Karin Vaneker, a writer and activist in the Netherlands, has been helping me by tackling subjects that haven’t yet attracted much scholarly research for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability. She’s written, for example, on including composting and community gardens - important, relevant, and yet somehow a little too close to home for
W E B Du Bois, a great US intellectual & civil rights activist, grew up right here in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I can think of no more appropriate way to affirm that Black Lives Matter than to quote some passages by Du Bois today. I’ve been browsing his writings, and am astonished at their range.
“I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation which began the freeing of American Negro Slaves.” That sentence begins the autobiography of the extraordinary intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963). William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was one of the most
When I moved back to America in 1992, I brought two small children, a desk that had belonged to T. S. Eliot, and a whole lot of books. The kids came with me, by plane, but the books and the desk went by boat. The kids and I had dropped into rural life in upstate New
I write today to share the sad news that William H. (Bill) McNeill died on Friday, 8 July 2016. He was 98 years old, and rooting for Roger Federer at Wimbledon right until the end. Bill and I worked together for many years, and he was the senior editor of Berkshire's major publication, the Berkshire Encyclopedia
From left: Susan Schwab Carla Hills, Barbara Franklin, and Stephen Orlins On Tuesday, 6 June 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to become the presidential candidate of one of our two major parties. This is historic, as the press keeps telling us, but we should remember that many other countries have, or
Berkshire Publishing is delighted to announce the launch of Berkshire Bookworld, a podcast series of interviews with authors around the world, hosted by Berkshire's CEO Karen Christensen. In the first group of podcasts, available at our website and on iTunes, you'll hear from Professor Kerry Brown in London about biographical writing, Professor Colin Mackerras in Beijing about
Kerry Brown talks about the massive and overwhelmingly ambitious Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography – the first work of its kind in over a century. Brown explains his lifelong interest in biography and presents Chinese biography as a uniquely useful way to get a handle on historical events over long periods of time. He and publisher
Book fairs are one of the dumber traditions of our hidebound industry. CEOs hate them. I don’t mean only CEOs of smaller independent presses, but people who run big publishing companies; I’ve known a couple of such people well enough for them to tell me that they wish they didn’t have to waste so much money on
It is the golden season, when the Berkshire Hills light up with flaming reds and golds and tawny oranges, but I am in Frankfurt, Germany, for the famous book fair that began in the 17th century. Mar Kaiser, the Berkshire editor who manages our China projects from the lovely city of Heidelberg, Germany, joined me for a number
