NetGalley features new galleys from University Presses #UPWeek

By David George Surdam

Before Magic, Michael, and Kobe. Today’s National Basketball Association commands millions of spectators worldwide, and its many franchises are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But the league wasn’t always so successful or glamorous: in the 1940s and 1950s, the NBA and its predecessor, the Basketball Association of America, were scrambling to attract fans. Teams frequently played in dingy gymnasiums, players traveled as best they could, and their paychecks could bounce higher than a basketball. How did the NBA evolve from an obscure organization facing financial losses to a successful fledgling sports enterprise by 1960?

Drawing on information from numerous archives, newspaper and periodical articles, and Congressional hearings, The Rise of the National Basketball Association chronicles the league’s growing pains and points to the innovations that helped the NBA become the powerhouse that it is today.

University of Illinois Press ~ Pub Date: Nov 18 2012 ~ ISBN: 9780252078668

Since the show’s debut in 2007, Mad Men has invited viewers to immerse themselves in the lush period settings, ruthless Madison Avenue advertising culture, and arresting characters at the center of its 1960s fictional world.

Mad Men, Mad Worldis a comprehensive analysis of this groundbreaking TV series. Scholars from across the humanities consider the AMC drama from a fascinating array of perspectives, including fashion, history, architecture, civil rights, feminism, consumerism, art, cinema, and the serial format, as well as through theoretical frames such as critical race theory, gender, queer theory, global studies, and psychoanalysis.

Duke University Press Books ~ Pub Date: Mar 4 2013 ~ ISBN: 9780822354185

TV on Strike examines the 2007 upheaval in the entertainment industry by telling the inside story of the hundred-day writers’ strike that crippled Hollywood. The television industry’s uneasy transition to the digital age was the driving force behind the most significant labor dispute of the twenty-first century.

With both sides afraid of losing millions in future profits, a critical communication breakdown spurred a brief but fierce fight with repercussions that continue today. The saga of the Writers Guild of America strike is told here as seen through the eyes of key players on both sides of the negotiating table and of the foot soldiers who shocked even themselves with the strength of their resolve to fight for their rights in the face of an ambiguous future.

By Peter Caddick-Adams

The most horrific battles of World War II ring in the popular memory: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, to name a few. Monte Cassino should stand among them. Waged deep in the Italian mountains beneath a medieval monastery, it was an astonishingly brutal encounter, grinding up ten armies in conditions as bad as the Eastern Front at its worst.

Now the battle has the chronicle it deserves. In Monte Cassino, military historian Peter Caddick-Adams provides a vivid account of how an array of men from across the globe fought the most lengthy and devastating engagement of the Italian campaign in an ancient monastery town. Not simply Americans, British, and Germans, but Russians, Indians, Georgians, Nepalese, Ukrainians, French, Slovaks, Armenians, New Zealanders, and Poles, among others, fought and died there. Caddick-Adams offers a panoramic view, surveying the strategic heights and peering over the shoulders of troops fruitlessly digging for cover in the stony soil.

Oxford University Press ~ Pub Date: Nov 7 2012  ISBN: 9780199974641

An Ancient Guide for Modern Leaders

By Marcus Tullius Cicero
Selected, translated, and with an introduction by Philip Freeman

Marcus Cicero, Rome’s greatest statesman and orator, was elected to the Roman Republic’s highest office at a time when his beloved country was threatened by power-hungry politicians, dire economic troubles, foreign turmoil, and political parties that refused to work together. Sound familiar? Cicero’s letters, speeches, and other writings are filled with timeless wisdom and practical insight about how to solve these and other problems of leadership and politics. How to Run a Country collects the best of these writings to provide an entertaining, common sense guide for modern leaders and citizens. This brief book, a sequel to How to Win an Election, gathers Cicero’s most perceptive thoughts on topics such as leadership, corruption, the balance of power, taxes, war, immigration, and the importance of compromise. These writings have influenced great leaders – including America’s Founding Fathers – for two thousand years, and they are just as instructive today as when they were first written.

Princeton University Press ~ Pub Date: Feb 6 2013 ~ ISBN: 9780691156576

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By David Orentlicher

When talking heads and political pundits make their “What’s Wrong with America” lists, two concerns invariably rise to the top: the growing presidential abuse of power and the toxic political atmosphere in Washington. In Two Presidents Are Better Than One, David Orentlicher shows how the “imperial presidency” and partisan conflict are largely the result of a deeper problem – the Constitution’s placement of a single president atop the executive branch. Accordingly, writes Orentlicher, we can fix our broken political system by replacing the one-person, one-party presidency with a two-person, two-party executive branch.

 

Analyzing the histories of other countries with a plural executive branch and past examples of bipartisan cooperation within Congress, Orentlicher shows us why and how to implement a two-person, two-party presidency. Ultimately, Two Presidents Are Better Than One demonstrates why we need constitutional reform to rebalance power between the executive and legislative branches and contain partisan conflict in Washington.

 

NYU Press ~ Pub Date: Mar 13 2013 ~ ISBN: 9780814789490

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We have entered a new phase of the global food crisis. Wealthy countries that import much of their food, along with private investors, are racing to buy or lease huge swaths of farmland abroad. The Global Farms Race is the first book to examine this burgeoning trend in all its complexity, considering the implications for investors, host countries, and the world as a whole.

The debate over large-scale land acquisition is typically polarized, with critics lambasting it as a form of “neocolonialism,” and proponents lauding it as a cure-all for global agriculture. The Global Farms Race instead offers diverse perspectives, featuring contributions from agricultural investment consultants, farmers’ organizations, international NGOs, and academics. This critical resource addresses historical context, environmental impacts, and social effects, and covers all the major geographic areas of investment.

Island Press ~ Pub Date: Oct 4 2012  ISBN: 9781610911870

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By Saru Jayaraman

 

The first comprehensive encyclopedia for the growing fields of media and communication studies, the Encyclopedia of Media and Communication is an essential resource for beginners and seasoned academics alike. Contributions from over fifty experts and practitioners provide an accessible introduction to these disciplines’ most important concepts, figures, and schools of thought – from Jean Baudrillard to Tim Berners Lee, and podcasting to Peircean semiotics.

 

Detailed and up-to-date, the Encyclopedia of Media and Communication synthesizes a wide array of works and perspectives on the making of meaning. The appendix includes timelines covering the whole historical record for each medium, from either antiquity or their inception to the present day. Each entry also features a bibliography linking readers to relevant resources for further reading. The most coherent treatment yet of these fields, the Encyclopedia of Media and Communication promises to be the standard reference text for the next generation of media and communication students and scholars.

University of Toronto Press ~ Pub Date:  Jan 8 2013  ISBN: 9781442611696

Readers generally know only one of the two famous James brothers. Literary types know Henry James; psychologists, philosophers, and religion scholars know William James. In reality, the brothers’ minds were inseparable, as the more than eight hundred letters they wrote to each other reveal. In this book, J. C. Hallman mines the letters for mutual affection and influence, painting a moving portrait of a relationship between two extraordinary men. Deeply intimate, sometimes antagonistic, rife with wit, and on the cutting edge of art and science, the letters portray the brothers’ relationship and measure the manner in which their dialogue helped shape, through the influence of their literary and intellectual output, the philosophy, science, and literature of the century that followed.

The saga of Jonestown didn’t end on the day in November 1978 when more than nine hundred Americans died in a mass murder-suicide in the Guyanese jungle. While only a handful of people present at the agricultural project survived that day in Jonestown, more than eighty members of Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, were elsewhere in Guyana on that day, and thousands more members of the movement still lived in California. Emmy-nominated writer Leigh Fondakowski, who is best known for her work on the play and HBO film The Laramie Project, spent three years traveling the United States to interview these survivors, many of whom have never talked publicly about the tragedy. Using more than two hundred hours of interview material, Fondakowski creates intimate portraits of these survivors as they tell their unforgettable stories.

What emerges are portrayals both haunting and hopeful – of unimaginable sadness, guilt, and shame but also resilience and redemption. Weaving her own artistic journey of discovery throughout the book in a compelling historical context, Fondakowski delivers, with both empathy and clarity, one of the most gripping, moving, and humanizing accounts of Jonestown ever written.

An unforgettable chronicle by the first full-time African American reporter for the Washington Post, and Jet magazine’s White House correspondent for a half-century.

 

Within a few years of its first issue in 1951, Jet, a pocket-size magazine, became the “bible” for news of the civil rights movement. It was said, only half-jokingly, “if it wasn’t in Jet, it didn’t happen.” Writing for the magazine and its glossy, big sister, Ebony, for fifty-three years, longer than any other journalist, Washington bureau chief Simeon Booker was on the front lines of virtually every major event of the revolution that transformed America.

This is the story of the century that changed everything about journalism, politics, and more in America, as only Simeon Booker, the dean of the black press, could tell it.

The first popular account of one of America’s most beloved foods (consumed by more than seventy-five percent of the population), Creamy and Crunchy is a comprehensive and entertaining history of peanut butter’s development and integration into the American diet. Richly illustrated and filled with anecdotes and facts culled from unusual and engaging sources, the book is a mix of interviews, research, travels in the peanut-growing regions of the South, personal histories and recipes, focusing on the manufacture of the food from the 1890s to the present, while also covering its cultural, nutritional, and even molecular evolution.

 

Krampner investigates the resurgence of natural, or old-fashioned, peanut butter; the five ways today’s product is different from the original; why Americans love peanut butter so much more than people from most other nations; and the future trajectory of the industry. He also provides tips on peanut butter etiquette (if eating it straight from the jar, use a teaspoon – unless your girlfriend has just brutally dumped you, in which case a tablespoon is considered acceptable) and concludes with a “best of” list featuring top, taste-tested peanut butters and a timeline of key figures and events.