[ The reviewer highlights some of the noteworthy (and readable)
academic press books coming out in the first half of 2021.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FOLLOWING THE TRACES: A ROUNDUP OF FORTHCOMING UNIVERSITY RELEASES  
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Scott McLemee
March 12, 2021
Inside Higher Ed
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_ The reviewer highlights some of the noteworthy (and readable)
academic press books coming out in the first half of 2021. _

Valery/Brozhinksy/istock // Inside Higher Ed,

 

LAST MONTH I WENT through a fairly unpleasant learning experience
when a data-storage catastrophe overtook the digital archive I had
accumulated over the past seven years. A technician was able to
recover a lot, but about a quarter of it (100 gigabytes) was wiped out
entirely. That included all the material I’d compiled on books
coming out in 2021.

Here’s the lesson: while “back everything up” is sound advice,
it is not sufficient. More to the point, albeit less memorable, would
be something like “back everything up in two distinct and
unconnected locations, such as an external drive and a cloud
service.” Or don’t, and risk pulling your hair out.

Having to recreate a pool of information on spring and summer
university-press titles was not the worst chore in the world to face,
of course, even when the effort is totally redundant. The second time
through, the occasional cluster of books caught my attention that I
hadn’t noticed in the fall. Here are listings of a few of them.

AS A SPECIES, WE show no natural immunity to pernicious nonsense --
and little sign of developing one. Seema Yasmin’s _Viral BS:
Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them_ (Johns Hopkins University
Press [[link removed]], January) has a
lot of ground to cover: acknowledging that the record of unethical
medical experiments and medical mistakes hasn’t made it any easier
to debunk "a host of celebrities spewing anti-science beliefs," Yasmin
"dissects some of the most widely circulating medical myths and
pseudoscience." (All quoted material in this column is taken from
publishers’ descriptions.) The book "even comes with Dr. Yasmin’s
handy pull-out-and-keep Bullshit Detection Kit."

The challenge, of course, is getting people to use it. Arriving in
translation from German, Zoran Terzic’s _Idiocracy: Thinking and
Acting in the Age of the Idiot _(Diaphanes, distributed
by University of Chicago Press
[[link removed]],
May) identifies "a new quality of idiocy today" that derives, not from
mere ignorance, but from a deliberate refusal to understand things.
The new-model idiot exhibits "the systematic incompetence that is
impacting every crevice of political and media life," thanks to which
"the absurd is redefining the image of reality." (Memo to marketing:
the paperback edition ought to have a picture of the QAnon shaman on
the cover.)

Not quite a companion volume, _Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to
Know_ (MIT Press
[[link removed]], March), edited
by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel, is an interdisciplinary
collection of papers exploring “the conscious choice not to seek
information.” This is not necessarily a bad choice: one of the
examples considered is blind orchestral auditions. “When is
[deliberate ignorance] a virtue, when is it a vice, and what can be
learned from formally modeling the underlying motives?” The
normative grounds and institutional protocols for enabling or
preventing deliberate ignorance are taken up by a roster of
“psychologists, economists, historians, computer scientists,
sociologists, philosophers, and legal scholars.” So much to know
about choosing not to!

A COUPLE OF NEW books sound like glosses on the maxim in the title of
one of W. C. Fields’s later films, _Never Give a Sucker an Even
Break_. In _Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth
Century_ (LSU Press
[[link removed]], April),
editors Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker bring together papers on the
social and economic history of Dixie’s underbelly: "the shady and
unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers,
thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get
ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy,"
ante- and postbellum.

Meanwhile, "a protean assortment of low-life characters" operated
south of the border, including those whose careers William B. Taylor
chronicles in _Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two
Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico_ (University of California Press
[[link removed]],
February). "Cut loose from their ancestral communities by wars,
natural disasters, and the great systemic changes" of the global
economy, an influx of shady operators into the Spanish colony of
Mexico "prompted a stream of decrees and administrative measures that
treated them as nameless threats to good order and public morals."
Clearly, Europe and America were not sending Mexico their finest
people.

The figures whose careers Taylor reconstructs passed themselves off as
priests but were also playing a familiar role from Spanish
literature: the _picaro_
[[link removed]]. The book examines
"the social histories and inner lives of two individuals at the
margins of an unfinished colonial order that was coming apart even as
it was coming together."

Closer to the narratives of today’s multimedia genre of true crime
is Eileen Welsome’s _Cold War Secrets: A Vanished Professor, a
Suspected Killer, and Hoover’s FBI _(Kent State University Press
[[link removed]],
May). The disappearing academic in question, Thomas Riha, is described
as “a native of Prague … a popular teacher at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and a handsome man, with thick, graying hair and a
wry smile” -- that is, at least until the mid-March of 1969. "After
his disappearance," it seems, "the FBI and the CIA told local law
enforcement and university officials that Riha was alive and well and
had left Boulder to get away from his wife."

Not so, probably. "When the local district attorney in Colorado
threatened to subpoena intelligence officials to find out who was
behind the 'alive and well' rumors, the CIA’s representative in
Denver claimed the information originated with the FBI," which
infuriated J. Edgar Hoover enough that he "actually cut off relations
with the CIA." The author names a suspect in what she argues was the
professor's murder.

Nowadays there’s a tendency to think of J. Edgar himself as a
suspect, or at least up to no good, on a great many fronts.
Christopher M. Elias’s _Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy,
Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation_ (University of Chicago
Press
[[link removed]],
May) "illustrates how these three men solidified their power through
the skillful use of deliberately misleading techniques like
insinuation, hyperbole and photographic manipulation." Their success
came in part from the American public of their day being "particularly
primed to accept these coded threats" through consumption of gossip
magazines. This may be a case of scholarship catching up with James
Ellroy, whose novel _American Tabloid_ pursued that thesis with all
due imaginative embellishment.

FINALLY, AS IF TO return to the trauma mentioned at the top of this
column, there’s Jessica Wynne’s _Do Not Erase_ (Princeton
University Press
[[link removed]],
June). The premise is somehow both obvious and inspired: it collects
more than 100 photographs of mathematicians’ chalkboards from around
the world, “accompanied by essays from each mathematician,
reflecting on their work and processes.”

To the layperson’s eye, each chalkboard
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a wall of hieroglyphics, awesome and inscrutable -- while also
exhibiting the diversity of aesthetics that go with pursuing different
kinds of mathematical creativity. The book also documents loyalty to
an old medium: “While other fields have replaced chalkboards with
whiteboards and digital presentations, mathematicians remain loyal to
chalk for puzzling out their ideas and communicating their
research.”

Of course, such loyalty also runs the risk of someone carelessly
wiping away an entire, hard-won line of thought, hence the book’s
title, chalked up against disaster. Nowadays, a mathematician might
also want to take a cellphone photo, just to be on the safe side --
and then back it up, by any and every means necessary.

_[Essayist  Scott McLemee is the INTELLECTUAL AFFAIRS columnist for
Inside Higher Ed. In 2008, he began a three-year term on the board of
directors of the National Book Critics Circle. From 1995 until 2001,
he was contributing editor for Lingua Franca. Between 2001 and 2005,
he covered scholarship in the humanities as senior writer at The
Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2005, he helped start the online
news journal Inside Higher Ed, where he serves as Essayist at Large,
writing a weekly column called Intellectual Affairs. His reviews,
essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Newsday, Bookforum, The
Common Review, and numerous other publications. In 2004, he received
the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the
National Book Critics Circle. He has given papers or been an invited
speaker at meetings of the American Political Science Association, the
Cultural Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and the
Organization of American Historians._

_Read more by SCOTT MCLEMEE  HERE
[[link removed]]. For information
on Inside Higher Ed, go HERE [[link removed]].]_

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