Each week we post a round-up of some of our most exciting national and international PUP book coverage. Reviews, interviews, events, articles–this is the spot for coverage of all things “PUP books” that took place in the last week. Enjoy!
THIS WEEK IN REVIEWS
We start this week across the pond from our Princeton, NJ, office to the home of our Woodstock office. We saw some great reviews in UK publications recently and have included two here.
If Walter Benjamin dubbed Paris “the capital of the nineteenth century,” which city takes that title during the much darker twentieth century? Derek Sayer’s new book argues that Prague, with its astonishingly vibrant and always surprising human landscape, is that city. Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Marci Shore, who called the book “[a] pleasure to read, luscious in a sultry kind of way.” Learn more about this book–which was named one of the Financial Times‘ Best History Books of 2013–and view the introduction here.
Next, we turn to Francisco Bethencourt’s Racisms, the first comprehensive history of racism, from the Crusades to the twentieth century. The New Statesman reviewed the title calling it “[an] impressive book.” Joanna Bourke of the New Statesman points out the importance of Bethencourt’s work as a lens for current debates about events like George Zimmerman’s acquittal after the killing of Trayvon Martin. She writes:
Bethencourt addresses the “scientific” turn in racial classification systems. There is a vast literature on the ideas of influential men such as […] Charles Darwin and many others. However, Bethencourt’s summary is the clearest and most sophisticated to date.
View the book’s introduction here.
We return stateside for the next PUP book. Check out this interview with Eswar Prasad, author of The Dollar Trap. He speaks with the Wall Street Journal‘s Jon Hilsenrath about why the dollar didn’t collapse after the events of the past few years and what this means for the future.
You can check out the preface here. Visit Eswar Prasad’s website for more information about the book, including a book trailer.
The WSJ‘s China RealTime blog also featured a question and answer piece with Prasad, who gives more explanation for his argument that no currency can rival the dollar.
PUP author and Princeton professor Jacob N. Shapiro writes his own piece this week for the Boston Globe. His piece, entitled “108 Terrorist Memoirs, Analyzed,” discusses how Shapiro prepared to write his book The Terrorist’s Dilemma and the surprising things that his research uncovered. He read 108 memoirs of terrorists, or former terrorists, in order to get to the bottom of what makes them tick. Shapiro writes:
Collectively, they form a valuable window into one of the core security challenges facing the world today. They help clarify what drives individuals to participate, expose groups’ internal conflicts to public scrutiny, and illuminate the political thinking behind their campaigns. The memoirs can occasionally be chilling for their sheer callousness towards human life. But reading them is surprisingly reassuring, because they reveal something else as well: the ordinariness and the incompetence that are common hallmarks of terrorist life.
Check out the full piece for more on the details that Shapiro’s reading revealed, and take a look at the first chapter of The Terrorist’s Dilemma.
