Weekly Book List, February 5, 2016

JANUARY 31, 2016

AMERICAN STUDIES

The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics by Ramzi Fawaz (New York University Press; 316 pages; $89 hardcover, $29 paperback). Draws on queer theory in a study of the emergence of mutant outcast superheroes that anticipated the countercultural politics of the 1960s and beyond.

ANTHROPOLOGY

The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest by Paul Kockelman (Duke University Press; 208 pages; $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paperback). Examines the local impact of an ecotourism and conservation project established in the highland village of Chicacnab with the intent of protecting the quetzal, Guatemala's national bird, from farming practices that threatened its habitat.

The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism by Douglas Rogers (Cornell University Press; 394 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Combines ethnographic and archival perspectives in a study of the Perm region of the Urals and oil's place in Soviet and Russian life.

El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America by Arlene Davila (University of California Press; 248 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Focuses on Bogota, Colombia in a study of shopping malls, consumerism, and class politics, and neoliberalism in urban Latin America.

Making Aboriginal Men and Music in Central Australia by Ase Ottosson (Bloomsbury Academic; 216 pages; $112). Explores masculine and Aboriginal modes of being in relation to rock, country, and reggae music making.

The Struggling State: Nationalism, Mass Militarization, and the Education of Eritrea by Jennifer Riggan (Temple University Press; 258 pages; $69.50 hardcover, $35 paperback). Offers an ethnographic perspective on Eritrean public education in the wake of a 2008 law that requireed an additional year of schooling for all children to be held at the nation's military training center at Sawa.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeology of Early Colonial Interaction at El Chorro de Maita, Cuba by Roberto Valcarcel Rojas (University Press of Florida; 424 pages; $84.95). Uses funerary and other data from the site to examine relations between Cuba's indigenous people and Spanish colonists.

Mississippian Smoking Ritual in the Southern Appalachian Region by Dennis B. Blanton (University of Tennessee Press; 384 pages; $65). Uses pipes recovered at sites across southern Appalachia and adjacent areas to trace changes in indigenous smoking practices.

Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul by Andrew K. Scherer (University of Texas Press; 336 pages; $65). Draws on previously unpublished data in a study of the diversity of death rites among the Maya of the Classic period (AD 250-900); focuses on sites along the Usumacinta River in the Guatemala-Mexico borderlands and in the Central Peten region of Guatemala.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Baroque Visual Rhetoric by Vernon Hyde Minor (University of Toronto Press; 288 pages; US$85). Explores the intertwined nature of style and meaning in Baroque art, with discussion of such masterpieces as Bernini's Baldacchino in St. Peter's Basilica.

Raphael's Ostrich by Una Roman D'Elia (Penn State University Press; 251 pages; $74.95). Explores the artistic and cultural history of the ostrich in text and image from ancient times to the Renaissance; pays particular attention to the bird painted by Raphael as an attribute of justice in the Vatican's Sala di Constantino.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

The Play of Allusion in the "Historia Augusta" by David Rohrbacher (University of Wisconsin Press; 246 pages; $65). Focuses on the key role played by allusion in a collection of bizarre and fictionalized biographies of Roman emperors and usurpers here dated to the very late fourth or fifth centuries.

ECONOMICS

The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve by Peter Conti-Brown (Princeton University Press; 347 pages; $35). Examines the Fed's history, activities, internal politics, and the extent to which the law defines its power.

The Regulation of International Trade, Volume 1: GATT by Petros C. Mavroidis (MIT Press; 648 pages; $86). Examines the history, negotiating record, policy background, economic rationale, and case law for the GATT regime of international trade.

FILM STUDIES

Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia 1945-1960 edited by Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal (Berghahn Books; 395 pages; $120). Topics include 1950s East/West German film co-productions and the changing role of Czechoslovakia's Karlovy Vary film festival.

Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial by Scott Higgins (Rutgers University Press; 232 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines the adventure serial as a distinct genre and art form and explores its key characteristics, including the cliffhangers that brought audiences back to the theaters each week.

Robert Altman: In the American Grain by Frank Caso (Reaktion Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 286 pages; $27). Examines more than 20 stylistic features of the American director's work.

GEOGRAPHY

Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South edited by Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane (University of Georgia Press; 336 pages; $85.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Writings that challenge global North/South binaries in a discussion of how poverty is constituted as a problem and territorialized.

HISTORY

Capitalist Family Values: Gender, Work, and Corporate Culture at Boeing by Polly Reed Myers (University of Nebraska Press; 284 pages; $50). Examines women's experiences at Boeing in the postwar era in light of the aircraft manufacturer's rhetoric of a "workplace family."

Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet: Hagiography and the Problem of Islam in Medieval Europe by Scott G. Bruce (Cornell University Press; 176 pages; $49.95). Traces changing views of Islam in hagiographical accounts from the 10th to the 12th century of an incident in 972 when a band of Muslim brigands based in southern France abducted the abbot of Cluny enroute to Burgundy and were later, for their offense, crushed by an army raised by Count William of Arles.

Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic's Border Campaign Against Haiti, 1930-1961 by Edward Paulino (University of Pittsburgh Press; 288 pages; $27.95). Discusses a campaign initiated by Dominican dictator Raul Trujillo to create a border zone between the DR and Haiti; also documents other Dominicans' positive attitudes toward their neighbors.

Enemies to Allies: Cold War Germany and American Memory by Brian C. Etheridge (University Press of Kentucky; 366 pages; $45). Explores realms from foreign policy to popular culture in a study of shifting American views of Germany, with a focus on the post-World War II period.

Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlanticby Victor M. Uribe-Uran (Stanford University Press; 429 pages; $70). Examines spousal murder as a reflection of wider gender relations and society; draws on more than 200 cases from New Spain, New Granada, and Spain proper from the 1740s to the 1820s.

John Birch: A Life by Terry Lautz (Oxford University Press; 344 pages; $29.95). A biography of the American Baptist missionary turned soldier who was shot and killed by Chinese Communist forces in 1945 and became the figurehead for a far-right organization that bears his name.

The Man who Wrote Pancho Villa: Martin Luis Guzman and the Politics of Life Writingby Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody (Vanderbilt University Press; 224 pages; $55). Sets Guzman's five-volume biography of the Mexican revolutionary in the context of its author's own motivations and self-fashioning as a public persona.

The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic by Lisa Ze Winters (University of Georgia Press; 248 pages; $59.95). Explores the figure of the free mulatta concubine in letters, travel writings, and other texts linked to three sites: Goree Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti).

The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists by Tarik Cyril Amar (Cornell University Press; 328 pages; $35). A study of the western Ukrainian city, which in the past has been under Habsburg, Polish, Russian, Nazi, and Soviet rule; focuses on the intensification of Ukrainian identity under its final period of external control.

A Sense of Power: The Roots of America's Global Role by John A. Thompson (Cornell University Press; 344 pages; $29.95). Links the rise of the United States in world affairs from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries to American leaders' sense of the country's power and potential.

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha (Yale University Press; 768 pages; $37.50). Documents the influence of the Haitian revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the movement's ideology and tactics.

Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula by Benjamin Reilly (Ohio University Press; 222 pages; $75 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Discusses the use of African slave labor, historically, in agricultural oases in the peninsula and links the practice to the prevalence of malaria in such regions and the need for a population of workers with acquired or genetic resistance.

The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico by Antonio Sotomayor (University of Nebraska Press; 302 pages; $60). Examines how Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States, came to participate in the Olympics as a separate, sovereign team.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876-1980 by Amos Morris-Reich (University of Chicago Press; 280 pages; $32.50). Examines how photography figured in German racial thought from the 1870s to and beyond the Nazi era.

LITERATURE

Curative Illnesses: Medico-National Allegory in Quebecois Fiction by Julie Robert (McGill-Queen's University Press; 252 pages; US$70). Explores the recurrent theme of illness in post-1940 Quebecois literature and its relation to national identity; authors discussed include Gabrielle Roy, Andre Langevin, and Denis Lord.

Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form by Hillary L. Chute (Harvard University Press; 336 pages; $35). Examines the representation of war and trauma in graphic format from Francisco's Goya's Disasters of War etchings to Keiji Nakazawa's I Saw It and Art Spiegelman's Maus.

Hemingway's Spain: Imagining the Spanish World edited by Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino (Kent State University Press; 232 pages; $40). Essays on Hemingway's long engagement with Spain in his life and writings, including such neglected works as The Dangerous Summer and his Spanish Civil War stories.

Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives by Jane Stadler, Peta Mitchell, and Stephen Carleton (Indiana University Press; 238 pages; $85 hardcover, $30 paperback). Draws on digital mapping in a study of Australian narratives that prominently feature space and place; examples include the novel, film, and stage versions of Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright.

Junot Diaz and the Decolonial Imagination edited by Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and José David Saldívar (Duke University Press; 464 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Interdisciplinary essays on the Dominican-American writer; topics include racialized constructions of gender and sexuality in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her.

Lyric Orientations: Holderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge (Cornell University Press; 244 pages; $79.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Draws on the theories of Stanley Cavell in a study of the two writers' views of lyrical poetry's capacity to orient us as social beings in the face of personal mortality.

Poetical Dust: Poets' Corner and the Making of Britain by Thomas A. Prendergast (University of Pennsylvania Press; 235 pages; $59.95). Explores the creation, history, and significance of a section of Westminster Abbey in which more than 70 people, mostly writers, are buried, and many more literary figures are memorialized.

Same-Sex Desire in Indian Culture: Representations in Literature and Film, 1970-2015by Oliver Ross (Palgrave Macmillan; 240 pages; $95). Writers and filmmakers discussed include Deepa Mehta, Vikram Seth, Kamala Das, and Raj Rao.

What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature by Pheng Cheah (Duke University Press; 397 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Combines approaches from idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction in a study of literature's world-making power; focuses on works by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo.

MUSIC

Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus by Krin Gabbard (University of California Press; 336 pages; $34.95). Discusses Mingus's autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, in a study of the jazz musician and composer's penchant for self-analysis and his crafting of racial identity.

The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles by Bob Gluck (University of Chicago Press; 264 pages; $37.50). A study of how Davis's recorded performances from 1968 to 1970 shed light on his thought during a period of transition.

PHILOSOPHY

Husserl's Ethics and Practical Intentionality by Susi Ferrarello (Bloomsbury Academic; 269 pages; $112). Draws on writings by the Austrian philosopher previously untranslated into English.

Knowing Better: Virtue, Deliberation, and Normative Ethics by Daniel Star (Oxford University Press; 147 pages; $60). Discusses the reconciliation of ordinary virtue and normative ethics.

Lectures on the "Theory of Ethics," 1812 by J.G. Fichte, translated and edited by Benjamin D. Crowe (State University of New York Press; 192 pages; $75). First English translation of lectures delivered by the German philosopher at the newly founded University of Berlin.

Luck's Mischief: Obligation and Blameworthiness on a Thread by Ishtiyaque Haji (Oxford University Press; 358 pages; $74). Describes luck's detrimental impact on moral obligation and moral responsibility, as in, for example, narrowing the range of things for which we are blameworthy.

Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture edited by Patricia M. Locke and Rachel McCann (Ohio University Press; 320 pages; $80). Topics include the spatial experience of the French philosopher's metaphors, and Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the time of objects.

The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution by Giovanni Maddalena (McGill-Queen's University Press; 206 pages; US$100 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Draws on Charles Sanders Peirce in a discussion of gesture or action in relation to knowledge, creativity, and reasoning.

Receptive Spirit: German Idealism and the Dynamics of Cultural Transmission by Marton Dornbach (Fordham University Press; 240 pages; $55). Focuses on Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, and Hegel.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America by Sarah Zukerman Daly (Cambridge University Press; 288 pages; $99.99). Draws on data on 37 militia groups in Colombia in a study of the postwar trajectories of former non-state belligerents.

PSYCHOLOGY

A Natural History of Human Morality by Michael Tomasello (Harvard University Press; 180 pages; $35). Uses comparative experimental data on apes and human children to reconstruct how early humans gradually emerged as a cooperative and moral species.

RELIGION

Refutation of All Heresies translated by M. David Litwa (Society of Biblical Literature; 844 pages; $119.95 hardcover, $99.95 paperback). Annotated Greek text with facing English translation of a work published anonymously by a "scholar-bishop" sometime around AD 225.

The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Volume Nine edited by Daniel C. Matt (Stanford University Press; 1,008 pages; $80). Ninth volume in a translation, with commentary, of the Sefer ha-Zohar or Book of Radiance, an Aramaic Kabbalistic text written in 13th-century Spain; includes a commentary on the Torah from the middle of Numbers through the end of Deuteronomy.

RHETORIC

Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration by Mira Shimabukuro (University Press of Colorado; 250 pages; $26.95). Examines how both public and private forms of writing figured in Japanese resistance to internment.

SOCIAL WORK

Subversive Action: Extralegal Practices for Social Justice edited by Nilan Yu and Deena Mandell (Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 187 pages; US$38.99). Writings on social work in relation to extralegal actions taken to further human rights and social justice; topics include apartheid South Africa, the landless workers' movement in Brazil, and the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto.

SOCIOLOGY

Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India by Sharmila Rudrappa (New York University Press; 224 pages; $89 hardcover, $27 paperback). Examines the experiences and self-perceptions of surrogate mothers in India who bear children for foreign couples; draws on interviews with women in Bangalore and gay and straight couples in the United States and Australia.

The Social Life of Forensic Evidence by Corinna Kruse (University of California Press; 208 pages; $39.95). Draws on fieldwork in Sweden in a study of the social dynamics of forensic evidence as it is produced in crime scene investigations and moves from there to courtrooms.

SPORTS STUDIES

From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line edited by Chris Lamb (University of Nebraska Press; 672 pages; $35). Topics include how black and white media differ in their portrayal of racial issues in sports.

THEATER

A Philosophy of Comedy on Stage and Screen: You Have to Be There by Shaun May (Bloomsbury Academic; 213 pages; $104). Draws on Heidegger's concept of human being to explore our seemingly unique nature as creatures who can make and understand jokes; considers comedy from Charlie Chaplin to Beckett's Endgame to Family Guy.

Reckoning With Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance by Donnalee Dox (University of Michigan Press; 282 pages; $85 hardcover, $39.50 paperback). Focuses on meditative dance and shamanic drumming in a study of how religious sensibilities shape performance.

URBAN STUDIES

Leaky Governance: Alternative Service Delivery and the Myth of Water Utility Independence by Kathryn Furlong (University of British Columbia Press; 240 pages; US$99). Uses Ontario, Canada, as a case study in a critique of efforts to disengage municipal governments from water management.

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