Weekly Book List, February 26, 2016

AMERICAN STUDIES

Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction by M. Michelle Robinson (University of Michigan Press; 264 pages; $75). Examines the use of the detective story to engage aspects of race and labor in America in late 19th and early 20th century fiction by black and white authors.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Catching a Case: Inequality and Fear in New York City’s Child Welfare System by Tina Lee (Rutgers University Press; 245 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Draws on interviews with parents, caseworkers, attorneys, and others in a critique of a system that, it is argued, often holds parents to standards almost impossible for poor households.

A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia by Lesley Gill (Duke University Press; 304 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Combines anthropological and historical perspectives in a study of violence to working-class people and institutions in the city of Barrancabermeja.

Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon by Jeremy M. Campbell (University of Washington Press; 231 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Discusses land claims in the region as a vernacular system improvised by colonists from wealthy ranchers to homesteaders who work to make illicit acquisition appear legitimate to one another and to authorities.

Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City by Daniel M. Goldstein (Duke University Press; 344 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). A study of vendors in the Cancha mega market of the Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South by Angela Stuesse (University of California Press; 328 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Examines the work and community lives of labor at chicken-processing plants in Mississippi, where large numbers of Latinos were recruited in the 1990s to work with an established black work force.

Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill by Joshua O. Reno (University of California Press; 351 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). An ethnographic study of workers on a large, transnational landfill outside Detroit; also discusses activists opposed to the import of waste from Canada.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Religious Architecture in Latium and Etruria, c. 900-500 BC by Charlotte R. Potts (Oxford University Press; 178 pages; $125). Research on cult buildings in west-central Italy from the Iron Age to the archaic period.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

The Genesis of Roman Architecture by John North Hopkins (Yale University Press; 268 pages; $65). Examines influences across the Mediterranean in a study of Roman architecture and sculpture from earliest times to the mid-fifth century BC.

Obsolescence: An Architectural History by Daniel M. Abramson (University of Chicago Press; 192 pages; $35). Traces the rise and decline of obsolescence as a concept and process that, beginning in the early 20th century, laid waste to numerous buildings new and old, such as the original Grand Central Terminal in New York.

A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia by Smriti Srinivas (University of Washington Press; 224 pages; $45). Explores landscape, architecture, religiosity, and urbanism in South Asian and other settings; topics include theosophy and South Indian garden design.

BUSINESS

The Engine of Enterprise: Credit in America by Rowena Olegario (Harvard University Press; 301 pages; $39.95). Traces the history of credit in America since colonial times, as well as recurrent debates over risk and access.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Aristophanes: Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria, Frogs: A Verse Translation, with Introduction and Notes by Stephen Halliwell (Oxford University Press; 298 pages; $100). Scholarly translation of three works by the Greek playwright.

The Greek Gods in Modern Scholarship: Interpretation and Belief in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Germany and Britain by Michael D. Konaris (Oxford University Press; 361 pages; $120). Explores rival theories of the Olympians in works by such well- and lesser-known scholars as Karl Otfried Muller, Jane Ellen Harrison, Hermann Usener, and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker.

Pindar’s Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts by Tom Phillips (Oxford University Press; 330 pages; $125). Examines the ancient Greek poet’s scholarly and wider reception in the Hellenistic era; focuses on the poems that begin and end the Olympian and Pythian books.

ECONOMICS

A Theory of Sustainable Sociocultural and Economic Development by Mohamed Rabie (Palgrave Macmillan; 256 pages; $119). Describes a model to identify the major obstacles that hinder poor countries’ development.

EDUCATION

DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education edited by David J. Connor, Beth A. Ferri, and Subini Annamma (Teachers College Press; 280 pages; $44.95). Topics include links between the school-to-prison pipeline and the over-representation of minority students in special education programs.

The Separation Solution? Single-Sex Education and the New Politics of Gender Equality by Juliet A. Williams (University of California Press; 256 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Draws on court cases, media reports, and research studies in an analysis of controversies caused by recent efforts to separate boys and girls in public schools.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Superstorm Sandy: The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore by Diane C. Bates (Rutgers University Press; 166 pages; $80 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). A work in environmental sociology that examines the region before and after the 2012 hurricane and factors that contributed to its high vulnerability.

FILM STUDIES

Rock ‘N’ Film: Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music by David E. James (Oxford University Press; 470 pages; $35). Covers studio productions to the avant-garde in a study of rock in cinema from the mid-50s to the mid-70s.

Time and Place Are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki by Tom Vick (University of Washington Press; 242 pages; $30). A study of the Japanese cult director (b. 1923), whose movies have influenced such filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch, Baz Luhrmann, and Quentin Tarantino.

HISTORY

The Ashley Cooper Plan: The Founding of Carolina and the Origins of Southern Political Culture by Thomas D. Wilson (University of North Carolina Press; 320 pages; $85 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines a political plan devised by one of the Carolina colony’s original Lord Proprietors, Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, and his then protege John Locke.

Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire by Frank Ellis (University Press of Kansas; 568 pages; $39.95). Draws on recently declassified materials to challenge previous accounts of German actions and motivations in Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union; also includes the previously untranslated diary of a German soldier in the 20th Panzer Division.

Confederate Sharpshooter: Major William E. Simmons by Joseph P. Byrd IV (Mercer University Press; 292 pages; $35). Traces the life of a college-educated young officer who became commander of the third battalion Georgia Sharpshooters.

Democratic Beginnings: Founding the Western States by Amy Bridges (University Press of Kansas; 216 pages; $34.95). A study of the constitutional conventions and pragmatic law making that marked the founding of 11 Western states, from California’s constitution of 1850 to the constitutions of Arizona and New Mexico in 1910.

The Embattled General: Sir Richard Turner and the First World War by William F. Stewart (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 408 pages; US$44.95). Draws on previously untapped sources in a re-evaluation of the controversial Canadian general (1871-1961) that examines his contributions in both combat and administrative commands.

Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War by Noriko Kawamura (University of Washington Press; 256 pages; $34.95). Draws on previously unavailable sources in a study of the Japanese emperor as a conflicted figure in his actions from the late 1920s to the end of the war.

Fascism: The Career of a Concept by Paul E. Gottfried (Northern Illinois University Press; 226 pages; $45). Traces the changing and expanding use and definition of the term fascist since the 1930s, including uses that have little to do with state corporatism or other once-essential attributes.

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott (Alfred A. Knopf; 454 pages; $30). Traces the quarter-century friendship between the First Lady and the writer and civil-rights activist that began in 1938 when Murray, 28 and the granddaughter of a slave, wrote a letter to the Roosevelts protesting segregation.

A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland edited by Karlyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker (Wayne State University Press; 360 pages; $34.99). Writings by scholars in American and Canadian history on the Detroit River and its borderlands and transnational abolitionism in the first decades of the 19th century.

Inside Israel’s Northern Command: The Yom Kippur War on the Syrian Border edited by Dani Asher (University Press of Kentucky; 704 pages; $40). Writings on the 1973 war, including prewar debates between Israel’s military and intelligence services over whether Syria would instigate conflict.

Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Mark G. Schmeller (Johns Hopkins University Press; 256 pages; $49.95). Traces the impact of the “contagious idea” of public opinion from the late 17th century to the Gilded Age.

Kill Jeff Davis: The Union Raid on Richmond, 1864 by Bruce M. Venter (University of Oklahoma Press; 356 pages; $29.95). Draws on newly discovered sources in a study of the failed Kilpatrick-Dahlgren cavalry raid on Richmond, which was ostensibly to free some 13,000 Union POWs but also appears to have had the goal of capturing the Confederate president.

Law and Legality in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey edited by Kent F. Schull, M. Safa Saracoglu, and Robert Zens (Indiana University Press; 216 pages; $25). Topics include Sharia courts in Egypt and how legal modernization set back women’s rights in the 19th century.

Principles and Gerrymanders: Parliamentary Redistribution of Ridings in Ontario, 1840-1954 by George Emery (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 348 pages; US$100). Discusses the parliament’s redistribution of electoral ridings in the province before the move, in the 1960s, to judge-led commissioned ridings.

Spying Through a Glass Darkly: American Espionage Against the Soviet Union, 1945-1946 by David Alvarez and Eduard Mark (University Press of Kansas; 344 pages; $34.95). Focuses on operations in Europe in a history of the Strategic Services Unit, an organization that laid the ground work for the creation of the CIA.

This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontier, 1715-1728 by Larry E. Ivers (University of South Carolina Press; 292 pages; $24.95). Focuses on the military history of a lengthy war between British colonists of South Carolina and various Indian peoples that began with the Yamasee and the 1715 Good Friday uprising.

A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community by Jessica van Horssen (University of British Columbia Press; 256 pages; US$99). Traces the history of Asbestos, Quebec, and the dependence of residents on mining a mineral discovered, over time, to be deadly to human health.

LAW

Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s by Risa Goluboff (Oxford University Press; 471 pages; $29.95). Documents how the Supreme Court’s loosening of vagrancy laws helped fuel social movements with expanded access to public space.

LINGUISTICS

Modality and Propositional Attitudes by Michael Hegarty (Cambridge University Press; 302 pages; $110). Defends the theory of modal interpretation developed by Angelika Kratzer, and a linked theory of propositional attitudes.

Regional Variation in Written American English by Jack Grieve (Cambridge University Press; 354 pages; $110). Identifies five modern dialect regions in a study mapping more than a hundred grammatical alternation variables across the United States.

LITERATURE

Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination by Sarah Phillips Casteel (Columbia University Press; 336 pages; $60). Traces representations of Jews by such writers as Derek Walcott, Myriam Chancy, Maryse Conde, and Jamaica Kincaid, including accounts of Sephardim who had been expelled from Spain, and “Calypso Jews” who fled 1930s Europe for Trinidad.

Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control by Aimee Armande Wilson (Bloomsbury Academic; 169 pages; $100). Traces the reciprocal influence of modernist aesthetics and the rhetoric of the birth-control movement in England and the United States; figures discussed include Octavia Butler, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, Flannery O’Connor, and Virginia Woolf.

Educating the Imagination: Northrop Frye, Past, Present, and Future edited by Alan Bewell, Neil ten Kortenaar, and Germaine Warkentin (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 288 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Essays on the Canadian critic and public intellectual (1912-91); topics include Frye’s symbolism, utopianism, and theory of tragedy, his work on Blake and Milton, and his work juxtaposed against that of Jameson, de Man, and Derrida.

H.G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy edited by Julia Creet, Amira Bojadzija-Dan, and Sara R. Horowitz (Northwestern University Press; 432 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $39.95 paperback). Essays on the Prague-born German-language writer Hans Gunther Adler (1910-88) that focus on his literary engagement, as a survivor, with the Holocaust.

The Legacy of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature and the English Novel, 1744--1859 by Patrick C. Fleming (University of Tennessee Press; 264 pages; $49.95). A study of how Dickens and other writers were influenced by the didactic children’s genre known as the “moral tale.”

Literary Journalism and the Aesthetics of Experience by John C. Hartsock (University of Massachusetts Press; 195 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Topics include what makes narrative literary journalism’s referentiality to phenomena different from that of conventional fiction or journalism.

Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China by Andrew Schonebaum (University of Washington Press; 283 pages; $50). Draws on literary and medical texts in a study of how fiction has incorporated, produced, and disseminated medical knowledge in China.

Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age by Jeannine Murray-Roman (University of Virginia Press; 256 pages; $59.50 hardcover, $27.50 paperback). Examines the depiction of music, dance, and oral storytelling in works by such writers as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Zoe Valdes, Rosario Ferre, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Marlon James.

The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor (Ohio State University Press; 328 pages; $90.95). Essays in medievalist ecocriticism; topics include the “hunter king,” medieval forest law, and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle.

Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage by Nina Levine (Fordham University Press; 200 pages; $85 hardcover, $28 paperback). Links theater and new forms of urban sociability through discussion of such plays as Englishmen for My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will and The Roaring Girl.

Shakespeare’s Literary Lives: The Author as Character in Fiction and Film by Paul Franssen (Cambridge University Press; $99.99). A study of fictions featuring the playwright, including as a time traveler made to speak to political and cultural issues outside his era.

MUSIC

Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music edited by Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker (University Press of Mississippi; 304 pages; $80 hardcover, $35 paperback). Topics include the performance of identity in songs by Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton.

Hearing the Future: The Music and Magic of the Sanguma Band by Dennis Crowdy (University of Hawai’i Press; 198 pages; $52). An ethnomusicological study of a group of Melanesian musicians whose music reflected the upheavals of political life in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s and 80s.

PHILOSOPHY

Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason by Georg Friedrich Meier, translated by Aaron Bunch (Bloomsbury Academic; 195 pages; $146). Translation of the German philosopher’s influential textbook, first published in 1752 and adopted by Kant and other instructors; includes a concordance linking Meier’s points to Kant’s lectures on logic.

Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and the Phenomenological Investigations by Johanna Oksala (Northwestern University Press; 200 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Combines approaches from Foucault and phenomenology to defend feminist philosophy as social critique.

On Nietzsche by Georges Bataille, translated by Stuart Kendall (State University of New York Press; 349 pages; $95). Scholarly translation of a work on the German philosopher that represents the third volume of Bataille’s Summa Atheologica.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Adapting in the Dust: Lessons Learned From Canada’s War in Afghanistan by Stephen M. Saideman (University of Toronto Press; 184 pages; US$95 hardcover, US$21.95 paperback). A study of how Canada’s military, politicians, and public adapted to the challenge of the country’s six-year intervention in Kandahar province.

Classical Geopolitics: A New Analytical Model by Phil Kelly (Stanford University Press; 210 pages; $29.95). Uses 13 pivotal events in world history to illustrate and test a new model of how power is effected and affected by the geographical and political environment in which it operates.

Green-lite: Complexity in Fifty Years of Canadian Environmental Policy, Governance, and Democracy by G. Bruce Doern, Graeme Auld, and Christopher Stoney (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 440 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Topics include Canada’s oil-sands energy economy, and the muzzling of environmental scientists during the era of Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why by Zoltan Barany (Princeton University Press; 230 pages; $35). Develops an approach to predicting how militaries will respond to domestic uprisings; draws on case studies from Iran, China, Eastern Europe, Burma, and the Arab world.

Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy by S.M. Amadae (Cambridge University Press; 360 pages; $99.99 hardcover, $34.99 paperback). Argues that neoliberal economics and politics reflect the mentality and institutions of orthodox game theory.

Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights in Latin America Past and Present edited by Alexander Wilde (University of Notre Dame Press; 496 pages; $49). Offers case studies from 10 countries in the region and contrasts Catholic and Evangelical responses.

Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism by George Hawley (University Press of Kansas; 376 pages; $34.95). Discusses “paleoconservatives,” radical libertarians, white supremacists, and others outside the conservative establishment.

The Soul of Armies: Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Military Culture in the US and UK by Austin Long (Cornell University Press; 288 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Compares counterinsurgency operations by the the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and the British army; settings include Vietnam, Kenya, and Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man by Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D. Seely (Polity Press; 195 pages; $69.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Juxtaposes Lacan and Fanon, Foucault and the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati, and Spinoza and the Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter in a defense of political spirituality and the viability of revolution.

RELIGION

Confucianism, a Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia edited by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Sungmoon Kim (State University of New York Press; 235 pages; $80). Essays that extend sociologist Robert Bellah’s ideas on American civil religion to examine whether Confucianism can be viewed as a civil religion for East Asia.

Evagrius and His Legacy edited by Joel Kalvesmaki and Robin Darling Young (University of Notre Dame Press; 376 pages; $39). Essays on the life and controversial legacy of Evangrius of Pontus (circa 345-99), who was condemned posthumously as a heretic by two ecumenical councils, but whose teachings were revered among Armenian and Syrian Christians.

Historical and Biblical Israel: The History, Tradition, and Archives of Israel and Judah by Reinhard G. Kratz, translated by Paul Michael Kurtz (Oxford University Press; 280 pages; $99). Enlarged English edition of a 2013 German book on the history of Israel and Judah, the formation of the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish archives from a perspective that separates biblical and historical Israel.

Middle of Nowhere: Religion, Art, and Pop Culture at Salvation Mountain by Sara M. Patterson (University of New Mexico Press; $24.95). Examines the experiences of pilgrims to a religious structure built by the outsider artist Leonard Knight (1931-2014) in the southern California desert.

The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality by Martin Westerholm (Oxford University Press; 249 pages; $115). A study of the Swiss thinker’s concept of theological reasoning.

Race and Secularism in America edited by Jonathon S. Kahn and Vincent W. Lloyd (Columbia University Press; 277 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). Essays that link secularist efforts to contain or privatize religion and the treatment of “racialized” subjects in the United States.

Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crises of Modernity by Andrew Prevot (University of Notre Dame Press; 432 pages; $39). Explores theological and philosophical perspectives on prayer in the modern age; draws on such thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean-Louis Chretien, Johann Baptist Metz, Ignacio Ellacuria, and James Cone.

SOCIOLOGY

Living Together, Living Apart: Mixed Status Families and US Immigration Policy edited by April Schueths and Jodie Lawston (University of Washington Press; 272 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Combines academic essays and personal narratives in writings on daily life in households that include a mix of undocumented family members and legal residents.

Multiple Autisms: Spectrums of Advocacy and Genomic Science by Jennifer S. Singh (University of Minnesota Press; 284 pages; $94.50 hardcover, $27 paperback). Draws on interviews with autism scientists, parents of autistic children, and people on the “autism spectrum” in a study of changes in how the condition has been identified and defined.

SPORTS STUDIES

Moments of Impact: Injury, Racialized Memory, and Reconciliation in College Football by Jaime Schultz (University of Nebraska Press; 240 pages; $40). Explores the racial politics of cultural memory through a study of three black men, Jack Trice, Ozzie Simmons, and Johnny Bright, who were seriously injured playing football on overwhelmingly white teams at three Iowa institutions in the first half of the 20th century.

Team Chemistry: The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League Baseball by Nathan Michael Corzine (University of Illinois Press; 229 pages; $95 hardcover, $19.95 paperback). Documents the interplay of baseball and alcohol, tobacco, amphetamines, steroids, and other legal and illicit drugs since the sport’s beginnings;

WOMEN’S STUDIES

Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia by Azza Basarudin (University of Washington Press; 272 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). An ethnographic study of Sunni Muslim activists in Sisters in Islam, an NGO of professional women promoting gender equality and justice in Malaysia.