McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

Aping Mankind reviewed in WJS

The following is a excerpt from Gerald Russello's review of Aping Mankind in the Wall Street Journal. The full review is available here -

In his vigorously argued "Aping Mankind," Raymond Tallis takes on what he calls "neuromania" (the belief that we are our physical brains and nothing more) and "Darwinitis" (the insistence that our consciousness can be reduced to evolutionary terms) in a robust defense of the unique nature of human consciousness. Mr. Tallis, a doctor and researcher in clinical neuroscience, believes that most contemporary accounts of human consciousness fail to understand the lived experience of individual minds. Reducing man to simply another animal in a real sense de-humanizes us, with disastrous effects in areas from social policy to the interpretation of art and literature, which the author touches on in engaging asides.

To request a review copy, arrange an author interview contact:

Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist   514 398 2555    jacqueline.davis@mcgill.ca 

 

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

The Year of the Dragon

First Nations Get Broad Promises on Indian Act, Development

Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North

David Alexander: The Shape of Place

Mike Babcock: Leave No Doubt

Scholarly look at slavery in Montreal exhaustive

 

What else?

Amazon Kindles 'go unused' after Christmas

Overused words

How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books

Massive Halifax bookstore starts its move

Happy Family Literacy Day!

 

Upcoming

Jan - Feb - Readings and book signings of Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:

• Jan 30, University of Washington Book Store, Seattle
• Feb 13, Montreal Jewish Community Centre
• Feb 14, Carleton University, Ottawa
• Feb 14, Collected Works, Ottawa

 

Jan 27 - Reading of Peter van Wyck's The Highway of the Atom as part of Concordia's Writers Reads series

Feb 5 - Maria Meindl reads from Outside the Box at the Skydragon Centre, Homegrown Hamilton division, 27 King William Street, 7:30 p.m.

Feb 6 - Book launch: Elections in Dangerous Places at the University of Ottawa

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2 at Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North

The following is excerpted from the article  Heart of Sharpness: Travel writer's long-lost work given new life by Kingston author by Hollie Pratt-Campbell.

 

Seventy-eight years later, a long-lost travel narrative detailing American author and journalist Emily Hahn's adventures in Congo - which included a shocking encounter with a real-life Mr. Kurtz figure - will at last see the light of day thanks to the efforts of a Kingston writer.

"In a nutshell, she went to the Congo looking for adventure," says Ken Cuthbertson, the man who made it all come together. "And she found more adventure than you'd ever think."

The book, called Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North, was not able to be published in its true form when it originally came out in 1933 due to the controversial nature of some of the material. Specifically, while in the Congo, Hahn stayed for a time with an American anthropologist, Patrick Putman.

"Putman, as Emily Hahn told me, 'went native,'" says Cuthbertson. "He started to go crazy, had six or seven black wives, and was kind of ruling his own little area of the Congo like he was the lord of it."

At one point, Hahn visited Putman's compound and found one of the wives on the front lawn, beaten and chained to a fence with a dog collar around her neck. When Hahn approached Putman about the incident, he warned her to be careful or she would be next.

"She wrote about it in the book, and Putman's family was scandalized by it," explains Cuthbertson. "They said if the book got published (they would sue her), and the father, who was a prominent doctor, (threatened to kill himself)."

 

Read the full article

 

To learn more about Congo Solo, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

First Nations Get Broad Promises on Indian Act, Development

The following is excerpted from the CBC News article First Nations Get Broad Promises on Indian Act, Development by Laura Payton.

 

The chiefs and the federal government disagreed Tuesday over what should be done with the Indian Act, the law that governs their relationship.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the gathering that the act is too entrenched to get rid of entirely, and the government won't repeal or unilaterally rewrite the act.

"After 136 years, that tree has deep roots. Blowing up the stump would just leave a big hole," Harper said.

But there are real and practical ways to change the act, or introduce measures outside the act,he said at a one-day gathering of government and First Nations chiefs in Ottawa, with consultation between the government, the provinces and First Nations communities.

"The incentives buried in the Indian Act self-evidently lead to outcomes that we all deplore," he said.

Crown and chiefs looking to 'reset'

Harper adopted language the chiefs themselves have used, saying there's never been a better moment "to reset the relationship."

But they were politely split on what should happen to the Indian Act, which Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo called a "complete abrogation of the partnership between respectful nations."

Read the full article on CBC.ca

 

For more information on Canada's First Nations:

The Year of the Dragon

Happy Chinese New Year!

To mark the occasion, we're featuring some of our Chinese themed titles.

 

In the Eye of the China Storm: A Life Between East and West
By Paul T.K. Lin

Paul T.K. Lin was a Chinese Canadian scholar and unofficial intermediary between China and Canada during the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. The memoir he began late in life remained unfinished after his death until his wife, Eileen Chen Lin, completed the manuscript.

Born in Vancouver in 1920 to immigrant parents, Lin became a passionate advocate for China while attending university in the United States. With the establishment of the People's Republic, and growing Cold War sentiment, Lin abandoned his doctoral studies, moving to China with his wife and two young sons. He spent the next fifteen years participating in the country's revolutionary transformation.

Click here to learn more

 

 

Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors

By Fan Pen Li Chen

In her study of Chinese shadow theatre Fan Pen Li Chen documents and corrects misconceptions about this once-popular art form. Drawing on extensive research and fieldwork, she argues that these plays served a mainly religious function during the Qing dynasty and that the appeal of women warrior characters reflected the lower classes' high tolerance for the unorthodox and subversive.

Chinese Shadow Theatre includes several rare transcriptions of oral performances, including a didactic play on the Eighteen Levels of Hell, and Investiture of the Gods, a sacred saga, and translations of three rare, hand-copied shadow plays featuring religious themes and women warrior characters.

Click here to learn more

 

Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980
By Kay J. Anderson

Popular wisdom maintains that the colourful Chinese quarters of Canadian, American, and Australian cities owe their existence to the generations of Chinese immigrants who have made their lives there. The restaurants, pagodas, and neon lights are seen as intrinsically connected to the Chinese and their immigrant experience in the West. Kay Anderson argues, however, that "Chinatown" is a Western construction, illustrative of a process of cultural domination that gave European settlers in North America and Australia the power to define and shape the district according to their own images and interests.

Click here to learn more

 

 

 

The Excluded Wife
By Yuen-fong Woon

The Chinese Immigration (Exclusion) Act, passed by the Canadian government in 1923, stopped the families of Chinese labourers working in Canada from entering the country. Based on extensive interviews with Chinese women affected by the Exclusion Act, Yuen-fong Woon has created a riveting account of their experiences told through the character of Sau-Ping.

A village woman from South China, Sau-Ping marries an Overseas Chinese from Canada in the late 1920s but the Exclusion Act prohibits her from joining him in Canada. For more than twenty years she remains in China, separated from her husband, taking care of his family members and struggling to survive during a turbulent period of Chinese history.

Click here to learn more

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

Excerpt from A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury 

The Digital Apocalypse

Historian brings Thomas D’Arcy McGee to life

 

What else?

A newfangled online bookstore

Some of my worst friends are books

Has word processing changed the way we write?

How to survive in the age of Amazon

 

Upcoming

Jan - Feb - Readings and book signings of Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:

• Jan 24, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle
• Jan 30, University of Washington Book Store, Seattle
• Feb 13, Montreal Jewish Community Centre
• Feb 14, Carleton University, Ottawa
• Feb 14, Collected Works, Ottawa

 

Jan 27 - Reading of Peter van Wyck's The Highway of the Atom as part of Concordia's Writers Reads series

Feb 6 - Book launch: Elections in Dangerous Places at the University of Ottawa

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2 at Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

The following is an excerpt from A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky by Galya Diment.

 

By the time Koteliansky arrived in England, there were around 250,000 Jews in the country, constituting 0.6 percent of the entire population. Many English Jews at the time – among them Leonard Woolf, whom Koteliansky would get to know well and work for – came from families that had already been in the country for several generations. Yet, even for them, the “lump-of-salt-in-water” effect was still but a dream. As Winder suggests, while anti-Semitismin England at the time might have been less “ferocious” than in the rest of Europe, it was still plenty “infuriating”: “One German characterized it as ‘exclusion from garden parties, refusing certain cherished intimacies, and occasional light-hearted sneers.’”

Leonard Woolf, his Cambridge education notwithstanding, definitely felt the “exclusion”: “I was an outsider … because although I and my father before me belonged to the professional middle class, we had only recently struggled up into it from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers. We had no roots in it.”

Anti-Semitismoften went beyond just social exclusion, however, and affected careers. A good case in point was Dr David Eder (1866-1936), a friend of the Stepniaks and a member of A.R. Orage’s circle, whom Koteliansky, too, would later befriend. Eder was born in London to a middle-class Jewish family that was rather typical for the times, inasmuch as they considered themselves Jews and attended a synagogue but were also quite acculturated into British social life. Eder went on to become a successful physician and psychoanalyst – as well as an early English Zionist – but after obtaining his medical degree in 1895 he immediately knew that, because he was a Jew, “the number of salaried medical posts open to him in England of those days was limited.” He therefore spent the next ten years practicing in South Africa and South America before returning to London in 1905 to open a modest clinic.

Even the Bloomsbury Group, which prided itself on tolerance and open-mindedness, was far from immune to strong anti-Semitic sentiments. In 1909, in a brief narrative called “Jews,” Virginia Woolf wrote about her well-heeled Jewish neighbour: “One wonders how Mrs Loeb became a rich woman. It seems an accident (...) Woolf wrote in her diary in 1915, three years after she married Leonard. "How I hated marrying a Jew."

 

To learn more about A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Singing for an unsung Canadian political icon

The following is excerpted from the article Singing for an unsung Canadian political icon: Historian brings times of Thomas D’Arcy McGee to life by Sean Bettam:

 

[David] Wilson’s fascination with McGee began in 1978 when he attended a Celtic Studies conference at U of T. He heard Irish politician and philosopher Conor Cruise O’Brien describe McGee as the greatest Irish Canadian who ever lived and deserving of a thorough scholarly biography. Wilson made a mental note at the time, but didn’t begin the work until 2000.

What was meant to be a one-volume project turned into a 10-year labour of love as Wilson uncovered more than enough material for a two-volume set. “I worked on it for two to three hours every day for a decade,” he said. “I never got tired of the era. McGee was a household name from the 1840s to the 1860s, and was the most articulate advocate for Confederation.”

Wilson was continuously stirred by the poetry of McGee’s speeches and letters, and his record as an extremely intellectual and prolific writer.

”He laid out a blueprint for Canada as a decent, tolerant society where individuals of differing beliefs and customs could coexist harmoniously,” he said.

 

Read the full article here

Or listen to RCI's author interview with David Wilson discussing Thomas D'Arcy McGee.  

 

To learn more about Thomas D'Arcy McGee, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

Uncertain future for serious reading?

Behind Valkyrie wins CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award

Looking after our veterans

Canadian war artist Leonard Brooks, 100, made Mexico his home

"This is a medical horror story, a tale of human ingenuity gone terribly wrong"

Q&Q looks at spring 2012's Canadian non-fiction titles

What else?

Random House takes over at McClelland & Stewart

BISG Explains Digital Books Policy Statement in Webcast

The way ahead for publishing

Abuses of the English language - 2012 Watchwords Annual Pet Peeves Anthology

To succeed in publishing in the digital era, good writing isn't enough

In Conversation With: Bookseller, Sarah Ramsey, on Amazon, cliché book club picks and the power of the handsell

Type Books brings magic back to the written word

 

Upcoming

Jan - Feb - Readings and book signings of Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:

• Jan 24, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle
• Jan 30, University of Washington Book Store, Seattle
• Feb 13, Montreal Jewish Community Centre
• Feb 14, Carleton University, Ottawa
• Feb 14, Collected Works, Ottawa

Feb 6 - Book launch: Elections in Dangerous Places at the University of Ottawa

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2 at Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

Canadian war artist Leonard Brooks, 100, made Mexico his home

The following is excerpted from The Globe and Mail article, Canadian war artist Leonard Brooks, 100, made Mexico his home by Philip Fine.

For all the ways in which Leonard Brooks was celebrated – as landscape painter, war artist, dean of a Mexican art colony, creator of abstract collages and tapestries, music school director and author of eight books for the working artist – the slights he felt from his native Canada proved a powerful counterforce throughout his life.

At the beginning of his career he brought energy to scenes of winter desolation, many of his pieces being watercolours that he painted outdoors with mittens and thinned-out paints. In his 30s, he became the most productive of the seven Canadian naval artists – 113 works in a two-year period – documenting, among other things, the daily lives of sailors and the heavy damage in bombed-out London.

His most well-known painting, Potato Peelers, was unique among the war artists for its subject matter, catching two sailors not in battle but in the unglamorous act of dinner preparation, sitting next to a couple of oil drums with a foreboding sky and sea, and a convoy of ships in the background.

Read the full article here

 

Leonard Brooks life and legacy is recounted by MQUP author John Virtue in Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende.