Stanford University Press Blog

11 Indie Booksellers We Love

More than retailers, bookstores are cultural anchors—and these are a few of our favorites.

by THE STANFORD PRESS STAFF

Public domain via Pixabay.

An independent bookstore is more than a retailer; It’s a resource and a refuge for the readerly and the writerly, often doubling as a community space (sometimes tripling as a cat enclave). Local booksellers are cultural anchors, connecting us with information, knowledge, and worlds beyond and it is this cherished institution that we celebrate today, on Independent Bookstore Day. Indies across the country are marking the occasion with great events and special offers and we’re commemorating the day with a list of some of our all-time favorite bookshops.

The Cold World of Deindustrialization

As in times past, poets are responding forcefully to the economic conditions of the day.

by JASPER BERNES

Public domain via Pixabay.

What happened? There was a brief moment, after Trump’s surprise victory, when the people whose faces appear on TV or whose words appear in newspapers were shocked enough that they were willing to consider tough answers to this question. The economy always rears its ugly head in a crisis, and for a few weeks in November and December 2016, you could actually hear some of these pundits acknowledge that the economy of the 2010s had failed almost everyone who wasn’t already affluent and that, as a result, many who could generally be relied upon to vote Democrat, both white and non-white, either stayed home, voted third party, or voted Trump. Putinoia and fake news about fake news eventually crowded these stories off the front page and into more marginal venues, but the question remains for anyone paying attention: What the hell happened? To hear Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin tell it,

a man lost a wager

with the god of good causes,
you know,
stood up for himself
a little too late
(maybe too early)

I can still see
Twenty angles of his jaw
Zig zagging through
The cold world
Of deindustrialization

“art to it,” I will tell my closest friends one day.

I quote the end of this poem, “Wave at the People Walking Upside Down,” not only because I think it’s brilliant, like all of Eisen-Martin’s work, but because I think it answers as well as any text the question briefly entertained by the pundits. The best poets have always responded forcefully to the economic conditions that surround them. In the 1960s, during the height of industrialization, poets were enormously perceptive about the destructiveness of factory and office, workplaces that were, at the time, organized according to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” and Henry Ford’s assembly line in ways nearly everyone who worked in them felt were stultifying, joyless, and soul-killing. Against the brutal repetitions of the assembly line or typing pool, poets and other artists instead imagined forms of laboring together that were participatory, creative, varied, and open-ended. In other words, they imagined that work could be made more like art.

Poets imagined that work could be made more like art.

The Sway of Economists in Public Policy

How have economic experts come to wield so much influence in policy making?

by JOHAN CHRISTENSEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

During the Brexit campaign, the British politician Michael Gove famously stated, “I think people in this country have had enough of experts […] saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” The Trump administration’s indifference to the scientific consensus on climate change and promotion of “alternative facts” is only a more extreme expression of what has become a hallmark of the current wave of populist politics: a profound rejection of experts and facts. Indeed, the populist movements raging in the U.S. and Europe can be understood as a reaction against the power of experts in contemporary policy making—whether the targets are the “technocrats in Brussels,” the scientists in the Environmental Protection Agency, or more vaguely, the élites who make policy decisions.

Since the 1980s, economists have had an outsize influence on the design of public policies in many Western countries.

Some of the fiercest of these attacks have been directed at economists and their political sway. Since the 1980s, economists have had an outsize influence on the design of public policies in many Western countries, pushing neoliberal reforms that have increased the reliance on the market and often produced widening income gaps. The deregulation of financial markets and the privatization of parts of the public sector are only a few examples.

The power of economists in politics takes many forms—from the influence of international economic expert institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, to the role of advisory bodies, such as the Council of Economic Advisers in the U.S. But scholars also point to the symbolic power of economics: Having economic expertise is seen as a guarantee for sound and responsible policies. Every time Italy is in deep financial trouble and needs to reassure investors, who do they call on to lead the government? An economist.

“Wrong Time, Wrong Place”

The clarion call of two men wrongfully detained in Guantanamo.

by DANIEL HARTNETT NORLAND

Guantanamo Camp X-Ray, January 2002. U.S. Army Military Police escort a detainee to his cell in Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Photo by Photographers Mate 1st Class Shane T. McCoy. Public domain.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently described the military prison at Guantanamo as a “very fine place.” I’d like to introduce him to two men who know better: Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir, who spent seven years in Guantanamo before establishing their innocence.

Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Sarajevo when, in October 2001, they were arrested by Bosnian police and accused of participating in a terrorist plot. After a three-month investigation uncovered no evidence, all charges were dropped. However, instead of releasing them, Bosnian officials—acting under the cover of darkness and intense U.S. pressure—handed them over to American soldiers who brought them, blindfolded and shackled, to Guantanamo.

Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Sarajevo when, in October 2001, they were arrested by Bosnian police and accused of participating in a terrorist plot.

By 2002, military intelligence officers realized that the charges against Lakhdar and Mustafa were—as acknowledged in emails that surfaced years later—“bullshit.” Nevertheless, it took six-and-a-half years and a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Boumediene v. Bush, for Lakhdar and Mustafa to even have a chance to appear before a federal judge and argue their innocence. When they finally did, that judge, George W. Bush–appointee Richard Leon, was stunned by the weakness of the government’s case and ordered their release.

Tempting Fate in Northeast Asia

Fear of instability in Northeast Asia mounts as US intentions in the region remain unclear.

by THOMAS FINGAR

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping before their bilateral meeting in Beijing, China, on March 19, 2017. Photo by the U.S. State Department. Public domain.

To depict President Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the functional equivalent of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union would be an exaggeration, but because trade is the primary instrument of regional integration in Northeast Asia, its implications are more worrisome than those of Brexit. While Europe has cultivated a system of shared values and made conscious efforts to overcome historical animosities and reduce the risks of war by building interlocking institutions and fostering a “European” identity, Northeast Asia has eschewed integrating mechanisms and the dilution of national identities. What integration has been achieved is the result of market-based economic decisions and American engagement. Trump’s rejection of TPP and repudiation of Obama’s “rebalance” to Asia undercuts both pillars of regional stability and prosperity.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades. North Korea is adding to its nuclear arsenal. China’s economy is slowing but Beijing’s military buildup and use of economic and political leverage to pressure its neighbors have intensified. South Korea’s president has been impeached and imprisoned; her approach to North Korea and “Comfort Women” agreement to reduce tensions with Japan might be repudiated after the upcoming special election. Japan’s modest adjustments to military policy in response to threats from North Korea and Chinese pressure over disputed islands have unsettled domestic constituencies and enraged Chinese and Korean politicians.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades.

The Not-So-Secular Age

In times of neoliberal precariousness, religion helps master everyday dread and ignominy.

by VIKASH SINGH

An image from Kanwar, India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Photo by Vikash Singh.

In his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy, sociologist, Peter Berger, famously argued that religion would decline and become redundant as the world modernized. Three decades later, equally famously, he did a volte-face and said he had been proven wrong; religion was back with vengeance. Like so many “theorists of modernity,” Berger had made the mistake of thinking of modernization as abstract history instead of concrete social reality, a tack sociologists inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. The philosophes of that era entertained a conceptual understanding of history as a long arc with an inbuilt direction, purpose, or goal (telos) and seen through this lens the decline of religion, as science and technology took over, was regarded as an inevitable, scientific truth—one of sociology’s own “laws” to rival the inviolable rules that govern the hard sciences. Yet in our fascination with science, carried away by the systematic biases of Cartesian objectivity, we have ignored something critical: the concrete conditions of human existence.

We are wont to approach the resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. But one must be careful.

I spent about a year, studying the Kanwar, a religious movement in India, in which millions of people carry water from the river Ganga to local Śiva shrines. This used to be a modest event, involving a few thousand people, but the pilgrimage has grown explosively over the last couple of decades. We are wont to approach such resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. And considering the rapid political ascendancy of the Hindu right over the same period of time, there may be some justification for such a reading. But one must be careful, because that is precisely the trap of abstraction.

As soon as I approached these subjects in their situated material and moral circumstances, I found not “fanatics,” but poor young men and women coming of age in conditions of hopeless uncertainty. These were people trying to find a meaning for their lives and find a path to life, livelihoods, and honor, in a sea of traumatic misfortunes and deprivation. In an exclusive global economy, premised on seducing and ingesting people as consumers while violently rejecting them as workers, religion becomes an alternate field for performed existence as well as social and self-recognition. In conditions where the overwhelming majority of workers are informally employed, and the prospects of a stable livelihood and respectable future are faint if not illusory, the often painful journey repeats, performs, and prepares for a daunting transition to an elusive adulthood. It is an open and freely accessible, yet formidable and valued stage for people to practice and demonstrate their talents, resolve, and moral worth.

Common Sense Science

The search for the cause of yellow fever reveals a lot about the early American republic.

by THOMAS APEL

During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Philadelphia authorities sent carriages around the city to pick up the dead and dying.

In August 1793, pestilence struck Philadelphia, the political capital of the nascent United States and its center of economic, cultural, and scientific activity. Those stricken exhibited high fever, chills, and delirium; in the worst cases, their skin turned yellow, and they emitted the infamous “black vomit,” a foul mixture made of partially digested blood that had hemorrhaged from the organs. Doctors who attended the sick identified the disease as yellow fever, a wasting illness that usually prevailed in tropical environments and struck down as many as half of those afflicted. By November, when the fever finally relented, more than four thousand people had died. Those who survived hoped that it would never return.

With the future of the republic hanging in the balance, thinkers hoping to prevent the disease posed a deceptively simple question: What caused yellow fever?

To the consternation of Americans, yellow fever reappeared annually from 1793-1805. The disease killed thousands in Philadelphia and New York, and hundreds more in Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. Yellow fever was the most pressing natural problem of the era. Besides the deaths, the fever incited frantic mass evacuations. It halted trade in the nation’s busiest commercial centers for months at a time and led to burdensome quarantines and expensive sanitary reform measures. To many, yellow fever also seemed to erode public virtue, the cornerstone of a healthy republic, as fearful citizens turned against each other. For many others, the fever constituted a direct challenge to American exceptionalism, the pervasive belief that Americans were God’s people and were destined to escape the cycles of history that doomed past peoples.

Race and the Cold War

Outspoken iconoclast, Andrew Young, brought a new worldview to the Carter presidency.

by NANCY MITCHELL

Andrew Young and Jimmy Carter meet in the Oval Office.

“A lot of times I think back about mistakes that I made as president, the things I would have done differently,” Jimmy Carter said, sitting opposite me in his modest living room in Atlanta, at the Carter Center. He mentioned the first mistake with a wry smile. “Frivolously, I would say—one more helicopter for the Iran rescue mission. Which is where I generally stop.”

But this time the president went further. After a pause, he added, “The other thing that I did that doesn't cause me to be proud was letting Cy Vance force me in effect to fire Andy Young after he had met with the PLO.... I wish I hadn't done it. But Cy Vance threw down his gauntlet and said, in effect, it was Andy or him.... I wish I had let Cy resign.”

Why was firing Andrew Young one of Jimmy Carter's main regrets?

A leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Young had been appointed by Carter as the US ambassador to the United Nations in 1977. But Young was much more than a diplomat and Carter's point man in Africa. He was the outlier, the iconoclast. In an administration that embodied the traditional view of the Cold War, Young expressed, again and again, an alternate view of reality.

In an administration that embodied the traditional view of the Cold War, Young expressed, again and again, an alternate view of reality.

Young got into hot water almost immediately. In an interview with Dan Rather on January 31, 1977, he said: “There's a sense in which the Cubans bring a certain stability and order—to Angola, for instance.” He went on to explain that, for him, communism was not the worst enemy. Young had been at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s side when the FBI had tried to discredit him as a communist. Young told Rather, “Most colored peoples of the world are not afraid of communism. Maybe that's wrong but communism has never been a threat to me. I have no love for communism. I could never be a communist. I could never support that system of government. But—it's never been a threat. Racism has always been a threat—and that has been the enemy of all of my life.”

Embodying History

How Fred Korematsu’s story reveals history’s evocative and empathetic power.

by KAREN M. INOUYE

The Google doodle from January 30th, 2017 commemorated the 98th birthday of Fred Korematsu.

In 1942 Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, directing over 100,000 people of Japanese descent to leave their homes and relocate to prison camps bounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Most of those affected were American citizens, including Fred Korematsu who became one of a handful of Japanese Americans to challenge the presidential order, not once, but twice. Facing a conviction for evading internment, he first brought his case before the Supreme Court in 1944, which, in a landmark ruling, affirmed the validity of the executive order. That decision rested on the reasoning that protection against espionage outweighed Kormatsu’s individual rights as a citizen and it stood until 1983 when a district court in northern California struck it down.

The case, Korematsu v. United States, turned its namesake into a civil rights hero whose memory was honored earlier this year with a Google Doodle commemorating Korematsu’s birthday, January 30th—a date that in California is now remembered officially as Fred Kormatsu Day. Remarkably, despite this legacy, Karen Korematsu-Haigh first learned the history of her father, Fred Korematsu, not at home but in high school. As she told NPR:

It was a social studies class when my friend Maya got up in front of all of us to give a book report, an oral book report, about the Japanese-American internment. Her book was called “Concentration Camps USA” [by Roger Daniels]. And when she was talking about the Japanese-American internment, it was a subject I had not heard of before. No one spoke about it in my family. And then she went on to say that someone had resisted the exclusion order and resulted in a famous Supreme Court case, Korematsu v. the United States. Well, I sat there and said that’s my name. And the only thing I knew is that Korematsu is a very unusual Japanese name.