Weekly Book List, February 9, 2018

ANTHROPOLOGY

Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai by Anne Rademacher (University of California Press; 204 pages; $34.95). Offers an ethnographic perspective on the learning of “green design” by student-architects in the Indian mega-city.

No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement by Elizabeth Cullen Dunn (Cornell University Press; 255 pages; $95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Explores the long-term “limbo of displacement” experienced by ethnic Georgians in resettlement camps set up to aid those forced to leave South Ossetia with the Russo-Georgian war of 2008.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture by Jason E. Hill (University of California Press; 400 pages; $65). Discusses the contributions of painters, photographers, cartoonists and other visual artists to the progressive New York tabloid PM, published from 1940 to 1948.

Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living by Mari Dumett (University of California Press; 400 pages; $65). A study of Fluxus and its engagement with corporatism as the artistic collective developed in New York, California, Europe, and Japan, between 1962 and 1978; focuses on the Fluxus founder, George Maciunas, and five other central figures: George Brecht, Robert Watts, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, and Mieko Shiomi.

The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum by Sarita Echavez See (New York University Press; 272 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Uses Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” to discuss knowledge accumulation in relation to Philippine art and other collections at Michigan’s Frank Murphy Memorial Museum and the University of Michigan Natural History Museum.

Macau and the Casino Complex edited by Stefan Al (University of Nevada Press; 224 pages; $24.95). Writings on the casino complex and gambling culture that dominates the former Portuguese colony, turned Chinese special administrative region in 1999; topics include the role of feng shui in casino design, and Macau’s struggle with historic preservation.

Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics by Erika Mary Boeckeler (University of Iowa Press; 285 pages; $75). Focuses on literature and visual arts from early modern Western Europe and Russia.

Sacred to the Touch: Nordic and Baltic Religious Wood Carving by Thomas A. DuBois (University of Washington Press; 208 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). Discusses six 20th- and 21st-century artists who have revitalized the tradition.

COMMUNICATION

Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media edited by Vanessa Joosen (University Press of Mississippi; 256 pages; $65). Essays on links drawn between children and the elderly in literature, film, television, advertising, and animation in the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Turkey, and other countries.

DANCE

The Evolving Feminine Ballet Body edited by Pirkko Markula and Marianne I. Clark (University of Alberta Press; 228 pages; US$24.95). Essays on such topics as ballet-inspired workouts, the ballet body in children’s fiction, and critical perceptions of ballerinas on the reality show So You Think You Can Dance.

ECONOMICS

Saving International Adoption: An Argument from Economics and Personal Experience by Mark Montgomery and Irene Powell (Vanderbilt University Press; 288 pages; $27.95). Argues for an embrace of market forces, properly regulated, in international adoption that would allow birth and would-be adoptive parents to meet and negotiate an exchange of parental rights.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience edited by Cindy Ermus (Louisiana State University Press; 216 pages; $45). Essays by scholars in history, anthropology, and sociology on multiple disasters in the region since the mid-19th century, beginning with the New Orleans flood of 1849.

FILM STUDIES

Hearing Haneke: The Sound Tracks of a Radical Auteur by Elsie Walker (Oxford University Press; 232 pages; $99 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). A study of the acclaimed Austrian director’s use of sound.

Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Tanzania by Laura Fair (Ohio University Press; 452 pages; $90 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Topics include how Tanzanians engaged with Indian melodramas, Italian westerns, blaxploitation films, and other genres to give films individual and communal meaning.

GEOGRAPHY

The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given by Rob Sullivan (University of Georgia Press; 204 pages; $59.95). Topics include bridging Erving Goffman’s concept of the situation and Michel Foucault’s idea of milieu.

HISTORY

Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism by Siobhan Doucette (University of Pittsburgh Press; 344 pages; $29.95). Traces the history and influence of Poland’s independent press from the mid-1970s through the rise of Solidarity and the events that led to the overthrow of Communism in 1989.

Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru by Cynthia E. Milton (University of Wisconsin Press; 296 pages; $79.95). Documents how the Peruvian military has used books, films, and museum exhibits to shift public opinion about the country’s period of conflict in the 1980s and 90s.

Contours of Change: Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905-1965 by Bala Saho (Michigan State University Press; 187 pages; $29.95). Draws on oral histories and qadi court records in a study of how women used the Muslim tribunals to seek redress in colonial Bathurst (now Banjul).

Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s by Kristine Alexander (University of British Columbia Press; 296 pages; US$85). A study of the British-based Girl Guides and the movement’s efforts to shape the lives of girls and young women in England, Canada, and India.

Harold Stassen: Eisenhower, the Cold War, and the Pursuit of Nuclear Disarmament by Lawrence S. Kaplan (University Press of Kentucky; 212 pages; $80). A biography of Stassen (1907-2001) that focuses on the former Minnesota governor’s work in the Eisenhower administration and efforts to promote nuclear disarmament.

Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit by Susannah J. Ural (Louisiana State University Press; 384 pages; $48). Links the cohesion and success of the brigade to the members’ unusually strong devotion to Southern independence, pride as Texans fighting more than a thousand miles from home in the Army of Northern Virginia, and belief in a slave-holding economy.

In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand by Tyrell Haberkorn (University of Wisconsin Press; 376 pages; $79.95). Offers a historical perspective on the normalization of political violence and suppression in modern Thailand.

In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles by Jerry Gonzalez (Rutgers University Press; 201 pages; $95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Documents how Mexican-Americans came to be the majority population in the suburban San Gabriel Valley.

Making Money: Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa’’s Guinea Coast by Colleen E. Kriger (Ohio University Press; 254 pages; $75 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Draws on the records of England’s Royal African Company in a study of the slave trade and other Anglo-African commerce on the Upper Guinea coast of West Africa at the end of the 17th century.

Mike’s World: Lester B. Pearson and Canadian External Affairs edited by Asa McKercher and Galen Roger Perras (University of British Columbia Press; 380 pages; US$95). Writings on the prime minister and Nobel Prize-winning statesman (1897-1972) and his legacy for Canada’s foreign policy.

The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War by Edwin E. Moise (University Press of Kansas; 276 pages; $29.95). Argues, among other things, that the North Vietnamese offensive in early 1968 was far larger in scope, duration, and impact,in terms of U.S. casualties, than most authors have acknowledged; also uses Vietnamese sources to examine Communist errors of coordination.

Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction by A. James Fuller (Kent State University Press; 496 pages; $59.95). A biography of the controversial Indiana governor that also sheds new light on his less-studied postwar career as a radical Republican in the US Senate.

The Other Roots: Wandering Origins in “Roots of Brazil” and the Impasses of Modernity in Ibero-America by Pedro Meira Monteiro, translated by Fiora Thomson-DeVeaux (University of Notre Dame Press; 318 pages; $100 hardcover, $29 paperback). A study of Sergio Buarque de Holanda’s 1936 work Raizes do Brasil and his key concept of the “cordial man.”

Pennsylvania Farming: A History in Landscapes by Sally McMurry (University of Pittsburgh Press; 472 pages; $49.95). Traces the evolution of Pennsylvania’s agricultural landscapes since the colonial era.

Punishing the Black Body: Marking Social and Racial Structures in Barbados and Jamaica by Dawn P. Harris (University of Georgia Press; 274 pages; $59.95). A comparative study of punishment in the two British colonies, including continuities from slavery in the post-emancipation period.

Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi by Robert Hunt Ferguson (University of Georgia Press; 240 pages; $56.95). A study of Delta Cooperative Farm (1936--42), founded by two dozen black and white ex-sharecropping families, and its descendant, Providence Farm (1938--56).

Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction by Catherine Gallagher (University of Chicago Press; 416 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). Examines the motivations, workings, goals, and appeal of works of counterfactual history, such as myriad texts imagining the outcomes of victories by the Confederacy and Hitler.

Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by Urmi Engineer Willoughby (Louisiana State University Press; 264 pages; $45). Examines the wider racial, imperial, and other contexts of yellow-fever epidemics in the city between 1796 and 1905 and public efforts at controlling the disease.

LABOR STUDIES

Labor Justice across the Americas edited by Leon Fink and Juan Manuel Palacio (University of Illinois Press; 312 pages; $95 hardcover, $35 paperback). Writings on the emergence of adjudicating bodies for labor issues in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia and other Andean nations.

LAW

City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance by Anne Fleming (Harvard University Press; 376 pages; $45). Focuses on the city and state of New York in a study of challenges regulating the small-sum lending industry.

Health Care and the Charter: Legal Mobilization and Policy Change in Canada by Christopher P. Manfredi and Antonia Maioni (University of British Columbia Press; 128 pages; US$65). Focuses on controversial Canadian Supreme Court rulings in Eldridge (1997), Auton (2004), and Chaouilli (2005).

Innovation and the State: Finance, Regulation, and Justice by Cristie Ford (Cambridge University Press; 368 pages; $99.99 hardcover, $34.99 paperback). Focuses on financial regulation in an analysis of the regulatory challenges posed by innovation.

Must We Defend Nazis? Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (New York University Press; 176 pages; $89 hardcover, $14.95 paperback). Defends a narrowed view of the First Amendment that takes into account the harms that hate speech can inflict upon marginalized people.

Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession by Elaine Craig (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 320 pages; US$34.95). Discusses actions by judges and lawyers that contribute to the trauma and revictimization of complainants in sexual-assault cases in Canada.

LITERATURE

The Hatred of Literature by William Marx, translated by Nicholas Elliott (Harvard University Press; 240 pages; $29.95). Translation of a 2015 French work on the history of attacks on literature by philosophers, theologians, politicians, and others since ancient times.

Levi’s Vindication: The 1007 Anonymous “as It Really Is” by Kenneth R. Stow (Hebrew Union College Press, distributed by University of Pittsburgh Press; 200 pages; $29.95). Discusses a Hebrew text from the first half of the 13th century that uses the story of a massacre and forced conversion to discuss the wider issues of relations between Jews and their rulers; challenges other scholars of the text by defending and expanding a view put forth by the French scholar Israel Levi at the turn of the 20th century.

Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History by Didem Havlioglu (Syracuse University Press; 256 pages; $55 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). A study of the Ottoman poet (1460-1515) that describes how she achieved admiration and fame in a male-dominated literary and wider culture.

Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes edited by Christopher Gogwilt and Melanie D. Holm (Fordham University Press; 320 pages; $125 hardcover, $35 paperback). Essays on such topics as starling song in European, American, and Indonesian poetry.

The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat by Johannes Voelz (Cambridge University Press; 246 pages; $99.99). Focuses on works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, and Don DeLillo in a study of American writers who have explored insecurity as an enlivening space of possibility.

“The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” by Amy Amendt-Raduege (Kent State University Press; 170 pages; $30). Topics include how Tolkien’s masterwork links medieval and modern ideas of dying.

Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness by Lily Wong (Columbia University Press; 229 pages; $60). Discusses depictions of Chinese sex workers in literature, film, and other realms in the United States, China, and Sinophone communities since the early 20th century.

An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel by Gregory Vargo (Cambridge University Press; 278 pages; $99.99). Focuses on the genres of melodrama and the Bildungsroman in a study of fiction in the radical Chartist press and its influence on middle-class writers; authors discussed include Thomas Cooper, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ernest Jones, and Charles Dickens.

Waka and Things, Waka as Things by Edward Kamens (Yale University Press; 352 pages; $65). Discusses classical Japanese poetry in relation to material artifacts and visual arts.

MUSIC

Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music edited by Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman (Oxford University Press; 384 pages; $99). Essays by scholars and practitioners on composer-performer collaboration and improvisation.

Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan by Marie Abe (Wesleyan University Press, distributed by University Press of New England; 252 pages; $85 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines the revival of a practice, dating back to the 1840s, of brightly costumed street musicians who publicize a business by parading through a neighborhood.

PHILOSOPHY

The Epistemic Lightness of Truth: Deflationism and its Logic by Cezary Cieslinski (Cambridge University Press; 298 pages; $99.99). Defends the notion of truth as an “innocent” concept that is absent any essence that could be revealed by scientific inquiry.

The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith by Paul Sagar (Princeton University Press; 248 pages; $45). Focuses on David Hume and Adam Smith and what is termed the two Scottish philosophers’ underappreciated contributions to political thought as they broke with the theories of Thomas Hobbes.

Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics by Eve Rabinoff (Northwestern University Press; 208 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Discusses perception’s role in ethical reasoning, choice, and action.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Abortion: History, Politics, and Reproductive Justice after “Morgentaler” edited by Shannon Stettner, Kristin Burnett, and Travis Hay (University of British Columbia Press; 352 pages; US$95). Writings on discrepancies between what people believe abortion law to be in Canada in the wake of the 1988 Morgentaler supreme court ruling and what people experience in actuality.

Allies That Count: Junior Partners in Coalition Warfare by Olivier Schmitt (Georgetown University Press; 264 pages; $36.95). Examines the effectiveness of U.S. allies in in the Gulf War, the Kosovo campaign, the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan, with broader comparative analysis of 204 “junior partners” in interventions since the end of the Cold War.

Latino Mayors: Political Change in the Postindustrial City edited by Marion Orr and Domingo Morel (Temple University Press; 310 pages; $94.50 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Writings on the campaigns, governance styles, and policies of 11 Latino mayors in San Antonio, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford, Miami, and Providence.

Leadership in American Politics edited by Jeffery A. Jenkins and Craig Volden (University Press of Kansas; 322 pages; $39.95). Topics include leadership at the top in the presidency, Congress, and judiciary, as well as in parties, the federal bureaucracy, interest groups, and the states.

Making Peace in Drug Wars: Crackdowns and Cartels in Latin America by Benjamin Lessing (Cambridge University Press; 326 pages; $94.99 hardcover, $34.99 paperback). Develops a theory of how different state policies shape cartel-state conflict, with brute-force crackdowns tending to elicit the most violent responses in contrast to policies that “condition repression” on cartel behavior; offers case studies of Colombia, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro.

Tug of War: Negotiating Security in Eurasia edited by Fen Osler Hampson and Mikhail Troitskiy (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 236 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$35 paperback). Writings by scholars from Russia, Eurasia, and the West on such topics as the disputes involving Nagorno-Karabakh and the Georgian secessionist areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Why Veterans Run: Military Service in American Presidential Elections, 1789-2016 by Jeremy M. Teigen (Temple University Press; 320 pages; $99.50 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Analyzes factors that have shaped the frequency and outcomes of military veterans as presidential candidates in six postwar periods of American history.

Women and the Egyptian Revolution: Engagement and Activism during the 2011 Arab Uprisings by Nermin Allam (Cambridge University Press; 221 pages; $99.99 hardcover, $29.99 paperback). An analysis and oral history of women’s participation.

PSYCHOLOGY

Beyond Evolutionary Psychology: How and Why Neuropsychological Modules Arise by George Ellis and Mark Solms (Cambridge University Press; 216 pages; $99.99 hardcover, $29.99 paperback). Argues, among other things, that there can be no innate language-acquisition module in the neocortex.

Guns and Suicide: An American Epidemic by Michael D. Anestis (Oxford University Press; 184 pages; $29.95). Focuses on ways to reduce the incidence of suicide by gun, a category that comprises the majority of both gun deaths and suicide deaths in the United States.

PUBLIC POLICY

Too Critical to Fail: How Canada Manages Threats to Critical Infrastructure by Kevin Quigley, Ben Bisset, and Bryan Mills (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 416 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$39.95 paperback). Evaluates the risk-regulatory regimes that shape the Canadian government’s ability to respond to natural disasters, industrial failures, pandemics, terrorist attacks, and other crises.

RELIGION

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler (New York University Press; 288 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Focuses on Chicago in a study of the impact on the church of tens of thousands of black converts in the wake of the Great Migration, and later with a distinctive form of black Catholicism promoted by activists inspired by the black-power movement and Vatican II.

Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West by Robin Whelan (University of California Press; 320 pages; $95). Examines disputes over orthodoxy between Nicene and Homoian Christians in Vandal-ruled North Africa from around 439 to 533.

Constructing Civility: The Human Good in Christian and Islamic Political Theologies by Richard S. Park (University of Notre Dame Press; 282 pages; $45). Uses a model from Aristotelian ethics and ideas of public civility to bridge the two faiths; explores, for illustrative purposes, tensions between Christians and Muslims on Mindanao in the Philippines.

Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife edited by Candi K. Cann (University Press of Kansas; 210 pages; $65). Interdisciplinary essays on such topics as food offerings to the deceased and the bereaved in various East Asian cultures, funeral casseroles and church cookbooks in the American South, and Moroccan funeral feasts.

God and Government: Martin Luther’s Political Thought by Jarrett A. Carty (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 208 pages; US$120 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Topics include how Luther applied political theory to the challenges of the Reformation, including the Peasants War of 1525, and resistance against the Holy Roman Empire.

Icons and the Liturgy, East and West: History, Theology, and Culture edited by Nicholas Denysenko (University of Notre Dame Press; 220 pages; $75). Essays on icons from theological, pastoral, and other perspectives.

Possessed by the Virgin: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Possession in South India by Kristin C. Bloomer (Oxford University Press; 352 pages; $99). Focuses on three Tamil Roman Catholic women in an ethnographic study of Marian possession, healing, and exorcism among Catholics and Hindus in southeast India.

Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720-1955: Linguistic Practices of the Catholic Church by Sylvie DuBois, Emilie Gagnet Leumas, and Malcolm Richardson (Louisiana State University Press; 216 pages; $38). Combines quantitative and qualitative data in a study of bilingualism in the church in the antebellum era, followed by the post-Civil War rise of English-language dominance.

Spiritual Guides: Pathfinders in the Desert by Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame Press; 198 pages; $45). Discusses the thought of Paul Tillich, Raimon Panikkar, Thomas Merton, and Pope Francis and transformative spirituality amid what is termed the decay of late modernity.

The Urban Church Imagined: Religion, Race, and Authenticity in the City by Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams (New York University Press; 240 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Focuses on a Chicago church in a study of white evangelical Protestants’ strategies in their creation of new congregations in urban areas.

SOCIOLOGY

Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men by Hector Carrillo (University of Chicago Press; 352 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). An ethnographic study of Mexican gay men who have migrated to the United States in pursuit of greater sexual freedom.

Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness by Trevor Hoppe (University of California Press; 288 pages; $85 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Examines punitive and coercive responses to HIV/AIDS, including through American states’ criminal-law legislation intended to police the behavior of those with the virus.

The Resilient Self: Gender, Immigration, and Taiwanese Americans by Chien-Juh Gu (Rutgers University Press; 208 pages; $95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). A study of middle-class, educated Taiwanese women and their efforts to redefine their lives after immigration as dependent spouses initially unable, by the terms of their visas, to work outside the home.

Taking Baby Steps: How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception by Jody Lynee Madeira (University of California Press; 304 pages; $85 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Explores emotional, contractual, and other aspects of the process of assisted reproduction.

WOMEN’S STUDIES

Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive by Clare Hemmings (Duke University Press; 291 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a study of the famed anarchist’s significance for feminist politics; explores Goldman’s own writings as well as ambivalence in the “critical archive.”

Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard (University of Pittsburgh Press; 200 pages; $26.95). Draws on a study of migrant writers from 17 countries now living in the United States.