Book reviews from THE

Book of the week: Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Jon Turney on the DNA pioneer's life and long career

The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Laura González on the meanings beneath people's compulsion to capture images of places visited

The Culture of Knitting

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As a knitter and an academic (although not an academic in the field of visual or textile arts), I found this treatise on the culture of knitting an engaging read. I consider myself well plugged in to the knitting culture at large: not only...

Comparing Conrad: Essays on Joseph Conrad and His Implied Dialogues with Other Writers

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This book has no ISBN. "Can it even exist?" I hear booksellers and librarians ask. It hasn't even come from a publishing house. It is a self-published work. I can now detect the gasps of appalled academics for whom self-publication is aligned...

Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It's high time Roy Kerr's contribution to theoretical physics was recognised, writes Graham Farmelo

He Was Some Kind of Man: Masculinities in the B Western

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There's an assumption - and this is not about proprietary disciplinary boundaries - that anyone can write about film. As many studies attest, this is manifestly not the case. He Was Some Kind of Man is, in many ways, a fascinating study,...

Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In 2003, news emerged that detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere had been subjected to hours of repeated playing of songs by bands ranging from the American heavy metallists Metallica to - bizarrely - the children's puppet Barney the...

Addiction: A Disorder of Choice

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Lots of good sense but too narrow a base leads to author's success and failure, says Bruce Alexander

Published this week

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

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Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Milton's Words

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The individual phrases of a great poet's work are freighted with significance, says Sophie Read

A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

You might be forgiven for expecting a 1,000-page book to be a little self-indulgent. Not this one. The prose is taut and tart, sometimes to the point of breathlessness; and it is an astonishing feat of compression. After all, this book aspires...

The Canon. Reading Dancing. By Susan Leigh Foster

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Reading Dancing enjoys somewhat emblematic status as a core text in the young discipline of dance studies. Published in 1986, it argues vehemently against the notion that dancing - and by extension, the role of dancers or choreographers...

THE Book of the Week - Rich Democracies, Poor People: How Politics Explain Poverty

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Fiona Taylor gives full marks to an expose of beggary amid plenty

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A clear account of theories and possibilities but conclusions not so satisfactory, writes David Smail

Newspeak in the 21st Century

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Newspeak in the 21st Century is the latest publication from Media Lens, a campaign group that undertakes press monitoring from an anti-war, anti-corporate perspective. Tackling left-liberal UK publications including The Independent...

The Canon: The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World By Barrington Moore Jr.

An inveterate activist

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Although his days in the front line of humanitarian aid are past for James Orbinski, his passion for justice and human rights is undiminished, as Matthew Reisz discovers

What are you reading?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

'Non-Lethal' Weapons

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The development of military hardware that does not kill is proving elusive, as Russell Brown discovers

Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This book began badly for me, with one of those imaginative reconstructions that some people enjoy; in this case of Francois de Lorraine, second Duke de Guise, setting out from his principal residence, the Chateau de Joinville, on the morning...

The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Prior to picking up The Dawn of Green, I had been re-reading Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. First published in 1975, it concerns the activities of four misfits with a shared love of wilderness. They wage a...

The Provocative Joan Robinson: The Making of a Cambridge Economist

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Housewife to acclaimed economist within a decade - not bad going, says Natalie Gold

Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The "making of American dance" bit of the title likely brings to mind a certain Martha, and indeed the legendary Graham figures significantly in Janet Mansfield Soares' biography. Its subject, however, is the rather less known Martha Hill...

Sexy Orchids Make Lousy Lovers and Other Unusual Relationships

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Gross," starts the preface to this curious collection on the strangeness of nature. Beetles that commit siblicide, toxic frogs, kleptoparasitism in birds, hallucinogenic plants, poisonous dragons, monkeys that wipe millipedes on their fur...

Published this Week

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

CULTURAL STUDIES

Book of the week: The Question of Morale

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How can the academy get over its gloom? Just grow up, Gail Kinman hears

1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Gareth Dale learns how the old world order slipped on the cloak of the new after the wall came down

Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Within a week of the Twin Towers falling I saw, at a sparsely attended cinema, the beautiful future-set AI: Artificial Intelligence. Late in the film, its frail robotic heroes approach a flooded and collapsed Manhattan. The image, rendered...

The Canon. Henry VIII by J. J. Scarisbrick

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Return to your garret in Oxford. Sadly I do not think that I can be of great help to you, but I am sure that you are on the right lines." It was with these words that Professor J.J. Scarisbrick said goodbye to me at Leamington Spa station,...

The Cult of St George in Medieval England

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Robert Bartlett is intrigued by how England came to embrace a fictional character as its patron saint

Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Ask a dozen people at random to describe what science fiction is and you will probably get a dozen different answers. Start a discussion with those 12 people about what, if anything, science fiction says about our society and you may well...

Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Trauma theorists have made much of a simple human reaction: when we are traumatised, we do not know what to say; words literally fail us - a debilitating problem if you happen to be a novelist.

Modernism on Sea

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The influence of seaside towns on our culture goes far beyond the kiss-me-quick hat, says Peter Borsay

Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer is worth its cover price for the collection of essays in Part One alone, a grouping of four papers under the heading "Revisiting Feminist Critique". The rest of the collection is icing on the cake.

The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The theme of this book is understanding and tackling worldwide poverty, conceived as the denial of human rights, and more especially the rights to access the resources, services and political influence necessary for a life in dignity, justice...

Demystifying Syria

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Never judge a book by its cover. In this case, the cover shows us a veiled woman on a Syrian street, ignoring a painting of a youthful Hafiz al-Asad, who looks here almost like Omar Sharif. The painting, suspended from a concrete wall, is...

Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A gathering of great thinkers convinces David Revill that our modern minds need expanding

The Italian Way: Food and Social Life

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Italians are different from you and me. They eat better. American sociologist and ethno-photographer Douglas Harper discovered this on his first visit to Italy. The food was fresher, the tastes brighter, the eating itself more exuberant...

Published this week

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

ECONOMICS

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Thu, 5 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

An indictment of today's academy strikes a chord with Susan Bassnett

Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A survey of strategies used by US institutions in hard times gives John Coyne a helpful heads-up

The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In the preface to this formidable biography, sure to enthral all those interested in theories of revolution, Tristram Hunt claims that Engels has "been excised from the popular memory", which may explain why the US edition is titled Marx's...

The Canon. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity By Marshall Berman

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Marshall Berman's book was first published in the UK in 1983 by Verso and it had an immediate impact. Perry Anderson wrote an 18-page review in New Left Review that was respectful - "surely ... a classic in its field" - yet critical. Berman...

Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Julia Droeber sympathises with a passionate treatise against the reasons given for covering up

Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There is a lot that is extremely worrying about this book. One might begin with the title. If the appearance on the cover of Lady Jane Grey in capital letters superimposed on a portrait of the aforesaid lady suggests a biography, the reality...

Consumerism and the Co-operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This book addresses a neglect of the Co-op in historical writings and business history. Fourteen chapters - loosely organised into the three themes of the postwar decline, ideologies and identities, and consumerism and material culture -...

Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The epistolary art was a rite of passage for women in 18th-century France, says Isobel Grundy

John Piper, Myfanwy Piper - Lives in Art

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This intimately informed account of John and Myfanwy Piper's domestic and artistic partnership brims over with insights and revelations. Who knew that in his Chiltern farmhouse, Fawley Bottom - John Betjeman's "Fawley Bum" - against all...

Belfast Boys: How Unionists and Nationalists Fought and Died Together in the First World War

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Belfast's Loyalist murals depict many images of the First World War. The 36th Ulster Division, in which so many forebears of today's Ulster Loyalists fought and died, is a regular theme for these gable-end remembrances. Alongside the 36th...

Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Elisa Aaltola is left with no doubt that humans have a moral obligation not to cause animals pain

Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In the run-up to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in Hyde Park during the summer of 1851 in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, Prince Albert declared that, by bringing the products of the world together for...

Notebooks from New Guinea: Field Notes of a Tropical Biologist

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The big question framing the research of Czech entomologist Vojtech Novotny is that of why there are so many species of insects in tropical rainforests. His investigations, for the past decade, have focused on the tropical forests of Papua...

The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A riposte to the biological determinism of Richard Dawkins leaves Janet Smith frustrated

Published this week

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

? = Review forthcoming

What are you reading?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: Am I Making Myself Clear?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Kathy Sykes finds much good advice, despite a disdain of the public

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n 'Roll

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Martin James discusses how the Fab Four played their part in the loss of rock's dancefloor vitality

A Philosophy of Pain

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This book is about pain, but in a very broad sense indeed. Almost any unwelcome psychic disturbance comes under the heading of pain for Arne Johan Vetlesen. This has its good side, for it means that the author takes seriously cases of strife...

The Canon. On Photography by Susan Sontag

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Susan Sontag was a controversial figure. Her writing, activism and strong, frequently unpopular but influential opinions earned her a prominent and unique place in American intellectual circles, somewhere between the academy and the more...

Invisible hand needs someone to stir the pot

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Reproduction and childcare tend to get short shrift from dismal science. But Nancy Folbre brings to the fore the impact that sex and family can have on economic activity. Matthew Reisz learns the value of home economics

The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Robert A. Segal is delighted by a study of two titans of thought who failed to fathom each other

A Rising China and Security in East Asia: Identity Construction and Security Discourse

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

China is the West's only serious rival for global dominance. Unlike its relationship with the defunct Soviet Union, the West depends on this competitor (the US survives on its lending), yet, more reminiscently, reviles and fears its political...

Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Architecture is the most politicised of professions. The process began after the First World War when Georg Walter Adolf Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and others associated with the Bauhaus movement evolved an anti-crafts and anti-historical...

The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

June Purvis is impressed by a long-overdue study of this poet, writer and lecturer for social reform

Charles Darwin's Notebooks From The Voyage Of The Beagle

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Whisper it quietly: 2009 has been something of a bad year for Darwin. The bicentennial celebrations of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species has led to an explosion of all manner of Darwin-related...

Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain: The Story of Madeleine Smith

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Murder is back in fashion. Historians such as Ginger Frost and M.J. Wiener have begun to exploit the fact that deaths in suspicious circumstances tend to leave more interesting records than deaths from natural causes. "The Madeleine Smith...

The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It is misleading to deny adults' continuities with their remarkable offspring, says Barbara Jacobs

Published this week

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

? = Review forthcoming

What are you reading?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: Nature's Ghosts

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Jules Pretty discusses humanity's tardy conservation efforts

The Earwig's Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-Legged Legends

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Michelle Harvey gets to the bottom of some of the most popular tales of horror surrounding insects

Teaching for Understanding at University: Deep Approaches and Distinctive Ways of Thinking

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I really liked this book. Viewed from the perspective of a lecturer looking to use it for reference when embarking on another academic year with a full teaching timetable, it is extremely well laid out and well structured. As a "teacher"...

The European Union and World Politics: Consensus and Division

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Nearly 40 years ago, Ralf Dahrendorf, who was then the European Commissioner for external relations, commented on a current round of negotiations with a developing country: "We're talking about tomatoes, but it's really about freedom." Indeed,...

Crime and Muslim Britain: Culture and the Politics of Criminology among British Pakistanis

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A fresh approach to a 'taboo' subject raises more questions than answers, says David Gadd

Published this week

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

? = Review forthcoming

What are you reading?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Organising Poetry

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Christoph Bode admires the scholarship but finds no space for novelty in this Romantic study

Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Adam Kuper's thesis is that "marriage within the family - between cousins or between in-laws - was a characteristic strategy of the new bourgeoisie, which had a great deal to do with the success of some of the most important Victorian clans".

The Canon: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects By Mary Wollstonecraft

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft articulated an idea that students now write about with (perhaps misjudged) ease: society constructs gender. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman discussed the many ways in which "females" are "made women of",...

Judas: A Biography

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A study of Jesus' traitor reveals the persistence of evil over the centuries, writes Deborah D. Rogers

Space Travel and Culture: From Apollo to Space Tourism

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Many books have been written about the manned exploration of space across its 50-year history and from all manner of perspectives: autobiographical, political, technological. In this 40th anniversary year of the Apollo 11 landing, it may...

Medieval Film

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer's edited collection of essays, Medieval Film, covers a wide range of topics related to the way in which the Middle Ages are portrayed on film, simplified and sometimes falsified for the enjoyment of mass...

Behind the Scenes at Boston Ballet

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Text and images capture a company facing a hostile environment, writes Anne Hogan

Globalization and Football

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Richard Giulianotti, arguably the most prolific academic writer on football over the past 15 years, and Roland Robertson, one of the most prominent figures in the scientific analysis of globalisation, have joined forces to write an account...

Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Christopher Davidson's new book on Abu Dhabi is certainly not one to be placed in the category of "do we really need another one of these"? It is a timely and thoughtful contribution to the thus-far scanty literature on the emirate, discussing...

Book of the week: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Will the web's total recall threaten our identities? wonders Henry Farrell

Muriel Spark: The Biography

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Martin McQuillan finds flashes of biographical gold revealed despite a life self-mythologising

1939: Countdown to War

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Dealing with history constantly raises the question of perspective. In his magnificent How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, Donald Cameron Watt states that the cataloguers of the Library of Congress dated the beginning...

The Canon: Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Language, Thought and Reality is not a very interesting title for a book, and in many ways Benjamin Whorf's subject is not very promising either, being about the structure and nature of language. Wake up at the back there! But here, unprepossessing...

Security and Environmental Change

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We should heed this warning against militarising environmental hazards, writes Tim Dunne

Bugs and the Victorians

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Bugs and the Victorians is an exploration of the coming of age of entomology in Britain. The collection and curation of insects, our omnipresent and abundant companions, was nothing more than a curiosity in the early 19th century; an amateur...

Killing in War

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It is commonly said that "all is fair in love and war": soldiers have the moral right to kill other soldiers in wartime whether or not their cause is just. One reason is that soldiers are permitted to act in self-defence. A second reason...

The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

When it comes to mammalian development, play's the thing, as Sue McHale discovers

Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There is a shortage of books on applied ethics, if not moral philosophy, and this one helps to fill that gap. Its style is that of a chatty lecture, with regular pauses to take notes, deal with possible "other viewpoints" and so on. There...

The Wolverhampton Tragedy: Death and the 'Respectable' Mr Lawrence

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There are an increasing number of opportunities in crime history to expand the often-denigrated genre of the "true crime" book. The long-established popular genre, defined by lurid red and black covers and shocking images, is still with...

An Intellectual History of Cannibalism

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Simon Blackburn relishes a scholarly dinner date, with anthropophagy as the main course

Published this week

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

BUSINESS AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES

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Thu, 8 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: The Idea of Justice

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Alex Danchev is bowled over by an impassioned discussion of reason and humanity

Saving Kyoto - An Insider's Guide to the Kyoto Protocol

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Anthony Giddens feels the authors have looked at carbon trading through rose-tinted glasses

The Communal Gadfly - Jews, British Jews and the Jewish State: Asking the Subversive Questions

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Some things live to be ephemeral: morning glories, cabbage white butterflies and newspaper columns. So it was with apprehension that I faced this collection of op-ed columns from The Jewish Chronicle written by the trenchantly opinionated...

The Canon. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In stark stylistic contrast to almost any work of philosophy you care to name, Thus Spoke Zarathustra dances from the pages with a florid exuberance that can border on the embarrassing. Its scope, as well as its tone, is immense, with Nietzsche's...

'History goes on; human beings don't change very much'

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

John Gray says he is no despairing grump, just trying to help us by injecting realism into political thinking. To that end, he tells Matthew Reisz, his essays do not skirt the nasty, shabby sides of life

Published this week

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

ART AND DESIGN

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Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: Heaven's Touch: From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We Are Connected to the Universe

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Simon Mitton on a tour de force that joins the human and the cosmic

The Gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A 19th-century obsession with the macabre was the medieval church's saviour, says James Stevens Curl

Cinema Entertainment: Essays on Audiences, Films and Film Makers

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This short book enters into a debate that has a lengthy history, not only in the context of cinema but in relation to the cultural industries more broadly. From its inception, cinema has found itself straddling the entertainment/art distinction...

Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As Donald Rumsfeld memorably observed: "There are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." While it is a truism that we do not know the things we are not conscious of, the implications of this statement are more than...

The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A theory that dispels the idea of Earth's systems being self-regulating does not convince Jon Turney

Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As a sociologist and ethnographer fascinated by the lived experiences of people, I was interested in reading a book that uses the research methodologies of ethnography, case studies and oral life histories to investigate class identities...

Atom Egoyan

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In the preface to her study of Atom Egoyan, Emma Wilson refers to the film-maker's fascination with Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), two seminal films that are not only instructive in...

Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A historian and a literary critic walk into a pub ... such formulaic jokes typically open with characters (eg, an Englishman, a Welshman and a Scotsman) united through some shared affiliation (ie, they are all British men).

The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Ironically, just as the American automobile industry falters, there have appeared several excellent books on its cultural, social and political dimensions, including Brian Ladd's Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age, Tom Vanderbilt's...

From Heads of Household to Heads of State: The Preaccession Households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, 1516-1558

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In the political ordering and governance of early modern England, J.L. McIntosh argues that power was distributed and exercised through the households of the nobility. While national policy may have been formulated in London by the state,...

Lived in London: Blue Plaques and the Stories Behind Them

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The quirky tales behind London's commemorative icons revive Duncan Wu's enthusiasm for the city

The Ethics of Torture

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The right not to be tortured is unique among internationally recognised human rights.

The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Peter Hart is unconvinced by the assertion that the secret to a soldier's survival was his family

Published this week

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

? = Review forthcoming

What are you reading?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Jane Humphries admires the detective work that is rekindling respect for the match girls' strike of 1888

Kierkegaard: An Introduction

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This general introduction to Kierkegaard's thought proves a clear, sober and informative guide both for students coming to Kierkegaard for the first time and for more experienced readers. The book's primary audience is the non-specialist....

The Canon. Utopian Thought in the Western World. By Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Frank Manuel was already a distinguished historian with several excellent books on Utopianism to his credit when, in 1979, he and his wife, Fritzie, published this magnum opus. More comprehensive, detailed and penetrating than any previous...

Book of the week: On Art and War and Terror

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

An interdisciplinary tour of conflict in all its shades and guises grips Robert Eaglestone

The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Lucy Wooding admires an assured interweaving of Scottish and English history in the 16th century

The Least Worst Place: How Guantánamo Became the World’s Most Notorious Prison

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

So how did Guantanamo become “the world’s most notorious prison”? Principally as a result of a Washington-created public-relations own goal.

The Canon: The Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. By E. H. Carr

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The bibliographies in today’s international relations texts rarely include anything published before about 1990, but there is one work still regularly listed and discussed that appeared as long ago as 1939. Why has E.?H. Carr’s The Twenty...

Sex, drugs and stats

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Matthew Reisz meets reluctant Facebook darling Andy Field, the Harry Potter of the social sciences

Published this week

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

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Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: Teaching What You Don't Know

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Leslie Gofton on advice for neophytes in the lecture-theatre spotlight

When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Gregory Kent says an important study on the growing power of modern China is incomplete

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

With this witty and polemical book, Terry Eagleton finally fulfils the promise of his early years as a left-wing Catholic. Here at last is his defence of Christianity as a radical movement comparable to, and compatible with, Marxism. It...

The Canon: Speculum of the Other Woman. By Luce Irigaray

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

When the weekly series The Canon began in April 2009, the question was posed: is there a "baggy monster" of a book that has opened up new ways of thinking and come to count as a classic in your research field? The phrase "baggy monster"...

My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A look at copyright crime from the student point of view is a refreshing change, says Kim Louise Walden

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We all have one or two of them, or at least most of us do - books that made us readers, if not bibliophiles. Some are books to be proclaimed proudly in conversation - Hans Christian Andersen's stories or The Jungle Book or The Lion, the...

Postfemininities in Popular Culture

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We discover how old we are when the people we read in our youth are rediscovered by a subsequent generation. The renewed interest in figures such as Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett is a theme of Stephanie Genz's book and part of her...

A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries - The Men and Women Who Fought For Our Freedoms

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A.W. Purdue enjoys this well-told tale, but isn't convinced that riots brought about social change

Published this week

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

? = Review forthcoming

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Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Philip Smallwood says this great philosopher's story is long overdue

Reporting the World

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The reporter Keith Kyle knew how to shape a good story, especially his own, says Alex Danchev

The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The American creative writing programme. Hardly are those words out when a vast image troubles our sight. Gone is the Shelley Circle and the Bloomsbury Group; gone the Jamesian high tea and Hemingway's low, moveable feast. In The Program...

The Canon. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Theodor Adorno

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

What might Theodor Adorno have said about Michael Jackson? Frank Zappa claimed that rock music writing was produced by people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, to provide articles for people who can't read. Given the continuing...

Channeling the Future: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy Television

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Sci-fi's visions of what is to come tell us much about present preoccupations, writes John Gilbey

Fresh: A Perishable History

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Food has always been a (in some ways the) central concern of mankind, but of late it has received unprecedented press: from a spate of books on "proper eating" to celebrity chefs moving beyond gastronomical confines to advocating the type...

Frankenstein: Icon of Modern Culture

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It may be impossible today to envisage Victor Frankenstein's Monster without invoking the grotesque that Boris Karloff created in the corny but influential 1931 cinema adaptation, one of the first of more than 1,000 film versions of the...

Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Roger Brown enjoys a timely text that shows we cannot afford to starve the academy of funds

Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

America's suburbs grew dramatically in the years after the Second World War, and the developer William Levitt was a key figure in the expansion. In Levittown, David Kushner paints a compelling picture of the inexpensive housing developments...

Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As fans of the hit television series 24 will know, Jack Bauer is the gutsy hero who races against the clock to save America from terror attacks. For some, including Michael Chertoff, the former US Secretary of Homeland Security, Bauer's...

The Dark Sahara: America's War on Terror in Africa

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

David H. Price asks if the Bush Administration engineered or simply exploited a hostage situation

The New Plagues: Pandemics and Poverty in a Globalized World

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Stefan Kaufmann is both lucky and unlucky. His luck is to be a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, situated close to the Luisenstrasse, where in 1880 Robert Koch established a bacteriology laboratory...

Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

That music can be a countercultural and subversive force is clear and well documented. Genres including folk, jazz, punk, rap and dancehall have all been subject to regulation and state attention, often being overseen by the gaze of the law.

The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The story of medieval Spain cannot be neatly delineated along religious lines, says Jill Ross

African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The title of Lindiwe Dovey's first monograph promises more than it can possibly deliver. This is not a synoptic study of African film or African literature, but a series of cogently focused case studies of several instances of literary works...

Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory: Unfinished Selves

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Alison Assiter's new work on Soren Kierkegaard and moral theory is a fine attempt at providing a fresh way of thinking about ethics and human rights without completely abandoning the framework that we already possess. Analysing lines of...

Published this week

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE

What are you reading?

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Book of the week: Replenishing the Earth

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Donald MacRaild admires a novel account of the rise of the Anglo-world

Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Carolyn Lesjak navigates a meticulous reading of Victorian novels with verbal conflict at its heart

The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Lectures played a very important role in Le Corbusier's strategy for converting people to the cause of his new architecture and for the acquisition of clients and other influential connections. They also provided him with an important forum...

The Canon: Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture by Raphael Samuel

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

First published in 1994, Raphael Samuel's collection of loosely affiliated essays presents a compelling argument about the nature, purpose and value of historical knowledge and investigation. The book outlines the ways in which the past...

The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Simon Underdown disagrees with the premise that racism is part of evolution, rather than a crime

'A Senseless, Squalid War': Voices from Palestine 1945-1948

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There is no promotion after Jerusalem." So said Ronald Storrs, the first governor of the city under the British Mandate for Palestine after the First World War, as he was packed off to become governor of Cyprus. He typified those for whom...

Rationality and the Literate Mind

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Raphael Salkie is unimpressed by the latest work from a controversial scholar

Faulkner and Love

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A quarter of a century ago, Judith Sensibar set up in opposition to William Faulkner's "official" biographer, Joseph Blotner, by insisting that Faulkner's ten-year "unromantic but fascinating" apprenticeship in poetry was crucial to his...

The Tudor Queens of England

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, "our greatest living historian", David Starkey, announced that Tudor queens were not important - admittedly after writing about them himself, when a rather different view was put forward. Undaunted, David Loades has come up with...

Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A compilation of the works of a highly regarded, influential painter is appreciated by Duncan Wu

What Mothers Say About Special Education: From the 1960s to the Present

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It would be generous to describe books on special education as appealing to a niche market. If education is one of the least attractive of the academic disciplines, special education is merely a splinter group within it. Yet it is the one...

Medieval English Drama

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Katie Normington's careful study of drama considers the period between the first recognisable performance text (the Winchester Regularis Concordia from around 965) and the establishment of the first permanent theatre by James Burbage in...

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Natalie Gold is intrigued by an exploration of what makes us tick, and how it affects the economy

Published this week

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

? = Review forthcoming

What are you reading?

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers