Stanford University Press Blog

Brian De Palma: Visionary Redactor?

Recently in American cinema, there have been of a number of films released that tackle the contentious issue of the war in Iraq. Perhaps the most controversial of these films is Brian De Palma’s Redacted, which unlike its counterparts such as Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, eschews traditional narrative for a multimedia format. Redacted is comprised of several media forms—a U.S. soldier’s video diary, U.S. and foreign news footage, a European documentary—which De Palma uses to reveal how images of war are seen and how they are filtered through a media lens.

The central image of Redacted is the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the subsequent murders of her family members at the hands of U.S. soldiers, a heinous act based on the actual rape and murder of 15-year old Abeer Qasim Hamza  in March 2006. While most critics have dismissed Redacted as heavy-handed "war porn,"  De Palma has still received praise for his use of multimedia formats and was the recipient of the Best Director award at the 2007 Venice Film Festival. Reviewers have also noted the significant nods to Jean-Luc Godard, one of De Palma’s main influences, particularly in light of the self-reflexive nature of the film and its discussion of knowledge, truth and how it is represented through media.

Perhaps most well-known for films such as Carrie and Scarface which have become iconic in American popular culture, Brian De Palma shows depth and boldness with Redacted, directorial or creative missteps aside. Eyal Peretz’s Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses explores that depth, bridging the disciplines of film and philosophy through a careful reading of De Palma’s work. Peretz shows how De Palma’s technique and choice of images create meaning, sparking examinations of trauma, representation, and cinema as technology. 

Peretz discusses Carrie as well as less successful films such as 2002’s Femme Fatale, giving each film a thorough analysis regardless of critical praise, or lack thereof. While Redacted might not catch on in the cinematic world, Peretz might argue that, with a more philosphical approach, it deserves a second glance.

Stanford Book wins National Jesuit Book Award

The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21^st Century by Albert Greco, Clara Rodriguez, and Robert Wharton has been awarded the 2007 National Jesuit Book Award on the basis of its scholarship, its significance to scholars in multiple disciplines, the authority of its interpretation, and its presentation and style.

This book presents the first objective study since the early 1980s to examine the publishing industry writ large. Greco et al. uncover the ways that publishers have coped, and failed to cope, with a public who reads less each year, a glut of used books on the market, and new technologies that have decreased our dependence on the printed page. With even the New York Times struggling to make money, as seen by its recent decisions to reduce its page size and its work force and to end Times Select, this is an important topic for anyone who reads.

Unlike most books about the world of publishing, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing presents conclusions based on statistical data gathered by the authors, rather than relying on anecdotes and individual experiences. For this reason,  “the book is popular among academics but is also intended for people in the book world or entering the book world who need to ‘make sense of it,’” as discussed in an interview on Shelf Awareness.

Does the Iowa Caucus Matter?

It’s not surprising that being first thrusts the Iowa Caucus onto a towering public stage with extraordinary public interest. But is all the attention warranted? Critics have argued that Iowa does not mimic the country’s demographics well. It's a small, mid-western state, which is primarily rural and predominantly white. Allowing Iowa to go first, they argue, skews results, preemptively damaging the chances of candidates who could do well at the national level.

And if you look at Iowa’s track record in making predictions about the presidential race, it does not improve the argument for Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status. Iowa has a reputation for picking losers when it comes to the presidential race (with a few exceptions, Jimmy Carter in 1977 and the current president in 2000 and 2004). In particular, the caucus has been a notoriously unreliable guide to the outcome of the Democratic primary process. New Hampshire is well acknowledged to be better when it comes to the picking winners.

In this primary season the timing of the primaries became a hotly contested issue, with bigger states wanting to hold their primaries before Iowa’s, such as Florida, New Mexico and South Carolina. Yet in a nod to tradition, Iowa remains first. The state will hold its elections on January 3.
So why Iowa?

In an interview, Christopher Hull took up this question with John Miller of the National Review. In his recently released book, Grassroots Rules, Hull compares the impact of Iowa and New Hampshire on the primary nomination and the presidency. He argues that Iowa’s first state status is well deserved because of the unique format of its caucus to convention system. (For those who are not familiar with how it works: Iowa's caucus involves party sympathizers meeting in schools, homes and other locations to debate their choices, and arrive at a consensus to declare support for a candidate. After this is a statewide tally is used to determine the allocation of delegates to each candidate for the party's convention.)

Hull makes the point that the caucus encourages "retail politics" and real debate on the issues. It forces candidates to organize and build grassroots coalitions. In putting a high premium on the grassroots networks, Iowa seems to amplify the impact of the internet. Hull also finds that the caucus limits the impact of negative campaigning and the influence of advertising dollars. Perhaps the most startling conclusion in the book is that increased television spending in Iowa seems to harm candidate’s chances rather than improving them, keeping other factors constant (time spent canvassing in the state, press coverage, campaign contributions, internet spending, etc).

Even if Iowa does not pick winners, in Hull’s view, the state performs an important function by weeding out losers (Steve Forbes in 2000, for instance) and bringing the spotlight on candidates who canvass well, can get their message across, and are therefore electable. Of course, other states could mimic Iowa’s caucus, and according to Hull that would be good for democracy in America. But as long as that is not the case, it appears that Iowa has earned its right to be first.

American higher education is becoming increasingly privatized and other countries are rapidly catching up to American standards. Two books from Stanford University Press, recently showcased in the Chronicle of Higher Education, show that the future the nation’s universities may well depend on lessons learned from the past.

John Aubrey Douglass’s The Conditions of Admission reminds us of public universities’ social contract to provide high quality and high-access higher education. As seen in a review in the History of Education Quarterly, Douglass uses the University of California system to address alarming trends in university admissions policies, both private and public. He finds that the distinction between public institutions, like UC, and private institutions has become increasingly blurred in terms of funding from public sources and the selectivity, or exclusivity, of the admission process. While private universities have had the luxury of celebrating their elitism and promoting tight admissions requirements as indicators of superior quality, public universities have continually struggled to reconcile their mission of high-access with their mission of high quality.

Joseph A. Soares’s book, The Power of Privilege, also covered in the Chronicle’s essay, attacks the elitism of private universities’ admissions policies. Soares targets Yale University in debunking the myth that elite universities pioneered, and still promote, pure meritocratic admissions policies. Soares exposes a long tradition of socially biased measures of merit and a complex relationship between intelligence, education, and social class. 

  Soares suggests having elite colleges directly connect their admissions standards with high school curriculum-based performance measures, such as grades and the ACT, and adopting socioeconomic-sensitive admissions policies. These solutions could be key starting points for achieving a true academic meritocracy.

The fight to control the internet in China

Yahoo agreed yesterday to settle the lawsuit brought against it by a Chinese dissident, Shi Tao, for giving the Chinese government about him that led directly to his imprisonment and torture.  The lawsuit has become a media nightmare for Yahoo, from congressional hearings to a corporate apology to congress to being berated by Congressman Lantos for conducting “inexcusably negligent behavior at best, and deliberately deceptive behavior at worst.”

 

Technological Empowerment by Yongnian Zheng, a new book from Stanford University Press, examines the ways in which the internet has both facilitated and repressed political dissidence in China. Zheng sees the internet as providing not a medium to bring about a rapid revolution, but a forum that is already encouraging gradual progress toward a more open society, as a facilitator both of communication and of international commerce. While these changes gradually develop, however, individuals like Shi Tao will continue to be jailed for sending emails, and the Chinese government will continue to ask American corporations to help it police its citizens.

Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq: Are Reconstruction Projects Worth it?

What is the success (or put it another way, the failure) rate of US-led efforts to export democracy and reconstruction projects in foreign countries? In his new book, After War, Christopher Coyne compares reconstruction projects from West Germany and Japan (after World War II) to more current examples in Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Coyne's analysis shows that, in general, the odds of failure in these operations have been all too high (without taking account of the obvious differences in political motivations across these projects). Of course, this comes as no surprise to even a casual political observer these days. But what is startling, as Coyne's analysis reveals, is how grim the numbers look. The US success rate is at a mere 28% after five years (roughly the length of the current operation in Iraq). The picture improves only slightly to 39 percent after 15 years (presumably long after direct US involvement in the country's affairs has ended). Tyler Cowen cites these numbers in a discussion of the book on the blog, Marginal Revolution. And writing for the Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias points out that these outcomes should give us pause before we undertake armed democratization projects against countries that are labeled "dubiously democratic" by the U.S. state department.

So how does one alter expectations on the ground to make the reconstruction "game" a cooperative one and at an early stage in operations? Coyne invokes an economic argument to make the point that successful social change requires finding and establishing a set of incentives that would make citizens prefer a liberal democratic order over available alternatives. He remarks "€œoccupying regimes can increase their chances of success if they create a new set of opportunities that were not there prior to the occupation. These opportunities might include the ability to vote, open a business, worship in the church of one'€™s choice, or utilize the legal system, among other possibilities." Professor Coyne will be giving a public lecture on this book at the Cato Institute on November 26th.

 

 

 

 

Bay Area papers review Off Mike

Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle remarked:

Krasny agonizes over not having achieved the great dream of his youth—to become 'a respected and valued author.' Now, arguably, he has achieved with nonfiction what he failed to do as a novelist: Off Mike is reminiscent of the enormously entertaining fiction of Herman Wouk and Neil Simon. Even if Krasny is not a bird, his writing soars.

Read the rest of the review here.

The San Jose Mercury News has likewise lauded Krasny’s memoir:

Perhaps the biggest plaudit to give Krasny - who aspired his whole life to be a novelist, but settled for hosting talk radio and television shows, doing live interviews and teaching college - is that this book is well written, and will equally please literati and listeners of commercial radio.

 

San Francisco’s 7x7 magazine interviewed the interviewer, and SF Weekly praises Krasny:

Krasny is to literature through Off Mike what Al Gore is to global warming in An Inconvenient Truth: a trusted communicator of profundities.

 

Islamic Law in Modern Life

Islamic militants in Pakistan have pledged to continue violence until Shari’a—best translated as Islamic religious law—is used to govern the area. Turkey, one of the most secular Muslim countries, is undergoing fierce debates over its secularism. This week’s verdict in the trial of the men who perpetrated the 2004 Madrid train bombing states that they want Shari’a to be implemented “in its most radical, extreme and minority interpretation.”

But what is Shari’a, and how is it viewed and invoked across the Muslim world?

A new book from Stanford University Press, Shari’a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context, seeks to answer these questions. It demonstrates how Shari’a, originally viewed as guidelines for approaching legal, moral, and social questions, came to be seen as a codified set of laws. The reader learns about how Shari’a has been implemented around the Muslim world, especially in post-revolutionary Iran, sees how some components of Shari’a have become prioritized over others, and is introduced to an influential Sunni scholar’s case that Shari’a necessitates democracy.

UPK Debate Heats Up as 2008 Election Nears

With the ongoing debate over the feasibility and benefits of universal preschool and now with the spotlight of the upcoming 2008 presidential election, Bruce Fuller’s Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle over Early Education is more of resource than ever. In the past year Fuller, a professor of Education and Public Policy at University of California at Berkeley, has been called upon by numerous media outlets—ranging from the Washington Post to Education Week to KQED’s Forum—to weigh in on issues such as No Child Left Behind and universal Pre-K (UPK) education. Most recently, his book was recommended as a resource for doctors and parents by the prestigious American Academy of Pediatrics.

Last week Fuller appeared in a New York Times article that focused on the significance of the UPK movement as a campaign issue in 2008. Fuller’s pragmatic look at the costs and effectiveness of a “one system for all” preschool program appears alongside the pro-UPK argument of fellow UC Berkeley Public Policy professor David Kirp. Fuller questions the educational benefits of a mass preschool program, while Kirp believes that UPK education is essential to developing brighter students and closing the education gap.

Just as these two policy experts differ in opinion, the 2008 presidential candidates are also decidedly split on the issue, mainly between the Democratic and Republican parties. Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, and Christopher Dodd, support federal funding for universal pre-K education, while most other Democratic candidates at the very least support increased funding for programs such as Head Start. Noticeably absent from the list of vocal UPK supporters are the Republican candidates, who have traditionally supported a limited role for the federal government when it comes to education, and are choosing to focus more on issues such as school choice and vouchers.

As the Bush administration nears its end, presidential candidates must gear up with plans on handling the state of post-NCLB education, an already contentious issue. With its clear analysis of the pros and cons of the universal preschool movement, Standardized Childhood will be especially invaluable as we come upon the 2008 election and decide the fate of our nation’s educational system.