"Black Farm Boys"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Black Farm Boys: The Untold Story of the New Farmers of America by Bobby J. Smith II.

About the book, from the publisher:

Founded in 1935, the New Farmers of America (NFA) was the first national organization for Black farm boys studying vocational agriculture at segregated public high schools across the South—and as far north as New Jersey. Sociologist and award-winning author Bobby J. Smith II charts new terrain in Black history by uncovering the hidden story of the organization, which grew to an annual membership of more than 55,000 members and empowered Black boys to challenge racial exclusion in agriculture by becoming farmers and pursuing careers in agriculture. But by 1965, the NFA had vanished—unraveled by a hostile takeover by the predominantly white Future Farmers of America (FFA). The NFA, and the generation of Black agricultural leaders it helped shape, were largely erased from the historical record.

In vivid prose, Smith confronts the haunting paradox of the NFA: an organization that transformed rural Black life yet remains almost entirely absent from American memory. Reconstructing the NFA’s rise, influence, and disappearance, Black Farm Boys reshapes the history of the Black agricultural experience and restores a vital chapter in the story of education, rural life, and racial justice in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tempting Fate"

New from Princeton University Press: Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life by Duncan Pritchard.

About the book, from the publisher:

A leading philosopher explains how risk-taking can help us live authentic and flourishing lives

We take risks every day—perhaps not the extreme, dangling-off-the-side-of-a-mountain kind of risks, but risks nonetheless, in decisions about careers, marriage, children, moving house, and other matters. Tempting fate is simply what we have to do from time to time in life. But how we should go about tempting fate in a reasonable way? In this illuminating book, philosopher Duncan Pritchard explains why risk-taking, even extreme risk-taking, can sometimes be both reasonable and admirable, and how it can play a crucial role in living an authentic life.

Using Alex Honnold’s famous free solo climb of El Capitan as a paradigm example of admirable risk-taking, Pritchard offers a completely new theory of risk, one that explains it in terms of fragility rather than probability. He shows how fragility can explain why skill and preparation are crucial to sensible risk-taking, even when the activity is unavoidably high risk. Fragility also makes clear that taking risks means riding one’s luck and why both risk and luck are vital to living an authentic and meaningful existence. Pritchard shows that his fragility theory of risk has practical implications for making sense of risk in law, arts, sports, and other domains. Tempting fate, in other words, is not merely thrill-seeking but essential for human flourishing.

Visit Duncan Pritchard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sceptic Isle"

New from Oxford University Press: The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War by Steven Casey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Based on a massive array of overlooked primary sources, The Sceptic Isle presents a fast-paced narrative of the British attempt to sell World War II to its citizens. It weaves together government public relations, media reporting, political manoeuvering, and the public's response to reinterpret some of the most famous moments of British history, from Chamberlain and appeasement to Churchill's great speeches, from the Battle of Britain to the military campaigns in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, from food rationing to the Beveridge Report.

Visit Colin Farrelly's website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Living Redemption"

New from NYU Press: Living Redemption: Latinas Building Evangelical Futures Under Carceral Control by Melissa Guzman-Garcia.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines how Latino Evangelical churches promise salvation while reinforcing logics of surveillance and criminalization systems that oppress their congregants

Living Redemption examines how faith-based institutions in Latinx communities enhance the state’s carceral power even as they attempt to empower and redeem their adherents. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research across two Latinx congregations in Fresno and the San Francisco Bay Area, Melissa Guzman-Garcia explores how Mexican, Central American, and Chicana women build their own spiritual services and support systems while recruiting other criminalized people into their church. While these services are meant to offer support, Guzman-Garcia uncovers how they also end up enacting their own spiritual versions of carceral control.

These faith-based organizations tend to socialize people to sanctify state power, either by promoting the idea that collective protests and social movements that challenge capitalism or capitalist exploitation would be unsuccessful, or by putting forward beliefs that the solution to social problems is a matter of “saving your soul,” not working for structural change. Thus, these evangelical settings both perpetuate and disrupt the dominant the racial and gendered social order, sustaining and strengthening state power.

Guzman-Garcia’s analysis urges us to assess the gendered logics and spiritual ideologies that fuel contemporary forms of American carceral governance and consider who exactly benefits from this spiritual and political labor.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Queer Resistance"

New from the University of California Press: Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China by Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Queer Resistance examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Susanne Y.P. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories.

Visit Susanne Choi's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bodies at Their Limits"

New from Oxford University Press: Bodies at Their Limits: Rethinking Political Violence through Hunger Strikes by Kerry McInerney.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hunger strikes have profoundly shaped the political landscape of the twentieth century, and in the early twenty-first century show no sign of abating. The prevalence of these costly protests provokes questions about the character of contemporary political violence, power, and resistance. This monograph asks how gender and race shape how hunger strikes are performed, enacted, mediated, and remembered. It argues that female hunger strikers push their bodies to their very limits to challenge their liminal positioning at the very limits of the body politic. Without romanticising these violent, desperate acts of last resort, I argue that female hunger strikers use self-directed political violence to produce new gendered identities that contest the gendered and racialised subjectivities that are violently imposed by the state. I focus on two examples of women’s collective hunger strikes in the British context: the hunger strikes undertaken by the British suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) between 1909 and 1914, and the 2018 hunger strike by detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). Through an analysis of these two cases, I argue that women’s hunger strikes are complexly situated within gendered norms, narratives, and discourses that affect the ability of female hunger strikers’ bodies to ‘speak’ of political injustice. Despite this, female hunger strikers still use their bodies to make political claims on the body politic, enact radical political projects that gesture towards a collective vision of freedom, and even invoke new and different ways of being human.

Visit Kerry McInerney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive"

New from Cornell University Press: Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive by Edward Goldring.

About the book, from the publisher:

Purges delves into one of the key tactics that autocrats deploy to maintain power: the removal of individuals from within the regime.

From Kim Jong Un's execution of his uncle to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's removal of over a hundred Turkish generals, purges bear significant consequences for the survival and endurance of autocrats. Yet much remains unknown about why dictators use purges and whether they achieve their intended effects.

Drawing on an original global dataset on civilian and military elite purges in dictatorships in addition to case studies spanning North and South Korea as well as Turkey, Edward Goldring examines the logic behind purges and their consequences. He shows that dictators purge to consolidate power, punish disloyalty, and scapegoat elites to alleviate popular threats. But even as purges help dictators consolidate power early in their tenure, purges actually weaken their position when they have been in power for a long time, prompting pushback. In the face of an increasing global shift toward authoritarian norms, Purges offers critical insight into how autocrats maintain―and sometimes lose―power.

Visit Edward Goldring's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Until the Last Ton"

New from Princeton University Press: Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis by Matthew Shutzer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A panoramic historical account of India’s ascent in the global fossil economy

India is today one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, driving new investments in the global fossil economy and achieving record-breaking levels of coal extraction at home. As the planet burns from climate change, this entrenchment of fossil fuel dependence has left many searching for how we arrived at this point. Until the Last Ton provides a sweeping new appraisal of this planetary dilemma, uncovering how India became part of an emerging fossil capitalism that continues to shape the present.

Matthew Shutzer recasts the origins of the fossil economy by showing how European industrialization unleashed a global search for fossil energy in the colonial world. Placing India at the center of this history, Shutzer traces how the highland forests of eastern India became early frontiers for global coal investment, transforming this landscape into the largest site of imperial overseas coal production across a century of colonial rule. At the heart of these shifts was a legal framework of subterranean property, which redefined local relations of land ownership and social power, while tying the growth of India’s fossil economy to the progressive ecological destruction of the forest frontier.

Following these dynamics into the postcolonial period, Until the Last Ton reveals the enduring impacts of colonial property on independent India’s energy history, shedding new light on postwar struggles for energy development and resource sovereignty, as well as the violent conflicts over mining dispossession that have haunted India’s economic ascent in an age of climate crisis.

Visit Matthew Shutzer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy"

New from Oxford University Press: Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy: Freedom to Choose from Those Worth Choosing by John J. Park.

About the book, from the publisher:

The alarming and recent rise of populist leaders in democracies over the past twenty years―seen in countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and the United States―has been accompanied by substantial increases in political corruption. A central question in political philosophy concerns the most morally legitimate form of government. The prevailing view in Western philosophy identifies democracy as that system. Yet a more legitimate model for Western societies emerges when the issue is examined through the lens of East Asian philosophy.

In this book, John J. Park introduces a Confucian-inspired hybrid system for the legislative branch, which fuses meritocracy with democracy. It's called prometheocracy, which is based on Prometheus, the mythological figure who gave fire and knowledge to the people. In this model, all legislators remain democratically elected through one person, one vote, but candidates must first meet specific merit-based requirements―such as passing a criminal background check, demonstrating relevant professional experience, and holding certain educational qualifications. Just as professions like medicine, law, engineering, and academia require specialized credentials, Park posits that the most consequential public offices should demand clear standards of competence. Drawing on philosophical reasoning and empirical research in the social sciences, Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy challenges the dominant democratic paradigm in the West and argues that prometheocracy possesses greater moral legitimacy.

Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy demonstrates that this system holds advantages over other major alternatives, including existing Confucian hybrid proposals and epistocracy. While many philosophers who support Confucian hybrid systems restrict their applicability to select Asian contexts, this work develops a model grounded explicitly in Western values and designed for Western societies. This contribution marks a significant development in comparative philosophy, presenting the book as a bridge between contemporary Confucian political theory and Western political thought.

Ultimately, Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy argues that prometheocracy is the most morally legitimate form of legislative governance for the West.

Visit John J. Park's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Divine Season"

New from Princeton University Press: A Divine Season: Christian Nationalist Activism in Zambia by Naomi Haynes.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Zambian Pentecostal activists worked to transform their country into a self-styled “Christian nation”

In 2015, Zambia began an ambitious program to “actualize” the country’s constitutional declaration that it was a “Christian nation.” For Pentecostal Christian nationalist activists, this was a “divine season,” an opportunity to change their country by submitting it to God’s control. In this book, Naomi Haynes examines these efforts at national transformation, offering a careful ethnographic exploration of Christian nationalist theology, ritual, and policy initiatives. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, Haynes describes how activists promoted Zambia’s Christian identity, whether by writing books and newspaper articles, posting on social media, building new monuments, praying for the nation, or lobbying for constitutional changes.

By tracing Zambian Christian nationalism’s internal contradictions and tensions, Haynes charts its ultimate failure, which she ascribes in part to institutional opposition from the civil service and Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations. She also points to what she terms its fatal theological flaw, going beyond the usual secular analysis in anthropology to engage with theological critiques of Christian nationalism. The example of Zambia offers the most fully realized expression of Christian nationalism outside the West, demonstrating what this movement can look like when given free political rein. With this book, Haynes provides an instructive account of an increasingly influential global movement.

The Page 99 Test: Moving by the Spirit.

--Marshal Zeringue