If you’ve been wondering about Mumbai Fables‘ evocative cover, it was recently featured in The Huffington Post‘s “25 Outstanding Book Covers of 2010.” Carmina Alvarez-Gaffin, one of the designers at Princeton University Press, was quoted in the article describing how she and author Gyan Prakash worked in tandem to create a design for the book’s jacket:
The image that we ultimately used for the cover of Mumbai Fables is a painting titled “Bombay Buccaneer” by Atul Dodiya, and was brought to us by the author, Gyan Prakash. He loved the image and felt that the image truly captured the essence of his book. Though the book is nonfiction, it is very novelistic in feel, and conjures up the images of Bollywood cinema and the graphic novels of Bombay . Gyan Prakash felt strongly about using a fresh and modern image — not an image traditionally associated with Bombay–but something that would capture the Mumbai of today.
To view the rest of the article, click here. For more information and news related to Mumbai Fables, check out the Facebook page – if you “like” the page, you’ll receive notice of updates!
Dr. Francesco Duina of Bates College recently provided a brief 90-second explanation of his book, Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession on WAMC’s Academic Minute. During the segment, Duina explains the argument and relevance of Winning and explores why the U.S. is consistently outranked on lists of the world’s happiest countries. Whew – that’s a lot for just 90 seconds!
Click here to listen, and here to learn more about the book!
Crises are a chance to learn. For the past 200 years, with the exception of the Great Depression, major financial crises originated in poor and unstable countries, which then needed major policy adjustments. Today’s crisis started in rich industrial countries – not only with sub-prime mortgages in the United States, but also with mismanagement of banks and public debt in Europe. So what will Europe learn, and what relevance will those lessons have for the rest of the world?
Europe’s contemporary problems offer striking parallels with previous problems on the periphery of the world economy. In successive waves of painful crisis – in Latin America in the 1980’s, and in East Asia after 1997 – countries learned a better approach to economic policy and developed a more sustainable framework for managing public-sector debt. Today it is Europe’s turn.
The European crisis is coming full circle. Initially a financial crisis, it morphed into a classic public-debt crisis after governments stepped in to guarantee banks obligations. That, in turn, has created a new set of worries for banks that are over-exposed to supposedly secure government debt. Sovereign debt no longer looks stable.
Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Marie Curie Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His books include The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton), A German Identity, International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods, and The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression.
In addition to Anton Kaes, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has also awarded Christine Poggi a prize for her Princeton book. Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism has been declared one of two winners of the MLA’s 21st Howard R. Marraro Prize, for outstanding books in the field of Italian literature or comparative literature involving Italian.
The selection committee’s citation for Poggi’s book reads: Published on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the movement, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism offers a cultural studies analysis that thoroughly revises our perception of futurism and of its most widely held tenets. Christine Poggi ably explores traditional modernist tropes associated with futurism-speed, machines, urbanization, war-to reveal that the movement’s most important figures were much more conflicted about modernity than has been thought thus far. By diachronically juxtaposing the artistic production and official pronouncements of futurist artists with coeval theories such as those advanced by social theorists like Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, and Cesare Lombroso, as well as with recent developments in the field of chronophotography and war technology, Poggi’s work makes a case for a radical reappraisal of futurism that revolutionizes its understanding within the context of Italian modernism.
To read the rest of the press release, click here. To see other recent prize-winning books from PUP, click here.
by Sarah Caldwell | Filed in: Twitter | 9:40am EST
It’s Tuesday! It’s been a while! (Tick tock, tick tock.) But the Elf is back and ready with a new batch of recs. Here are this week’s picks from Stefani Wexler, Editorial Associate in Biology, Earth Sciences, and Mathematics.
* The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life while Corresponding about Math by Steven Strogatz – This little book is a great gift for just about anyone who’s had an influential teacher in their life. It’s a quick read, weighing in under 200 pages, and a really gripping tale of the relationship between a teacher and his student. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the math, you can skip right through it and still pick up the charm of Strogatz’ story as a correspondence about math develops into a true friendship.
* Just Kids by Patti Smith – Smith’s memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe is this year’s non-fiction National Book Award winner for good reason. I couldn’t put it down as I was pulled through the streets of 1970s New York City, into such iconic locales as Max’s Kansas City and the Chelsea Hotel, meeting the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. It’s a real story of enduring love between two people, and the art that drove their lives.
* Bloodthirsty by Flynn Meaney – I must admit that I never jumped on the vampire band wagon – I’ve never read Twilight and True Blood scares me – but this isn’t your typical vampire book. The main character is not your usual vampire. Well, he’s not actually a vampire at all. But if Edward can get all the girls by being pale and mysterious, so can Finbar Frame! This laugh-out-loud parody of the vampire craze is a great read for teens and adults alike.
Stay tuned for our final installment on Tuesday, December 21.
This week’s book giveaway is Mathematicians by Mariana Cook. All Facebookers that LIKE us are automatically entered to win. The drawing takes place this Friday.
Mathematicians is a remarkable collection of ninety-two photographic portraits, featuring some of the most amazing mathematicians of our time. Acclaimed photographer Mariana Cook captures the exuberant and colorful personalities of these brilliant thinkers and the superb images are accompanied by brief autobiographical texts written by each mathematician. Together, the photographs and words illuminate a diverse group of men and women dedicated to the absorbing pursuit of mathematics.
“Mariana Cook has photographed everyone from Francis Crick to Barack and Michelle Obama but has chosen to turn her lens on a slightly more obscure subject for this collection of black-and-white portraits of mathematicians. She photographed 92 in all, some just beginning their careers, others Fields Medal winners with their fame secure. Accompanying the images are personal essays in which each subject reflects on the obsessions, disappointments, and relationships that continue to endear them to their profession. What emerges is a sincere and candid look inside an often insular field.”–Seed Magazine
On December 1, the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) declared Anton Kaes, author of Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War, winner of the ninth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. The award recognizes outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of of the Germanic languages.
The committee’s citation for the winning book reads: The thread count of Anton Kaes’s Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War is high. Selecting from all the filaments of the most innovative genealogies of media, politics, and psychoanalysis, Kaes has woven a central thread tying the epidemic breakdown of war neurosis to the expressive breakthrough of German film. Shell Shock Cinema is one of those enviable books that we can now not imagine being without. How did we not see before the ways in which aberrant mourning, the technical media, traumatic neurosis, and projective politics met and crossed over during the Weimar period? As a new standard work, Shell Shock Cinema will guide the study of German expressionist film in its many contexts for years to come.
The prize will be presented on January 7, 2011 during the association’s annual convention in Los Angeles.
To read the rest of the press release, click here.
Fact: With more than 100 different families and 40,000 individual species, spiders are among the most successful creatures on Earth. Highly adaptable, they live almost everywhere, from equatorial rainforest to Arctic tundra.
In The Private Life of Spiders, spider expert Paul Hillyard takes the reader on a fascinating and richly illustrated tour of the lives of some of the world’s most remarkable spiders. The book reveals the intriguing behaviors of these complex creatures, from their extraordinary web-spinning skills and hunting strategies to their courtship displays and devoted care for their young. The book also describes other surprising skills of some spiders, such as the ability to cross vast stretches of open water.
by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Mathematics | 8:30pm EST
Who needs a chocolate advent calendar? The Plus Advent Calendar offers a mathematical goody for each day leading up to Christmas. Click over and enjoy.
What do they have planned for Day 1?
To celebrate the frosty beginning of December we have hidden all things icy behind Door #1. Wrap up warm, pack a thermos of hot tea and strap on your skis and enjoy!
After a nice long Thanksgiving break, we’re back in our offices and it is time for yet another issue of Princeton Global Science. Features of this issue include:
The first installment of Crossley Unplugged, a series of videos from birder and nature photographer Richard Crossley. In this short video, he answers the all-important question: “Where to go birding?” As we gear up for the publication of The Crossley ID Guide in March 2011, we will post many more videos from Richard that address practical birding concerns as well as provide hints to improve your identification skills.
Physical Sciences editor Ingrid Gnerlich gives us an overview of the series Princeton Primers in Climate, including a new book from David Archer on The Global Carbon Cycle.
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.
Arnold writes:So, if the demand for mortgages collapses, all it takes to get back to 2006 levels is for mortgage underwriters to take a 20 percent pay cut? In a world with no discontinuities, we would not get crazy subprime lending and sudden sharp drops in demand. The no-discontinuity world is what classical economists are trained to work with. Too bad it i […]
I have taken photos of birds that are so bad, out of focus, poorly exposed, wings cut off, etc. We all have, but why would anyone keep them? I delete them, especially when I can't identify them...hah. But I have to say, there are photos I should have deleted long ago that still sit in my collection. The Cooper's Hawk photo above is one of them....i […]
That’s the title of my piece in the Fin last week. As with my previous column, Catallaxy was out with a comment long before I got around to posting here, but it seemed to me to miss the point fairly comprehensively. Ever since the first signs of the global financial crisis emerged back in 2007, […]
Arnold writes:Suppose that a bunch of mortgage underwriters get laid off. There are two possible full employment equilibria. (a) They can be instantly employed as dishwashers at 20 cents an hour. (b)They can be employed as health insurance claims processors at a salary close to what they were making as mortgage underwriters. The reason that we don't obs […]
Kevin Outterson writes of “Hand Sanitizers as Agent Orange”: Over at CommonHealth, Aayesha rounds up the literature on the limits of hand sanitizers, but fails to mention the collateral damage to the skin microbiome. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers kill many bacteria, viruses and fungi, but they don’t selectively target pathogens. They kill a wide swath of [.. […]
1. Via Chris F. Masse, alligator eats capitalist. 2. Pizza topping mark-ups. 3. Markets in everything the culture that is Japan. 4. Trade Diversion economics blog. 5. Symposium on how to fix the housing market, including me. […]
Why are cell phone taxes so high? In the United States we tax cell phones more than beer. The usual explanations for high taxes, negative externalities and low elasticity of demand don’t seem to apply to cell phones. Our colleagues Thomas Stratmann and Matt Mitchell offer an answer based in political economy. …no single politician […]
Next week, I'm going to debate Modeled Behavior's Karl Smith on "How Deserving Are the Poor?" Logistics:Date: Wednesday, February 1Time: 6:00-9:00 PMLocation: Johnson Center Meeting Room A, George Mason University (Fairfax Campus)My strategy, as usual, is to use an uncontroversial moral premise to show that the status quo is absurd. The […]
There has been an increasing discussion about the proliferation of flawed research in psychology and medicine, with some landmark events being John Ioannides’s article, “Why most published research findings are false” (according to Google Scholar, cited 973 times since its appearance in 2005), the scandals of Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel, two leading psyc […]
Justin Wolfers writes: Predictably enough, I spent yesterday reading lefty blogs trumpeting Corak’s analysis, and right-leaning blogs who didn’t want to believe the inequality-mobility link, endorsing Winship. But both missed the bigger picture implications. Either you’re convinced by Corak that the data can be trusted, and that they show there’s a strong li […]
If you’ve been wondering about Mumbai Fables‘ evocative cover, it was recently featured in The Huffington Post‘s “25 Outstanding Book Covers of 2010.” Carmina Alvarez-Gaffin, one of the designers at Princeton University Press, was quoted in the article describing how she and author Gyan Prakash worked in tandem to create a design for the book’s jacket:
In addition to Anton Kaes
On December 1, the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) declared Anton Kaes, author of 
