University of California Press Blog

The State of Health Atlas Highly Commended By The British Medical Association Book Competition

The State of Health Atlas, by Diarmuid O'Donovan, has been Highly Commended in the Public Health category of the 2008 British Medical Association (BMA) Medical Book Awards. The State of Health Atlas provides a portrait of health and disease across the world, and shows how political, economic, social and environmental forces affect the entire spectrum of health—from general well-being to cancer, diabetes, mental health, violence, and HIV/AIDS. Colorful maps and graphs consolidate mountains of research data, making global health statistics and public health challenges like maternal health, climate change, and malnutrition accessible at a glance.

UC Press Podcast Featuring, Joel Best and Roger Martin

Statistics and a 61 year-old college Freshman are the topics of this month's edition of the UC Press podcast series, which is now available.  In August's episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews Joel Best, the author of Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data and Roger Martin, author of Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again. 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.

Listen to an interview with Joel Best, author of Stat-Spotting.

Listen to an interview with Roger Martin, author of Racing Odysseus.

Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again

In 2004, Roger Martin, former Harvard dean and then President of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, enrolled as a college freshman at St. John’s College in Annapolis Maryland. When this undertaking captured the headlines of the national media, Dr. Martin appeared on NBC’s Today Show and was interviewed by NPR’s Scott Simon. His book, Racing Odysseus: A College President becomes a Freshman Again (UC Press, July 2008) now tells the whole story in a way that will be enjoyed by young and old alike. Today Dr. Martin serves as President of the British Schools and Universities Foundation in New York City. His book Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian England is still an authoritative work on the early ecumenical movement.

GIVEN THEIR DRUTHERS: What Baby Boomers Really Want To Do

By Roger Martin

I kid you not.

Given their druthers, most Baby Boomers would quit their jobs in an instant, go back to college and move right into their children’s residence hall!

Take, for example, the 45 year old mother we know who, last Fall, delivered her first child to college.

Like many Boomer parents and their Millennial Generation children, Mom and daughter were very close. So during orientation week, they attended all the sessions together, hearing about the college’s academic and social programs and being told “not to drink until you’re twenty-one”. Mom even stayed in her daughter’s room (to the great consternation of her daughter’s roommate, I might add). When orientation was over, Mom couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye, and so she lingered on...and on. The Dean of Students finally had to tell Mom it was time to go home.

One moonlit night, after classes were well under way, campus safety discovered Mom hiding in the bushes below her daughter’s window. When asked what she was doing there, Mom replied somewhat mournfully “I wish I could be in there with her. I just wish I could go back to college.”

This is perhaps an extreme example of the Boomer urge to relive their college years, if possible with their children. But the truth is that for many Boomers, college was the high point of their lives. They remember with great fondness the Daisy Chain at Vassar, tailgating at the University of Virginia, singing the Notre Dame Fight Song. They would love to do it all over again.

Not only that, but if they could, they would also go out for an intercollegiate sport and relive their glory days on the playing field.

Boomers as a group are not couch potatoes. They are the most physically active, the most in-your-face, the most involved generation ever. Their secret wish is to kick that winning field goal “just one last time!”

My bet is that as his presidency winds down, America’s Baby Boomer-in-Chief, George Bush, is in the Oval Office secretly fanaticizing about butting heads on the Rugby field with his former Yale teammates (me included) rather than butting heads with more formidable adversaries like a recalcitrant Congress or a bear economy. You’ve got to believe that he too wishes he could go back to college.

Well, guess what? I actually lived out these fantasies. I spent six months doing what most Boomers can only dream about doing.

After eighteen years as a college president, I wanted to better understand the current generation of college students. So, taking advantage of a scheduled sabbatical, I decided to become a college freshman myself.  I enrolled at St. John’s College, the Great Books school in Annapolis, Maryland, took the freshman course of study reading ancient Greek philosophy and literature, and, at age 61, even went out for crew racing in an intercollegiate regatta in Northern Virginia with eight high testosterone teenagers. And I lived to tell the tale in my book Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again.

I helped kick that proverbial field goal!

This is a great book for Boomers and XGens who want vicariously to relive their college years.  It’s a book for parents sending their kids off to college who want to get the inside story on what’s really happening on campus. And it’s a book for wannabe athletes like myself, tired of being couch potatoes.

It’s a book for the young at heart.

Audio and Video Interviews with Pamela Stone, author of Opting Out?

Pamela Stone, author of Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (UC Press, May 2008) was interviewed on July 18th by Dr. Kevin Keough, host of The North Star Guardians. While a day later, Stone was interviewed by CBS News reporter, Kelly Wallace.

Audio Interviews with authors Jennifer Heath and David Carle

Two UC Press authors were recently interviewed by Eric Tomb of BookTown, which is an affiliate of radio station KVMR 89.5 FM of Nevada City, CA. On July 7th, Tomb interviewed Jennifer Heath, author of The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (UC Press, May 2008), and on July 21, Tomb interviewed David Carle, author of Introduction to Fire in California (UC Press, June 2008).

The Calorie Connection: Marion Nestle Column in San Francisco Chronicle

UC Press author and nutrition scholar Marion Nestle debuted her question-and-answer column in the San Francisco Chronicle's Food section on July 16. In the column, Nestle responds to readers' questions and comments about food and nutrition policy. Last week she addressed the question, "What is the most pressing nutrition issue today, and why?" According to Nestle, at the heart of this complicated matter is a familiar culprit: calories. She dissects the politics of the global food crisis, and describes how the increasing cost and unequal distribution of calories across the world have an impact far beyond the wallet and the waistline.
Read Marion Nestle's column at the San Francisco Chronicle's website, sfgate.com.

Marion Nestle is the author of these UC Press books: Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, (available in September); Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health; and Safe Food: Bacteria, Bioterrorism, and Biotechnology.

Malformed Frogs: The Collapse of Aquatic Ecosystems

Michael Lannoo is a Professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine and editor of Amphibian Declines: The Conservation Status of United States Species (UC Press, June 2005). In his latest release, Malformed Frogs: The Collapse of Aquatic Ecosystems (UC Press, June 2008), he examines the unusual case of deformed frogs, the environmental impacts it has on them, and what their deformities means to co-existing humans.

By Michael Lannoo

A society in comfort can ignore, even dismiss, science as a tool for creating health and well-being.  But a society in crisis, frightened and facing illness, looks not only to science for answers, but demands answers from science.  The discovery of malformed frogs by Cindy Reinitz and her students in Minnesota was quickly followed by scores of other, similar reports.  The malformed frog problem reached a tipping point and became a phenomenon.  Society panicked (the State of Minnesota began distributing bottled water to families perceived to be in harms way) and turned to science for answers.  It has now been over a decade since those Minnesota school kids went on their infamous field trip and it would be both a fair assessment to say, and a surprise for the public to learn, that science has failed to solve the malformed frog phenomenon. Why?  Because the scientists forgot, or perhaps never knew, that science must dedicate itself to fruitful doing, not clever thinking; no malformed frog hotspot has been restored to ecological health due to either the direct or indirect actions of scientists.  The purpose of "Malformed Frogs: The Collapse of Aquatic Ecosystems" is to explore the science underlying the malformed frog phenomenon; its history, background, and what it offers in terms of solutions to the problem.

Most malformed frog investigations have focused on causes.  But knowing causes does not lead (or at least to this point has not lead) to solutions, in part because every seriously considered cause of amphibian malformations has flaws as a universal theory.  Further, one of the counter-intuitive conclusions from the work done to date is that the solution to the malformed frog problem is largely independent of cause.  All of the effort to solve the malformed frog problem by determining cause turns out to have not been so necessary, because no matter what the proximate cause (parasites, chemicals, etc.), the ultimate cause is, in most cases, runoff (nutrient runoff starts the ecological cascade that ends in parasites that cause malformations; chemical runoff affects development by directly or indirectly acting on tissues).  The solution to the malformed frog problem is to control runoff.

At the beginning of the malformed frog phenomenon, Cindy Reinitz and her kids had concerns that environmental health may be telling us something about human health.  They were correct.  The most important and under-cited paper in all the modern malformed frog literature is the 1997 report by Les Lowcock (Aquatic Toxicology 38:241-255) and his colleagues, which says, simply: malformed frogs have chromosomal damage.  Not all malformed frogs have chromosomal damage.  But even if chromosomal damage shows up in animals from only a handful of sites, it means that every new report of malformed frogs should raise deep concern.  Which scenario is wisest: dismissing new reports as unimportant until a crisis arises, or treating each new report as a concern until it has been proven no risk exists?

The most important implication to the fact that malformed frogs have chromosomal damage is that if there is something out there causing chromosomal damage in frogs, it could be causing chromosomal damage in humans.  People exposed to the toxins at Love Canal had chromosomal damage, and most spontaneous abortions and a high percentage of congenital anomalies are caused by chromosomal damage.  The lead scientist of the Love Canal report noted: "The [controversy over the] cytogenetic study of the Love Canal population is totally overshadowed by the outcome of the last 18 pregnancies among the residents: two births were normal: nine children had birth defects: there were four spontaneous abortions and three stillbirths."

If the initial point of concern about amphibian malformations centered on what they might be telling us about threats to human health, if environmental health threats to humans are signaled by chromosomal abnormalities, and if at least some malformed frogs also exhibit chromosomal abnormalities, it is worth asking why this chromosomal link between frogs and humans hasn't been explored more often, especially in high profile review articles. 

Wine Politics

Tyler Colman, Ph.D., teaches wine classes at New York University and the University of Chicago. He contributed to the third edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine and his articles have appeared in Food & Wine, Wine & Spirits, Trump Magazine, and the New York Times. Colman also writes the award-winning blog, Dr. Vino. In his latest book, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink (UC Press, June 2008), he reveals the politics and economics behind the wine making business, both domestic and international. For some interesting wine antedotes, here is a blog by Dr. Vino himself. Cheers!


By Tyler Colman

A quick quiz: Is it easier to ship wine from Napa to Nashville or from Bordeaux to Berlin?

If you chose the European example, you’re right!

The United States is often considered to have a more liberal market economy than France. But when it comes to wine, the evidence is not always as clear as a glass of Chablis. This paradox is at the heart of my new book, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wine We Drink.

Getting wine from wineries to the dining room tables of consumers can be surprisingly difficult and can disadvantage many consumers, reducing choices and raising prices. Those consumers in smaller states or states out of the wine-mainstream are hardest hit. Consider that in Kentucky it is a felony to ship wine from an out-of-state winery directly to a consumer. Or in Pennsylvania, all the wines are selected by administrators in Harrisburg and sold only through state-owned monopoly stores. Or that in Ohio, mandatory minimum markups can make it hard to find a deal.

What makes wine different from, say, ordering a computer direct from Dell is, in a word, politics. Relying on laws that date to the repeal of prohibition, out-of-state wine must pass through a local distributor, making the U.S. look like fifty sovereign countries, not simply states.

Fortunately, there’s a bull market for wine in the U.S. now after fifteen consecutive years of growth in wine consumption. That increasing demand may be what it takes to restructure the quirks of the wine market.

OK, another quiz: which country, France or the US, has prohibited a wine advertisement as too sultry? If you guessed France, a land known for both le vin and l’amour, you’d be, in fact, correct!

Times have changed in France. Wine consumption is declining, particularly among young drinkers. Advertising restrictions make it hard for winemakers to mount even campaigns for awareness of regions, let alone brands. There has been an increase in road safety and cracking down on drunken driving. And that’s just the domestic market: overseas, competition has increased with more countries producing better wine.

All this has led to a glut of wine in France and 2005, for the first time, wine from appellations—originally just the best wines but now over half of all French wine—went to the distillery to be turned into ethanol. In France some cars really do run on cabernet. Some exciting producers have also started to defect from the appellation system, compounding its woes.

France’s crown has slipped. Can it be put right? That’s another question the book explores.

Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema

Dan Streible is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and Associate Director of its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master's program. He is also director of the Orphan Film Symposium. In his recent book, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema, (UC Press, 2008), he examines how early prizefight films transformed the stigmatized sport into a popular American culture. Here's an entry from Streible's Orphan Film Symposium weblog, "Fight Pictures and Orphans at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival."   

"The truism 'silent films were never silent' is of course correct - except for the peculiar genre of fight pictures. Their exhibitions virtually never had musical accompaniment. Instead of music, fight pictures had screen-side announcers telling spectators what to watch for - the knockout 'solar-plexus punch' in Veriscope's Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897), the questionable performance of the old master Joe Gans ('was he taking a dive, ladies and gentlemen?') as filmed by Selig Polyscope in the McGovern-Gans Fight Pictures (1900), or the Australian constabulary stopping the Gaumont cameras as Jack Johnson's finished off Tommy Burns in 1908."

Note: Image from the Police Gazette, Dec. 9, 1899, captioned: "Spectators Applaud Sharkey. Visitors at the New York Theatre Carried Away with His Work as Shown by the Biograph." Tom Sharkey lost a brutal title fight to Jim Jeffries at Coney Island a month earlier.

An article by Gayle Greene, author of Insomniac

In the Spring edition of Ms. Magazine, Insomniac author Gayle Greene examines how women are more affected by the sleep disorder than men, which is partly due to the high levels of estrogen. You can read the article Why We Can't Sleep, here. For more information on insomnia, you can check out Gayle Greene's website, Sleep Starved.