The University of Chicago Press 1427 East 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637 CHICAGO FALL 2009 FALL CHICAGO Chicago FALL 2009 FALL Recently Published Fall 2009 Contents General Interest 1 Special Interest 36 Paperbacks 81 Distributed Books 104 The AMS Weather Book Nature’s Great Events Ordering The Ultimate Guide to The Most Amazing Natural Events Information 210 America’s Weather on the Planet Jack Williams Karen Bass, General Editor With Forewords by Rick Anthes With an Introduction by Brian Leith Subject Index 215 and Stephanie Abrams ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47154-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-89898-8 Cloth $39.95 USA Cloth $35.00/£24.00 Author Index 216 Title Index Inside back cover The Subversive Copy Paradise Found Editor Nature in America at the Time Advice from Chicago (or, How to of Discovery Negotiate Good Relationships with Steve Nicholls Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58340-2 Yourself) Cloth $30.00/£20.50 Carol Fisher Saller Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73425-5 Paper $13.00/£9.00 Cover image: Stock car racing, backlit shot of man and two boys leaning Bigfoot An Orchard Invisible on railing, watching field from the colonnades, 1947. Photograph by permission and courtesy of the Chicago Park District Special Collections. The Life and Times of a Legend A Natural History of Seeds Joshua Blu Buhs Jonathan Silvertown Cover design by Mary Shanahan ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07979-0 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75773-5 Cloth $29.00/£20.00 Cloth $25.00/£17.50 Catalog design by Alice Reimann and Mary Shanahan ADRIAN JOHNS Piracy The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates ince the rise of Napster and other file sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a prod- Suct of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much lon- ger and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood. Praise for Adrian Johns’s The Nature of Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of the Book print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the “A mammoth and stimulating account of twenty-first. Written with a historian’s flair for narrative and sparkling the place of print in the history of knowl- detail, the book swarms throughout with characters of genius, prin- edge. Johns has written a tremen- ciple, cunning, and outright criminal intent. In the wars over piracy, dously learned primer on . how books it is the victims—from Charles Dickens to Bob Dylan—who have were made and sold, by whom, and how always been the best known, but the principal players—the pirates one decided which could be relied on.” themselves—have long languished in obscurity, and it is their stories —New Republic especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open “Entertainingly written. The most access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately comprehensive account available. Well argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to rec- documented and engaging.” oncile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine —Times Literary Supplement of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Cal- “Provocative. Johns has an enviable las to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story eye for telling detail, a skill in narrative, of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive and an ability to intersperse this with history of the subject for years to come. ingenious, often deflationary, asides.” —Nature Adrian Johns is professor of history and chair of the Committee on Concep- tual and Historical Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of FEBRUARY 648 p., 40 halftones 6 x 9 The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, also published by the ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40118-8 University of Chicago Press. Cloth $35.00/£24.00 HISTORY general interest 1 MICHaeL FORSBERG Great Plains America’s Lingering Wild With a Foreword by Ted Kooser, Chapter Introductions by David Wishart, and Essays by Dan O’Brien he Great Plains were once among the greatest grasslands on the planet. But as the United States T and Canada grew westward, the Plains were plowed up, fenced in, overgrazed, and otherwise degraded. Today, “The Great Plains of America are not for this fragmented landscape is the most endangered and least protected sissies, but those who respond to their ecosystem in North America. But all is not lost on the prairie. Through haunting beauty will not be driven off. lyrical photographs, essays, historical images, and maps, this beauti- The photographer Michael Forsberg and fully illustrated book gets beneath the surface of the Plains, revealing three of his writing friends show why. the lingering wild that still survives and whose diverse natural com- Forsberg has spent a long time looking at munities, native creatures, migratory traditions, and natural systems the Great Plains and now he has shared together create one vast and extraordinary whole. what he saw.” —Larry McMurtry Three broad geographic regions are covered in detail in Great Plains, evoked in the unforgettable and often haunting images taken “The prairie is a minimalist landscape, by Michael Forsberg. Between the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2008, anything but flashy. Forsberg’s discern- he traveled roughly 100,000 miles across twelve states and three prov- ing eye frames its sparse beauty in all inces, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to complete the its exquisite detail and lovely sweep. To photographic fieldwork for this project, underwritten by the Nature spend time with this book is to under- Conservancy. Complementing his images and firsthand accounts are stand why the Great Plains matter.” essays by Great Plains scholar David Wishart and acclaimed writer —Chris Johns, editor-in-chief, Dan O’Brien. Each section of the book begins with a thorough overview National Geographic by Wishart, while O’Brien—a wildlife biologist and rancher as well as a writer—uses his powerful literary voice to put the Great Plains into a hu- “The beauty and majesty of the Great man context, connecting their natural history with man’s uses and abuses. Plains come alive in the pages of this magnificent book.” The Great Plains are a dynamic but often forgotten landscape— —James V. Risser, overlooked, undervalued, misunderstood, and in desperate need of two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting conservation. This book helps lead the way forward, informing and inspiring readers to recognize the wild spirit and splendor of this irreplaceable part of the planet. OCtoBER 256 p., 150 color plates 12 x 11 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25725-9 Cloth $45.00/£31.00 Michael Forsberg is a Nebraska native and a professional photographer whose NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY images have appeared in publications including Audubon, National Geographic, Natural History, National Wildlife, and in books published by National Geo- graphic and the Smithsonian. He is also the author of On Ancient Wings: The Sandhill Cranes of North America. 2 general interest DIetmaR ELGER Gerhard Richter A Life in Painting Translated by Elizabeth M. Solaro erhard Richter is one of the most important and popular artists of the postwar era. For decades he has sought innova- G tive ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, glass and mirror constructions, “At a time when art is full of doubt, Richter prints, sculptures, and installations. is the most self-critical of artists, putting painting to the most extravagant tests Though Richter has been known in the United States for quite and taking nothing for granted. In the some time, the highly successful retrospective of his work at the MOMA process, he makes disturbing and often in 2002 catapulted him to unprecedented fame. Enter noted curator utterly beautiful art. His work asks Dietmar Elger, who here presents the first biography of this contem- people to think freshly and not roman- porary artist. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, this tically about control versus freedom, fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. austerity versus exuberance, faith versus Elger explores Richter’s childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a skepticism: about what we can trust in student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the what we see. Having grown up under West during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests, po- the Nazis and then in Communist East litical strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; Germany, he has had his share of dicta- and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond. tors and ideologues, in life and in art. Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse, and the He is a solitary man who rarely grants seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated interviews, aware that his solitude also and sometimes confounded critics.