"Pierogi"

New from Columbia University Press: Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food by Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status?

Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United States. When Polish immigrants crossed the ocean, they brought with them their traditional cuisine, which came to signify enduring attachment to homeland, family, religion, and culture. In time, they as well as new generations and new immigrant waves gradually transformed Polish American culinary culture, reflecting food trends and changes in the United States, Poland, and the world.

Pierogi takes readers into the kitchens where Polish American families, friends, and community organizations carry on the custom of cooking and eating together. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann highlights small- and large-scale pierogi producers who adapted traditional dishes for the US market and food celebrities who mainstreamed them, and she traces the symbolic representation of pierogi in popular culture. She also shares personal stories, from her family’s resourcefulness in communist-era Poland facing near-constant food shortages to her experiences as an immigrant to the United States in the 1980s. Drawing on sources from historical and recent cookbooks to interviews with Polish American entrepreneurs and community members, this book offers new insights for anyone interested in East Central European and American foodways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Social Ladders"

New from Oxford University Press: Social Ladders: Urban Inequality and the Ideal of Social Mobility by Anthony Miro Born.

About the book, from the publisher:

Social Ladders offers a new understanding of a core ideal in political, public, and academic discourses on low-income neighbourhoods: that of promoting upward mobility. It explores the contradictions between the lofty promises of social mobility in marginalised areas, its ambivalent politics and its complex manifestations in people's lived experiences. The analysis put forward in this book invites readers to fundamentally question upward mobility as an effective strategy for enhancing social justice in marginalised neighbourhoods.

Drawing on international case studies as well as in-depth fieldwork in Germany, the book depicts the ideal of social mobility from multiple perspectives. Social Ladders, then, is not only an account of how the language of social mobility is used and abused as a way of ignoring the primary needs and problems of disadvantaged communities. It also argues that to understand its divisive nature and hidden costs, we need to hear from more than just the few who have 'made it' up the ladder to social and economic success. We must also include the voices of those commonly seen as having been 'left behind'.

Visit Anthony Miro Born's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fate in My Hands"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union by Yana Skorobogatov.

About the book, from the publisher:

A striking examination of the death penalty in the Soviet Union that documents in heart-rending detail how its citizens, hopeful for a new life post-Stalin, lost faith that their transgressions could be forgiven.

From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period―women and men of all ages and backgrounds―who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.

Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Counter-Terror"

New from Stanford University Press: The Politics of Counter-Terror: Islam and Security in the Postcolonial Muslim State by Nicholas Chan.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a fundamental paradox in counter-terrorism: while Muslim state elites insist that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, the way Muslim states deal with terrorism has everything to do with Islam. In countries like Morocco and Tunisia, terrorism is treated by governments as if it is a religious problem. Elsewhere, in Malaysia, Islamic actors are relied upon to conduct "deradicalization" programs, Islamic institutions are the key authors of counter-radicalization materials, and Islamic expertise is often considered interchangeable with counter-terror expertise. These findings draw attention to a security logic whereby Islam and Islamic interventions have become central to solving the problem of terrorism. In this theoretically innovative and empirically rich book, Nicholas Chan argues that Malaysia's "Islamized" counter-terrorism is an outcome filtered through a matrix of factors, including postcolonial elite status-seeking, modernist state-building, and the immediacies of governmental problem-solving. Chan fills a void in the Western-centric Global War on Terror literature that often fails to examine what happens when Muslim actors must wage a "war" not of their making but strongly tied to their identity, security, and status. This book's original findings will interest scholars and students of security, international relations, area studies, and Muslim politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This One Will Be Different"

New from Oxford University Press: This One Will Be Different: False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums by J.C. Bradbury.

About the book, from the publisher:

For more than a century, America's sports stadiums have evolved from modest, private ballparks into billion-dollar play-palaces for the rich-built increasingly on the backs of taxpayers. Government commitments to major-league venues are approaching $50 billion, and a looming wave of new construction threatens to double public outlays by the end of the next decade. Elected leaders justify the massive subsidies by arguing that stadiums are economic catalysts, despite overwhelming evidence that sports venues are unwise public investments.

Why does this keep happening? The refrain is always the same: This one will be different. The Atlanta Braves's Truist Park in Cobb County, Georgia is the latest example. Marketed as a game-changing mixed-use development that would create a year-round economic hub, the project has fallen far short of its boosters' lofty projections-just like all the venues that came before it.

In This One Will Be Different, sports economist J.C. Bradbury draws from decades of academic research and his up-close and personal experiences with the Cobb Braves stadium deal to elucidate why publicly funded venues never deliver on their promises. Moving beyond the standard explanations of monopoly leagues and special-interest lobbying, Bradbury reveals how pliable politicians-drawn to the prestige and perks of professional sports-buck the will of their constituents to approve increasingly generous taxpayer handouts to billionaire team owners.

Authoritative yet accessible, this book blends economic analysis, political insight, and vivid storytelling to examine why politicians continue to fall for the stadium grift and presents practical steps for reform. Bradbury argues that improved transparency, greater understanding, and giving voters a direct say at the ballot box have the potential to break the stadium subsidy cycle.

Visit J.C. Bradbury's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Silk Roads, Steppe Roads"

New from Princeton University Press: Silk Roads, Steppe Roads: History Unearthed from the Tombs of Medieval China by Jonathan Karam Skaff.

About the book, from the publisher:

An innovative study of medieval Chinese tombs that provides new insights into the history of Eurasian cultural contact and exchange

Silk Roads, Steppe Roads takes the reader on a journey to three sites in northwestern China and Mongolia to investigate medieval Chinese tombs containing evidence of Eastern Eurasian cultural contacts and exchanges. The construction, artifacts, and texts on paper and stone found at these tombs of the Sui (581–618) and early Tang (618–907) dynasties reveal glimpses of people, rituals, and objects that were in motion on the Silk and Steppe roads until being laid to rest over a millennium ago.

Jonathan Karam Skaff shows how the major transit hubs of the Silk and Steppe roads were particularly active sites of cultural contestation, experimentation, and mutual influence that had an impact on the historical development of China and Inner Asia. Challenging the idealized image of the Silk Road, he also examines travel permits and sales contracts that document the trade of enslaved people over the route.

Innovatively drawing on both textual and archaeological sources, Silk Roads, Steppe Roads shows how Eurasian peoples, despite believing their societies to be unique, spun overlapping and entangled webs of culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The End of Violence"

New from Cornell University Press: The End of Violence: France and the Single Struggle of Jacques de Bollardière by Hugh McDonnell.

About the book, from the publisher:

The End of Violence focuses on General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, who transformed from a rising star in the French army into a stalwart of nonviolence. In 1957, de Bollardière abruptly left his command in Algeria out of a refusal to countenance torture, publicly denouncing this paradigmatic war of European decolonization. In doing so, he jettisoned a glittering career forged in the Free French forces and Resistance maquis in the Second World War, and in France's colonial war in Indochina (1945–1954).

Hugh McDonnell offers an innovative contribution with previously unexplored source material that reveals worldviews informing early twentieth-century provincial aristocratic family life, novel insights into Second World War dynamics, ethical problems of the Free French movement, and the messy and lethal world of the Ardennes maquis. He provides a complex analysis of revolutionary warfare as the guiding ethos of the French army in its colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, the retrospective debates in the 1970s about torture in Algeria, and the wider, highly politicized public sphere in late Cold War France.

The End of Violence contextualizes de Bollardière's public interventions to examine the contentious French debates about Western military alliances and commitment to nuclear weaponry. Thus, de Bollardière's story, while unique, sheds light on vital wider historical questions, both in France and beyond: ideas and practices of violence and nonviolence, forms of socialization and possibilities for dissent in the military, and the achievements and limitations of the nonviolence movement.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking"

New from Oxford University Press: Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking by Thomas Grundmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is no doubt that experts play a prominent but controversial role in modern societies. While they constitute an invaluable source of knowledge and represent the gold standard of expertise, they may also exhibit arrogance, harbour blind spots, make mistakes, and contribute to larger institutions that are susceptible to serious abuse. In Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking, Thomas Grundmann develops a new theory of rationality that enables us to take the epistemic authority of experts seriously without exempting it from rational scrutiny by laypeople.

This volume argues that expert testimony holds epistemic authority over laypeople in a way that may preempt their critical reasoning from being usable in belief formation. This Preemption View of epistemic authority, shaped by philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Joseph Raz, Arnon Keren, and Linda Zagzebski, has yet to receive a thorough epistemological explanation, a compelling motivation, or a robust defence against challenges--all of which this book aims to provide. Preemptive reasons are explored through the framework of higher-order defeat, demonstrating how expert testimony generates these higher-order defeaters; further, the ten most common challenges to the Preemption View are addressed at length. The emerging account explains how laypeople's deference to experts is properly linked to their thinking for themselves and what remains of their epistemic autonomy.

The volume also offers a short history of epistemic authority and applies its theoretical insights to real-world phenomena such as the role of experts in politics, expert communication, and conspiracy thinking, and explores what the interplay between expert authority and critical oversight by the public means for democracy and the Enlightenment ideal of thinking for oneself.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Race on the Move"

New from NYU Press: Race on the Move: Public Transportation and Unequal Spaces by Gwendolyn Y. Purifoye.

About the book, from the publisher:

Whether on the bus, subway or train, public transit continues to be a separate and unequal experience for many Black Americans

In Race on the Move, Gwendolyn Purifoye argues that, whether on the subway, bus, or commuter rail, Black passengers have unequal experiences in terms of time, quality, speed of service, bodily movement, and leisurely enjoyment. As she shows, the capacity to move around a city is of major economic and social import: who has the ability to get to jobs, healthcare, grocery shopping, good schools, and quality and affordable housing are among the features of urban life that are structured by public transportation systems. The woefully inadequate and underperforming public transportation systems in many Black communities has led to unyielding disruptions of families, communities, and futures.

Drawing on interviews and nine years of ethnographic field research and media analysis in Chicago, Purifoye details how covert and overt racial hostilities are shaped through racial residential segregation. Purifoye contends that race and racism have been historically spatialized, materialized, and mobilized through public transportation systems. By showing how minority passengers and transit personnel are not equally protected by the transit agencies, how they experience raced social aggression, and the lack of dignity afforded riders on a daily basis, Purifoye documents the intensity of everyday racism as lived out on public transportation. Race on the Move also offers community organizers and policy makers more equitable and sustainable design options that could improve the lives of Black city dwellers.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Move Over, Mona Lisa"

New from Stanford University Press: Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look At, and Learn by Peggy Levitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

Calls to include a wider range of art, literature, and ideas in the world's classrooms, libraries, and museums are loud and clear. If so many agree that reforms are needed, why is change so slow? The answer is the inequality pipeline—the multiple obstacles that ideas and art need to overcome to circulate globally. Most strategies to disrupt the pipeline only increase inclusivity, without fundamentally challenging institutional hierarchies. In Move Over, Mona Lisa, Peggy Levitt reveals, through her conversations with creatives, thinkers, and professionals working in the cultural and academic worlds in Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea, that another approach to combatting global cultural and intellectual inequality is underway. Like-minded actors outside of traditional cultural centers are creating new nodes of power, and new pathways which connect them, that allow art, books, and ideas to, "travel from Buenos Aires to Mexico City without having to pass through Madrid." They are circumventing traditional powerbrokers and boldly reconfiguring the cultural and intellectual order. Levitt's journey begins where art and literature are first created; then takes us to where they get discovered, circulated, exhibited, and acquired; and concludes where they are researched, published about, and taught. Along the way, we meet visionary artists, out-of-the box writers, committed activists, and teachers striving to define what it means to train truly global citizens. We also discover how the culture and history of the cities they work from influences what they do. By linking these ideas together, Levitt persuasively demonstrates that what happens in the museum or the library is integrally connected to what happens in institutions of higher learning. With deeply researched, novel insights, ambition, and hope, Move Over, Mona Lisa offers nothing short of a new theory of global cultural and intellectual change.

Visit Peggy Levitt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue