"The Last House on the Block"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit by Sharon Cornelissen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Gentrification is not inevitable, reveals Sharon Cornelissen, in this surprising, close look at the Detroit neighborhood of Brightmoor and the harsh reality of depopulation and urban decline.

In the minds of many, Detroit is undergoing a renaissance thanks to gentrifying urbanites who’ve been drawn to the city with the promise of cheap housing and thriving culture. But what happens when gentrification attempts to come to one of the most depopulated neighborhoods in the country—a place where every other property in the neighborhood was a vacant lot and every third house stood empty? To find out, Sharon Cornelissen moved to the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit for three years and became the owner of a $7,000 house.

The Last House on the Block takes us to Brightmoor to meet Cornelissen’s fellow residents. She introduces us to the long-time residents of the neighborhood who reveal their struggles to keep a home while keeping violence, tall grass, and yes—gentrification—at bay. We also meet the eclectic white newcomers of Brightmoor and learn about their real estate bargains, urban farms, and how they became the unlikely defenders of urban desolation. Where oldtimers take pride in neatly mowed lawns and hope for a return to residential density, newcomers love the open space and aim to buy more empty lots to raise chickens and goats. It is a story of gentrification, but not at all in the usual sense: it is a case of failed gentrification. We often think about gentrification as an unstoppable force—once the first white newcomers with yoga mats enter an often brown or Black community, the coffee shops and restaurants follow. But in Brightmoor, the dreams of white newcomers met the harsh reality of decade-long decline. Nearly a decade after Cornelissen’s fieldwork began, Brightmoor is even emptier than it was when she started.

Today, depopulation remains more common than gentrification in poor communities. Cornelissen’s story offers deep insights into what it is like to live in a declining neighborhood, and through the example of Brightmoor, Cornelissen reveals why depopulation continues and helps us imagine a more inclusive and equitable city turnaround.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Policing Pain"

New from NYU Press: Policing Pain: The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care by Kevin Revier.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the medicalization of addiction during the U.S. opioid crisis has driven mass incarceration and mass policing in rural and deindustrialized communities

The nationwide opioid public health emergency has led many advocates and public officials to call for drug policy reforms that reject traditional “law-and-order” approaches. In Policing Pain, Kevin Revier approaches the opioid epidemic from an abolitionist framework that seeks to treat people who use opioids not as so-called criminals, but as people in need of health care. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Upstate New York, a region highly impacted by overdoses, job loss, and deindustrialization, Revier shows that incorporation of treatment within the criminal justice system has ultimately expanded the scope of the drug war, turning individuals into "treatable carceral subjects" who are both medicalized and criminalized.

He argues that the incorporation of medical rhetoric and treatment within the criminal legal system maintains a carceral approach in rural and low-income areas facing high rates of opioid overdose and economic disinvestment, further entrenching the carceral state in the lives of people who use drugs. Ultimately, Policing Pain explores alternative strategies to promote harm reduction from an abolitionist ethic of care that advocates for people who use drugs while seeking to minimize criminal justice involvement in drug-related issues.

Visit Kevin Revier's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Intimate Borders"

New from Oxford University Press: Intimate Borders: Feminist Migration Ethics by Amy Reed-Sandoval.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Intimate Borders, Amy Reed-Sandoval offers a decolonial, feminist theory of borders that enables us to perceive hidden gender injustices at borders and then take concrete steps to stop them. Grounded in feminist privacy ethics, Chicana feminism, Indigenous philosophies of borders and space, and original ethnographic research conducted by Reed-Sandoval at two abortion clinics in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this book challenges political philosophy's public/private divide by urging us to understand borders as intimate. Specifically, it argues that borders are sites of embodied and identity-based harms that often tamper with the boundaries of our "selves" in ways that impact our personal autonomy.

Reed-Sandoval also critically investigates unhelpful dichotomies. Intimate Borders calls into question popular, all-or-nothing proposals for both "open" and "closed borders," arguing instead that a feminist approach to borders requires careful exploration of how different borders (including non-Western borders) may both cause and protect against intimate harms of vulnerable groups. This book unpacks some of the most urgent and under-theorized ethical challenges presented at borders today, including border-crossings for abortion care, the migration of children, pregnancy and miscarriage at borders, family separations at borders, and the complicated relationship between borders and Indigenous identities. Intimate Borders is a theoretical framework for feminist migration scholars, policy makers, activists, and anyone else who wishes to raise awareness of gender injustice at the world's borders.

Visit Amy Reed-Sandoval's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Assassins and Templars"

New from Yale University Press: Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood by Steve Tibble.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of the medieval world’s most extraordinary organisations, the Assassins and the Templars

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.

In this engaging account, Steve Tibble traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

The Page 99 Test: Crusader Criminals.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Smuggling Law"

New from Stanford University Press: Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands by Fırat Bozçali.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods, and the province supports the financial, technical, and labor capacities that sustain these smuggling economies. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics. This book explores anti-smuggling law enforcement and criminal prosecutions to reveal a key site—the criminal court—where borders and claims of sovereignty are simultaneously remade and disrupted. Taking readers from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, Fırat Bozçalı examines how Kurdish smugglers, with the help of their lawyers, legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Kurdish smugglers and lawyers adopt and rework procedures, rules, and reasonings in ways that interrupt the courts' capacity to coopt, discipline, and oppress. Bozçalı theorizes this evasive engagement with the legal system as a strategy of techno-legal politics among marginalized and persecuted groups, one that extends beyond the Kurdish case. Smuggling Law holds profound relevance in today's world, where ever-expanding regimes of surveillance, oppression, and dispossession unfold in the broader contexts of the global war on terror and data-driven capitalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Killing the Dead"

New from Princeton University Press: Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World by John Blair.

About the book, from the publisher:

A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the living

Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.

In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.

Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Menace of Prosperity"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 by Daniel Wortel-London.

About the book, from the publisher:

Upends entrenched thinking about cities, demonstrating how urban economies are defined—or constrained—by the fiscal imagination of policymakers, activists, and residents.

Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable.

In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land-value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just.

Overturning stale axioms about economic policy, The Menace of Prosperity shows that not all growth is productive for cities. Wortel-London’s ambitious history demonstrates the range of options we’ve abandoned and hints at the economic frameworks we could still realize—and the more democratic cities that might result.

Visit Daniel Wortel-London's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Civil Blood"

New from Cornell University Press: Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy by Amanda G. Madden.

About the book, from the publisher:

Civil Blood is a study of the practice of vendetta among the civic elites in sixteenth-century Italy and illustrates the complex and integral role that vendetta violence played in civic life and state formation on the winding path to state cent

ralization. At many temporal, geographic, and political points in early modern Italy, vendetta appears to have not only disrupted but also constituted the processes by which the modern state emerged.

Amanda G. Madden examines vendetta as both central to politics and as an engine of change and illustrates the degree to which key phenomena of the period―state centralization, growing bureaucracies, institutional reforms, and the process of state formation―were interpenetrated by, and not simply opposed to, ongoing factional violence among civic elites.

Madden further illuminates in Civil Blood how elites utilized violent enmities to maintain a grip on political control and negotiated with the duke concerning political power and civic prerogatives. As a result, ruling elites not only defined their own place in governance but also shaped the function and definition of government.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era"

New from Columbia University Press: Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era by Brandon Rottinghaus.

About the book, from the publisher:

Once, it was thought, a scandal was the kiss of death for a political career. Today, however, surviving scandal seems to be the norm. Donald Trump has weathered―and even perhaps benefited from―controversies that would have been unimaginable for virtually any other candidate. Prominent figures in both parties have won elections and remained in office despite credible allegations of wrongdoing. Do scandals still matter? When and why do voters punish politicians or give them a free pass?

Charting the changes from Watergate to the present, this book is a rigorous and compelling investigation of the politics of scandals. Bringing together wide-ranging survey data, innovative experiment design, and historical analysis, Brandon Rottinghaus demonstrates how political polarization, affective partisanship, fading trust in media, and the spread of misinformation have diminished the resonance of controversies. Although scandals still fell many politicians, there is a clear trend over time for fewer voters to be swayed by them. In a polarized world, scandals take only a modest toll on politicians’ approval ratings, survival in office, ambitions, and legacies. In many cases, partisans accept―or even embrace―misbehavior from members of their own party and revel in scandals affecting the opposing party. Challenging conventional wisdom with extensive data, this book illuminates the declining significance of scandals and the consequences for democratic accountability.

Visit Brandon Rottinghaus's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Empire of Print"

New from Oxford University Press: Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media by Sonia Hazard.

About the book, from the publisher:

Empire of Print offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War.

It wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered―it was the sophisticated media infrastructure that evangelicals developed for their message to reach readers, coast to coast. Media infrastructure refers to the material assemblages that work below the surface of media content, including the format of publications, the avenues of their movement, and the circumstances surrounding their reading. As a non-coercive yet effective form of power, infrastructure shaped how, when, and why readers engaged with evangelical texts.

While showing how the ATS became a formidable force in American society during the nineteenth century, Empire of Print opens larger questions about the entanglements among people, things, texts, and institutions, the dynamics of power in a media-saturated world, and the salience of race, class, and region in the distribution and reception of media.

--Marshal Zeringue