The Scholarly Publishing Scene — The 2022 PROSE Awards by Myer Kutz (President, Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) <myerkutz@aol.com>
B
ooks have power. They can make you laugh or cry. They can make you cringe. They can horrify you. They can sell you new ideas, good or evil. They can make you change your mind about something. They can make people so crazy, even, or especially, if they haven’t read them, that they demand their removal from classrooms and library shelves. If that’s not enough, ban them outright! Burn them! No more having your cherished beliefs challenged! OK, I admit it. Some books make me very uncomfortable. Some of them are supposed to. Some of them preach to a choir different from the one I belong to, a choir that seeks to harm me and those whom I care about. Does that mean I should try to prevent other people from reading these difficult (for me) books? I have a hard time with that concept. Besides, I love reading books. I love reading lengthy book reviews. I love talking about books with a friend in his nineties who used to teach philosophy. Every January, I get to talk about books with my fellow PROSE Awards judges. The books competing for prizes are all challenging. They instruct, enlighten, and provoke. Some might make some people feel uncomfortable, and some years, those are the books that capture the judges’ imaginations. PROSE Awards (just Google for more information) deals with professional and scholarly books (as well as electronic products and journals). The program, forty-six years old, is run by the Association of American Publishers. It’s like a professional and scholarly version of, say, the National Books “The books Awards, but with arguably more competing for interesting winners. To me, at prizes are all least. And because National Book challenging. Awards winners are almost always They instruct, published by trade houses, they receive more publicity than PROSE enlighten, and Awards winners, which are published provoke. Some mainly by university presses and commercial STM houses, which might make newspapers, radio, television, and, some people feel probably, most of social media uncomfortable, and, therefore. much of the general public usually ignore, unless there’s and some a juicy scandal of some sort. years, those
are the books that capture the judges’ imaginations.”
This past Januar y, twentyfour PROSE judges reviewed and discussed a total of 560 entries, published in 2021, spread across over three dozen disciplines and formats. In deference to COVID and scheduling conflicts, discussions were conducted over Zoom and spread over more than a week. The inimitable Syreeta Swann, aided by Nadia Mathis, ran the program and set up the sessions. As they did last year, they went off perfectly.
The plan was to distribute entries and materials to judges electronically, so PDFs were to be read on screen. Now, I do read fiction and general non-fiction on my iPad’s Kindle App. But I had a hard time reviewing high-level mathematics books
Against the Grain / April 2022
on screen. PDFs of Popular Science and Mathematics books, my other category, were easier to deal with. Because I got fewer popular books and the same small number of mathematics books as usual, I asked for print copies of everything. Probably because of COVID, warehouses weren’t operating as usual, I didn’t receive all the books I asked for (but I did receive three books, two of which were ineligible because of publication years, that I didn’t request). Once the winners in each category are selected, they’re grouped into four overarching categories. From the four ultimate winners, the best-in-show, the R.R. Hawkins Award, named for the legendary post-World-War-II head of science and technology at the New York Public Library, is chosen. I asked the judges who presided over entries that won the top four book awards and the innovative journal award to describe the winners. Let’s start with the winner of the Award for Excellence in Humanities, which the judges moved up to the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award. This book happened to be in the purview of PROSE Awards chief judge, Nigel Fletcher-Jones (University of Cairo Press, retired). He describes a terrific book that could make some people uncomfortable: “Every so often a PROSE Award submission comes along that shouts out to the judges, ‘this is a story that absolutely needed to be told.’ Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke University Press) by NYU Professor Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is one of them. The book clearly illustrates Faulkner’s famous line, ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Experiments in Skin is a finely written amalgam of ethnography, military history, chemistry, and biomedicine that illuminates the links between the substantial modern day ‘cosmeceutical’ industry in Vietnam; the Vietnam War and its continuing toxic aftermath in the form of dioxin in the food chain; and the racist history of dermatological experimentation in both the U.S. and Vietnam that occurred around that war and continues to resonate to this day.” The winner of the Award for Excellence in Social Sciences, another book that could make some people uncomfortable, is described by Ilene Kalish (NYU Press): “Even with only 4% of the world’s population, America, with 25% of the world’s prisoners, is the world’s number one jailer. Of the roughly 2 million men and women behind bars, 40% are black and 84% are poor, so 95% of cases end in a plea deal, not because 95% of people ensnared in the criminal justice system are guilty, but because many of them lack resources or time to spend on ‘waiting for their day in court.’ And once someone agrees to a felony conviction the ‘afterlife’ of punishments goes well beyond a prison term. Rights are curtailed by the way the criminal justice system operates as a a
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