Weekly Book List, April 29, 2016

AMERICAN STUDIES

Serious Nonsense: Groundhog Lodges, Versammlinge, and Pennsylvania German Heritage by William W. Donner (Penn State University Press; 164 pages; $29.95). Explores the language and traditions of the Pennsylvania Germans through a study of groundhog lodges and other community events known as versammlinge.

ANTHROPOLOGY

From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat by Andrew B. Kipnis (University of California Press; 280 pages; $70 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Examines the transformation of Zouping, Shandong province, from a town of 30,000 to a city of more than 300,000 between 1988 and 2013.

Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network by Madeline Otis Campbell (Syracuse University Press; 280 pages; $59.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Traces the lives of 12 men and women from young adulthood to their work as interpreters for U.S. forces in Iraq, to resettlement in the United States.

Knowledge in Motion: Constellations of Learning Across Time and Place edited by Andrew P. Roddick and Ann B. Stahl (University of Arizona Press; 309 pages; $65). Writings by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians on “situated learning”; topics include potting practices and social relations in the Niger River region.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Killing Civilization: A Reassessment of Early Urbanism and Its Consequences by Justin Jennings (University of New Mexico Press; 360 pages; $75). Uses data from the New and Old World sites of Catalhoyuk, Cahokia, Harappa, Jenne-jeno, Tiahuanaco, and Monte Alban to develop a new theory of “incipient urbanism.”

The Pueblo Bonito Mounds of Chaco Canyon: Material Culture and Fauna edited by Patricia L. Crown (University of New Mexico Press; 274 pages; $85). Draws on excavations from 2004 to 2007 at the largest of the “great houses” at the prehistoric New Mexico site; includes research on such topics as crafts production, long-distance exchange, and feasting and other ritual behavior.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art and History by Maria Stavrinaki (Stanford University Press; 107 pages; $60 hardcover, $18.95 paperback). Focuses on the work of Dadaists in Berlin as a meditation on history and art.

Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City by Sarah Bassnett (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 228 pages; US$50). Focuses on Arthur Goss, Toronto’s first official photographer, in a study of how photographers and their work figured in early 20th-century debates over the city’s development.

Where Are the Women Architects? by Despina Stratigakos (Princeton University Press; 128 pages; $19.95). Examines factors contributing to the low and stagnating numbers of women in the profession.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution by Benjamin Straumann (Oxford University Press; 414 pages; $85). Traces the content and legacy of the constitutional theory that emerged as Romans sought explain the collapse of the Republic.

Kinyras: The Divine Lyre by John Curtis Franklin (Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, distributed by Harvard University Press; 794 pages; $39.95). A study of the mythical Cypriot king that focuses on his association with ritual music and deified instruments.

The Sublime in Antiquity by James I. Porter (Cambridge University Press; 670 pages; $160). Emphasizes variations on the sublime as it predates Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century by Kate Eichhorn (MIT Press; 201 pages; $26.95). Discusses the use of the photocopy machine---with its original technology---as a tool for artistic creativity and political activism from the early 1970s to the late 90s.

How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe by Ferruh Yilmaz (University of Michigan Press; 288 pages; $80 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Focuses on Danish immigration discourse in a study of the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the ways feminism and other progressive values have been used to further a racist agenda.

Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display by Jennifer Tyburczy (University of Chicago Press; 286 pages; $105 hardcover, $37.50 paperback). Topics include the wider context and significance of cultural battles over the display of sexual imagery, objects, performance, and other phenomena in museums.

ECONOMICS

The Great Debt Transformation: Households, Financialization, and Policy Responses by Gregory W. Fuller (Palgrave Macmillan; 256 pages; $105). Focuses on Britain, France, and Germany.

Money Changes Everything:How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann (Princeton University Press; 584 pages; $35). Examines the role of finance at key moments in history, beginning as the force behind the invention of writing in Mesopotamia.

EDUCATION

When School Policies Backfire: How Well-Intended Measures Can Harm Our Most Vulnerable Students edited by Michael A. Gottfried and Gilberto Q. Conchas (Harvard Education Press; 222 pages; $66 hardcover, $33 paperback). Writings on the unintended consequences of policies that end up damaging the very students they intended to help; topics include accountability, minimum grading, school choice, school closures, and technology.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Toxic Safety: Flame Retardants, Chemical Controversies, and Environmental Health by Alissa Cordner (Columbia University Press; 332 pages; $60). Focuses on the controversy over flame-retardant chemicals in a study of how environmental health risks are defined and contested in the face of scientific uncertainty and competing interests.

FILM STUDIES

Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947-1960 edited by N. Megan Kelley (University Press of Mississippi; 282 pages; $65). Focuses on cinema in a study of the wider fears expressed conveyed in anxieties over passing---including blacks passing as whites, Jews as gentiles, gay people as straight, aliens as humans, and Communists as “good Americans.”

Transactions with the World: Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood by Adam O’Brien (Berghahn Books; 212 pages; $95). Examines the environmental concerns of Chinatown, Nashville, The Wild Bunch, and other films of the late 1960s and early 70s.

FOLKLORE

City of Neighborhoods: Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston by Anthony Bak Buccitelli (University of Wisconsin Press; 237 pages; $65). Examines the symbols, stories, landmarks, and events used by locals to represent the neighborhoods of East Boston, Southie, and North Quincy.

HISTORY

Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics by Li Chen (Columbia University Press; 400 pages; $60). Focuses on Britain in a study of Western perceptions of Chinese law in the century before the First Opium War.

Citizen of a Wider Commonwealth: Ulysses S. Grant’s Postpresidential Diplomacy by Edwina S. Campbell (Southern Illinois University Press; 257 pages; $34.50). Describes the former president’s public diplomacy on a tour through Europe and Asia in 1877-79.

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire by Lauren Janes (Bloomsbury Academic; 220 pages; $112). Examines the wider attitudes signaled by French resistance to the colonial lobby’s promotion of exotic imports.

Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee by Tula A. Connell (University of Illinois Press; 249 pages; $95 hardcover, $30 paperback). Traces the clash between a socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, and business and conservative interests that fought him on housing, integration, and other initiatives.

Desertion in the Early Modern World: A Comparative History edited by Matthias van Rossum and Jeannette Kamp (Bloomsbury Academic; 213 pages; $112 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Essays on such topics as desertion by sailors, soliders, and slaves in the 17th- and 18th-century Dutch Atlantic.

The Desperate Diplomat: Saburo Kurusu’s Memoir of the Weeks Before Pearl Harbor edited by J. Garry Clifford and Masako R. Okura (University of Missouri Press; 176 pages; $35). Draws on both the English and Japanese versions of Kurusu’s memoir to document the special envoy’s diplomatic efforts during a visit to Washington three weeks before the attack.

Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic by Ellen D. Tillman (University of North Carolina Press; 288 pages; $29.95). A study of U.S. interventions in the Dominican Republic; describes how military occupation set the stage for the Trujillo dictatorship.

The Duchy of Warsaw, 1807-1815: A Napoleonic Outpost in Central Europe by Jaroslaw Czubaty, translated by Ursula Phillips (Bloomsbury Academic; 246 pages; $112). Examines the history and impact of a state established by Napoleon in Polish lands ceded by Prussia.

Eisenhower’s Guerrillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France by Benjamin F. Jones (Oxford University Press; 384 pages; $29.99). A study of the Jedburghs, teams of three officers each—British, American, and Free French—who were parachuted into occupied France after D-Day to coordinate operations with the French Resistance, or Maquis.

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy edited by Galen Brokaw and Jongsoo Lee (University of Arizona Press; 312 pages; $60). Essays on the life, work and legacy of the controversial Mexican historian (d. 1648).

A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830--1941 by John M. Rhea (University of Oklahoma Press; 293 pages; $34.95). Discusses Helen Hunt Jackson, Louise Phelps Kellogg, Angie Debo, and six other female scholars key to the historiography of American Indians.

Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire by Allyson M. Poska (University of New Mexico Press; 278 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Focuses on women in a study of an ill-fated effort by the Spanish Crown to send peasants from northern Spain to South America, with the initial idea of having them settle in the remote southern coastal region of Patagonia.

The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture by Pamela Haag (Basic Books; 448 pages; $29.99). Draws on the archives of the Winchester Company in a study of how, beginning in the 19th century, America was sold its gun culture by manufacturers and marketers.

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America by Kali Nicole Gross (Oxford University Press; 220 pages; $24.95). Discusses an 1887 murder case involving the discovery of a torso outside Philadelphia with the prime suspects being an African-American working-class woman and a former neighbor, a white man, whom she implicated.

Heroines of the Qing: Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories by Binbin Yang (University of Washington Press; 230 pages; $50). Explores textual and visual strategies of self-representation by Qing-era women considered exemplars of female virtue

Hesitant Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement by Geoffrey Bell (Pluto Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 272 pages; $95 hardcover, $35 paperback). Traces the ambivalent, fragile, and at times undermining relationship between the British left and Irish revolutionaries at the time of the Easter Rising and war of independence.

Johnson’s Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers by Roger Pickenpaugh (Kent State University Press; 136 pages; $18.95). Traces the history of a Union prison for Confederate officers built on an island in northern Ohio’s Sandusky Bay.

Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital by Joan Quigley (Oxford University Press; 358 pages; $29.95). Examines early civil-rights struggles in Washington, D.C., with particular attention to Terrell (1863-1954), a suffragist and charter member of the NAACP whose activism helped end the segregation of restaurants in the capital.

The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values by Steven L.B. Jensen (Cambridge University Press; 334 pages; $99.99). Focuses on Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines in a study of how the Global South figured in the decade’s breakthrough on human rights.

The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States by Kevin Butterfield (University of Chicago Press; 311 pages; $40). Examines the voluntary associations remarked upon by France’s most famous visitor to the fledgling republic; argues that first generations of Americans found in law, formality, and procedure a way to cohere.

Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco by Ocean Howell (University of Chicago Press; 392 pages; $45). Examines the neighborhood mobilization and struggles of the Mission District as a “city within a city” from the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake to the 1970s.

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press; 374 pages; $27.95). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a discussion of war’s memory in writing, film, monumental architecture, and other realms.

Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest by Mario Jimenez Sifuentez (Rutgers University Press; 192 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Discusses Mexican agricultural, cannery, and other labor in the region since the 1940s; topics include the conditions that led to the creation of a union, the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste.

Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for World War II by John M. Lillard (Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press; 224 pages; $39.95). Examines the transformative role of simulated combat games played at the Naval War College in the interwar period.

The Red Sea: The Search of Lost Space by Alexis Wick (University of California Press; 259 pages; $34.95). Documents how Ottoman perceptions of the Red Sea, or lack thereof, altered with the expansion of European colonialism in the Middle East.

Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press by Kenton Storey (University of British Columbia Press; 312 pages; US$70). Describes how the colonial press in mid-19th-century New Zealand and Vancouver Island adopted humanitarian language as a means of justifying segregation, the expansion of settlers’ access to land, and fears of indigenous uprising.

Theodore Roosevelt in the Field by Michael R. Canfield (University of Chicago Press; 476 pages; $35). Documents how TR engaged with the outdoors as naturalist, hunter, soldier, writer, and conservationist.

Until There Is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman by Jennifer Scanlon (Oxford University Press; 321 pages; $34.95). Traces the life of the faith-based activist (1899-1990), who played key roles in the civil-rights, feminist, and labor movements.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia by Loren Graham (Harvard University Press; 209 pages; $24.95). Examines the discredited genetic theories of the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) and evaluates claims that new developments in molecular biology, including the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance, may validate his claims.

LAW

Adultery: Infidelity and the Law by Deborah L. Rhode (Harvard University Press; 260 pages; $28.95). Discusses the legal and social consequences of adultery and argues for repealing civil and criminal penalties under American law.

On British Islam: Religion, Law, and Everyday Practice in Shari’a Councils by John R. Bowen (Princeton University Press; 275 pages; $35). Combines history and ethnography in a study of Islamic councils that oversee divorce and other religious matters; focuses on three such bodies, in London, in Birmingham, and in a Sufi community in the Midlands.

These Estimable Courts: Understanding Public Perceptions of State Judicial Institutions and Legal Policy-Making by Damon M. Cann and Jeff Yates (Oxford University Press; 167 pages; $49.95). Draws on new, original survey data to examine public views of state courts, as well as related perceptions of judicial selection, judicial decision making, judges’ role in policy, and the importance of obeying the law.

LITERATURE

African American Haiku: Cultural Visions edited by John Zheng (University Press of Mississippi; 192 pages; $65). Essays on the adaptation of the haiku form by five African-American writers: Richard Wright, James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore.

The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe edited by Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney (Johns Hopkins University Press; 640 pages; $69.95). Includes dozens of recently discovered poems by the Anglo-Irish poet (1772-1810) and identifies eight false attributions.

Pearl: A New Verse Translation translated by Simon Armitage (Liveright; 153 pages; $24.95). Edition, with facing verse translation, of the famed Middle English poem, believed to have been composed in the 1390s by the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Redemption of Narrative: Terry Tempest Wiliams and Her Vision of the West by Jan Whitt (Mercer University Press; 254 pages; $29). A critical study of the American writer (b. 1955) that draws parallels between her and T.S. Eliot, and discusses her as an animal activist and writer of literary journalism.

Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi (University of Virginia Press; 272 pages; $49.50). Uses works by such writers as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince to discuss sympathy and the varied depictions of slavery in different genres.

Uses and Abuses of Moses: Literary Representations since the Enlightenment by Theodore Ziolkowski (University of Notre Dame Press; 360 pages; $60). Focuses on Austro-German and Anglo-American literature in a study of representations of Moses beginning with Schiller and Goethe.

Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment by Priscilla Solis Ybarra (University of Arizona Press; 216 pages; $29.95). Examines a critique of environmentally destructive values in Mexican-American writing over the past 150 years.

MUSIC

Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound by Ragnhild Brovig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen (MIT Press; 188 pages; $27). Topics include how Auto-Tune, originally a technique for pitch correction, has been repurposed by such artists as Bon Iver and Lady Gaga.

Played Out on the Strip: The Rise and Fall of Las Vegas Casino Bands by Janis L. McKay (University of Nevada Press; 272 pages; $27.95). Draws on interviews with former musicians in a study of a strike in 1989 and hotel-casinos’ decisions to replace live house bands with synthesizers and recorded music.

The Process That Is the World: Cage/Deleuze/Events/Performances by Joe Panzner (Bloomsbury Academic; 227 pages; $100). Links the ontological, ethical, political, and other perspectives of the American composer John Cage and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music by Stephen Graham (University of Michigan Press; 328 pages; $70). A study of extreme metal, noise, and other underground forms of music that have resisted both the market and high-art institutions.

PHILOSOPHY

Between Probability and Certainty: What Justifies Belief by Martin Smith (Oxford University Press; 213 pages; $74). Offers an alternative to the risk minimization concept of justification.

Democracy and Its Others by Jeffrey H. Epstein (Bloomsbury Academic; 309 pages; $120). Traces the evolution of ideas of sovereignty and foreignness through the ideas of such philosophers as Plato, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Derrida, and Seyla Benhabib.

Ego Sum: Corpus, Animal, Fabula by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Marie-Eve Morin (Fordham University Press; 138 pages; $95 hardcover, $28 paperback). First English translation of the French philosopher’s 1979 work on Descartes.

In His Voice: Maurice Blanchot’s Affair with the Neuter by David Appelbaum (State University of New York Press; 166 pages; $75). Focuses on The Writing of the Disaster and other later works in a study of authorial voice in the French author and thinker.

Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought by Alice Crary (Harvard University Press; 283 pages; $49.95). Defends the exercise of “moral imagination” in understanding human and non-human animals in ethical terms; draws on perspectives from literary and other realms.

Intellectual Assurance: Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism edited by Brett Coppenger and Michael Bergmann (Oxford University Press; 261 pages; $74). Topics include acquaintance and fallible non-inferential justification.

Performance Epistemology: Foundations and Applications edited by Miguel Angel Fernandez Vargas (Oxford University Press; 250 pages; $74). Topics include dispositional robust virtue epistemology versus anti-luck virtue epistemology.

The Poverty of Eros in Plato’s “Symposium” by Lorelle D. Lamascus (Bloomsbury Academic; 188 pages; $112). Discusses the significance of the Symposium’s portrayal of love as the child of poverty (penia) and resource (poros).

POLITICAL SCIENCE

China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy by Kay Ann Johnson (University of Chicago Press; 218 pages; $22.50). Examines the consequences of China’s previous one-child policy, with an emphasis on the more than 120,000 children, most often girls, given up for international adoption.

The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations by Benjamin Gregg (University of Pennsylvania Press; 283 pages; $59.95). Considers how the exclusivity of the nation state undermines efforts to expand human rights globally.

Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold-War Era by Michael Mandelbaum (Oxford University Press; 485 pages; $29.95). A critique of the emphasis on state- and nation-building in U.S. foreign policy since 1993.

The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East by Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon (W.W. Norton & Company; 396 pages; $28.95). Focuses on 10 crises in a study of the interests that guided U.S. policy in the region from 1945 to 1991.

Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards by Afshon Ostovar (Oxford University Press; 306 pages; $34.95). Examines religious, ideological, cultural, and political factors that have shaped the history of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps since its founding in the 1979 revolution.

When Norms Collide: Local Responses to Activism against Female Genital Mutilation and Early Marriage by Karisa Cloward (Oxford University Press; 314 pages; $99 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Uses three Maa-speaking communities in Kenya to examine the factors that shape local response to transnational activism.

RELIGION

The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges edited by Thomas Banchoff and Jose J. Casanova (Georgetown University Press; 299 pages; $64.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Topics include Jesuits and Muslims in the age of empires, the history of anti-Jesuitism, and Jesuits and social justice in contemporary Latin America.

Paul and Ancient Rhetoric: Theory and Practice in the Hellenistic Context edited by Stanley E. Porter and Bryan R. Dyer (Cambridge University Press; 346 pages; $120). Topics include Hellenistic rhetorical education and Paul’s letters; using Aristotle’s enthymeme to navigate First Thessalonians; and appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos in Galatians 5:1-21.

Priestly Celibacy: Theological Foundations by Gary B. Selin (Catholic University of America Press; 232 pages; $29.95). Develops a Eucharist-based theology of priestly celibacy as distinct from general theologies of virginity and celibacy.

RHETORIC

Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention by Candice Rai (University of Alabama Press; 264 pages; $54.95). Uses divisions over the use of Wilson Yard---a vacant lot in Chicago’s gentrifying Uptown area---to examine the limits of democratic discourse in solving urban disputes.

SOCIOLOGY

Brought to Light: Contemporary Freemasonry, Meaning, and Society by J. Scott Kenney (Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 320 pages; $38.99). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a sociological study of Freemasonry; draws, among other sources, on interviews with 121 Masons in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

Life in the Time of Oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad by Lori Leonard (Indiana University Press; 149 pages; $75 hardcover, $25 paperback). Offers an ethnographic perspective on the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project and its impact on villages on and around the Miandoum oilfield.

Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger (Oxford University Press; 225 pages; $27.95). Combines survey, interview, and focus-group data to examine how religion influences family life for African-Americans and Latinos.

URBAN STUDIES

DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City without Services by Kimberley Kinder (University of Minnesota Press; 238 pages; $87.50 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Documents how residents in the blighted city have worked on both home and community spaces, including sweeping streets, maintaining parks, and caretaking vacant houses.