’sup? @ SUP

Out this month: 

Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century | Steven Cassedy

Connected  focuses on the decades from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth to bring to life the dramatic transformation in self-conception that Americans underwent. Cassedy bridges research across myriad disciplines to show us how the networks in which we live today have been a century in the making.

This blog post provides a sprightly excerpt from Connected on the politics of facial hair at the turn of the century.

Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918-1989 | Edited by Jonathan Haslam and Karina Urbach

These essays offer an array of insight into intelligence communities across countries and across time at a moment when questions of secret intelligence—Edward Snowden and the NSA—loom large in the public's mind. A keen interdisciplinary eye focused on these developments leaves us with a far more complete understanding of secret intelligence in Europe than we've had before.

The Parable and Its Lesson | A Novella by S.Y. Agnon, translated by James S. Diamond 

Nobel Prize winner in Literature, S.Y. Agnon's The Parable and Its Lesson is one of the major stories from his corpus, available for the first time in English. Set shortly after the massacre of hundreds of Jewish communities in Ukraine in 1648, this novella tells the tale of a rabbi and his young assistant as they journey into the Netherworld. 

 More on S.Y. Agnon and his work

Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence | Patricia A. Weitsman

"Most modern wars are fought by coalitions, but we know remarkably little about the structures that have been put in place. By highlighting the tension between legitimacy and efficiency, examining several cases, developing a theory of realist institutionalism, and analyzing the implications for the American foreign policy, Weitsman has made a major contribution."

—Robert Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics, Columbia University

Chinese Money in Global Context: Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and  2012 | Niv Horesh

Niv Horesh explores the trajectory of Chinese currency from the birth of coinage to the current global financial crisis.  Expertly navigating the history of Chinese finance through three millenia, Horesh provides insight into the development of Chinese currency, the relationship between the West's ascendancy and its mineral riches, and speculations on the future outcomes of China's global influence. 

Also new: 

• Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject | Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
• Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry | Dorothy J. Wang
• Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women’s Work and Households in Global Production | Edited by Wilma A. Dunaway
• Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China | Michelle T. King

In Other News: 

Event: A Panel on Personalities in Post-war Publishing
Wednesday, December 11th at Columbia University, New York, NY, 6 pm

Loren Glass, author of Counterculture Colophon, the publishing house biography of the avant-garde incubator, Grove Press, will hold a discussion with authors Boris Kachka (Hothouse) and Jay Gertzman (Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist) on personalities in post-war publishing. Tune into the SUP blog next week for a teaser from the three authors. 

Award: Anonymous Agencies, Backstreet Businesses and Covert Collectives

SUP extends a heartfelt congratulations to Craig Scott for winning the National Communication Association's 2013 Top Book Award in Organizational Communication. Scott's book coins a new typology for hidden organizations: transparent, shaded, shadowed and dark, delving into groups such as the KKK, the Church of Scientology, Alcoholics Anonymous and men's bathhouses.  

"Scott richly interrogates what have become taken-for-granted assumptions in organizational communication by considering 'hidden organizations.' In considering work on anonymity and putting it in conversation with work on organizational identity, identification processes, transparency, as well as with organizing phenomena that are quite 'real' in the 21st century (e.g.,networked terrorist organizations), Scott rightly encourages us to reconsider how we think about organizations and organizing forms. This is a book that demands that the reader pause and rethink previously held assumptions.”

Sneak Peek: The Spring 2014 Catalog has arrived . . .