, Cassini’s findings have prompted a whole series of new and deeper questions.

3.) How have the Cassini mission and the Huygens Probe helped us understand Saturn and its moons better? What have been some of the more surprising findings?

Titan has been much more diverse than we expected – all our pre-Cassini ideas were very one-dimensional. Finding an Earth-like landscape with lakes and seas at the poles that contrasts with the huge fields of sand dunes at the equator was a total surprise. We also knew Enceladus might be interesting – there was some circumstantial evidence that it might be somehow geologically active, but nobody expected to see giant plumes of ice crystals hosing out into space.

4.) You have written two books about the moon Titan. What are some of the exciting findings about this moon?

The diversity of Titan’s landscape, which is both exotic and familiar, is one of the most interesting things for me. The close-up view from the Huygens probe, showing an area where methane rainfall had formed river channels and tumbled rocks around on the surface has profoundly set our picture of this world.

Another major finding has been the surprising richness of the organic chemistry in the upper atmosphere as Cassini flies through it. Instead of just a handful of molecules (as you’d find at Earth or Mars) there are dozens or hundreds of carbon-bearing compounds being formed up there. What’s really impressive to see now is the breadth of science being engaged at Titan – people who study sand dunes on Earth are interested, rivers, clouds; planetary rotation, organic chemistry, atmospheric electricity. Titan is like a huge scientific playground.

5.) The Cassini mission has been extended twice since its original mission. What do you think is next for Cassini?

The second mission extension has just begun, and is very bold – to continue operations until the Saturn/Titan northern summer solstice in 2017. So not only are there seven more years of observations to look forward to, but we expect to see some dramatic seasonal change in weather patterns on both Saturn and Titan. Cassini will not be the end of the Titan story. There are already very serious proposals for follow-on missions – to splash down and float in the polar seas, or to fly above the surface in a balloon or airplane.