University of Michigan Press Blog

Outdoors writer calls Jerry Dennis "a national treasure"

Reviewing The Windward Shore, Michigan outdoors writer Dave Richey described author Jerry Dennis as "a national treasure" and said of Dennis' latest book, "We see, feel, hear, taste and touch winter along the Great Lakes, and we rejoice with the author as he examines everything about winter in this area."

The Windward Shore has garnered enthusiastic praise since its release in September, and Dennis has given popular readings from the book throughout Michigan and the Midwest. Here, Dennis collects his thoughts and reflections on nature as he recounts several walks throughout the Great Lakes region after a knee injury forced him to live life at a slower pace.

Richey, himself a prominent nature writer who retired from the Detroit News in 2003, concluded his review calling The Windward Shore "a truly wonderful read by a favorite author."

WSJ Marketplace Praises 'Open Wound'

Marketwatch, part of the Wall Street Journal family of web sites, featured Jason Karlawish's Open Wound as the only fiction title on its list of "Health Books That Get Your Blood Pumping."

"Health care is likely to resurface next year as a major topic ahead of the presidential election," the article begins. "A handful of books published this year seek to challenge or explain how our standards of medical care in the U.S. have emerged."

Listing Open Wound among several recent non-fiction books, reviewer Kristen Gerencher says of Karlawish's book, "In this historical novel, [Beaumont and St. Martin] become entwined in each other’s lives medically, financially and even legally. Karlawish sketches their fraught relationship in the ensuing decades artfully, with clear relevance to the ethical questions of modern medicine."

Open Wound is available now from the University of Michigan Press.

'Windward Shore' author Jerry Dennis on Minnesota Public Radio

Acclaimed Great Lakes author Jerry Dennis recently appeared on Minnesota Public Radio to discuss his new book, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes (University of Michigan Press, 2011) and his abiding interest in the region. Joined by fellow nature writer Darby Nelson, Dennis spoke on his appreciation for Thoreau, the roots of his own writing, the improbable hoax of whales in Lake Michigan, and more.

"I have always been fascinated with the contradictions in human nature when it comes to nature," Dennis said on the Midday program. "As I've spent twenty-some years studying the Great Lakes and writing about them, I've seen them as a very good example of that. This is a place we love, yet we dump our sewage overflow into it. Our industrial waste for many, many years was dumped into them. We still dump billions of gallons of agricultural waste--inadvertantly in most cases, but it still ends up there. Every time we have a major thunderstorm, huge amounts of water flood our sewage treatment plants, millions and sometimes billions of gallons of untreated sewage go into our lakes. I wanted to understand this better, as well, and thought, what is our relationship with nature and why is it so central to our existence and our experience as human beings? And why are we short sighted? Why do we not take a more active role in protecting these places that we claim to love?"

Listen to the entire broadcast online at Minnesota Public Radio. Jerry Dennis's The Windward Shore is available now.

Q&A with Ruth A. Miller, author of 'Seven Stories of Threatening Speech'

In her new book Seven Stories of Threatening Speech: Women's Suffrage Meets Machine Code, Professor Ruth A. Miller examines the functions and implications of speech divorced from any human speaker, as well as from any ideological content it might contain.

University of Michigan Press: First, Ruth, what does it mean for speech to be “threatening,” aside from a specific verbal threat against another person?

There are three ways to approach this question.  The first is to think about what sort of speech, historically, has been criminalized or denied protection.  Even in the United States, where free speech is often characterized as the fundamental right, a person can be convicted of treason solely because of speech.  In other national and transnational contexts, hate speech is similarly illegal.  Both of these are instances of speech itself, regardless of context, speaker, or audience, defined as a materially criminal act against a particular legal or political order. 

A second, and related, way to approach this question is from the direction of classical discourse analysis.  Here, speech is threatening if it contributes to a discursive field in which a particular, and particularly oppressive, mode of embodied subjectivity becomes the norm.  Hate speech, then, becomes threatening not because it undermines a legal ideal—say, political equality—but because it produces or re-produces violent modes of existence.

Both of these interpretations of threatening speech recognize the material or physical quality of language.  Each assumes speech to be an act in and of itself.  Each also limits speech to the human sphere, and thereby misses an aspect of threatening speech that Seven Stories tries to highlight.  Namely, a third way to describe speech, or speech acts, as dangerous is to discuss the work of language not on political or biological bodies (or political or biological bodies alone) but on systems and environments.  Indeed, one of the running themes of the book is that as much as historical writing on or about threatening speech may have been concerned with sovereignty or subjectivity, it has been equally concerned with systems and environments.  We just have to expand our definition of “materiality” to recognize this interest.

Q&A with Ole Bjerg, author of 'Poker: The Parody of Capitalism'

The popularity of poker is on the rise not just in the United States but throughout the world. A number of guides and strategies have been published to help players navigate the complexities of the game, but there are few studies of how poker functions as a game and its meaning both to players and the broader culture. Ole Bjerg's new book, Poker: The Parody of Capitalism represents an intriguing new scholarly perspective on poker, capitlalism, and the surprising ways one relates to the other. Bjerg is a sociologist and associate professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, and we spoke with him briefly about Poker, available now from the University of Michigan Press

University of Michigan Press: To begin with, I’m hoping you can talk a little about how poker functions as a “parody” of capitalism. Briefly, what do you mean by this?

Ole Bjerg: The notion of parody is a concept that I have found in Baudrillard. The idea is that games in general and poker in particular seem to simulate features of the ordinary or "serious" non-game world. I demonstrate that the way money circulates in No-Limit Texas Hold'Em, which is currently the most popular form of poker, is comparable to the way that money circulates in contemporary financial capitalism. However, the difference between capitalism and poker is that the former comes with a whole ideological system of explanation and justification while the latter makes no attempt to justify itself. Poker does not pretend to be fair, efficient, or productive. It just is. This means that the parody shows us the mechanisms of the system but without the ideological superstructure.

Your book considers poker as an expression of culture, along the lines of art and literature. What does poker tell us about the people who play it and the cultures to which they belong?

My research has shown that different people have very different reasons for playing poker. This is one of the faschinating features of the game.

It enables people to play with very different emotional investments.

Some play just for amusement. Some play because the dream of being professionals. Some are professionals. Some play because they are compulsive gamblers. And even the ones that are compulsive gamblers have different attachments to the game. However, if there is one thing that all players have in common, I think it is the sensation that there is something in poker which transcends the ordinary life outside of poker.

People who do not play poker themselves often tend to think that poker players play to win money. This is much too simple. People play poker to play poker. One of my favorite quotes from the reservoir of poker folklore is by Nick "the Greek" Dandalos: "The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing." I think that sums up beautifully what poker is about.

Continuing the analogy, can there be a “great work” of poker, which I would think would amount to an extraordinarily well-played hand?

Yes, certainly. "Great works of poker" come into being precisely at those moments when the game seems to transcend life itself. Poker provides the player with the opportunity to test and display character.

Great works of poker come into being when the player has the courage and wit to become one with the game in a way that makes it seem as if the game itself is on his side. Similar moments may happen in music when the musician becomes one with the music.

Citing Recent Court Cases, Professor Praises U-M Press Title

In a recent blog post considering high court decisions in the United States and Britain, Michael Smithson, Professor of Psychology and Decision Sciences at Australia National University, called Stephen T. Ziliak and Deidre N. McCloskey's Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives "a swinging demolition of the unquestioned application of statistical significance in a variety of domains." Like Ziliak and McCloskey, Dr. Smithson notes that there are meaningful applications of statistical significance, but context is important--what is being measured, what is the sample size, and what a non-significance finding might actually mean are all important factors. To illustrate this, Smithson gives an unusual example:

For a quick intuitive, if fanciful, example let’s imagine randomly sampling one person from the world’s population and our hypothesis is that s/he will be Australian. On randomly selecting our person, all that we know about her initially is that she speaks English.

There are about 750 million first-or second-language English speakers world-wide, and about 23 million Australians. Of the 23 million Australians, about 21 million of them fit the first- or second-language English description. Given that our person speaks English, how likely is it that we’ve found an Australian? The probability that we’ve found an Australian given that we’ve picked an English-speaker is 21/750 = .03. So there goes our hypothesis. However, had we picked an Australian (i.e., given that our hypothesis were true), the probability that s/he speaks English is 21/23 = .91.

In the case of drug manufacturers involved in the Supreme Court case Smithson cites (and for which Ziliak contributed an amicus brief), it is also essential to take into account the severity of side effects, whether or not they occur with a frequency that is statistically significant.