Weekly Book List, December 4, 2015

ANTHROPOLOGY

Amada’s Blessings From the Peyote Gardens of South Texas by Stacy B. Schaefer (University of New Mexico Press; 301 pages; $29.95). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a study of Amada Cardenas (1904-2005), a Mexican-American woman who, beginning the 1930s, was a federally licensed peyote harvester and dealer for the Native American Church.

Indigenous Medicine Among the Bedouin in the Middle East by Aref Abu-Rabia (Berghahn Books; 216 pages; $95). Draws on fieldwork among pastoral, nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled tribes in the Negev, Galilee, Gaza Strip, Sinai, and Jordan over the past 30 years.

The Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State edited by William S. Sax and Helene Basu (Oxford University Press; 255 pages; $39.95). Essays on healing rituals that combine elements of spirit possession and court-like proceedings with a prosecution, defense, judge, and witnesses; includes studies from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa.

Masculine Identities and Male Sex Work Between East Java and Bali: An Ethnography of Youth, Bodies, and Violence by Matteo Carlo Alcano (Palgrave Macmillan; 208 pages; $100). An ethnographic study of a gang of young sex workers from East Java, Indonesia, who work in tourist areas of neighboring South Bali.

Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai by Lisa Bjorkman (Duke University Press; 281 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Offers an ethnographic perspective on why the Indian city has chronic water-supply problems for rich and poor alike.

Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba by Andrea J. Queeley (University Press of Florida; 258 pages; $74.95). Draws on fieldwork in Santiago and Guantanamo in a study of Cubans who are descendants of early 20th-century migrants from the British West Indies.

Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture by Angelique V. Nixon (University Press of Mississippi; 240 pages; $65). Focuses on the Anglophone Caribbean in a study of how artists, writers, and activists engage the region’s over-dependence on tourism and linked legacy of colonialism.

ARCHAEOLOGY

American Antiquities: Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology by Terry A. Barnhart (University of Nebraska Press; 572 pages; $75). Uses debates over “mound builders” to explore the beginnings and early history of American archaeology from the late 18th through the 19th centuries.

Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere, 200 B.C. to A.D. 500, by A. Martin Byers (University of Oklahoma Press; 428 pages; $65). Reclaims but modifies a theory of the Middle Woodland sites put forth in 1964 by Joseph Caldwell.

Victims of Ireland’s Great Famine: The Bioarchaeology of Mass Burials at Kilkenny Union Workhouse by Jonny Geber (University Press of Florida; 282 pages; $84.95). Uses skeletal data from workhouse inmates to examine physical and other conditions that worsened the impact of the Great Famine (1845-52).

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Aesthetic Hybridity in Mughal Painting: 1526--1658 by Valerie Gonzalez (Ashgate Publishing Company; 336 pages; $119.95). Topics include the importation of new Persian models after 1555 and later European influences.

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance by Uri McMillan (New York University Press; 282 pages; $89 hardcover, $29 paperback). A study of black female artists’ purposeful self-objectification, turning themselves into art-objects, from Joice Heth (d. 1836) who toured as George Washington’s nursemaid to Simone Leigh and Nicki Minaj today.

Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics by W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press; 244 pages; $35). Essays on such topics as globalization and visual culture; includes some previously unpublished material.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens by Andrew T. Alwine (University of Texas Press; 253 pages; $55). Draws on the legal speeches of Attic orators in a study of the competitive power dynamics of struggles over honor and standing.

The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire by Nigel Nicholson (Oxford University Press; 353 pages; $74). Examines the relationship between the epinician or poem of victory and the hero-athlete oral narratives that circulated in Greek settlements of Sicily and southern Italy.

Roman Reflections: Studies in Latin Philosophy edited by Gareth D. Williams and Katharina Volk (Oxford University Press; 305 pages; $74). Essays on such topics as Helvidius Priscus as a Stoic hero, vision and perception in Lucretius and Cicero, and doctrinalism and adaptation in Seneca’s Epistles.

COMMUNICATION

Friended at the Front: Social Media in the American War Zone by Lisa Ellen Silvestri (University Press of Kansas; 256 pages; $29.95). Draws on in-person interviews and online fieldwork in a study of how U.S. Marines use Facebook and youtube to narrate their experiences to each other, family and friends, and themselves.

CRIMINOLOGY

The Con Men: Hustling in New York City by Terry Williams and Trevor B. Milton (Columbia University Press; 276 pages; $27.95). Offers an ethnographic perspective on how con artists operate in the city, including tourist scams, street hustles, the numbers, counterfeit goods, and Ponzi schemes.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging by Minh-Ha T. Pham (Duke University Press; 280 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Explores the “taste work” done and money earned by “superbloggers” who post photographs of themselves in various fashion brands.

Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality edited by Analouise Keating (Duke University Press; 271 pages; $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paperback). Edition of writings by the scholar and feminist theorist (1942-2004) that date from the last decade of her life.

DANCE

America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk by Megan Pugh (Yale University Press; 398 pages; $32.50). Traces the class- and racial- boundary crossing of American dance through its history.

ECONOMICS

China and the 21st Century Crisis by Minqi Li (Pluto Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 221 pages; $100 hardcover, $28 paperback). Offers a Marxist and ecologically oriented perspective on political and economic factors in China that could lead to a system collapse.

Economic Behavior, Economic Freedom, and Entrepreneurship edited by Richard J. Cebula and others (Edward Elgar Publishing; 328 pages; $135). Topics include how institutions, as say in transition economies, influence entrepreneurship.

EDUCATION

Race Among Friends: Exploring Race at a Suburban School by Marianne Modica (Rutgers University Press; 192 pages; $80 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Documents how avoiding race as a subject for discussion in a “racially friendly” suburban charter school in the Northeast increased bias and insensitivity.

FILM STUDIES

Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era by Dominique Bregent-Heald (University of Nebraska Press; 436 pages; $60). A comparative study of representations of the borderlands with Canada and Mexico in hundreds of films from 1908 to 1919.

Despite All Adversities: Spanish-American Queer Cinema edited by Andres Lema-Hincapie and Debra A. Castillo (State University of New York Press; 307 pages; $90). Essays on Lucia Puenzo’s XXY, Juan Carlos Tabio’s Strawberry and Chocolate, and 13 other individual films from across the region, as well as a discussion of recent lesbian-themed films from Mexico.

HISTORY

Bridging the Sea Island’s Past and Present, 1893-2006: The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Volume 3 by Lawrence S. Rowland and Stephen R. Wise (University of South Carolina Press; 492 pages; $44.95). Third book in a history of the South Carolina county.

The Crown and the Cosmos: Astrology and the Politics of Maximilian I by Darin Hayton (University of Pittsburgh Press; 312 pages; $45). Explores the interplay of astrology and politics in the 15th-century Habsburg court.

Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador by Catherine Fletcher (Cambridge University Press; 201 pages; $99.99). Documents the centrality of the papal court to diplomacy of the period.

Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice by Lorraine K. Bannai (University of Washington Press; 301 pages; $34.95). Discusses a Japanese-American who was arrested and convicted of a crime for refusing to report for internment, appealed unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court, and decades later was exonerated and had his conviction reversed.

The Iran-Iraq War by Pierre Razoux, translated by Nicholas Elliott (Harvard University Press; 688 pages; $39.95). A history of the 1980-88 conflict and its enduring impact on the region’s geopolitics; sources include interviews, oral histories, previously unpublished military documents, as well as recordings seized that reveal Saddam’s debates his generals.

Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860--1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order by Jelmer Vos (University of Wisconsin Press; 234 pages; $65). Topics include how the royal court of the African Kingdom of Kongo figured in Portuguese rule in northern Angola.

Outsiders in a Promised Land: Religious Activists in Pacific Northwest History by Dale Soden (Oregon State University Press; 320 pages; $24.95). Topics include how Protestants, Catholics, and Jews worked to make the vice-filled mining and timber towns of the frontier Pacific Northwest more hospitable to religious and family values.

The Royal Air Force in American Skies: The Seven British Flight Schools in the United States during World War II by Tom Killebrew (University of North Texas Press, distributed by Texas A&M University Press; 443 pages; $32.95). Traces the history of RAF training schools in Terrell and Sweetwater, Tex.; Lancaster, Calif.; Miami and Ponca City, Okla; Mesa, Ariz.; and Clewiston, Fla.

To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw (Viking; 593 pages; $35). First book in a two-volume history of modern Europe.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

The Experiment Must Continue: Medical Research and Ethics in East Africa, 1940--2014 by Melissa Graboyes (Ohio University Press; 350 pages; $79.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Combines historical, ethnographic, and ethical perspectives in a study of research on human subjects in the region, from past failed efforts to cure tropical diseases to ongoing malaria and AIDs research.

LAW

Trafficking Justice: How Russian Police Enforce New Laws From Crime to Courtroom by Lauren A. McCarthy (Cornell University Press; 276 pages; $39.95). Documents how Russia police, prosecutors, and judges have largely ignored a a new 2003 law intended to combat sexual, labor, and child trafficking, preferring when they do pursue traffickers to charge them with related crimes.

LITERATURE

Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings by Hanadi Al-Samman (Syracuse University Press; 294 pages; $39.95). A study of writings by Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida al-Na’na’, Hoda Barakat, Samar Yazbek, and Salwa al-Neimi.

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories by Matthew L. Potts (Bloomsbury Academic; 224 pages; $110). Describes how the American author places the language of sacrament in dialogue with postmodern ideas of immanence, action, identity, and narration.

Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print by Joshua King (Ohio State University Press; 368 pages; $86.95). Topics include John Keble’s The Christian Year, and reading and educational programs promoted by Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and F.D. Maurice.

Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship by Edlie L. Wong (New York University Press; 292 pages; $89 hardcover, $28 paperback). Draws on case files, cartoons, sensationalist fiction, and plantation diaries in a study of anxieties over the import of indentured labor that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature by Lloyd Pratt (University of Pennsylvania Press; 186 pages; $49.95). Describes the “stranger humanism” espoused in the writings of Frederick Douglass and works by a group of Francophone men of color who wrote and published in mid-19th century New Orleans.

Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity by Susana Araujo (Bloomsbury Academic; 217 pages; $110). A study of American and European writers’ responses to the attacks and their aftermath, including Amy Waldman, Michael Cunningham, Frederic Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, Joseph O’Neill, Moshin Hamid, Jose Saramago, Ricardo Menendez Salmon, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie.

PHILOSOPHY

Thomas Hobbes by Otfried Hoffe, translated by Nicholas Walker (State University of New York Press; 258 pages; $80). Translation of a 2010 German study of the British philosopher in and beyond his political thought.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

The Evolution of Cyber War: International Norms for Emerging-Technology Weapons by Brian M. Mazanec (Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press; 329 pages; $34.50). Considers how constraining norms for cyberwarfare might be developed along the lines of norms for chemical and biological weapons, nuclear arms, and strategic bombing.

Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives by James M. Curry (University of Chicago Press; 274 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). Examines how Congressional leaders wield power by controlling rank-and-file members’ access to information about legislation.

Making “Ubumwe": Power, State, and Camps in Rwanda’s Unity Building Project by Andrea Purdekova (Berghahn Books; 292 pages; $100). Examines efforts to build ubumwe or unity in post-genocide Rwanda through programs of re-education and re-integration in camps known as ingando.

Minority Parties in U.S. Legislatures: Conditions of Influence by Jennifer Hayes Clark (University of Michigan Press; 240 pages; $70 hardcover, $40 paperback). Focuses on committee assignments, bill cosponsorship, and roll-call votes in a study of minority-party members’ influence in Congress and state legislatures.

Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities by Rogers M. Smith (University of Chicago Press; 323 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). New and previously published writings on Americans’ individual and group forms of identity; considers how those overlapping identifications conflict with traditional notions of American exceptionalism and providence.

Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration by William G. Resh (Johns Hopkins University Press; 190 pages; $44.95). Examines how trust between federal agency careerists and appointees affects the institutional competence of agencies and, in turn, the successful implementation of an administration’s policies.

PSYCHOLOGY

On Psychological and Visionary Art: Notes from C. G. Jung’s Lecture on Gerard de Nerval’s “Aurelia” by C.G. Jung, edited by Craig E. Stephenson (Princeton University Press; 240 pages; $35). First publication of a lecture given in Zurich by the Swiss psychoanalyst in 1945 on a “visionary memoir” by Nerval in which the poet describes his attempt to emerge from madness.

RELIGION

Augustine: Conversions to Confessions by Robin Lane Fox (Basic Books; 657 pages; $35). A biography of the theologian and saint through age 43.

The Book of the Twelve and the New Form Criticism edited by Mark J. Boda, Michael H. Floyd, and Colin M. Toffelmire (Society of Biblical Literature; 366 pages; $54.95 hardcover, $39.95 paperback). Writings on new approaches in form criticism in relation to Amos, Zechariah, and other of the Bible’s 12 Minor Prophets.

The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement by Stephen LeDrew (Oxford University Press; 262 pages; $27.95). Discusses the New Atheism as a form of “secular fundamentalism” that represents a rightward drift from the atheism of past periods.

Phoenician Aniconism in Its Mediterranean and Ancient Near Eastern Contexts by Brian R. Doak (Society of Biblical Literature; 182 pages; $42.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines the ancient Phoenicians’ views on imagery of the divine, set against the prohibitions of such imagery by their neighbors, the Israelites.

Preaching Islamic Renewal: Religious Authority and Media in Contemporary Egypt by Jacqueline G. Brinton (University of California Press; 307 pages; $70 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). A study of Muhammad Mitwalli Sha’rawi (1911-98), a Sunni scholar turned TV preacher who at his height was watched weekly by some 30-million people.

We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics by Neil J. Young (Oxford University Press; 412 pages; $34.95). Discusses the religious right as a response by evangelicals, Mormons, and conservative Catholics to the ecumenism of mainline Protestants.

SOCIOLOGY

The Meaning of Sunday: The Practice of Belief in a Secular Age by Joel Thiessen (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 227 pages; US$100 hardcover, US$32.95 paperback). Uses interview and other data to explore varied levels of religiosity and church going in contemporary Canada.

Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City by Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage (Temple University Press; 198 pages; $74.50 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Combines urban and whiteness studies in an analysis of the memories and experiences of whites in Chicago who experienced major racial change in their neighborhoods from the 1950s through the 80s.

THEATER

Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 by Adrienne Macki Braconi (Northwestern University Press; 280 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Discusses productions by the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Negro Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project.

Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre by Dorothy Chansky (University of Iowa Press; 291 pages; $55). Sets theatrical depictions of housework in the context of women’s changing roles since World War I, including class and race dynamics.