Spring is here, and with it come longer daylight hours (more time for reading), warmer temps (for reading outside) and a fresh crop of new titles from Stanford University Press to seize and hold your attention all season long. This spring's list caters to every taste, interest, and sensibility and covers topics from politics to film, world events to business, science to literature. While it's impossible for us to pick our favorites (there are too many, and we like them all!), here is a sampling of our tempting titles to whet your appetite:
Journalists, politicians, scholars and others are marking the one-year anniversary of the "Arab Spring" by re-examining the causes, similarities, and differences between the various protest movements that populated the Middle East in 2011. Josh Stacher's Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria is a critical comparison of the revolutions in Egypt and in Syria in which Stacher argues that the structural underpinnings of autocracies differ very much from one to another, and these differences have everything to do with how regime change will play out within a state.
For the cinéaste (or for anyone who's read Paul Rudnick's latest in the New Yorker), The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses is SF Chronicle film critic and Bay Area Talking Head Mick La Salle's (very opinionated!) tribute to French film, and in particular to the actresses who make it what it is. American audiences are hungry for the kind of intelligent, introspective, and thought-provoking films that French actresses are making throughout their careers. And yes, throughout: from teenagers to nonagenarians.
This election year, Matt Grossman's The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance will be the guide to understanding why some interest groups are far better than others in gaining access to politicians and getting what they want. As Publishers Weekly stated in their review, "constituencies that are more engaged with public affairs and their communities, he contends, make their voices heard better through organized representation." In other words, says PW, "Grossmann’s clear-eyed analysis of who gets a seat at the table suggests that democracy’s faults lie not in our lobbyists but in ourselves."
The marketplace is awash in titles that suggest "how to" start a business: entrepreneurship has been the topic in boardrooms and classrooms across the country. But say you've started your own business, and you've made it through that first hurdle. You are a success! Erm...now what? Professor of Business Administration and Batten Executive-in Residence at the Darden Graduate School of Business has the answers. Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Entrepreneurial Business is for those who want their business to thrive beyond the start-up phase. He identifies the top ten growth challenges to new businesses and, based on extensive research on more than fifty companies, and offering the lived experiences of eleven entrepreneurs, shows how to overcome them
Be sure to keep checking our website, blog, Twitter feed (@Stanfordpress) and Face Book Page for more updates as the season rolls on!
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