Indiana University Press blog

Brown University Bookstore to host event with author Marcy Brink-Danan

Marcy Brink-Danan will read from her new book Jewish Life in 21st Century Turkey at the Brown University Bookstore February 9 at 5:30 p.m. For more information, visit the bookstore's event page.

Book review: Cinepaternity

"The eleven articles in this anthology provide insightful studies of the Oedipal dynamics dramatized in diverse films beginning in the immediate post-Stalin period." —Slavonic and East European Review

Book review: Today I Am a Woman

"Today I am a Woman is filled with lyrical accounts of being a bat mitzvah in such exotic places as Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Tegucigalpa, Honduras. ... All the vignettes are accompanied by a well-researched history of the Jewish community in the area." —Jewish Book Council

Podcast: Matthew Tully discusses 'Searching for Hope'

On this episode of the IU Press Podcast, I speak with award-winning journalist Matthew Tully. He spent a year covering Manual High School for the Indianapolis Star and has written a new book about it called Searching for Hope.

'A Prophetic Peace' author Alick Isaacs attends National Prayer Breakfast at White House

Alick Isaacs, author of A Prophetic Peace attended the 60th National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., today, February 2, capping a season of honors for IU Press books in the field of Jewish studies and their authors.

The awards and honors demonstrate IU Press’s lasting relevance for scholarship, teaching and learning, notably in the area of Jewish Studies, said the Press's director Janet Rabinowitch.

The White House Prayer Breakfast is an interfaith gathering of men and women to discuss political and social issues. President Barack Obama, members of Congress and other dignitaries gathered with leaders from across the country and around the world. Isaacs was invited in recognition of his Talking Peace project, the aim of which is to bring individuals of different views together to share varying understandings of peace. The project is sponsored by Mishkenot Sha'ananim, an international cultural center in Jerusalem.

Isaacs writes that his combat experience in the second Lebanon war provoked him to search for a way of reconciling the belligerence of religion with its messages of peace, challenging deeply held convictions about Judaism, Zionism, war and peace. In his readings of Biblical prophecy and rabbinic law, Isaacs draws on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber, among others, to propose an ambitious vision of religiously inspired peace. Rejecting the notion of Jewish theology as partial to war and vengeance, A Prophetic Peace points to the ways in which Judaism can be a path to peace.

In addition to Isaacs’s attendance of the prayer breakfast, recent awards for IU Press books include:

• The Jewish Book Council named Gender and Jewish History, edited by Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore, the winner in the Anthologies and Collections category of the 2011 National Jewish Book Awards. Modern Ladino Culture, Olga Borovaya’s study focusing on the three major forms of Ladino literacy production, was a finalist in the Sephardic Culture category.
• The American Academy for Jewish Research named Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature by Chaya T. Halberstam the winner of the 2010 Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize. The prize is awarded annually to a first-time author of an outstanding book in Jewish studies.
• The American Jewish Historical Society has named three IU Press publications as Essential Readings in American Jewish History for 2010: Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora by Rebecca Kobrin; The Prophetic Minority by Gerald Sorin; and Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports by Jeffrey S. Gurock.

To see a complete list of our Jewish Studies titles, visit our website.

'Taliaferro' author Dawn Knight to appear at Barnes & Noble store in Carmel this Saturday

Dawn Knight will discuss and sign copies of her book, Taliaferro: Breaking Barriers From the NFL Draft to the Ivory Tower, at 11:00 a.m. this Saturday, February 4 at the Barnes & Noble store in Carmel, IN.

“We ... are excited during this Super Bowl weekend and Black History Month to have Dawn Knight discuss her biography about the legendary Indiana University football player, NFL star and pathfinder, George Taliaferro, and the challenges he faced as an athlete and citizen,” said Thomas E. McLean, Community Relations Manager for the Barnes & Noble store in Carmel.

For more information on the event, call the store at 317-844-2501.

Book review: Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy

"Kelly’s book is a great achievement. Well written and based on new sources, his biography of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz allows the reader deep insights into the life of a man who played a very important role at the turn of the last century and who shaped German policy in a way few others did." —German History Journal

Staff pick: Searching for Hope by Matthew Tully

Today we are excited to launch a new monthly staff pick feature on our blog! This month's selection is Searching for Hope, reviewed by trade marketing and publicity manager, Mandy Clarke.

Going to high school in an upper-middle class area of Northwest Indiana, extracurricular activities were abundant, the words football and high school were synonymous, and the graduation rate hovered around 95%. My teenage thoughts revolved mainly around my friends, whichever boy I liked, ways to trick my parents into borrowing one of their cars, and gymnastics. You know—the important stuff. I edited the school newspaper and wrote about things like homecoming, prom, and SATs. College was a given.

At Manual High School in Indianapolis where there is no football at all, teenage drama is very real with guns being fired, multiple in-school arrests, its very own police staff, and a graduation rate of 39%. Complete with students who think that’s normal.

In Searching for Hope, Indianapolis Star columnist Matthew Tully describes the time he spent at a low-income Indianapolis Public School as an investigative reporter who stirred an entire city with his weekly front page columns during the 2009-10 school year. The book is not a collection of the columns, but the story of Tully’s personal experience as he enters the lives of these high schoolers, administrators, teachers, counselors, and law enforcement officers.

An identity-less student. An assembly-line mentality. A soon-to-be nationally renowned choir. Thousands of Star readers moved to donate almost $100,000. Administrators hunting down kids just to get state funding—not to educate them. These are just a few of the stories of desperation, inspiration, and hopelessness in this book.

Easy to read, yet not so easy to digest, Searching for Hope reads like fiction—but sadly is not. Highly recommended for general readers, book clubs, and those interested in education and educational policy alike, Searching for Hope will evoke a strong reaction from its readers.

Choice reviews - February 2012

The following books were reviewed in the February issue of Choice (requires subscription):

Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India

"The strength of this first-rate, well-illustrated study is its thorough grounding in source material, an intimate knowledge of people and places, and its connections between Ahmedabad and such personalities as Gandhi, Vallabbhai Patel, and Anasuyaben Sarabhia, among a long list of prominent Gujeratis. ... Highly recommended."

Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World

"Rather than rewriting her previous books, anthropologist Hodgson (Rutgers), already well known for her work on the Maasai of Tanzania (Once Intrepid Warriors; The Church of Women), takes readers in a new direction. In this instance, her concern is with how the Maasai have been converted by themselves (and others) in the postcolonial era from romantic traditionalists into an 'indigenous' people ... Highly recommended."

Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania

"[The] prologue sets the scene for the body of the discussion, which covers such topics as witchcraft, oracles, and native medicine; making Tanzanian traditional medicine; healers and their intimate becomings; and traditional birth attendants as institutional evocations. ... Recommended."

Learning, Teaching, and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures

"This is a work of theme and variations: each essay reviews investigative research, revealing musicians from a particular culture and the issues facing the newer generation. ... Valuable for music educators and ethnomusicologists. ... Highly recommended."

Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations

"This is a compendium of writings by one of the most original thinkers in musicology. ... Treitler stands every issue on its head and shakes well to expose a viewpoint about musical meaning... Highly recommended."

The Euro and Its Rivals: Money and the Construction of a Transnational City

"[A]n ethnographic study arguing that a bridge connecting Malmö, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark, has similar cultural effects as a common European currency. ... [Peebles] draws similar parallels between those who opposed the bridge and those who advocated local currency rings... Along the way he ties in attitudes toward debt and bankruptcy, vagrancy, and immigration. ... Recommended."

The Great War in Russian Memory

"This important book radically alters understanding of the Russian and Soviet responses to WW I during the interwar period and up to 1945. ... The author skillfully analyzes films, graphic arts, novels, short stories, journalism, architecture, memoirs, paintings, museum exhibits, and many other expressions of people's memory of the war to demonstrate the main themes of this discourse as well as how it changed over time. The book deserves a wide readership. ... Highly recommended."

The Politics of Dress in Somali Culture

"This work has two major themes: Somalis' long involvement with the outside world, and the subsequent growing tensions over male and female roles in Somali society. ... Akou provides English readers rare insights into the complexities of dress traditions continually interwoven with political conflicts. ... Highly recommended."

New releases for February

Pink and Blue
Telling the Boys from the Girls in America
Jo B. Paoletti

"Pink and Blue is an interdisciplinary tour de force. Readers will never again take gendered children’s fashion for granted." —Susan B. Kaiser, author of The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context

Earth Works
Selected Essays
Scott Russell Sanders

"Like the building stones of his beloved limestone country, Scott Russell Sanders’s enduring essays are beautifully carved from the material of the Earth and its layered lives. ... This collection of Sanders’s finest work will become a classic of American thought." —Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars
Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier
Nguyen Cong Luan

"Of all the many books I have read about the Vietnam War, this one pays the ultimate tribute to the incredible sacrifices made by the courageous soldiers and people of South Vietnam.  ... This book is a must read for those who want the complete picture and whole truth about a tragic war that consumed the world for over two decades." —Lawson W. Magruder III , Lieutenant General, US Army Retired. Vietnam '70-'71

Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean
Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries
Edited by Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli

"Promises to ignite new discussions and understandings of Islam in relation to the other great religious traditions of the West. ... Allows the opening of larger questions and the beginning of a quest to regain a world that we wish we still had." —Charles Stewart, University College London

Muslim Families in Global Senegal
Money Takes Care of Shame
Beth Buggenhagen

"A lively, insightful, and important study of exchange practices between Senegal and a circuit of global trade. The innovative focus is on the meanings, not the social and economic functions, of exchange." —Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern University

Women's Voices from West Africa
An Anthology of Songs from the Sahel
Edited by Aissata G. Sidikou and Thomas A. Hale

"A valuable contribution to the corpus of literature on African women's verbal art." —Fiona Mc Laughlin, University of Florida

Musical Forces
Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music
Steve Larson
Foreword by Robert S. Hatten

"Musical Forces presents an original and important theory of melody, centered on the idea that we experience musical motion metaphorically through our experience of physical motion. The study sheds new light on musical expectation, compositional practice, and the role of metaphor in musical experience and discourse. Musical Forces is a major contribution to musical scholarship." —David Temperley, Eastman School of Music