Weekly Book List, January 12, 2018

AMERICAN STUDIES

Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the West by Nathaniel Lewis and Stephen Tatum (University of Nebraska Press; 300 pages; $60). Uses a case study of “4 x 4,” a single episode from the TV crime drama CSI, to explore the complexity of Las Vegas and the problem of regional identity in the American West.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality by David A. Palmer and Elijah Siegler (University of Chicago Press; 352 pages; $85 hardcover, $27.50 paperback). Examines the encounter of Chinese monks and Western seekers in a study of the spread of Westernized Daoism in contemporary China; draws on fieldwork in monasteries atop Hua or Huashan, a mountain in Shaanxi province.

The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved by Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg (Yale University Press; 352 pages; $38). Draws on evolutionary biology and indigenous history in a study of coevolution and mutualism between wolves and Paleolithic humans, including cooperative hunting, companionship, and wolves protecting human camps.

Ojibwe Stories From the Upper Berens River: A. Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth in Conversation edited by Jennifer S.H. Brown (University of Nebraska Press; 240 pages; $50). Edition of stories and reminiscences recorded by the ethnographer from an elder depicting four generations of Anishinaabeg along the Berens River in Manitoba and Ontario.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Connected Communities: Networks, Identity, and Social Change in the Ancient Cibola World by Matthew A. Peeples (University of Arizona Press; 296 pages; $60). A study of social and political change in what are now the Arizona-Mexico borderlands from about AD 1150 to 1325.

The History and Archaeology of Jaffa 2 edited by Aaron A. Burke, Katherine Strange-Burke, and Martin Peilstocker (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, distributed by University of New Mexico Press; 472 pages; $98). Reports on excavations in the port city, including by the Israeli Antiquities Authority at the both the Postal Compound and Armenian Compound in recent years.

Landscapes of the Itza: Archaeology and Art History at Chichen Itza and Neighboring Sites edited by Linnea Wren and others (University Press of Florida; 306 pages; $110). Research on debates surrounding the capital and trading center of Late Maya civilization, with a special emphasis on its architecture, murals, and other visual culture.

The Rosewood Massacre: An Archaeology and History of Intersectional Violence by Edward Gonzalez-Tennant (University Press of Florida; 208 pages; $79.95). Combines archaeological and other data in a study of the 1923 destruction of the predominantly black town of Rosewood, Fla., which was burned to the ground by neighboring whites.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Christian Krohg’s Naturalism by Oystein Sjastad (University of Washington Press; 288 pages; $50). Examines the art and theories of the Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic (1852-1925), whose 1886 novel Albertine, and related paintings, about a seamstress forced into prostitution, were banned upon release.

Like Andy Warhol by Jonathan Flatley (University of Chicago Press; 288 pages; $45). Discusses Warhol’s work across a wide variety of media as an archive of his “affective labor” of liking, including ways of being alike.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual by Christopher Nappa (University of Michigan Press; 236 pages; $75). Explores Juvenal’s methods and targets in his critique of the breakdown of traditional Roman values; topics include how his satires reveal their author’s revelry in what he condemns.

COMMUNICATION

The Anime Boom in the United States: Lessons for Global Creative Industries by Michal Daliot-Bul and Nissim Otmazgin (Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press; 230 pages; $39.95). Draws on interviews with Japanese and Americans in the animation industry in a study of the marketing and commercial expansion of anime in the United States; focuses on television anime series, with additional discussion of theatrically released films.

Becoming the News: How Ordinary People Respond to the Media Spotlight by Ruth Palmer (Columbia University Press; 261 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). Examines people’s perceptions and experience interacting with journalists and seeing themselves represented in stories; draws on interviews with 83 people featured in newspapers in the New York City area or in a here-unnamed mid-sized city in the West.

Breaking News? Politics, Journalism, and Infotainment on Quebec Television by Frederick Bastien, translated by Kathe Roth (University of British Columbia Press; 160 pages; US$75). Documents how “infotainment” has figured in public-affairs communication in the Canadian province.

Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century by Fred Carroll (University of Illinois Press; 278 pages; $95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Topics include how beginning in the 1920s, the commercial African-American press drew on such themes in the alternative black press as anticolonialism, separatism, and anticapitalism.

CRIMINOLOGY

After Prison: Navigating Employment and Reintegration edited by Rose Ricciardelli and Adrienne M.F. Peters (Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 320 pages; US$39.99). Pays particular attention to the experiences of former inmates in Canada.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror by Kinitra D. Brooks (Rutgers University Press; 216 pages; $95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Discusses black women of the Americas and Britain as creators and characters in the horror genre.

ECONOMICS

Sewing Hope: How One Factory Challenges the Apparel Industry’s Sweatshops by Sarah Adler-Milstein and John M. Kline (University of California Press; 224 pages; $85 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Focuses on the Alta Gracia apparel factory in the Dominican Republic, here described as an “anti-sweatshop” with, among other things, wages at three times the legal minimum, high safety standards, and a recognized union.

Sovereign Debt Crises: What Have We Learned? edited by Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and Kunibert Raffer (Cambridge University Press; 304 pages; $110). Essays on singular aspects of debt crises in 14 nations, including Argentina, Greece, Iceland, Malaysia, and South Africa.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Good Food, Strong Communities: Promoting Social Justice through Local and Regional Food Systems edited by Steve Ventura and Martin Bailkey (University of Iowa Press; 304 pages; $45). Writings by scholars and activists on strengthening food security in urban areas of the United States.

Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency by Jonathan Wlasiuk (University of Pittsburgh Press; 184 pages; $27.95). Focuses on Cleveland, Ohio, and Whiting, Ind., in a history of the environmental impact of Standard Oil’s operations, beginning in the Gilded Age.

FILM STUDIES

Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel (Rutgers University Press; 256 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Explores newly emergent cultural anxieties as worked through in such films as Singin’ in the Rain, On the Waterfront, and Sunset Boulevard.

Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of an Image by Shaina Hammerman (Indiana University Press; 157 pages; $75 hardcover, $25 paperback). Pays particular attention to The Frisco Kid, Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob, Deconstructing Harry, La petite Jerusalem, and Hester Street.

GEOGRAPHY

From Rice Fields to Killing Fields: Nature, Life, and Labor Under the Khmer Rouge by James A. Tyner (Syracuse University Press; 288 pages; $60 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Discusses the mass violence in Cambodia in terms of the structural violence engendered by Khmer Rouge policies intended to further rapid capital accumulation.

Spaces of Capital/Spaces of Resistance: Mexico and the Global Political Economy by Chris Hesketh (University of Georgia Press; 240 pages; $79.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Draws on fieldwork in Chiapas and Oaxaca in a study that bridges geography and historical sociology to explore indigenous movements as a force for popular mobilization in Latin America.

HISTORY

Abolitionists, Doctors, Ranchers, and Writers: A Family Journey through American History by Lynne Marie Getz (University Press of Kansas; 352 pages; $49.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Documents three generations of the extended Wattles-Faunce-Wetherill family, beginning with the Kansas abolitionists Augustus and Susan Wattles.

The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East by Melanie S. Tanielian (Stanford University Press; 350 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Focuses on efforts to combat war-related famine in Beirut and Mount Lebanon.

Cradock: How Segregation and Apartheid Came to a South African Town by Jeffrey Butler, edited by Richard Elphick and Jeannette Hopkins (University of Virginia Press; 256 pages; $39.50). Topics include how housing, services, and related concerns changed with the mid-sized town’s transition from segregation to a formalized and rigorously applied apartheid.

Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World by Isa Blumi (University of California Press; 312 pages; $85 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Sets the current war in Yemen in the historical context of the country’s geopolitics and relations with major powers since the Cold War.

Diaspora and Identity: Japanese Brazilians in Brazil and Japan by Mieko Nishida (University of Hawai’i Press; 352 pages; $68). Emphasizes gender in a study of shifting aspects of identity for Japanese migrants to Brazil, beginning in the early 20th century; also discusses the return wave of Brazilians of Japanese heritage to Japan since the mid-1980s.

Fannye Cook: Mississippi’s Pioneering Conservationist by Dorothy Shawhan, edited and with contributions by Marion Barnwell and Libby Hartfield (University Press of Mississippi; 144 pages; $20). A biography of a scientist and conservationist (1889-1964) key to the creation of the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

Inglorious Passages: Noncombat Deaths in the American Civil War by Brian Steel Wills (University Press of Kansas; 408 pages; $34.95). Draws on letters, diaries, and other sources in a study of deaths by disease, accident, and other non-combat sources in the field and in factories and other war-impacted areas of the homefront.

Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa by Jon Soske (Ohio University Press; 342 pages; $80 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Documents how the Indian diaspora in apartheid South Africa and the advent of India’s independence figured in an inclusive philosophy of nationalism developed by African National Congress intellectuals in Durban.

Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana by Jeffrey S. Ahlman (Ohio University Press; 322 pages; $80 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Draws on newly available sources in a study of the infrastructure that organized Kwame Nkrumah’s philosophy into a political program for Ghana’s decolonization.

New Italian Migrations to the United States: Vol. 2: Art and Culture since 1945 edited by Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra (University of Illinois Press; 228 pages; $95 hardcover, $25 paperback). Topics include an Italian language radio program that sent messages to family in Italy, the depiction of Italian women in postwar Hollywood cinema, and, in recent decades, an Italian “brain drain” from Italy to the United States in the field of Italian studies.

The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, Volume 25: 10 March--12 May 1780 edited by William M. Ferraro (University of Virginia Press; 712 pages; $95). Documents a period that saw the spring continuation of food shortages and other problems for Washington’s troops, with a rare positive note sounded by the return of General Lafayette to America and the promise of a French expeditionary force.

Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean by Joshua M. White (Stanford University Press; 355 pages; $65). Draws on letters, petitions, ambassadorial reports, and other materials in a study of how widespread piracy shaped imperial Ottoman law in the region beginning in the late 16th century.

The Salvadoran Crucible: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency in El Salvador, 1979-1992 by Brian D’Haeseleer (University Press of Kansas; 272 pages; $29.95). Examines the history and lessons of the United States’ intervention in the Central American nation.

Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania by Emily Callaci (Duke University Press; 288 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Discusses fiction, lyrics, newspaper columns, and other texts in a study of new forms of urbanism generated by youth migrants to Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam.

Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son by Mary F. Ehrlander (University of Nebraska Press; 216 pages; $29.95). Traces the life of the Alaskan-born climber (1893-1918)---son of an Irish-immigrant father and a Koyukon-Athabascan mother---who in 1913 was the first person to reach the summit of Mount Denali.

The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 by Robert M. Citino (University Press of Kansas; 615 pages; $34.95). Focuses on German military culture and the notion of Bewegungskrieg or “war of movement” in a study of what kept an increasingly doomed German army going from January 1944 to May 1944.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

China Gadabouts: New Frontiers of Humanitarian Nursing, 1941-51 by Susan Armstrong-Reid (University of British Columbia Press; 272 pages; US$85). A study of Western and Chinese nurses in the China Convoy, a Quaker medical unit created to provide care in areas of China not occupied by the Japanese.

Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic by Richard A. McKay (University of Chicago Press; 400 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). Examines the origins, diffusion, resilience, and consequences of the idea of a “patient zero,” a term applied, erroneously, to a flight attendant said to have introduced HIV to the United States.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France by Paola Bertucci (Yale University Press; 320 pages; $40). A study of the Societe des Arts and its legacy for French science, intellectual culture, and the making of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie.

LABOR STUDIES

Sewing the Fabric of Statehood: Garment Unions, American Labor, and the Establishment of the State of Israel by Adam M. Howard (University of Illinois Press; 176 pages; $95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Documents the support of three major U.S. labor unions for the founding and development of the Jewish state, including through land purchases, the building of trade schools, aid to the Israeli union, the Histadrut, and political lobbying.

LAW

Being Watched: Legal Challenges to Government Surveillance by Jeffrey L. Vagle (New York University Press; 208 pages; $26). Examines the difficulties encountered in challenges to government surveillance in the wake of Laird v. Tatum, a 1972 case dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court for insufficient “ripeness” for litigation.

Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court by Paul Finkelman (Harvard University Press; 304 pages; $35). Focuses on the political ideas and personal interests that shaped the pro-slavery rulings of three key Supreme Court justices of the pre-Civil War era---John Marshall, Roger B. Taney, and Joseph Story.

LITERATURE

Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel (University of Virginia Press; 214 pages; $55 hardcover, $27.50 paperback). Focuses on Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore in a study of how modernist poets engaged the realms of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management.

Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination by Farrell O’Gorman (University of Notre Dame Press; 368 pages; $60). Examines Catholicism’s recurrent role in American gothicism, with particular links to the church in Latin America and the Caribbean; writers discussed include J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy.

The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier, edited by Carolyn Woodward (University Press of Kentucky; 406 pages; $80). Scholarly edition of a women-centered 1754 novel by Sarah Fielding, novelist sister of Henry, and Jane Collier, best known for her Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting.

The Damned Don’t CryThey Just Disappear: The Life and Works of Harry Hervey by Harlan Greene (University of South Carolina Press; 184 pages; $29.99). A study of the novelist and screenwriter (1900-51), who lived openly with his male lover in Charleston and Savannah and whose works featured thinly disguised gay themes and characters.

The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich by Elizabeth R. Baer (Wayne State University Press; 208 pages; $54.99 hardcover, $32.99 paperback). Uses works of literature and art to explore parallels between the Holocaust and earlier German colonial violence against the Nama and Herero in what is now Namibia.

The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein (Stanford University Press; 256 pages; $85 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Draws on cognitive psychology in a study of reading practices, with particular attention to 19th-century readers; topics include ideas of hard and easy reading, reading for literary influence, and readers’ reactions to works widely panned.

Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent (Kent State University Press; 216 pages; $55). Focuses on how female antislavery writers, beyond Beecher Stowe, used their female characters to depict exemplary abolitionists, while still revealing an authorial anxiety about the respectability of women’s activism.

Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text by Katie McGettigan (University of New Hampshire Press/University Press of New England; 282 pages; $95 hardcover, $45 paperback). Links aesthetics and materiality in a study of how Melville pioneered new forms of writing through his engagement with the industrially produced book.

In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi edited by Anthony Caleshu (Wesleyan University Press, distributed by University Press of New England; 305 pages; $80 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Writings on the contemporary American poet, including on his latest collection, Archeophonics (2016).

Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English (Syracuse University Press; 256 pages; $60 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Examines the influence of the Irish wake and other rites on literature, as well as literature’s role in working through changing views of death in an increasingly secular Ireland; focuses on works by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O’Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright.

Milton and Catholicism edited by Ronald Corthell and Thomas N. Corns (University of Notre Dame Press; 216 pages; $50). Essays by literary scholars and historians on the English poet’s engagement with Catholicism; topics include how Milton’s anti-Catholicism was linked to his understanding of inwardness and conscience.

Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court by Sunil Sharma (Harvard University Press; 280 pages; $39.95). Discusses Persian-language poetry in India’s Mughal court, including the work of poets from Safavid Iran; also examines ideas of literary paradise exemplified in Persian gardens and in the valley of Kashmir.

Post-Personal Romanticism: Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics, and the Comedy of Modern Ethical Life by Bo Earle (Ohio State University Press; 244 pages; $84.95). Focuses on Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction by Mark C. Jerng (Fordham University Press; 272 pages; $105 hardcover, $30 paperback). Uses works by H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, and other writers to examine narrative strategies that shape our perception of how race operates in societies, including the worlds generated by science fiction, romance, and fantasy.

Rafts and Other Rivercraft in “Huckleberry Finn” by Peter G. Beidler (University of Missouri Press; 212 pages; $40). Topics include how the specifics of Huck and Jim’s raft--made of lumber not logs, and once part of a much larger structure--shed light on the material world depicted in the novel.

Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572-1616 by Katherine S. Maynard (Northwestern University Press; 200 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). A study of how French poets during the Wars of Religion used epic to envision reconciliation; works discussed include Pierre de Ronsard’s Franciade, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas’s La Judit and La Sepmaine, Sebastian Garnier’s La Henriade, Agrippa d’Aubigne’s Les Tragiques.

Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence by Jessica Hooten Wilson (Ohio State University Press; 200 pages; $89.95). Discusses the Russian writer as key to the strengths of Percy’s fiction, including the latter’s appeal to non-Christian readers with fiction saturated by a Christian vision.

World War I and Southern Modernism by David A. Davis (University Press of Mississippi; 240 pages; $65). Examines the war and its disruptions as key to the flowering of modernist Southern literature; writers discussed include William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay.

MUSIC

Jazz Transatlantic, Volume II: Jazz Derivatives and Developments in Twentieth-Century Africa by Gerhard Kubik (University Press of Mississippi; 272 pages; $75). Completes a two-volume study of jazz on the continent, including a wide variety of genres and mixing of traditions since the 1940s.

PHILOSOPHY

The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance by Andre Laks, translated by Glenn W. Most (Princeton University Press; 152 pages; $29.95). Translation of a French study of the history and philosophical impact of thinking of a loose group of early Greek thinkers collectively as the Presocratics.

Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty by D.C. Schindler (University of Notre Dame Press; 496 pages; $55). Uses a contradiction in Locke’s account of human freedom to explore paradoxes in modern understandings of liberty.

Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason by Andrew Feenberg (Harvard University Press; 256 pages; $35). New and previously published writings that develop a theory of both the threat and democratic potential of technocratic modernity; draws on the theories of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School as well as present-day science, technology, and society studies.

The Worker: Dominion and Form by Ernst Junger, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming, translated by Bogdan Costea and Laurence Paul Hemming (Northwestern University Press; 232 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). First complete English publication of the German novelist and thinker’s 1932 work.

Young William James Thinking by Paul J. Croce (Johns Hopkins University Press; 392 pages; $54.95). Draws on James’s personal correspondence, notes, and earliest publications in a study of the American philosopher’s development as man and thinker.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Continent by Default: The European Union and the Demise of Regional Order by Anne Marie Le Gloannec (Cornell University Press; 266 pages; $29.95). Topics include how the EU’s geopolitical strategy has been furthered, problematically, by enlargement, but hindered by the fact that foreign policy remains the concern of individual member states.

Politics Over Process: Partisan Conflict and Post-Passage Processes in the U.S. Congress by Hong Min Park, Steven S. Smith, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen (University of Michigan Press; 204 pages; $70). Examines how increasing partisanship and other factors have changed the processes of inter-cameral resolution in recent years.

POPULAR CULTURE

Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere by Hillary Chute (Harper; 449 pages; $40). A study of comics and graphic novels that emphasizes the distinctiveness of the medium’s take on such themes as disaster, suburbia, sex, and punk culture.

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture by Nasser Mufti (Northwestern University Press; 264 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Draws on political essays, novels, travelogues, and other texts in a study of how civil war has figured in the politics of empire from the mid-19th to the late 20th century.

RELIGION

“Against Marcellus” and “On Ecclesiastical Theology” by Eusebius of Caesarea, translated by Kelley McCarthy Spoerl and Markus Vinzent (Catholic University of America Press; 328 pages; $39.95). First English translation of the final two theological works by the fourth-century bishop, scholar, and polemicist.

Creation “ex nihilo": Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges edited by Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (University of Notre Dame Press; 418 pages; $45). Writings on the Christian idea of “creation ex nihilio,” or God’s creation of everything from nothing; topics include the doctrine’s relationship to claims of modern science.

Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia by Natalie Carnes (Stanford University Press; 233 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Explores the interplay of iconoclasm and iconophilia in a meditation on how images convey presence in the world.

Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography by Maren R. Niehoff (Yale University Press; 320 pages; $38). Topics include the Jewish thinker’s trip to Rome in AD 38 as a turning point in his life and thought.

Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World edited by John Corrigan (University of South Carolina Press; 384 pages; $69.99). Multidisciplinary essays that offer a spatial perspective on religion in the colonial and later Atlantic world; topics include the erasure of indigenous sacred spaces by missionaries serving as cartographers.

RHETORIC

Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange by Brian Gogan (Southern Illinois University Press; 234 pages; $35). A study of the French thinker as rhetorical theorist.

Museum Rhetoric: Building Civic Identity in National Spaces by M. Elizabeth Weiser (Penn State University Press; 232 pages; $69.95). A study of how heritage exhibits work to build identification and civic engagement in visitors; draws on fieldwork in more than 60 museums in 22 nations on six continents.

ROBOTICS

Living With Robots by Paul Dumouchel and Luisa Damiano, translated by Malcolm DeBevoise (Harvard University Press; 280 pages; $29.95). Translation of a 2016 French study on social robotics, with a focus on the programming of “artificial empathy.”

SOCIOLOGY

Building Nature’s Market: The Business and Politics of Natural Foods by Laura J. Miller (University of Chicago Press; 288 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). Topics include the ideas and practices altered with the shift of “natural foods” from marginal to mainstream.

The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap by Yasemin Besen-Cassino (Temple University Press; 208 pages; $94.50 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Draws on interview, survey, and other data in a study of how wage inequalities emerge in early employment that set the stage for disparities in the adult workforce.

The Moral Power of Money: Morality and Economy in the Life of the Poor by Ariel Wilkis (Stanford University Press; 208 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Develops a theory of moral capital linked to different forms of money, including that lent among relations, sacrificed to the church, or circulating in politics; draws on fieldwork in Villa Olimpia, an impoverished area of Argentina’s capital.

The New Pakistani Middle Class by Ammara Maqsood (Harvard University Press; 208 pages; $45). Examines how Pakistan’s image in the world filters down to shape local class politics; focuses on Lahore and on relations between an established middle class and a new, more visibly religious, upwardly mobile middle class in the city.

THEATER

Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina by Noe Montez (Southern Illinois University Press; 239 pages; $50). Discusses “national memory narratives” and the Argentine theater’s responses to truth and reconciliation hearings, trials, and other efforts at transitional justice since the end of dictatorship.

WOMEN’S STUDIES

Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother by Jenna Vinson (Rutgers University Press; 256 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Draws on feminist and rhetorical theory in a study of the creation, circulation, and reception of often-stigmatizing discourse on teenage pregnancy and motherhood; also analyzes the narratives, in resistance, of teen mothers themselves.