ForeWord's Big Ten Picks

A doubtful economy and dismal job market kept many Americans at home in 2003 – and may well do so in 2004. However, the university presses’ magnificently varied lists will keep boredom at bay. Books about travel, abroad and at home, are plentiful, as well as novels set abroad or by foreign writers (a field in which Northwestern University and the University of Nebraska are particularly strong ). MIT’s intellectually challenging list has as usual several very accessible, mind-expanding titles. The University of Alaska (listed here for the first time) has a fine Russians-in-America list. Boydell and Brewer, as distributors, continue to harvest the farther intellectual reaches: books they market range from a newly translated Berlioz musical miscellany to an erudite and elegant treatment of Mechtild of Magdeburg, a polymathic thirteenth-century visionary-mystic. In new endeavors, university presses are increasingly publishing debut novels and detective fiction (not yet treated here).
The mentions that follow (and the accompanying sidebar, Not To Be Missed) aims to round up some of the best broad-interest books. For more specialized interests, university-press websites offer salvation.

NO. 1 HISTORY Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization, Dan Burton and David Grandy, Indiana University Press, 424 pages, 50 B&W illustrations, softcover $21.95, 0-253-21656-7

In this no-nonsense, heavily illustrated and fully referenced volume, the authors state that “Scholars increasingly see the occult as a ‘third current,’ no less important to the shaping of Western civilization than Greek rationalism or Judeo-Christianity.” They proceed chronologically from the Egyptian obsession with the world’s daily re-creation to contemporary concern abut Western physics’ limiting concept of a “wholly mechanical world,” suggesting greater acceptance of the “Eastern belief in a sentient, holistic Universe.” Explorations en route include numerology, the cabala, alchemy, astrology, nineteenth-century pseudo-science; Nazism and German ancestral memory, UFOs and alien abduction, psi power, and more.
For many readers, the richly detailed chapter on witchcraft from Greco-Roman times to the late seventeenth century will prove a revelation. The push-pull between superstition and science, political prosecutions and public outcry, and private goals and social good was of great complexity. Here, as throughout this engrossing book, the authors provide a detailed analysis, enriching the historical record by noting pertinent art, artifacts, literature, and folklore.
What totally removes the book from any hint of ‘pop-cult occult’ promotion is the authors’ concern with presenting and explaining “motivating assumptions.” They introduce the perceived phenomena, the hopes and fears that led to the adoption and sway of different occult beliefs over the centuries. These phenomena are presented and analyzed in the full context of the social and scientific climate of their time.

Also recommended: The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature, by Brian J. Frost (University of Wisconsin Press). Never leave for the forest without it!

NO. 2 SURVIVAL Lifeboat: A History of Courage, Cravenness, and Survival at Sea John Stilgoe, University of Virginia Press, 317 pages, 21 B&W illustrations, hardcover $29.95, 0-8139-2221-6

The author takes his readers (whether couch-anchored or ready to strain at the oar) on a magnificent voyage of discovery. Eschewing a straight-line history of this vital craft, he nonetheless weaves in a concise account. Primarily Stilgoe presents a well-structured, incident-filled account of how suddenly disaster can strike a vessel (“Ship overdue,” as Lloyds of London soothingly terms it), describing what long-distance small-boat survival voyages demand, and who are the heroes and villains in great sagas of disaster at sea.
Cruise-liner vacationers should note every old salt’s belief: apprenticeship under sail is the only preparation for the sea’s demanding ways. Driving large steel boxes doesn’t do it; moreover, Morse code transmitters hold up in disaster conditions while satellite navigation devices don’t: “They are the first thing to go” states the Canadian Coast Guard.
Stilgoe presents a virtual encyclopedia of incidents and actors skillfully integrated into the hows, whys, and responsibilities of disaster, rescue, or loss. Stirring tales crowd the pages; writers from Conrad, R. L. Stevenson, Nordhoff and Hall, Tomlinson, and Villiers through to the moderns are appositely quoted, while Stilgoe’s deft introduction of forgotten classics—some feeding the morbid reader’s taste for cannibalism (passengers are eaten first)—is of lasting value. Previously neglected historical and geographical information abounds; arcana such as U-boat etiquette for ship-sinking and survivor-treatment are also presented. (See the full review of this book on page 65.)

Also recommended: An abundance of choices found listed in Stilgoe’s extensive bibliography.

NO. 3 EXPLORATION The First Russian Voyage Around the World: The Journal of Hermann Ludwig von L—wenstern, 1803-1806. Victoria Joan Moessner, translator, University of Alaska Press, 500 pages, 63 illustrations, 25 color plates, hardcover $35.95, 1-889963-45-3

This extensive, intelligent, and fortunately uncensored account of the first Russian circumnavigation is a rare delight. His journal, finely translated and annotated by Moessner, is an encyclopedia of shipboard life and onshore encounters. The writer (a young cartographer of German-Estonian background) possessed true ethnographic curiosity. Slavery in Brazil, Polynesian taboos, Kamchatkan survival techniques, Japanese protocol and intractability, Chinese amiability and deceit—and every human practice from prayer to prostitution engaged his attention, resulting in richly detailed narratives and telling drawings—of which sixty-three revealing examples are reproduced. They range from precise renderings of tools and equipment to rapid sketches of places and people, capturing interactions with obstreperous on-shore officials and cantankerous on-board colleagues.
The Nadezhda’s voyage, in addition to conveying Russia’s ambassador to Japan, was intended to heighten Russia’s visibility in far eastern waters and to promote trade with Russia’s Pacific and North American possessions, and on these matters L—wenstern is an acute commentator.
“Everyone for himself and God for all of us!” L—wenstern quotes as a needed exhortation in the age of sail: storms, shipwreck, and starvation threatened—and he incisively portrays the effects of constant challenge on men and their leaders.

Also recommended: The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook’s Remarkable Encounters in the South Seas by Ann Salmond (Yale University Press), an absorbing, mind-opening study of outsiders’ often tragic impact on isolated societies.

NO. 4 CULTURE The Musical Madhouse (Les Grotesques de la Musique) Hector Berlioz, Alastair Bruce, translator, University of Rochester Press (distributed by Boydell and Brewer, Inc.), 200 pages, 20 B&W illustrations $70.00, 1-58046-132-8

As with the music, so with the writings! In both Berlioz was a true original, bursting with energy and grand romantic ideas, all reflecting an unmistakable personal style. Readers of Berlioz’s dramatic Memoirs marvel at the man, his triumphs and setbacks, and not least his concertizing journeys across Europe. Enthusiasts hold his Evenings with the Orchestra in high regard; they will be delighted to have The Musical Madhouse, ably and elegantly translated and annotated by Alastair Bruce. Whether analyzing a “programme of grotesque music” or “national fatuities” or the effects of being kissed by Rossini, Berlioz enchants the reader.
Though technically a brilliant critic (as his ten-year stint at the Journal des Dbats confirms), Berlioz shone even more as the ad-hoc commentator. Antic imagination, coruscating wit, and instant recognition of the absurd or pompous drove his pen to every sort of send-up and put down—never divorced from acute perception, always laced with exuberant humor. Nothing in the musical world of his day escaped his ear. His writing, as Bruce notes, was “much more extensive than Schumann’s, much more readable than Wagner’s, and much funnier than both.” Given this fact, it is hard to believe, as Berlioz claimed, that when required to write, he stared at his brace of pistols before tearing his hair “like a schoolboy who cannot do his homework.”

Also recommended: Berlioz, David Cairns (University of California) and The Memoirs of Berlioz and Evenings at the Orchestra (out of print but findable).

NO. 5 ACHIEVEMENT Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America Linda Lawrence Hunt, University of Idaho Press, 300 pages, 40 B&W photographs, softcover $16.95, 0-89301-262-9

Thanks to the author’s seventeen years of dogged research, a heroic “forgotten first” and a new women’s history classic has emerged. In 1893, to save her debt-burdened family farm, Helga Estby, of Washington State, took up a $10,000 challenge offered by an unknown benefactor. With $5 only, she was to walk and work her way from Spokane to New York; wear the new “short” bicycling skirt (three inches above the ankle) from Salt Lake City onward; and visit state capitals—all within seven months.
Helga and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Clara, faced instant condemnation—she abandoned her family, disgraced feminine ideals, encouraged assault, etc. The great trek was shot through with incident, from meeting with President-elect McKinley to snowstorms, rattlesnakes, and aggressive tramps. In recounting the trek (and events pre- and post-) Hunt also provides a valuable picture of American life and attitudes in the 1890s.
Arriving in New York two days late, Helga was denied her reward and even rail fare home. Meanwhile, two of her children had died of diphtheria; later on, the farm was repossessed. Helga was ostracized and her achievement made a non-topic. Appalled by her firsthand awareness of the restraints women suffered throughout America, Helga became a suffragist, only to meet with renewed hostility.
This is a to-keep book, the more so since the University of Idaho Press and designer A. E. Grey have blessed it with excellent design, typography, and illustration.

Also recommended: The Devil May Care: Fifty Intrepid Americans and Their Quest for the Unknown, edited by Tony Horwitz (Oxford University Press). Readers will wonder why so many are so little known.

NO. 6 PHOTOGRAPHY The New World’s Old World: Photographic Views of Ancient America May Castleberry, editor, 268 pages, 80 photographs, University of New Mexico Press, hardcover $47.50, 0-8263-2971-3

Whether through visits or images, the great archaeological sites of Europe and the Near East—Stonehenge, the Colosseum, Pompeii, Delphi, and the Pyramids—are known to virtually all Americans. Their images are universal constants, endlessly reproduced. In the New World, despite the work of pioneer artist-archaeologists such as Catherwood and photographers such as Dsir Charney, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and their confreres, major sites have seldom become so individually distinct or prominent in visual memory or historical recall. Machu Picchu and some bigger complexes such as Palenque are certainly exceptions to the general rule—but such iconic sites are relatively few.
This handsome, haunting volume, ably edited by Castleberry, engages the reader on many levels. It is no simple “Fifty Must-see Sites.” It presents an array of evocative photographs of Southwestern USA, Mesoamerican, and Andean South American sites taken by the aforementioned pioneers; by such moderns as Josef Albers, MartÚn Chambi, Edward Weston, and others; and by the contemporary photographers Marilyn Bridges, Javier Hinojosa and Edward Ranney. Their work is a moving meditation upon time, place, and change; upon durability and fragility. It powerfully confirms critic Andreas Huyssencos’ claim: “The past is not there simply in memory, it must be articulated to become memory.”

Also recommended: The Mediterranean in History, edited by David Abulafia (Getty Publications), the latest lavishly illustrated volume in the Getty Museum’s historical series; earlier volumes (Rome, Cyprus, etc.) are equally impressive.

NO. 7 VENTURING Travel in the Middle Ages Jean Verdon, George Holoch, translator, University of Notre Dame Press, 348 pages, 3 woodcuts, softcover $25.00, 0-268-04223-3

Verdon’s engrossing account spans the millennium 400–1400, focusing mainly on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Though Europe is the primary location, Asia, China and India as experienced by Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta (a fine commentator on Islam and its traditions) receive interesting coverage. Also well represented is the Middle East and points beyond, brilliantly written up by Sir John Mandeville after a journey he almost certainly did not take.
Travel in the Middle Ages and the succeeding centuries was fraught with anxiety: wretched roads, dangerous forests, miserable accommodations, pirates, robbers, and hunger were the common experience. Going astray was a real threat: hence Dante’s “I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.” Nonetheless, princes, prelates, merchants, pilgrims, and others had to make journeys. Through Verdon’s extensive and skillful use of historic accounts (including those of Gallo-Romans, Chaucer, Crusaders, Columbus, and articulate lesser-knowns) the reader learns how travellers coped. The sense of wonder at the new, the contrasting styles of daily life, the human differences, provide a constant throughout the stories. No less than today, the traveler, on returning, wanted to be the person who had seen more and knew more.
The book’s last section deals with too-good-to-be-true reports of Asia and the Indies, with visionary destinations and imagined perils, particularly threatening to medieval travelers, in whose minds heaven and hell were real places.

Also recommended: Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey Through the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press), which illuminates the Hellenophile emperor, the age, and the empire.

NO. 8 PERSONAL REPORT Cleopatra’s Wedding Present: Travels Through Syria Robert Tewdwr Moss, University of Wisconsin Press, 248 pages, 14 B&W photographs, hardcover $24.95, 0-299-19290-3

Syria as a place, a state of mind, and a mix of nostalgia and despair is beautifully captured in this book, published shortly after the author was casually murdered in London. Moss’s route within Syria was arbitrary, his interests idiosyncratic, his friends odd (sometimes mercenary), and his actions by turns courageous or slightly louche.
Nothing of human interest escaped Moss’s refined eye. Whether reporting on Syria’s golden Greco-Roman past compared to its stagnant present, on the ever-present Mukhabarat (secret police), or on the intricate web of negotiable relationships that get Syrians and resident foreigners through their days and nights, he is a master of the telling detail. Brilliant vignettes abound; those of isolated expatriates, returnees, and a named Noisy American are memorable.
Human history, tragic or escapist, is ever present: Moss provides a heart-wrenching account of the fate of Armenians harried out of Turkey and, in stark contrast, on happier pages, describes socially progressive Englishwomen who found freedom, both personal and sexual, in Syria and adjoining countries. Hiding little, he observes his own tangled emotions driving him toward dangerous relationships.
Those who know Colin Thubron’s engaging Mirror to Damascus (1967) will welcome this resonant addition to the modest Syrian canon, discovering a writer as distinctive as Robert Byron, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Bruce Chatwin.

Also recommended: A Pilgrimage to Angkor, by Pierre Loti, translated by W. P. Baines (Silkworm Books/University of Washington Press). A welcome first translation of a pioneering journey.

NO. 9 POETRY PLUS The Hornbooks of Rita K Robert Kroetsch, University of Alberta Press, 108 pages, 8 B&W drawings, softcover $16.95, 0-88864-372-1

He, the drear and monkey slave of time;
She, eternal spinner of sublime . . . . .

Kroetsch (a recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Literature), has created a small gem of a book. ‘Excavating’ a mass of unfinished work left by a writer who disappeared in mid-life is a time-honored device, but Kroetsch’s interactive reconstruction of Rita’s abandoned writings—whether playful, cautionary, obscure or revealing—is dazzlingly new and vibrant.
Much-traveled Rita, poet, observer, commentator, and explorer of the dynamics of life and art, lit up the mind and warmed the bed of Raymond, her older, settled, and grateful lover. Drawing upon her papers (“half technician to her sometimes obscured intention, half lover of the plain truth”) he creates a running exchange between the two, built upon threads and shards of her literary leavings. By turns reportage, recapture, rumination, imagination; by turns deeply searching, lightly whimsical, or refreshingly palpable, the two lives—shared and hidden—play out, with the matter of poetry itself seldom absent.
Playfulness abounds in fragments of poems, in witty one-offs (“Love, that fatal pharmacy. / A choice of remedies: the (fatal) poem”) and also in edgy reflections (“Ours is a world bloodied / by a kiss—or ketchup”). Similarly the juxtaposition of the esthetic and the earthy is refreshing: upon the heels of Ryokan’s poetic thought comes a consideration of aircraft toilets.

Also recommended: Ars Poetica, by Clay Reynolds (Texas Review Press) and Literary Lunch, edited by Jeanette Brown (University of Tennessee Press). The former rages, the latter comforts; both will delight.

NO. 10 FICTION The Master of Monterey Lawrence Coates, University of Nevada Press, 288 pages, softcover $20.00, 0-87417-529-1

This antic novel of extraordinary characters, incidents, and outcomes is as invigorating as champagne and caviar on a damp Friday in November. In 1842, Thomas ap Catesby Jones, a love-stricken U.S. Navy commodore, captured the port of Monterey, capital of Mexican California, and held the remote city for three days in the belief that the U.S. was at war with Mexico. Jones’ crew of bizarre misfits included family-fleers, parent-seekers, would-be epic writers, and emulators of ancient heroes, all present in person if absent in mind.
The incident actually occurred, and to the accidental face-off Coates has added his omnium-gatherum of unlikely characters. The Spaniards and Mexicans act within their peculiar customs and constraints, the motley Americans within the farther reaches of their untrammeled imaginations. The narrative abounds with unlikely situations (the marriage of seventy-year-old Ignacio Castro to fourteen-year-old Arcadia Serrano—derailed by the invasion—an epic bull and bear fight, and vaquero dancers remounting their horses between sets), all with origins in the historic Spanish archives that Coates has unearthed. This is a novel of dislocated actors head over heels in the making—and unmaking—of history, juggling the what-is, the what-might-be, and the what-might-have-been. In all, a hilarious, beautifully achieved tour de force.

Also recommended: The King of Odessa, by Robert A. Rosenstone (Northwestern University Press), a must for all who admire the great writer, killed by Stalin, and Fable for Another Time, by Cline, translated by Mary Hudson (University of Nebraska). Cline’s beliefs were vile; his impassioned, staccato writing hints at an explanatory madness.

The books listed in this round-up represent only a modest sampling of what the university presses, both large and small, offer in any year, and discovery of hundreds of other attractive titles is only a website or 800-number call away. Many of the best and most imaginative people in publishing have chosen to work in university presses, dedicated to bringing out fine books. Let’s not neglect the rich harvest they offer.