Wednesday, November 30, 2016

"Endangered Economies"

New from Columbia University Press: Endangered Economies: How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity by Geoffrey Heal.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the decades since Geoffrey Heal began his field-defining work in environmental economics, one central question has animated his research: "Can we save our environment and grow our economy?" This issue has become only more urgent in recent years with the threat of climate change, the accelerating loss of ecosystems, and the rapid industrialization of the developing world. Reflecting on a lifetime of experience not only as a leading voice in the field, but as a green entrepreneur, activist, and advisor to governments and global organizations, Heal clearly and passionately demonstrates that the only way to achieve long-term economic growth is to protect our environment.

Writing both to those conversant in economics and to those encountering these ideas for the first time, Heal begins with familiar concepts, like the tragedy of the commons and unregulated pollution, to demonstrate the underlying tensions that have compromised our planet, damaging and in many cases devastating our natural world. Such destruction has dire consequences not only for us and the environment but also for businesses, which often vastly underestimate their reliance on unpriced natural benefits like pollination, the water cycle, marine and forest ecosystems, and more. After painting a stark and unsettling picture of our current quandary, Heal outlines simple solutions that have already proven effective in conserving nature and boosting economic growth. In order to ensure a prosperous future for humanity, we must understand how environment and economy interact and how they can work in harmony—lest we permanently harm both.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Audible States"

New from Oxford University Press: Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania by Nicholas Tochka.

About the book, from the publisher:
During the Cold War, state-sponsored musical performances were central to the diplomatic agendas of the United States and the Soviet Union. But states on the periphery of the conflict also used state-funded performances to articulate their positions in the polarized global network. In Albania in particular, the postwar government invested heavily in public performances at home, effectively creating a new genre of popular music: the wildly popular light music.

In Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania, author Nicholas Tochka traces an aural history of Albania's government through a close examination of the development and reception of light music at Radio-Television Albania's Festival of Song. Drawing on a wide range of archival resources and over forty interviews with composers, lyricists, singers, and bureaucrats, Tochka describes how popular music became integral to governmental projects to improve society--and a major concern for both state-socialist and postsocialist regimes between 1945 and the present. Tochka's narrative begins in the immediate postwar period, arguing that state officials saw light music as a means to cultivate a modern population under socialism. As the Cold War ended, postsocialist officials turned again to light music, now hoping that these musicians could help shape Albania into a capitalist, "European" state. Interweaving archival research with ethnographic interviews, Audible States demonstrates that modern political orders do not simply render social life visible, but also audible.

Incorporating insights from ethnomusicology, governmentality studies, and post-socialist studies, Audible States presents an original perspective on music and government that reveals the fluid, pervasive, but ultimately limited nature of state power in the modern world. A remarkably researched and engagingly written study, Audible States is a foundational text in the growing literature on popular music and culture in post-socialist Europe and will be of great interest for readers interested in popular music, sound studies, and the politics of the Cold War.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

"A Time of Scandal"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: A Time of Scandal: Charles R. Forbes, Warren G. Harding, and the Making of the Veterans Bureau by Rosemary Stevens.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the early 1920s, with the nation still recovering from World War I, President Warren G. Harding founded a huge new organization to treat disabled veterans: the US Veterans Bureau, now known as the Department of Veterans Affairs. He appointed his friend, decorated veteran Colonel Charles R. Forbes, as founding director. Forbes lasted in the position for only eighteen months before stepping down under a cloud of criticism and suspicion. In 1926—after being convicted of conspiracy to defraud the federal government by rigging government contracts—he was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary. Although he was known in his day as a drunken womanizer, and as a corrupt, betraying toady of a weak, blind-sided president, the question persists: was Forbes a criminal or a scapegoat?

Historian Rosemary Stevens tells Forbes’s story anew, drawing on previously untapped records to reveal his role in America’s initial and ongoing commitment to veterans. She explores how Forbes’s rise and fall in Washington illuminates President Harding’s efforts to bring business efficiency to government. She also examines the Veterans Bureau scandal in the context of class, professionalism, ethics, and etiquette in a rapidly changing world. Most significantly, Stevens proposes a fascinating revisionist view of both Forbes and Harding—and raises questions about not only the validity but the source of their respective reputations. They did not defraud the government of billions of dollars, Stevens convincingly documents, and do not deserve the reputation they have carried for a hundred years.

Packed with vibrant characters—conniving friends, FBI agents, and rival politicians split by sectional and ideological interests as well as gamblers, revelers, and wronged wives— A Time of Scandal will appeal to anyone interested in political gossip, presidential politics, the "Ohio Gang," and the 1920s.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 28, 2016

"Food Power"

New from Oxford University Press: Food Power: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System by Bryan L. McDonald.

About the book, from the publisher:
There is a widespread assumption that the American food system after World War II was transformed-toward an increasingly industrialized production of crops, more processed foods, and diets higher in fat, sugar, and calories-as part of a unified system. In this book, Bryan McDonald brings together the history of food, agriculture, and foreign policy to explore how food was deployed in the first decades of the Cold War to promote American national security and national interests, a concept referred to as food power.

In the postwar years, Americans struggled to understand how an unprecedented abundance of food could be used to best advance U.S. goals and values. Was food a weapon, a commodity to be valued and exchanged through markets, or a substance to be provided to those in need? McDonald traces different visions of food power and shows how food formed an essential part of America's postwar modernization strategy and its vision of what it meant to be a stable, secure, and technologically advanced nation. Policymakers and experts helped build a new food system based around American agricultural surpluses that stabilized prices and food availability. This system averted a global-scale food crisis for almost three decades. The end of this food system in the early 1970s ushered in a much more precarious period in global food relations. By the late twentieth century, food politics had become a battleground in which the interests of security and foreign policy experts, farmers, businesses, and politicians contended with a growing social movement whose adherents worried about the role of food in contributing to conflict and inequality.

Food Power argues that the ways postwar American policymakers and experts politically linked people and places around the world through food illuminates both America's role in the world during the mid-twentieth century and sheds light on contemporary food problems.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers"

New from Yale University Press: Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers: The Rise of the Arab Gulf by Rory Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:
A lively analysis of the Arab Gulf states’ stunning rise to global power over the last half-century and of the daunting challenges they confront today

Once just sleepy desert sheikdoms, the Arab Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait now exert unprecedented influence on international affairs—the result of their almost unimaginable riches in oil and gas. In this book, Rory Miller, an expert in Gulf politics and international affairs, provides an accessible account of the achievements of these countries since the 1973 global oil crisis. He also investigates how the shrewd Arab Gulf rulers who have overcome crisis after crisis meet the external and internal challenges of the onrushing future.

The Arab Gulf region has become an East–West hub for travel, tourism, sport, culture, trade, and finance. But can the autocratic regimes maintain stability at home and influence abroad as they deal with the demands of social and democratic reform? Miller considers an array of factors—Islamism, terrorism, the Arab Spring, volatile oil prices, global power dynamics, and others—to assess the future possibilities.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 27, 2016

"Frozen Empires"

New from Oxford University Press: Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula by Adrian Howkins.

About the book, from the publisher:
Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southwardd towards the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart," the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent. Since the start of the twentieth century, Argentina, Britain, and Chile have made overlapping sovereignty claims, while the United States and Russia have reserved rights to the entire continent. The environment has been at the heart of these disputes over sovereignty, placing the Antarctic Peninsula at a fascinating intersection between diplomatic history and environmental history.

In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which imperial powers have used the environment to support their political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region. British officials argued that the production of useful scientific knowledge about the Antarctic helped to justify British ownership. Argentina and Chile made the case that the Antarctic Peninsula belonged to them as a result of geographical proximity, geological continuity, and a general sense of connection. Despite various challenges and claims, however, there has never been a genuine decolonization of the Antarctic Peninsula region. Instead, imperial assertions that respective entities were conducting science "for the good of humanity" were reformulated through the terms of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, and Antarctica's "frozen empires" remain in place to this day. In arguing for imperial continuity in the region, Howkins counters the official historical narrative of Antarctica, which rests on a dichotomy between "bad" sovereignty claims and "good" scientific research. Frozen Empires instead suggests that science, politics, and the environment have been inextricably connected throughout the history of the Antarctic Peninsula region--and remain so--and shows how political prestige in the guise of conducting "science for the good of humanity" continues to influence international climate negotiations.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The First Victory"

New from Yale University Press: The First Victory: The Second World War and the East Africa Campaign by Andrew Stewart.

About the book, from the publisher:
A riveting new account of the long-overlooked achievement of British-led forces who, against all odds, scored the first major Allied victory of the Second World War

Surprisingly neglected in accounts of Allied wartime triumphs, in 1941 British and Commonwealth forces completed a stunning and important victory in East Africa against an overwhelmingly superior Italian opponent. A hastily formed British-led force, never larger than 70,000 strong, advanced along two fronts to defeat nearly 300,000 Italian and colonial troops. This compelling book draws on an array of previously unseen documents to provide both a detailed campaign history and a fresh appreciation of the first significant Allied success of the war.

Andrew Stewart investigates such topics as Britain’s African wartime strategy; how the fighting forces were assembled (most from British colonies, none from the U.S.); General Archibald Wavell’s command abilities and his difficult relationship with Winston Churchill; the resolute Italian defense at Keren, one of the most bitterly fought battles of the entire war; the legacy of the campaign in East Africa; and much more.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 26, 2016

"Dividends of Development"

New from Oxford University Press: Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of U.S. Capitalism, 1865-1922 by Mary A. O'Sullivan.

About the book, from the publisher:
The unprecedented importance of finance in our societies, as well as its central role in provoking economic crises, has generated an enormous interest in understanding the historical origins and evolution of modern financial systems. Today the U.S. economy is seen as an archetype of a capitalist system in which securities markets play a central role. Moreover, these markets have had a high profile in some of the most dramatic moments in U.S. history, often in the context of crises.

Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of U.S. Capitalism, 1865-1922, explains how U.S. securities markets became central to the institutional fabric of U.S. capitalism. After the Civil War, these markets had a narrowly circumscribed relationship to the country's real economy, being largely dominated by railroad securities. Moreover, their role in the U.S. financial system was of limited significance given the relatively modest resources that financial institutions committed to investment in, and lending on, corporate securities. That situation was to undergo fundamental change from the Civil War through the end of World War 1 but the development of U.S. securities markets did not occur as a result of a smooth, or even, linear process.

Instead, the book shows that the transformation of U.S. securities markets occurred through a process that was volatile and time-consuming, unscripted by powerful actors, and driven, above all else, by the dramatic but unstable character of the nation's economic development. These claims about the trajectory, the operation, and the underlying dynamics of the development of U.S. securities markets are brought together in a novel synthesis that portrays the historical evolution of securities markets in the United States as the "dividends" of the country's distinctive trajectory of economic development.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital"

New from Princeton University Press: Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital by William Clare Roberts.

About the book, from the publisher:
Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers’ emancipation to the secret depths of the modern “social Hell.” In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism.

Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 25, 2016

"Out in the Rural"

New from Oxford University Press: Out in the Rural: A Mississippi Health Center and Its War on Poverty by Thomas J. Ward Jr.

About the book, from the publisher:
Out in the Rural is the unlikely story of the Tufts-Delta Health Center, which in 1966 opened in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to become the first rural community health center in the United States. Its goal was simple: to provide health care and outreach to the region's thousands of rural poor, most of them black sharecroppers who had lived without any medical resources for generations.

In Out in the Rural, historian Thomas J. Ward explores the health center's story alongside the remarkable life of its founder, Dr. H. Jack Geiger. A former teenage runaway, through a serendipitous turn of events he was befriended and taken in by the actor and Harlem Renaissance icon Canada Lee. Lee would later loan Geiger money for college, and after stints as a journalist and Merchant Marine, Geiger attended medical school and became a physician.

Geiger's personal history brings a profound human element to what was accomplished deep in the Mississippi Delta. In addition to providing medical care, the staff of the Tufts-Delta Health Center worked upstream to address the fundamental determinants of health-factors such as education, poverty, nutrition, and the environment-and ask the question, "What does it take to stay healthy?"

Equal parts social history and personal history, Out in the Rural is a story of both community health and of a stranger's kindness and determination to bring health care to areas out of reach.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Immigrants and Electoral Politics"

New from Cornell University Press: Immigrants and Electoral Politics: Nonprofit Organizing in a Time of Demographic Change by Heath Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Immigrants and Electoral Politics, Heath Brown shows why nonprofit electoral participation has emerged in relationship to new threats to immigrants, on one hand, and immigrant integration into U.S. society during a time of demographic change, on the other. Immigrants across the United States tend to register and vote at low rates, thereby limiting the political power of many of their communities. In an attempt to boost electoral participation through mobilization, some nonprofits adopt multifaceted political strategies including registering new voters, holding candidate forums, and phone banking to increase immigrant voter turnout. Other nonprofits opt to barely participate at all in electoral politics, preferring to advance the immigrant community by providing exclusively social services.

Brown interviewed dozens of nonprofit leaders and surveyed hundreds of organizations. To capture the breadth of the immigrant experience, Brown selected organizations operating in traditional centers of immigration as well as new gateways for immigrants across the South: Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and, North Carolina. The stories that emerge from his research include incredible successes in mobilizing immigrant communities, including organizations that registered sixty thousand new immigrant voters in New York. They also reveal efforts to suppress nonprofit voter mobilization in Florida and describe the organizational response to hate crimes directed at immigrants in Illinois.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 24, 2016

"Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers"

New from Oxford University Press: Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers by Daniel L. Dreisbach.

About the book, from the publisher:
No book was more accessible or familiar to the American founders than the Bible, and no book was more frequently alluded to or quoted from in the political discourse of the age. How and for what purposes did the founding generation use the Bible? How did the Bible influence their political culture?

Shedding new light on some of the most familiar rhetoric of the founding era, Daniel Dreisbach analyzes the founders' diverse use of scripture, ranging from the literary to the theological. He shows that they looked to the Bible for insights on human nature, civic virtue, political authority, and the rights and duties of citizens, as well as for political and legal models to emulate. They quoted scripture to authorize civil resistance, to invoke divine blessings for righteous nations, and to provide the language of liberty that would be appropriated by patriotic Americans.

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers broaches the perennial question of whether the American founding was, to some extent, informed by religious-specifically Christian-ideas. In the sense that the founding generation were members of a biblically literate society that placed the Bible at the center of culture and discourse, the answer to that question is clearly "yes." Ignoring the Bible's influence on the founders, Dreisbach warns, produces a distorted image of the American political experiment, and of the concept of self-government on which America is built.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Rebelocracy"

New from Cambridge University Press: Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War by Ana Arjona.

About the book, from the publisher:
Conventional wisdom portrays war zones as chaotic and anarchic. In reality, however, they are often orderly. This work introduces a new phenomenon in the study of civil war: wartime social order. It investigates theoretically and empirically the emergence and functioning of social order in conflict zones. By theorizing the interaction between combatants and civilians and how they impact wartime institutions, the study delves into rebel behavior, civilian agency and their impact on the conduct of war. Based on years of fieldwork in Colombia, the theory is tested with qualitative and quantitative evidence on communities, armed groups, and individuals in conflict zones. The study shows how armed groups strive to rule civilians, and how the latter influence the terms of that rule. The theory and empirical results illuminate our understanding of civil war, institutions, local governance, non-violent resistance and the emergence of political order.
Visit Ana Arjona's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

"Child Labour in India"

New from Oxford University Press: Child Labour in India: Globalization, Power, and the Politics of International Children's Rights by Gurchathen S. Sanghera.

About the book, from the publisher:
India has the largest number of child labourers in the world, and has been the subject of intense media and political campaigns in the North aimed at addressing the abuse of children's rights. This book explores children's rights as a site of power and reveals how the rights discourse has been used by international actors, national elites, and local NGOs in the child labour debate in India.

While discussing the children's rights in the contemporary world, the author analyses human rights and power along with insights from postcolonial theorists. He provides empirical accounts of how three Indian NGOs-Bonded Labour Liberation Front, Butterflies, and South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude-are using the discourse of children's rights to challenge child labour practices.

Combining global and local perspectives to arrive at a comprehensive picture, the book locates the struggle for child rights on two fronts: critiquing neo-liberal globalization and challenging rights violations in India.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

"After Rape"

New from Cambridge University Press: After Rape: Violence, Justice, and Social Harmony in Uganda by Holly Porter.

About the book, from the publisher:
Following the ICC intervention in 2005, northern Uganda has been at the heart of international justice debates. The emergent controversy, however, missed crucial aspects of Acholi realities: that the primary moral imperative in the wake of wrongdoing was not punishment but, instead, the restoration of social harmony. Drawing upon abundant fieldwork and in-depth interviews with almost 200 women, Holly Porter examines issues surrounding wrongdoing and justice, and sexual violence and rape, among the Acholi people in northern Uganda. This intricate exploration offers evidence of a more complicated and nuanced explanation of rape and its aftermath, suggesting a re-imagining of the meanings of post-atrocity justice, whilst acknowledging the role of sex, power and politics in all sexual experiences between coercion and consent. With its wide investigation of social life in northern Uganda, this provocative study offers vital analysis for those interested in sexual and gender violence, post-conflict reconstruction and human rights.
Holly Porter is a Research Fellow at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and lead researcher for the Justice and Security Research Programme in northern Uganda, where she has lived and worked for over ten years. Dr Porter's research has focused on gender, sexualities and sexual violence, war and violence, and local notions of healing and justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 21, 2016

"Clearing the Air"

New from ILR Press: Clearing the Air: The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace by Gregory Wood.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Clearing the Air, Gregory Wood examines smoking's importance to the social and cultural history of working people in the twentieth-century United States. Now that most workplaces in the United States are smoke-free, it may be difficult to imagine the influence that nicotine addiction once had on the politics of worker resistance, workplace management, occupational health, vice, moral reform, grassroots activism, and the labor movement. The experiences, social relations, demands, and disputes that accompanied smoking in the workplace in turn shaped the histories of antismoking politics and tobacco control.

The steady expansion of cigarette smoking among men, women, and children during the first half of the twentieth century brought working people into sustained conflict with managers’ demands for diligent attention to labor processes and work rules. Addiction to nicotine led smokers to resist and challenge policies that coldly stood between them and the cigarettes they craved. Wood argues that workers’ varying abilities to smoke on the job stemmed from the success or failure of sustained opposition to employer policies that restricted or banned smoking. During World War II, workers in defense industries, for example, struck against workplace smoking bans. By the 1970s, opponents of smoking in workplaces began to organize, and changing medical knowledge and dwindling union power contributed further to the downfall of workplace smoking. The demise of the ability to smoke on the job over the past four decades serves as an important indicator of how the power of workers’ influence in labor-management relations has dwindled over the same period.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 20, 2016

"The Silk Workers of Medieval Paris"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience by Sharon Farmer.

About the book, from the publisher:
For more than one hundred years, from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth, Paris was the only western European town north of the Mediterranean basin to produce luxury silk cloth. What was the nature of the Parisian silk industry? How did it get there? And what do the answers to these questions tell us?
According to Sharon Farmer, the key to the manufacture of silk lies not just with the availability and importation of raw materials but with the importation of labor as well. Farmer demonstrates the essential role that skilled Mediterranean immigrants played in the formation of Paris's population and in its emergence as a major center of luxury production. She highlights the unique opportunities that silk production offered to women and the rise of women entrepreneurs in Paris to the very pinnacles of their profession. The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris illuminates aspects of intercultural and interreligious interactions that took place in silk workshops and in the homes and businesses of Jewish and Italian pawnbrokers.

Drawing on the evidence of tax assessments, aristocratic account books, and guild statutes, Farmer explores the economic and technological contributions that Mediterranean immigrants made to Parisian society, adding new perspectives to our understanding of medieval French history, luxury trade, and gendered work.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Gulag after Stalin"

New from Cornell University Press: The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev's Soviet Union, 1953-1964 by Jeffrey S. Hardy.

About the book, from the publisher:
In The Gulag after Stalin, Jeffrey S. Hardy reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a "progressive" system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective.

The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Reeducation proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s, they joined with a coalition of party officials, criminologists, procurators, newspaper reporters, and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan “The camp is not a resort” and succeeded in reimposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system, the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s, and the ensuing counterreform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 19, 2016

"Surge of Piety"

New from Yale University Press: Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life by Christopher Lane.

About the book, from the publisher:
The dramatic untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States during the 1950s

Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, Presbyterian minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking. Selling millions of copies worldwide, the book offered a gospel of self-assurance in an age of mass anxiety.

Despite Peale’s success and his ties to powerful conservatives such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy, the full story of his movement has never been told. Christopher Lane shows how the famed minister’s brand of Christian psychology inflamed the nation’s religious revival by promoting the concept that belief in God was essential to the health and harmony of all Americans. We learn in vivid detail how Peale and his powerful supporters orchestrated major changes in a nation newly defined as living “under God.” This blurring of the lines between religion and medicine would reshape religion as we know it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Visit Christopher Lane's website.

Author Interviews: Christopher Lane (2008).

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Doubt.

Writers Read: Christopher Lane (March 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

"North Korea's Hidden Revolution"

New from Yale University Press: North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society by Jieun Baek.

About the book, from the publisher:
The story of North Korea's information underground and how it inspires people to seek better lives beyond their country’s borders

One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government’s sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea’s information underground—the network of citizens who take extraordinary risks by circulating illicit content such as foreign films, television shows, soap operas, books, and encyclopedias. By fostering an awareness of life outside North Korea and enhancing cultural knowledge, the materials these citizens disseminate are affecting the social and political consciousness of a people, as well as their everyday lives.
Visit Jieun Baek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 18, 2016

"The Paradox of Preservation"

New from the University of California Press: The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore by Laura Alice Watt.

About the book, from the publisher:
Point Reyes National Seashore has a long history as a working landscape, with dairy and beef ranching, fishing, and oyster farming; yet, since 1962 it has also been managed as a National Seashore. The Paradox of Preservation chronicles how national ideals about what a park “ought to be” have developed over time and what happens when these ideals are implemented by the National Park Service (NPS) in its efforts to preserve places that are also lived-in landscapes. Using the conflict surrounding the closure of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, Laura Alice Watt examines how NPS management policies and processes for land use and protection do not always reflect the needs and values of local residents. Instead, the resulting landscapes produced by the NPS represent a series of compromises between use and protection—and between the area’s historic pastoral character and a newer vision of wilderness. A fascinating and deeply researched book, The Paradox of Preservation will appeal to those studying environmental history, conservation, public lands, and cultural landscape management, and to those looking to learn more about the history of this dynamic California coastal region.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 17, 2016

"No Solution"

New from Manchester University Press: No Solution: The Labour government and the Northern Ireland conflict, 1974-79 by S.C. Aveyard.

About the book, from the publisher:
Utilising a wide range of archival correspondence and diaries, this monograph reconstructs the 1974-79 Labour government's policies in Northern Ireland. It covers the collapse of power-sharing in May 1974, the secret dialogue with the Provisional IRA during the 1975 ceasefire, the acquiescence of Labour ministers in continuing indefinite direct rule from Westminster, efforts to mitigate conflict through industrial investment, a major shift in security policy emphasizing the police over the army, the adaptation of republicans to the threat of these new measures and their own adoption of a 'Long War' strategy. It sheds light on the challenges faced by British ministers, civil servants, soldiers and policemen and the reasons why the conflict lasted so long. It will be a key text for researchers and students of both British and Northern Irish politics.
S.C. Aveyard is Research Fellow at the Centre for War Studies, University College Dublin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

"The Prison School"

New from the University of California Press: The Prison School: Educational Inequality and School Discipline in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Lizbet Simmons.

About the book, from the publisher:
Public schools across the nation have turned to the criminal justice system as a gold standard of discipline. As public schools and offices of justice have become collaborators in punishment, rates of African American suspension and expulsion have soared, dropout rates have accelerated, and prison populations have exploded. Nowhere, perhaps, has the War on Crime been more influential in broadening racialized academic and socioeconomic disparity than in New Orleans, Louisiana, where in 2002 the criminal sheriff opened his own public school at the Orleans Parish Prison. “The Prison School,” as locals called it, enrolled low-income African American boys who had been removed from regular public schools because of nonviolent disciplinary offenses, such as tardiness and insubordination. By examining this school in the local and national context, Lizbet Simmons shows how young black males are in the liminal state of losing educational affiliation while being caught in the net of correctional control. In The Prison School, she asks how schools and prisons became so intertwined. What does this mean for students, communities, and a democratic society? And how do we unravel the ties that bind the racialized realities of school failure and mass incarceration?
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

"Toussaint Louverture"

New from Basic Books: Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life by Philippe Girard.

About the book, from the publisher:
The definitive biography of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, leader of the only successful slave revolt in world history

Toussaint Louverture's life was one of hardship, triumph, and contradiction. Born into bondage in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), the richest colony in the Western Hemisphere, he witnessed first-hand the torture of the enslaved population. Yet he managed to secure his freedom and establish himself as a small-scale planter. He even purchased slaves of his own.

In Toussaint Louverture, Philippe Girard reveals the dramatic story of how Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman to revolutionary hero. In 1791, the unassuming Louverture masterminded the only successful slave revolt in history. By 1801, he was general and governor of Saint-Domingue, and an international statesman who forged treaties with Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—empires that feared the effect his example would have on their slave regimes. Louveture's ascendency was short-lived, however. In 1802, he was exiled to France, dying soon after as one of the most famous men in the world, variously feared and celebrated as the "Black Napoleon."

As Girard shows, in life Louverture was not an idealist, but an ambitious pragmatist. He strove not only for abolition and independence, but to build Saint-Domingue's economic might and elevate his own social standing. He helped free Saint-Domingue's slaves yet immediately restricted their rights in the interests of protecting the island's sugar production. He warded off French invasions but embraced the cultural model of the French gentility.

In death, Louverture quickly passed into legend, his memory inspiring abolitionist, black nationalist, and anti-colonialist movements well into the 20th century. Deeply researched and bracingly original, Toussaint Louverture is the definitive biography of one of the most influential people of his era, or any other.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 14, 2016

"The Master Plan"

New from Yale University Press: The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory by Brian H. Fishman.

About the book, from the publisher:
An incisive narrative history of the Islamic State, from the 2005 master plan to reestablish the Caliphate to its quest for Final Victory in 2020

Given how quickly its operations have achieved global impact, it may seem that the Islamic State materialized suddenly. In fact, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, Sayf al-Adl, devised a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world by 2020 that included reestablishing the Caliphate in Syria between 2013 and 2016. Despite a massive schism between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, al-Adl’s plan has proved remarkably prescient. In summer 2014, ISIS declared itself the Caliphate after capturing Mosul, Iraq—part of stage five in al-Adl’s plan. Drawing on large troves of recently declassified documents captured from the Islamic State and its predecessors, counterterrorism expert Brian Fishman tells the story of this organization’s complex and largely hidden past—and what the master plan suggests about its future. Only by understanding the Islamic State’s full history—and the strategy that drove it—can we understand the contradictions that may ultimately tear it apart.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 13, 2016

"Televised Redemption"

New from NYU Press: Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment by Carolyn Moxley Rouse, John L. Jackson, Jr., and Marla F. Frederick.

About the book, from the publisher:
The institutional structures of white supremacy—slavery, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and mass incarceration—require a commonsense belief that black people lack the moral and intellectual capacities of white people. It is through this lens of belief that racial exclusions have been justified and reproduced in the United States. Televised Redemption argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing the race by unabashedly claiming that blacks are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites—if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans’ rights to citizenship.

If racism is a form of perception, then religious media has not only altered how others perceive blacks, but has also altered how blacks perceive themselves. Televised Redemption argues that black religious media has provided black Americans with new conceptual and practical tools for how to be in the world, and changed how black people are made intelligible and recognizable as moral citizens. In order to make these claims to black racial equality, this media has encouraged dispositional changes in adherents that were at times empowering and at other times repressive. From Christian televangelism to Muslim periodicals to Hebrew Israelite radio, Televised Redemption explores the complicated but critical redemptive history of African American religious media.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 12, 2016

"Æthelred"

New from Yale University Press: Æthelred: The Unready by Levi Roach.

About the book, from the publisher:
An imaginative reassessment of Æthelred "the Unready," one of medieval England’s most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure

The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred "the Unready" (978–1016) has long been considered to be inscrutable, irrational, and poorly advised. Infamous for his domestic and international failures, Æthelred was unable to fend off successive Viking raids, leading to the notorious St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, during which Danes in England were slaughtered on his orders. Though Æthelred’s posthumous standing is dominated by his unsuccessful military leadership, his seemingly blind trust in disloyal associates, and his harsh treatment of political opponents, Roach suggests that Æthelred has been wrongly maligned. Drawing on extensive research, Roach argues that Æthelred was driven by pious concerns about sin, society, and the anticipated apocalypse. His strategies, in this light, were to honor God and find redemption. Chronologically charting Æthelred’s life, Roach presents a more accessible character than previously available, illuminating his place in England and Europe at the turn of the first millennium.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 11, 2016

"Making Moderate Islam"

New from Stanford University Press: Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy by Rosemary R. Corbett.

About the book, from the publisher:
Drawing on a decade of research into the community that proposed the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," this book refutes the idea that current demands for Muslim moderation have primarily arisen in response to the events of 9/11, or to the violence often depicted in the media as unique to Muslims. Instead, it looks at a century of pressures on religious minorities to conform to dominant American frameworks for race, gender, and political economy. These include the encouraging of community groups to provide social services to the dispossessed in compensation for the government's lack of welfare provisions in an aggressively capitalist environment. Calls for Muslim moderation in particular are also colored by racist and orientalist stereotypes about the inherent pacifism of Sufis with respect to other groups. The first investigation of the assumptions behind moderate Islam in our country, Making Moderate Islam is also the first to look closely at the history, lives, and ambitions of the those involved in Manhattan's contested project for an Islamic community center.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 10, 2016

"Brothers at Arms"

New from Knopf: Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It by Larrie D. Ferreiro.

About the book, from the publisher:
The remarkable untold story of how the American Revolution’s success depended on substantial military assistance provided by France and Spain, and places the Revolution in the context of the global strategic interests of those nations in their fight against England.

In this groundbreaking, revisionist history, Larrie Ferreiro shows that at the time the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord the colonists had little chance, if any, of militarily defeating the British. The nascent American nation had no navy, little in the way of artillery, and a militia bereft even of gunpowder. In his detailed accounts Ferreiro shows that without the extensive military and financial support of the French and Spanish, the American cause would never have succeeded. France and Spain provided close to the equivalent of $30 billion and 90 percent of all guns used by the Americans, and they sent soldiers and sailors by the thousands to fight and die alongside the Americans, as well as around the world.

Ferreiro adds to the historical records the names of French and Spanish diplomats, merchants, soldiers, and sailors whose contribution is at last given recognition. Instead of viewing the American Revolution in isolation, Brothers at Arms reveals the birth of the American nation as the centerpiece of an international coalition fighting against a common enemy.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

"The Némirovsky Question"

New from Yale University Press: The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France by Susan Rubin Suleiman.

About the book, from the publisher:
A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, condemned her as a “self-hating Jew” whose earlier works were rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Informed by personal interviews with Némirovsky’s descendants and others, as well as by extensive archival research, this wide-ranging intellectual biography situates Némirovsky in the literary and political climate of interwar France and recounts, for the first time, the postwar lives of her daughters. Némirovsky's Jewish works, Suleiman argues, should be read as explorations of the conflicted identities that shaped the lives of secular Jews in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Other California"

New from the University of California Press: The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands by Verónica Castillo-Muñoz.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Other California is the story of working-class communities and how they constituted the racially and ethnically diverse landscape of Baja California. Packed with new and transformative stories, the book examines the interplay of land reform and migratory labor on the peninsula from 1850 to 1954, as governments, foreign investors, and local communities shaped a vibrant and dynamic borderland alongside the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalia. Migration and intermarriage between Mexican women and men from Asia, Europe, and the United States transformed Baja California into a multicultural society. Mixed-race families extended across national borders, forging new local communities, labor relations, and border politics.
Verónica Castillo-Muñoz is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

"City of Refuge"

New from Princeton University Press: City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning by Michael J. Lewis.

About the book, from the publisher:
The vision of Utopia obsessed the nineteenth-century mind, shaping art, literature, and especially town planning. In City of Refuge, Michael Lewis takes readers across centuries and continents to show how Utopian town planning produced a distinctive type of settlement characterized by its square plan, collective ownership of properties, and communal dormitories. Some of these settlements were sanctuaries from religious persecution, like those of the German Rappites, French Huguenots, and American Shakers, while others were sanctuaries from the Industrial Revolution, like those imagined by Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and other Utopian visionaries.

Because of their differences in ideology and theology, these settlements have traditionally been viewed separately, but Lewis shows how they are part of a continuous intellectual tradition that stretches from the early Protestant Reformation into modern times. Through close readings of architectural plans and archival documents, many previously unpublished, he shows the network of connections between these seemingly disparate Utopian settlements—including even such well-known town plans as those of New Haven and Philadelphia.

The most remarkable aspect of the city of refuge is the inventive way it fused its eclectic sources, ranging from the encampments of the ancient Israelites as described in the Bible to the detailed social program of Thomas More’s Utopia to modern thought about education, science, and technology. Delving into the historical evolution and antecedents of Utopian towns and cities, City of Refuge alters notions of what a Utopian community can and should be.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 7, 2016

"Executing Freedom"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States by Daniel LaChance.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn’t trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death?

That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do—and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it’s the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 6, 2016

"23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement"

New from Yale University Press: 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement by Keramet Reiter.

About the book, from the publisher:
How America’s prisons turned a “brutal and inhumane” practice into standard procedure

Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators’ discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one “supermax,” California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. This book describes how Pelican Bay was created without legislative oversight, in fearful response to 1970s radicals; how easily prisoners slip into solitary; and the mental havoc and social costs of years and decades in isolation. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book provides essential background to a subject now drawing national attention.
Keramet Reiter, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and at the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, has been an associate at Human Rights Watch and testified about the impacts of solitary confinement before state and federal legislators. She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 5, 2016

"The Twilight of Cutting"

New from the University of California Press: The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs by Saida Hodzić.

About the book, from the publisher:
The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations engaging in new campaigns to end the practice of female genital cutting across Africa. These campaigns have in turn spurred new institutions, discourses, and political projects, bringing about unexpected social transformations, both intended and unintended. Consequently, cutting is waning across the continent. At the same time, these endings are misrecognized and disavowed by public and scholarly discourses across the political spectrum.

What does it mean to say that while cutting is ending, the Western discourse surrounding it is on the rise? And what kind of a feminist anthropology is needed in such a moment? The Twilight of Cutting examines these and other questions from the vantage point of Ghanaian feminist and reproductive health NGOs that have organized campaigns against cutting for over thirty years. The book looks at these NGOs not as solutions but as sites of “problematization.” The purpose of understanding these Ghanaian campaigns, their transnational and regional encounters, and the forms of governmentality they produce is not to charge them with providing answers to the question, how do we end cutting? Instead, it is to account for their work, their historicity, the life worlds and subjectivities they engender, and the modes of reflection, imminent critique, and opposition they set in motion.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 4, 2016

"Confessions of the Shtetl"

New from Stanford University Press: Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 by Ellie R. Schainker.

About the book, from the publisher:
Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism.

Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 3, 2016

"The Fifth Beginning"

New from the University of California Press: The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future by Robert L. Kelly.

About the book, from the publisher:
“I have seen yesterday. I know tomorrow.” This inscription in Tutankhamun’s tomb summarizes The Fifth Beginning. Here, archaeologist Robert L. Kelly explains how the study of our cultural past can predict the future of humanity.

In an eminently readable style, Kelly identifies four key pivot points in the six-million-year history of human development: the emergence of technology, culture, agriculture, and the state. In each example, the author examines the long-term processes that resulted in a definitive, no-turning-back change for the organization of society. Kelly then looks ahead, giving us evidence for what he calls a fifth beginning, one that started about AD 1500. Some might call it “globalization,” but the author places it in its larger context: a five-thousand-year arms race, capitalism’s global reach, and the cultural effects of a worldwide communication network.

Kelly predicts that the emergent phenomena of this fifth beginning will include the end of war as a viable way to resolve disputes, the end of capitalism as we know it, the widespread shift toward world citizenship, and the rise of forms of cooperation that will end the near-sacred status of nation-states. It’s the end of life as we have known it. However, the author is cautiously optimistic: he dwells not on the coming chaos, but on humanity’s great potential.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

"Circuits of Faith"

New from Stanford University Press: Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission by Michael Farquhar.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Islamic University of Medina was established by the Saudi state in 1961 to provide religious instruction primarily to foreign students. Students would come to Medina for religious education and were then expected to act as missionaries, promoting an understanding of Islam in line with the core tenets of Wahhabism. By the early 2000s, more than 11,000 young men from across the globe had graduated from the Islamic University.

Circuits of Faith offers the first examination of the Islamic University and considers the efforts undertaken by Saudi actors and institutions to exert religious influence far beyond the kingdom's borders. Michael Farquhar draws on Arabic sources, including biographical materials, memoirs, syllabi, and back issues of the Islamic University journal, as well as interviews with former staff and students, to explore the institution's history and faculty, the content and style of instruction, and the trajectories and experiences of its students. Countering typical assumptions, Farquhar argues that the project undertaken through the Islamic University amounts to something more complex than just the one-way "export" of Wahhabism. Through transnational networks of students and faculty, this Saudi state-funded religious mission also relies upon, and has in turn been influenced by, far-reaching circulations of persons and ideas.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

"Waging Insurgent Warfare"

New from Oxford University Press: Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State by Seth G. Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:
Since the end of World War II, there have been 181 insurgencies around the world. In fact, most modern warfare occurs in the form of insurgencies, including in such high-profile countries as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. However, in spite of their prevalence, we still know relatively little about how insurgencies function. With more than three dozen violent insurgencies currently taking place today, a deeper understanding of insurgent groups is more important than ever.

In Waging Insurgent Warfare, Seth G. Jones offers new insights into the dynamics of insurgent groups. Jones weaves together examples from current events and recent history to identify the factors that contribute to the rise of an insurgency, the key components involved in conducting an insurgency -from selecting an organizational structure to securing aid from an outside source - and the elements that contribute to the end of insurgencies. Through examining the strategies, tactics, and campaigns that insurgents use, as well as how these factors relate to each other on the ground, Jones provides a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which insurgent groups operate. Empirically rich and historically informed, Waging Insurgent Warfare features data on over one hundred factors for every insurgency that has taken place between 1946 and 2015.

While the primary emphasis revolves around insurgency, the findings in this book also have important implications for waging counterinsurgent warfare. Bringing together the existing body of knowledge on insurgencies, Jones provides a practical, accessible resource to help understand insurgent warfare. The definitive resource on insurgency, Waging Insurgent Warfare will appeal to anyone with an interest in insurgency, counterinsurgency, or modern war.
--Marshal Zeringue