Weekly Book List, March 24, 2017

ANTHROPOLOGY

Death, Materiality and Mediation: An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland by Barbara Graham (Berghahn Books; 154 pages; $95). Discusses wakes, house clearances, and other death rites in Ireland; draws on ethnographic research in the border regions of Counties Down and Armagh in the North of Ireland and Louth in the Republic.

Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal by Mark Liechty (University of Chicago Press; 387 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). Combines anthropology and history in a study of Western fantasies of Nepal, and Nepalese responses, during three phases: postwar tourism, countercultural outpost in the 1960s, and hip adventure destination.

Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine by Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Duke University Press; 328 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines the hegemony of the global pharmaceutical industry though two case studies from India, one involving the introduction of an HPV vaccine in 2010, and the other the denial of a patent for a cancer treatment in 2006.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Multiethnicity and Migration at Teopancazco: Investigations of a Teotihuacan Neighborhood Center edited by Linda R. Manzanilla (University Press of Florida; 261 pages; $89.95). Draws on data from 116 formal burials in Teopancazco, a key multiethnic neighborhood in the central Mexican city of Teotihuacan.

“The Only True People": Linking Maya Identities Past and Present edited by Bethany J. Beyyette and Lisa J. LeCount (University Press of Colorado; 288 pages; $75). Multidisciplinary writings on Mayan identity by archaeologists, linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and epigraphers; covers sites from the northern Yucatan to the Southern Periphery, and periods from the Classic Era to the present.

Purple Hummingbird: A Biography of Elizabeth Warder Crozer Campbell by Claude N. Warren and Joan S. Schneider (University of Utah Press; 206 pages; $19.95). Traces the life of a Pennsylvania woman turned Mojave Desert homesteader (1893-1971), whose work as an amateur archaeologist produced findings on California’s prehistoric cultures eventually accepted by the profession.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis by Amanda Wunder (Penn State University Press; 208 pages; $84.95). Focuses on the 1660s and 70s in a study of projects for religious art in 17th-century Seville and the view of such projects as medios divinos or divine solutions to the problems that plagued the city.

Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler (University of Oklahoma Press; 295 pages; $39.95). Writings on art from the ancient Andes, Classic period Mesoamerica, and Postclassic Mesoamerica.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

The Complete Tragedies, Volume 1: Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, Octavia by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated by Shadi Bartsch and others, edited by Shadi Bartsch (University of Chicago Press; 274 pages; $45). First book in a two-volume translation of the dramas of the Roman Stoic philosopher and playwright.

The Complete Tragedies, Volume 2: Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, Agamemnon by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated by Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, and David Konstan, and edited by Shadi Bartsch (University of Chicago Press; 320 pages; $45). Completes a two-volume translation of the tragedies of the Roman Stoic philosopher and playwright.

The Ethics of the Family in Seneca by Liz Gloyn (Cambridge University Press; 258 pages; $99.99). Explores the Roman Stoic philosopher’s view of the family as key to individual development; includes discussion of his fragmentary De matrimonio.

COMMUNICATION

Little Mosque on the Prairie and the Paradoxes of Cultural Translation by Kyle Conway (University of Toronto Press; 185 pages; US$70 hardcover, US$27.95 paperback). Explores the paradox of “saleable diversity” in a study of a popular sitcom that ran on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for six seasons about Muslims in a small Canadian town.

Media Theory in Japan edited by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten (Duke University Press; 423 pages; $104.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Topics include the work of such figures as Azuma Hiroki, Nakai Masakazu, and Nancy Seki.

ECONOMICS

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin (MIT Press; 256 pages; $26.95). Topics include how politicians appeal to the racial beliefs of poor white voters to promote policies that hurt low-income people in general.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Conserving the Dust Bowl: The New Deal’s Prairie States Forestry Project by Sarah Thomas Karle and David Karle (Louisiana State University Press; 200 pages; $35). Discusses a project that enlisted farmers, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Works Progress Administration in the planting of over 220 million trees in six states to create more than 18,000 miles of wind breaks.

Germ Wars: The Politics of Microbes and America’s Landscape of Fear by Melanie Armstrong (University of California Press; 293 pages; $85 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Topics include bioterrorism preparedness and the interwoven notions of fighting against and with biological agents.

FILM STUDIES

Brechtian Cinemas: Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars Von Trier by Nenad Jovanovic (State University of New York Press; 262 pages; $90). A study of the German dramatist’s work in and influence on cinema, including Straub and Huillet’s History Lessons, Watkins’s La Commune, and von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.

Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager (University of Texas Press; 163 pages; $85 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Examines the varied functions of jazz in film noir, with discussion of such composers as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Chico Hamilton, and John Lewis.

Michael Haneke: The Intermedial Void by Christopher Rowe (Northwestern University Press; 256 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Argues that the Austrian director’s use of television, photography, and other media in his work represents an opposition to the film medium itself.

GEOGRAPHY

Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving by Caitlin DeSilvey (University of Minnesota Press; 233 pages; $108 hardcover, $27 paperback). A work in cultural geography that develops and documents an approach to heritage preservation that embraces decay.

HISTORY

The 1929 Sino-Soviet War: The War Nobody Knew by Michael M. Walker (University Press of Kansas; 400 pages; $49.95). Draws on Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and declassified U.S. sources in a study of the seven-week clash in Manchuria between Chinese and Soviet forces over control over the Chinese Eastern Railroad.

Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa by Lisa A. Lindsay (University of North Carolina Press; 328 pages; $35). Traces the tumultuous life of South Carolina-born James Churchwill Vaughan (1828-93) as in the early 1850s he fulfilled the wish of his father, a former slave, and left the United States for Liberia eventually in his father’s Yoruba homeland (southwestern Nigeria).

Bataan Survivor: A POW’s Account of Japanese Captivity in World War II by David L. Hardee, edited by Frank A. Blazich Jr. (University of Missouri Press; 290 pages; $50). Annotated edition of the journal written in 1945 detailing an American Air Corps officer’s experience of the Bataan Death March and captivity in four Japanese prison camps.

British Intelligence and Hitler’s Empire in the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 by Ben Wheatley (Bloomsbury Academic; 254 pages; $114). A study of Britain’s OSINT (open-source intelligence) operations during the war, with a focus on information acquired by the Stockholm Press Reading Bureau in Sweden.

Claretta: Mussolini’s Last Lover by R.J.B. Bosworth (Yale University Press; 312 pages; $28). Draws on the extensive diaries and letters of Clara Petacci, who suffered the same death and postmortem exhibition as her dictator-lover in April 1945; sets her relationship with Mussolini in the context of her staunchly Fascist, social-climbing family.

Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain by John Bew (Oxford University Press; 688 pages; $39.95). A biography of the postwar Labour Party prime minister; contrasts Attlee’s reticence with the large personality of his predecessor in the office, Winston Churchill.

Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism by Nishani Frazier (University of Arkansas Press; 340 pages; $39.95). Focuses on the Cleveland chapter in a study of the rise of black-power ideology in CORE.

The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers by Elizabeth Cobbs (Harvard University Press; 370 pages; $29.95). Discusses 223 women sent to France in 1918 by the U.S. Army Signal Corps to operate switchboards for the American Expeditionary Force, including on battlefields; topics include their decades’ long struggle to receive veterans’ benefits.

Historians and Historical Societies in the Public Life of Imperial Russia by Vera Kaplan (Indiana University Press; 316 pages; $65). Focuses on the Society of Zealots of Russian Historical Education (1895--1918).

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Volume 13: 22 April 1818-31 January 1819 edited by J. Jefferson Looney and others (Princeton University Press; 784 pages; $145). Documents, among other things, the former president’s deliberations concerning a site for the University of Virginia.

Radicalism and Reputation: The Career of Bronterre O’Brien by Michael J. Turner (Michigan State University Press; 378 pages; $49.95). A biography of the English radical (1804-64), who came to be known as the “schoolmaster of Chartrism”; examines why he distanced himself from other Chartrist leaders in the 1840s.

Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China by Robert J. Antony (Hong Kong University Press, distributed by Columbia University Press; 308 pages; $65). Links chronic unemployment and organized crime in a study of banditry, sworn brotherhoods, and law enforcement in the south Chinese province of Guangdong during the mid-Qing dynasty (circa 1760-1845).

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Reading Galileo: Scribal Technologies and the “Two New Sciences” by Renee Raphael (Johns Hopkins University Press; 280 pages; $54.95). Draws on marginalia, notes, and teaching materials in a study of how early modern university professors responded to Galileo’s final published work.

HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY

When They Hid the Fire: A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America by Daniel French (University of Pittsburgh Press; 250 pages; $26.95). Topics include how the silent and unseen nature of electricity has helped obscure its environmental cost and impact.

LAW

Blaming Mothers: American Law and the Risks to Children’s Health by Linda C. Fentiman (New York University Press; 422 pages; $55). Examines the class, race, and gender biases that have shaped legal actions taken against pregnant women when they, for example, refuse Caesarean sections or attempt suicide.

How the Gloves Came Off: Lawyers, Policy Makers, and Norms in the Debate on Torture by Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault (Columbia University Press; 267 pages; $35). A study of the logic and rhetoric used to undermine once-accepted prohibitions on torture after 9/11.

LITERATURE

Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things by Luke Roberts (Palgrave Macmillan; 241 pages; $99.99). A critical study of the British poet (1948-2000); topics include MacSweeney in relation to such contemporaries and influences as Shelley, J.H. Prynne, Jack Spicer, and Sylvia Plath.

Borges and Kafka: Sons and Writers by Sarah Roger (Oxford University Press; 180 pages; $95). A study of Kafka’s influence on Jorge Luis Borges, with particular attention to how the Argentine writer’s view of Kafka’s relations with his father, Hermann, shaped Borges’s perceptions of his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, a failed author.

The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow (University of Notre Dame Press; 310 pages; $50). Focuses on Finnegans Wake in a study of the influence of Scottish writers, philosophers, and history on Joyce’s work.

Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust by Jennifer Rushworth (Oxford University Press; 201 pages; $95). Draws on the theories of Freud, Kristeva, Derrida, and Barthes.

Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character by Marta Figlerowicz (Oxford University Press; 189 pages; $49.95). Examines the challenge to the novel, as genre, of characters whose self-expression and links to others contract and simplify over the course of a work; focuses on such characters in works by Aphra Behn, Isabelle de Charriere, Francoise de Graffigny, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust.

The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890-1964 by Jonathan Vincent (Oxford University Press; 293 pages; $74). A study of how the war novel and memoir shaped the American political imaginary during three phases of the “long modernism.”

A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present by Walter Cohen (Oxford University Press; 612 pages; $135). Pays particular attention, in structural terms, to issues of language, as with the shift from the learned language of Latin to European vernaculars.

James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake by Chrissie Van Mierlo (Bloomsbury Academic; 161 pages; $108). A historicist study of Finnegans Wake that explores Joyce’s relationship with the church, Catholicism in the Irish Free State, and such themes as heresy, anticlericalism, Mariology.

Li Mengyang, the North-South Divide, and Literati Learning in Ming China by Chang Woei Ong (Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press; 354 pages; $49.95). Examines the resistance met by Li Mengyang, a northern writer and scholar-official who sought to restore ancient styles of poetry and prose in 16th-century China; topics include how the southern literati’s indifference to Li’s accomplishments in philosophy, cosmology, and other realms furthered his marginalization.

Milton in the Long Restoration edited by Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford University Press; 635 pages; $135). Writings on the English poet’s relation to his early 18th-century editors, translators, and commentators.

Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression by Julian Yates (University of Minnesota Press; 366 pages; $120 hardcover, $30 paperback). Draws on literary and other realms in a discussion of tropes that cross animal, plant, fungal, microbial, chemical, mineral, and other boundaries.

The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature by Denys Van Renen (University of Nebraska Press; 268 pages; $55). Traces greater middle-class awareness of the urban underclass and other marginalized groups as reflected in works by Jonson, Brome, Behn, Addison, Richard Steele, Haywood, and Defoe.

“Piers Plowman” and the Books of Nature by Rebecca Davis (Oxford University Press; 272 pages; $90). Discusses Langland’s use of a common Middle English word for nature, kynde, as also a representation for God.

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature by Andrew Hui (Fordham University Press; 282 pages; $95 hardcover, $28 paperback). Examines the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse and source of poetic inspiration beginning in the Renaissance; focuses on works by Petrarch, Joachim du Bellay, and Spenser.

Samuel Beckett and Cinema by Anthony Paraskeva (Bloomsbury Academic; 195 pages; $108). A study of how Beckett’s engagement with cinema shaped his work and aesthetic.

Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland by Steven W, May and Alan Bryson (Oxford University Press; 449 pages; $95). Edition and study of 52 examples of little-known defamatory verse from 16th-century England and Scotland.

Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities by David Lawton (Oxford University Press; 243 pages; $80). Focuses on Langland and Chaucer, as well as Hoccleve and other of their 15th-century successors.

Writing an Icon: Celebrity Culture and the Invention of Anais Nin by Anita Jarczok (Ohio University Press; 263 pages; $59.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Explores Nin’s crafting of her literary and public persona, particularly after the publication of the first volume of her diary.

Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Ruth Livesey (Oxford University Press; 246 pages; $80). A study of Victorian novels that take place not in the then-railway-present, but in the waning or just-past era of the stage coach; pays particular attention to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, and Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical.

MUSIC

Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change edited by Milosz Miszczynski and Adriana Helbig (Indiana University Press; 311 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Writings on hip-hop music and culture in Eastern Europe as shaped by local social conditions; settings discussed include Albania, Bosnia, Estonia, Russia, Siberia, Turkey, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic (including in and outside the Roma community).

PHILOSOPHY

Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek by Zahi Zalloua (Bloomsbury Academic; 240 pages; $114). Uses Levinas as a starting point to examine both the Jew and the Palestinian in Continental philosophy; other figures discussed include Agamben, Badiou, Butler, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Finkielkraut, Ranciere, Said, and Zizek.

Kant’s Theory of Normativity: Exploring the Space of Reason by Konstantin Pollok (Cambridge University Press; 350 pages; $99.99). Topics include the German philosopher’s “transcendental hylomorphism.”

Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict edited by David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara (University of Chicago Press; 423 pages; $50). Topics include the Italian philosopher and statesman’s view of virtues in The Prince, his place in the history of political thought, and his relevance to political issues today.

Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism: Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change by Iwona Janicka (Bloomsbury Academic; 192 pages; $114). Draws on Judith Butler, Rene Girard, and Peter Sloterdijk in a discussion of left-wing social movements in recent decades and the link between universality and social transformation.

Toleration and Understanding in Locke by Nicholas Jolley (Oxford University Press; 208 pages; $70). Argues that Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises of Government, and Epistola de Tolerantia are a unified attempt to promote religious toleration; draws on the English thinker’s responses to Jonas Proast.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Drawing the Lines: Constraints on Partisan Gerrymandering in U.S. Politics by Nicholas R. Seabrook (Cornell University Press; 160 pages; $49.95). Argues that partisan redistricting plans often have no detrimental effect on district-level competition or democratic accountabililty.

From Inclusion to Influence: Latino Representation in Congress and Latino Political Incorporation in America by Walter Clark Wilson (University of Michigan Press; 296 pages; $75). Finds, among other things, that Latino members of Congress represent Latino interests more effectively than non-Latino representatives.

Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus: Immigrant Incorporation in New Destinations by Stefanie Chambers (Temple University Press; 234 pages; $89.50 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Combines qualitative and quantitative perspectives in a comparative study of the political, economic, and social incorporation of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Columbus, Ohio.

Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid by Ali Mirsepassi (Cambridge University Press; 288 pages; $99.99 hardcover, $27.99 paperback). A study of the Iranian philosopher and public intellectual (1909-94) and his Heidegger-influenced vision of Islamism.

RELIGION

Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography by Amir Engel (University of Chicago Press; 226 pages; $40). A study of the German-born Israeli historian and philosopher (1897-1982), best known for his study of Jewish mysticism.

Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination by Melissa Anne-Marie Curley (University of Hawai’i Press; 256 pages; $65). Documents how Pure Land concepts have been appropriated by such wartime scholars as Kawakami Hajime, Miki Kiyoshi, and Ienaga Saburo.

Singing Moses’s Song: A Performance-Critical Analysis of Deuteronomy’s Song of Moses by Keith A. Stone (Ilex Foundation/Center for Hellenic Studies, distributed by Harvard University Press; 180 pages; $19.95). Draws on performance theory in a study of the transformative nature of the Song of Moses contained in Deuteronomy 32:1-43.

The Story of Hebrew by Lewis Glinert (Princeton University Press; 281 pages; $27.95). Traces the history of the language from the opening of Genesis to the language’s rebirth as the vernacular for the modern Jewish state.

RHETORIC

Living Chronic: Agency and Expertise in the Rhetoric of Diabetes by Lora Arduser (Ohio State University Press; 196 pages; $74.95). Develops a new concept of patient agency through an analysis of the discourse of diabetes patients and health-care providers.

SOCIOLOGY

Battering State: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel by Madelaine Adelman (Vanderbilt University Press; 304 pages; $69.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines the intersection of statecraft and domestic violence in Israel, including competing and overlapping religious and civil laws.

Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe by Amy Adamczyk (University of California Press; 291 pages; $39.95). Includes comparative case studies that contrast attitudes toward homosexuality in three largely Protestant countries, the United States, Uganda, and South Africa; three majority Muslim countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey; and three majority Catholic countries, Brazil, Spain, and Italy.

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost by Donna (Oxford University Press; 368 pages; $29.95). Draws on survey data and on interviews with students on 13 campuses.

THEATER

Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics by Barry Freeman (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 224 pages; US$100 hardcover, US$32.95 paperback). Focuses on theater in Toronto in a study of ethical aspects of staging such “strangers” as refugees and minorities.

URBAN STUDIES

Suburb: Planning Politics and the Public Interest by Royce Hanson (Cornell University Press; 328 pages; $45). Combines scholarly and practitioner perspectives in a study of land-use planning and policy for the Washington, D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Md.