AMERICAN STUDIES
Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez (University of Minnesota Press; 210 pages; $91 hardcover, $25 paperback). Discusses the use of photography, film, video, and other technologies to depict the struggles of migrant farmworkers.
Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and Personhood in the Americas, 1830-1940 by Nihad M. Farooq (New York University Press; 243 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Draws on field journals, letters, novels, recordings, and other sources in a study of the constructions and permeability of personhood in scientific, travel, and other discourse of the Atlantic world in and beyond the era of Darwin’s travels.
Younger Than That Now: The Politics of Age in the 1960s by Holly V. Scott (University of Massachusetts Press; 206 pages; $90 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Explores the meaning and use of “youth” as a political identity and strategy during the period.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China by Lily Chumley (Princeton University Press; 244 pages; $35). Explores the social role and performance of creativity in an ethnographic study of Chinese students in test-prep institutions for art school and in art academies themselves.
Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India by Harris Solomon (Duke University Press; 292 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Draws on fieldwork in households, clinics, and other settings in Mumbai in a discussion of perceptions of food, fat, bodies, environment, and obesity and diabetes.
Mortuary Dialogues: Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities edited by David Lipset and Eric K. Silverman (Berghahn Books; 244 pages; $110). Focuses on Papua New Guinea in writings on how mortuary rituals reflect Pacific societies’ assertions of continuity and engagement with modernity.
Sex, Shame, and Violence: A Revolutionary Practice of Public Storytelling in Poor Communities by Kathleen Cash (Vanderbilt University Press; 254 pages; $69.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Describes efforts to use story telling and graphic novels to discuss public-heath issues in poor neighborhoods in Thailand, Bangladesh, Haiti, Uganda, and the United States.
The Slow Boil: Street Food, Rights and Public Space in Mumbai by Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria (Stanford University Press; 215 pages; $90 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Examines the stressful lives of roadside food venders, who, mostly unlicensed, operate in daily negotiation with authorities.
ARCHAEOLOGY
The Chora of Metaponto 6: A Greek Settlement at Sant’Angelo Vecchio edited by Francesca Silvestrelli and Ingrid E.M. Edlund-Berry (University of Texas Press; 700 pages; $75). Reports on the excavation of a Greek settlement site overlooking southern Italy’s Basento River.
Stones, Bones, and Profiles: Exploring Archaeological Context, Early American Hunter-Gatherers, and Bison edited by Marcel Kornfeld and Bruce B. Huckell (University Press of Colorado; 454 pages; $95). Writings on such topics as use-wear analysis of Clovis bifaces from the Gault Site in Texas, late Holocene geoarchaeology in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, and Folsom bison hunting on the southern Plains.
Theodore E. White and the Development of Zooarchaeology in North America by R. Lee Lyman (University of Nebraska Press; 260 pages; $55). Discusses White (1905-77) as a neglected pioneer in the subfield.
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism by William Kaizen (Dartmouth College/University Press of New England; 232 pages; $40). Topics include how Videofreex and other collectives created alternative networks of production, distribution, and consumption.
Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media by Noam M. Elcott (University of Chicago Press; 306 pages; $45). Explores the history of controlled artificial darkness, with particular attention to what originated as the velvet light traps of black screens.
Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region by Larissa Hjorth and others (MIT Press; 210 pages; $37). A study of activist and climate-aware screen art and media in the region; topics include water as a focus of such work as Chen Qiulin’s River, River project in China.
CLASSICAL STUDIES
Linguistic Interaction in Roman Comedy by Peter Barrios-Lech (Cambridge University Press; 410 pages; $120). Pays particular attention to commands and requests.
COMMUNICATION
Off-Track and Online: The Networked Spaces of Horse Racing by Holly Kruse (MIT Press; 201 pages; $39). Discusses the horse-racing industry as a pioneer in the use of interactive media to build its fan base and increase wagering.
TV Socialism by Aniko Imre (Duke University Press; 315 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Documents the hybrid aesthetic and economic practices that characterized television in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during and after the Cold War.
CRIMINOLOGY
Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control by Diana Rickard (Rutgers University Press; 199 pages; $44.95). Draws on interviews in a study of six men convicted of a sexual offense against a minor; focuses on their self-perceptions and experience of social stigma and isolation after incarceration or lesser sanction.
CULTURAL STUDIES
Blacktino Queer Performance edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon H. Rivera-Servera (Duke University Press; 573 pages; $119.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Writings by and about established and emerging black and Latino playwrights and performance artists.
ECONOMICS
The Changing Global Economy and its Impact on International Entrepreneurship by Hamid Etemad and others (Edward Elgar Publishing; 336 pages; $140). Topics include the influence of the entrepreneur and the accelerator on the internationalization of web-based companies.
Connectedness and Contagion: Protecting the Financial System From Panics by Hal S. Scott (MIT Press; 416 pages; $38). Focuses on the Lehman Brothers and AIG failures in a study of contagion, rather than asset connectedness, as the greatest systemic risk in the financial system.
From Convergence to Crisis: Labor Markets and the Instability of the Euro by Alison Johnston (Cornell University Press; 256 pages; $39.95). Uses case studies of Denmark, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain to examine aspects of monetary union that favored the labor markets of northern economies.
EDUCATION
Schooling Selves: Autonomy, Interdependence, and Reform in Japanese Junior High Education by Peter Cave (University of Chicago Press; 287 pages; $105 hardcover, $35 paperback). A study of how Japanese junior-high-school teachers have reinterpreted, reshaped, and resisted reforms that call for promoting individual autonomy among students; draws on fieldwork in two schools in a city in west-central Japan over a 12-year period.
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel by Alon Tal (Yale University Press; 377 pages; $40). Examines the environmental and other implications of population increases in Israel, described here as rising from one million to eight million over the past 68 years.
FILM STUDIES
Cinema Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968 by Paul Douglas Grant (Wallflower Press, distributed by Columbia University Press; 224 pages; $85 hardcover, $28 paperback). Focuses on four collectives---Cinelutte; les groupes Medvedkine, Atelier de recherche cinematographique; and Cinethique---in a study of cinema that emerged in France during the uprisings of May 1968 and continued into the 70s.
Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives by Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey (Rutgers University Press; 272 pages; $90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Examines adaptations of Mary Shelley’s tale of scientist and monster across a wide range of media, including film, theater, children’s cartoons, and pornography.
GAME STUDIES
Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts by Mia Consalvo (MIT Press; 259 pages; $32). Draws on interviews with gamers, game developers, and others in a study of how Japanese video games are used, perceived, and transformed in the West.
HISTORY
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe by Benjamin Madley (Yale University Press; 692 pages; $38). Focuses on how government backed, organized slaughter figured in the major decrease in California’s Indian population, from about 150,000 to 30,000 between 1846 and 1873.
Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East by Jon K. Chang (University of Hawai’i Press; 286 pages; $68). Draws on oral-historical interviews and other sources in a study of the lives and persecution of the Korean minority in the Russian Far East, including wholesale deportations in 1937-38.
Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. (Kent State University Press; 272 pages; $34.95). Examines the conduct of irregular warfare in Civil War Missouri, including the logistical support given guerrilla bands by their female kind and households.
Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya by Julie MacArthur (Ohio University Press; 320 pages; $34.95). A study of “ethnogenesis” that examines the role of mapping in the emergence of a hitherto unknown ethnicity, the Luyia, on the 1948 census of British-ruled Kenya.
Choosing War: Presidential Decisions in the “Maine,” “Lusitania,” and “Panay” Incidents by Douglas Carl Peifer (Oxford University Press; 331 pages; $34.95). Compares Presidents William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in a study of U.S. responses to the loss of American lives at sea in, respectively, 1898, 1915, and 1937.
Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism by Sylvie Anne Goldberg, translated by Benjamin Ivry (Stanford University Press; 364 pages; $65). Uses the metaphor of a clepsydra or ancient water clock in a cultural history of Jewish temporalities since antiquity.
Colonel Henry Theodore Titus: Antebellum Soldier of Fortune and Florida Pioneer by Antonio Rafael de la Cova (University of South Carolina Press; 336 pages; $44.99). Traces the life of a soldier of fortune, brawling braggart, and “frontier opportunist,” who despite his Northern origins became a staunch defender of Southern slavery (as well as U.S. expansionism).
Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace by Katherine Turk (University of Pennsylvania Press; 284 pages; $45). Examines efforts over the decades by workers and activists to define and create workplace gender equality using the Title VII provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Farmers Helping Farmers: The Rise of the Farm and Home Bureaus, 1914-1935 by Nancy K. Berlage (Louisiana State University Press; 328 pages; $48). Focuses on the bureaus’ role circulating science-based agriculture at the local level.
Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany by Nathan Stoltzfus (Yale University Press; 415 pages; $40). Describes strategic compromises made by Hitler when faced with public dissent in such realms as religion.
Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community During the Great Depression by Timothy Kelly, Margaret Power, and Michael Cary (Penn State University Press; 256 pages; $79.95). Traces the impact of New Deal programs on the western Pennsylvania town.
Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea by Gerald Izenberg (University of Pennsylvania Press; 542 pages; $59.95). Draws on literature, philosophy, politics, psychology, and other realms in an intellectual history of the modern concept of identity, since the end of World War I.
Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837-1860 by Greg Olson (University of Oklahoma Press; 163 pages; $29.95). Examines the Ioway people’s struggles to maintain their traditions and identity in the face of efforts by government officials and missionaries to promote assimilation in the tribe on the Great Nemaha Agency, a 200-square-mile area to which they were confined in 1837.
Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy edited by Ariel Hessayon (Palgrave Macmillan; 304 pages; $85). Essays on the English mystic and writer (1624-1704).
The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary by Henry Rousso, translated by Jane Marie Todd (University of Chicago Press; 245 pages; $95 hardcover, $32.50 paperback). Translation of a 2012 French study on issues that arise in the writing of recent history, including tensions between knowledge and experience, distance and proximity, and objectivity and subjectivity; focuses on France, Germany, Britain, and the United States.
Lawrence of Arabia’s War: The Arabs, the British and the Remaking of the Middle East in WWI by Neil Faulkner (Yale University Press; 528 pages; $37.50). Combines archaeology, anthropology, and history in a study of conflicts in the Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, and Syria during the First World War.
Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism by Timothy S. Huebner (University Press of Kansas; 576 pages; $34.95). Topics include how different interpretations of the Founding-era’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution figured in the divisions that ultimately led to the Civil War.
Love Canal: A Toxic History From Colonial Times to the Present by Richard S. Newman (Oxford University Press; 306 pages; $29.95). Discusses the environmental crisis that peaked in a suburb of Niagara Falls, N.Y., in the late 1970s as residents protested leakage from a 16-acre site containing some 100,000 barrels of chemical waste.
Luxury: A Rich History by Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello (Oxford University Press; 351 pages; $34.95). Examines the concept and manifestation of luxury from ancient times to the “brands” embraced today.
Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century by Matthew N. Johnston (University of Oklahoma Press; 242 pages; $34.95). Examines the use of landscape prints in railroad guidebooks, geological reports, and other such media.
The Russian Violin School: The Legacy of Yuri Yankelevich translated and edited by Masha Lankovsky (Oxford University Press; 257 pages; $99 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Includes previously untranslated writings by and about the famed Russian violin teacher, who taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1936 to the year of his death, in 1973.
The Shaykh of Shaykhs: Mithqal al-Fayiz and Tribal Leadership in Modern Jordan by Yoav Alon (Stanford University Press; 224 pages; $85 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Traces the life of the leader of the Bani Sakhr tribe in Jordan between 1921 and 1967 and played a crucial role in support of the Hashemite regime.
Sign Talker: Hugh Lenox Scott Remembers Indian Country edited by R. Eli Paul (University of Oklahoma Press; 260 pages; $29.95). Edition of the first part of a 1928 memoir by General Hugh Lenox Scott, a soldier-diplomat who recounts his interactions with Plains Indians.
Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism by Nick Fischer (University of Illinois Press; 345 pages; $95 hardcover, $32 paperback). Traces the activities of a wide range of individuals and groups, including including nativists and eugenicists, who sought to inflame American fears of Soviet-directed conspiracy during the interwar period (1919-1941).
White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West by Ryan Eyford (University of British Columbia Press; 272 pages; US$99). Discusses a colony established by Icelandic immigrants on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba in 1875,
HISTORY OF MEDICINE
Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu: The Ancient Classic on Needle Therapy: The Complete Chinese Text With an Annotated English Translation by Paul U. Unschuld (University of California Press; 786 pages; $110). Scholarly edition and translation of the full text of the ancient Chinese medical treatise.
Selling Science: Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin by Stephen E. Mawdsley (Rutgers University Press; 210 pages; $54.95). Documents how politics, marketing, and deception figured in the “selling” of the concept, conduct, and outcome of a now-forgotten polio prevention experiment, pre-Salk vaccine, that involved more than 55,000 healthy children.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Darwin’s Man in Brazil: The Evolving Science of Fritz Muller by David A. West (University Press of Florida; 320 pages; $79.95). A study of the German naturalist (1821-87), who emigrated to Brazil in 1852 and later used field studies there to test Darwin’s theory of evolution; describes his close intellectual relationship with his British counterpart.
LAW
The Globalization of Childhood: The International Diffusion of Norms and Law against the Child Death Penalty by Robyn Linde (Oxford University Press; 305 pages; $74). Traces the diffusion of the now near-universal norm of countries’ banning the death penalty for offenders under 18; topics include the effects of colonialism and legal acculturation on the former English and French colonies of Kenya, Tanzania, Algeria, and Tunisia, and the United States as “hegemonic laggard,” only formally ending the practice under law in 2005.
LINGUISTICS
Contiguity Theory by Norvin Richards (MIT Press; 381 pages; $76 hardcover, $38 paperback). Proposes a different relation between syntax and morphology than usually found in Minimalism.
Interpreting in the Zone: How the Conscious and Unconscious Function in Interpretation by Jack Hoza (Gallaudet University Press; 270 pages; $70). Draws on interviews with both novice and professional American Sign Language interpreters.
LITERATURE
Allen Tate: The Modern Mind and the Discovery of Enduring Love by John V. Glass III (Catholic University of America Press; 376 pages; $59.95). A study of the American poet and critic’s artistic, intellectual, and spiritual development.
Ancestral Recall: The Celtic Revival and Japanese Modernism by Aoife Assumpta Hart (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 472 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$37.95 paperback). Examines the reciprocal influence of Irish and Japanese literature in the early 20th century, with particular attention to William Butler Yeats.
Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park (Oxford University Press; 310 pages; $99 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Topics include the Asian-American “friendly” in three Korean-American novels, Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred, Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student, and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered.
The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community edited by Thomas Claviez (Fordham University Press; 197 pages; $95 hardcover, $25 paperback). Topics include the invocation of W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939" in the wake of 9/11.
Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971 by Jamie Hilder (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 272 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$37.95). Sets the postwar flowering of concrete poetry in the context of other phenomena, including the modernist architecture of Brasilia and the rise of computers.
The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain by Elizabeth R. Wright (University of Toronto Press; 288 pages; US$65). Examines the pressures shaping the life and work of Juan Latino, author of an epic on the battle of Lepanto, Austrias Carmen, and a slave turned writer and schoolmaster in 16th-century Granada.
Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman by Harriet Pollack (University of Georgia Press; 284 pages; $49.95). Explores the writer’s treatment of women’s bodies in both her fiction and photography; topics include recurrent juxtapositions of the sheltered girl and “other-class” woman, Welty’s photographs of black women, and hear repeated and sometimes comic rape plots.
From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print by Allison E. Fagan (Rutgers University Press; 184 pages; $90 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Examines the material history and social lives and struggle of “border literature,” including issues of editing, revision, glossaries, translation, publishing, and blurbing.
Indebted: Capitalism and Religion in the Writings of S.Y. Agnon by Yonatan Sagiv (Hebrew Union College Press/University of Pittsburgh Press; 216 pages; $27.95). Applies economic theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and other approaches in a study of a central figure in modern Hebrew literature.
The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity by Eva Mroczek (Oxford University Press; 269 pages; $99). Focuses on Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees in a study of how texts were viewed in early Jewish culture without presupposing the Bible or books.
Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose by Sylvia Huot (University of Notre Dame Press; 348 pages; $40). Draws on elements of postcolonial theory in a study of giants figure in constructions of race, class, gender, and subjectivity in Lancelot, Tristan, Perceforest, Des Grant Geants, Le Conte de papegau, and Guiron le Courtois.
Shakespeare, Court Dramatist by Richard Dutton (Oxford University Press; 321 pages; $55). Argues that many if not most of Shakespeare’s plays were revised for performance at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I and that the form and length familiar to us reflects the adaptations for those settings; focuses on Henry VI Part II and III, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians edited by John Colarusso and Tamirlan Salbiev, translated by Walter May (Princeton University Press; 442 pages; $39.50). Translation of tales of the Narts, a mythical nomadic people whose saga is preserved as a living tradition among Ossetians in southern Russia.
Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human by Jean-Michel Rabate (Fordham University Press; 264 pages; $95 hardcover, $32 paperback). Topics include the Irish writer’s decision to write in French, his sense of metaphysical comedy, and his use of the animal to subvert the human.
Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction by Ken Frieden (Syracuse University Press; 389 pages; $65 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Identifies a key period in the emergence of modern Hebrew literature after 1780 with Hebrew writers’ translations of travel narratives from European languages.
Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror by Louis Betty (Penn State University Press; 168 pages; $64.95). Focuses on the controversial French writer’s complex relationship with religion.
MATHEMATICS
Martingales in Banach Spaces by Gilles Pisier (Cambridge University Press; 580 pages; $79.99). Topics include Banach space valued martingales and Radon-Nikodym property.
MUSIC
Spiders of the Market: Ghanaian Trickster Performance in a Web of Neoliberalism by David Afriye Donkor (Indiana University Press; 240 pages; $80 hardcover, $30 paperback). Documents how the government of Ghanian President J.J. Rawlings co-opted performance traditions linked to the trickster-spider figure Ananse in efforts to influence public opinion.
PHILOSOPHY
Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece by Sean Alexander Gurd (Fordham University Press; 200 pages; $55). Discusses the song and other auditory art of the ancient Greeks as an early European avant-garde; covers the four centuries leading up to the death of Euripides, in 406 BC.
Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (University of Minnesota Press; 257 pages; $94.50 hardcover, $27 paperback). A study of the French philosopher’s writings on the 1979 revolution and the mark that event made on his thought.
Nietzsche’s Great Politics by Hugh Drochon (Princeton University Press; 200 pages; $45). Examines the German philosopher’s politics in the context of the policies and political order of the Bismarckian era.
Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 by Frederick C. Beiser (Oxford University Press; 301 pages; $74). Discusses Schopenhauer and the philosophical controversy over pessimism after his thought became posthumously fashionable in the 1860s; focuses on defenders Philipp Mainlander, Eduard von Hartmann and Julius Bahnsen---and critics Eugen Duhring and the neo-Kantians.
What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? by Vinciane Despret, translated by Brett Buchanan (University of Minnesota Press; 249 pages; $105 hardcover, $30 paperback). Translation of a 2012 French abecedarium that offers a philosophical perspective on issues of animal agency, wants, and cognition.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama: Faith and the Civic Life of Democracy by Giorgi Areshidze (University Press of Kansas; 224 pages; $29.95). Explores the role of religion in American civic life from the perspectives of Lockean and Rawlsian models, with discussion of Barak Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexis de Toqueville, and Jurgen Habermas.
The Governors’ Lobbyists: Federal-State Relations Offices and Governors Associations in Washington by Jennifer M. Jensen (University of Michigan Press; 288 pages; $60). Combines archival, quantitative, and interview data in a study of the promotion of governors’ interests by states’ individual lobbying organizations in Washington as well as wider collective groups; topics include why only about half of all states have such organizations.
North Korea and the World: Human Rights, Arms Control, and Strategies for Negotiation by Walter C. Clemens Jr. (University Press of Kentucky; 443 pages; $39.95). Evaluates competing policy options with North Korea and argues for engagement and negotiation with the authoritarian regime.
The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy by Jeffrey Edward Green (Oxford University Press; 252 pages; $39.95). Discusses liberal democracy as best understood as plebeian democracy, including the second-class status of ordinary, non-elite, citizens.
Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy by Henry Wai-chung Yeung (Cornell University Press; 360 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). A study of economic development and state-company relations that focuses on South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.
PUBLIC POLICY
Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Infrastructures by Emery Roe and Paul R. Schulman (Stanford University Press; 241 pages; $65). Examines risks of interconnected operations and failures in electricity, telecommunications, ports, water supply, levees, marine navigation, roads, and railroads infrastructure in the San Francisco Bay-Sacramento River-San Joaquin River Delta.
RELIGION
Becoming Religious in a Secular Age by Mark Elmore (University of California Press; 305 pages; $70 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Combines ethnographic and archival perspectives in a study of how members of the community of Himachal Pradesh in the western Himalayas recognized their own beliefs and practices as religious.
Christianity, Development, and Modernity in Africa by Paul Gifford (Oxford University Press; 187 pages; $30). Compares Pentecostalist and Roman Catholic worldviews as they affect people’s views of modernity and development in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Jesuit Emblem in the European Context by Peter M. Daly and G. Richard Dimler (Saint Joseph’s University Press; 468 pages; $70). Examines the content, material culture, and uses of the emblematic books produced by Jesuits in Europe and sets their work in wider European context.
The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion by Julie Byrne (Columbia University Press; 416 pages; $29.95). A study of a movement of independent Catholics that practice the seven sacraments and devotion to saints, but are not formally linked to the pope in Rome; focuses on the Church of Antioch, one of the first such groups to ordain women.
Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks by Kerry Mitchell (New York University Press; 247 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Examines how spirituality figures in public land management, with a focus on crowd containment, viewpoint construction, and other activities designed to preserve the spiritual experience of visiting national parks.
RHETORIC
The Politics of the Superficial: Visual Rhetoric and the Protocol of Display by Brett Ommen (University of Alabama Press; 176 pages; $44.95). Focuses on graphic design in a study of the force and consequences of a ubiquitous visual culture.
ROBOTICS
The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson (Oxford University Press; 426 pages; $34.95). Offers an economist’s speculations on the economic and other impacts of a future in which whole-brain emulations are used to make artificial robot minds.
SOCIOLOGY
Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea by Jaeeun Kim (Stanford University Press; 340 pages; $65). Examines issues of the status of ethnic Koreans in China and Japan during the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods.
Contested: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food by Michaela DeSoucey (Princeton University Press; 270 pages; $29.95). Draws on field and archival work in both France and the United States in a study of debates over the production and consumption of a traditional French delicacy---the fattened livers of ducks and geese that have been force fed through tubes.
The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules: Latinos and African Americans in South Los Angeles by Cid Gregory Martinez (New York University Press; 256 pages; $89 hardcover, $28 paperback). Discusses Neighborhood Councils, the Roman Catholic Church, and street gangs in a study of how violence is kept to a manageable level by the African-American and Latino residents of South L.A.
On Pauperism in Present and Past by Jan Breman (Oxford University Press; 289 pages; $50). Draws on fieldwork in south Gujarat in a study that discusses extreme poverty in contemporary India and the ultra-poor in Victorian England and a rebirth of social Darwinism.