Judith Lynne Hanna has visited many exotic-dance clubs around the world where “I would feel comfortable dancing—if I could wear the high heels. And I was younger.”

As she says so, the veteran scholar, now in her mid-70s, laughs at the idea. But it’s clear from our talk that moral reservations wouldn’t stop her.

Heels of four inches or more are a stripper’s go-to footwear. Hanna describes their hazards, and much else, in her new book, Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, and a Christian Right, just out from the University of Texas Press.

Hanna, a former Los Angeles high-school civics teacher with a master’s degree in political science and a doctorate in anthropology, is a longtime dancer (modern) who has published numerous books as well as hundreds of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles. Now an affiliate senior research scientist in anthropology at the…

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For admirers of John Steinbeck’s fiction, a new volume of his newspaper columns may come as a shock.

Between December 1966 and May 1967 the then-64-year-old writer contributed 58 columns on the Vietnam war to Newsday, the Long Island, NY, newspaper. In them, the 1962 Nobel Laureate in literature came out strongly in favor of American actions in Southeast Asia.

Reporting from various theaters of the war, Steinbeck had 400,000 readers at Newsday, and millions more at the 29 other papers that syndicated his columns.  Now, as its lead title this season, the University of Virginia Press has issued Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War. This is the first collection of the columns and their first publication in 40 years. The dispatches “infuriated the doves and delighted the hawks,” says Thomas E. Barden, the collection’s editor and a professor of English and dean of the…

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Patrick White was cranky enough while alive, so will he be grumbling in his grave about what a Sydney academic and colleagues have gone and done?

Last week, they published, with Knopf Australia, The Hanging Garden, a novel fragment that the 1973 Nobel Laureate in literature told his literary executor to burn.

White has joined an impressive group of writers countermanded in that way by their heirs and representatives, among them Jane Austen, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Roberto Bolaño, and David Foster Wallace.

Patrick White is Australia’s only Nobelist in literature (save for 2003 laureate J.M. Coetzee, a South African naturalized as Australian in 2006). He lived from 1912 to 1990, and before he died, he gave his executor, Barbara Mobbs, instructions to destroy anything he left behind. He had, however, earlier assured archivists at the…

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The publishing phenomenon that is Willis Barnstone is too busy to pause just because another of his books is fresh off the presses.

As his The Poems of Jesus Christ, from Norton, makes its way to readers, he is finishing up another book for publication this summer, from Black Widow Press, The ABC of Translation. It will encapsule his more than 60 years of thinking about the art.

Also near completion is Ways of Ecstasy, his study of the writing process as one of standing outside oneself—the meaning of “ecstasy”—whether in passion, dreaming, mysticism, oblivion, or even hatred. A major expansion of his 1983 book, Poetics of Ecstasy, it has new chapters on the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, and Dante from whom Kerouac, “on the road,” drew so much.

Ways runs to 600 pages. Volume has never been a problem for Barnstone. Apparently, less and…

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At a whopping 752 pages, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition sums up all that Robert N. Proctor has discovered about the leaf he loathes.

The historian of science has long been committed to uncovering what the American tobacco industry knew—and when—about the harmful effects of its products.

Proctor’s prescription: Rather than concentrate on educating the public about tobacco’s dangers, eliminate the product.

“We ban lead paint, and children’s toys that can be swallowed, and asbestos insulation,” the Stanford University professor says in a phone interview. “But the biggest killer in the history of human civilization, we tolerate.”

His tome, just out from the University of California Press, contains reams of the information he relies on when testifying in smokers’ law suits against tobacco companies—dozens of …

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Last year The Baffler was thrown a lifeline, allowing the revival of the feisty but struggling journal of political, social, and cultural affairs.

The publication, a favorite among many academics, entered into an agreement with MIT Press that guaranteed $500,000 over five years, enough not only to run and publish the periodical, but to permit two other notable changes.

First, The Baffler would appear not at bafflingly irregular intervals, as it most often had since its first issue in 1988. Second, it would pay its authors, a rarity in the world of small-circulation journals.

Now, The Baffler is back. Its first issue under the MIT imprint goes out to subscribers and shops on March 15.

Not content to be fed by the institutional hand of MIT, the journal bites that appendage. In an almost derisive article, Will Boisvert rubbishes MIT’s Media Lab as more fabled than fantastic,…

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If you spend much of your time inspecting, testing, and diagnosing human genitalia, it’s not far to thinking about what their owners do with them.

For Mels van Driel, a consultant urologist and sexologist at Groningen University Medical Center, in the Netherlands, the result is his new book, With the Hand: A History of Masturbation, due out next month from Reaktion books. But the consultant urologist and sexologist at Groningen University Medical Center, in the Netherlands, packs a wealth of other tidbits into his amble through the literature, medical and otherwise.

When his stethoscope is about his neck, the M.D. employs all the unvarnished plainspokenness of any health-care professional. But when he entertains historical, literary, and other arts-and-humanities perspectives, he is as curious and open to surprise as any cultural critic.

Enhancing his book’s charm is that van …

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Was President George W. Bush not as bad as his countless critics have painted him?

Stephen F. Knott thinks the 43rd president doesn’t deserve his reputation among many Americans as “the worst president in history,” leader of a rogue, scofflaw administration.

At least, says Knott, a professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College, whether Bush was that flawed cannot yet be properly judged, as many relevant facts remain unknowable or unrevealed.

So Knott argues in his sure-to-be-contested Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, just out from the University Press of Kansas. In it, he takes on Bush’s critics—the ones who say that in waging a “war on terror” he tore up the Constitution by imposing such measures as torture, rendition, and imprisonment of people branded as enemy combatants; that he used…

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Just in time for the 2012 electoral silly season comes an old text, newly translated, with timeless advice for those who would rule.

Among its pearls of swinedom, offered with not even a pause over self-contradiction: Flatter voters grandly, but beware, “politics is full of deceit, treachery, and betrayal.”

Quintus Tullius Cicero set down that and other advice for his big brother, Marcus Tullius Cicero, in 64 BC. Quintus was trying to help Marcus, perhaps Rome’s greatest orator, win election to one of two annual consulships of Rome, the state’s supremely powerful top post.

Quintus’ counsel took the form of a punchy, you’re-just-going-to-have-to-man-up letter. And it suggests that little is new in political thrust and parry: Nothing the younger Cicero told his brother has lost any currency—at all. Statesmen considered shameless flattery to be effectively deceitful the…

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All budding authors with hopes of fame would do well to befriend someone like William Jay Smith—someone who goes on to write numerous books, becomes his country’s poet laureate, and is still writing strongly as he approaches age 93.

In My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams, just out from the University Press of Mississippi,  one of America’s greatest playwrights receives a fine testimonial from a fellow author who knew him in his years as an apprentice writer.

Their friendship began when the two young men were undergraduates at Washington University, and organized a writers’ coterie in St. Louis, surrounding themselves with others aspiring to their chosen trade. At that time, Williams’s primary objective was to excel in poetry, even more than in theater.

Smith had been born into a Southern family that had no intention of producing a writer son, even…

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