Eavesdropping is a vital part of human communication, says John Locke, professor of linguistics at Lehman College and language sciences at the Graduate Center. “It’s essential,” Locke says, it’s one of the ways humans gather needed information. “You can tell people not to — but they’ll do it anyway.” In his new book, “Eavesdropping: An Intimate History,” Locke draws on documentation of the practice from centuries ago right up to today’s world of Facebook and YouTube. But Locke does have some fears about the ocean of personal postings in cyberspace. “I worry about those who could be seriously damaged in the future. All of us need to be on guard if we donate information about ourselves in the form of words or visual images that the recipient will respect that material.”
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Since 1980, when Phase 1 drug tests were banned in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry has relied on medical volunteers to participate in safety trials of new drugs. In his recently published book, “The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects,” Robert Abadie, an anthropologist and a visiting scholar in the health sciences program at the Graduate Center, examines this subculture of paid “volunteers.” “Most of these guys have 50 to 100 trials over the course of five to ten years,” says Abadie, who spent 18 months living among some of them in youth hostels and group houses in Philadelphia. “My worry is that 20 to 30 years from now these drugs, which are toxic, may interact with each other to create serious health problems.”
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Intelligent design, global warming, and UFOs–what distinguishes science from pseudoscience? Massimo Pigliucci, chair of the philosophy department at Lehman College, tackles that question and raises some more in his recently published book, “Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk.” There’s no problem “if you open your horoscope and just read it for fun,” explains Pigliucci, “on the other hand, if you plan your financial investments based on what your horoscope tells you, you’re likely to run into trouble.” In an interview, Pigliucci, who previously taught evolutionary biology at SUNY at Stony Brook, also discusses the difference between “hard” sciences, like physics and chemistry, and “soft,” including sociology and anthropology, and how they both shape our world.
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“I’m bursting with joy and pride — and a certain amount of terror, to be honest,” said Colum McCann on winning the 2009 National Book Award for fiction, now in its 60th year. “But one must go on to the next book, and that, sometimes, is the more difficult.” McCann’s bold novel, “Let the Great World Spin,” which uses Philippe Petit’s famous high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 as a prism to examine the story’s main characters, took home the top prize on Nov. 18. Author of two short-story collections and five previous novels including bestsellers “Dancer” and “Zoli,” McCann has taught in Hunter College’s MFA Creative Writing program for nearly five years. At his office, he discussed his teaching approach and how his love for American literature began early in Ireland. “My father was a literary editor for a newspaper in Dublin and he would come home with books by Steinbeck and Faulkner. I remember holding them in my hands.”
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Like others who felt compelled to make something good out of so much evil, Paul Moses turned to religious history after 9/11 as he struggled to make sense of the senseless. As a reporter for Newsday, Moses wrote the main story on that horrific day. Not long after, he read a story about Saint Francis of Assisi that would become the kernel of a book. Eight years later, “The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and St. Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace,” captures a meeting between St. Francis, who crossed enemy lines to gain an audience with Malik al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt, in 1219. “If, in the middle of a Crusade, Francis and the sultan can speak to each other with great respect, than we, today, should be able to sit down and talk to each other, as Christians and Muslims,” said Moses, now a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College. In a discussion about his book, Prof. Moses draws lessons from the past and sees a future where dialogue can triumph over war.
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For his new book “Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War,” Jonathan Pieslak, an associate professor of music at City College, interviewed soldiers who have served in Iraq to learn about the roles music they compose, write, and listen to, play in the war and in American military culture. “Some soldiers speak about how music puts them in a predatory mindset,” said Prof. Pieslak, who analyzed some of the troops’ original lyrics and explored the impact of certain musical genres, including heavy metal and rap, in contemporary military recruiting campaigns and in combat.
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If Mark Twain was the Abraham Lincoln of American literature, then Lincoln was the Twain of American politics. So says Fred Kaplan, distinguished professor emeritus of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, who has written biographies on both men. His new book, “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer,” has been generating attention, in this bicentennial year of Lincoln’s birth. Just months before his inauguration, President Obama was photographed by the Associated Press holding a copy of the book. Prof. Kaplan discusses how he seized an unprecedented opportunity to “look into the origin and development of Lincoln’s genius with language, especially since I saw that no one else had done that before.”
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For many Americans, the years between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars are a desert, little known, rarely visited. But David S. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center, lifts the veil with his book “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.” Focusing on 1815 to 1848, the book reveals the United States to be a growing powerhouse, with an incredible array of fascinating individuals, including politicians (chief among them Andrew Jackson); writers (such as Melville and Thoreau); artists, scientists and wacky personalities pushing various fads. “I tried to humanize the period in ways which it hadn’t been humanized, ” says Prof. Reynolds. “I go into the literature, the music, the theater — I wanted to fill out the entire culture.”
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Since Sept. 11, 2001, the reports of hate crimes and harassment in Arab-American communities has exploded, says Moustafa Bayoumi, associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, and, youth, in particular, are being affected. “They are the ones in the eye of the storm today,” he says. “The ones that people are most ready to judge because of their faith or because of their ethnic background.” In his new book, “How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” Prof. Bayoumi chronicles the lives of seven, young men and women from Brooklyn and the realities of being Arab and Muslim in the post-9/11 world.
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Set in the middle of the Jazz Age, the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case had all the elements of a true-crime thriller. In his acclaimed book, “For The Thrill Of It: Leopold, Loeb and the Murder that Shocked Chicago,” Simon Baatz sheds new light on the brutal murder of a 14-year-old boy by two privileged and brilliant young men. Baatz, an associate professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, breathes life back into the personalities in the case, including legendary defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. “It was really my background in the history of science that persuaded me that this was a book that needed to be written,” says Baatz, who has a Ph.D. in history of medicine from the University of Pennsylvania. “I knew that it would be very complicated and intricate, as well as fascinating. It turned out to be both.”
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