What Temple University Press staff wants to give and read this holiday season

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press suggest the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to read this holiday season. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Give: As a recent Press tweet suggested, I’d give Alexander Wolff’s The Audacity of Hoop to those on my list who’ve been in a funk since November 8.

Read:  A review of Maria Semple’s new book, Today Will Be Different, pointed me to an earlier book, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and I’ve had it on my list ever since. I love smart, witty, satirical contemporary novels and this looks to be just that.

Karen Baker, Financial Manager
Give: Boathouse Row  by Dotty Brown and Building Drexel, edited by Richardson Dilworth and Scott Gabriel Knowles, as both of these books are beautiful. Since all of my family are born and raised in Philadelphia, they will make great gifts for them.

Read: A Dog’s Purpose: A Novel for Humans. This book was just brought to my attention because it is about to be made into a movie, and it looks like a fun read.

 

 

Aaron Javsicas, Editor-in-Chief

Give: Boathouse Row, by Dottie Brown. We at Temple University Press have done our part to make holiday gift giving a little easier on Philadelphians this year. Dottie is a terrific writer who is passionate about rowing, the book is gorgeous, and it’s the first full exploration of this fascinating and unique Philadelphia institution. Giving Boathouse Row is practically a required act of Philadelphia civic pride.

Read: American Amnesia, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. These authors argue we have apparently forgotten how a “mixed economy” — with a substantial role for public intervention as well as for free markets — was crucial to achieving American prosperity in the twentieth century. It’s hard to know where we’re headed these days, but with seemingly everything up for grabs this looks like the sort of fundamental civics lesson we could all use.

Sara Cohen, Editor

Give: I’ll be giving folks copies of Dennis and Michele Waskul’s Ghostly Encounters.  It’s fascinating, readable, and (at least as far as I’m concerned) nothing says “holiday season” like ghosts.

Read:  I’ll be reading Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, the latter of which I received as an early holiday gift from a good friend.

 

 

 

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

Give: Will Big League Baseball Survive? The World Series this year brought in so many viewers and gave them such a sublime show at just the moment that football looks like it might be losing a shade of its luster. Will baseball fandom remain arcane to casual audiences? Is a breakthrough imminent, possible, or even necessary? Lincoln Mitchell sees the path forward. His book is perfect for the baseball evangelists I know.

Read: Colson Whitehead’s NBA-winning (no – we’re not talking about sports anymore) Underground Railroad and Zadie Smith’s new Swing Time (read her speech on hope and history ) in fiction and I’m curious about Michael Lewis’s take on Kahneman and Tversky in The Undoing Project.

Nikki Miller, Rights and Contracts Manager

Give: Dotty Brown’s Boathouse Row, which takes you through the history of rowing with beautiful pictures along the Schuylkill.  It offers a relaxing balance of history and storytelling which makes it a perfect read for the holiday season.

Read: The holidays give me an excuse to lay by the fire and reread my favorite book: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.

Joan Vidal, Senior Production Editor

Give: Suicide Squeeze: Taylor Hooton, Rob Garibaldi, and the Fight against Teenage Steroid Abuse, by William C. Kashatus. This important story of the tragic steroids-related suicides of two up-and-coming student-athletes is an essential addition to the continuing education on the widespread problem of steroid abuse among young people.

Read: I hope to receive The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter, by Tom Mendicino, a novel about two brothers who grow up in 1960s South Philadelphia and then go their separate ways: one staying and taking over their father’s barbershop and the other moving away and becoming a high-society lawyer. When life goes awry, they reveal the strength of the bond between them.

Kate Nichols,  Art Manager

Give: I would give George Lipstiz’s How Racism Takes Place.

 

Read: I have already given myself Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (through a donation to WXPN).

Dave Wilson, Senior Production Editor

Give: I thoroughly enjoyed working on and reading City in a Park: A History of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System by Lynn Miller and Jim McClelland. The authors recount a fascinating story of the birth of the park system, and I found myself wanting to visit the many places and houses so vividly depicted by the authors. The accompanying talks the authors gave made me more aware of one of the world’s greatest park systems, one that I didn’t fully appreciate until I had read this book.

 

 

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marketing Director

Give: I’d like to give a few of my friends copies of The Possessive Investment of Whiteness, by George Lipsitz, a book that illustrates the injustices suffered by and the advantages of white supremacy.

Read: I’m trying to catch up on my reading, so from the 2015 New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books list, I just bought Loving Day by Mat Johnson to read over the holiday break.  Peace and love to all this holiday season!

 

 

 

Emma Pilker, Editorial Assistant

Give: Framing the Audience by Isadora Anderson Helfgott, to my art history colleagues. Anyone interested in the social history of art will appreciate Helfgott’s analysis of pivotal 20th century movements that shaped today’s art world.

Read: I have been putting off reading Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller because of the heavy themes, but the end of the year is the perfect time to commit to some historical reflection and cultural

 

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

Give: Considering how 2016 was, Timothy Recuber’s Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America’s Decade of Disaster,  an appropriate gift. Recuber looks at how the media covered four crises–the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings and the 2008 financial crisis–and how our concern for the suffering of others help soothe our own emotional turmoil.

Read: I just started read Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, which actually acknowledges a Temple University Press book–Murray Dubin’s South Philadelphia—as source material for the depiction of South Philadelphia in the book. This video of Chabon, made during his Free Library of Philadelphia appearance on December 8 opens with him talking about how Dubin’s South Philadelphia influenced his “autobiographical novel.”

Lou Barletta: Burdensome, Illegal, Alien

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post Undocumented Fears author Jamie Longazel’s recent essay from the Huffington Post about Lou Barletta. 

Donald Trump is reportedly considering Congressman Lou Barletta to serve as his Secretary of Labor.

A Trump supporter from the beginning, Barletta made a national name for himself as mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, when he spearheaded the Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA) in 2006. Riding the wave of popularity generated from his hard-line anti-immigrant stance, he went on to unseat longtime Democratic incumbent Paul Kanjorski in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This potential appointment does not surprise me given Barletta’s loyalty to Trump and the political similarities the two share. However, as someone who grew up in Hazleton and spent the last decade studying the politics surrounding the IIRA, I am deeply concerned.

As I chronicle in my book, Undocumented Fears, Barletta pushed the IIRA without any evidence to support his anti-immigrant claims. He suggested undocumented immigrants were wreaking havoc on his city – committing crimes, draining resources, and the like. I show how in reality it was economic policies favoring the wealthy that were responsible for Hazleton’s decline.

Like Trump, Barletta has elevated demagoguery over truth. “I don’t need numbers,” he boasted when confronted with the reality that undocumented immigrants did not increase crime in Hazleton. At the same time he has masked how his own political decisions have done more harm than good for his constituents, including some of his most ardent supporters.

Although there was no evidence to support his claim that “illegal aliens in our city create an economic burden that threatens our quality of life,” there is plenty of evidence of Barletta burdening city resources. Back in 2001, as mayor, he gave his blessing to local developers seeking to implement a state-level corporate welfare initiative that provided exploitative multinational companies with massive tax breaks. Some enjoyed a moratorium on all taxes for a dozen years. Hazleton today provides a clear example of how a city cannot provide its residents with adequate services when its largest employers do not pay their fair share.

More directly, Barletta took advantage of the system for his own benefit by dragging his exclusionary law through a years-long appeal process. While increasing his political capital by refusing to “back down,” he ignored clear pronouncements that this would cost the city immensely. Indeed, it has. Hazleton – which operates on an annual budget of less than $10 million – now owes $1.4 million in legal fees. As the Editorial Board of the local newspaper, the Citizen’s Voice so appropriately put it, “[T]he residents of Hazleton will have to consider [this] an involuntary contribution to [Barletta’s] campaign war chest.”

Silencing critics who sought to add complexity to the debate, Barletta regularly uttered the simplistic, faux-populist line “illegal is illegal.” The hypocrisy of this was in full view as he reacted to the court’s determination that the IIRA illegally overstepped federal authority and violated the Equal Protection Clause, unleashing Trump-like criticisms of judges, immigrant rights groups, and musings about a rigged system.

Because he hails from a hardscrabble former coalmining town, Barletta may look the part as potential Secretary of Labor. Hazleton, after all, has one of the richest histories of labor organizing you will find.

But we shouldn’t let that fool us. Lou Barletta’s pro-corporate / anti-immigrant stance is alien to the working class legacy of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region. He has more in common with the barons of the mining era than he does with the miners, enabling exploitation more than protecting us from it. What should worry us most is how he has followed in the footsteps of the coal barons, using ethnic stereotyping to pit working people against one another.

It is true Barletta and Trump are both widely popular in Hazleton at the moment. But after sifting through Lou Barletta’s record, I can say with confidence that he does not represent the interests of the working class people living in Hazleton today, despite posturing as though he does. Unfortunately, laborers across the country may soon find out that he does not represent theirs, either.

White paper from Temple-hosted summit of university presses reporting to libraries now available

University Press and Library Summit Releases White Paper, Recommendations

 The P2L Summit brought together 23 teams of university library and press directors with an administrative relationship (typically the press reporting to the library—“P2L”) on May 9–10, 2016, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Convened by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the P2L Summit was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and hosted by Temple University Libraries and Temple University Press.

In this first such meeting of members of this community, the library-press teams discussed the benefits of, challenges in, and possibilities around this kind of relationship. Summit participants explored how libraries and presses might leverage the strengths of their distinctive enterprises to move toward a unified system of publication, dissemination, access, and preservation that better serves both the host institution and the wider world of scholarship. The P2L Summit was an important first step toward a shared action agenda for university presses and academic libraries that supports a full spectrum of approaches to scholarly communication and publishing.

P2L Summit organizers Mary Rose Muccie (Temple University Press), Joe Lucia (Temple University Libraries), Elliott Shore (ARL), Clifford Lynch (CNI), and Peter Berkery (AAUP) have released a white paper on the summit, “Across the Great Divide: Findings and Possibilities for Action from the 2016 Summit Meeting of Academic Libraries and University Presses with Administrative Relationships (P2L).” The white paper discusses key issues covered in the summit, areas that need greater mutual understanding between libraries and presses, the press’s role on campus, preliminary recommendations that came out of the summit, and the European perspective on these issues as presented by Wolfram Horstmann (Göttingen State and University Library, Germany).

Appendices to the P2L Summit white paper include the text of the opening keynote presentation by Scott Waugh (UCLA) on “The Role of Libraries and University Presses in the Scholarly Eco-system: A Provost’s Perspective”; a roster of summit participants; results and analysis of a pre-summit survey of teams of press and library deans/directors, about how those relationships are managed; the summit agenda; and the text of Clifford Lynch’s closing remarks on the summit.

The white paper concludes by noting a subsequent summit, P2L2, will continue this collective conversation and delve deeply into the recommendations from the first summit as well as those proposed in other contexts. Open to a wider audience, P2L2 will focus on collaboration—both intra- and inter-institutional—and on strategies to reinforce the library and press joint mission and advance the shared goal of promulgating scholarship. Details about P2L2 will be announced in 2017.

About the Association of American University Presses

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) is an organization of nearly 140 international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, AAUP advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom as core values. AAUP members are active across many scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing. AAUP is on the web at http://www.aaupnet.org/.

About the Association of Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at ARL.org.

About the Coalition for Networked Information

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Some 230 institutions representing higher education, publishing, information technology, scholarly and professional organizations, foundations, and libraries and library organizations make up CNI’s members; CNI is entirely funded through membership dues. Semi-annual membership meetings bring together representatives of CNI’s constituencies to discuss ongoing and new projects, and to plan for future initiatives. Learn more about CNI at https://www.cni.org/.

About Temple University

Temple University is a public, four-year research university and a national leader in education, research, and healthcare. Founded by Dr. Russell H. Conwell in 1884, Temple’s official motto—Perseverantia Vincit, or Perseverance Conquers—reflects its students’ drive to succeed and commitment to excellence. Temple is a vital institution in the Philadelphia region and commonwealth of Pennsylvania, contributing more than $3 billion toward Pennsylvania’s economy each year. The university also has a strong global reach, with long-standing and vibrant campuses in Tokyo and Rome, programs in London, Beijing, and other locations worldwide, and over 300,000 alumni living around the world. Temple University is on the web at http://www.temple.edu/.

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