University of California Press Blog

Share Your Favorite UC Press Books

UC Press has added links to a number of the most popular social bookmarking websites to it's book pages. Now, you can easily share your favorite UC Press titles with your friends or with the world at large.

Social bookmarking sites allow you to store your bookmarks online, which lets you access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere.  See the links that your friends, colleagues, and others bookmark, and share links with them in return.

For more information on social bookmarking, check out the Wikipedia article here.  Currently, the site supports the following services: del.icio.us, digg, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Stumpleupon, Reddit, BlinkList, and Furl.  Others will likely be supported in the future.

Episode 4 of the UC Press Podcast Series is Now Available

Episode 4 of the UC Press podcast series is now available.  In June's episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, the authors of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice and Robert J. Davis, the author of The Healthy Skeptic: Cutting through the Hype about Your Health. The audio for episode 4 is included herewith.  You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at www.ucpress.edu/podcast or on the individual book pages using the embedded player.

Slave Revolts in Antiquity

Theresa Urbainczyk is Senior Lecturer in Classics at University College Dublin and author of Spartacus, among other books. In her latest release, Slave Revolts in Antiquity (UC Press, May 2008), Theresa talks about slave resistance and the meaning of freedom in Ancient Rome and Greece. Furthermore, Theresa talks about the inspiration for her book in the blog below.

By Theresa Urbainczyk

I read somewhere that Stalin put forward the thesis that the revolt of Spartacus had brought down the Roman Empire. Whoever was commenting on this, remarked that 500 years was rather a long time-span for the effect to result from the cause.

I was reminded of this when reading in a recent book (Spartacus: Film and History edited by Martin M. Winkler, Blackwell 2007) that in 1960 the Universal film studios wanted an academic to write an article advertising Kubrick’s forthcoming movie, Spartacus, and in the specifications instructed, ‘If you feel that Spartacus’ revolt contributed to the downfall of the great Roman Empire, please emphasise this’. 

The response this generally evokes is similar to that some of us have to rather comical mistakes in students’ exam scripts but I was struck by two people making the same comment, especially since it was unlikely that the film executive was familiar with Stalin’s arguments.

Part of me hesitates to admit that another movie Gladiator was one of the reasons I started to study slave revolts. In fact I probably was too much of a snob to go and see Ridley Scott’s film at all if I hadn’t been living in New York and feeling lonely. Any invitation was (almost) better than none when you know hardly anyone in a new city so I went with a couple of classicists. The young American woman beside me murmured at the end ‘Oh that was wonderful.’ The older English man on the other side snarled ‘Spartacus was much better’. I hadn’t ever seen that film and when I did I assumed most of it was pure invention. Which was how I came to look at the ancient sources on slave revolts.

To me they were intrinsically interesting and worth writing about and I was mystified as to why my colleagues weren’t as fascinated as I was. And they most certainly weren’t.  After I gave what probably was an overenthusiastic talk on the unexpected (to me at any rate) amount of information there was on slave revolts in antiquity in our ancient texts, one professor chipped in ‘Yes but so what? What effect did the large slave wars have on the course of events of Roman Republic? None at all as far as I can see.’

Thinking about just how much effect the wars did have on this particular period of history, helped explain to me how in both the USA and the USSR the same seemingly ridiculous theory could have arisen. A common confusion for students is the way historians use the term Roman Empire. At the time of the Roman Republic, the Romans had an empire but it wasn’t the Roman Empire, in that they did not have emperors.  If we substitute the term ‘Republic’ for ‘Empire’, the theory is not so far-fetched. In fact, expressed in these terms, it’s a commonplace in our historians from antiquity. It’s only in more recent times that the threat of slave revolts has been played down.

Fanny Howe wins Academy Award in Literature

Congratulations to author Fanny Howe, who has won a 2008 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Literature. Howe is the author of more than twenty books, including the UC Press titles The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life, Gone: Poems, and Selected Poems. Howe also crafted the introduction to Henia and Ilona Karmel's A Wall of Two. The Academy honors the year's most outstanding achievements in architecture, art, literature and music, and to win is a significant achievement. The work of all the 2008 Academy Award recipients is on display through June 15 at the Academy's galleries in New York.  

UC Press is on Facebook!

Please find us on our Facebook fan page here. If you are on Facebook, we would appreciate your support by becoming a fan of our page. We will be updating our page with the latest news, author appearances, podcasts, audio and video clips, and other information. The page also enables you to connect and interact with authors and other fans of the Press.

Here's to social networking!

Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything

As Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, Doug Macdougall writes about his findings while still in school about the earth's evolution and human prehistory in his blog below. Furthermore, you can check out Doug's latest book, Nature's Clock: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything (UC Press, July 2008). In addition to Nature's Clock, Doug is the author of Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages (UC Press, 2004).

By Doug Macdougall

Time is a sometimes elusive concept, but it’s crucial for understanding history, and that goes for everything from very recent history to the history of the universe.  Geologists are especially attuned to concepts of time, because the rocks they study – especially the layers of sedimentary rocks – contain a record of the earth’s history, ordered in time.
   

But until the discovery of radioactivity, there was no way to measure the earth’s history quantitatively.  Geologists studying layers of sedimentary rocks knew that the top layer was younger than the bottom layer, but they had no idea whether the difference in ages was a year, a few thousand years, or millions of years.  All that changed when they realized that the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in the rocks act like built-in clocks.
   

When I was an undergraduate studying geology – it seems like an embarrassingly long time ago – dating rocks was in a fairly rudimentary state compared with today.  We touched on the topic briefly in our courses, but it was only when I was studying for a master’s degree that I really learned the details of dating and isotope geology.  From that point on I was hooked.  What could be more exciting than working out the exact timing of events in the earth’s distant past?  Much of my research since then has concerned geological time.
   

Radioactivity was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, and another French scientist, Henri Becquerel, near the end of the nineteenth century.  For their discovery they were awarded the Nobel Prize, but they didn’t really understand the phenomenon they had identified.  And they didn’t realize its potential for measuring the ages of natural materials.  It was another scientist, the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, who, a few years later, discovered that radioactive isotopes decay at a constant rate and used this knowledge to date several rock samples from the earth’s crust.  His results – he determined the rock ages to be around 500 million years – were a shock to many scientists who thought the earth was much younger.
   

In Nature’s Clocks I’ve tried to bring some of the excitement of geological age measurements to life by delving into the discoveries of scientist like Rutherford and the Curies, and also by outlining some of the amazing techniques scientists have developed more recently to make accurate time measurements of the distant past.  It is a fascinating field, and it’s at the heart of our understanding of planet earth and everything that it has experienced over its long history, from plate tectonics to climate change and the evolution of life.

Audio Interview with Gayle Greene, author of Insomniac

In the latest installment of NPR's Talk of the Nation, author Gayle Greene offers insight into the condition, while elaborating on her book, Insomniac (UC Press, March 2008), in this audio interview. Additionally, you can read more about Gayle and the disorder, including tips and shared experiences on her website, Sleep Starved.

They Called Me Mayer July wins the Samuel and Rose Cohen Memorial Award

The Canadian Jewish Awards jury at the Koffler Centre for the Arts has awarded They Called Me Mayer July the Samuel and Rose Cohen Memorial Award for best biography/memoir. Born in Poland in 1916, author Mayer Kirshenblatt started painting his childhood memories at age 73, at the encouragement of his wife and his daughter, co-author Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Through his paintings and stories, the boy known as Mayer July guides us through Jewish life in Poland, as it was before World War II. We learn how to make a tin whistle and a pair of shoes, watch the "Human Fly" do acrobatics on the roof of the richest man in town, witness market thieves stealing wood and eggs and the town kleptomaniac sneaking a fish into her dress, and finally, accompany Mayer to the icy shores of Canada. They Called Me Mayer July is a portal to a past full of culture, color, and love, seen through a child's eyes and told with a father's wisdom. 

Interview with Author Darra Goldstein: Illuminating New Perspectives on Food and Culture

Darra Goldstein is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Russian at Williams College, series editor of California Studies in Food and Culture, and editor-in-chief of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, which recently won an Utne Independent Press award. She has published four cookbooks and numerous articles on Russian literature, culture, art, and cuisine. She has also organized several exhibitions including Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005, at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She was recently interviewed by Associate Director and Publisher Sheila Levine.

When did you start writing about food?

When I was at Stanford in the mid-1970s I wanted to write my dissertation on food in Russian literature. But none of my professors thought this was a serious enough topic. It was too domestic. So instead, I wrote about Nikolai Zabolotsky, a brilliant Russian poet. In 1978–79, I spent a year in the former Soviet Union. The generosity of the Russians, who had so little in those years, was extraordinary, and their hospitality gave me a way to enter more deeply into Russian culture. My first cookbook, A Taste of Russia, resulted from that experience. I went on to write three more cookbooks. Meanwhile, I was teaching Russian and publishing academic articles on Russian literature and art. It was like having two lives—dutiful Russian scholar and cookbook writer.

You had read an article of mine in Food & Wine, and you recognized, in a way that I wasn’t yet able to, that my two halves could come together. You asked me to write on vodka in Russian culture. I decided that book wasn’t for me, but as we talked I started thinking about writing a larger book about food in Russian culture. UC Press’s commitment to the food and culture series validated that the study of food was a legitimate intellectual pursuit.

You also started our prize-winning journal Gastronomica. Why was it needed?

After my second cookbook, The Georgian Feast, won the Julia Child award, I started writing more frequently about food. In the mid-1990s I published one of my favorite articles, on Carême, the great French chef. Carême was celebrated for his pièces montées, fanciful sculptures for the table made out of a special pastry dough or sugar, which were fashioned after great architectural forms. I compared his architectural studies for the table with those for the city of St. Petersburg and published my article in a small scholarly journal. I doubt that many more than 50 people read it.

I decided there needed to be a journal where people like me, who were interested in a serious investigation of food but weren’t necessarily joined by discipline, could come together and begin a dialogue that would also help legitimize the nascent field of food studies. I brought the idea of Gastronomica to UC Press, because you and I had already developed a relationship. It is wonderful to be working with you on the book side of the house and with Rebecca Simon and her staff in the Journals Division.

What is most challenging and satisfying about editing a quarterly magazine?

I read every article that is submitted and edit every one that I accept! It’s like having a second fulltime job. Gastronomica is helping to shape the field of food studies, which is wonderful. On a more personal level, I’m continually learning new things, and I feel very connected with the world, especially when I hear from potential contributors in Asia, or India, or Australia. One of the best things about Gastronomica is that it truly represents a global community.

And the book series? What are you most proud of?

What I love about our series, and something that distinguishes it, is that we are looking at food and culture very broadly. If you look at our list of twenty-plus titles, you might say it is eclectic, but you’ll see the multiple perspectives represented. For example, the series includes historian Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, anthropologist Theodore Bestor’s Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, and nutritionist Marion Nestle’s Food Politics. Taken together, the books show how multidisciplinary the study of food is, and how by looking at familiar subjects through the prism of food we can see these subjects in new ways, and make new discoveries. Our series shows both depth and range, which I find very exciting.

How do you see the future of food studies developing?

Food studies is now recognized as a legitimate mode of inquiry, but I do worry that there is not yet a sufficient number of people who are able to comment on all of the work being produced, and therefore there is a lot out there this is not critically sound. But this situation is slowly changing, especially as more academic programs are established in the field, such as those at NYU and Indiana University.

Food studies is more and more rooted in the social sciences. Although it is good to have a disciplinary home, ideally I would like the study of food to encompass other modes of thought, including the arts and the natural sciences. It is this inclusiveness that I aim to represent in the book series and Gastronomica.

Audio Interview with Kasra Naji, author of Ahmadinejad

Kasra Naji, author of Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran's Radical Leader (UC Press, February 2008), was recently interviewed by Fresh Air at WHYY/NPR. In the interview, Naji talks about the controversial leader and his rise to power. You can find his interview on the NPR website.