ROROTOKO :: Cutting-Edge Intellectual Interviews

Book interviews for April 2010

Headline	Deck	Featured book	Excerpt	Featured author	Date
To survive, we must do things based not on concepts of self	Timothy Morton on his book The Ecological Thought		In a nutshell All life forms are interconnected. We share our DNA with chimps (98%) but also with daffodils (35%). We drive cars that burn crushed dinosaurs. The oxygen we breathe is the excretion of the most ancient bacteria. We humans hardly allow ourselves to know the half of this. We are even less clear on what it all means. Global warming and mass extinction (the sixth one to hit…	Morton, Timothy	04/30/10
The whole of the American Empire in six brief biographies	Richard H. Immerman on his book Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz		In a nutshell Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But the juxtaposition of “empire” with “liberty” embeds the story in a conceptual and interpretive framework that I believe readers will find distinctive, challenging, and perhaps even uncomfortable. Further, my methodology—collective biography—seeks to provide perspectives from both ground level…	Immerman, Richard	04/28/10
How we became the secure, independent, yet group-joining Americans we are	Claude S. Fischer on his book Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character		In a nutshell Made in America asks whether, how, and in what ways Americans of today are culturally and psychologically different from Americans of the past. The book reaches back to the nation’s colonial era and comes forward to 2010. Throughout our history, observers, both Americans and foreign visitors, tried to describe the special character of this new people in a new world. But what was fact and what was myth…	Fischer, Claude	04/26/10
The real tragedy of the Thirty Years War is that it could have been avoided	Peter H. Wilson on his book The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy		In a nutshell The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was the most destructive conflict in European history prior to the twentieth-century world wars. The War was a struggle over the political and religious order in the Holy Roman Empire, Europe’s second largest state (after Russia, which was then generally not considered part of Europe). The Empire encompassed modern Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, parts of Denmark, France and Poland, and also held jurisdiction…	Wilson, Peter	04/23/10
Calvin was always in the process of becoming Calvin	Bruce Gordon on his book Calvin		In a nutshell After five hundred years John Calvin remains the object of admiration and loathing. For some he is revered as the great reformer of the sixteenth century whose legacy embraces both the rise of capitalism and modern American democracy. Many others recoil in revulsion at the mention of his name, regarding him as a hateful tyrant who condemned opponents to death, preached an intrusive morality, and with his doctrine…	Gordon, Bruce	04/21/10
How international environmental law works—and sometimes doesn’t work	Daniel Bodansky on his book The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law		In a nutshell How and why do international environmental norms arise? In what ways do they affect behavior? Do they change what states and individuals actually do, and, if so, why? How effective are they in solving international environmental problems? These are some of the questions I examine in The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law. The book has several defining features. First, it focuses on the processes by which…	Bodansky, Daniel	04/19/10
Why the Cultural Revolution’s student red guards fought one another	Andrew Walder on his book Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement		In a nutshell It seems that almost everyone has heard of Chairman Mao and China’s Cultural Revolution and the “red guards” of the late 1960s. The “red guards” were students who rampaged through schools and government offices, terrorizing officials and intellectuals, humiliating them, beating them, and even killing them. These events are seen in China as a national catastrophe, so traumatic that even today publication on the period is almost completely…	Walder, Andrew	04/16/10
Attempting to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement	Erin Manning on her book Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy		In a nutshell Relationscapes attempts to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement. Initially, my main concern was to continue a line of questioning developed in my previous book, Politics of Touch, which already aimed to explore the amodality of sensation and how sensation is always linked to movement. The focus of Politics of Touch was on the sensing body in movement’s relation to the political; emphasis being on how…	Manning, Erin	04/14/10
The media through a story of no political sides	Jack R. Censer on his book On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper: Fear and the Media		In a nutshell On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper tells the story of the press coverage of the deeds of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo as they traversed the Washington D.C. area in October 2002. Honing in on twenty-three days permits a tightly focused analysis of the kaleidoscope of information and opinions provided by the media. To understand this coverage, the book also compares it to the sniper as imagined…	Censer, Jack	04/12/10
Unknowingly, William Strachey contributed to the creation of a masterpiece	Hobson Woodward on his book A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest		In a nutshell A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon wit with an eye for a good plot. The book tells the story of Strachey’s shipwreck on Bermuda during a voyage to the Jamestown colony in Virginia. A long letter home to an anonymous lady about the hurricane-tossed…	Woodward, Hobson	04/09/10
Spelling out the counterfactual method improves policy analysis	Richard Ned Lebow on his book Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations		In a nutshell Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent (the change in the present) by a chain of logic. Counterfactual argument is no different in these respects from its “factual” counterpart. Depending on the context, it may also be rich in supporting evidence. We give credence to…	Lebow, Richard	04/07/10
Art and the Changing Texture of Urban Life	Joshua Shannon on his book The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City		In a nutshell New York’s artists around 1960 were living in the shadows of the city’s deindustrialization—moving among demolition sites, abandoned factories, and decrepit hardware stores, while all around them new highways, sleek skyscrapers, and urban renewal projects were forever altering the city’s purpose and shape. The purpose of The Disappearance of Objects is to tell this important chapter of postwar art history, but especially to place that strange history back…	Shannon, Joshua	04/05/10
Food as an objection to modernity	Mark Swislocki on his book Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai		In a nutshell Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book argues that regional food culture mediated and expressed the ways in which city residents connected to the past, lived in the present, and imagined a future. By considering the Shanghai experience as part of a wider history of…	Swislocki, Mark	04/02/10