Duke University Press Log

Behind the Scenes at a Book Printer

A few weeks ago, our Books Design and Production department took a field trip to
one of our book printers, Edwards Brothers in Lillington, North Carolina. Designer Amy Ruth Buchanan was impressed: "During our tour of the plant, it was confirmed for me again that I am in the right business. I found all the paper, the huge printing presses, stacks of signatures waiting for binding, binding equipment, and 
rolls of foil for stamping spines totally thrilling. I really am a book-making geek. We were all especially impressed by the long tenures of the staff there. I think the "new guy" has been there for about seven years. The Director of Customer Service and Prepress has been with the company for 42 years." And Production Assistant Brittany Miller said she "enjoyed seeing the mechanics of printing. All too often we forget the physical labor and technical skills that are involved in the publishing process. We were able to see just how enthusiastic and learned our book-makers are!" Brittany was inspired to take some gorgeous photos of the workings of the factory. We share some here, and you can see the rest on our Facebook page.   

When Breast Cancer Recurs: Expert Advice

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Most articles and media attention focus on prevention and finding a cure. Unfortunately, some women find that their cancer is not cured, but has instead metastasized into advanced disease. Many patients have no idea how to proceed when they learn this news. Barbara Gordon, a professor of English at Elon University, found herself in this unfortunate position several years ago. She looked everywhere for a comprehensive book that would tell her how to deal with treatment, telling her loved ones about her disease, and coping with death, but none existed. Gordon learned later that her diagnosis was incorrect, but now, along with her oncologist and other experts, she has written the book that she wished she had as she faced late-stage breast cancer and the prospect of dying from the disease. Filled with information and advice, and designed to enable informed decisions and improved quality of life, Breast Cancer Recurrence and Advanced Disease: Comprehensive Expert Guidance gathers in one place authoritative medical information about recurrence and late-stage breast cancer, and it addresses the practical, emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal aspects of dying and death. Gordon recently appeared on WFMY-TV talking about how to discuss advanced breast cancer with friends and family. See the video and read the story here. You can also catch her on WRAL-TV this Saturday, October 30, at 7:45 a.m.

Paul Gootenberg Discusses Inequality in Latin America

Check out the newest author interview video from Duke Press! Paul Gootenberg, co-editor of Indelible Inequalities in Latin America: Insights from History, Politics, and Culture (2010), sits down with Amanda E. Sharp, our Publicity & Marketing Assistant, to answer questions about his new, edited collection. Building on sociologist Charles Tilly's relational framework for understanding enduring inequalities, the contributors explore the processes that have combined to produce and reproduce inequalities in Latin America.

 

James N. Green Talks about His New Books on Brazil

Check out our latest author interview video! James N. Green, author of We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (2010) and editor of A Mother's Cry: A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (2010), talks about how his two new books share a unique insight into Brazil, its politics, and the campaigns to end its history of torture.

 

Truthiness and the American Dialect Society

The New York Times recently featured a piece on the staying power of the word “truthiness,” coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005.  The word has made its way into the New Oxford American Dictionary this year for the first time, but its first validation came in 2005 at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, where it was voted Word of the Year. 

 The words that are in contention for Word of the Year are published in the American Dialect Society’s official journal, American Speech, in a special section based on words or terms that dominated the national discourse.  Recent contenders were Bromance, Obamarama, First Dude, Dracula sneeze, and Sexting.  For definitions of these words or more information about the Word of the Year contest, click here and download the PDF. 

Global Open Access Week

Next week, October 18-24 is Open Access Week, "[A]n opportunity for the worldwide academic and research community to continue to learn about the potiential benefits of Open Access (OA), to share what they've learned with colleageus, and to inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research."

Duke University is participating in OA Week with a series of events focusing on how and why Duke scholars support and benefit from open access, and background information on the various aspects of OA.  One such event is a panel featuring two Duke Press employees: LIbrary Relations Manager Kim Steinle, and Project Euclid Manager Mira Waller.  The panelists will discuss their experiences with Open Access publisihing and its impact on scholarly communications.

Project Euclid, a joint venture with Cornell University Library, hosts a number of open access titles.  With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Duke University Press currently offers over 10,000 letters written by Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle to the public. 

Duke Authors at the Latin American Studies Association 2010 Meeting

We were excited to be a part of LASA2010 in Toronto last week. We had many authors stop by and say hello, and here are photos of some of them. We will also be posting a couple of YouTube videos soon.

James N. Green, author of We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States

 

 

 

 

Erin Graff Zivin, author of The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary

 

 

Miguel Tinker Salas, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela

 

 

 

 

Edward Wright-Rios, author of Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934

 

 

Patricia de Santana Pinho, author of Mama Africa: Reinvinting Blackness in Bahia

 

 

 

 

Jerry Dávila, author of Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980

 

 

 

Paul K. Eiss, author of In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatán

 

 

 

 

Aviva Chomsky, author of Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class

 

 

 

 

W. George Lovell, co-translator and co-editor of Severo Martínez Peláez's La Patria del Criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala

 

 

 

Lauren Derby, author of The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo

 

 

 

 

Paul Gootenberg, co-editor of Indelible Inequalities in Latin America: Insights from History, Politics, and Culture

 

 

 

Donna J. Guy, author of Women Build the Welfare State: Performing Charity and Creating Rights in Argentina, 1880-1955

 

 

 

 

Matthew B. Karush, co-editor of The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina

 

 

 

Steve J. Stern, author of Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006, with Carolina Aguilera Insunza of FLACSO Chile

 

Thanks to our Exhibits Manager, Helena Knox, for taking these photos!

Surfer Girls in the New World Order

The Atlantic offers a short, interesting piece in their new issue on Gaza's surfer girls. The girls surf fully-clothed and will have to quit when they turn seventeen. One asks reporter Sarah A. Topol, "When you surf in America, do people stare at you?" This piece is just a vignette, and if it leaves you wanting to learn more about girls' and women's surfing around the world, you should check out Krista Comer's new book Surfer Girls in the New World Order. In the book Comer offers stories from Mexico, Indonesia, and Australia, as well the U.S. as she explores surfing as a local and global subculture, looking at how the culture of surfing has affected and been affected by girls, from baby boomers to members of Generation Y. To win a leftover advance review copy of the book, leave a comment here, or over at our Facebook page.

Remembering Che Guevara

On the anniversary of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's death, we offer a guest post by Paulo Drinot, editor of Che's Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America.

On 9 October 1967 Che Guevara was shot dead in Bolivia, thus ending his attempt to ignite a continental revolution. Many attribute Guevara’s death to his lack of understanding of the country he chose to initiate a hemispheric version of the struggle that had resulted in the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. But Bolivia was not completely unfamiliar territory for Guevara. He had visited the country shortly after the triumph of that country’s own revolution, in 1952. In fact, Guevara had travelled through much of Latin America in his youth. As the contributors to Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America show, these travels played a key, but little recognised, role in shaping Guevara’s understanding of the region as well as his revolutionary praxis and vision.

Half a century after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the broader revolutionary project Che inspired–-certainly in its armed variant--appears moribund. But Guevara, and in particular the famous Korda photograph of the “heroic guerrilla”, remains ubiquitous. Recent films, by Walter Salles and Steven Soderbergh, have done much to revive interest in Che. Yet despite the obvious importance of Guevara to twentieth-century Latin American and indeed world history, there is surprisingly little serious scholarship on him. The bulk of what is published on Guevara tends to be either hagiographical or demonizing. In recent years, much of the serious scholarship on Che has focused less on the man, his life and his ideas, than on his iconography.  

Che’s Travels shows that Guevara’s journeys across Latin America in the early 1950s represent a uniquely useful conduit to understand both the man and the region in a pivotal and yet poorly researched decade. The contributors draw on Guevara’s own accounts of his two journeys, from his native Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, and then from Argentina through Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, and other sources in order to shed new light on Che’s formative years. In so doing they also provide new insight into Che’s subsequent revolutionary trajectory and the failure of his guerrilla in Bolivia in 1967 and why, despite his death forty-three years ago, he remains, for many Latin Americans, as relevant today as he ever was.

Praise for Bring on the Books for Everybody

Some great praise today for Jim Collins's Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Collins's book is a hopeful assesment of the culture of reading and books that considers film, e-books, Oprah, and the rise of the chain bookstore. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Tara Brabazon says the book is "the "killer app" for popular cultural studies." She exhorts readers to "Buy it. Borrow it. Download it. Now. It is a book that we will remember where we were when we we first read it. This is a game-changer for popular cultural studies, media studies and the new humanities." The Chicago Tribune thinks the book is one of five that writers should read right now. So what are you waiting for? Get reading!