The Bernie Madoff Story: New Book Explains Rise and Fall

Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, The Man Who Swindled the World

Ever play “Chutes and Ladders”?

“Chutes and Ladders”, of course, was (and still is) a board game for small children. If you land on a square with a ladder, you move up the board quickly. If you land on a square with a chute, you slide back down just as fast. First to the top wins.

And that pretty much sums up the stock market lately. Up the ladder, down the chute, and few winners.

But some investors lost everything to someone authors Deborah and Gerald Strober say has been called the most hated man in New York. In the new book Catastrophe,you’ll read about Bernie Madoff, his scams, and his victims.

Bernard Madoff was born in 1938 in New York and was raised in Queens. Although he attended a close-knit high school, surprisingly few of his classmates remember him from then. His acumen with money wasn’t obvious when he was in high school, but in 1960, he took $5,000, invested it, and founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, or BMIS.

Almost quietly, he began making his fortune. Madoff was doing things that few brokers were doing; some later called him a “pioneer” and a “financial wizard”. Few experts had even heard of him prior to the 1980s. No one seems to know for sure when he started his Ponzi scheme.

Read more of Terri Schlichenmeyer's review here, or get a copy of Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, The Man Who Swindled the World now!

Afghanistan Veteran Writes Memoir: The Unforgiving Minute

The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

At the beginning of his insightful memoir's second section, Craig Mullaney includes this apt quotation from Sir William Francis Butler: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."

Mullaney, West Point graduate, Rhodes scholar and a former Army captain who is a veteran of combat in Afghanistan, is neither a fool nor a coward. This book should be read, certainly, by everyone who has a loved one who is serving in the military, has served or might one day serve. But it also should be required reading for all Americans.

It's only by the grace of e-mail and parental loyalty that I had the pleasure of reading The Unforgiving Minute. I rarely buy a book. As the editor of this book-review page since 1985, I've received a steady flow of review copies of new books. If I don't get it free, I can usually do without.

And I don't read nonfiction books for pleasure. Having dealt with reality all too much over decades in the newspaper business, I choose fiction when I want to settle down with a good book and enjoy myself. The few times I've tried to read a nonfiction book, I failed to finish.

Craig Mullaney's book is different. I bought a copy because of a request from a fellow member of an e-mail list for parents of Naval Academy midshipmen. Mullaney's book has made it to No. 10 on The New York Times best-seller nonfiction list this week in part because of such grass-roots efforts and word of mouth (The Daily Show appearance didn't hurt, either). In this case, the parent of a Naval Academy graduate urged others to support this book written by a young man who had taught at the academy a few years ago. I placed my order, figuring that I wouldn't read it, but I could give it to my midshipman.

Read the rest of Linda Brinson's book review here, or get a copy of The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education now!

Call for Writers: New Book Series on the Legal History of the Civil War Era

LEGAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA ~FROM THE MEXICAN WAR TO JIM CROW~

A Series of Books Published by Southern Illinois University Press

Edited by Christian G. Samito

Abraham Lincoln identified a “new birth of freedom” during the Civil War era, when the government and people of the United States undertook the most comprehensive reconsideration of legal and political issues since the constitutional convention in 1787. Americans confronted the contours of governmental power and considered the boundaries of civil liberties during wartime. Legislation fueled national development, nationalized the monetary and banking system, and promoted both the coercive power of government, through taxation and conscription, and its role in taking care of citizens, though the provision of pensions for Civil War veterans. Wartime experiences, and the triumph of unionism on the battlefield, allowed for the creation of a stronger nation-state. Millions of Africans Americans marched out of bondage into inclusion in a newly defined national citizenship, called for an enduring freedom, and began to enjoy civil and political rights for the first time. At the same time, a racist counter-revolution in the South sought to tamp out this new enjoyment of citizenship rights by African Americans, as well as to intimidate white Republican governments.

This exciting new series from Southern Illinois University Press is the first to focus on the rich legal history of the period from the Mexican War to Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow. The series will explore legal history from different angles, ranging from presidential leadership to legislative mandates, and from judicial interpretation to the impact society had on legal development, and how law, society, and politics mixed during this period to shape American legal development. Broad topics to be covered include, but are not limited to:

• slavery
• abolitionism
• the Republican party
• civil liberties during wartime
• war powers
• economic development and modernization
• the expansion of the federal government
• Confederate legal history
• the redefinition of American citizenship
• changes in legal thought and education
• suffrage movements
• race relations
• Native Americans
• African Americans and the Union military
• rights developments during Reconstruction (both in terms of advances in theory and practice as well as negative reactions, e.g. the Ku Klux Klan)
• the rise of Jim Crow

Books in the series will be written with a high scholarly caliber and will also be accessible to an interested non-academic audience. In addition to making significant contributions to historiography, these volumes will be important and relevant, often covering topics bearing on issues that continue to be debated today. The primary audience for this series consists of professional historians, political scientists, law professors, and practicing attorneys, as well as students in undergraduate, graduate, and law school classes. The wider audience fascinated by the Civil War era and its legacy—and increasingly interested in the history of American legal development—will find these books particularly appealing as well. Although the majority of the books will be overviews and monographs, themed essay compilations and selected edited collections of papers from important legal thinkers will be welcome in the series. Ideally, books in the series will be up to 95,000 words in length and may include as many as twenty graphic images.

Anyone interested in learning more about the series is invited to email the series editor, Christian G. Samito, at CGS1865@aol.com.

About the Series Editor

Christian G. Samito obtained his law degree from Harvard Law School and his Ph.D. in American history from Boston College. Samito is currently teaching a seminar on the legal history of the Civil War and Reconstruction at Boston University School of Law and a course on the Civil War and Reconstruction at Boston College through its history department. Samito’s book Changes in Law and Society During the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Legal History Documentary Reader is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in July 2009, and another book, Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in November 2009. Samito edited two collections of Civil War letters, published by Fordham University Press in 1998 and 2004. He also practices law in Boston.

Christian G. Samito
CGS1865@aol.com
Email: cgs1865@aol.com

Declutter Your Life and Mind: Detox Your Desk Provides Solutions

Detox Your Desk: Declutter Your Life and Mind

My desk is a mess.

It’s not so much a factor of having too much stuff - virtually everything on it has a purpose. The problem is that I collect too many little pieces of paper and various other items and I tend to not spend enough time organizing them and dealing with them in a constructive fashion. My desk usually winds up being a mess of notes jotted on pieces of paper, magazines, photocopied articles from the library, books, photographs, and various correspondence that I need to attend to or file away somewhere.

Most days, my focus is on getting creative work done: researching posts, writing them, and working on other directly related tasks. As a result, all of these little pieces of information detritus tend to build up over time into an overwhelming mass that dominates the left hand side of my desk. Once a month or so, I force myself to go through it - and then I’m glad I did, because I seem to always find tons of interesting and useful things in there.

This isn’t a particularly good situation, particularly since in most regards I do a great job of managing my information. I use a mix of the notebook in my pocket, Evernote, and Remember the Milk to manage the vast majority of the information I deal with every day.

Yet the stuff on the left side of my desk keeps piling up.

This is the exact problem that Theo Theobald and Gary Cooper’s Detox Your Deskdeals with. If you are involved in a high-information job, how do you handle the accumulation of information on your desk? Let’s dig in and see what they have to say.

Read more of Trent Hamm's review here, or get a copy of Detox Your Desk now and start to declutter your life!

Interview With Amber Benson: Author of Death's Daughter

Interview with Amber Benson: Author of Death's Daughter

Though she’s probably best known for playing Tara on Buffy The Vampire SlayerAmber Benson has kept busy since her three-season stint on the series. A screenwriter, director, and author, she recently released her first solo novel. The first in a trilogy, Death's Daughterfollows Calliope Reaper-Jones as she’s forced to take over for her father (that would be Death) while trying to locate his whereabouts. I spoke to Amber about the origins of the story, her mythologist ambitions, and the future of the series.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: My first question is sort of the obvious one — where did these ideas come from?

Amber Benson: You know, I hadn’t really read a lot of paranormal romance, and then I read Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series, and I was like, this is an awesome genre. I really like it, the paranormal romance-slash-urban fantasy world. And I thought I’d like to try something in that vein. Until then, I’d written mostly horror with a Victorian slant to it, so I started just trying to come up with ideas for something in that genre. And then I was like, well, I love mythology, I love American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Maybe there’s a way to incorporate this mythological sort of context to the paranormal romance. That’s when I came up with the idea of Death’s Daughter. What would happen if death was run like a corporation, and the daughter of Death had to come and take it over because her dad was missing, and she didn’t want any part of it? I guess that’s where the idea came from: working all these things that I liked into a genre I was curious about.

SFBG: So did you end up doing any research, or was this all mythology you were already familiar with?

AB: I love mythology and religion. That’s something that I’ve been interested in since I was a kid. I saw Joseph Campbell’s thing on PBS with Bill Moyers, that big interview, and I was just hooked. And I actually thought for a while that I wanted to be a mythologist. In fact I applied to Berkeley; they had a Celtic Studies department, and I was like, that’s where I want to go. So I was interested in all this stuff, and the research that I ended up doing was mostly on fashion, which is something I know less about. But I’ve learned a lot in the interim. But I tried to incorporate a lot of different mythological stories and characters from different mythological pantheons. I just love the idea that the afterlife has room for everybody’s beliefs. And you know, this isn’t brain surgery — this is easy, fun chick lit. But I wanted to inject a little bit of something heavier into it.

SFBG: Actually one of the things I really liked about the book was that you have Heaven and Hell, but it doesn’t stick to this Judeo-Christian understanding of the two.

AB: Yeah, I wanted all of it in there. Actually the second book deals much more with Egyptian mythology. And then the third one will be its own thing totally.

Read the rest of Amber Benson's interview here, or pick up a copy of Death's Daughter now!

Three University Presses Looking for Early North American History Books or Authors

Open Call for History Books or Writers

PRESS RELEASE--Thursday, March 26, 2009

Three university presses have received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support Early American Places, a new scholarly book series devoted to early North American history. The University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, and Northern Illinois University Press will receive $648,000 over five years to publish twelve series titles annually.

The goal of the series is to publish books written by first-time authors that root developments in early North America to the specific places where they occurred. The three presses will focus on the regions where they have particular expertise: UGA Press on the southeastern colonies, the Gulf South, and the Caribbean; NYU Press on the northeastern and middle Atlantic colonies; and NIU Press on the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi Valley.

"All three presses collaborating on the series are sensitive to the transnational turn in the study of early North America," commented Derek Krissoff, senior acquisitions editor at UGA Press and a coauthor of the grant. "But we're also sensitive to the things that are particular to where we live and work. The idea behind Early American Places is to combine the two—to look at how specific cities and counties and colonies and regions experienced, and contributed to, global phenomena like migration, trade, and war. Scholarship undertaken at this scale can capture a level of texture that often gets lost in 'bigger' books."

Deborah Gershenowitz, senior editor at NYU Press and the other coauthor of the grant, added that the series was created specifically with junior faculty in mind. "First books in history are almost always revised dissertations, and many dissertations in early American history are regional in scope, drawing on town, county, and colonial archives. In part, this is a reflection of the fact that developments in early North America were often experienced and made sense of at a local level."

"Our focus on place gets to the heart of history—real people, doing real things, in real places," stated NIU acquisitions editor Sara Hoerdeman. "The books in the series will also explore significant ideas and historical themes, but our books will be innovative by being grounded in a geographic place."

The grant, which is being administered by UGA Press, will fund a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated to the editing and production of books. The three presses will also combine marketing efforts. An editorial board of leading scholars of early American history who will help recruit outstanding manuscripts is currently being assembled.

"Regional American history is a very important part of our publishing program, and it is an area of the field that has been underserved due to the relatively tiny markets for such works," said Steve Maikowski, director of NYU Press. "This new series will allow us to expand our publishing of outstanding original scholarship in the history of the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions."

"We are honored that Mellon has chosen to lend us their support," said Nicole Mitchell, director of UGA Press. "It's gratifying to work collaboratively with our colleagues at other university presses, and this grant will be invaluable help to us all."

"NIU Press has made a commitment in the past to publish in Early American history and in regional studies, and this collaborative series offers us a better opportunity to synthesize these areas," stated J. Alex Schwartz, Director of NIU Press. "Moreover, I am delighted to be working with our fellow presses at Georgia and NYU."

For more information on the Early American Places series contact John McLeod, sales and marketing director at the University of Georgia Press at jmcleod@ugapress.uga.edu, or (706) 369-6158.

Early American Places member presses:

UGA Press (www.ugapress.org)
Nicole Mitchell, Director
Derek Krissoff, Senior Acquisitions Editor

NYU Press (www.nyupress.org)
Steve Maikowski, Director
Deborah Gershenowitz, Senior Editor

NIU Press (www.niupress.niu.edu)
J. Alex Schwartz, Director
Sara Hoerdeman, Acquisitions Editor

John McLeod
Sales and Marketing Director
University of Georgia Press
Phone: (706) 369-6158.
Email: jmcleod@ugapress.uga.edu

The Secret World of College Cheerleaders: New Book Reveals Stories

Cheer!: Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders

A new book about the ‘hidden’ world of cheerleading is the ultimate guilty pleasure, even though it shouldn’t be.

People who think cheerleading isn’t a sport should Google “Stephen F. Austin NCA 2007” and watch the accompanying video. Then they should shut up.

On a late-night show appearance years ago, Jerry Seinfeld once joked about why he respected baseball players and not NASCAR drivers, saying, “I can’t do that.”

After watching this national championship video and reading Cheer!: Inside the Secret World of College CheerleadersI can definitely say, “I can’t do that.” Competitive cheerleading is super-human.

It’s easy enough to initially scoff at Kate Torgovnick’s 346-page book. The cover sports four pair of cheerleaders. The men are shirtless and rippling, the women flashing megawatt smiles as they twist in the air. Oh please, I thought. They can’t really do that.

In fact, they can.

Over the course of a year, Torgovnick, a writer for the New York Times and former Jane magazine editor, shadowed three college cheerleading teams: the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks, the Southern University Jaguars, and the University of Memphis All-Girl Tigers.

Read the rest of Katie Hanson's review here, or get a copy Cheer!: Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders now!

Stephen F. Austin Cheer, 2007 Nationals.