"Living On"

New from Stanford University Press: Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey by Christopher T. Dole.

About the book, from the publisher:

Living On centers around the unprecedented mobilization of mental health professionals in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999―a disaster that left more than 20,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. Working amid unimaginable destruction and suffering, volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists would quickly improvise a makeshift response, offering thousands of survivors access to psychiatric care for the first time. Never before had there been such a collective expression of concern for people's psychological well-being.

Christopher Dole explores how this psychiatric response fashioned individual and collective lives far into the disaster's future. Based on research spanning two decades, from the earthquake to its twentieth anniversary, he considers how this convergence of geological activity and psychiatric expertise introduced novel psychiatric and psychological discourses into everyday lives of survivors, as it also animated new visions of self, society, and technopolitical promise. Living On not only offers insight into Turkey's transformations over the opening decades of the twenty-first century, but it also sheds light on a more general arrangement of disaster, governance, and medical expertise―one that increasingly characterizes our era of planetary ecological crisis.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Imperial Weather"

New from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya by Fiona Williamson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tropical weather in colonial Malaya presented an unknown atmosphere that manifested in extremes and uncertainties. From 1840 to 1940, the Indigenous landscapes of Singapore and Penang Islands were altered in ways that will never be reclaimed, the natural ecology of much of the peninsula forever changed by the British colonial government. With this book, Fiona Williamson revisits the fraught relationship between climate, weather science, and empire within the Straits Settlements in the long nineteenth century. Her book examines official and scientific responses to local weathers within the multicultural ports and peripheries of Singapore and George Town, Malaysia. The challenges of creating a livable environment in tropical conditions, she explains, frequently pushed the colonial government beyond its capacities, and solutions often came at the expense of nature, which, ironically, made managing the weather more problematic. Imperial Weather offers a deep exploration of various official attempts to understand and apply structure to the previously unknown or uncontrollable through knowledge gathering, institutionalization, and technological and infrastructural change. Drawing from the history of science—especially the history of meteorology—and environmental history, it explores the multiple interests, capacities, and capabilities at play, including the state of scientific knowledge and the economy, funding, and importantly, socioenvironmental needs and practicalities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Searching for Memory"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Searching for Memory: Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil by Jacob Blanc.

About the book, from the publisher:

This biography of Brazilian journalist and activist Aluízio Palmar (b. 1943) tells the remarkable story of a revolutionary who, after surviving torture as a political prisoner during his country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, would devote the second half of his life to investigating human rights abuses. With an eye to the intricacies of how Palmar has narrated his life across interviews, writings, and public engagement, Blanc offers an innovative window into how former activists view their place in history.

Searching for Memory is a singular contribution to literature on dictatorship, memory, and oral history. It does more than just recount Palmar’s life story. It is also a story about stories: how Palmar has told his own life history, why he has transformed his most traumatic memories into a public narrative, and the meanings of memory in the shadow of dictatorship.

Jacob Blanc is associate professor of history and international development studies at McGill University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia by Lina Pinto-García.

About the book, from the publisher:

Delves into the relationship between war and disease, focusing on Colombian armed conflict and the skin disease known as cutaneous leishmaniasis.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis, transmitted by female sandflies, produces skin lesions of varying size and shape. In Colombia, the insect vector of the disease is native to the same forested environments that have served as the main stage for one of the longest and most violent wars in Latin American history. As a result, the populations most affected by leishmaniasis in Colombia are members of the state army and nonstate armed groups.

Lina Pinto-García explores how leishmaniasis and the armed conflict are inextricably connected and mutually reinforcing. Maraña means “tangle” in Spanish but is also commonly used in Colombia to name the entangled greenery, braided lianas, and dense foliage that characterize the tropical forests where leishmaniasis transmission typically occurs. Pinto-García argues that leishmaniasis and the war are not merely linked but enmarañadas to each other through narratives, technologies, and practices produced by the state, medicine, biomedical research, and the armed conflict itself. All told, Maraña is a passionate study of how war has shaped the production of scientific knowledge about leishmaniasis and access to its treatments in Colombia.

Visit Lina Pinto-García's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Merchants of Knowledge"

New from Stanford University Press: Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe by Robert G. Morrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge—multilingual and transregional Jewish scholars—became an important bridge among the powers. With this book, Robert Morrison is the first to track the network of scholars who mediated exchanges in astronomy, astrology, Qabbalah, and philosophy. Their books, manuscripts, and acts of translation all held economic value, thus commercial and intellectual exchange commingled—knowledge became transactional as these merchants exchanged texts for more intellectual material and social capital. While parallels between medieval Islamic astronomy and the famous heliocentric arrangement posited by Copernicus are already known, Morrison reveals far deeper networks of intellectual exchange that extended well beyond theoretical astronomy and shows how religion, science, and philosophy, areas that will eventually develop into separate fields, were once interwoven. The Renaissance portrayed in Merchants of Knowledge is not, from the perspective of the Ottoman Muslim contacts of the Jewish merchants of knowledge, hegemonic. It's a Renaissance permeated by diversity, the cultural and political implications of which the West is only now waking up to.

--Marshal Zeringue

"On Truth in Politics"

New from Princeton University Press: On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It by Michael Patrick Lynch.

About the book, from the publisher:

The “philosopher of truth” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker) shows why truth is an essential democratic value—and how it can be strengthened

Do any of us really care about truth when it comes to politics? Should we? In a world of big lies, denialism, and conspiracy theories, democracies are experiencing two interlocked crises: a loss of confidence in democracy itself and the growing sense among many that politics is only about power—not truth. In this book, Michael Patrick Lynch argues that truth not only can—but must—matter in politics. He shows why truth is an essential democratic value—a value we need to sustain our democratic way of life—and how it can be strengthened.

Despite evidence that people are rarely motivated by truth when it comes to politics, On Truth in Politics argues that this isn’t inevitable. Accessibly written and rigorously argued, it draws on the American pragmatist tradition to develop an original theory of the nature and value of truth in the messy world of politics. Contrary to the belief of many, political beliefs can be true or false. But if democracy is to continue to be a space of reason and not just an arena of power, we must build a better infrastructure of knowledge, including stronger schools and media, and renew our commitment to science and history.

A vital and timely book, On Truth in Politics makes an original case for why democracy cannot survive without truth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Future of the Forest"

New from Cornell University Press: Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India by Anand P. Vaidya.

About the book, from the publisher:

Future of the Forest is the story of legal transformations of forests across India through collective action. Since the nineteenth century, Indian forest dwellers have been unable to enforce their claims to the land on which they live or the products of it that they use. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new national movement led to the passage of the Forest Rights Act, a landmark law that recognizes the tenure and use rights of India's millions of landless forest dwellers.

Anand P. Vaidya tracks the Forest Rights Act from the movements that pushed for its passage to its drafting—and the many revisions it underwent to satisfy coalitions of local peoples, conservationists, and a wide spectrum of political parties and movements—and finally to its impact on two neighboring villages in central India's forest belt. The forests have seen a long history of political authority enacted to the benefit of the powerful; Future of the Forest follows the work of activists and forest dwellers who turned to the law to shift this balance of power.

Anand P. Vaidya is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unjust Authority"

New from Oxford University Press: Unjust Authority by Robert Jubb.

About the book, from the publisher:

Unjust Authority addresses a systematic weakness in contemporary political theory and philosophy. Most contemporary political theorists and philosophers are unable to explain, vindicate, or justify the authority of the liberal democratic institutions that they live under. Instead, they endorse moralist accounts of the right to rule which require governments to meet impossibly high standards to avoid condemnation as illegitimate usurpers. This is true not just of the dominant Rawlsian mainstream, but of many of its radical critics, whose membership of more critical traditions leaves them sceptical of the value of existing institutions, even where they provide stable, decent rule.

The book instead provides a realist account of the authority of liberal democratic rule focused on impersonal rule and regulated democratic competition. It uses groundbreaking work in political economy to explain how, at least reasonably favourable conditions, these two mechanisms can be expected to combine to generate a growing surplus whose fruits will be made widely available. The prosperity and protection provided by liberal democratic rule to most of those it governs forms the basis of its authority, even though the hierarchies and exclusions that remain leave liberal democratic societies a long way from justice. Understanding liberal democratic authority in this way allows us to reassess challenges to it. While anger and even violence may then be acceptable and even appropriate, even peaceful attempts to remove the winners of democratic elections must be condemned.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Governing the Global Clinic"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Governing the Global Clinic: HIV and the Legal Transformation of Medicine by Carol A. Heimer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A deep examination of how new, legalistic norms affected the trajectory of global HIV care and altered the practice of medicine.

HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things. It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements—and law in particular—are also crucial.

Drawing on years of research in HIV clinics in the United States, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, Governing the Global Clinic examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems and how the effects of legalization vary across different national contexts. A key feature of legalism is universalistic language, but, in practice, rules are usually imported from richer countries (especially the United States) to poorer ones that have less adequate infrastructure and fewer resources with which to implement them. Challenging readers to reconsider the impulse to use law to organize and govern social life, Governing the Global Clinic poses difficult questions: When do rules solve problems, and when do they create new problems? When do rules become decoupled from ethics, and when do they lead to deeper moral commitments? When do rules reduce inequality? And when do they reflect, reproduce, and even amplify inequality?

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Age of the Borderlands"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850 by Andrew C. Isenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Age of the Borderlands, acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence.

Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government’s power: the land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state—ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.

The Page 99 Test: Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life.

My Book, The Movie: Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What to Expect When You're Dead"

New from Princeton University Press: What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland.

About the book, from the publisher:

An entertaining and enlightening book about how ancient peoples dealt with death—and what we might learn from them

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You’re Dead explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Robert Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.

What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?

Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.

The Page 99 Test: Wandering Greeks.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Provoking Religion"

New from Oxford University Press: Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars by Anthony M. Petro.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion, Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political.

Through captivating case studies of "subversive" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Sanctuary Cities"

New from Stanford University Press: Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship, and Urban Governance by Rachel Humphris.

About the book, from the publisher:

From its development in the 1980s, the sanctuary city movement—municipal protection of people with uncertain migration status from national immigration enforcement—has been a powerful and controversial side of progressive migration policy reform. While some migration activists view sanctuary city policy as the most important aspect of their work, others see it as actively impairing efforts in the fight for migrant rights. In Making Sanctuary Cities, Rachel Humphris provides a new understanding of how citizenship is negotiated and contested in sanctuary cities and what political potentials are opened (and closed) by this designation. Through long-term fieldwork across the sanctuary cities of San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto—three of the first municipalities to adopt this designation in their respective countries—Humphris investigates the complexity of sanctuary city policy. By capturing the wide-ranging meanings and practices of sanctuary in comparative context, Humphris uncovers how liberal citizenship is undermined by the very thing that makes it worth investing in: the promise of equality. Attending to the tensions inherent in sanctuary policy, this book opens vital questions about the ways governing systems can extinguish political ideals, and how communities choose to live and organize to fight for a better world.

Visit Rachel Humphris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Our Interest"

New from Columbia University Press: In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular by Alexander Kustov.

About the book, from the publisher:

The economic benefits of increased immigration are potentially massive, many experts say. The United States and other wealthy countries, however, have put up barriers against even the highest-skilled foreign workers. Such choices reflect public opinion, which typically favors stringent restrictions. Under what conditions do voters in affluent democracies back higher levels of immigration? How can advocates build support for pro-immigration policies?

In this data-driven, counterintuitive book, Alexander Kustov argues that showing people how immigration benefits them and their fellow citizens can lead to greater acceptance of more open policies. Looking beyond the stereotype of xenophobic voters, he identifies people’s genuine concern for their compatriots as a key driver of attitudes toward immigration. Using extensive cross-national surveys and experiments, this book demonstrates that people are willing to bear costs to benefit others―but they prioritize helping their fellow citizens. Voters tend to oppose freer immigration because they believe it threatens the well-being of their communities, but they can be persuaded to support it if they see the outcomes of immigration policies as in their interest. Through in-depth comparison of Canada and Sweden, Kustov shows why pragmatic approaches that focus on attracting skilled, needed workers are more effective than humanitarian appeals and policies. Offering a realistic path forward that meets voters where they are, In Our Interest provides a new, optimistic perspective on the political prospects of pro-immigration reforms.

Visit Alexander Kustov's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sand, Snow, and Stardust"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments by Gretchen Heefner.

About the book, from the publisher:

A vivid tour of US military efforts to understand, survive, and command harsh environments worldwide—and beyond.

Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US military had navigated during World War II, the United States defense establishment took a keen interest in these places, dispatching troops to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, to pave runways and build bridges, engineers had to understand and then conquer dunes, permafrost, and even the surface of the moon.

Sand, Snow, and Stardust explores how the US military generated a new understanding of these environments and attempted to master them, intending to cement America’s planetary power. Operating in these regions depended as much on scientific and cultural knowledge as on military expertise and technology. From General George S. Patton learning the hard way that the desert is not always hot, to the challenges of constructing a scientific research base under the Arctic ice, to the sheer implausibility of modeling Martian environments on Earth, Gretchen Heefner takes us on a wry expedition into the extremes and introduces us to the people who have shaped our insight into these extraordinary environments. Even decades after the first manned space flight, plans for human space exploration and extraplanetary colonization are still based on what we know about stark habitats on Earth.

An entertaining survey of the relationship between environmental history and military might, Sand, Snow, and Stardust also serves as a warning about the further transformation of the planet—whether through desertification, melting ice caps, or attempts to escape it entirely.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Life in the Viking Great Army"

New from Oxford University Press: Life in the Viking Great Army: Raiders, Traders, and Settlers by Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Viking Great Army that landed in East Anglia in late 865 had a lasting impact on English society, culture, politics, and economy.

The Viking Great Army landed in East Anglia in late 865 and over the following fifteen years it fought numerous battles in all four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, made and broke peace treaties, and deposed or killed at least three Anglo-Saxon kings, replacing them with its own appointees. It had a major impact on English society, initiating extensive transformations in Anglo-Saxon society, culture, economy, and political organisation. Previous Viking armies had raided only in the summer months, but the Great Army was a constant presence over this period, overwintering at various locations in northern and eastern England.

This presence changed the political, economic, and social landscape of England forever, but historical sources say very little about it. Now, new archaeological evidence has revealed the location of two of its camps, and at least fifty other places it visited. This book describes life in the tents and towns that the Viking Great Army inhabited: the treasure, tools, and weapons found in the camps and what they reveal about how the groups that made up the Army lived and the activities that took place, including the processing and trading of loot, the minting of coins, and the manufacture of jewellery. What emerges is evidence of a rich and diverse community whose impact on England can be traced to the present day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Welcome to Soylandia"

New from Cornell University Press: Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado by Andrew Ofstehage.

About the book, from the publisher:

Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Andrew Ofstehage calls "flexible farms" that have severed connections with the basic units of agriculture: land, plants, and labor. But while the transnational farmers have destroyed these relationships, they cannot simply do as they please. Regardless of their nationality, race, and capital, they must contend with pests, workers, the Brazilian state, and the land itself.

Welcome to Soylandia explores the frictions that define the new relationships of flexible farming―a paradigm that Ofstehage shows is ready to be reproduced elsewhere in Brazil and exported to the rest of the globe, including the United States. Through this compelling ethnography, Ofstehage takes readers on a tour of Soylandia and the new world of industrial agriculture, globalized markets, international development, and environmental change that it heralds.

Visit Andrew Ofstehage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ireland's Opportunity"

New from NYU Press: Ireland's Opportunity: Global Irish Nationalism and the South African War by Shane Lynn.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the South African War transformed nationalist politics across Ireland’s global diaspora

In 1899, the British Empire embarked on a deeply controversial war against two small Boer Republics in South Africa. To many Irish nationalists, the Boers were fellow victims of British mistreatment. Defeat for the Boers, they worried, would mean defeat for the principle that small, white nations like Ireland were entitled to govern themselves. Widespread outrage sparked a dramatic resurgence in Irish nationalism after a decade of disunity and decline.

The shape and strength of this revival varied throughout Ireland’s vast global diaspora. Ireland’s Opportunity traces the impact of “Boer fever” across Ireland and the diaspora networks that connected Irish communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Home Rulers reunited to oppose the war, even as those in Britain’s colonies asserted their loyalty to the empire and its racist underpinnings. Fenian revolutionaries, meanwhile, saw “England’s difficulty” in South Africa as “Ireland’s opportunity” to strike for independence. Explosive conspiracies hatched in Ireland and the United States failed to kindle the desired revolution. But the lessons and legacies of the South African War years would shape their fateful response when “England’s difficulty” returned after 1914.

Blending global perspectives with intimate portraits of individuals whose lives were forever changed by the war, Shane Lynn reveals how Irish nationalism was a global phenomenon with a tangled and paradoxical relationship to empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ransom War"

New from Oxford University Press: Ransom War: How Cyber Crime Became a Threat to National Security by Max Smeets.

About the book, from the publisher:

This timely book explores the alarming rise of ransomware: malicious software blocking users from their systems or data, until they've paid money to regain access or to prevent the release of sensitive information. High-profile British examples of the twenty-first century have targeted national libraries and healthcare organizations; in the US, hackers of Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley Health Network held patient data hostage--when their demands went unmet, they published topless photographs of women with breast cancer.

The issue presents formidable challenges and costs for businesses, national security and, as the Pennsylvania case showed, individuals--often society's most vulnerable. But we can watch and learn from cyber extortionists, leaving us better prepared for next time. In 2022, a series of devastating ransomware attacks prompted Costa Rica's President to declare a national emergency, describing a 'state of war'. This episode had much to tell us about how these networks arise, operate, organize--and collapse.

Max Smeets' landmark study demystifies the ransomware playbook, from funding to networking. Through one of the largest ransomware operations on record, he reveals how this challenge has evolved, how it differs in substance and style from traditional cyber/hacking threats, and how to combat it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"World War Zoos"

New from the University of Chicago Press: World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age by John M. Kinder.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new and heartbreaking history of World War II as told through the shocking experiences of zoos across the globe.

As Europe lurched into war in 1939, zookeepers started killing their animals. On September 1, as German forces invaded Poland, Warsaw began with its reptiles. Two days later, workers at the London Zoo launched a similar spree, dispatching six alligators, seven iguanas, sixteen southern anacondas, six Indian fruit bats, a fishing cat, a binturong, a Siberian tiger, five magpies, an Alexandrine parakeet, two bullfrogs, three lion cubs, a cheetah, four wolves, and a manatee over the next few months. Zoos worldwide did the same. The reasons were many, but the pattern was clear: The war that was about to kill so many people started by killing so many animals. Why? And how did zoos, nevertheless, not just survive the war but play a key role in how people did, too?

A harrowing yet surprisingly uplifting chronicle, Kinder’s World War Zoos traces how zoos survived the deadliest decades of global history, from the Great Depression, through the terrors of World War II, to the dawn of the Cold War. More than anything before or since, World War II represented an existential threat to the world’s zoological institutions. Some zoos were bombed; others bore the indignities of foreign occupation. Even zoos that were spared had to wrestle with questions rarely asked in public: What should they do when supplies ran low? Which animals should be killed to protect the lives of others? And how could zoos justify keeping dangerous animals that might escape and run wild during an aerial attack?

Zoos in wartime reveal the shared vulnerabilities of humans and animals during periods of social unrest and environmental peril. World War II–era zoos offered people ways to think about and grapple with imprisonment, powerlessness, and degradation. Viewed today, the story of zoos during World War II can be read as an allegory of twenty-first-century crises, as the effects of climate change threaten all life across the planet.

A one-of-a-kind history, World War Zoos is the story of how the world’s zoos survived the deadliest conflict of the twentieth century—and what was lost along the way.

Writers Read: John M. Kinder (April 2015).

The Page 99 Test: Paying with Their Bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Confederate Sympathies"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era by Andrew Donnelly.

About the book, from the publisher:

The archive of the Civil War era is filled with depictions of men’s same-sex affections and intimacies. Across antebellum campaign biographies, proslavery fiction, published memoirs of Confederate veterans and Union prisoners of war, Civil War novels, newspaper accounts, and the war’s historiography, homoerotic symbolism and narratives shaped the era’s politics, as well as the meaning and memory of the war. The Civil War, in turn, shaped the development of homosexuality in the United States. In a book full of surprising insights, Andrew Donnelly uncovers this deeply consequential queer history at the heart of nineteenth-century national culture.

Donnelly’s sharp analytical eye particularly focuses on the ways Northern white men imagined their relationship with white Southerners through narratives of same-sex affection. Assessing the cultural work of these narratives, Donnelly argues that male homoeroticism enabled proslavery coalition building among antebellum Democrats, fostered sympathy for the national retreat from Reconstruction, and contributed to the victories of Lost Cause ideology. Linking the era’s political and cultural history to the history of homosexuality, Donnelly reveals that male homoeroticism was not inherently radical but rather cultivated political sympathy for slavery, the Confederacy, and white supremacy.

Visit Andrew Donnelly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ghosts and Things"

New from Cornell University Press: Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism by Aviva Briefel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ghosts and Things argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, séances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to specialized technologies invented to register the presence of spirits. In its supernatural object lessons, Victorian spiritualism was not just a mystical movement centered on the dead but also a practical resource for learning how to negotiate the uncanniness of life under capitalism.

Aviva Briefel explores how spiritualism compelled séance participants to speculate on the manufacture of spectral clothing; ponder the hidden histories and energies of parlor furniture; confront the humiliations of consumerism as summoned spirits pelted them with exotic fruits; and comprehend modes of mechanical reproduction, like photography and electrotyping, that had the power to shape identities. Briefel argues that spiritualist practices and the objects they employed offered both believers and skeptics unexpected frameworks for grappling with the often-invisible forces of labor, consumption, exploitation, and exchange that haunted their everyday lives.

Ghosts and Things reveals how spiritualism's explorations of the borderland between life and death, matter and spirit, produced a strange and seductive combination of wonder and discomfort that allowed participants to experience the possibilities and precarities of industrial modernity in novel ways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Why Religion Went Obsolete"

New from Oxford University Press: Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Is traditional American religion doomed?

Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as "not religious" has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in "organized religion" has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religious younger Americans replace older more-religious ones and increasingly fewer American children are raised by religious parents.

All this is clear. But what is less clear is exactly why this is happening. We know a lot more about the fact that traditional American religion has declined than we do about why this is so.

Why Religion Went Obsolete aims to change that. Drawing on survey data and hundreds of interviews, Christian Smith offers a sweeping, multifaceted account of why many Americans have lost faith in traditional religion. An array of large-scale social forces-everything from the end of the Cold War to the rise of the internet to shifting ideas about gender and sexuality-came together to render traditional religion culturally obsolete. For growing numbers of Americans, traditional religion no longer seems useful or relevant. Using quantitative empirical measures of big-picture changes over time as well as exploring the larger cultural environment--the cultural "zeitgeist"--Smith explains why this is the case and what it means for the future. Crucially, he argues, it does not mean a strictly secular future. Rather, Americans' spiritual impulses are being channelled in new and interesting directions.

Why Religion Went Obsolete is a tour de force from one of our leading chroniclers of religion in America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Uncertain Empire"

New from Stanford University Press: Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism by Elizabeth E. Imber.

About the book, from the publisher:

Following the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine, Jews across the British Empire—from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, London to Calcutta—found themselves at the heart of global Jewish political discourse. As these intellectuals, politicians, activists, and communal elites navigated shifting political landscapes, some envisioned Palestine as a British dominion, leveraging imperial power for Jewish state-building, while others fostered ties with anticolonial movements, contemplating independent national aspirations. Uncertain Empire considers this intricate interplay between British imperialism, Zionism, and anticolonial movements from the 1917 British conquest of Palestine to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Elizabeth Imber highlights diverse and sometimes conflicting visions of Jewish political futures, offering detailed case studies of key figures including Chaim Arlosoroff, Moshe Shertok, Helen Bentwich, Rachel Ezra, and Hermann Kallenbach. She explores a "politics of uncertainty" in which Jews engaged with both imperial stability and the rise of anticolonial mobilization, when many were likewise forced to reconsider Palestine as a viable refuge and political solution. Ultimately, this book provides a nuanced understanding of how the British Empire's fate became central to Zionist and broader Jewish political thought, revealing the complex intersections of empire, state power, and Jewish politics during a time marked by profound urgency and exigency.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Burdens of Belonging"

New from NYU Press: Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation by Jessica Vasquez-Tokos.

About the book, from the publisher:

How systemic racism and settler colonialism shapes the lives of people in the US today

W.E.B. Du Bois famously pondered a question he felt society was asking of him as a Black man in America: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Jessica Vasquez-Tokos uses this question to examine how communities of color are constructed as “problems,” and the numerous ramifications this has for their life trajectories. Uncovering how various members of racial groups understand and react to what their racial status means for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the nation, Burdens of Belonging examines the historical underpinnings of the racial-colonial hierarchy, the influence this hierarchy has on lived experience, and how racialized life experience influences the feelings, perspectives and goals of people of color.

Burdens of Belonging is based on interviews with people in Oregon from various racial groups, and brings multiple racial groups’ opinions together to weigh in on the ways in which race contours national belonging and affects sense of self, everyday life and wellness, and aspirations for the future. This book highlights the value of inquiring how people from various racial backgrounds perceive their fit in the nation and reveals how race matters to belonging in multifaceted ways.

Filling a gap in research on the everyday effects of accumulated racial disadvantage, Burdens of Belonging brings to the fore an analysis of how racial inequality, settler colonialism, and race relations penetrate multiple layers of social life and become etched into bodies and futures.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Perpetual Children"

New from Oxford University Press: Perpetual Children: The Politics of Autism in France since 1950 by Jonathyne Briggs.

About the book, from the publisher:

Perpetual Children is a narrative history of debates over the definition and appropriate treatment of autism in France since 1950, noting the French divergence from psychological norms in the rest of the world. Examining the works of psychoanalysts, the activities of parents' associations, and the efforts of autistic self-advocates, the book argues that the consistent framing of autism as a form of childhood psychosis marginalized autists and emphasized the voices of parents and professionals. This framing also justified the continued use of psychoanalysis as an intervention due to the placement of autism within the family dynamic.

Even as research in the United States pointed to biological and neurological conceptions of autism, the French continued to support a psychogenic origin for the disorder, impacting state policy and medical norms for decades. This position energized conflict between professionals and parents concerning expertise, leading to political and legal changes at the end of the twentieth century. By the twenty-first century, French autists entered the debate to transform its parameters and assert their own position as experts on autism, reconceiving the disorder outside of childhood to a limited degree. Perpetual Children reveals the international dimension of the story of autism and how the French context provides a different perspective on its history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Measure of Progress"

New from Princeton University Press: The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters by Diane Coyle.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why do we use eighty-year-old metrics to understand today’s economy?

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy? Coyle makes the case for a new framework, one that takes into consideration current economic realities.

Coyle explains why economic statistics matter. They are essential for guiding better economic policies; they involve questions of freedom, justice, life, and death. Governments use statistics that affect people’s lives in ways large and small. The metrics for economic growth were developed when a lack of physical rather than natural capital was the binding constraint on growth, intangible value was less important, and the pressing economic policy challenge was managing demand rather than supply. Today’s challenges are different. Growth in living standards in rich economies has slowed, despite remarkable innovation, particularly in digital technologies. As a result, politics is contentious and democracy strained.

Coyle argues that to understand the current economy, we need different data collected in a different framework of categories and definitions, and she offers some suggestions about what this would entail. Only with a new approach to measurement will we be able to achieve the right kind of growth for the benefit of all.

Visit The Enlightened Economist blog.

The Page 69 Test: Diane Coyle's The Soulful Science.

The Page 99 Test: The Economics of Enough.

The Page 99 Test: Cogs and Monsters.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Painting as a Way of Life"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Painting as a Way of Life: Philosophy and Practice in French Art, 1620–1660 Richard Neer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Neer uncovers a key moment in the history of early modern art, when painting was understood to be a tool for self-transformation and for living a philosophical life.

In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer shows how French painters of the seventeenth century developed radically new ways to connect art, perception, and ethics. Cutting across traditional boundaries of classicism and realism, Neer addresses four case studies: Nicolas Poussin, renowned for marrying ancient philosophy and narrative painting; Louise Moillon, who pioneered French still life in the 1630s; Georges de La Tour, a painter of intense and introspective nocturnes; and the Brothers Le Nain, specialists in genre and portraiture who inspired Courbet, Manet, and other painters of modern life. Setting these artists in dialogue with Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, and others, ranging from the studios of Rome to the streets of Paris, this book provides fresh accounts of essential artworks—some well-known, others neglected—and new ways to approach the relation of art, theory, and daily life.

Visit Richard Neer's website. Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as co-Editor. He is currently Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Is a Person?"

New from Oxford University Press: What Is a Person?: Untapped Insights from Africa by Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire.

About the book, from the publisher:

What makes us 'persons' in the moral sense, beings with a certain dignity and worth? Philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire explore this question by bringing African and Western philosophies into conversation. They start by characterizing the differences in the contemporary scene in Africa and the West, proposing that these differences were not always present, are hardly inevitable, and can and should be bridged. They then introduce the concept of Emergent Personhood, a new philosophy of personhood that combines insights from Africa and the West. It holds that beings with superlative worth emerge through social relational processes involving human beings, yet they are more than the sum of these relationships. Persons have an identity of their own and exhibit superlative moral worth, a remarkable feature not present at the base. Emergent Personhood justifies personhood for all human beings from birth to death. It also gives strong support to personhood for a wide range of animals, soils, rocks, and ecosystems.

Focusing on human personhood, Jecker and Atuire argue that high moral status is stable across the lifespan and reaches a terminus with death's declaration, which ends the human-human associations that enable personhood to arise. They conclude with a turn to nonhuman personhood, considering personhood for artificial intelligence, animals, non-living nature, and extra-terrestrial life and lands.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Revolution Within"

New from Stanford University Press: The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt by Yasmin Moll.

About the book, from the publisher:

The New Preachers of Egypt—so named because of their novel preaching styles, which incorporate everything from melodrama to music to self-help—came to prominence on the world's first Islamic television channel on the cusp of the Arab Spring uprisings. They promoted an innovative and inclusive Islamic piety that millions of young middle-class viewers found radical and compelling—but were scorned as neoliberal by leftists, as stealth Islamists by secularists, and as too Westernized by other Muslim preachers. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with the New Preachers, their producers, and followers in Cairo, Yasmin Moll shows how Islamic media and the social life of theology mattered to contestations over the shape of a New Egypt. These mass-mediated fractures within Islamic Revivalism were happening at a time of both revolutionary possibility and authoritarian entrenchment. The New Preachers' Islamic media inspired a "revolution within" that transcended the country's divisions and anticipated the ethos of creativity, solidarity, and coexistence that soon would mark Tahrir Square, the ethical epicenter of the 2011 uprising. Vividly written and boldly theorized, The Revolution Within challenges conventional accounts of the 2011 revolution and its aftermath as a struggle between secular and religious forces, reconsidering what makes a practice virtuous, a public Islamic, a way of life Godly.

--Marshal Zeringue