The ideas in David Marquand’s book ‘The End of the West: The
Once and Future Europe’ were the subject of a panel event at the British Academy on 29 November.
In front of a capacity audience David and his fellow panellists Rt Hon
Professor Shirley Williams and Professors Paulo Pombeni and Christopher Hill
addressed a range of issues, from how Europe should respond to the
changing global balance of power, to the growing demands for recognition by the
ethnic communities within its borders and the legitimacy deficit of its
politicians. There were also a variety of suggestions as to how the
current crisis in the Eurozone might be resolved. To hear this event in
full follow the link below.

http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2011/The_End_of_the_West.cfm

Emma Rothschild has won the 2011 Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year Award for her book The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History. This award recognizes an exceptional work of Scottish historical research:

“The Saltire Society Literary Awards bring together the very best of Scottish literature, from the writings of established and new authors through to the accomplishments of researchers and historians, and is a wonderful way of celebrating this important aspect of our rich cultural heritage.”

Princeton Professor Sheldon Garon has done a few major interviews so far this week to discuss the big ideas in his new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves.

His recent Q&A with NPR’s senior business editor Marilyn Geewax is the most popular post on the NPR site today: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/143149947/why-americans-spend-too-much

And Kimberly Blanton of the Squared Away Blog of the Financial Security Project at Boston College recently spoke with Prof. Garon about savings rates, “over-indebtedness,” and America’s “unusual” Christmas shopping season: http://fsp.bc.edu/united-states-of-credit/

You can also check out Prof. Garon’s interview yesterday with Marilyn Geewax and host Michel Martin on “Tell Me More” from NPR News: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=143141870

Kristen Ghodsee’s “Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria” has won the 2011 John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize from the Bulgarian Studies Association. This award is established for the most outstanding recent scholarly book within any area of Bulgarian studies.

“Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion.

Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region’s state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women’s embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks’ new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria’s Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.”

This is the most recent in a slew of prizes for “Muslim Lives,” which has also won the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize, the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

FACT: “In World War II (1939–45) more men (and women) were mobilized than in the Great War. The United States mustered 14.9 million men and women; the British Empire raised 6.2 million; the USSR 25 million; Germany 12.5 million; Japan 7.5 million. Many women entered the armed forces to fill noncombat positions. The U.S. Army Air Force had hundreds of women pilots, some of whom had such hazardous duty as flying aircraft from the United States to the war zones.”

On War and Leadership: The Words of Combat Commanders from Frederick the Great to Norman Schwarzkopf
by Owen Connelly

What can we learn about leadership and the experience of war from the best combat leaders the world has ever known? This book takes us behind the scenes and to the front lines of the major wars of the past 250 years through the words of twenty combat commanders. What they have to say—which is remarkably similar across generational, national, and ideological divides—is a fascinating take on military history by those who lived it. It is also worthwhile reading for anyone, from any walk of life, who makes executive decisions.

The leaders showcased here range from Frederick the Great to Norman Schwarzkopf. They include such diverse figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, commanders on both sides of the Civil War (William Tecumseh Sherman and Stonewall Jackson), German and American World War II generals (Rommel and Patton), a veteran of the Arab-Israeli wars (Moshe Dayan), and leaders from both sides of the Vietnam War (Vo Nguyen Giap and Harold Moore). What they have had in common is an unrivaled understanding of the art of command and a willingness to lead from the front. All earned the respect and loyalty of those they led—and moved them to risk death.

“Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society” by PUP author Steven A. Barnes is the winner of the 2011 Baker-Burton Award: “The Award is given by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association for the best first book in European history by a member of the Section or a [...]

Congratulations to Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria has been awarded the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.” Ghodsee’s book explores gender roles and reconfigurations in a post-Communist Bulgarian community.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe also won the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

Norway’s biggest bank DnB NOR is banking on customers, well, banking on their clever new commercial to promote personal savings accounts. In it, a dazed newlywed wakes up in a luxurious white hotel room after a night of partying only to discover that eternal bachelor George Clooney has put a (giant diamond) ring on it:

The tag line reads, “Some people are lucky in life. For the rest of us, saving up can be smart.” DnB NOR’s ad has gone viral this week, with major newspapers such as Britain’s Independent and Australia’s Telegraph and gossip bloggers such as Perez Hilton posting it to the delight of their readers across the globe.

Funny viral video aside, countries in Europe and Asia share a common modern history of promoting small saving, which is the subject of Princeton professor Sheldon Garon‘s forthcoming book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. Garon’s sweeping transnational history shows how nations such as Germany and Japan have encouraged a culture of thrift by supporting government and private institutions that single-mindedly promote popular savings and wage savings campaigns.

Do you think U.S. banks should start personal savings campaigns featuring stars like Clooney? Tell us what you think in the comments section, and become an early fan of Garon’s forthcoming title on Facebook.

This is the argument of Maurizio Viroli’s The Liberty of Servants, a new book that is featured in this terrific article by Rachel Donadio in today’s NY Times. Donadio writes:

To a growing number of critics, the lurid party details, as well as a semi-conspiratorial attitude in which criticism is seen as disloyalty, are the latest evidence that the Berlusconi government, although democratically elected, has devolved into something from a different age: a royal court, in which everyone, from his coalition partners to his attractive young guests, serves at the pleasure of the prince.

And while this court system may have functioned fairly well in earlier centuries, it fails miserably when confronted by the multitude of economic challenges faced by Italy (whose credit rating, much like the US, was recently downgraded by the S&P and whose borrowing rates are rising). So, how is the royal court system preventing change and allowing Berlusconi to stay in power?

As Donadio explains, “the government’s success is tied less to external economic reality than to internal political calculation.” A point that Maurizio elaborates by saying, “Usually a court systems falls when the ‘signore’ is no longer able to offer protection, benefits, money.”

This explains why Berlusconi endures in spite of a falling approval rating in Italy, according to Donadio who writes, “his loyalists are standing by him — at least for now — because none of them has enough power to replace him. All are tied to Mr. Berlusconi, sometimes through complex personal arrangements that transcend institutional roles, as some of the wiretaps indicate.”

Read Donadio’s complete article (which includes excerpts from wire tap transcripts) here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/world/europe/despite-wiretaps-and-economic-woe-berlusconi-endures.html

To read a chapter from Maurizio’s incredibly timely book, please visit this site: Chapter 1 (PDF)

The Society for the Anthropology of Europe, part of the American Anthropological Association, has announced that Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria by Kristen Ghodsee is the winner of the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology.

According to their web site, “The William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology honors the best book published annually in Europeanist anthropology as determined by a panel comprising SAE senior members, chaired by the Society’s President-elect.”

People who follow such things, may be interested to learn that another PUP book won this same prize last year: The Empire of Trauma by Didier Fassin & Richard Rechtman.

Last week European Advisory Board member David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect Magazine, acted as a judge for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, the most prestigious award in the UK for non-fiction. The award ceremony was filmed as a special edition of the Culture Show on the BBC and can be seen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012fvh3/The_Culture_Show_BBC_Samuel_Johnson_Prize_for_NonFiction_2011_A_Culture_Show_Special/

An ever increasing number of our rights deals are for translations into Chinese, and this week saw the sale of the Chinese (complex) rights for Daniel Bell and Avner de Shalit’s THE SPIRIT OF CITIES.

It was a terrific week for coverage of PUP books in the European media, with a two-page review of Emma Rothschild’s THE INNER LIFE OF EMPIRES appearing in the Times Higher Education, and John Ikenberry’s LIBERAL LEVIATHAN and Diane Coyle’s THE ECONOMICS OF ENOUGH listed as summer “must reads” in the Financial Times. Timothy Garton Ash praised Yan Xuetong’s ANCIENT CHINESE THOUGHT, MODERN CHINESE POWER in the Guardian , while Ian Goldin’s EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE was noticed in Le Monde and the Polish daily Gazeta Prawna.

Princeton scored a double hit in the Economist of 26th May with reviews of Ian Goldin’s ‘Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and will Define our Future’ http://www.economist.com/node/18741382 and Emma Rothschild’s ‘The Inner Life of Empires’ http://www.economist.com/node/18741372.   In addition, Ian has appeared on BBC R3 Nightwaves http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011ckk3 and BBC World Service The Forum http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gyhh2 .  Emma will [...]