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James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?: This is a book about the various attempts to unseat William Shakespeare as the author of Shakespeare’s plays, by a serious Shakespeare scholar. Shapiro argues that people—other authors—started expressing uncertainty at the historical point at which autobiography became ascendant, and when writing became understood as predominantly the expression of the artist’s own experiences. It’s the alleged poverty of Shakespeare’s experiences and education that made it hard for skeptics to accept that he could have written the plays. Shapiro suggests that Francis Bacon was first proposed as the bearer of sufficient erudition and nobility, while the Earl of Oxford became popular as psychological accounts of meaning became more popular than political ones. In the end, Shapiro argues, though Shakespeare often collaborated, the contemporary evidence is quite convincing that he wrote the plays attributed to him, and those who argue otherwise ignore the power of the imagination: Shakespeare didn’t have to be a king or a wizard or a murderer or anyone else in his plays to conceive of what they would be like. Side note: the Amazon reviews of the book are hilarious, because so many of the reviewers are arguing about who wrote Shakespeare rather than about Shapiro’s argument about the meaning of contesting authorship.
Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee: An excellent collection of interdisciplinary writing on IP. Fairly heavy on patents, but even those tend to be interesting—there’s even a piece on the role of patent drawings in constructing the ideal patent reader. A lot of the pieces are shortened versions of articles available elsewhere and/or online (Tarleton Gillespie’s great work on copyright education campaigns, Chris Sprigman & Dotan Oliar on stand-up comedians and IP norms, Peter Jaszi on postmodern copyright, Cori Hayden’s "No Patent, No Generic: Pharmaceutical Access and the Politics of the Copy," Lawrence Liang on the figure of the pirate, etc.).
John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War: Dower investigates how the racial beliefs of Americans and Japanese contributed to the ferocity of WWII in the Pacific. Both sides committed atrocities, often aided by the belief that the other was a savage race. The Japanese portrayed the Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch as venal, brutish, and impure; Americans saw the Japanese as vicious animals in need of extermination (with an interlude in which the Japanese were also frightening supermen, cunning and free of individual desire for life). Japanese soldiers massacred civilians and mistreated prisoners of war, and treated other Asians terribly because of an official ideology that the Japanese were to be the master/father race, while American soldiers took souvenirs of bones, teeth, and even skulls from the Japanese they killed—a picture of a woman with the skull her fiance sent her appeared in Life, and then reappeared in Japanese propaganda to demonstrate that Japan was in a fight to the death. Dower argues that the racial ideology of both sides was highly similar (though Japanese propagandists didn’t consistently use the animal imagery of the Americans, and focused more on Japanese purity/superiority than American inferiority). He also suggests that the war shows both how easily race hate can be stirred up and how it can, at least for a time, be ratcheted down, given how readily most Japanese accepted American occupation.
Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee: An excellent collection of interdisciplinary writing on IP. Fairly heavy on patents, but even those tend to be interesting—there’s even a piece on the role of patent drawings in constructing the ideal patent reader. A lot of the pieces are shortened versions of articles available elsewhere and/or online (Tarleton Gillespie’s great work on copyright education campaigns, Chris Sprigman & Dotan Oliar on stand-up comedians and IP norms, Peter Jaszi on postmodern copyright, Cori Hayden’s "No Patent, No Generic: Pharmaceutical Access and the Politics of the Copy," Lawrence Liang on the figure of the pirate, etc.).
John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War: Dower investigates how the racial beliefs of Americans and Japanese contributed to the ferocity of WWII in the Pacific. Both sides committed atrocities, often aided by the belief that the other was a savage race. The Japanese portrayed the Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch as venal, brutish, and impure; Americans saw the Japanese as vicious animals in need of extermination (with an interlude in which the Japanese were also frightening supermen, cunning and free of individual desire for life). Japanese soldiers massacred civilians and mistreated prisoners of war, and treated other Asians terribly because of an official ideology that the Japanese were to be the master/father race, while American soldiers took souvenirs of bones, teeth, and even skulls from the Japanese they killed—a picture of a woman with the skull her fiance sent her appeared in Life, and then reappeared in Japanese propaganda to demonstrate that Japan was in a fight to the death. Dower argues that the racial ideology of both sides was highly similar (though Japanese propagandists didn’t consistently use the animal imagery of the Americans, and focused more on Japanese purity/superiority than American inferiority). He also suggests that the war shows both how easily race hate can be stirred up and how it can, at least for a time, be ratcheted down, given how readily most Japanese accepted American occupation.
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