Rice University Press Catalog

Marcia Brennan, Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson (2009). For years, the work of Elliot Wolfson (one of the world’s leading scholars of Jewish mysticism) has been taking the form of poetry and painting, and he has composed a compelling, mysterious body of such work that calls not only for serious treatment by critics and scholars, but also for new critical genres. With Flowering Light, Marcia Brennan takes just such a bold, imaginative step. The first to examine Wolfson’s scholarship, poetry, and painting as a single, integrated body of work, Brennan also effectively invents a new form of scholarship. Flowering Light is at once a critical work—an explication of the scholarly, painted, and poetic works of Wolfson—and a mystifying, mystical work of art in its own right: “a work of conceptual art,” in the author’s own words, “that resonates with the capacity of mystical envisioning to create imaginative worlds.”

Stephen A. Fredericks, The New York Etching Club Minutes: November 12, 1877 through December 8, 1893 (2009). The last half of the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous artistic ferment in New York. By the end of the century, the city had emerged as one of the great arts centers in the world. Artists of the time were constantly forming collaborative organizations to help them promote their work and to learn how to use the endless new technologies that were emerging at the time. One of the foremost groups of the 1880s was the New York Etching Club, which included among its members some of the foremost painters of the day. Meeting monthly, the group explored the newfound art of etching, producing over a span of some twenty years an impressive array of etchings, and helping develop and define the art of artist printmaking. In The New York Etching Club Minutes, New York artist printmaker Stephen A. Fredericks has reproduced the club's minutes, augmenting them with reproductions of the club members' etchings and abundant annotations—the result of his ten years of research into the New York Etching Club. The result, in the words of New York Public Library Curator of Prints Emerita Roberta Waddell, is "an enlightening study of a largely unsung chapter in nineteenth-century American art history."

I. J. Good, The Good Book: Thirty Years of Comments, Conjectures, and Conclusions (2008). As a child, I.J. Good was a mathematical prodigy; during World War II, he was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park; after the war, he helped lay the intellectual foundation for modern Bayesian statistics. Although his scientific reputation rests on his significant contributions to contingency table analysis, hierarchical modeling, and density estimation, Jack Good’s friends also relish his lighter publications. For more than twenty-five years, he produced an obscure series of columns for the Journal of Statistical Computing and Simulation. This book reprints the first 142 of those. Some are startling, some are recondite, and some will make the reader laugh. Together, they provide a three-dimensional view of one of the most influential minds in twentieth-century statistics.

Herbert L. Fred, MD, MACP, and Hendrik A. van Dijk, Images of Memorable Cases: 50 Years at the Bedside (2007). Widely praised for its unequalled collection of medical images, this book is an indispensable resource for medical professionals and students. Dr. Fred, one of the world's foremost medical educators, presents 154 cases, challenging the reader to make his or her own diagnosis before turning the page to see the actual diagnosis. Images of Memorable Cases has been called "wonderful," "marvelous," "splendid," "beautifully illustrated," and "truly a collector's item" by reviewers. "Medical writers would greatly benefit from having this well-written, exciting book in their medical libraries," says the American Medical Writers Association Journal.

Kevin Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit's Long Struggle for Survival (2008). Mr. Guthrie's exhaustive history is an object lesson in nonprofit governance. Covering everything from budgeting to archival practices, and replete with charts and graphs illustrating investment performance, endowment value, operating budgets, and all manner of nonprofit financial management, The New-York Historical Society tells a riveting story of one nonprofit's life on the edge, while offering invaluable instruction on nonprofit management in general. New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc praises Guthrie's book as "compelling reading. With exceptional lucidity, he tells the complicated history of an important cultural institution, and draws conclusions that will be important for all of us responsible for managing the affairs of our nation's private libraries and museums."

Sarah C. Reynolds, Houston Reflections: Art in the City, 1950s, 60s, and 70s (2008). A collection of thirty-eight interviews with artists and other figures who were instrumental in growing the Houston arts scene from its nascent beginnings to its present-day vitality, Houston Reflections is an important source of information for anyone interested in this city's arts during the thirty years covered in this volume. Alison de Lima Greene, Curator of Contemporary Art & Special Projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, calls the book "an indelible record of this dynamic era...a brilliant archival project that will be a resource for generations to come."

Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann, Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age (2006). A lucid analysis of the daunting problems besetting those writing and trying to publish Art History books in a world where tools both for delivery and for reading are increasingly digital.