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"Reclaiming the Shrew"
CRC Professor Katie Roiphe reviews Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife. The New York Times Book Review, April 27, 2008.
The prevailing image of Ann Hathaway is that of an illiterate seductress who beguiled the young Shakespeare, conceived a child and ensnared him in a loveless union. Germaine Greer's task in her ingenious new book, "Shakespeare’s Wife," is to expose the construction of this fantasy, tracing its evolution from early biographers like Thomas de Quincey through the work of respected modern scholars like Stephen Greenblatt. "The Shakespeare wallahs," she writes, "have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women."
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Song Yet Sung
Professor James McBride's's book, Song Yet Sung
looks to both the past and the future not only of the black community, but of America itself, as his story poses questions about the true meaning of freedom, redemption, and justice. His is a morally complicated world, in which people may be seen as black or white, but right choices often are not. Yet it is also a world in which the infinite human capacity for love transcends all else, including issues of race, identity, and conflict. Song Yet Sung will resonate powerfully for his legions of devoted fans and draw thousands of new readers of transfixing, touching, eloquently written fiction of consequence.
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"The Checkpoint"
For Israeli soldiers checkpoint life is dull, alienating, and stress-inducing. For the Palestinians it is frustrating, humiliating, and anger-provoking. Yet it's the human face of the occupation—and as close as some Israelis and Palestinians will ever come.
Professor Ted Conover, a department Distinguished Writer in Residence, covers Israeli soldiers and the Palestinians who have to negotiate these checkpoints as part of their daily life. In the March 2006 issue of The Atlantic.
Read article... [subscription required]
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Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
A collection of essays and interviews on art, without the heavy-handedness present in so much art history writing — by Prof. Lawrence Weschler, a Distinguished Writer in Residence.
"Weschler combines his keen insights into art (both contemporary and Renaissance), his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays that are sure to illuminate, educate, and astound."
A brief (starred) review of the book is available from Publishers Weekly.
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Clooney on Murrow and Journalism, at NYU
Prof. Marcia Rock hosted an hour-long discussion on the Academy Award-nominated film on Edward R. Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck, with director, writer, and actor George Clooney, producer and co-writer Grant Heslov and the actor playing Murrow, David Strathairn.
The film is up for an Academy Award, as are the director (Clooney), the writers (Clooney and Grant Heslov), and the actor playing Murrow (Strathairn). Find out why they made the film and what they learned about the Fourth Estate and Edward R. Murrow's legacy in this one hour discussion held at NYU on December 15, 2005, hosted by broadcast journalism professor Marcia Rock.
The discussion is available as both a video stream and a downloadable audio (mp3) version. The video requires RealPlayer, while the audio should work with almost any computer or portable music player.
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"Science and Journalism Fail to Connect"
"How can we expect Americans to know anything beyond what they happen to remember from science class? Journalists certainly don't tell them."
Prof. Dan Fagin, Associate Director of the Science & Environmental Reporting Program, looks at the coverage of intelligent design and global warming, and the intersection of science and journalism in the lede article of Nieman's coverage of intelligent design and global warming.
Available as a single article; the entire Winter 2005 issue of Nieman Reports is also available. Nieman Reports is published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
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The New New Journalism
By Robert Boynton
In the thirty years since Tom Wolfe published his manifesto, "The New Journalism," a group of writers has been quietly securing a place at the very center of contemporary American literature for reportorially based, narrative-driven long form nonfiction. These New New Journalists--Adrian LeBlanc, Michael Lewis, Lawrence Weschler, Eric Schlosser, Richard Preston, Alex Kotlowitz, Jon Krakauer, William Langewiesche, Lawrence Wright, William Finnegan, Ted Conover, Jonathan Harr, Susan Orlean, and others--represent the continued maturation of American literary journalism.
Rigorously reported, psychologically astute, sociologically sophisticated and politically aware, the New New Journalism may well be the most popular and influential development in the history of American literary nonfiction.
Professor Robert Boynton is the director of the graduate magazine journalism program.
More info on the book: http://www.newnewjournalism.com/
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PASSING:
When People Can't Be Who They Are
Despite the social changes of the last half-century, many Americans still "pass": black for white, gay for straight, and in many new ways as well. Though we tend to think of passing as a betrayal of one's essential self, many who do so are actually trying be more truly themselves.
Through the provocative stories of six contemporary "passers," and examples from history and literature, PASSING: When People Can't Be Who They Are by Professor Brooke Kroeger illuminates passing as a strategy for bypassing prejudice and injustice.
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The Return of the Repressed
Mohammed Masud Raza Khan was one of psychoanalysis' best and brightest. With his impeccable pedigree he was the link between the legendary first generation of analysts and some of today's most important. Why did he go mad and start abusing patients? Did the very tradition that trained him fail him as a patient? Was Khan—who tormented so many—himself a victim?
Read "The Return of the Repressed: The Strange Case of Masud Khan" by Professor Robert Boynton.
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A Love Supreme
Professor Pamela Newkirk's new book, A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters, is scheduled to be published this January. Professor Newkirk's last book, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (2000), won the National Press Club Award for Media Criticism.
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Decloaking
"I wanted to write a 'people' book, not yet another 'machines and missions' book," writes Professor William E. Burrows of his 10th and latest title, By Any Means Necessary: America’s Secret Air War in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). This combination of history and investigative reporting, like his classic Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (Random House, 1986), tears the cloak of secrecy off U.S. intelligence collection. It describes the cat and mouse game U.S. Air Force and Navy reconnaissance planes played with Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean air defenses during the Cold War. Burrows recounts their white-knuckle missions in detail that, according to one review, could have opened a Tom Clancy techno-thriller. Publishers Weekly praised Burrows' "superb research and stellar writing."
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Best of the Muck
In their gripping new anthology Muckraking!: The Journalism That Changed America (New Press, 2002), Professor William Serrin and co-editor Judith Serrin have collected 125 of investigative journalism's greatest hits, from "Escape to Freedom" by Frederick Douglass to "The My Lai Massacre" by Seymour Hersh. The publisher calls Muckraking "an anthology for anyone who feels passionate about the heights that journalism can climb or its ability to illuminate the darkest depths."
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The Story of Their Lives
Co-edited by Professor Mitchell Stephens, Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11 (Bonus Books, 2002), is an anthology of white-knuckle accounts of what it was like to cover the story of their lives, in the words of 137 of the TV and radio journalists who covered it, "from the reporters and cameramen who were on the streets below the towers (or above them in helicopters) to Ann Compton who was on Air Force One, to the local crews who first ran onto that field in Pennsylvania," says Professor Stephens. Royalties from this book will be donated to September 11 charities.
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Dancing with My Father
Professor Marcia Rock's new documentary, Dancing with My Father, was screened at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival at the end of July; at the Hooker-Dunham Theater and Gallery, in Brattleboro, Vermont on June 16; and at the American Psychological Association Convention in Chicago on August 23, 2002. Hailed for its "universal appeal" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), Dancing traces Professor Rock's family saga — and family demons — from a tiny Jewish community in Slovakia to the immigrant neighborhoods of Cleveland, Ohio.
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