Weekly Book List, April 7, 2017

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940 by Lorraine Elena Roses (University of Massachusetts Press; 227 pages; $90 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Discusses Dorothy West, Ralf Coleman, Allan Rohan Crite, and other figures from a period of flourishing black literature, theater, music, and visual arts in the city.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture: From Customary Law to Human Rights in Tanzania by Dorothy L. Hodgson (Indiana University Press; 187 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Draws on fieldwork among Maasai pastoralists in a study of the impact of multiple legal institutions in Tanzania, with particular attention to women.

Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine by Yifat Gutman (Vanderbilt University Press; 200 pages; $59.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). A study of “memory activism” by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens---Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna.

River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga by Georgina Drew (University of Arizona Press; 257 pages; $60). Draws on fieldwork in the Himalayan Uttarakhand state in an ethnographic study of social movements fighting hydroelectric projects on India’s sacred Ganges.

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region: Cultural Dynamics and Historical Interactions edited by Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez and Josiah Heyman (University of Arizona Press; 402 pages; $70 hardcover, $35 paperback). Writings by anthropologists and other scholars on such topics as food insecurity in the borderlands, and the pension crisis among elderly migrant farmworkers.

War Is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon by Sami Hermez (University of Pennsylvania Press; 260 pages; $65). Explores everyday life in Lebanon with people’s memories of the long civil war (1975-90), anticipation of future conflict, and periods of violence in-between.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology edited by Sabrina C. Agarwal and Julie K. Wesp (University of New Mexico Press; 295 pages; $85). Combines theoretical essays with case studies on such topics as gender differentials in the experience of disease as revealed in skeletal remains.

La Belle: The Archaeology of a Seventeenth-Century Vessel of New World Colonization edited by James E. Bruseth (Texas A&M University Press; 892 pages; $95). Reports on the excavation of a ship wrecked in Texas’s Matagorda Bay that was originally part of an ill-fated effort in the 1680s to create a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form by Allison Morehead (Penn State University Press; 241 pages; $89.95). Documents how the methods of experimental science influenced innovative art of the 1890s; focuses on works by such figures as Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

The Drunken Duchess of Vassar: Grace Harriet Macurdy: Pioneering Feminist Classical Scholar by Barbara McManus (Ohio State University Press; 281 pages; $99.95). Explores the gender and wider politics of classics and American academe through a biography of Macurdy (1866-1946), whose slightly disheveled clothing and hair led her students to call the teetotaling scholar the “drunken duchess.”

“Theogony” and “Works and Days": A New Bilingual Edition by Hesiod, translated by Kimberly Johnson (Northwestern University Press; 175 pages; $16.95). Edition and translation of the Greek poet’s works.

ECONOMICS

Crisis and the Failure of Economic Theory: The Responsibility of Economists for the Great Recession by Giancarlo Bertocco (Edward Elgar Publishing; 264 pages; $125). Discusses economists’ failure to anticipate the crisis of 2007-08 and offers an alternative approach based on insights from Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, Kalecki, Kaldor, and Minsky.

Loan Sharks: The Birth of Predatory Lending by Charles R. Geisst (Brookings Institution Press; 261 pages; $26). Focuses on the history and societal impact of predatory lending from the Civil War through the Depression, as well as efforts to combat the practice.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World by Kath Weston (Duke University Press; 250 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Explores what is termed the “new animism” through discussion of such topics as radiation exposure in Japan, and biosecurity and surveillance systems in the food chain.

Living Well Now and in the Future: Why Sustainability Matters by Randall Curren and Ellen Metzger (MIT Press; 312 pages; $34). Combines the perspectives of a philosopher and a scientist to define an ethic of sustainability; uses, for illustration, three case studies in the management of energy, water, and food.

Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity by Jeremy J. Schmidt (New York University Press; 308 pages; $35). Offers an intellectual history of a philosophy of water management that emerged in the United States at the intersection of geology and early anthropology and later spread globally.

FILM STUDIES

Bodies in Suspense: TIme and Affect in Cinema by Alanna Thain (University of Minnesota Press; 332 pages; $120 hardcover, $30 paperback). Focuses on HItchcock’s Vertigo, David Lynch’s trilogy Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire, and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River.

From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film by Celestino Deleyto (Wayne State University Press; 296 pages; $36.99). Topics include the 1992 riots as a turning point in perceptions of the city and in its image on screen.

Sweet and Lowdown: Woody Allen’s Cinema of Regret by Lloyd Michaels (Wallflower Press, distributed by Columbia University Press; 160 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). Explores a recurrent theme in Allen’s stand-up comedy and filmmaking of regret in response to the existentialist dilemma of not being someone else.

FOLKLORE

Israel in the Making: Stickers, Stitches, and Other Critical Practices by Hagar Salamon (Indiana University Press; 292 pages; $90 hardcover, $40 paperback). Discusses bumperstickers, women’s gobelin embroidery, “David Levi” jokes, and other aspects of the expressive culture of ordinary Israelis.

GEOGRAPHY

We Want Land to Live: Making Political Space for Food Sovereignty by Amy Trauger (University of Georgia Press; 155 pages; $74.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Discusses the struggles of independent farmers in Maine, Anishinabek wild-rice gatherers in Minnesota, community gardeners in Lisbon, Portugal, and other groups.

HISTORY

The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Biography by Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge University Press; 315 pages; $29.99). Traces Kennedy’s persona as shaped in the afterlife of American memory, with his widow as chief guardian of his image; documents the endurance of his image despite characterizations brought by revisionist and eventually postrevisionist historians.

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin (Duke University Press; 277 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Focuses on North America in meditations on how indigenous forms of time resist settler colonialist temporality; topics include the forms of reorganization imposed by the 1906 Osage Allotment Act.

The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China by Shang Yang, edited and translated by Yuri Pines (Columbia University Press; 351 pages; $60). Scholarly translation and study of a book on statecraft compiled in the fourth to third centuries BC.

By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 by Michael J. Green (Columbia University Press; 725 pages; $45). A study of how fears of a rival power impeding trade and defense have shaped U.S. foreign policy in the region.

Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics by Marjorie J. Spruill (Bloomsbury USA; 436 pages; $33). Discusses the National Women’s Conference held in Houston in November 1977, the countermobilization by conservative women, and the centrality of women’s rights issues to political polarization in America.

A History of Borno: Trans-Saharan African Empire to Failing Nigerian State by Vincent Hiribarren (Hurst, distributed by Oxford University Press; 311 pages; $70). Examines the history and borders, since 1810, of a region in southeastern Nigeria that is now best-known as once the home base for the Islamist militants Boko Haram.

Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa by Keith Somerville (Hurst, distributed by Oxford University Press; 390 pages; $29.95). Traces the history of African trade in elephant tusks over the centuries and argues that the only way to stem uncontrolled poaching may be regulation not prohibition.

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin (Indiana University Press; 329 pages; $90 hardcover, $38 paperback). Topics include how recurrent economic crises in the 1920s revived discourse questioning the possibility of Jewish integration in post-revolutionary society.

Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen (University of Pennsylvania Press; 284 pages; $45). Documents how consumer indulgence was tied to the national interest and ideas of good citizenship between the end of the Revolution and the Civil War.

Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History by Jennifer L. Lambe (University of North Carolina Press; 344 pages; $90 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Examines the interplay of politics and psychiatry in modern Cuban history through a study of Mazorra, an asylum founded in 1857 on the outskirts of Havana.

Make It Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America by Kristine C. Harper (University of Chicago Press; 317 pages; $40). Traces federal efforts to pursue weather control as an instrument of domestic and foreign policy, with a heyday of spending during the Cold War.

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson (University of North Carolina Press; 304 pages; $85 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Discusses monuments and other memorials to the forced removal of the Cherokee.

The Pearl of Khorasan: A History of Herat by C.P.W. Gammell (Hurst, distributed by Oxford University Press; 464 pages; $45). Traces the history of the western Afghani city since the invasions of Genghis Khan in 1221.

Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland edited by Jim Smyth (University of Notre Dame Press; 216 pages; $40). Essays on how competing collective memories of the “Troubles” continue to shape Northern Irish politics.

The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People by Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts (University of North Carolina Press; 160 pages; $29.95). Documents how change in the South has reinforced the importance of regional identity.

The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s--1980s by Pamela E. Pennock (University of North Carolina Press; 328 pages; $85 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Combines archival and interview sources in a study of Arab-American activism, particularly in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War by Daniel J. Sharfstein (W.W. Norton & Company; 613 pages; $29.95). A study of the 1877 conflict that saw forces led by the former Union general battle the Nez Perce leader and his allies who were resisting relocation to a reservation in Idaho.

Turning Point 1917: The British Empire at War edited by Douglas E. Delaney and Nikolas Gardner (University of British Columbia Press; 256 pages; US$39.95). Essays on military, diplomatic, and domestic aspects of the war for the empire during the most pivotal year of the conflict.

INFORMATION STUDIES

Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World by Ramesh Srinivasan (New York University Press; 280 pages; $35). Topics include non-commercial and public avenues for the Internet and digital technologies that embrace diverse cultural needs; settings discussed include village India, indigenous America and Australia, and revolutionary Egypt.

LAW

The Balance Gap: Working Mothers and the Limits of the Law by Sarah Cote Hampson (Stanford University Press; 174 pages; $70 hardcover, $22.95 paperback). Draws on interviews with female faculty at two public universities and former and with current active-duty military in a study of how mothers negotiate leave laws and workplace culture when taking time off at the birth or adoption of a child.

Defaming the Dead by Don Herzog (Yale University Press; 270 pages; $40). Uses the question of whether we can libel or slander the dead as a starting point to explore and defend an account of posthumous interests.

The First Amendment and LGBT Equality: A Contentious History by Carlos A. Ball (Harvard University Press; 368 pages; $39.95). Juxtaposes how the First Amendment figured favorably in the early struggles of the gay-rights movement with its use today by conservative opponents of gay rights.

LITERATURE

The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West by Ning Ma (Oxford University Press; 263 pages; $74). Sets the early realist novel in the context of global trade from 1500 to 1800, with a focus on Chinese importation of South American and Japanese silver; focuses on the anonymous Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Ihara Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Man, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition by Martin R. Delany, edited by Jerome McGann (Harvard University Press; 332 pages; $19.95). Corrected, scholarly edition of a novel by an African-American writer born in 1812 to a free mother and enslaved father; the work, originally published in serial form in 1859, depicts the escape of Henry Blake from a Southern plantation, his travels in the United States, Canada, Africa, and Cuba, and his struggle to unite blacks, free and enslaved, in resistance.

The Complete Old English Poems translated by Craig Williamson (University of Pennsylvania Press; 1,248 pages; $59.95). Translation of the entire known corpus of Old English verse, including works and fragments discovered in the past 50 years.

Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention by David Marno (University of Chicago Press; 315 pages; $40). Uses John Donne’s famous work to explore a bond between religion and philosophy revealed in devotional poetry, and lessons drawn from prayer on the art of attention.

Edgar Allan Poe, “Eureka,” and Scientific Imagination by David N. Stamos (State University of New York Press; 586 pages; $90). Explores the speculative science in Poe’s 1848 work, including his anticipation of developments in 20th-century science.

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year by Peter Brooks (Basic Books; 241 pages; $32). Draws on letters exchanged with George Sand in a study of Flaubert in 1870-71, a year that saw France’s defeat by Prussia and the rise and brutal suppression of the Paris Commune; topics include his view that more readers for his recent flop, A Sentimental Education (1869), might have saved the nation.

Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty by Nathan K. Hensley (Oxford University Press; 312 pages; $90). Uses works by such authors as Eliot, Dickens, Collins, Swinburne, Haggard, and Stevenson to examine how writers expanded the possibilities of literary form in the face of a key contradiction in political modernity: the violence and coercion endemic in the Pax Britannica.

Friendship and its Discourses in the Seventeenth Century by Cedric C. Brown (Oxford University Press; 231 pages; $90). Explores various forms of friendship in mid-to-late 17th-century England, from intimate to instrumental; draws on literary texts as well as on the “lived friendships” embodied in letters and such artifacts as keepsakes, pictures, and funerary monuments.

“Holy Deadlock” and Further Ribaldries: Another Dozen Medieval French Plays in Modern English edited and translated by Jody Enders (University of Pennsylvania Press; 536 pages; $65). Translation of 12 anonymous bawdy plays, all but one rendered in English for the first time.

Learning From the Curse: Sembene’s “Xala” by Richard Fardon (Hurst, distributed by Oxford University Press; 133 pages; $27.50). Discusses the Senegalese writer and director’s Ousman Sembene’s 1973 novella and 1975 film Xala, a political satire about a corrupt businessman who is struck with a xala or curse of impotence on the day he is to be married to his third wife.

Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison by Geneva Cobb Moore (University of South Carolina Press; 368 pages; $59.99). Focuses on Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Morrison, and Alice Walker.

Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M. R. James by Patrick J. Murphy (Penn State University Press; 264 pages; $84.95). A study of the British medievalist Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) that focuses on how his scholarship influenced his better-known second career writing ghost stories.

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison (Alfred A. Knopf; 532 pages; $29.95). A biography of Lowell (1917-77) that draws on unprecedented access to the American poet’s psychiatric records as well as unpublished drafts and fragments, and interviews with his daughter, Harriet.

Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print by Julia S. Carlson (University of Pennsylvania Press; 354 pages; $59.95). Explores realms from cartography and travel writing to elocution, grammar, and punctuation in a study that sets Wordsworth’s major blank-verse poems in the context of experimentation and change in the representation of sound and landscape.

Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siecle by Sophie Duncan (Oxford University Press; 279 pages; $105). Uses Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendall’s Rosalind, and other groundbreaking performances to explore the interplay of Shakespeare and theatrical and wider culture in the late Victorian era.

Symptoms of an Unruly Age: Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity by Rivi Handler-Spitz (University of Washington Press; 239 pages; $50). Explores aesthetic commonalities in works by the Chinese writer and philosopher Li Zhi (1527-1602) and his late Ming compatriots, and works by such Europeans as Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes.

Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, and Ego by Matthew Woodcock (Oxford University Press; 358 pages; $95). A biography of the English soldier, author, and courtier (circa 1529-1604), who served five monarchs; fought in most major Tudor conflicts, beginning in his teens; and published more than 50 works in a variety of genres; considers the issues inherent in limning the life of a person who was “auto-referential” to a fault.

MUSIC

Musicians’ Mobilities and Music Migrations in Early Modern Europe: Biographical Patterns and Cultural Exchanges edited by Gesa zur Nieden and Berthold Over (Transcript-Verlag, distributed by Columbia University Press; 428 pages; $40). Writings on migration as it figured in musical exchange among royal courts and other settings in the 17th and 18th centuries.

PHILOSOPHY

The Illusion of Doubt by Genia Schonbaumsfeld (Oxford University Press; 165 pages; $60). Argues that radical skepticism is an illusion generated by the Cartesian worldview.

Immediacy and Meaning: J.K. Huysmans and the Immemorial Origin of Metaphysics by Caitlin Smith Gilson (Bloomsbury Academic; 297 pages; $120). Juxtaposes discussion of the human as knower and agent with discussion of the French writer’s tetralogy of The Damned, En Route, The Cathedral, and The Oblate.

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism by Elizabeth Grosz (Columbia University Press; 322 pages; $35). Argues that a link between ideality and materiality are ontologically fundamental to the development of human consciousness.

The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy after Early Modernity edited by Paul A. Kottman (Fordham University Press; 298 pages; $125 hardcover, $35 paperback). Essays on such topics as metaphysical poetry, art and philosophy in Hegel and Shakespeare, and allegory, poetic theology, and Enlightenment aesthetics.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

The Accountability State: US Federal Inspectors General and the Pursuit of Democratic Integrity by Nadia Hilliard (University Press of Kansas; 275 pages; $50 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines the history and effectiveness of IGs since the passage of the Inspectors General Act of 1978; focuses on variations in IG performance at the Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security.

Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa by Robyn Autry (Columbia University Press; 250 pages; $60). Draws on museum archives, interviews with staff, and other sources in a study that contrasts the representations of racial domination and violence in history museums in both countries.

One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking About Five Hard Issues That Divide Us by Peter H. Schuck (Princeton University Press; 425 pages; $29.95). Focuses on the issues of poverty, immigration, affirmative action, campaign finance, and religious objections to gay marriage and transgender rights.

A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road Beyond Revolt by H.A. Hellyer (Oxford University Press; 320 pages; $29.95). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a study of the 2011 uprising and its aftermath.

Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan by Daniel Haines (Oxford University Press; 264 pages; $45). Discusses the Indus water dispute in the wake of India’s partition in the wider context of decolonization and development politics during the Cold War era; topics include continued tensions after the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty and issues of water in Kashmir and Punjab.

Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology by Gregory Koger and Matthew J. Lebo (University of Chicago Press; 222 pages; $95 hardcover, $30 paperback). Links the high level of partisan polarization in Congress less to ideology than to both parties’ desire, above all, to win elections and command legislative majorities.

RELIGION

The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity From Deuteronomy to Paul by John J. Collins (University of California Press; 319 pages; $85 hardcover, $29.95). Examines variations in the way the Torah was received and interpreted during the first 600 years of its existence.

John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing by Cristina Rocha (Oxford University Press; 269 pages; $99 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Explores the global appeal of the Brazilian faith healer Joao Teixeira de Faria (b. 1942), who is known as Joao de Deus or John of God; draws on fieldwork in Brazil, the United States, Britain, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate by A. Edward Siecienski (Oxford University Press; 510 pages; $74). Examines the 2,000-year history of the Christian Orthodox church’s view of the Bishop of Rome.

The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns translated by Robert R. Phenix Jr. and Cornelia B. Horn (Society of Biblical Literature; 750 pages; $99.95). Contains both the Syriac text and an English translation of every available original text by the controversial fifth-century bishop of Edessa (now Urfa, Turkey).

THEATER

Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking With the Body by Evelyn Tribble (Bloomsbury Academic; 227 pages; $102). Explores the “kinesic intelligence” brought to bear by early modern actors in gesture, fencing, dance, and other movement; links “mindful bodies” to the ability to perform plays with a minimum of rehearsal time.

WOMEN’S STUDIES

Babies for Sale? Transnational Surrogacy, Human Rights, and the Politics of Reproduction edited by Miranda Davies (Zed Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 400 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Writings by scholars and activists on the controversial transnational practice of would-be parents contracting with women in other countries to bear their children; settings of surrogates discussed include Mexico, India, Romania, and Greece.