ShelfLife@Texas

The Feb. 12 issue of The New York Review of Books highlights a selection of new works about Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, including “Traitor to His Class” by UT Historian H.W. Brands.

In the story “A Revolutionary President,” Russell Baker suggests the blooming of FDR books “…probably has a lot to do with Barack Obama’s assuming the presidency at a moment of economic breakdown just as Roosevelt did seventy-six years ago.”

The New York Review of Books isn’t the only media outlet to take…

Tune in to your local PBS station next Monday for an in-depth look at one of the biggest public health crises of the 20th century.

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) will air “The Polio Crusade,” a one-hour television documentary based in part on History Professor David Oshinsky’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, at 8 p.m. (CST) Feb. 2.

Oshinsky won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in history for “Polio: An American Story” (Oxford University Press, 2005) which details America’s obsession with the disease.

“The Polio Crusade,” produced…

Last August, LBJ School of Public Affairs Professor James K. Galbraith’s prescient book “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too” was published by Free Press.

Less than a month later, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG stunned a nation already reeling from the government takeover of mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Galbraith, who will discuss his book tonight in an event co-sponsored by the College of Communication Senior Fellows honors program and…

Sixty-four years ago today, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz, one of the largest concentration camps established by the Germans during World War II. The United Nations now recognizes January 27 as an International Day of Commemoration for victims of the Holocaust.

Allied forces would liberate many other camps that spring, revealing photos and stories of atrocity that stunned the world.

Historian Robert H. Abzug chronicles American soldiers’ eye-witness accounts in the seminal work “Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration…

In the first of the Harry Ransom Lectures, writer Barry Unsworth discusses his new book “Land of Marvels,” at 7 p.m., Monday, Jan. 26 at the Ransom Center. The program will be webcast live. A book signing will follow.

The Ransom Center holds the papers of the celebrated writer who won the Booker Prize in 1992 for “Sacred Hunger”, a novel about the 18-century slave trade widely considered his masterpiece.

His other acclaimed works include “Morality Play,” “Pascali’s Island” (which was adapted…

For Thomas Gilligan, recently appointed dean of the McCombs School of Business, reading is like breathing.

“I’m not sure I can think of myself as existing apart from reading—it’s an integral part of life,” Gilligan says. “Reading was a big salvation for me when I went into military service right out of high school. It’s the way I educated myself before I ever went to college.”

Prior to joining academia, Gilligan served as a Russian linguist in the United States Air Force…

Michener Center alumnus Philipp Meyer (MFA ‘08) has earned an amazing plug for his debut novel from crime writer Patricia Cornwell. The best-selling author mentioned it in “Scarpetta,” the latest in her popular coroner-detective series.

The unprecedented endorsement caught the attention of both The New York Times and the UK’s Guardian this week.

Meyer and Cornwell share an agent, who gave the best-selling author an advance copy of Meyer’s “American Rust,” due out from Spiegel and Grau (a division of Random House) this February.

Cornwell…

In the United States, translations make up only a small percentage of books published each year, and very few of them are from the Middle East. But translators have been working steadily over the years to alter this picture.

Among them is UT Professor of Persian and Comparative Literature Mohammad Ghanoonparvar, translator of “Fortune Told in Blood,” a novel about the Iran-Iraq War by Iranian author David Ghaffarzadegan.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, in partnership with University of Texas Press,…

Texas Monthly’s new editor Jake Silverstein, a 2006 graduate of UT’s Michener Center for Writers, will read at BookPeople at 7 p.m., Jan. 20 from “Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine” (New Press, 2008).

The collection features 15 pieces of inside-out reportage by Silverstein and other cutting-edge journalists such as Barbara Ehrenreich, William T. Vollmann, Charles Bowden, Jay Kirk and Wells Trevor.  

“A piece I wrote on high-stakes poetry gambling is in the book,” Silverstein says.…

Edgar Allan Poe, American poet, critic and inventor of the detective story, turns 200 years old today.

In honor of Poe’s 2009 bicentennial, the Harry Ransom Center has collaborated with the University of Virginia (UVA) on the exhibit From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe. The exhibition features many items from the Ransom Center’s significant Poe collection.

The exhibition opens March 7 at UVA, and arrives at the Ransom Center Sept. 8.

The narrative poem “The Raven” is…