The University of Chicago Press Podcast

James Curry has written Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Curry is assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah.With Congress in the news, a new book about the House arrives in timely fashion. Not only is Curry’s book timely, it also helps explain part of what’s been going on in Washington. Curry argues that House leaders use special procedural tactics to restrict information about bills from rank-and-file members. By limiting information, leaders can efficiently push ahead an agenda with much less opposition. This is an effect strategy, but can lead to resentment and distrust, two of the factors that may have created the environment for the search for a new speaker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Lila Corwin Berman, Associate Professor of History, Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History, and Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University, looks at how post-WWII American Jews retained a deep connection to cities, even after migrating to the suburbs in large numbers. A work of Jewish urban history, Berman’s book investigates the enduring and evolving commitment of Detroit Jews to the city as a real and imagined space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Considered by many reviewers to be one of the most important books in recent years on the human cost of war, Paying with Their Bodies blends lively anecdotal accounts of individual veterans with the complex questions of their imagined and real place in society before, during, and after their time served. Not surprisingly the answers are at times even more disheartening as Kinder uncovers a pattern of promises made and unfulfilled, in which the only consistencies across time are episodes of exploitation for political and personal gain by others and the eventual neglect as the public memory of their sacrifice fades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In their book, Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (University of Chicago Press, 2015) UCLA sociologist and current department chair Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder, assistant professor of social medicine and anthropology at the University of North Carolina address tough questions about the efficacy of genetic testing through a longitudinal study of a genetics clinic.Screening for common genetic disorders is a high opportunity area for the application of biomedical knowledge to the clinic. However, this population health measure can quickly precipitate personal crises and emotional upheaval in the process of confirming results that often turn out to be false positives. For many families, this taxing diagnostic ordeal profoundly shapes the experience of starting or growing their family, and for some it is only the beginning of a greater therapeutic odyssey. Newborn genetic screening undoubtedly saves lives, but its social repercussions require greater scrutiny.This is precisely the task to which Saving Babies? sets itself: an ethnographically-informed assessment of the intended and unintended consequences of genetic screening as they impact families in the clinic and beyond. While newborn screening is meant to provide actionable certainty, its reality is far less clear-cut. Uncertainty is not simply lack of knowledge that the application of technology can eradicate, but rather an intrinsic characteristic of the clinical situation that more information, even more precise information, can often exacerbate. Moreover, longstanding inequalities in the U.S. healthcare system often prevent conditions that can be easily diagnosed from being treated.Saving Babies? is a serious exercise in the sociology of knowledge driven by engaging personal narratives that get at the urgency of newborn screening as a felt phenomenon, as much as an important public health program. As such, it is great reading for sociologists, anthropologists, and clinicians interested in the broader social dimensions of medical practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died alone and whose bodies were never claimed. Known as the “forgotten,” their stories are at the heart of Richard C. Keller‘s fascinating new book Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015).Official narratives of the disaster focused narrowly on the problem of the elderly who died alone, seemingly because their families were too busy vacationing to check in or claim their relatives. Yet, as Keller shows, these official narratives were incomplete and often incorrect. Moreover, by focusing so intently on elderly victims, these narratives have shaped subsequent public health initiatives, which have collectively identified the elderly as the most vulnerable population in the event of heat, all the while ignoring other similarly vulnerable groups.Fatal Isolation pushes past official narratives to provide the first historical treatment of the disaster. By drawing on disaster studies, social theory, ethnography, demography, and sociology, Keller weaves together the August vacation, housing policy, architecture, and debates over the place of the aging in French society. In the process, Fatal Isolation uncovers a much longer, much richer, and much more complex history of the disaster and French society’s own contributions to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the “needs” that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model “person,” anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like “minimum wage,” like “citizen”) that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bhavani Raman‘s new book Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012) explores the world of colonial clerks in the Madras Presidency. Arguing that paper played an important role in colonial rule, Raman analyses cutcherry scribes and the allegations of corruption that surrounded them, accountant-scribes and their amazing memory skills, the changes in the education system wrought by the colonial encounter, issues of forgery and finally the use of petitions that helped form a particular type of colonial subject. The book details this fascinating topic with extreme subtlety and care and pushes the reader to ask many questions about corruption and the importance of paper not only in colonial but also in contemporary India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were “enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally.” As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer’s account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Janet Vertesi‘s fascinating new book is an ethnography of the Mars Rover mission that takes readers into the practices involved in working with the two robotic explorers Spirit and Opportunity. Based on two years of immersive ethnography from 2006-2008, Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the visuality of the mission, exploring “how scientists and engineers on Earth work with the digital images” sent by their robots to make sense of Mars and to work together to explore it. Vertesi proposes a way of understanding image-making practices as a kind of teamwork: learning to see like a rover, here, is an embodied, skilled, social achievement. Building on Wittgenstein’s notion of seeing as, Vertesi conceptualizes these imaging practices in terms of an analytic framework of drawing as: the Rover scientists “use digital tools to draw Mars as consisting of different kinds of materials or surfaces, with implications for future viewings and for team relations.” From mapping Mars to robot funerals, it’s a wonderful study for readers interested in space exploration, visual studies, sociology, and STS alike! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this oversight, turning our attention to the importance of biological field stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in generating new scientific practices, theories, and networks. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the German- and French-speaking scientific community in Europe, looking at a number of influential case studies that collectively embody what de Bont calls a “station movement” in this period. Exploring the relationship between these field stations and a notion of “experimentalism” embraced therein, de Bont usefully undermines a tendency to focus on laboratories as sites of experimentation in the history of science. The stations ranged in kind from very technologically sophisticated marine labs to cabins in the woods, from urban Naples to the isolated beaches of France to the birdlands of East Prussia. Some of the practices cultivated at these sites spread into a wider political and intellectual economy, transforming disciplines and spaces of inquiry and education in the process. It’s a fascinating study that offers readers a more robust and complex understanding of the spaces of modern science and their entangled histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices