Author video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coniwRMX470. Will alse be posted on Amazon, Facebook, Myspace, bn.com, google, goodreads, beacon.org and is available to all accounts. This is our first Beacon author video!
Worst Instincts, Wendy Kaminer, May 2009, cloth, $24.95, 978-0-8070-4430-8
"The willingness to criticize your own based on principles you would apply to others is a measure of integrity. Kaminer's important book about her beloved ACLU has that integrity. She tells a startling, sad & exceptionally well-documented story."
—Ira Glasser, former executive director, ACLU
"Standing up to your political enemies is easy, fun and often profitable. Taking public issue with your friends and allies on a matter of great principle is none of these, but it is a far more important service to others. I am enormously grateful to Wendy Kaminer for the intellectual integrity and moral courage this book represents."
—Congressman Barney Frank
Evidence: Poems, Mary Oliver, April 2009, cloth, $23.00, 978-0-8070-6898-4
Advance Access Galley offer happening today, January 5th. This is the beginning of our Indie Bound Top Ten Poetry Pick campaign. Nominations are due February 20th.
Publicity, Reviews, and Praise:
Sowing Crisis, Rashid Khalidi, January 2009, cloth, $25.95, 978-0-8070-0310-7
Kirkus; a nice review in the January 1st issue
Publisher's Weekly; starred review in the January 1st issue
California Literary Review; a nice and lengthy review posted December 21st
"It's a fairly simple idea on the surface, but Pearce's mission took him more than 110,000 miles, to at least 20 foreign nations. The resulting narrative [is] pleasantly written and surprisingly informative."
Quiverfull, Kathryn Joyce, March 2009, cloth, $24.95, 978-0-8070-1070-9
Quiverfull is getting picked up as resource in responses to the Warren Invocation choice, among other issues. Hits so far on American Prospect, Daily Kos, Religion Dispatches and more.
The American Prospect; fantastic early praise from Sarah Posner
"Joyce's keen reporting . . . will prove to be an invaluable resource for understanding the origins of some of [Rick Warren's] comments on gender."
Religion Dispatches; Clarkson interviews Kathryn Joyce about Old Spice's "Art of Manliness" competition
“Kathryn Joyce, author of the forthcoming Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Beacon Press, March 2009), calls it “pretty savvy marketing” in our e-mail interview:
One of Vision Forum’s strongest suits is in finding and developing charismatic and photogenic representatives of the lifestyle they promote….[G]ender roles are greatly exaggerated and glamorized. The featured women are often attractive in a somewhat fragile, old-fashioned way, and the men are depicted (and dressed up) as adventuring heroes.”
Reality Check; there's been some pick-up of Joyce's recent article at Reality Check, the reproductive health blog, which addressed attempts by Rick Warren's church to impose behavioral change requirements on global AIDS policy
"All marriages are a bit of journey to the foreign country that is another's mind and heart, but Sophia Raday's remarkable Love in Condition Yellow takes us on a true adventure: into a marriage that is both riven and strengthened by political differences that run nearly as deep as those that divide our country. Raday shows us the empathetic imagination behind true respect for those with whom one differs, and in her clear-sighted portrait of the complexities of marriage, she may show us what love is, as well."
New York Times; Nicholas Kristof plugs Prescription for a Healthy Nation in his December 17th op-ed column
"Every 10 percent price increase on cigarettes reduced sales by about 3 percent over all, and 7 percent among teenagers, according to the 2005 book, "Prescription for a Healthy Nation."
The story of African Americans and Latinos in Major League Baseball is traditionally one of their shameful segregation and the triumph of integration with Jackie Robinson. But for players of color, integration was also painful—among its other costs, it destroyed once vibrant Negro Leagues and often grouped Latinos into Jim Crow racism. Beacon is excited to announce the acquisition of a new book on baseball’s “great experiment” by historian and Emmy Award-winning documentary film writer and producer Rob Ruck. Tentatively titled WHITEOUT, Ruck’s book will look at Caribbean baseball and the Negro Leagues in a linked narrative, and will examine what this intertwined history—with its shared civil rights struggles as well as intraracial tensions—suggests about the future of the game and rapidly changing demographics and social relations in this country and beyond. SABR-MacMillan Award-winning author Rob Ruck teaches in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh and is on the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies. His previous books, SANDLOT SEASONS: Sport in Black Pittsburgh and TROPIC OF BASEBALL: Baseball in the Dominican Republic, are widely acclaimed. Fall 2010.
This Week in Beacon Broadside, a project of Beacon Press (www.beaconbroadside.com):
Beacon Press is a department of the