Weekly Book List, February 3, 2017

ANTHROPOLOGY

The Art of Connection: Risk, Mobility, and the Crafting of Transparency in Coastal Kenya by Dillon Mahoney (University of California Press; 264 pages; $85 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Documents how digital technologies came to figure in the global mobility of Kenya’s craft industry and in relations between buyers and producers.

Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government by Tony Bennett and others (Duke University Press; 360 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Explores links among anthropological fieldwork, collecting, and social governance in Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, and the United States.

Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization by Emanuela Guano (University of Pennsylvania Press; 242 pages; $59.95). Focuses on middle-class Genoese who refashioned themselves as tour guides, entrepreneurs, and cultural brokers in hopes for their city’s revitalization as a site for cultural tourism.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Dressing the Part: Power, Dress, Gender, and Representation in the Pre-Columbian Americas edited by Sarahh E.M. Scher and Billie J.A. Follensbee (University Press of Florida; 497 pages; $125). Writings on how clothing, hairstyle, and ornament conveyed aspects of identity, status, and affiliation for men, women, and people of multiple or ambiguous gender.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872-1887 by Michael Marrinan (Getty Research Institute; 416 pages; $69.95). A study of the French painter (1848-94) that explores his upper-class Parisian milieu.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life edited by Sherry Simon (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 320 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Essays on such topics as Trieste between Italy and Slovenia.

ECONOMICS

The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street by Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez (New York University Press; 255 pages; $30). Discusses the 2008 financial crisis and the federal government’s failure to dismantle megabanks or prosecute any senior bankers.

The Currency of Confidence: How Economic Beliefs Shape the IMF’s Relationship with Its Borrowers by Stephen C. Nelson (Cornell University Press; 248 pages; $39.95). Draws on the archives and personnel files of the International Monetary Fund in a study of how educational credentials and other factors shape IMF officials’ trust of negotiators from borrower nations.

Sweet Talk: Paternalism and Collective Action in North-South Trade Relations by J.P. Singh (Stanford University Press; 264 pages; $85 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Focuses on the lack of reciprocal tariff and nontariff concessions in a critique of paternalism in the global North’s explicit and implicit demands in trade relations with the global South.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature by Benjamin Hale (MIT Press; 317 pages; $29.95). Argues for our duty to be environmentalists despite what can be viewed as nature’s indifference and brutality.

FILM STUDIES

Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Films by Vlad Dima (Indiana University Press; 232 pages; $80 hardcover, $35 paperback). Explores the uses of sound and silence in Touki Bouki, Hyenes, and other works by the Senegalese director (1945-98).

GEOGRAPHY

The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements by Jennifer L. Fluri and Rachel Lehr (University of Georgia Press; 188 pages; $74.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). A study of aid groups in Afghanistan and the ways in which Afghans and their country have been imagined, described, fetishized, politicized, vilified, and rescued.

HISTORY

The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States by David C. Atkinson (University of North Carolina Press; 319 pages; $95 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). A study of efforts to restrict Asian labor mobility in the British dominions and in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City’s Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood (Columbia University Press; 488 pages; $40). Examines seven pivotal periods in the history of New York’s upper class since the 1750s and its aggressive pursuit of prestige, power, and wealth with the rise of the city’s economy.

Irish-American Autobiography: The Divided Hearts of Athletes, Priests, Pilgrims, and More by James Silas Rogers (Catholic University of America Press; 208 pages; $24.95). Uses autobiographies to trace the changing meaning of Irishness for Irish-Americans over the 20th century.

Martyr of the American Revolution: The Execution of Isaac Hayne, South Carolinian by C.L. Bragg (University of South Carolina Press; 208 pages; $34.99). Examines the circumstances that led to a South Carolina militia colonel to be executed for treason in 1781 in British-occupied Charleston.

Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia edited by Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, and Nicole Svobodny (Indiana University Press; 339 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Interdisciplinary writings by historians and literary scholars on such topics as migrant female workers and a “white slavery” sex panic in turn-of-the-century partitioned Poland.

Mr Barry’s War: Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament After the Great Fire of 1834 by Caroline Shenton (Oxford University Press; 288 pages; $40). Documents the practical and political challenges that faced architect Charles Barry, who won the competition to rebuild, in Gothic revival style, the Palace of Westminster.

Nixon’s Back Channel to Moscow: Confidential Diplomacy and Detente by Richard A. Moss (University Press of Kentucky; 390 pages; $45). Draws on newly declassified documents in a study of the “back channel” established by Henry Kissinger with the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908--1940 by John Lear (University of Texas Press; 366 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). A study of Mexican artists and labor unions and their representation of Mexican workers during three revolutionary decades; discusses such canonical figures as Diego Rivera as well as lesser-known figures.

The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer by Bonnie S. Anderson (Oxford University Press; 231 pages; $34.95). Traces the life of a now little-known Polish-Jewish immigrant who by the 1850s had became a leading orator for feminism, abolition, and free thought in the United States.

Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France by Meghan K. Roberts (University of Chicago Press; 214 pages; $45). A study of the Diderot, Du Chatelet, Helvetius, D’Epinay, Condorcet, Necker, Lavoisier, and Lalande families, including how Enlightenment intellectuals used their own children to test their ideas in realms from education to vaccination.

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns by Lisa Voigt (University of Texas Press; 225 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Draws on 18th-century accounts of civic festivals and religious feasts in a study of the diverse festive cultures created in the silver-mining town of Potosi, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and in the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil.

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso (Columbia University Press; 289 pages; $35). Uses art, cinema, political theory, and other realms to explore manifestations of melancholy and a crisis of defeat in the history of the 20th-century left.

LAW

Closing the Courthouse Door: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable by Erwin Chemerinsky (Yale University Press; 262 pages; $32.50). Discusses U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have cumulatively narrowed the public’s access to courts for constitutional redress by expanding categories of immunity, restricting who has “standing,” and constraining the right of habeas corpus.

Genocide: The Act as Idea by Berel Lang (University of Pennsylvania Press; 209 pages; $24.95). Defends the concept and term “genocide” as applied to acts that have a longer history than the word; topics include issues of definition, intent, and individual and collective responsibility.

LITERATURE

Dickens’s Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence by Andrew Mangham (Ohio State University Press; 275 pages; $84.95). Sets Dickens’s fiction and early journalism in the legal and scientfic contexts of Victorian forensic medicine.

Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801--1900 by Adrianna M. Paliyenko (Penn State University Press; 304 pages; $99.95). Examines debates over genius in 19th-century France and the reception of works by such female poets as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anais Segalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert, and Louise Ackermann.

German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy by Vivian Liska (Indiana University Press; 201 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Focuses on Jewish dimensions in the work of Kafka, Benjamin, Scholem, Arendt, and Celan as crucial to their concept of modernity.

Good Night, Beloved Comrade: The Letters of Denton Welch to Eric Oliver edited by Daniel J. Murtaugh (University of Wisconsin Press; 144 pages; $29.95). Annotated and first publication of 51 letters written by Welch (1915-48) to an agricultural worker with Britain’s wartime Land Army who became his lover and caretaker during the last six years of the disabled writer’s life.

MATHEMATICS

Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense: Histories and Philosophies of Mathematical Practice by Roi Wagner (Princeton University Press; 236 pages; $45). Combines perspectives from philosophy, history, and cognitive science in a study of how mathematics evolves over time.

PHILOSOPHY

The Commentarial Transformation of the “Spring and Autumn” by Newell Ann Van Auken (State University of New York Press; 338 pages; $95). Uses clues from a commentaries in the Zuo Tradition to document how a non-narrative Chinese historical record covering 722-479 BC became known as a Confucian classic.

The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing by Drew Leder (University of Chicago Press; 287 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). Counters Cartesianism using phenomenological and other perspectives on the “distressed body,” including bodies in chronic pain, and those human and non-human bodies, marginalized in factory farming and the prison system.

A History of Light: The Idea of Photography by Junko Theresa Mikuriya (Bloomsbury Academic; 176 pages; $114). Discusses photography as an idea preexisting in Plato’s dialogues, Iamblichus’ writings on theurgy, and works by the Renaissance thinker Marsilio Ficino.

Land and the Given Economy: The Hermeneutics and Phenomenology of Dwelling by Todd S. Mei (Northwestern University Press; 272 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines views of land in the work of Locke, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Henry George, Alfred Marshall, and Veblen, and defends an approach grounded in Heidegger.

On Betrayal by Avishai Margalit (Harvard University Press; 310 pages; $26.95). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a philosophical exploration of the nature and varied forms of betrayal.

The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre by Noreen Khawaja (University of Chicago Press; 306 pages; $45). Traces the influence of a Protestant-Pietist on existentialist thought, with a focus on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force by Eliot A. Cohen (Basic Books; 285 pages; $27.99). Argues that the use of “hard force” remains essential to U.S. foreign policy.

Latin American Elections: Choice and Change by Richard Nadeau and others (University of Michigan Press; 248 pages; $70). Considers the applications of the “Michigan model” of voting behavior to the analysis of Latin American elections; draws on data from 18 countries from 2008 to 2012.

Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War by Ana Arjona (Cambridge University Press; 392 pages; $120). Combines theoretical and empirical perspectives in a study of how armed groups attempt to rule in conflict zones, and how civilians influence that process.

POPULAR CULTURE

The 10 Cent War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II edited by Trischa Goodnow and James J. Kimble (University Press of Mississippi; 256 pages; $65). Essays on how comics worked to mobilize Americans for the fight against fascism and the war effort even before Pearl Harbor.

RELIGION

History of the Church by Rufinus of Aquileia, translated by Philip R. Amidon (Catholic University of America Press; 504 pages; $39.95). Translation of a history of Christianity between 325 and 395 that was published by Rufinus around AD 403-3 and continued the account started by Eusebius of Caesarea.

SOCIOLOGY

Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec by Genevieve Zubrzycki (University of Chicago Press; 226 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). Uses the annual feast of St. John the Baptist to explore challenges to the ethno-Catholic model of Quebecois identity and trace the rise of a new secular identity in the province.

The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and Its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors by Janet Jacobs (New York University Press; 179 pages; $89 hardcover, $24 paperback). Explores the intergenerational transmission of trauma through a study of 75 children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

Redefining Japaneseness: Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland by Jane H. Yamshiro (Rutgers University Press; 224 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Draws on fieldwork in the Tokyo area in a study of American immigrants---some of full Japanese heritage, others mixed---and their navigation of life and cultural categories in Japan.

WOMEN’S STUDIES

Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater by Dia Da Costa (University of Illinois Press; 304 pages; $95 hardcover, $30 paperback). An ethnographic study of two activist performance groups in India: the Communist-affiliated Jana Natya Manch, and Budhan Theatre, a community-based group of the indigenous Chhara people.