Weekly Book List, May 27, 2016

AMERICAN STUDIES

Artful Lives: The Francis Watts Lee Family and Their Times by Patricia J. Fanning (University of Massachusetts Press; 224 pages; $90 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Examines the Arts and Crafts movement, Christian Socialism, and other aspects of turn-of-the-century culture in Boston through a study of the family of the photographer and printer.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Native American Nationalism and Nation Re-Building: Past and Present Cases edited by Simone Poliandri (State University of New York Press; 210 pages; $80). Interdisciplinary writings on indigenous nationhood; peoples discussed include the Mi’kmaw, Hualapai, and Potawatomi.

World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives edited by Christoph Brumann and David Berliner (Berghahn Books; 327 pages; $99). Writings by anthropologists on the impact of UNESCO’s regime for naming world heritage sites; topics include the transformation of Xiaotun village at Yin Xu archaeological park in Henan province, China.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires by Lori Khatchadourian (University of California Press; 384 pages; $34.95). Focuses on ancient Persia and the South Caucasus in a study of the role of material culture in imperialism.

A Universal Theory of Pottery Production: Irving Rouse, Attributes, Modes, and Ethnography by Richard A. Krause (University of Alabama Press; 214 pages; $54.95). Draws on the classification theories of Irving Rouse in a study of potsherds from the Paso del Indio site in Puerto Rico.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes by Ananda Cohen Suarez (University of Texas Press; 274 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). A study of vivid church murals painted in Peru’s Cuzco region from the 16th through the early 19th centuries.

BOTANY

Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians by Patricia Whereat-Phillips (Oregon State University Press; 176 pages; $22.95). Discusses the traditional use of plants by three coastal tribes of southern Oregon.

BUSINESS

The Disruption Dilemma by Joshua Gans (MIT Press; 166 pages; $24.95). Contrasts demand-side and supply-side disruption and considers why some companies exhibit resilience in the face of disruption while others fail.

COMMUNICATION

By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism by Henry Jenkins and others (New York University Press; 352 pages; $29.95). Offers case studies of how youth are engaging the political potential of social media, video, and other communications strategies.

Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles over U.S. Television by Allison Perlman (Rutgers University Press; 241 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Offers case studies of education reformers, feminists, the NAACP, the Parents Television Council, and others in a study of activists’ efforts to influence broadcasting policy.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla by Kimberly Mair (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 384 pages; US$100 hardcover, US$29.95 paperback). Explores the aesthetic rather than instrumental intent of actions by the Red Army Faction and other elements of the West German radical left from 1967 to 1977.

ECONOMICS

China’s Innovation Challenge: Overcoming the Middle-Income Trap by Arie Y. Lewin, Martin Kenney, and Johann Peter Murmann (Cambridge University Press; 496 pages; $150 hardcover, $44.99 paperback). Writings by Chinese and Western economists and management scholars on the challenges of building an innovation growth model in China.

The Evolution of the World Economy: The ‘Flying-Geese’ Theory of Multinational Corporations and Structural Transformation by Terutomo Ozawa (Edward Elgar Publishing; 224 pages; $120). Topics include the prospects for Chinese industry in Africa.

FILM STUDIES

Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-War Fiction Film by Peter Verstraten (Amsterdam University Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 410 pages; $124). Uses such categories as low-class comedies, neurotic romances, deliberate camp, and grotesque satire to examine Dutch feature films.

Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History by Paul A. Schroeder Rodriguez (University of California Press; 376 pages; $41.95). Uses close readings of 50 films to examine the region’s cinema since the silent era.

Slow Fade to Black: The Decline of RKO Radio Pictures by Richard B. Jewell (University of California Press; 296 pages; $70 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Completes a two-volume history of the studio, with a focus on 1942 to the company’s demise in 1957.

Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema by Janice Loreck (Palgrave Macmillan; 179 pages; $95). Explores the appeal of violent women in art-house fare, with a focus on Antichrist, Trouble Every Day, Baise-moi, Heavenly Creatures, Monster, and The Reader.

GENDER STUDIES

What Gender Is, What Gender Does by Judith Roof (University of Minnesota Press; 280 pages; $94.50 hardcover, $27 paperback). Uses examples from film, television, and other realms of popular culture in a discussion of the polymorphous dynamics of gender.

HISTORY

Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape by Francesca Russello Ammon (Yale University Press; 383 pages; $45). Discusses the bulldozer as instrument and icon in a study of the machine’s move from military to civilian uses and the rise of a postwar “culture of clearance.”

Charcoal and Blood: Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada, and the Fish Creek Massacre by Silvio Manno (University of Nevada Press; 294 pages; $29.95). Discusses an incident in August 1879 in which five Italian-immigrant charcoal-making workers were killed, along with six others wounded and 14 taken captive by a sherriff’s posse.

A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunko by William J. Farge (Catholic University of America Press; 336 pages; $34.95). Documents the hidden history of Christianity in 18th-century Japan through a study of the life, writings, and influence of an author and orator who was tried and executed in 1759.

From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia by Robert Heinrich and Deborah Harding (Louisiana State University Press; 162 pages; $35). Traces the life of a man born into slavery in 1852 who, after gaining his freedom with the Civil War and pursuing education, became a teacher and principal, newspaper editor, and civil-rights activist in Staunton, Va.

From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie: The Alliance for Sovereignty Between American Indians and Central Europeans in the Late Cold War by Gyorgy Ferenc Toth (State University of New York Press; 313 pages; $90). Describes a transatlantic activist alliance that worked on behalf of the American Indian sovereignty movement.

Girls of Liberty: The Struggle for Suffrage in Mandatory Palestine by Margalit Shilo (Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England; 232 pages; $85 hardcover, $40 paperback). Examines feminist struggles for suffrage and equal rights within emerging Zionist political institutions in British Mandate Palestine.

The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics by Giacomo Macola (Ohio University Press; 249 pages; $80 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Considers both practical and symbolic aspects of firearms in a study of why some Central African peoples embraced gun technology in the 19th century while others did not.

Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire by Peter H. Wilson (Harvard University Press; 942 pages; $39.95). Traces the empire’s history from its Carolingian origins to its dissolution in 1806.

The Holy See and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East: Benedict XV’s Diplomacy in Greater Syria (1914-1922) by Agnes de Dreuzy (Catholic University of America Press; 296 pages; $69.95). Discusses Pope Benedict XV’s statecraft during and after World War I regarding post-Ottoman Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Imagining Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die by Kara L. McCormack (University Press of Kansas; 206 pages; $27.95). Explores the encounter of myth and history in Tombstone, Ariz., a silver boomtown turned ghost town turned tourist attraction with reenactments of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siecle by Mary Gluck (University of Wisconsin Press; 251 pages; $39.95). Discusses coffee houses, music halls, and other realms in a study of how assimilated, secular Jews shaped the city’s modernist culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Jefferson Highway: Blazing the Way from Winnipeg to New Orleans by Lyell D. Henry Jr. (University of Iowa Press; 213 pages; $29.95). Examines the origins, history, and significance of the first North American north-to-south intercontinental highway.

Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa by Leslie Anne Hadfield (Michigan State University Press; 270 pages; $39.95). Focuses on the yearbook Black Review, the Zanempilo Community Health Center, and the Njwaxa leatherwork factory in a study of Black Consciousness projects of the late 1960s and early 70s.

The Revolution before the Revolution: Late Authoritarianism and Student Protest in Portugal by Guya Accornero (Berghahn Books; 169 pages; $90). Focuses on student protest in the “long 1960s” that predated the military coup and “Carnation Revolution” that overthrew the authoritarian Estado Novo in 1974.

Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945--1970 by Gleb Tsipursky (University of Pittsburgh Press; 384 pages; $29.95). Combines archival and interview sources in a study of youth entertainment and leisure activities at tens of thousands of state-sponsored klubs.

The Thomas Indian School and the “Irredeemable” Children of New York by Keith R. Burich (Syracuse University Press; 189 pages; $59.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Discusses a school founded around 1900 by Presbyterian missionaries on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in western New York.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick by Jessica Riskin (University of Chicago Press; 548 pages; $40). Traces the rise in science of a principle banning ascriptions of agency to nature, as well as the history of dissents from that mechanistic view.

LITERATURE

Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews by Ted Geltner (University of Georgia Press; 448 pages; $39.95). Traces the “outlaw” life and work of the Georgia-born writer (1935-2012), whose books included Scar Lover, Body, and Naked in Garden Hills.

Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 by Mark J. Miller (University of Pennsylvania Press; 208 pages; $49.95). Draws on conversion narratives, poems, novels, and other texts in a study of how of Protestant discourse on abjection.

Cultivating Environmental Justice: A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing by Robert S. Emmett (University of Massachusetts Press; 246 pages; $90 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Documents how ideas of environmental justice emerged in descriptions of gardening across a wide range of mid-20th-century literature.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil by Bethany Hicok (University of Virginia Press; 192 pages; $59.50 hardcover, $24.50 paperback). Draws on unpublished sources in a study of the poet’s nearly two decades in Brazil, where she lived after falling in love with Lota de Macedo Soares; topics include Brazilian writers’ influence on her work.

Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature by Brandy Nalani McDougall (University of Arizona Press; 204 pages; $55). Explores the Hawaiian aesthetic concept of kaona in a discussion of such authors as Haunani-Kay Trask, John Dominis Holt, Imaikalani Kalahele, and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl.

Kafka’s Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair by Jennifer L. Geddes (Northwestern University Press; 176 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Disputes the notion that Kafka attempted to avoid or prevent the interpretation of his work.

Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism edited by Lisa Rowe Fraustino and Karen Coats (University Press of Mississippi; 240 pages; $60). Topics include animal mothers and animal babies, mothers in Kindertransport fiction, and maternal care ethics and children’s fantasy.

Shakespeare’s Binding Language by John Kerrigan (Oxford University Press; 622 pages; $60). A study of oaths, threats, pledges, vows, contracts, and similar language in the plays.

MUSIC

Bach and the Organ edited by Matthew Dirst (University of Illinois Press; 124 pages; $60). Topics include the origins of the composer’s cantata movements with obbligato organ, and organ trios from his Leipzig workshop.

Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties by James Wierzbicki (University of Illinois Press; 312 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Documents wider social forces that shaped the fortunes of both established and emerging musical genres during the decade.

Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America by Christine Bacareza Balance (Duke University Press; 256 pages; $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paperback). Discusses Pinoy indie rock and other genres in a study of how popular music figures in the construction of Filipino identity and acts to challenge U.S. stereotypes.

PHILOSOPHY

Complicity and Moral Accountability by Gregory Mellema (University of Notre Dame Press; 176 pages; $40). Uses St. Thomas Aquinas’s nine-part taxonomy of complicity as a starting point to examine issues of blame and responsibility in being an accomplice to the wrongdoing of others.

Knowledge Through Imagination edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung (Oxford University Press; 250 pages; $74). Offers philosophical perspectives on how imagination can provide us with knowledge about the world; topics include thought experiments in ethics.

Levinas’s Ethical Politics by Michael L. Morgan (Indiana University Press; 432 pages; $100 hardcover, $40 paperback). Defends the Lithuanian-born French philosopher as a serious political thinker, with particular attention to his writings on Zionism and Israel.

Ontology After Carnap edited by Stephan Blatti and Sandra Lapointe (Oxford University Press; 244 pages; $74). Writings on the legacy of Rudolf Carnap, and his debate with Willard van Orman Quine, for the understanding of metaontology.

Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington (Fordham University Press; 294 pages; $125 hardcover, $35 paperback). Topics include politics’ relation to rhetoric, philosophy, and truth.

Unity and Plurality: Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics edited by Massimiliano Carrara, Alexandra Arapinis, and Friederike Moltmann (Oxford University Press; 259 pages; $65). Essays on pluralities in logic and semantics; topics include relations as plural-predications in Plato.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Dangerous Doctrine: How Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America by Robert G. Kaufman (University Press of Kentucky; 294 pages; $40). Focuses on Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in a critique of Obama’s foreign policy as a doctrine that threatens America’s role as a superpower.

The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act by Charles S. Bullock III, Ronald Keith Gaddie, and Justin J. Wert (University of Oklahoma Press; 240 pages; $29.95). Pays particular attention to the period between the 2006 revision of the 1965 act and the invalidation of one of its key provisions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

RELIGION

Commentary on Genesis by Didymus the Blind, translated by Robert C. Hill (Catholic University of America Press; 248 pages; $39.95). First translation of what may be the earliest work of the fourth-century Egyptian monk and theologian, who was acclaimed by Jerome and other contemporaries but was anathematized by the church in 553 for his defense of Origen.

Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity by Yonatan Moss (University of California Press; 264 pages; $65). Focuses on early sixth-century debates between the theologians Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus concerning the nature of Christ’s physical body before the resurrection.

RHETORIC

Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies edited by Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton (Fordham University Press; 444 pages; $125 hardcover, $45 paperback). Writings on the Jesuits’ use and teaching of rhetoric since the 16th century; includes essays on current approaches to eloquentia perfecta in contemporary Jesuit institutions.

SOCIOLOGY

Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet by Kelsy Burke (University of California Press; 240 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). A study of evangelical websites that promote satisfying sex lives for married, heterosexual couples.

Making Things Stick: Surveillance Technologies and Mexico’s War on Crime by Keith Guzik (University of California Press; 272 pages; $34.95). Focuses on three programs set up under the government of President Felipe Calderon: the National Registry of Mobile Telephone Users (RENAUT), the Citizen Identity Card (CEDI), and the Public Registry of Vehicles (REPUVE).

Spanish Legacies: The Coming of Age of the Second Generation by Alejandro Portes, Rosa Aparicio, and William Haller (University of California Press; 336 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Draws on interviews of students in Madrid and Barcelona in a study of adaptations to Spanish life by children of immigrants; includes comparisons with the United States.

THEATER

The Late Work of Sam Shepard translated and edited by Shannon Blake Skelton (Bloomsbury Academic; 256 pages; $112). Focuses on Simpatico, The Late Henry Moss, and other of the American playwright’s work since 1988.

URBAN STUDIES

A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism and Urban Revitalization in the Postwar Rustbelt by Aaron Cowan (Temple University Press; 234 pages; $84.50 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Compares Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore in a study of Rustbelt cities’ efforts to attract tourism in the wake of deindustrialization.