MITPressLog

Gift Books: Finale

The MIT Press staff has been telling us which books they'd suggest as gifts all month--you can view their recommendations here and here. For those of you who are still seeking very last-minute gift ideas, below are a few final staff picks. Happy Holidays!

 

Molly, Design

My holiday book recommendation is Spacesuit by Nicholas de Monchaux. It is the perfect gift for a wide range of recipients; anyone interested in the space program, fashion design, technology, engineering, history, or politics would love it. De Monchaux’s account of the spacesuit’s design is detailed and fascinating, and his selection of images are as informative as they are whimsical.

The icing on the cake is the book’s cover, which is printed on an unusual rubbery black paper, and silkscreened with white ink. It feels as futuristic now as the spacesuit must have looked in 1969. Spacesuit makes for a truly special gift.

 

Pam, Permissions

For Stocking Stuffers:

Semiotext(e)
Boston Review Books 
Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds by John Bevis
101 Things to Learn in Art School by Kit White
101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick 

Or any other small format book.

 

                                   

Marc, Acquisitions

Gilles Deleuze from A to Z by Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, and Pierre-Andre Boutang

This is an amazing 3-disc labor of love DVD set from Semiotext[e]: an 8-hour discussion between Deleuze and one of his former students filmed over several days at the end of the 1980s on a wide range of topics, with his thoughts and feelings on everything from animals, drinking, and illness to the importance of philosophy, to memories of childhood and May 68 (striking for being almost the sole instances of anything resembling autobiography for him), to more whimsical commentary on such topics as tennis and Benny Hill. As someone who continues to struggle with the concepts and books of Deleuze (and his frequent cohort Félix Guattari), I wish I had had access to this film years ago, before my first attempt at diving into tomes like Anti-Oedipus. The humor and humility on display in this film has introduced me to the human behind the concepts, and the fact that Deleuze is speaking here, before us, knowing his illness is going to eventually overtake him (“I speak after my death,” he begins, insisting on the film being posthumous), also makes the whole thing very moving. How can one not be stirred, knowing that he will eventually take his own life, when he speaks of Primo Levi and Parnet beings up Levi’s suicide: “Ah yes, ah yes,” Deleuze acknowledges, “he could no longer hold on, so he committed suicide to his personal life. But there are four pages or twelve pages or a hundred pages of Primo Levi that will remain, that will remain eternal resistances...”

Monday Eye Candy: Sidewalks

Last week, we featured photographs from Paul Shaw's Helvetica and the New York City Subway System. Today's eye candy is Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht. Sidewalks contains 35 black and white photos to illustrate the authors' examination of the evolution of the American urban sidewalk and conflicts that have arisen over its competing uses. Here are a few photographs from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

(A hotdog stand, at times considered sidewalk clutter, Los Angeles Fashion District, December 2005)

 

 

 

 

 

(City Walk, Universal City, California, 2002)

 

 

 

 

 

(Masked riders throwing beads, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Lousiana, 2006)

 

 

 

(Police in front of the boarded buildings at the World Trade Organization meetings, Seattle, Washington, 1999)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Canopied street, Coral Gables, Miami, Florida, 2006)

Happy Holidays! We will resume the Monday Eye Candy feature in the New Year (1/9/12).

How to Read the Landscape

Last week, MIT Press staff told us which titles they'd suggest as gifts.This week, Daniel Bouchard, a member of the MIT Press Journals Division, recommends A Landscape History of New England, edited by  Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd:

 

A Landscape History of New England  is an ideal primer for answering (and providing) a lot of questions about the common and uncommon landscapes all around as you travel through New England. It’s a resource, serving as a decoder of landscapes. Drawing on a long and scholarly tradition, it teaches you how to read the landscape. As an interested reader of many of the books cited throughout these 21 articles (by 23 authors), and a fan of many of those earlier authors (John Brinckerhoff Jackson, William Cronon, John Stilgoe, D.W. Meinig, and others, not least of whom, Thoreau), I found this collection a significant addition and worthy contribution to the literature. Now, as a pleasantly burdensome bonus, I have two handfuls of new (to me) authors on whom to keep an eye.

But what good is that to you? Well, imagine you and a friend are driving separate cars north out of New York City. You’ve got some time on your hands, opted for a road trip, and decided to “see” New England. It’s not the biggest territory in the States, but it’s still a lot of ground to cover. You pass over bridges, pause thru toll booths, and lean the wheel into the lanes under the big green highway signs boldly declaring “New England.”

Then you do something unique. Your car and the other car part ways to investigate different routes. You will meet up again somewhere way up north, let’s say at a diner in Brewer, Maine, in ten days. There, over lobster rolls and ale, you will discuss what you saw and compare notes. One car will “take a left” off Interstate 95 at New Haven and head north into Vermont. The other will continue along the coast up through Rhode Island, Boston and New Hampshire.

Is it a scavenger hunt for the eyes? What do we expect them to see? When they see the attractive old buildings in a town center painted white will they know those buildings are painted “a starker white paint than had been available to earlier generations”? (31) There is a lot to be gained by understanding such a thing. There’s a lot of history to consider beyond any plaques mounted nearby, and such plaques may indeed be more part of that history than they are a guide to it. Take the town Common: it may look postcard nice when our travelers pull up, but chances are good it was once held with the regard of any uncared for empty lot with junk on it, deep ruts from vehicles and stray animals. That condition wouldn’t be acceptable today, of course, and you can find out why it used to be.

Think about what you would see if you bought someone a coffee-table book “about” New England, one of those over-size picture books (which A Landscape History of New England definitely is not). No doubt, in that book there would be a lot of superb photographs of historic town centers with colonial and Federal style housing on streets radiating out from rising white steeples. In the rural section there would be old farmhouses and barns and piles of pumpkins gathered in the fall. On the coast there would be pictures of beaches and waterfronts, and fishermen on small boats coming in or out of the harbor. There may be pictures of quahogs, oysters or lobsters. There are few better pictorial representations of New England than a close up of a bivalve or crustacean in the hands of an old salt donning rubber overalls. For representations of the city you would see some nicely framed vantages of historic houses like those on Beacon Hill (Boston) or College Hill (Providence) and an aerial shot of Faneuil Hall and Fenway Park and so on. And in the mountains some photos of the colorful fall foliage with more farms and attractive town centers nearby. But what do any of the pictures tell us about New England? They only show us what we already know is there. And it is pretty.  

In both cars the challenge for the groups (yes, I’ve populated the front and back seats of the two cars—it’s more fun) is the same as they speed across the highways. They have the option to take any exit and explore whatever towns they come into and also the back roads between the towns as well as the large and small cities. The car along the coast exits and heads toward the water. They want to see some little town where there are fishing boats and a decent seafood restaurant. They will get out and take some pictures before they eat. The other car off-ramps in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. They admire the farms and meadows they pass and soon they come to the white steeple of a church and an old town hall and then the car pulls over by a small bridge where a handsome brick factory sits next to the water. The travelers get out, stretch, take some pictures and then go find something to eat.

If we have been in New England we have an idea of what others may expect to see in it. Now the questions turn to what can we understand about what we see all around us on the trip. The roads everywhere are lined with old stone walls. Sometimes, from the highway, you see the same stone walls rising up off the roadside and heading up over a hill covered with trees. Who put them there? The harbor atmosphere in a seaside tourist destination tries hard to evoke an earlier time. Why? Is the past more authentic? It is common knowledge that New England is the place to view autumn foliage but were those beautiful autumn views always highly valued?

Anyone can give you a dozen good reasons to visit Cape Cod. With this book you begin to see it from the eyes of a geographer. People on the Cape work hard to make a living from the land and sea. They always have. But after the First World War the economy shifted from working the land’s natural resources to working the industries and services that comprise a tourist seasonal-resident destination. The Cumbler chapter traces those changes with a cautionary note on the Cape as a “fragile ecosystem.”

So as our travelers compare notes they realize that they can now list dozens of towns all founded in the mid-18^th century, from each state. Some look like they are still in that time period with sprawling old farms and pastoral views—beautiful. Some simply look ravaged. Some look like revived mill towns, with humming, retro-fitted brick factories. And some mill towns look simply dilapidated with no help on the way. Some towns, after 250 years, appear to be just two highways crossing by a gas station and some, maybe a town or two away, are congested with upscale housing and fancy shops. Are the current economic winners also the past economic losers, thus preserving the things now highly valued as “New England”? Read the Wood chapter to find out.

This book informs like a startling tour guide. What it can’t answer directly it points you in the direction to find out for yourself. Did you know that three-quarters of New England was deforested by the mid-19^th century? Today it is three-quarters forested, and it reverted to its forested state “even more rapidly” than it was stripped (41). A Landscape History of New England offers everything our travelers need except restaurant recommendations. It offers everything they need to really see, the forest and the trees. After reading this book your trip on the Mass. Pike or the Merritt Parkway or the Spaulding Turnpike or through the Northeast Kingdom or the road to Mount Katahdin (after you finish your ice cream in the Bremen diner) or on what Jack Kerouac called “one long red line called Route 6” from the tip of Cape Cod to where it leaves Connecticut west of Danbury will never be the same. 

 

Ai Weiwei: Person of the Year Runner-Up

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ai Weiwei was named a runner-up for TIME Person of the Year! Visit TIME for a Q&A with Ai Weiwei that touches on everything from his 81-day Beijing detention to details on how he used his blog as a platform for political activism--and to read Ai's posts, check out Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, culled from the blog that Chinese authorities shut down in 2009. Ai Weiwei's Blog offers a collection of Ai's online writings translated into English--the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language.

Monday Eye Candy: Helvetica and the New York City Subway System

Last week, we featured beautiful spreads from Kit White's 101 Things to Learn in Art School. Today's eye candy is Paul Shaw's Helvetica and the New York City Subway System. Helvetica and the New York City Subway System contains numerous previously unpublished documents as well as more than 200 photographs, most of them original or never seen before. Here are a few photographs from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

Porcelain enamel station sign. Rector Street (R/W), 1970s. This is the only remaining sign in Standard Medium among a group of stations on the BMT Broadway and Fourth Avenue lines that were renovated with large colored tiles in the 1970s. Regarding the disappearing mosaics, a TA spokesman said at the time, “We didn’t consider these things had any great artistic merit anyhow.” (2008)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

Porcelain enamel station sign. 242nd Street—Van Cortlandt Park (1). (2007)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

 

Illuminated sign. 42nd Street—Port Authority (A/C/E), 1980s? Handcut Helvetica Medium. (2009)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

Porcelain enamel station sign. Beach 36 Street / Edgemere (A). 2010

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

 

Handwritten directional sign. Avenue N (F), 2010. (2010)

Credit: Paul Shaw

 

 

 

 

Gift Books

We asked MIT Press staff to tell us which MIT Press titles they'd suggest as gifts. Here are a few of their picks (more to come next Friday, 12/16):

 

 

Kelley, Sales

"Urban Code (by Anne Mikoleit and Moritz Pürckhauer) would be a great gift for your urbanite friends. It is hip, smart, and easily back-pocketable. Plus you don’t even need a bookmark as it comes with its own! Can’t beat a two-for-one!"

 

 

 

Emily, Acquisitions

"Something for Nothing (by Michael Klein) is a great gift for that grad student or young professor on your list. The novel chronicles David Fox’s first year as a visiting assistant professor of economics in small-town upstate New York. The central dilemma involves David’s decision to publish a paper with a right-wing think tank, but the rest of the story covers his attempts to find a tenure-track job while balancing teaching, research, and a social life. The details will ring true for anyone in academia and, best of all, this book is funny!"

 

Ellen, Director's office

"The Metamorphosis of Plants (by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; photographs and introduction by Gordon L. Miller). The illustrations that Goethe would have wanted! One gardener in the MIT community to whom I gave the book called it 'a treat for the eyes and the soul.'"  

 

Patricia, Sales

"I like the little books-– A Hut of One’s Own (by Ann Cline); Le Corbusier’s Hands (by André Wogenscky); A Day with Picasso (by Billy Kluver); Eccentric Spaces (by Robert Harbison).

And always a fan of Henk Tennekes, The Simple Science of Flight.

The Metamorphosis of Plants is just lovely, it’s been a favorite on display at St. John’s College Bookstore in Santa Fe."

Pearl Harbor and Grace Hopper

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The events of December 7, 1941 not only triggered US involvement in World War II, but also created opportunity for women to join a workforce that was previously dominated by men. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer tells about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), who joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, made herself "one of the boys" in Howard Aiken's wartime Computation Laboratory, and created the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. Grace's advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers. Here's an excerpt from the book to commemorate both Pearl Harbor and Grace Hopper:

 

Anecdotes abound of the late Admiral Hopper, the majority highlighting her most lauded trait: irreverence bordering on insubordination. Nonetheless, the first 36 years of her life were marked by a certain amount of conventionality. In the 1920s it was not uncommon for privileged women from the Northeast to seek higher education. In fact, the percentage of women receiving doctorates in mathematics during the 1920s and the early 1930s was not achieved again until the 1980s. This reminds us that the history of women's emancipation in America has not been linear. Rather than steady progress, there have been waves of opportunity and retrenchment--for example, increasing opportunity in the 10 years after World War I, then retrenchment during the Depression. Hopper came of age during the 1920s, and both her public choices and her private ones coincided rather than conflicted with the desires of her family and her community.

The attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing mobilization created unprecedented career opportunities for women. The large-scale reorganization of labor opened a wide variety of occupations that before 7 December 1941 were reserved for men. The most iconic cultural image of this period, Rosie the Riveter, represented the millions of women who replaced men in the workforce as they deployed to Europe and the Pacific. Like millions of other women of her generation, Hopper benefited from this labor shift. And Pearl Harbor was a watershed in Grace Hopper's personal life as well as in her career. In the months following that fateful day, she divorced her husband, left a secure tenure-track position at Vassar College, and joined the Navy. She then became an officer in one of the most gendered organizations of its day. Her military rank endowed her with the external trappings of authority: uniform, title, privilege. Military rank, protocol, and tradition helped to neutralize societal prejudices agains women in positions of public responsibility.

The benefits of military rank were evident as newly minted Lieutenant (j.g.) Hopper was assigned to Commander Howard Aiken's Harvard Computation Laboratory during the war. Aiken, a difficult man who would be classified as a "male chauvinist" by today's standards, found a kinship with Hopper not because she was a rebel but because of her ability to ingratiate herself to Aiken and her fellow workers. Of course she was a talented mathematician and computer programmer, but more importantly she was loyal to her boss and helped to organize and control his laboratory. She actively erased gender differences through her clothing, her language, her drinking habits, and her humor, gaining the trust and respect of Aiken and her peers to the point that she became the most prominent person in the Harvard Computation Laboratory apart from the fiery Aiken.

"The camp's the thing"

Charlie Hailey, author of Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space, on Occupy Wall Street camps as urban stages.

 

The camp’s the thing. Apologies to Shakespeare but the Occupy camps have entered the global conscience. What some have criticized as a lack of goals has materialized as a network of urban spaces not just in the U.S. but throughout the world. The camps themselves were the goals all along, and they have answered the OWS Declaration of the Occupation’s gentle directive to “occupy public space” in order to “let these facts be known.” This primary objective forms the graphical center of the Declaration’s flow-chart diagram, a document that reminds me of the archetypal camp with multiple camping sites—in the radially-organized diagram, they are plotted as grievances—arranged around a central campfire. But with Occupy this central focus is more revelatory than reverie. The Occupy camps have in fact come to be scenes of disclosure, revealing the sometimes messy, at times ambiguous, process of achieving democratic consensus. Camping in public urban spaces is unavoidably theatrical, and the occupy meme camps that have sprung from OWS’s genetic code are also exercises in applied aesthetics, combining self-expression with the practicalities of self-organizing and day-to-day living. And the camps’ strategic locations have helped their visibility: OWS capitalized on zoning rules for Zuccotti Park’s privately-owned public space to allow for 24-hour occupation and to attain proximity to Wall Street; and the McPherson Square location allows Occupy DC axial linkage to the White House and interrupts a lobbyist corridor along K Street NW.  Like Colin Ward’s “seeds beneath the snow,” the Occupy camps ultimately demonstrate a vision of everyday life. Though many have been forced to close, the encampments may return with the spring thaw and will likely continue as urban stages that do not require the platforms demanded by critics.

Monday Eye Candy

While it’s supposed to be unwise to judge a book by its cover, at The MIT Press, we believe that to acknowledge the visual and material appeal of books is not to diminish their content. In spirit of this belief, we're instituting "Monday Eye Candy" to celebrate the many MIT Press titles that we feel are beautiful, inside and out.

Today's eye candy is Kit White's 101 Things to Learn in Art School. The cover is a stamped case and each of the lessons in the book is accompanied by a black and white drawing that illustrates the point made by referring to an historical or contemporary work of art. The drawings, produced by the author, act both as referrals to well-known works that students should study, as well as demonstrations of the difficulty of successfully capturing the subtleties of art works when copying them in order to decipher their secrets. Feast your eyes on these spreads from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fifteen Percent-Off Friday: December

Happy Friday! As with last month, we are excited to offer a 15 percent discount on an MIT Press title to our blog readers (when purchased through the MIT Press website). Our December discount pick is Something for Nothing, a novel by Michael W. Klein, William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. Follow this link, which will automatically apply the discount, to get your copy of Something for Nothing just in time for the holidays. *In the (unlikely) event that the discount doesn't appear when you click the link, have no fear--simply manually enter the discount code "kleinreads11" in the shopping cart to get the discount.*

Here's an excerpt from Something for Nothing to whet your appetite. Check back on the first Friday of January (1/6/12) for our next "Fifteen Percent-Off Friday" pick.

David sat at a table in the kitchen of the apartment he had rented, his laptop and a cup of steaming coffee in front of him. Even on a visiting professor’s salary, he could afford a decent one-bedroom apartment in Knittersville, one that was large and sunny, at least as compared to the single room in Manhattan that had served as office, bedroom, and living room when he was a graduate student at Columbia. The apartment, one of six in the building, was also only five blocks from campus, and a ten-minute walk to his office in Central Hall. This proximity was especially welcome today since it was already 9:00 and the first meeting of his Principles of Economics class would begin in a little more than an hour.

Time was pressing because of his typical close attention to detail. He was a little obsessive, sure, but his attention to detail in this case seemed warranted. After all, this was the first class offered here, or anywhere, by Professor David Fox, PhD. Of course, obsession does not come without its traveling companion, stress. After a restless night with dreams of classrooms filled with obstructed views, chalkboards that could not be written upon, and lectures made while attired only in underwear, he got out of bed at 6:00. The cup of coffee sitting in front of him was his fourth that morning. He had also gone through more clothes changes in the past three hours than in any given three-day period when he was a graduate student.

The first choice was a white shirt and striped regiment tie. Reconsidering his tie choice, he went through most all of his (admittedly meager) neckwear portfolio. He settled, or thought he had settled, on a black tie with a subtle textured pattern. But, after some inspection, it was clear that the pattern was too subtle and the black tie would cause students to think that, right after class, he would be going to a funeral. This certainly would not work in his favor, since sympathy is a cheap and ultimately ineffectual way to try to get on the good side of students. He then changed to a black shirt with the black tie to go for a monochromatic effect, a proven look, but perhaps one that had become a bit clichéd and, for that reason, desperate. Students can sense desperation in professors’ efforts to be cool in the same way that sharks sense blood in the water, and with much the same ultimate outcome. So, after some more consideration, a return to the original white shirt and striped regiment tie combination. Of course, this entire protracted decision-making process was the natural follow-up to his internal discussion last night that weighed the subtle messages that were conveyed by not wearing a tie (either “Hey kids, I’m not that much older than you, and I can relate to you” or “Hey, that professor’s not much older than us, so he probably doesn’t know what he’s doing”) versus those that would be sent were he to don one (“I’m the professor. You can tell because I’m dressed like a grown-up.”)

After so much time spent on style, David’s attention turned for one last time to substance. First lines, like first impressions, are vital. Beginning with demand and supply, the Romulus and Remus of economics, would make students’ eyes glaze and make him seem like some uncool middle-aged professor (Could he somehow let on to the students that he was only 28? Should he?). He considered beginning his Principles of Economics class with the sentence “All of economics is about making choices.” But, when he looked up and saw the ties littering the chair across from him, he decided to try another tack.