University Press Roundup: Mingus, Barbecue, Obama, a Gay Gatsby, and More.

Our weekly roundup of some of the best from university press blogs:

Like barbecue? Looking for a summer vacation? The University of Texas Press’s Barbecue Crossroads: Notes and Recipes from a Southern Odyssey recounts the authors’ enlightening journey as well as conveying their experiences through gorgeous photographs and recipes picked up along the way.

John S. W. Park, author of Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem examines the ways in which issues of race that haunted Mark Twain’s novel are still very much with twenty-first century America. (via Temple University Press’s North Philly Notes)

Forty years ago, all the residents of the tiny island of Chagos were forcibly reported to make room for a U.S. military base. Michael Vine, author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia follows up on their story at the Princeton University Press blog.

It’s summer. It’s Friday. Allow yourself to procrastinate. Allow Oxford University Press to help.

Sue V. Rosser, author of Breaking into the Lab: Engineering Progress for Women in Science, on the place of women in the IT and patenting industries via New York University Press’s From the Square.

At the University of North Carolina Press blog, Michael Hunt looks at Obama’s recent foreign policy shifts and his failures and successes thus far.

The links between the works and ideas of science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem and philosopher Henri Bergson are explored by Joanna Zylinska, translator of Lem’s Summa Technologiae, at the University of Minnesota Press
blog.

Maria San Filippo asks whether Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is gay enough at the Indiana University Press blog.

The publication of the DSM-5 has brought a not unexpected degree of hand-wringing about the state of American psychiatry and the American psyche. At the Harvard University Press blog, Richard Noll, author of American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, explores the deficiency of public understanding of mental disorders and their treatment.

The University of California Press blog has a great podcast interview with John Goodman, author of Mingus Speaks, a collection of interviews with Charles Mingus.