ROROTOKO :: Cutting-edge Intellectual Nonfiction through In-depth Author Interviews

Book interviews for January 2009

Headline	Deck	Featured book	Excerpt	Featured author	Date
A glimpse into the intellectual life of early modern Europe	Steven Nadler on his book The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil		In a nutshell This book is about three philosophers – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Antoine Arnauld, and Nicolas Malebranche – who happened to be together in Paris in the 1670s and their great debate over God, evil, and the meaning of life. The three were friends, at least until their intellectual and personal falling out, although they were very different personalities and came from very different national, religious, cultural and social backgrounds.…	Nadler, Steven	01/30/09
A “history” of education from 2010 to 2060	Kieran Egan on his book The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up		In a nutshell The Future of Education is an attempt to do precisely what its subheading suggests—reimagine our schools from the ground up. The book begins with a scenario in which a priestess in ancient Athens is holding up the bloody remains of a heifer’s liver, declaring that it is unspotted and that the goddess approves the idea of war with Corinth. One of the men in the audience suggests to…	Egan, Kieran	01/27/09
The photograph as an unintentional effect of an encounter between photographer, photographed subject, camera, and spectator	Ariella Azoulay on her book The Civil Contract of Photography		In a nutshell The Civil Contract of Photography is about the relations between photography and citizenship in disaster contexts. The book proposes a historical and theoretical analysis of the relation between photography and citizenship, and in order to do that, I reread two moments in history: the French Revolution (1789) and the invention of photography (1839). The Civil Contract of Photography centers around the open-ended relations between photographers, photographed persons and…	Azoulay, Ariella	01/23/09
The line between culture and politics is exceptionally fluid—if it exists at all	Mark Fenster on the updated edition of his book Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture		In a nutshell I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories are necessarily a pathological cry from the political and social margins. The notion that they and their adherents are “paranoid” is most frequently associated today with the work of Richard Hofstadter, a preeminent American historian in the 1950s…	Fenster, Mark	01/20/09
The story of entomological warfare that has never been told	Jeffrey Lockwood on his book Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War		In a nutshell Six-Legged Soldiers is a story, a bizarre and fantastic tale of how humans have conscripted the natural world—insects in particular—to do our bidding in times of war. For thousands of years we’ve exploited the biology of insects to inflict direct harm on our opponents. For example, Medieval troops catapulted beehives and wasp nests into enemy strongholds. Clever militaries also co-opted pests to destroy the food supplies of other…	Lockwood, Jeffrey	01/16/09
What Le Corbusier was like as a human being	Nicholas Fox Weber on his book Le Corbusier: A Life		In a nutshell There are hundreds of books about Le Corbusier’s architecture, but very little knowledge about the man himself. This book is an attempt to reveal Le Corbusier’s personality, his motivations, give a sense of his mind, his human relationships. Le Corbusier is a book about what Le Corbusier was like as a human being. The wide angle I am never quite sure of…	Weber, Nicholas Fox	01/13/09
Silent cinema makes visible the ambivalence around modern technologies and traffic in early twentieth century America	Kristen Whissel on her book Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and Silent Cinema		In a nutshell Picturing American Modernity is about how the early American cinema represented major changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the early twentieth century, particularly changes that were related to the introduction and spread of new technologies. Each chapter analyzes a group of films that directly represented a major, (inter)national, mass-mediated “event”: the Spanish-American war, the Philippine-American war, the Pan-American Exposition, where President McKinley was shot,…	Whissel, Kristen	01/09/09
To change the health care system, combine the collective action potential of government with the flexibility and innovation of well-designed markets	Harold S. Luft on his book Total Cure: The Antidote to the Health Care Crisis		In a nutshell The current policy environment is one in which we must come to grips with the unsustainable increases in health care costs, the unconscionable proportion of the population without insurance, and the uncomfortable reality that our care is not of as high quality as it can be. The implosion of the financial markets means that as a nation we cannot continue to operate and expand a system that has…	Luft, Harold	01/06/09
The story of the toothpick industry is the story of American industry	Henry Petroski on his book The Toothpick: Technology and Culture		In a nutshell The Toothpick is a technical and cultural history of what is arguably the simplest of manufactured things. A wooden toothpick consists of a single part made of a single material and intended for a single purpose. Yet in spite of its apparent simplicity, the toothpick has a long history that is full of lessons about design, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, competition, and intellectual property—all of which are highly relevant…	Petroski, Henry	01/02/09