Stanford University Press Blog

’sup? - March 2014

March is a month of chock-full of big announcements at Stanford University Press. First off, we're welcoming a new face to the press this week—our new history and Jewish Studies editor, Eric Brandt. Secondly, we've got a handful of new titles to spotlight. Joblessness, American foreign policy, and botched executions are what's on the docket this month. As the final order of business: March Madness is in full swing! (We're not talking about basketball—we're talking about books, very cheap books). 

 

Meet Eric Brandt: 

Our new Executive Editor, Eric Brandt, starts this week. Eric, a Polar Vortex survivor, comes to us from Connecticut, windswept and thick-blooded (see his guest post from last week, California Dreamin’). In the past, Eric has worked for HarperCollins and two other UPs—Yale and Columbia—serving in both publicity and editorial capacities. With a Doctorate in Philosophy and Religion, and a long history in non-fiction and humanities editing, we’re excited to see how the history and Jewish Studies lists evolve under his stewardship.

Out this month:

“Mary manages to discuss the problems that unemployed women face in finding work, not only from a practical point of view, but also from a personal standpoint.”
—Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr.

“The Politics of American Foreign Policy is a treasure trove of interesting findings on the deep rooted opinions of Americans and will appeal to a wide audience.”
—Professor Brian C. Rathburn (USC)

“America has no more incisive scholar of capital punishment than Austin Sarat, who always has something fresh to say. Gruesome Spectacles offers readers new and provocative insights.” 
—Scott Turow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March Madness Sale: 5 Timely Titles

The sports fans can keep basketball; this month we’re talking about a different March Madness, one book lovers will appreciate. For the month of March we’ll be running a sale featuring some deep discounts: $10 cloth and $5 paperbacks on over 600 titles.

Throughout the month we'll curate a few choice titles from the sale—staff picks and top bargains—spotlighting them here on the blog (so stay tuned). First up to bat is a list of titles culled for their current timeliness—recent backlist books with of-the-moment relevance.

 

5 Timely Titles from the March Madness Sale

 

Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession
by Haggai Ram
$55.00 cloth, now $10.00

As tensions between Israel and Iran crackle with talks of Iran’s nuclear program, journalists continue to predict a seemingly inevitable confrontation between the two regional rivals; an event which, according to most spectators’ predictions, is invariably instigated by Israel to parry the specter of a nuclear-capable Iran. In Iranophobia, Israeli scholar, Haggai Ram, explores anti-Iranian sentiment amongst Israelis—and how that national phobia plays out domestically and internationally. 

Read an excerpt from the Introduction.

The Difference “Difference” Makes: Women and Leadership
Edited by Deborah L. Rode
$55.00 cloth, now $10.00

In 2013 Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg urged women to “lean in” at the boardroom; today Hillary Clinton is regarded as a shoe-in for the Democrats’ 2016 Presidential ticket. Yet, despite seeming strides toward professional equality, women still constitute a minority in formal leadership, whether in business, law, or politics. In this collection of papers from “heavy-hitters”—women at the top of their careers, describe how they achieved success, what obstacles they overcame along the way, and the difference that “difference” made for them.

The Paradox of a Global USA
Edited by Bruce Mazlish, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode
$50.00 cloth, now $10.00

Drawing from history, political science, economics and cultural studies, The Paradox of A Global USA addresses the awkward tension that arises from the United States’ enthusiastic pursuit of economic globalization, and its simultaneous recalcitrance in deferring to global institutions of authority (for example, opposing the Kyoto Protocol, and invading Iraq without the approval of the UN). 

See the Table of Contents, read the Foreword and the Introduction here.

Other sale titles that contend with globalization include Islam in a Globalizing World ($29.95, now $5.00) & Global California ($60.00, now $10.00)

Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora
by Nico Israel
$52.50, now $10.00

With novels the likes of Americanah, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Namesake topping fiction bestseller lists, it is clear that the transnational writer is fast becoming a new cornerstone of the American literary canon. In Outlandish, Nico Israel delves into the works of three transnational writers who have captured imaginations across the globe—Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, and Salman Rushdie. Through these writers he explores themes of increasing importance in a globalizing and transitory world: race, national belonging, exile, and migration. 

The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State
by Rachel M. Scott
$65.00, now $10.00

In the wake of the Egyptian uprising and the precipitous rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood, Rachel M. Scott’s book offers a fascinating exposition to the rise and nature of Islamism in Egypt. She delves into the minds of Egyptian Islamists—including members of the Muslim Brotherhood—to understand the changing perceptions of Islamists regarding the viability of non-Muslim citizens in an Islamic state. Perhaps most poignantly, The Challenge of Political Islam dismantles the assumption that secularism is a precondition for tolerance.

See the Table of Contents and read the Introduction.

 

March Madness: A Month-Long Spree of Discounted Books

 

Announcing the March Madness Sale: A Month-Long Spree of Discounted Books across a variety of disciplines—Business, Middle East Studies, Literary Criticism and more! 

 

Spring is in the air (at least in California, it is) and it's time for a little seasonal sprucing. In an effort to dust off warehouse shelves, SUP is throwing an overstock sale beginning March 3rd and lasting through the end of the month! Over 600 titles will be available at a deep discounts—$10 hardcovers, and $5 paperbacks. 

On March 3rd this handy link will be populated with a long list of discounted books. Here you can peruse sale titles and filter books by discipline for targeted browsing. Discounted prices will be noted on the right of the book page and these discounts will be automatically applied at checkout—no coupon code necessary.

Happy Spring shopping! 

California Dreamin'

 

Meet Eric Brandt—Executive Editor at Stanford University Press.

 

It snowed another four inches last night in New Haven, and this morning that accumulation was being covered with an unrelenting sleet. As 17th-century British scholar James Howell would have said (echoed later by the esteemed W.C. Fields), “Not fit for man nor beast.” Literally, it seems, as even my faithful dog refused to go out for his morning walk with me. He simply raised one eyelid, rolled over and returned to his puppy-dog dreams. As I waited at the bus stop with two other hopefuls wrapped up like Inuit fishermen, wondering if the buses would brave the icy roads, my thoughts turned to my new job in California.

I was out at Stanford just last week, searching for an apartment in a housing market that can only be described as having lost all touch with reality, much less reason. The highlight of the trip was meeting my future colleagues at their monthly “Cake Day.” A misnomer, as there sadly was no cake in sight, though there was pie, in the form of pizza, and one of the warmest groups of colleagues anyone could hope for. They interrupted their work for food and conversation, to announce their award-winning books and forthcoming improvements to the office, and to introduce me. I would have liked to stay there for hours chatting with each of them about their own challenges and dreams.

And everyone who works in book publishing these days has challenges and dreams. I’ve been in the business for over twenty years and I’ve seen a lot of changes, but perhaps nothing to compare with what has transpired over the last five. The perfect storm of a global recession and the explosive growth of digital books made a business plan that has been in place since the Great Depression suddenly and almost completely unworkable. Sadly, books are now considered a luxury by many Americans, who have stopped spending their money in bookstores. As for digital books, the fear was that book publishing would go the way of the record industry. Publishers panicked—and not without reason.

In this age of “big data,” even librarians can no longer build collections for the next 100 years, but are rather held to account for how often a book has been checked out in the last 12 months. In addition, if they don’t renew their subscriptions for essential digital periodicals and databases, their access to all the previous issues for which they have already paid disappears somewhere in a digital cloud. The purchasing of books is becoming a second priority. Long relied upon by publishers of scholarly books for a baseline of sales, librarians are now strapped.

The good news is that the economy is beginning to thaw and ebook sales have leveled off at about 23% of total book sales. Publishers are beginning to breathe easier, but the lessons they have learned are the value of nimbleness and a targeted market. Know what you do best and be flexible and intrepid in adapting to the quickly changing demands of your readers. A top university that continues to rise in rank and reputation, Stanford University has a track record for such forward thinking and risk-taking, and these qualities are embodied in its press.

The anticipation of moving to Stanford reminds me of the excitement I felt during my first publishing internship. I was finishing my PhD at Columbia and would ride the subway down to a small, independent press in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. Thunder’s Mouth Press began by republishing out-of-print Beat poets, moved on to left-leaning political non-fiction, and enjoyed its first New York Times bestseller while I was there. I moved to Columbia University Press, where I had my first lessons in academic publishing. After two graduate degrees, I knew what scholarly authors most valued, so it was a good fit. From there, I went to Basic Books where I had the great opportunity to work with authors who were world-renowned social scientists, including Stanford’s own Irvin Yalom and Thomas Sowell. Eventually, I moved to HarperCollins’s San Francisco office, where I had the privilege of acquiring and editing world historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Native-American historian Paula Gunn Allen, and the great historian of religion, Huston Smith.

Yale University Press has been a great, great experience for which I will always be grateful. They brought me back into the fold of university presses, and the staff and faculty here have been generous and kind. It’s been a distinct honor to work with authors such as Edmund White, Arthur Krystal, Howard Gardner, and former Stanford President Gerhard Casper. But as marvelous as Yale has been, I could not resist the opportunities a position at Stanford promises. I feel excited and hopeful—rare pleasures in publishing of late.

This winter, the Connecticut weather has been relentlessly encouraging of my departure. As I look out my window at the snow and sleet, I and my dog take quiet comfort in dreaming of our new California home.

Eric Brandt,
February 2014

Eric Brandt is the incoming Executive Editor at Stanford University Press, acquiring in History and Jewish Studies. Before coming to SUP he worked for Yale University Press, HarperCollins, Basic Books, and Columbia University Press.

 

The Dinosaur In Your Pocket

After a series of high profile thefts of sensitive credit card data, Akos Rona-Tas and Alya Guseva, authors of Plastic Money, discuss the vulnerabilities of the American credit card and the barriers to switching to better alternatives.

Following recent massive credit card data theft at several national retailers, everyone, including Congress, is suddenly worried about cyber security. Cyber thieves made off with the credit card data of 40 million customers at Target’s U.S. stores during the pre-holiday shopping season. The company later said the personal information of 70 million people was also taken, including names, contact information and personal buying history dating as far back as 10 years. Neiman Marcus and several national hotel chains have also reportedly been targeted.

In the ensuing squabble, the banks are pointing fingers at retailers for not securing their communication channels. But the retailers, in turn, criticize banks for issuing theft-prone swipe-and-sign credit cards, which can be distinguished by the magnetic stripe on the back. If you’re looking for an example of such a card, look no further than your own wallet—virtually all US-issued credit cards are of the swipe-and-sign variety.




When a purchase is made with a swipe-and-sign card, a signal is sent to the bank that issued the card to authorize the purchase at the point-of-sale. It is during this exchange of information between the bank and the retailer that criminals can intervene.

The U.S. is actually one of the few countries where the magnetic stripe card—a technological dinosaur, on par with the compact audiocassette­—still rules. Cardholders in most European countries, Canada and even Kenya carry chip-and-PIN cards that are more difficult to counterfeit because the chip is more complex than a magnetic stripe, and a PIN is a better protection than a signature. Besides, the chip can contain all the information about the cardholders’ account, including the amount of available credit, and as a result does not need to relay information to and from the bank, thus cutting out the exchange that is typically the site of interception for cyber thieves.

Europe is by and large wedded to the chip, which means that crooks inevitably gravitate to U.S.-issued cards as easier targets. Not only are the American swipe-and-sign cards less secure, but in the coming years they will be increasingly obsolete abroad. Magnetic stripe and chip cards require different card readers that are incompatible with one another, and—at least in Europe—magnetic stripe card readers are an endangered species. Already today, American travelers cannot use U.S.-issued cards to buy RER (train) tickets at a Parisian automated ticket kiosk, or pay for a road toll or a parking fee.

Why have the U.S. banks not yet adopted top-of-the-line chip cards?

The U.S. credit card market is the first and the oldest in the world. This is where credit card technology was born, and it was the magnetic stripe that the first Visas and MasterCards featured. The barrier to switch is path-dependency, the same reason Americans stick to a non-metric system or why the Brits and the Japanese drive on the left side of the road.  

It is generally costly, financially and mentally, to switch to a different technology (for instance, it costs about $2 to a bank to make and distribute a magnetic stripe card, but $15 to $20 to make and distribute a chip card). But the switch is particularly difficult in the case of a credit card market because the change would have to be adopted simultaneously by banks that issue cards, and by retailers who would have to purchase different card reader equipment compatible with chip cards.

Had most American cardholders already switched to chip cards, it would not be a difficult decision for a retailer to buy a chip-compatible card reader—not buying it would be tantamount to turning customers away. Conversely, had many retailers already invested in new chip machines, banks would gladly start issuing chip cards too. Several years ago a few large American banks did, in fact, flirt with the chip, by issuing cards that had both a magnetic stripe and chip technology. But the banks did not reissue them, most likely because there were not many chip-compatible readers in the U.S. and it was not worth the extra cost to the bank to produce the dual-function cards.

It is moving early, when no one or few other actors have already switched to new technologies that is both risky and costly (what if the rest of the market never switches?) As it stands, none of the key actors are sufficiently motivated to make the switch from swipe-and-sign to chip-and-PIN. In the U.S., consumers’ liability is limited by the Electronic Fund Transfer Act of 1978, and losses from fraud are generally absorbed by issuing banks rather than retailers. So it comes at little to no surprise that retailers are not especially interested in investing in more secure technology, but neither are banks, as it turns out! Card issuers can claim a 50 percent tax write-off on losses from fraud, and they can easily pass the rest of the costs incurred from unsecure cards onto consumers and merchants via increased fees and charges.

Since coordinating change between competitive private actors is difficult, there is a call for powerful third parties to step in. The recent security breaches of major U.S. retailers may be the final push that will result in across-the-board regulation (and chip card adoption) of the kind that was recently passed in the EU.  That is, of course, unless our plastic payment methods capitulate altogether to the smart phone-as-mobile payment device first.

Akos Rona-Tas is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, a Research Associate at Met@risk, INRA in Paris, and co-author of Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries.

Alya Guseva is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University and co-author of Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries.

 

The Arab Spring That Wasn't: Bahrain

As Bahrain experienced paroxysms of revolt in the midst of the Arab Spring, Toby Matthiesen was on the ground in the small island kingdom, watching the events of 2011 unfold.

Inspired by the domino-chain of the Arab Spring, in 2011 Bahrainis rallied for political reform. Last week marked the three-year anniversary of the start of what have now become ongoing protests, a benchmark which thousands of Bahrainis observed by taking to the streets. Unlike Libya and Egypt, the political aspirations of Bahrain’s protesters (which run the gamut from moderate reform to complete regime-change) remain largely unsatisfied, and on the eve of February 14, 2014, 29 protesters were arrested in police clashes. Meanwhile dialogue between the ruling family and oppositional groups is stymied by sectarian antipathy between Sunni and Shia—a schism that undergirds much of the country’s instability.

In 2008, three years before the Arab Spring and Bahrain’s dovetailing protests, Toby Matthiesen, professor and author of Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t, visited the small island kingdom, where 60-70% of the population is Shia.

 “As I got into the taxi, I wondered what the discussion with the driver would bring, and if, like many modern travelers, I would see his opinions as representative of the current state of the country, if they would confirm what I had read previously about the region. From the ring the cab driver wore on his right hand, I knew that he was Shia. The ring, which can be made of various gemstones and has references to the oneness of God engraved, was a tradition first established by Shia imams. When I asked him about this, he looked puzzled. His typical foreign customers—Western businessmen, oil workers, and soldiers—generally were not interested in local religious and political affairs. He replied with a lowered voice, ‘Yes I am a Shia, we are the majority in this country, but the ruling family is Sunni. Therefore, we have many problems with them.’ I would learn much more about the history and politics of the Gulf Shia over the next years, but even this first conversation made me wonder whether the political marginalization of the Gulf Shia was not a ticking time bomb.” (Sectarian Gulf, 4)

In a recent article for the Middle East Research and Information Project Matthiesen attributes the unrest that erupted in 2011 to decades of neoliberal economics that produced a have/have-not dichotomy that fell, in large part, along sectarian fault lines, with the Sunni royal family and a handful of prominent business families (also largely Sunni) comprising the haves, and the Shia-majority making up the beleaguered proletariat.

Matthiesen maintains that Bahrain’s more oil-rich neighbors have been able to recycle petroleum profits into high salaries for the civil service sector and “cushion the blows of neoliberalism” for the non-élite. Without a comparable revenue stream, not only was Bahrain not able to quell working class unrest, but the government added metaphoric oil to the fire, by importing cheap labor (mostly Sunni immigrants from poorer South Asian and Arab countries) to undercut the domestic (and predominantly Shia) work force.

When he visited Bahrain again in February 2011—three years after his conversation with the Shia cab driver—a Facebook page calling for a Day of Rage in the capital city had amassed thousands of followers. By the time Matthiesen arrived, large-scale protests, consisting mostly of Shia Bahrainis and a smattering of Sunni opposition groups, were already underway in Manama.

After a few days of mostly peaceful protest, security forces began a sudden battery of violent crackdowns on February 17, 2011, to disperse the dissidents.

“Shocked by the sudden turn of events, I stayed in my hotel room that day, as Bahrain television was urging people to stay away from busy intersections and my friends were not answering their phones. From a jubilant mood, Bahrain had moved to a state of lockdown. The other guests were leaving the hotel, and soon I was almost the only one there. The South-Asian employees at the hotel were scared. When I asked one waiter from Kerala about his opinion, he replied, ‘It’s the Shia, they always make trouble. They don’t like the ruling family, and they want to take our jobs. They don’t like us, they want all foreigners to leave. But the country works because of us; if we were not here nothing would function.’” (Sectarian Gulf, 34)

The Kerala-native waiter’s comments represent a pervasive attitude shared by many Bahraini immigrants (most of whom are Sunnis from poorer South Asian and Arab countries), whose migration and assimilation are frequently expedited by sponsors inside the regime and, as a result, harbored sympathies for the existing government.

In Sectarian Gulf, while Matthiesen distills the cultural perceptions and stereotypes that inform the Shia and Sunni’s schismatic opinions of one another, he develops the case that the original protest movement was significantly less divided by creed than it eventually came to be in the intervening years. But, as Matthiesen reveals in his book, a perfect storm of factors reified the Shia-Sunni divide creating the diplomatic gridlock that has frustrated reform and reconciliation ever since. 

As popular uprisings spread across the Middle East, popular wisdom often held that the Gulf States would remain beyond the fray. In Sectarian Gulf, Toby Matthiesen paints a very different picture, offering the first assessment of the Arab Spring across the Gulf region with first-hand accounts of events in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.