Weekly Book List, March 25, 2016

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping by Lucy Maddox (Temple University Press; 256 pages; $28.50). Discusses the 1851 kidnappings, two weeks apart, of two young free black sisters from farms in Chester County, Pa.; considers the incidents in the context of the Fugitive Slave Act, which led to free blacks being taken across state lines to be sold.

AGRICULTURE

Yam in West Africa: Food, Money, and More by Felix I. Nweke (Michigan State University Press; 154 pages; $24.95). Draws on interviews in Nigeria and Ghana in a study of the tuber’s centrality to West African culture, but marginalization in food policy.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Identity and the Second Generation: How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space edited by Faith G. Nibbs and Caroline B. Brettell (Vanderbilt University Press; 228 pages; $69.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines the social worlds, including online, of immigrants’ children in Europe and North America.

Metrics: What Counts in Global Health edited by Vincanne Adams (Duke University Press; 258 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Writings by medical anthropologists and others scholars evaluating the use of metrics in the realm of global health; topics include the politics of monitoring maternal mortality in Nigeria.

Regulating Romance: Youth Love Letters, Moral Anxiety, and Intervention in Uganda’s Time of AIDS by Shanti Parikh (Vanderbilt University Press; 320 pages; $79.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Explores the romantic desires, anxieties, and disappointments of young Ugandans in the context of the country’s social mores and anti-HIV campaigns; sources include 250 interviews and more than 300 love letters.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest by Jason Weems (University of Minnesota Press; 368 pages; $122.50 hardcover, $35 paperback). Discusses painting, mapmaking, cinema, animation, and other realms in a study of how the perspective afforded by flight shaped perceptions of the Midwest and modernity.

China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context by Christopher M.S. Johns (University of California Press; 192 pages; $49.95). Topics include how the Chinese emperor’s 1722 ban on Catholic missionary activity, after more than a century of tolerance, affected European artists’ depictions of the Chinese.

Singular Images, Failed Copies: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Early Photograph by Vered Maimon (University of Minnesota Press; 288 pages; $105 hardcover, $30 paperback). Examines the work of a Victorian pioneer of paper photography in a study of the epistemological and other significance of the new medium in 19th-century Britain.

Soft is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After by Meredith Morse (MIT Press; 255 pages; $36.95). Discusses Forti’s “dance constructions” of the 1960s as a negotiation of the music of John Cage via the teachings of Anna Halprin.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Augustan Poetry and the Irrational edited by Philip Hardie (Oxford University Press; 327 pages; $125). Essays on both the fear and celebration of passion, disorder, and furor in works by poets of the Augustan era, including Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, and Propertius.

Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre edited by Christina S. Kraus and Christopher Stray (Oxford University Press; 533 pages; $200). Writings on the genre of the commentary on ancient Greek and Latin texts, covering individual commentators and national traditions of commentary from ancient times to the present; topics include the impact of commentary on a text’s reception.

Oscan in the Greek Alphabet by Nicholas Zair (Cambridge University Press; 268 pages; $99.99). A study of the orthography of a language spoken in southern Italy in the second half of the first millennium BC.

Provincial Soldiers and Imperial Instability in the Histories of Tacitus by Jonathan Master (University of Michigan Press; 238 pages; $70). Argues that a central lesson of the Histories is Tacitus’ portrayal of the dangers of forcing Batavian, Flavian, and other provincial subjects to fight in the Roman army for little reward.

COMMUNICATION

Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous by Marco Deseriis (University of Minnesota Press; 296 pages; $81 hardcover, $27 paperback). Offers five case studies of the collective adoption of a pseudonym, including, for example, Anonymous for “hacktivism,” and Hollywood directors’ use of Alan Smithee to disavow films recut by producers.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Injustice in Canada by Lisa Monchalin (University of Toronto Press; 464 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$49.95 paperback). Examines the overrepresentation of indigenous people in Canada’s criminal justice system---as both victims and offenders---as a legacy of colonialism, racism, dishonored treaty agreements, and misguided assimilation policies.

ECONOMICS

Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises by Anwar Shaikh (Oxford University Press; 979 pages; $55). Combines theoretical and empirical perspectives to develop a understanding of capitalism that emphasizes the unity of order and disorder.

“Why Save the Bankers?” and Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis by Thomas Piketty, translated by Seth Ackerman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 212 pages; $26). Annotated translation of writings by the French economist.

EDUCATION

Bringing Montessori to America: S. S. McClure, Maria Montessori, and the Campaign to Publicize Montessori Education by Gerald L. Gutek and Patricia A. Gutek (University of Alabama Press; 280 pages; $59.95). Discusses the collaboration between Maria Montessori and the Irish-born American publishing baron, which eventually dissolved as the Italian educator felt she was losing control over the dissemination of her Method.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Canadian Countercultures and the Environment edited by Colin M. Coates (University of Calgary Press, distributed by Michigan State University Press; 302 pages; US$34.95). Essays on activism in the 1970s and 80s; topics include the back-to-the-land movement and the Ark bioshelter on Prince Edward Island.

FILM STUDIES

Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker by Frank Noack (University Press of Kentucky; 464 pages; $50). A biography of the German director and Goebbels-appointed propagandist (1899-1964), who after World War II was charged with crimes against humanity for his 1940 film Jew Suss.

GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES

Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis by Kevin J. Mumford (University of North Carolina Press; 272 pages; $32.95). Documents how black gay men were both inspired and marginalized by the civil-rights, black-power, gay-liberation, and AIDS activist movements.

GEOGRAPHY

Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin by Eliot M. Tretter (University of Georgia Press; 179 pages; $74.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Challenges aspects of Austin’s reputation as a progressive city; pays particular attention to the University of Texas’s real-estate ventures, including the use of eminent domain.

HISTORY

Bayonets in Paradise: Martial Law in Hawai’i during World War II by Harry N. Scheiber and Jane L. Scheiber (University of Hawai’i Press; 512 pages; $45). Documents the crisis in civil liberties as the U.S. Army placed the total population of the islands under martial law.

Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Harvard University Press; 384 pages; $29.95). Describes how American sailors’ experience of challenges to their citizenship led the fledgling U.S. government to create special identification for seamen long before such documents became widespread.

Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court by Audrey Truschke (Columbia University Press; 362 pages; $60). Examines relations between Sanskrit intellectuals and the Mughal elite over roughly a 100-year period beginning in the 1560s when Emperor Akbar invited Brahman and Jain scholars to his court.

Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands During the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris (University of Hawai’i Press; 249 pages; $62). Topics include islanders’ efforts to bring American and global attention to the damaging health effects of U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshalls.

Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State by Mark McNicholas (University of Washington Press; 280 pages; $50). Describes ordinary people’s forgery of government documents and impersonation of officials in 18th-century, as well as the punishment of such deceptions.

From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century by John Weber (University of North Carolina Press; 336 pages; $34.95). Traces the rise of large-scale agriculture in the region beginning in the early 20th century and its role as a laboratory for the control and exploitation of migrant Mexican workers.

Heroic Failure and the British by Stephanie Barczewski (Yale University Press; 266 pages; $40). Discusses the British celebration of heroic failure and valient defeat as a product of Britain’s dominance as an imperial power.

Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic by Larry Eugene Jones (Cambridge University Press; 425 pages; $120). Argues that both politicians’ increasing reliance on charisma in the 1932 elections greatly accelerated the delegitimizing of the Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933.

Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire by Elleke Boehmer (Oxford University Press; 283 pages; $50). A study of the cross-cultural encounters of Indians and Britons in Britain during the period, with a focus on such figures as Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Cornelia Sorabji, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680--1860 by Jennifer Oast (Cambridge University Press; 280 pages; $99.99). Focuses on institutional ownership of slaves as practiced by Anglican and Presbyterian churches, free schools, and the College of William and Mary, Hampden-Sydney and Hollins Colleges, and the University of Virginia.

Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics by Corey M. Brooks (University of Chicago Press; 302 pages; $45). Discusses abolitionists’ creation of the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party and describes how both laid the foundations for Republican success.

Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity by Jonathan Wyrtzen (Cornell University Press; 334 pages; $45). Topics include how interactions between European and local actors politicized religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid monarchy during the period of the Protectorate.

Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913 by Victor Roman Mendoza (Duke University Press; 286 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Explores sexual and social intimacies, real and imagined, that accompanied U.S. imperial incursions in the Philippines.

More Than God Demands: Politics and Influence of Christian Missions in Northwest Alaska, 1897-1918 by Anthony Urvina with Sally Urvina (University of Alaska Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 311 pages; $50). Documents the impact of government agents and missionary teachers on northwest Alaska’s indigenous population.

A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo by Nancy Rose Hunt (Duke University Press; 353 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Examines medical, security, and other realms in a study of life in the region of Equateur under King Leopold’s Congo Free State (1885-1908) and the Belgian Congo (1908-60).

A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America by Elizabeth J. Clapp (University of Virginia Press; 280 pages; $39.50). Traces the life of a widowed Virginia woman who turned to travel writing and polemical journalism to make a living after her in-laws successfully challenged her husband’s will.

Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics by Timothy Stewart-Winter (University of Pennsylvania Press; 336 pages; $45). Topics include an emerging coalition between black and gay activists, who shared a focus on police harassment.

The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern by Thomas J. Knock (Princeton University Press; 553 pages; $35). A biography of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, who was an early critic of the Vietnam War.

The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South by Noeleen McIlvenna (University of North Carolina Press; 158 pages; $24.95). A study of the “Georgia Experiment,” a period of nearly 20 years at the start of the colony during which slaveholding was banned in favor of free labor by paid poor white workers.

Truman, Congress, and Korea: The Politics of America’s First Undeclared War by Larry Blomstedt (University Press of Kentucky; 305 pages; $50). A political history of the Korean conflict, including the demise of a brief period of bipartisanship in foreign policy that marked World World II.

Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters edited by Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz (University of Illinois Press; 219 pages; $40). Documents the family and work lives of Ann Dumville, a woman expelled from her Methodist church for radical abolitionism, and her adult daughters Jemima, Hephzibah, and Elizabeth in mid-19th-century central Illinois.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America by Susan E. Cayleff (Johns Hopkins University Press; 416 pages; $39.95). Topics include the political activism of naturopathic healers from the movement’s beginnings in the 19th century.

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Machiavelli’s Legacy: “The Prince” After Five Hundred Years edited by Timothy Fuller (University of Pennsylvania Press; 203 pages; $47.50). Multidisciplinary essays on Machiavelli and his masterwork; topics include the Florentine thinker’s portrayal of women, his ideal of a political redeemer for Italy, and Machiavelli and Machiavellianism.

Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory by Martin Jay (University of Wisconsin Press; 270 pages; $44.95). Focuses on ideas of reason in the work of Frankfurt School theorists, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and especially Habermas.

LAW

Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, “The Legless Veteran” by Robert Justin Goldstein (University Press of Kansas; 240 pages; $39.95 hardcover, $19.95 paperback). Discusses cases in which Kutcher, gravely disabled, fought government efforts in 1948 to fire him from his Veterans Administration job, take his World War II disability benefits, and evict his family from federally subsidized housing because of his membership in the Socialist Workers Party.

The Polygamy Question edited by Janet Bennion and Lisa Fishbayn Joffe (Utah State University Press; 262 pages; $31.95). Essays by scholars in law, anthropology, and other fields on the practice of polygamy by fundamentalist Mormons, Muslims, and others in North America.

LINGUISTICS

Talk About Books: A Study of Reading Groups by David Peplow (Bloomsbury Academic; 200 pages; $128). Analyzes transcripts from four British book groups, whose settings include homes, pubs, and libraries.

LITERATURE

Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance by Donald Beecher (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 496 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$39.95 paperback). Combines insights from neuroscience with analyses of Doctor Faustus, Measure for Measure, and other Renaissance works to explore how we perceive, understand, and empathize with fictional characters.

The Book of Khalid: A Critical Edition by Ameen Rihani, edited by Todd Fine (Syracuse University Press; 560 pages; $75 hardcover, $49.95 paperback). Edition of semi-autobiographical 1911 work that many regard as the first Arab-American novel and that depicts two young men who leave Lebanon and find work as peddlers in New York.

Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange: Authorship, Manuscript Culture, and the Making of the “Vita Nova” by Jelena Todorovic (Fordham University Press; 233 pages; $55). Focuses on how the poet redefined, in multiple roles, the medieval theory of authorship.

Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment by Matthew Wickman (University of Pennsylvania Press; 352 pages; $69.95). Discusses the adaptation and emulation of geometry in Scottish literary and philosophical works during and after the “long 18th century.”

Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State by James Purdon (Oxford University Press; 224 pages; $65). Explores modernist writers’ responses to an emerging informatic culture in Britain from the late 19th century to the end of World War II; authors discussed include Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Graham Greene, and Elizabeth Bowen.

Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon by Tison Pugh (Louisiana State University Press; 240 pages; $38). Examines humor in the work of such writers as Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Florence King, Rita Mae Brown, Dorothy Allison, and David Sedaris.

MUSIC

Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera by Aida Huseynova (Indiana University Press; 360 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). A study of Azerbaijani music from the improvisational tradition known as mugham to an opera of the Silk Road.

NEUROSCIENCE

Animal Electricity: How We Learned That the Body and Brain Are Electric Machines by Robert B. Campenot (Harvard University Press; 340 pages; $39.95). Traces the history of our understanding of the electrical properties of nerve cells.

PHILOSOPHY

The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives edited by John Zeimbekis and Athanassios Raftopoulos (Oxford University Press; 376 pages; $99). Writings that evaluate the notion that cognitive states such as belief and desire can causally influence perception to literally affect how we see the world.

Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Ranciere by Devin Zane Shaw (Bloomsbury Academic; 208 pages; $112). New and previously published writings on the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, including his debt to Cartesian egalitarianism, his debate with Alain Badiou, and his critique of Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg.

The Metaphysics of Relations edited by Anna Marmodoro and David Yates (Oxford University Press; 282 pages; $74). Topics include relations as plural predications in Plato; medieval philosophers’ rejection of polyadic accidents; external relations, causal coincidence, and contingency; and whether powerful causation is an internal relation.

Neofinalism by Raymond Ruyer, translated by Alyosha Edlebi (University of Minnesota Press; 300 pages; $84.50 hardcover, $27 paperback). First English translation of the masterwork by the French thinker (1902-87), whose works were an influence on Deleuze, Guattari, and Simondon.

The Task of Hope in Kierkegaard by Mark Bernier (Oxford University Press; 220 pages; $110). Describes the centrality of hope in the Danish philosopher’s narrative, with the self beginning in despair but overcoming through faith; texts discussed include Works of Love, The Concept of Anxiety, and Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (Simon & Schuster; 455 pages; $28). Traces the rise of a mixed economy in the United States and argues that a stronger government is key to prosperity.

Congress: Protecting Individual Rights by Louis Fisher (University Press of Kansas; 190 pages; $29.95). Argues that Congress has done more to defend blacks, women, children, American Indians, and the religious than any other branch of government.

Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World by Juliet Johnson (Cornell University Press; 312 pages; $35). Compares central-bank development in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan.

The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence by Tilo Schabert, translated by Javier Ibanez-Noe (University of Chicago Press; 166 pages; $55). Translation of a 2009 German book that offers a cosmological perspective on the origins of politics; draws on ancient Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, and Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts.

POPULAR CULTURE

Three Years in Wonderland: The Disney Brothers, C. V. Wood, and the Making of the Great American Theme Park by Todd James Pierce (University Press of Mississippi; 287 pages; $30). Draws on interviews from more than 150 people who designed, managed, and operated theme parks in the 1950s.

PSYCHOLOGY

Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time by Marc Wittmann, translated by Erik Butler (MIT Press; 167 pages; $24.95). Topics include whether it is possible through “mindfulness” to slow down our temporal perception and thus gain more time.

PUBLIC POLICY

Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age by Bernard E. Harcourt (Harvard University Press; 384 pages; $35). Traces the rise of an “expository society,” with unprecedented levels of surveillance and exhibitionism; considers methods of subverting relentless data mining and other intrusive practices.

RELIGION

Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of Religion and American Politics edited by Matthew Avery Sutton and Darren Dochuk (Oxford University Press; 302 pages; $99 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Topics include Obama and evangelical politics, and the rise of the “nones,” or religiously disaffiliated Americans.

The Invention of God by Thomas Romer, translated by Raymond Geuss (Harvard University Press; 296 pages; $35). Translation of a 2014 French work that combines philological, archaeological, epigraphic, and other perspectives in a study of Israelite beliefs from the Iron Age to the third century BC.

Redeeming the Kamasutra by Wendy Doniger (Oxford University Press; 182 pages; $24.95). A study of the ancient treatise on pleasure that explores its place in the Sanskrit canon and its guidance on realms well beyond the erotic.

Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E. by Heidi Marx-Wolf (University of Pennsylvania Press; 200 pages; $55). Focuses on Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Plotinus in a study of third-century thinkers who ordered the spiritual world into hierarchies.

Theology Needs Philosophy: Acting Against Reason is Contrary to the Nature of God edited by Matthew L. Lamb (Catholic University of America Press; 344 pages; $69.95). Topics include reason in Aquinas, Trinitarian theology, Christology, and Mariology.

SOCIOLOGY

A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization by Barbara Katz Rothman (New York University Press; 253 pages; $89 hardcover, $28 paperback). Examines parallels and differences between social movements intended to improve two realms overtaken by industrialization.

Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism by Kim Park Nelson (Rutgers University Press; 230 pages; $90 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Traces the life histories of 60 Korean adoptees, now adults, in Minnesota, the Pacific Northwest, and in Seoul, home now to a number of returnees.