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 The first entry in our Author Reflections series comes from Matt Delmont, author of The Nicest Kids in Town. In The Nicest Kids in Town, Matt deftly places the TV show American Bandstand squarely in the civil rights struggles going on in Philadelphia during the 1950s. Here, Matt shares his thoughts around the passing of the great Don Cornelius, creator and host of Soul Train.
Like music fans across the country, I was deeply saddened to hear of Don Cornelius’s untimely death. While the obituaries for Cornelius have noted that as the creator and host of Soul Train he brought black culture into American living rooms, Cornelius needs to also be remembered as one of the last members of a generation of black television pioneers.
Long before Soul Train black deejays and entrepreneurs fought to bring black music to television. Singer Lorenzo Fuller’s “Musical Miniatures” became the first show with a black host when it debuted in 1947. The Billy Daniels Show and the all-black music variety show Sugar Hill Times, which featured a young Harry Belafonte, also debuted in television’s early years. The Nat King Cole Show debuted to great expectations in 1956, but failed to attract national advertisers and lasted only a year.
In Chicago, where Cornelius’s Soul Train debuted locally in 1970, the Al Benson Show and Richard Stamz’ Open the Door Richard, both had brief periods of success in the 1950s. Black deejays in other cities also made the transition to television in the 1950s and 1960s. Bob King’s Teenarama Dance Party achieved success in Washington DC, while deejay J.D. Lewis hosted the longest running local dance show, Teenage Frolics, in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1958 to 1983. In my research for The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia, I also uncovered The Mitch Thomas Show, a black teen dance show that started broadcasting to the Philadelphia region in 1955, fifteen years before Soul Train.
These locally produced black music television shows were particularly important in the 1950s and 1960s because American Bandstand, television’s most popular music program of the era, used racially discriminatory admissions policies to keep black teenager dancers out of the studio and off of American television screens. As rhythm and blues and became a dominant musical form in America, American Bandstand elected to travel what Los Angeles deejay Johnny Otis called the “lily-white Jim Crow route.”
Like American Bandstand’s host Dick Clark, Don Cornelius profited from bringing black music to television. These commercial goals made Clark and Cornelius rivals throughout much of their careers. In 1973, for example, when Soul Train started to draw many of the top black R&B performers and competed with American Bandstand for viewers on Saturday afternoons, Clark developed Soul Unlimited, which broadcast in place of American Bandstand every fourth Saturday on ABC. Cornelius felt that Soul Unlimited was a blatant attempt to push Soul Train off the air and with the help of Rev. Jesse Jackson and Operation PUSH, successfully persuaded ABC and Clark to drop the show.
For Cornelius, keeping Soul Train on the air was both a commercial and a political goal. He viewed Soul Train as an important step toward securing more black-oriented, black-produced, and black-owned media. While the dance moves, fashion, and Afros on Soul Train received most of the attention, Cornelius needs to be remembered as the first host to sustain a nationally broadcast black music television program. Viewing Cornelius as part of a generation of black broadcast pioneers makes it clear what a remarkable accomplishment this was.
Matt Delmont
 Every publisher, at least on some level, would like to think that the books they publish are essential. But, really, how often does this happen and when it does, how do you know?
Well, one good sign is looking at what others have said about your work:
“A book that will stand for many years as the ultimate reference and guide to California flora. . . . A miracle of descriptive botany.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“This is one remarkable cutting-edge flora. Put it on your shelf, peruse it and abuse it, fondle it, learn from it. But most importantly, do yourself a favor—buy it!”—American Society of Plant Taxonomists
“California’s extraordinary flora is described in contemporary detail in this handy volume, which should prove an inspiration to all of those interested in these plants, their habitats, and their importance to a state richer in botanical diversity than any other part of the United States. This is a thorough revision of an indispensable book.”—Peter H. Raven, Missouri Botanical Garden
They are, of course, talking about The Jepson Manual: Vascular Plants of California. The second edition of The Jepson Manual thoroughly updates this acclaimed work, the single most comprehensive resource on California’s amazingly diverse flora. The Jepson Manual, second edition, integrates the latest science with the results of intensive fieldwork, institutional collaboration, and efforts of hundreds of contributing authors into an essential reference on California’s native and naturalized vascular plants.
The second edition includes treatments of many newly described or discovered taxa and recently introduced plants, and reflects major improvements to plant taxonomy from phylogenetic studies. Nearly two-thirds of the 7,600 species, subspecies, and varieties the volume describes are now illustrated with diagnostic drawings. Geographic distributions, elevation ranges, flowering times, nomenclature, and the status of non-natives and native taxa of special concern have all been updated throughout. This edition also allows for identification of 240 alien taxa that are not fully naturalized but sometimes encountered. A new chapter on geologic, climatic, and vegetation history of California is also featured.
The Jepson Manual, second edition is available now directly through us and many other fine booksellers.
AND, if you order before February 14, 2012 and use source code: 12W7219, you’ll get a 20% discount.
 English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree.
Here’s an interview with the author with questions posed by U.C. Berkeley Professor Vasudha Dalmia, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor in South and Southeast Asian Studies:
VD: You grew up in Los Angeles, studied in Berkeley and SOAS; it would be easy to imagine that you would become interested in Anglophone literature and explore its antecedents. What moved you to write on English and Hindi?
RS: I had been exposed to Hindi through my family and relatives growing up and on visits to Delhi, and was always aware that if I had been growing up in India rather than in the U.S. I would have had a much more naturally multilingual life. I think that prompted me to take Hindi as an undergraduate at Berkeley, and then in my last year of college, I took a course on Indian women writers where most of what we read was in translation, not only from Hindi, but also Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Kannada and others. This was the early 1990s and the “boom” in Indian fiction was in full swing. But, as we know, this was an English-only phenomenon. It seemed to me that something was missing. I knew from all the time I had spent in Delhi that the languages around me, at home and in the street, were Hindi and Punjabi. I wanted to find out what got lost – not in translation, but in transnational literary production. Why was India only being represented by English? Surely this writing existed in a multilingual context, but looking at how Indian novels in English were read and received in the U.S. and the U.K., you would never know it.
VD: Do you feel you have to defend the place of English in India?
RS: Not at all. Just about everyone will agree that English is a language of opportunity, aspiration, and exclusion – and not only in India, but in many parts of the world. There is a hierarchy of languages in different Indian contexts, depending on the languages in use, but even these hierarchies shift according to different situations. English is the language of the elite, but it can also be an underdog at times. Hindi is also a language of elites in that there is an elite discourse in Hindi. But Hindi is also popular in a way English is most certainly not. And yet, English more and more is “popularly” desired. It is a complex situation that seems simple on the surface. That’s what drew me to write about it.
VD: Of the various situations and people you encountered in the years you worked on this project, which do you think provided you with the most immediate insight into the Hindi-English relationship in the nation’s capital?
RS: Actually there is no one person or situation that encapsulates the relationship for me. What was fascinating for me while I was doing my research was how each person I spoke to offered a different angle on the question of language politics based on his or her work and personal history. Geetanjali Shree showed me a novelist’s intimacy with language and emotion, whereas the bookseller Amar Varma shed light on what it meant to promote Hindi books internationally. Ashok and Arun Maheshwari and then Ravi Dayal made the worlds of Hindi and English publishing appear like completely different ones with different histories, yet operating side-by-side. Ashok Vajpeyi and K. Satchidanandan were fascinating to listen to because they understood the politics of the multilingual literary landscape and helped shape them, yet as poets, they were also incredibly sensitive to the wide gap between the world of politics and that of contemplation and creativity. I was intrigued by how they dwelled in that gap.
VD: Alok Rai, in his widely acclaimed Hindi Nationalism, dealt with quite another aspect of Hindi, the relationship of official “Hindi” to Hindi, as actually spoken. How do you place your work vis-à-vis his?
RS: Alok’s book was foundational for me; it came out during my first major research stint in 2001 and became a kind of intellectual guidebook I toted around. It brought the political and cultural history of the Hindi-Urdu divide that Amrit Rai and Christopher King had written about in regards to the 19th and early 20th centuries, into the post-Independence context – with such passion and sense of immediacy. My book looks at the competition between English and Hindi elites from an ethnographic view. I interview figures from Delhi’s literary establishment and place them in relation to one another and the larger field of literature and politics. Perhaps because of my insider-outsider perspective, these figures stood out for me, even though they are mostly known and regularly featured in the Indian press. I make the ideologies that Alok Rai maps out come alive through contemporary figures in the literary world. In the process, some of these ideologies get refined, re-tuned, debunked, or emboldened, enabling me to make new arguments about such vexing topics as cultural authenticity, literary nationality, and the postcolonial / global status of English.
VD: Could you say something about the range of authors whose works you analyze? What moved you to include the works of Chetan Bhagat, a writer who would ordinarily be excluded from the galaxy?
RS: The texts I write about emerge from what I saw and experienced “on the ground.” My book begins with me reading the slush pile at Granta in London, since that is how I very literally found my subject. In India, it was seeing books being sold on pavements and at stoplights that initially brought me into the realities of language, class, and caste. Living in Old Delhi for a time made me reflect more deeply on Delhi’s linguistic history and led me to write about Twilight in Delhi and In Custody. I wrote about the Hindi translation of A Suitable Boy (“Koi Accha-sa Ladka”) because it came up in a debate I witnessed at the Sahitya Akademi. I conclude the book by reflecting on Chetan Bhagat because it is impossible to ignore the impact he’s had on English in a popular context. His books draw readers into the “having made it” world of IITs, and aspirational worlds of call centers, bank jobs, and love marriages, through a more simple, manageable English. My book is motivated by the story of English vis-à-vis Hindi and the bhashas more generally, and Bhagat’s novels speak to that. I was also teaching at IIT Delhi when I wrote the conclusion to the book, so I was thinking about my students and the range of Englishes they spoke.
 It’s been two decades since Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa jumped the fence at the U.S.-Mexico border and labored as a migrant farmworker in southern California. Today, he is one of the foremost neurosurgeons in the country and renowned for his cutting edge research to cure brain cancer. But how did he get to where he is?
Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon, tells the story of his odyssey—from his impoverished childhood in the tiny village of Palaco, Mexico, to his harrowing border crossing and his transformation from illegal immigrant to American citizen and gifted student at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard Medical School.
Packed with adventure and adversity—including a few terrifying brushes with death— Becoming Dr. Q is also a story about the importance of family, of mentors, and of giving people a chance. Dr. Q’s story exemplifies our human potential for success, perseverance, and compassion and provides a truly inspiring account of the importance of education and access to knowledge.
This short interview with Dr. Q reveals how his upbringing and experiences prepared him for a career in medicine.
Becoming Dr. Q is a perfect example of the exceptional work that is made possible through the work of the UC Press Foundation and donors from all walks of life. We hope that you will consider becoming a member to help give voice to inspiring stories like Dr. Q’s.
Please join now. Through your donation, you will have access to wonderful membership opportunities including discounts on book purchases, invitations to author readings, and more. More importantly, your donation will support intellectually and culturally significant publications that make a difference.
Thank you in advance for your support, and happy holidays!
Alison Mudditt
Director, UC Press
 We’ve just posted the newest episode in our on-going podcast series. In it, podcast producer extraordinaire, Chris Gondek, interviews Julie Guthman about her amazing book, Weighing In.
Rather than go on about what I think about her thought provoking look at issues around what has come to be called the obesity epidemic, here are some reviews the book has already garnered:
“A bold, compelling challenge to conventional thinking about obesity and its fixes, Weighing In is one of the most important books on food politics to hit the shelves in a long time.” —Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History
“Weighing In is filled with counterintuitive surprises that should make us skeptics of all kinds of food — whether local, fast, slow, junk or health — but also gives us the practical tools to effectively scrutinize the stale buffet of popularly-accepted health wisdom before we digest it.” —Paul Robbins, professor of Geography and Development, University of Arizona
“If you liked Michael Pollan, this should be your next read. Guthman gives us the research behind the questions we should be asking, but, falling all over ourselves in the rush to consensus, we have overlooked. A self-described Berkeley foodie, Guthman takes on the self-satisfaction of the alternative food movement and places it in rich context, drawing on research in health, economics, labor, agriculture, sociology, and politics. This marvelous, surprising book is a true game-changer in our national conversation about food and justice.” —Anna Kirkland, author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood
Far be it for me to seem like I’m bragging, so here’s our history editor, Niels Hooper, with the good news:
Dear all,
UC Press has won 4 of the major prizes at the largest and most prestigious annual history conference, the American Historical Association. This is a remarkable success for any press. History is a massive field with all major university and trade presses publishing competitively in it (there are 125 presses exhibiting at this year’s meeting). Only two of these are mine … two are Reed’s … so I can brag on his behalf.
The winners are:
 The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab by Farina Mir won the John F. Richards Prize for the most distinguished book of the year on South Asian History.
Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic by James H. Johnson won the George L. Mosse Prize for the most “outstanding major work of extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity and originality in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe after the Renaissance.”
 Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America by Leslie J. Reagan won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for the best book in Women’s History.
 Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010 by Carol Benedict won the John K. Fairbanks Prize for the most outstanding book in the history of East Asia after 1800.
Congratulations to everyone who worked on these.
Thanks, Niels
As the Occupy movement continues to grow and influence the global economic debate, two of our editors came forward with what titles they would recommend people consider if they want to gain perspective on the issues behind the debate. If you have any UC Press titles you’d like to add to the list, please us know in the comments.
From Naomi Schneider, Executive Editor:
 Rallying for Immigrant Rights: The Fight for Inclusion in 21st Century America edited by Kim Voss and Irene Bloemraad
 Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression by Dale Maharidge and photographs by Michael S. Williamson, with a foreword by Bruce Springsteen
 The Activist’s Handbook: A Primer, Updated Edition with a New Preface by Randy Shaw
 Changing Inequality by Rebecca Blank
 Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged by Katherine S. Newman and Rourke O’Brien
From Niels Hooper, History Editor-
 The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige
 The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All by Peter Linebaugh
 Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice, A new direction for labor by two of its leading activist intellectuals by Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin
 Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics by Rebecca Solnit
 The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 by Immanuel Wallerstein
University of California Press is partnering with Oxford University Press to make Scholarly Monographs available via Newly Launched Platform.
Details are on the pdf attached to this link.
This is best left in the words of Scott Norton, our Director of Editing, Design and Production:
Folks:
I’m proud to announce that four of our books have recently won two prestigious design awards.
Infinite City, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Culinary Ephemera, and The Exultant Ark have all received awards at the 37th Bookbuilders West Book Show.
Infinite City is also one of the winners in AIGA’s 50 Book/50 Covers 2011 Competition. You may not have heard of 50 Books/50 Covers before, but these selections exemplify the best current work in book design as chosen by a distinguished jury of design peers. Founded in 1914, the American Institute of Graphic Arts remains the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design.
Please join me in congratulating the designers and their team members! They are:
 Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Sponsor: Niels Hooper
Designer: Lia Tjandra
PC: Sam Rosenthal
PE: Dore Brown
 The Autobiography of Mark Twain
Editors: Harriet E. Smith et al
Sponsor: Laura Cerruti
Designer: Sandy Drooker
PC: Sam Rosenthal
PE: Marilyn Schwartz
 Culinary Ephemera
Author: William Woys Weaver
Sponsor: Sheila Levine
Designer: Claudia Smelser
PC: Pam Augspurger
PE: Dore Brown
 The Exultant Ark
Author: Jonathan Balcombe
Sponsor: Hannah Love
Designer: Lia Tjandra
PC: Sam Rosenthal
PE: Dore Brown
Before I begin, I’m going to ask y’all a question as you read through this post: What are you looking for in a podcast?
First up, we have The Art of Eating Cookbook: Essential Recipes from the First 25 Years. From his first newsletter, issued in 1986, through today’s beautiful full-color magazine, Edward Behr has offered companionship and creativity to avid culinary enthusiasts, including some of America’s most famous chefs. This book collects the best recipes of the magazine’s past twenty-five years—from classic appetizer and vegetable side dishes to meat entrees and desserts. In this podcast, Chris Gondek gets Edward to open up about how he started The Art of Eating 25 years ago, some of the challenges he faced and how the magazine changed over time.
Beyond a single book, our second podcast is really talking about a new way to study history. The book is Deep History: The Architechture of Past and Present by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail.
Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was discovered. In the podcast, co-author Andrew Shryock talks about this breakthrough book, as important for readers interested in the present as in the past, brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Deep History invites scholars and general readers alike to explore the dynamic of connectedness that spans all of human history.
Getting back to my original question, I really would love to hear what you think about our podcasts, if there’s anything we haven’t covered in either theme or specific title or, well, anything else you’d like to hear. Please email any and all of this to manderson@ucpress.edu. Thanks.
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