Weekly Book List, January 29, 2016

Compiled by Nina C. Ayoub JANUARY 24, 2016

AMERICAN STUDIES

American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific edited by Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England; 400 pages; $85 hardcover, $40 paperback). Essays on such topics as the transnational Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois in the Eurasian Pacific, and how transnationalism reconfigured the field of American studies.

Our Gang: A Racial History of "The Little Rascals" by Julia Lee (University of Minnesota Press; 337 pages; $87.50 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). A study of Our Gang, known later as The Little Rascalsthrough the series' origins as silent film shorts to its revival in 1950s television.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking by Faranak Miraftab (Indiana University Press; 304 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Draws on fieldwork in Illinois, Mexico, and Togo in a study of the transformation of Beardstown, Ill., with the recruitment of foreign workers for its meat-packing plant.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842--1843 by Richard Doyle, edited by Grant F. Scott (Ohio University Press; 370 pages; $79.95). Edition and study of 53 illustrated letters that were written weekly by a young man who would later design the iconic covers of Punch; sheds light on London culture.

On Stage: The Theatrical Dimension of Video Image by Mathilde Roman, translated by Charles Penwarden (Intellect Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 111 pages; $36). Explores theater as a reference point for artists who work in video installations; people discussed include Michael Snow, Maider Fortune, and Laurent Grasso.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795-1821 by Henry Stead (Oxford University Press; 352 pages; $110). Examines literary and popular engagement with the scandalous Roman poet; topics include John Nott's pioneering bilingual edition of his work in 1795, and his influence on Keats, Byron, Leigh Hunt, and other writers.

Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy by Melissa Mueller (University of Chicago Press; 272 pages; $55). Examines the importance of weapons, textiles, vessels, and other props in the staging and reception of tragedies by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides.

COMMUNICATION

The Format Age: Television's Entertainment Revolution by Jean K. Chalaby (Polity Press; 232 pages; $65.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Topics include shows such as Big Brother, Idols, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire that are adapted around the world to local audiences.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968 by Samuel Steinberg (University of Texas Press; 266 pages; $80 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Explores photographic, cinematic, and other artifacts of the massacre of student and populist protesters in a plaza in Mexico City's Tlatelolco neighborhood on October 2, 1968.

ECONOMICS

Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Disability Insurance Programs and Retirement edited by David A. Wise (University of Chicago Press; 544 pages; $130). Compares Canada, Japan, the United States, and nine other countries in research on how national differences in labor-force participation reflect disability insurance programs.

FILM STUDIES

Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934by Laura Horak (Rutgers University Press; 296 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Examines cross-dressing women in more than 400 films that predate the famous turns of Dietrich, Garbo, and Hepburn.

HISTORY

African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World by Priya Lal (Cambridge University Press; 278 pages; $99.99). Draws on oral and written sources in a study of the rural communal experiment known as "ujamaa villagization" in 1967-75.

Camera Aloft: Edward Steichen in the Great War by Von Hardesty (Cambridge University Press; 250 pages; $99.99). Discusses the artist and photographer's role in shaping the U.S. use of aerial photography as a means of intelligence gathering in World War I.

Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz (Fordham University Press; 236 pages; $120 hardcover, $35 paperback). Argues that the war ultimately alienated most Northern Catholics, leading them to seek a separate Catholic subculture after the conflict.

Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao's Campaign to Deworm China by Miriam Gross (University of California Press; 376 pages; $70). Draws on newly available archives in a study of a campaign against snail fever in rural China that met some local resistance; documents the role of banished urban doctors and educated rural youth in its ultimate success.

Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction by Nicolas Barreyre, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (University of Virginia Press; 336 pages; $39.50). Translation of a French study on the centrality of debt, taxation, tariffs, and other economic issues to American politics after the Civil War.

Mussolini's Army in the French Riviera: Italy's Occupation of France by Emanuele Sica (University of Illinois Press; 288 pages; $40). Examines relations between Italian soldiers and local French populations during the former's occupation of the Riviera and nearby Alpine areas in 1940-43.

Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow by Cheryl Knott (University of Massachusetts Press; 296 pages; $90 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Describes both conflict and cooperation between whites and blacks in the creation, growth, and eventual demise of separate libraries for African-Americans in the South.

Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz by Lauren Arrington (Princeton University Press; 360 pages; $35). Explores avant-garde culture and anti-imperialist politics through a dual biography of the activist couple---the Irish nationalist Constance Markievicz (1868-1927) and her husband, Casimir Markievicz (1872-1932), a painter, playwright, and theater director.

Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South by Christopher D. Haveman (University of Nebraska Press; 414 pages; $65). Draws on previously untapped sources in a study of the combination of coercion and negotiation that marked the removal of nearly 23,000 Creek from the South to the Indian Territory.

A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid by Nancy H. Kwak (University of Chicago Press; 328 pages; $45). Examines how the American ideal of homeownership came to be an export around the world, functioning as both a tool of foreign policy and a vehicle for investment.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence by Guenter B. Risse (University of Illinois Press; 298 pages; $95 hardcover, $30 paperback). Documents how fear, disgust, racism, xenophobia, and other feelings shaped city policies to segregate victims of leprosy and other diseases in San Francisco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers by Nancy Tomes (University of North Carolina Press; 538 pages; $45). Traces the evolution of the middle-class patient as shopper through three periods of consumerist agitation, in the Progressive Era, the 1930s, and the late 1960s and early 1970s.

HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY

Weekend Pilots: Technology, Masculinity, and Private Aviation in Postwar America by Alan Meyer (Johns Hopkins University Press; 305 pages; $44.95). Focuses on the first four decades after World War II in a study of the role of masculinity in the culture of private aviation.

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft (University of Pennsylvania Press; 344 pages; $59.95). Contrasts how the European-born Jewish political thinkers viewed the relationship between philosophers and politics.

LAW

Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda's Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes by Anuradha Chakravarty (Cambridge University Press; 390 pages; $99.99). Draws on previously untapped data, including field interviews, in a study of the dynamics of confessions, denunciations, and rulings in what are described as patronage-driven courts.

Legalizing LGBT Families: How the Law Shapes Parenthood by Amanda K. Baumle and D'Lane R. Compton (New York University Press; 320 pages; $45). Draws on interviews with 137 parents in a study of how the law shapes decision making in LGBT families.

The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law by Michael J. Saks and Barbara A. Spellman (New York University Press; 325 pages; $89 hardcover, $38 paperback). Examines the psychological beliefs reflected in rules about witnesses, hearsay, expert testimony, and other evidence and whether such understandings are confirmed in research.

LITERATURE

Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics by Elizabeth Swanstrom (University of Alabama Press; 207 pages; $49.95). Considers how forms of digital media can promote human engagement with nature.

Gendered Geographies in Puerto Rican Culture: Spaces, Sexualities, Solidarities by Radost Rangelova (University of North Carolina Press; 224 pages; $65). Examines the work of such authors and filmmakers as Rosario Ferre, Carmen Lugo Filippi, Magali Garcia Ramis, and Mayra Santos-Febres.

Herder: Aesthetics Against Imperialism by John K. Noyes (University of Toronto Press; 408 pages; US$75). A study of the German writer and philosopher that links his epistemology and rejection of universalisms to his anti-imperialism.

Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist by Clara Jones (Edinburgh University Press; 272 pages; $120). Examines Woolf's activism in life and the ways in which it is written into her fiction and nonfiction; topics include her work teaching at Morley College for adult education and her affiliation with the Women's Co-operative Guild.

Women's Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant edited by Shachar Pinsker, translated by Adriana X. Jacobs and Yosefa Raz (Wayne State University Press; 232 pages; $34.99). Edition and translation of works written by two American-born poets who published Hebrew poetry between the 1930s and 60s.

Writing West Virginia: Place, People, and Poverty in Contemporary Literature from the Mountain State by Boyd Creasman (University of Tennessee Press; 184 pages; $39.95). A study of the fiction and poetry of Davis Grubb, Mary Lee Settle, Breece D'J Pancake, Denise Giardina, Irene McKinney, Ann Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Pinckney Benedict.

MUSIC

Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice by Nina Sun Eidsheim (Duke University Press; 304 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Defends a view of sound, listening, and music as dynamic and contextually dependent; draws on case studies of operas by Juliana Snapper, Meredith Monk, Christopher Cerrone, and Alba Triana.

PHILOSOPHY

Aristotle's Ethics and Medieval Philosophy: Moral Goodness and Practical Wisdom by Anthony Celano (Cambridge University Press; 274 pages; $99.99). Examines conflicting ideas of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics in a study of how medieval thinkers recast Aristotle's work for their own moral views.

The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory by Amy Allen (Columbia University Press; 280 pages; $35). A critique of Eurocentric views of historical progress in the work of Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst as thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School.

Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing by Duncan Pritchard (Princeton University Press; 215 pages; $35). Offers solutions to what are described as two logically distinct problems regarding radical skepticism, or the issue of how we can have knowledge of a world external to us.

The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau: Privatism and the Practice of Philosophyby Jonathan McKenzie (University Press of Kentucky; 214 pages; $75). Discusses Thoreau as a radical individualist deeply influenced by ancient philosophy, and in particular the Stoics.

The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science by Dustin Sebell (University of Pennsylvania Press; 215 pages; $39.95). Explores Socrates' path from materialist natural science to moral and political philosophy.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador by Christine J. Wade (Ohio University Press; 301 pages; $69.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Focuses on the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) in a study documenting how elites commandeered the peace process and used their power to deepen control in economic, political, and social realms.

Muslim Minority-State Relations: Violence, Integration, and Policy edited by Robert Mason (Palgrave Macmillan; 256 pages; $105). Includes essays on Muslim minorities in Britain, Russia, Austria, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma), and other countries.

The Polythink Syndrome: U.S. Foreign Policy Decisions on 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and ISIS by Alex Mintz and Carly Wayne (Stanford University Press; 208 pages; $70 hardcover, $22.95 paperback). Uses 11 foreign-policy decisions to examine the problems created when a plurality of opinions results in a disjointed decision-making process or decision paralysis.

Truth Commissions: Memory, Power, and Legitimacy by Onur Bakiner (University of Pennsylvania Press; 320 pages; $65). Focuses on the actions and impact of truth and reconciliation commissions in Chile and Peru, with additional discussion of 13 other societies in transition.

RELIGION

Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo by Yolanda Covington-Ward (Duke University Press; 312 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Considers how gestures, dance, and spirituality figure in social and political action among the BisiKongo people, past and present.

Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God's Name by Mona Siddiqui (Yale University Press; 288 pages; $38). Examines teachings on hospitality in Islamic scripture and in the writings of Muslim scholars; includes comparative discussion of Christian traditions.

SOCIOLOGY

The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome by Alondra Nelson (Beacon Press; 200 pages; $27.95). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a discussion of how DNA testing is affecting racial politics in the United States, including over the legacy of slavery.

URBAN STUDIES

Sequel to Suburbia: Glimpses of America's Post-Suburban Future by Nicholas A. Phelps (MIT Press; 272 pages; $30). Includes case studies of Kendall-Dadeland in Miami-Dade County, Fla.; Tysons Corner in Fairfax County, Va.; and Schaumburg, Ill., near Chicago.

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