Princeton University Press Blog
Mind over chatter since 1905
John Tomasi, author of the recently published Free Market Fairness, will be in London for the week of 30 April. He will be talking at the Legatum Institute on 1 May, IPPR on 2 May, the Royal Society of Arts on 3 May, and the Adam Smith Institute on 3 May.
Please follow links for more information or to sign up for any of these events. If you have any queries about his visit please contact Julia Hall on jhall@pupress.co.uk
Paul Seabright gave a fascinating and typically wide ranging talk “On Lying, Risk Taking and the Euro” for our second annual Princeton University Press
in Europe lecture on 18th April. The talk, which is open to the public, honours our European Advisory Board. In the lecture, Seabright argued that many of the factors which led to the Euro crisis were in plain sight from its launch. The challenge is that in many different ways we are hard wired not to notice. We tend for example to like to tell a morality tale with good guys and bad guys; we tend not to notice slow creeping crises; and we succumb to the very human desire not to rock the boat. Drawing on a wealth of economic data and the insights of neuroscience and behavioural economics, Seabright’s analysis is both compelling – and chilling.
Please click here to watch the lecture in full. You can also read more about this topic in an article in The Guardian, prompted by the Princeton in Europe Lecture.
Despite difficult global economic conditions, there has been strong interest in our foreign rights catalogue at the London Book Fair. Our economics and social science titles, from Justin Lin’s timely The Quest for Prosperity to James Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism, have received a great deal of attention, as have our popular science titles, especially Ostriker and Mitton’s Heart of Darkness and Paul Nahin’s The Logician and the Engineer. Peter Brown’s magnum opus Through the Eye of the Needle and Burger and Starbird’s The Five Elements of Effective Thinking have also proved a hit.
All in all, a very successful fair, which bodes well for the continued spread of PUP authors and ideas around the globe.
David Scheffer author of ‘All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals’ was in London this week and spoke at Chatham House. An audio recording of his talk is now available on their website. His trip coincided with the conviction on Wednesday 14th March of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo in what was the first verdict delivered by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (please scroll down to 0824 for the clip) he was interviewed about this and the relationship of the United States to the court.
Self-confessed city flâneur Avner de-Shalit was recently interviewed by fellow Princeton University Press author Diane Coyle. Professor de-Shalit is the author of The Spirit of Cities, along with co-author Daniel A. Bell:
Which are your favourite books about cities by other authors, and why?
If it’s a sociology of cities I like coming back to Georg Simmel’s classic book, but it’s because I think the opposite — he thought it was impossible to
create a sense of community in the city and I think it’s the only place where a genuine community can rise. But my best cities book is Yehuda Amichai’s poems book on Jerusalem. I wish I could do the same: squeeze the entire city into two to three sentences.
Of all the cities you’ve visited which are the most interesting to walk around?
Well, I am biased. I am just in love with Jerusalem, and it’s such a lunatic city. Half of its inhabitants believe they have a direct line to God. But outside my city, I think Berlin is the most exciting city today. One can see that the city simply changes every day, and that people are excited about it. The combination of ultra modern architecture with the remains of the Communist architecture, and the abundance of sites of collective memory — this is just amazing. Not very easy for somebody Jewish like me, but still, terribly interesting.
Your book advocates walking to imbibe the spirit of cities. Which group is winning the battle for control of urban space – people or vehicles? Are many cities becoming unwalkable?
Well, now that Time Square NYC is walkable, there is hope. In the US there is a list of the 50 most walkable cities and the 50 which are most friendly to cyclists. While cars still dominate today’s cities, at least planners and mayors are well aware of the need to think differently.
If you had to choose another city to live in, which would it be?
Oxford, Oxford, Oxford. When I studied there one of my professors heard me saying I liked it a lot, and he said: But you know it’s not a real place. Now I know he was wrong. Oxford is a city which is full of life and energy and creativity. Only one has to get away from the colleges, to walk in the neighbourhoods. You can see artists, novelists, poets, and people who want to be artists, novelists and poets.
This interview was originally published on Diane Coyle’s blog, The Enlightened Economist
Princeton University Press author Avner de-Shalit will be speaking at three events in the UK next week. On Monday 20th February he will be discussing what makes cities tick at Jewish Book Week with Barbara Mann, chaired by Ziona Strelitz. On Tuesday 21st, Professor de-Shalit will be giving a lunchtime talk at The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) and discussing why cultivating the distinctive ‘spirit of cities’ is the best antidote to global homogenisation. Finally, on the evening of 21st February, he will be in Bristol, discussing cities with Sunder Katwala at a Bristol Festival of Ideas event. These talks all tie into Avner de-Shalit’s book, The Spirit of Cities, which is co-authored by Daniel A. Bell and was recently published by Princeton University Press.
The talks at Jewish Book Week and the RSA will be recorded and made available online. Please follow the links for more information.
Princeton author Larry Bartels’ ‘Unequal Democracy’ appears on a list of books that President Obama is known to have read in recent years according to this article in The Daily Telegraph.
We are delighted to announce that Professor Paul Seabright will deliver the second annual Princeton University Press in Europe lecture during the London Book Fair.
This year’s lecture, which marks our annual celebration of the Princeton University Press European Advisory Board, will take place on Wednesday 18th April at Goodenough College in London, under the title: “On Lying, Risk-Taking and the Implosion of the Euro”.
Paul Seabright is Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse, and the author of two PUP books: The Company of Strangers (2nd edition, 2010) and The War of the Sexes (forthcoming, May 2012).
For more information on this event and how to attend, please contact Hannah Paul.
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.
Our PUP Europe week ended with attending a wonderful celebration of Clutag Press, a small independent publisher of poetry established by our Advisory Board member Andrew McNeillie. Clutag has published Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill; and at t the Bodleian Library in Oxford a group of celebrated poets, including Tom Paulin and the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, read from work which had originally appeared in Clutag in honour of its tenth anniversary.
On Day 3 of his London tour, Robert Frank, author of The Darwin Economy, recorded an episode of the BBC Radio 4 Analysis program before a live audience of more than 400 at the London School of Economics.
Hosted by Paul Mason, BBC Economics editor, Analysis has an audience of more than 1 million, and the live crowd was filled with luminaries of the London political scene, including “Blue Labour” architect Maurice Glassman and FT commentator Samuel Brittan. The program will air on Monday (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r4vz).
Day 2 of his London tour saw Robert Frank record a podcast at the Guardian with Economics editor Larry Elliott and leader writer Tom Clark, and deliver a talk on The Darwin Economy at NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts, the UK’s leader in studying and funding innovation. Frank was also interviewed for the BBC World Service program, The Forum, with environmental scientist Peter Liss (pictured) and singer Claron McFadden. The interview which will air on Saturday.
Read about Day 1 here.
These are the best-selling books for the past week.
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No Joke: Making Jewish Humor by Ruth R. Wisse |
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Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson |
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird |
![j9925[1]](http://blog.press.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/j99251.gif) |
The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil |
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Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica by T.J. Clark |
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On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt |
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QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman |
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Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. |
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The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori & Brian Sullivan |
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Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield |
![j9967[1]](http://blog.press.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/j99671.gif)
