Smart Books For the Rest of Us
by Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 9/26/2005
W.W. Norton is planning to launch a new book series that will examine important contemporary social and critical ideas and be written by a lineup of prominent academics and intellectuals.
Conceived by Norton executive editor Robert Weil and Roby Harrington, director of Norton's college division, the series is called the Issues of Our Time. The ubiquitous public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, chair of the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard, will edit the series.
Norton will release three books a year in the series, beginning in January 2006 with Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Princeton philosophy professor. Following in February will be Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways by outspoken defense lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz and in March, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Nobel economics laureate Amartya Sen.
Despite the books' lofty themes, Norton is aiming the works, relatively short at 250 pages, at a general reader, in both the general trade and the education market. Gates said the series offered "clarity without shying away from complexity."
Similar in tone to the short, popularized nonfiction published by Walker & Co. and Discoveries, another Norton series, which examines scientific breakthroughs, Issues of Our Time titles are distinguished by the wide range of issues and topics the books will address. Gates also emphasized accessibility and quipped, "If you can't explain literary theory to your mom or your dad, you probably don't understand it anyway."
