Weekly Book List, July 27, 2018

AMERICAN STUDIES

Modern Bonds: Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul by Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello (University of Massachusetts Press; 312 pages; $90 hardcover, $36.95 paperback). Draws on fiction, photography, architecture, and other realms in a study of the diverse meaning of community for residents of the Minnesota city from 1900 to 1920.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal by Jeevan R. Sharma (Temple University Press; 176 pages; $69.50). An ethnographic study of young men’s out-migration from the hill country of Palpa in western Nepal to Indian cities; emphasizes issues of identity and agency and the actual border-crossing experience, as well as the ill-treatment often suffered by migrants.

Faces of Resistance: Maya Heroes, Power, and Identity edited by S. Ashley Kistler (University of Alabama Press; 256 pages; $54.95). Writings by anthropologists, linguists, historians, and other scholars on hero figures and ideas of heroism among the Maya, including Tekun Umam, Aj Poop B’atz’, Mapla’s Sojuel, and Jacinto Pat.

Fault Lines of Care: Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia by Carina Heckert (Rutgers University Press; 187 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Focuses on women in a study of how the agendas of global agencies affect the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz.

Peruvian Lives across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home by M. Cristina Alcalde (University of Illinois Press; 240 pages; $99 hardcover $28 paperback). Examines how Peruvian gender, racial, and class hierarchies shape the sense of home and what is termed the “exclusionary cosmopolitanism” of middle- and upper-class Peruvians at home and in the diaspora; draws on research in Peru itself, the United States, Canada, and Germany.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Connecting Continents: Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean World edited by Krish Seetah (Ohio University Press; 428 pages; $75). Writings that reflect and promote interdisciplinary perspectives on the societies of the Indian Ocean Basin region, with particular attention to the work of historical archaeologists; topics include religious syncretism, forced and free labor migration, and pearling.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Alexander Girard, Architect: Creating Midcentury Modern Masterpieces by Deborah Lubera Kawsky (Wayne State University Press; 192 pages; $39.99). A study of the American architect and designer (1907-93) that focuses on his architectural projects for the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe.

Girl with Dead Bird: Intercultural Observations by Volkmar Muhleis (Leuven University Press, distributed by Cornell University Press; 200 pages; $29.50). A study of an enigmatic 16th-century portrait by an unknown artist; uses the work, painted in the South Netherlandish tradition, to explore themes of life and death, links between the art-historical and the anthropological understanding of images, and ideas from Western and Eastern philosophy.

The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Lynda Klich (University of California Press; 344 pages; $60). A study of Estridentismo, a modernist art and literary movement founded by the poet Manuel Maples Arce.

Ray Johnson: Selective Inheritance by Kate Dempsey Martineau (University of California Press; 294 pages; $49.95). A study of the American collagist and correspondence artist (1927-1995) that focuses on his inspiration from Marcel Duchamp and other figures.

Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture by Rachel Stephens (University of South Carolina Press; 256 pages; $39.99). Traces the impact of Earl’s portraits on Jackson’s career, as the painter worked as personal artist for the general and politician from 1817 to 1838.

Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America by Noelle Giuffrida (University of California Press; 260 pages; $65). Explores the collection of Chinese art in the United States through the career of a leading curator and museum director (1918-2000) who shaped both public and scholarly understandings.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

The Iphigenia Plays: New Verse Translations by Euripides, translated by Rachel Hadas (Northwestern University Press; 176 pages; $18.95). Translations of Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia Among the Taurians.

Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome: Between Art and Social Reality by Tonio Holscher (University of California Press; 395 pages; $49.95). Explores the social function of visuality in Greek and Roman life, with particular attention to such public spaces as sanctuaries, agora, and forum.

ECOLOGY

Fire Ecology of Florida and the Southeastern Coastal Plain by Reed F. Noss (University Press of Florida; 336 pages; $70). Uses fossil and later data to document fire’s importance to biodiversity and healthy ecosystems in the region; examines waves to improve the use of controlled burns in an era in which urbanization has greatly reduced the range and frequency of fires.

FILM STUDIES

The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema edited by Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher (Wayne State University Press; 364 pages; $31.99). Essays on a new movement in filmmaking that began in the early 1990s with such figures as Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, and Thomas Arslan; sets Berlin School filmmakers in dialogue with various peers in global cinema, including Kelly Reichardt and Derek Cianfrance in North America, Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Thailand, and the Dardenne brothers in Belgium.

Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media by Tanine Allison (Rutgers University Press; 250 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Examines depictions of combat in films, television series, and video games and describes how their “destructive sublime” complicates notions of WWII as the “good war.”

Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze by Roger Stahl (Rutgers University Press; 237 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines how a weapon’s-eye view has become commonplace in news reports, action movies, video games, and other genres and how it has affected the depiction of war.

FOLKLORE

Heinrich Himmler’s Cultural Commissions: Programmed Plunder in Italy and Yugoslavia by James R. Dow (University of Wisconsin Press; 208 pages; $79.95). Describes the manipulation of folklore research for the purposes of ethnic German resettlement in a study of Nazi cultural commissions that sent poorly qualified and ideologically motivated fieldworkers to Italy’s South Tyrol region and Gottschee in Slovenian Yugoslavia.

GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES

Turning the Page: Storytelling as Activism in Queer Film and Media by David R. Coon (Rutgers University Press; 210 pages; $95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Focuses on three nonprofit organizations---In the Life Media, POWER UP, and Three Dollar Bill Cinema---and their work to produce and distribute films and other media by and for the LGBTQ community.

GEOGRAPHY

Public Privates: Feminist Geographies of Mediated Spaces by Marcia R. England (University of Nebraska Press; 216 pages; $50 hardcover, $30 paperback). Combines cultural geography, feminist geography, and media studies in a discussion of the gendered representation of public and private spaces and how media images influence lived experience; topics include socio-spatial identities in the Canadian school-set drama Degrassi: The Next Generation.

HISTORY

An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North by Liudmila Novikova, translated by Seth Bernstein (University of Wisconsin Press; 344 pages; $79.95). Focuses on a popularly supported, anti-Bolshevik White government that held out in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia from 1918 to early 1920.

Aristocracy in America: From the Sketch-Book of a German Nobleman by Francis J. Grund, edited by Armin Mattes (University of Missouri Press; 452 pages; $40). Edition of a fictional, satiric travel memoir written by a German emigre journalist in response to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

California at War: The State and the People During World War I by Diane M.T. North (University Press of Kansas; 496 pages; $29.95). Traces the conflict’s impact on Californians, from homefront to European battlefield.

Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast edited by Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly (University of Georgia Press; 384 pages; $49.50). Scholarly and other writings on the interplay of nature and culture along the Georgia coast and adjacent chain islands across five millennia; topics include the making of the Gullah Geechee.

Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual by Daniel Bessner (Cornell University Press; 312 pages; $35). A biography of a German-born American academic (1905-90) who became a highly influential figure in defense and foreign-policy circles; topics include how Speier’s experience of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism shaped his work.

First Taste of Freedom: A Cultural History of Bicycle Marketing in the United States by Robert J. Turpin (Syracuse University Press; 224 pages; $60 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Topics how bicycle marketers switched gears and targeted children rather than adults as consumers after bikes declined in popularity with the rise of the automobile.

The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates edited by David Head (University of Georgia Press; 304 pages; $84.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Essays on the history of pirates in the Caribbean region in the 17th and 18th centuries, including the responses of governments and reasons for piracy’s eventual decline; also explores the public image of pirates, from feared marauder to pop-culture icon.

Jewish Libya: Memory and Identity in Text and Image edited by Jacques Roumani, David Meghnagi, and Judith Roumani (Syracuse University Press; 360 pages; $55 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Writings on Jews in Libya from ancient times to mass migration to Israel after 1948 and the development of diasporic communities in Italy and other settings.

Mayor Harold Washington: Champion of Race and Reform in Chicago by Roger Biles (University of Illinois Press; 408 pages; $34.95). A biography of the city’s first black mayor.

The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series: 19 February 1815-12 October 1815 edited by Angela Kreider and others (University of Virginia Press; 776 pages; $95). Documents the months following the end of the War of 1812, including the growing influence of European events on U.S. affairs.

Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600--1870 by David Andrew Nichols (Ohio University Press; 286 pages; $45 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Examines the intertwined history of the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, and other Great Lakes peoples in the face of colonialism and the competing interests of British, French, and American empire.

The Secret History of RDX: The Super-Explosive that Helped Win World War II by Colin F. Baxter (University Press of Kentucky; 214 pages; $45). Combines archival and interview sources to trace the creation, production, and uses of the explosive from its conception at England’s Woolwich Arsenal to its mass production at the Holston Ordnance Works near Kingsport in east Tennessee.

LAW

Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts by Eric A. Posner (University of Chicago Press; 272 pages; $27.50). Argues that while government bailouts in the recent financial crisis violated the law, they were in the public interest; develops an approach to adjusting legal constraints while forestalling abuses of power by federal agencies.

Law and Performance edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (University of Massachusetts Press; 250 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Writings that draw on performance studies to offer a kinetic perspective on law, including the roles of spectacle, repetition, audience, and other performative phenomena; topics include the performance of punishment, the rituals of legal reenactments, and the theatrics of the courtroom.

LITERATURE

At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University by Sebastian D.G. Knowles (University Press of Florida; 296 pages; $79.95). Explores error as a theme in Joyce’s work and argues that the Irish modernist offers an antidote to risk-averse attitudes in today’s university.

Comic China: Representing Common Ground, 1890-1945 by Wendy Gan (Temple University Press; 173 pages; $64.50). Draws on literary and other realms in a study of cross-cultural humor and a search for the familiar among differences in Anglo-American representations of China.

In Search of the True Russia: The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse by Lyudmila Parts (University of Wisconsin Press; 176 pages; $69.95). Draws on literature, film, journalism, and other realms in a study that contrasts the portrayal of Russia’s provinces in “high” culture with the nationalist celebration of those areas in popular culture.

Kafka’s Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison (Northwestern University Press; 208 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Draws on newly available sources in a study of Kafka’s later works in relation to the German-language author’s changing experience of Czech language and culture; topics include the influence of his translator and lover, the Czech journalist Milena Jesenska.

Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature by Amy T. Hamilton (University of Nevada Press; 218 pages; $44.95). Applies “material ecocriticism” in a study of representations of walking in captivity narratives, stories of the forced Navajo “Long Walk,” desert writings by Mary Austin, Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, and novels by Louise Erdrich.

Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light by Laila Amine (University of Wisconsin Press; 256 pages; $44.95). Examines Paris as depicted in novels, films, and street art since World War II by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African-Americans, including work by such figures as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Leila Sebbar, and Driss Chraibi.

Reading Popular Newtonianism: Print, the Principia, and the Dissemination of Newtonian Science by Laura Miller (University of Virginia Press; 248 pages; $45). Discusses the mainstreaming of the English scientist’s ideas across diverse readerships and genres, including encyclopedias, poems, and a work “written for the ladies.”

Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature by Erin Michael Salius (University Press of Florida; 223 pages; $79.95). Explores Catholic imagery in “neo-slave narratives” by such authors as Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Leon Forrest, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Charles R. Johnson, and Edward P. Jones.

Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (Syracuse University Press; 216 pages; $55 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Documents how the depiction of trauma has shifted in Irish literature since the end of the 20th century; focuses on works by Colm Toibin, John Banville, Anne Enright, Emma Donohue, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry.

MUSIC

The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music edited by Mark Allan Jackson (University of Massachusetts Press; 312 pages; $90 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Writings on progressive political thought in country music since the genre’s beginnings, and on performers’ expressions of such sentiments in song and activism.

PHILOSOPHY

The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy by Omedi Ochieng (University of Notre Dame Press; 314 pages; $55). Topics include five aesthetic theories, here termed communalist, pedagogical, mythopoetic, elemental, and late modernist.

The Socratic Way of Life: Xenophon’s “Memorabilia” by Thomas L. Pangle (University of Chicago Press; 300 pages; $35). A study of the Greek philosopher’s defense and portrayal of Socrates.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Dead in the Water: Global Lessons from the World Bank’s Model Hydropower Project in Laos edited by Bruce Shoemaker and William Robichaud (University of Wisconsin Press; 288 pages; $79.95). Writings that draw lessons for development policy from the negative environmental and human impact of the Nam Theun 2 dam project.

Democratizing Urban Development: Community Organizations for Housing Across the United States and Brazil by Maureen M. Donaghy (Temple University Press; 219 pages; $99.50 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines the strategies and challenges of community organizations working to secure housing for low-income residents in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.

In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer by Steven Davis (Temple University Press; 273 pages; $89.50 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Develops a comprehensive argument against the privatization of public lands in the United States, including biological, economic, political, and other considerations.

The Paradox of Repression and Nonviolent Movements edited by Lester R. Kurtz and Lee A. Smithey (Syracuse University Press; 368 pages; $65 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Essays by scholars and activists on how repression can fuel rather than undermine the impact of social movements, as with Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” in the civil-rights struggle and the Amritsar Massacre in British-ruled India.

Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment by Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent (Cornell University Press; 260 pages; $42.95). A study of great powers’ strategic responses to relative decline, with historical references to retrenchment and revival by Britain, France, and Russia and contemporary discussion of the United States vis-a-vis China.

RELIGION

A Gift of Presence: The Theology and Poetry of the Eucharist in Thomas Aquinas by Jan-Heiner Tuck, translated by Scott G. Hefelfinger (Catholic University of America Press; $75). Translation of a 2009 German book that sets the medieval thinker’s Eucharistic hymns in systematic dialogue with the Eucharistic theology in the Summa theologiae, and draws lessons for the contemporary church.

Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America by Ari Y. Kelman (New York University Press; 224 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Draws on interviews with songwriters, worship leaders, and music-industry professionals in a study of how people create songs that may become expressions of prayer.

RHETORIC

Inventing Place: Writing Lone Star Rhetorics edited by Casey Boyle and Jenny Rice (Southern Illinois University Press; 280 pages; $45). Focuses on five regions of Texas in essays that combine scholarly and personal perspectives to explore the rhetoric and spatial-temporal dynamics of place.

SOCIOLOGY

Migration and Integration in Flanders: Multidisciplinary Perspectives edited by Christianne Timmerman and others (Leuven University Press, distributed by Cornell University Press; 278 pages; $79.50). Uses the northern part of Belgium as a multidisciplinary case study of migration.

SPORTS STUDIES

Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball’s Campaign Against Its Biggest Star by Edmund F. Wehrle (University of Missouri Press; 302 pages; $29.95). Documents the baseball establishment’s response to Ruth’s agency and ambition as a player unafraid to challenge the sport’s labor system.

Fit for America: Major John L. Griffith and the Quest for Athletics and Fitness by Matthew Lindaman (Syracuse University Press; 296 pages; $60 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Uses an intellectual biography of the Big Ten’s first commissioner, who served from 1922 to 1945, to examine how athletics shaped military preparedness.

WOMEN’S STUDIES

Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam by Sylvia Chan-Malik (New York University Press; 288 pages; $89 hardcover, $29 paperback). Pays particular attention to the experiences and representations of black American Muslim women, beginning in the early 20th century.

In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools by Keisha Lindsay (University of Illinois Press; 230 pages; $99 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Documents how anti-racist and anti-feminist politics combine in an educational reform movement that champions all-black male schools.