You are invited to be among the first to check out our new Earth Science Catalog:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/earth11.pdf

Take a look at what is new and forthcoming in our new series, Princeton Primers in Climate. David Archer’s book, The Global Carbon Cycle is launching the new series. The Princeton Primers in Climate is a series of short, authoritative books that explain the state of the art in climate-science research.

Professors, check out the textbook section of the catalog for great course adoption selections. And if you’re in San Francisco for the AGU meeting this week, stop by booth no. 627 and say hello. Hope to see you there.

This week’s giveaway is Gauguin: Maker of Myth, edited by Belinda Thomson. Everyone that “LIKES” Princeton University Press on Facebook is automatically entered to win. The drawing will be made this Friday at noon, EST. This will be our last book giveaway of 2010.

Stunningly illustrated and unprecedented in scope, Gauguin features more than 200 museum-quality reproductions of paintings, works on paper, ceramics, woodcarvings, and writings, including Gauguin’s beautifully illustrated letters and books.

Gauguin: Maker of Myth, edited by Belinda Thomson

The new catchphrase in business seems to be “do well by doing good.” In other words, undertaking socially responsible activities boosts profits. For example, Pepsi bolsters its bottom line by shifting to more nutritious, healthier food.

Microfinance has become the darling of development enthusiasts. After all, who could be against an activity that produces uplifting stories like the cell phone ladies of Bangladesh, who lift themselves out of poverty by obtaining loans to buy phones and then selling minutes to others in the village.

Read more…

Raghuram Rajan is Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and author of Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton), which was recently awarded The Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

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Five Princeton books were listed as best sellers in Politics/Law since February 2010 in Library Journal! At number three was Derek Bok’s The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being. Number nine was Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents by Ian Buruma, and seventeen was How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace by Charles A. Kupchan. Closely following was W.G. Runciman’s Great Books, Bad Arguments at nineteen and Norman M. Naimark’s Stalin’s Genocides at twenty.

You can see the full list here.

Congratulations, all!

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Every Friday afternoon for more than a year, hundreds of Israeli Jews have gathered on a dusty little square in the middle of Arab East Jerusalem. There are some Palestinians there, too, including a couple of boys selling fresh orange juice. The people gather there, in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, to protest the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes to make way for Israeli settlers.

At first, the Israeli police used force against the protesters, even though such demonstrations are perfectly legal in Israel. This provoked such bad publicity that the police backed off, while still blocking the road to the new settlements. All the demonstrators can do is hold up signs, bang drums, chant slogans, and show solidarity just by turning up.

Read more…

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (Princeton). He is a regular contributor to many publications, including the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the Financial Times.

On November 6th, 2010 a panel of renowned scientists, philosophers, and public intellectuals gathered to discuss what impact evolutionary theory and advances in neuroscience might have on traditional concepts of morality. If human morality is an evolutionary adaptation and if neuroscientists can identify specific brain circuitry governing moral judgment, can scientists determine what is, in fact, right and wrong? The panelists were psychologist Steven Pinker, author Sam Harris, philosopher Patricia Churchland, physicist Lawrence Krauss, philosopher Simon Blackburn, bioethicist Peter Singer and The Science Network’s Roger Bingham.

Recorded live at the Arizona State University Gammage auditorium.

“The Great Debate” was sponsored by the ASU Origins Project in collaboration with the ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law Center for Law, Science and Innovation; the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge; and The Science Network.

Last spring my husband and I went to the World Science Festival in Manhattan. He is a high school science teacher and I am the math editor for Princeton so we thought this was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The exhibits were wonderful but our favorite was the Math Midway. It also was the most crowded. There were all kinds of hands-on exhibits, puzzles, and even a tricycle with square wheels. We loved the NASA exhibit and the Virginia Tech robot, Charlie, but we kept going back to the Math Midway. Seeing the excited, and sometimes concentrated, looks on the faces of kids and adults alike was almost as much fun as being a part of the action.

Even better than this, we learned that the Math Midway was a preview of what will become the Museum of Mathematics. It will be a unique and innovative institution which will strive to enhance public understanding and perception of mathematics as an evolving, creative, and aesthetic human endeavor. Slated to open in Spring 2012, the Museum’s hands-on, interactive exhibits will provide a place for children and adults to become excited about math. MoMath will be North America’s only museum devoted to the wonders of mathematics and its many connections, from art to science to finance.

In addition to the exhibits that we saw in the Math Midway, there will be lectures, classroom events, and a gift shop where you can purchase all kinds of great math toys. If you just can’t wait, go to http://momath.org/shop to find a great math gift. You will also be supporting the Museum. If you would like to know more about the museum, visit http://momath.org/. If you will be attending the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans this January, please stop by their exhibit.

From a Swedish hotel made of ice to the enigma of UFOs, from a tragedy on Lake Minnetonka to the gold mine of cyberpornography, The Princeton Reader brings together more than 90 favorite essays by 75 distinguished writers. This collection of nonfiction pieces by journalists who have held the Ferris/McGraw/Robbins professorships at Princeton University offers a feast of ideas, emotions, and experiences–political and personal, light-hearted and comic, serious and controversial–for anyone to dip into, contemplate, and enjoy.

The volume includes a plethora of topics from the environment, terrorism, education, sports, politics, and music to profiles of memorable figures and riveting stories of survival. These important essays reflect the high-quality work found in today’s major newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and websites.

The book’s contributors include such outstanding writers as:

• Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times
• Jill Abramson, Jim Dwyer, and Walt Bogdanich of the New York Times
• Evan Thomas of Newsweek
• Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher of the Washington Post
• Nancy Gibbs of Time
• Jane Mayer, John McPhee, Alex Ross and John Seabrook of the New Yorker
• Alexander Wolff, senior writer at Sports Illustrated
• Michael Dobbs, formerly of Washington Post, now a Cold War historian and author
• Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times‘ Beijing Bureau Chief
• James V. Grimaldi, Washington Post, Pulitzer prize-winner
• Roberta Oster Sachs, formerly ABC, CBS, and NBC news and Emmy Award winner, now University of Richmond School of Law
• Joel Stein, columnist and a regular contributor to Time
• Claudia Roth Pierpont, staff writer at New Yorker
• Greil Marcus, music and culture critic, author, has been a columnist for the New York Times, The Believer

For a complete listing, visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/TOCs/c9322.html

The perfect collection for anyone who enjoys compelling narratives, The Princeton Reader contains a depth and breadth of nonfiction that will inspire, provoke, and endure.

John McPhee’s many books include Annals of the Former World, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Carol Rigolot is executive director of the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

We invite you to read chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9322.pdf

The Princeton Reader:
Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University
Edited by John McPhee & Carol Rigolot

Now that the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have committed €67.5 billion to rescue Ireland’s troubled banks, is the eurozone’s debt crisis finally nearing a conclusion?

For starters, there are more bailouts to come, with Portugal at the top of the list. With an average growth rate of less than 1% over the past decade, and arguably the most sclerotic labor market in Europe, it is hard to see how Portugal can grow out of its massive debt burden.

Read more…

Kenneth S. Rogoff is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics at Harvard University, was formerly chief economist at the IMF. He is the coauthor of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton), Foundations of International Macroeconomics, and a frequent commentator for NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.

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Two Princeton books have recently been mentioned on strategy+business‘ online list of the “Best Business Books 2010.” Raghuram G. Rajan’s Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy made the cut for the category, “The Economy,” and was reviewed by David Warsh, while Boris Groysberg’s Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance appeared in the category, “Human Capital” and was reviewed by Sally Helgesen.

Click here and here to see the reviews. And if you would like to see a list of other recent award-winning books from PUP, please click here!

Could this be a revolution in design publishing?

MIT Press has just released a new iPad app for its design title, NONOBJECT, by Branko Lukić and Barry Katz. The print version of this book was available in early November, but now you can buy it from the Apple Store and download it to your iPad for $19.95.

Inspired by Debussy’s notion of music’s existence in the “space between the notes,” NONOBJECT explores the designs made from the space between people and objects and produces a series of objects that can’t exist but perhaps should. The app complements and builds on the printed book, presenting flexible navigation based on touch controls, interactive 360º views, and videos that show what the objects would be like if they did exist. The new level of interactive engagement brings the book’s images to life.

“We get excited about those pairings of content and technology that genuinely benefit the reader,” said MIT Press Director, Ellen W. Faran. “How better to experience these unbounded nonobjects which open our minds than to explore them in new and infinitely varying ways in the NONOBJECT app?”

Fascinating! If you want to read more about NONOBJECT, check out its website here. You can also take a tour of the app’s features at http://www.nonobject.com/blind/ipad_demo_Short.mov.

Five Princeton books were recently featured in Financial Times‘ Nonfiction Round-Up for 2010! Here’s what FT had to say about them:

Business & Economics

	Banking on the Future: The Fall and Rise of Central Banking, by Howard Davies and David Green The best assessment yet of the role played by the leading western central banks – the US Federal Reserve, the ECB and the Bank of England – in the run-up to the financial crisis and beyond, from two former insiders at the top level of UK policymaking.
	Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, by John Quiggin A critical look, from a left-leaning perspective, at some of the defining intellectual fashions of the past three decades. Quiggin is a writer of great verve who marshals some powerful evidence.
	Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, by Raghuram G Rajan A high-powered yet accessible analysis of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Fault Lines was awarded the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. Rajan, a University of Chicago economist, was one of the few who warned that the crisis was coming and his book fizzes with striking and thought-provoking ideas.

Science & Environment

Honeybee Democracy, by Thomas D Seeley The year’s most enchanting science book. Seeley, biology professor at Cornell University, distils the insights of 40 years studying and keeping bees. He focuses on the astonishing “democratic” process that takes place when a swarm of thousands of bees leaves an overcrowded hive to find a new home: how scouts evaluate potential sites and advertise their merits, how a final choice is made, and how the swarm navigates to its new nest.

Sport

Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture, by Andrei S Markovits and Lars Rensmann A very readable guide to the recent globalisation of sport by academics who understand both US and European sports. Packed with examples, from David Beckham to Kobe Bryant, the book explores the tension between sport’s globalisation and the fact that most teams still arouse the greatest emotions in their local areas.

Definitely a great year of non-fiction books! Congratulations to all authors mentioned!

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