Penn Press Log

Three "Essential" Penn Press Books in Choice Magazine

Three very different Penn Press books were named "essential" in the June 2010 issue of Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries--Marisa Chappell's The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America, Lloyd Pratt's Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, and The Bohemians, a novel by Anne Gedeon Lafitte, Marquis de Pelleport.

Choice described The War on Welfare as a "must read for anyone interested in the Great Society and conservative attempts to dismantle it." Choice said of Archives of American Time, "This lively interdisciplinary study is entertaining as well as informative."  Choice reviewer C. B. Kerr thanked Robert Darnton for rediscovering Pelleport's The Bohemians. "Witty and outrageous, the novel was lost as soon as it was published. Today, beautifully translated into English by [Vivian] Folkenflik, it seems remarkably modern. The novel richly deserves the audience it never had," wrote Kerr.

Choice Reviews Online subscribers can access the full reviews at the American Library Association's Choice web site.

Behind the Killing Fields--Now Available

Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims
Gina Chon and Sambath Thet
212 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus.
Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4245-4 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Based on exclusive interviews with the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea, this book tells the story of a man who began as an idealistic freedom fighter and wound up involved in one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, Cambodia's Killing Fields.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Sageman Cited in Rolling Stone Article

In this week’s much discussed McChrystal piece in Rolling Stone, Michael Hastings cites Penn Press author Marc Sageman in his commentary on the complex and messy nature of the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan.

But even if [McChrystal] somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."

National Post Op-Ed on Darnton’s Work

An op-ed piece on Robert Darnton’s research on French libel recently appeared in the National Post. Columnist Robert Fulford writes:

When we chronicle the struggle for literary freedom we too rarely give proper credit to the scandalous books, the salacious books, the truly outrageous books…. A closer look reveals that much of the vast terrain on which literature and politics stand was in fact cleared by some dubious characters publishing books that no one, even the authors, considered respectable.

Robert Darnton has spent many years nudging us toward an understanding of this reality.

Highlighting Darnton’s distinguished career, Fulford goes on to explain the significance of Darnton’s dedication to underground literature as a shaper of French history:

His work has influenced cultural historians in France and elsewhere. One skeptical academic called his approach “the ‘pornographic’ interpretation of the French Revolution” but his habit of poking into the darker corners of French publishing has enriched the world’s view of the era.

The complete column is available at www.nationalpost.com.

Penn Press at the AAUP Annual Meeting

The 2010 annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) has come and gone, but it has left the scholarly press community with much to think about. With significantly higher attendance than last year’s conference, the lively 2010 convention reflects hopefully on the general fortunes of university presses. 

Among the Penn Press staff who attended the meeting was Director Eric Halpern, who spoke at “Partnering for Sustainability: Selling E-books to Libraries,” a panel designed to bring other presses and e-book specialists up to speed on the latest developments of an e-book consortium being organized by NYU Press, Penn Press, Rutgers University Press, and Temple University Press and supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. According to Eric, at AAUP “there was a lot of talk about e-publishing, as there has been for the past ten years, but the general sense at the meeting was that it has arrived at last.”

For more information on the annual meeting, check out Jennifer Howard’s recap in the Chronicle of Higher Education at www.chronicle.com.

The Conversion of Herman the Jew--Now Available

The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century
Jean-Claude Schmitt. Translated by Alex J. Novikoff
312 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 illus.
Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4254-6 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the Middle Ages Series

Jean-Claude Schmitt examines a unique and controversial conversion narrative to explore its meaning within the society and culture of its period as well as what it has to tell us about the way historians think and write.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

The TLS Reviews Noble's Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians

Times Literary Supplement reviewer Lucy Beckett calls Thomas F. X. Noble's Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, "an immensely scholarly and interesting book on the Carolingian response to the drama of iconoclasm in Byzantium."

In "Like the Romans," a review in the June 11 issue of the TLS, Beckett praises Noble's "painstaking work on more than a thousand pages of Carolingian texts with some or much bearing on the question of sacred images--text that have suffered varying degrees of damage and editorial excision and have never been translated into any modern language."

"Noble unscrambles with meticulous attention an extremely complex story," writes Beckett.

TLS Online subscribers can access the full review of this first comprehensive study of the Western response to Byzantine iconoclasm at the TLS web site.

Accessories to Modernity--Now Available

Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France
Susan Hiner
288 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus.
Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4259-1 | $47.50 | £31.00

Examining fashion accessories in both novels and fashion discourses, Susan Hiner reframes the feminine accessory as a signifier of modernity and makes an important claim about the "accessory" status of women in nineteenth-century France: as both commodities and consumers, women were in fact "accessories to modernity."

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Fictions of Well-Being--Now Available

Fictions of Well-Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain
Michael Solomon
200 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus.
Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4255-3 | $55.00 | £36.00

In late medieval and early modern Spain, physicians began to translate and refashion medical information for lay readers. This book explores the concept of the sickly reader, a highly motivated individual whom medical writers encouraged to seek out useful remedies and efficacious hygienic practices in various vernacular health guides.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Thet Sambath Looks Behind the Killing Fields in Print and On Screen

Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath continues to dig for the truth behind the killing fields in his writings and on screen. He coauthored Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims with Wall Street Journal reporter Gina Chon. Thet also collaborated on the documentary film Enemies of the People which will be screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York beginning June 18.

New York Times film critic Stephen Holden praised the reporter for his work on the documentary:

Enemies of the People. . . is an inspiring film. To hear people recall committing unspeakable acts while under duress is liberating for them and for us. And the story of Mr. Thet Sambath, who spent years researching and interviewing, is a testament to one man’s persistent search for the truth. The faces and voices of these ordinary people forced to kill raises the age-old question: Who, in the same situation, would have acted differently?

In the film, as in the book Behind the Killing Fields, Thet attempts to dissect the heart of political violence by confronting Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea, a. k. a. Brother Number 2, Pol Pot's top lieutenant during the 1970s. As a survivor of this  bloody regime, Thet offers a critical perspective to one of the darkest episodes in world history.