Weekly Book List, July 8, 2016

AMERICAN STUDIES

Westerns: A Women’s History by Victoria Lamont (University of Nebraska Press; 194 pages; $55). Discusses Emma Ghent Curtis, B.M. Bower, Muriel Newhall, and other writers in a study of how women shaped the emerging genre of the western.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Living Class in Urban India by Sara Dickey (Rutgers University Press; 288 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Explores class in modern India through a study of an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic designer, an English teacher, and a domestic worker in Madurai, a city in Tamil Nadu.

Making the Modern Primitive: Cultural Tourism in the Trobriand Islands by Michelle MacCarthy (University of Hawai’i Press; 304 pages; $68). Focuses on performance, village life, souvenir shopping, and photography in a study of the encounter between tourists and locals in a group of Pacific islands famous in anthropology.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast by James S. Dunbar (University Press of Florida; 324 pages; $84.95). Argues that the most significant archaeological and paleontological resources remain undiscovered in the Americas remain undiscovered in the karst river basins of Florida.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Playing with Earth and Sky: Astronomy, Geography, and the Art of Marcel Duchamp by James Housefield (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England; 312 pages; $85 hardcover, $40 paperback). A study of the French avant-garde artist (1887-1968) and his engagement with astronomy, geography, and aviation.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Hallowed Stewards: Solon and the Sacred Treasurers of Ancient Athens by William S. Bubelis (University of Michigan Press; 288 pages; $75). A study of the religious magistrates who maintained sacred treasuries.

Legible Religion: Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture by Duncan MacRae (Harvard University Press; 272 pages; $49.95). Examines the significance of books written by Varro and others in the final two centuries BC that made Roman religion legible in a way akin to Judaism and Christianity without being scripture.

ECONOMICS

Poor States, Power and the Politics of IMF Reform: Drivers of Change in the Post- Washington Consensus by Mark Hibben (Palgrave Macmillan; 185 pages; $129). Compares four cases of IMF policy reforms regarding low-income developing countries between 1996 and 2010.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Subsistence under Capitalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives edited by James Murton, Dean Bavington, and Carly Dokis (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 391 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$37.95 paperback). Multidisciplinary essays on how indigenous and other local food systems in Canada and beyond were marginalized with the expansion of capitalist markets.

FILM STUDIES

The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America by Johannes von Moltke (University of California Press; 336 pages; $70 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Discusses the German-Jewish thinker’s arrival as a refugee in New York in 1941 and describes how American intellectual and political culture shaped his landmark writings on film.

Doing Time: Temporality, Hermeneutics, and Contemporary Cinema by Lee Carruthers (State University of New York Press; 173 pages; $80). Draws on Bazin, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in a phenomenological study of cinematic time and the interplay of film and viewer.

When the Cock Crows: A History of the Pathe Exchange by Richard Lewis Ward (Southern Illinois University Press; 248 pages; $40). Traces the history of the film company from its beginnings as a distributor for its parent French studio through its merger with RKO.

HISTORY

Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings From the “Negro World,” 1923-1928 edited by Louis J. Parascandola (University of Tennessee Press; 248 pages; $50). Edition of editorials by the activist and writer, who at times challenged the perspectives of her husband, Marcus Garvey, and others in the United Negro Improvement Association.

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagan (University of Georgia Press; 186 pages; $44.95). A study of how struggles for black freedom were linked in the antebellum black press to the notion of black Americans as God’s chosen people on earth.

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert G. Parkinson (University of North Carolina Press; 640 pages; $45). Documents how the Founders and others sought to build support for revolution by spreading stories of British agents’ inciting slaves and Indians to take arms against the colonists’ rebellion.

Dealing with Dictators: The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe, 1942-1989 by Laszlo Borhi, translated by Jason Vincz (Indiana University Press; 562 pages; $68). A study of U.S. policy toward Hungary, and Hungary’s efforts, given its wartime and Cold War position, to use the U.S. as a counterbalancing force.

Eisenhower and Cambodia: Diplomacy, Covert Action, and the Origins of the Second Indochina War by William J. Rust (University Press of Kentucky; 354 pages; $40). Draws on recently declassified sources in a study of U.S. policy toward Cambodia and its then-leader, Prince Sihanouk.

Epidemics in Modern Asia by Robert Peckham (Cambridge University Press; 355 pages; $89.99 hardcover, $29.99 paperback). Examines the interplay of disease and geopolitics from India through China and the Russian Far East over the past 200 years.

Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein (University of Chicago Press; 224 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). Discusses Ottoman Jews who held, sought, or lost the protection of a European power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A History of Gold Dredging in Idaho by Clark C. Spence (University Press of Colorado; 331 pages; $57). Examines the financing, operation, and environmental and economic impact of bucket-line and dragline dredging, which, beginning in the late 19th century, allowed the working of previously untouched ground.

In the Land of a Thousand Gods: A History of Asia Minor in the Ancient World by Christian Marek and Peter Frei, translated by Steven Rendall (Princeton University Press; 797 pages; $49.50). Translation of a 2010 German study of Asia Minor from prehistory to the Roman imperial era.

Margin of Victory: Five Battles That Changed the Face of Modern War by Douglas Macgregor (Naval Institute Press; 268 pages; $34.95). A study of the Battle of Mons, 1914; the Battle of Shanghai, 1937; the Soviet destruction of Germany’s Army Group Center, 1944; the Israeli counterattack across the Suez, 1973; and Desert Storm and the Battle of 73 Easting, 1991.

Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America by Robin C. Sager (Louisiana State University Press; 200 pages; $48). Analyzes more than 1,500 divorce records from Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin from 1840 to 1860; finds, among other things, that Southern couples were no more or less violent than Midwesterners, and that women were more often perpetrators than has been assumed.

Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 by Okezi T. Otovo (University of Texas Press; 288 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Topics include the class interests of reformers behind a maternalist movement targeting poor Afro-Brazilian mothers and children in Bahia.

Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871--1971 by Elizabeth Dale (Northern Illinois University Press; 184 pages; $32). A study of allegations of police torture in Chicago that focuses on a 1938 case that became the basis for Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots by Laura Visser-Maessen (University of North Carolina Press; 432 pages; $35). A biography of the civil-rights activist and educator (b. 1931), who was a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and helped make Mississippi a central site for the struggle over voting rights.

Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801 by G.M. Hamburg (Yale University Press; 900 pages; $125). Documents the diversity of Russian religious, political, and social thought during the period, as well as a path toward Enlightenment that predated Peter I’s turn to the West.

The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration by David A. Chang (University of Minnesota Press; 320 pages; $94.50 hardcover, $27 paperback). A study of how Native Hawaiians explored and understood the outside world in the century after Capt. James Cook’s arrival in 1778; topics include Ka’iana, a chief who took an English captain as his lover and sailed the Pacific.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

Blood Picture: L. W. Diggs, Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South’s First Blood Bank by Richard H. Nollan (University of Tennessee Press; 277 pages; $45). Focuses on Dr. Lemuel Whitley Diggs (1900-95), a physician whose pioneering research on sickle-cell disease and work among poor patients at Memphis City Hospital led him to create the South’s first blood bank.

LAW

Disqualifying the High Court: Supreme Court Recusal and the Constitution by Louis J. Virelli III (University Press of Kansas; 304 pages; $39.95). Examines tensions between the Constitution’s design and how recusal by Supreme Court justices is currently understood.

LITERATURE

Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles: The Enigma of Francis Crawford by Scott Richardson (University of Missouri Press; 269 pages; $50). A study of the Scottish novelist (1923-2001) that focuses on the nobleman character at the center of her six-part Lymond series.

In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt by Michael Allan (Princeton University Press; 180 pages; $85 hardcover, $35 paperback). Explores the transformations of reading practices and the Arabic literary realm in the transition from Qur’anic schooling to secular education.

The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After by Joseph R. Millichap (Louisiana State University Press; 176 pages; $40). Focuses on James Agee, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison.

The Lyric in the Age of the Brain by Nikki Skillman (Harvard University Press; 320 pages; $40). Examines how scientific understandings of the brain and our inner life have shaped postwar American poetry; poets discussed include Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Harryette Mullen, and Tan Lin.

Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Allison Speicher (University of Alabama Press; 248 pages; $54.95). Explores the social anxieties reflected in the plotlines of fiction set in one-room schoolhouses, a genre especially popular between 1830 and 1890.

The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier (University of Virginia Press; 224 pages; $75 hardcover, $29.50 paperback). Examines scholars, writers, and artists who pushed for an antiracist science of culture; figures discussed include Fernando Ortiz, Jacques Roumain, and Gilberto Freyre.

The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia by Simone Pinet (University of Toronto Press; 248 pages; $65). Draws on cartographic materials in a study of the wider political and military context of the Libro de Alexandre, a work by clerics that was Spain’s first vernacular romance of Alexander the Great.

Women Lovers, or The Third Woman by Natalie Clifford Barney, edited and translated by Chelsea Ray (University of Wisconsin Press; 160 pages; $29.95). First English translation of a lost experimental novel by Barney, written in 1926 but only recently published in French; offers a roman a clef about a Parisian love triangle involving Barney, the Italian baroness Mimi Franchetti, and the French courtesan Liane de Pougy.

MUSIC

What She Go Do: Women in Afro-Trinidadian Music by Hope Munro (University Press of Mississippi; 224 pages; $65). Draws on fieldwork in Trinidad and Tobago in a study of the wider social impact of women’s rising participation in folk and popular music.

PHILOSOPHY

Immanuel Kant: The Very Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason by J. Colin McQuillan (Northwestern University Press; 192 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Focuses on the German philosopher’s concept of critique.

Karol Wojtyla’s Personalist Philosophy: Understanding “Person and Act” by Miguel Acosta and Adrian J. Reimers (Catholic University of America Press; 288 pages; $65). A study of Wojtyla’s philosophical masterwork, which was published nine years before he became Pope John Paul II.

The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan by Lorenzo Chiesa (MIT Press; 251 pages; $28.95). Focuses on seminars of the early 1970s in a study of ideas of God and logic in the French philosopher’s early work.

The Philosophy of Philip Kitcher edited by Mark Couch and Jessica Pfeifer (Oxford University Press; 313 pages; $74). Writings on the work of the wide-ranging American philosopher (b. 1947), including his replies to his interlocutors; includes topics in the philosophy of science, mathematics, and religion, as well issues of ethics and epistemology.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

After Obama: Renewing American Leadership, Restoring Global Order by Robert S. Singh (Cambridge University Press; 151 pages; $89.99 hardcover, $24.99 paperback). Argues that President Obama’s foreign policy has encouraged Russia, China, Iran, and other adversaries to assert themselves while neglecting Western alliances.

Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising by Gilbert Achcar (Stanford University Press; 226 pages; $65 hardcover, $21.95 paperback). Focuses on Egypt and Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011.

Transnational Capitalism in East Central Europe’s Heavy Industry: From Flagship Enterprises to Subsidiaries by Aleksandra Sznajder Lee (University of Michigan Press; 320 pages; $75). Focuses on steel in a study of changes in the control of flagship state enterprises in the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia in the post-Communist transition.

PSYCHOLOGY

Honor Bound: How a Cultural Ideal Has Shaped the American Psyche by Ryan P. Brown (Oxford University Press; 232 pages; $29.95). Discusses realms from domestic violence to sports to foreign policy in a study of how an ideology of honor and reputation shape American society.

RELIGION

Our Lady of the Nations: Apparitions of Mary in 20th-Century Catholic Europe by Chris Maunder (Oxford University Press; 219 pages; $39.95). Examines apparitions of the Virgin Mary officially recognized by the church, such as at Fatima, and those that are well-known but not approved, such as Medjugorje; topics include status of women and children as visionaries, and the wider social, political, and other contexts of the phenomena.

The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790-1860 by Robert Elder (University of North Carolina Press; 288 pages; $34.95). Documents the longstanding links between Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian evangelicalism and secular codes of honor in the region.

Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shi’ism by Matthew Pierce (Harvard University Press; 232 pages; $45). A study of how 10th-century biographies of Shia Islam’s recognized heirs to Mohammed helped shape Shia identity and religious imagination for centuries.

RHETORIC

The Ides of War: George Washington and the Newburgh Crisis by Stephen Howard Browne (University of South Carolina Press; 138 pages; $44.99). A study of General Washington’s address to a group of disaffected and near-mutinous officers on March 15, 1783.

SOCIOLOGY

American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11 by James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf (Temple University Press; 196 pages; $84.50 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Draws on interview and other data in a study of the evacuation measures spontaneously taken by boat operators and waterfront workers on 9/11; considers their actions’ implications for disaster management.

Appetite for Innovation: Creativity and Change at elBulli by M. Pilar Opazo (Columbia University Press; 336 pages; $35). An organizational analysis of the Catalonia-based restaurant whose “test kitchen” under Ferran Adria was known for experimentation; discusses its post-2011 transition into a foundation for creative inquiry.

God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right by Rebecca Barrett-Fox (University Press of Kansas; 256 pages; $24.95). An ethnographic study of the notorious Topeka-based church and its extreme Calvinist theology; argues that Westboro’s aggressively offensive rhetoric and behavior serves to soften the anti-gay theology of more mainstream religious conservatives.

Religious Freedom and Gay Rights: Emerging Conflicts in the United States and Europe edited by TImothy Samuel Shah, Thomas F. Farr, and Jack Friedman (Oxford University Press; 347 pages; $99 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Essays on such topics as “asymmetry in accommodation” in culture wars over same-sex unions.

THEATER

London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880-1920 by Catherine Hindson (University of Iowa Press; 245 pages; $65). Describes leading actresses’ roles in high-profile charity events from bazaars to fundraising for soldiers in the Boer and First World Wars.