New Books Network

Emilie Cloatre’s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects—and ineffectualness—of a landmark international agreement for healthcare: the World Trade Organization’s “Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.” Cloatre takes seriously the idea of TRIPS as a technology in Bruno Latour’s meaning of the word—as a material object that anticipates effects in specific settings. Cloatre follows the text from its consolidation in European meeting halls to its use in the former French and British colonies of Ghana and Djibouti. Pills for the Poorest is a significant ethnography of law and healthcare in Africa that shows precisely how this paper tool begat new buildings, relationships, experts, and, indeed, pills, but only in particular places, among certain people, and for particular kinds of pharmaceuticals. Cloatre is a broadly trained scholar and talented researcher who shows the power of Actor Network Theory as an analytic device, and yet does so with a spirit of critique in the best sense: that is, as an act of sympathetic, yet persistent, questioning. As a text itself, the book has potential to reshape the thinking of readers from a wide range of fields, from law, science studies, healthcare policy, and beyond.

In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way in which text and body are not as separate as we usually assume.  Two of the questions she wants to answer are “What do sūtras want?” and “What do sūtras get?”  She examines Buddhist scriptures of continental origin to answer the former, while she turns to Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) to answer the latter. Two ideas central to the book are that bodies can become texts, and that texts can become bodies.  Concerning the first, through reciting, reproducing, and in some sense embodying a sutra, an individual can in effect turn his or her body into the text itself (a result that the sūtras themselves encourage through various admonishments, a move that can be seen as their own quest for survival). As for the second—the idea that texts can become bodies—Eubanks shows that in the Japanese context sūtras literary materialize, becoming independent actors in their own right. While it was largely through setsuwa and other such filters that medieval Japanese understood Buddhist scripture, the ease with which sūtras and bodies moved back and forth along what Eubanks terms “the text-flesh continuum” was dependent upon Mahāyāna sūtras’ concealment of their authorship.  Indeed, certain sūtras went so far as to suggest that their origins are to be found prior to the Buddha himself, the figure who in traditional Buddhism would have been considered the author of these texts.  This move allowed Mahāyāna sūtras to claim agency for themselves, and thus for Japanese setsuwa to later depict sūtras as willful, motivated actors rather than mere containers for the teachings of the Buddha. Besides using setsuwa as a source for understanding the Japanese reception of Buddhist sūtras, Eubanks examines the prefaces and colophons of setsuwa collections in order to understand how the compilers or authors of these tales intended this didactic literature to interact with human bodies (e.g., as food or medicine), showing that in the ideal relationship between setsuwa and reader/listener, the latter not only received ideas and ethical norms but also came to embody (both literally and figuratively) those very ideas and norms. Beside being rewarded with a stimulating reinterpretation of the way in which sūtras and setsuwa make their messages heard and felt, the reader will be treated to a plethora of fascinating accounts from nine medieval setsuwa collections.  In addition, Eubanks addresses gender at various points throughout the work, showing how Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike have treated this genre as an erotic object, and the way in which setsuwa were conceived by their own authors and compilers as elderly female matchmakers (to give but two examples).  And in the final chapter Eubanks discusses the relationship between material form and the practice of reading, seeking to understand the development of the revolving sūtra library and the persistence of the scroll in East Asian Buddhism long after the codex has come into use. This book will be of particular interest to those researching medieval Japanese Buddhism, Mahāyāna sūtras as a genre, setsuwa, Buddhist textual culture, gender symbolism in Japanese Buddhism, medieval traditions of preaching and proselytization, and the body in religious thought and practice.

Stephanie Coontz is an award-winning social historian, the director of Research and Public Education at the Council for Contemporary Families and teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. In A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic Books, 2014), Coontz reveals why so many women in the early 1960s found Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963) speaking to them personally. Freidan identified an unnamed problem allowing women to see the self-doubt and depression they suffered as no longer a personal issue, but a social one. Coontz’s work is both a social history of women at mid-century and a reception history of Friedan’s book: A book regarded as one of the most influential in the twentieth century and a catalyst for the 1960s women’s movement.  Coontz’s narrative provides a vivid picture of the realities and the contraction in the post-war lives of many women. She also critically examines Friedan and responds to the charge that the Feminine Mystique was too white and middle class. Including the voices of minority and working class women’s response to the book, Coontz provides a fresh way for understand Friedan’s legacy.  This is not a story only trying to make sense of the past, but shows how the feminine mystique in new guises continues to reproduce itself in contemporary society. Consumerism, the search for meaningful work, and equity between men and women both a home and at work, are enduring issues we all continue to contend with.

Islamic theology is generally understood or approached in terms of its systematic or speculative forms. In Islamic Theological Themes: A Primary Source Reader (University of California Press, 2014), John Renard, Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University, has produced a collection of primary sources that thinks through theological deliberation far beyond the narrow strictures of kalam. This inclusive model is both chronologically expansive and geographically diverse. Renard offers relevant passages from the Qur’an and hadith, the tafsir tradition, narrative histories, manuals of moral direction, texts from spiritual guidance, creedal statements, and political theology. All of these sources are artfully introduced leading the reader through the diversity of the Islamic tradition. In our conversation we discussed human responsibility, the nature of God, the evaluation of non-Muslim beliefs, what merits community membership, the spiritual journey, functions of poems, stories, and letters, Iblis, mercy and justice, political succession, governance, and questions of leadership, and the social consequences of theological thinking.

As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day.  The first genocidal conflict covered in real time, dozens of reporters covered the war from the front lines or from a Sarajevo under siege. Not surprisingly, the media coverage was accompanied by a flood of memoirs and histories trying to explain the wars to a population that, at least in the US, knew little to nothing about the region.  These were valuable studies–informative, interesting and often emotionally shattering.  I still assign them in classes today. But histories of the present, to steal a phrase from Timothy Garton Ash, are always incomplete and impressionistic.  They lack both the opportunity to engage primary sources and the perspective offered by distance. Twenty years on, we’re now in a position to begin to reexamine and rethink many of the conclusions drawn in the midst of the conflict.  Robert J. Donia‘s new book Radovan Karadžič: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is an excellent step in this direction.  Donia takes advantage of a remarkable depth of sources, including wiretap records of the phone calls Karadzic made with leading officials in Bosnia and Yugoslavia, to paint a compelling picture of a man transformed by conflict.  His argument is simple, that it was the events of the late 1980s and especially early 1990s that made Karadzic into a nationalist willing to employ ethnic cleansing and genocidal massacres in his quest to secure safety and power for his people.  In elevating Kardzic, Donia revises our understanding of the role and guilt of Slobodan Milosevic.   His argument is detailed and well-supported, made even more compelling by Donia’s recollections of his encounters with Karadzic when Donia was a witness at before the ICTY.  It’s a book anyone interested in understanding what happened in the former Yugoslavia will have to read and engage.

Why are club sandwiches so good? This is among the important questions we get around to discussing during this podcast. Chef Bryan Voltaggio, a Top Chef finalist and Maryland-area restaurateur, met me at the Malibu Diner in Manhattan, known for blinky fluorescent lighting and a menu that includes cheap burgers and moussaka, to discuss his new cookbook Home: Recipes to Cook with Family and Friends (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), which comes out in a few months, his desire to open a restaurant in his house like my old dentist used to do with his practice, and whether or not chefs are artists. His wife Jennifer eventually slid into the booth to join the conversation.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a moment that “we” could lose. “We” were a great country run by good people; “they” were a little country run by bad people. I spent my time building models of American tanks, planes, and ships. I read a lot of “Sergeant Rock” and watched re-runs of “Combat.” My friends and I played “war” everyday after school. Given all this, you’ll understand that I was bewildered when “we” pulled out of Vietnam. How could “we” lose the war when “we” were bigger, better, and righter? It made no sense. All this came to mind as I read Andrew Donson terrific book Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918 (Harvard UP, 2010). As Andrew points out, German children were taught that their nation was great, their cause was just, and their victory inevitable. Their heads were full of heroic tales of soldiers sacrificing themselves for the good of Germany, and they longed to fight for the Vaterland themselves. So when things began to come apart in 1917, Germany’s young people were deeply disappointed. They would not “get their chance.” Rather, they would suffer hunger, humiliation, and defeat. They had hard questions for their mothers, fathers, and the authorities. How could it happen? Who is at fault? And, most importantly, what should we do? As we know, they answered this final question in different and, as it turned out, radical ways.

In Infrastructure Redux: Crisis, Progress in Industrial Pakistan and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Nausheen H. Anwar explores double-edged narratives of development. Through detailed case studies of Sialkot and Faisalabad, as well as analyses of development in Pakistan since independence and the impact of liberalized trade policies on industrial labour, the book explores how ideas of both crisis and progress frame the country’s infrastructure.

The current conflict in Ukraine has reopened old wounds and brought the complexity of Russia’s relationship with the United States and Europe to the forefront. One of the most important factors in relations between the Kremlin and the West has been the issue of Ballistic Missile Defense, particularly as a result of American plans to develop a Missile Defense Shield with installations in Eastern Europe. Bilyana Lilly, an expert on Eurasian affairs and security, has written the most comprehensive study available on Russia’s Ballistic Missile Defense policies. In the course of her book Russian Foreign Policy toward Missile Defense: Actors, Motivations, and Influence (Lexington Books, 2014), drawing on a huge array of media sources as well as interviews, she demonstrates how these policies serve as a barometer for measuring US-Russia and US-NATO relations, as well as how they illustrate the complex interplay of factions and forces among Russia’s elite. As relations between Russia and the West continue to worsen, a thorough examination of how BMD policies have affected both Russia’s relations with the outside world and served as a tool for domestic political considerations could not be timelier.

Philip K. Dick Award-winning author Ben H. Winters discusses his The Last Policeman series, featuring Frank Palace, a police detective from Concord, N.H., who is determined to keep solving crimes even as the Earth approaches its rendezvous with a planet-destroying asteroid.

To read this collection is to enter into a world of dimly lit rooms with candle light shimmering off errant metallic surfaces. It is mystical, it is brutal, and it unflinchingly stares down a history that some folks block out to merely survive the day. Amnesiac, you become American. Historian, you remain a Jew. Your story begins: the book open like supplicant palms. Strike your words with an exacting hand. Rachel Mennies is that exacting and sure hand, guiding you from room to room through her family’s rich and difficult past. Oral history and folklore are necessary parts of our humanity. Stories live inside us and are altered by us, but remain “true.” These poems are true in the way that our skin knows the wind is blowing. The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards (Texas Tech University Press, 2014) does more than document realities, it brings itself to live in the speaker’s family as an entity, a gentle presence that should remain unstirred but revered. This text will live many lives.

During the 20th century, El Salvador suffered from one of the longest periods of military rule and political domination in the Americas, beginning with the 1931 coup against the democratically-elected Arturo Aurajo, and culminating in a bloody civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), Erik Ching examines the origins of this history of authoritarian governance in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. What he reveals is a seemingly paradoxical political system, in which frequent elections and high voter turnout and political engagement coexisted with frequent coups and a near-total lack of actual democratic influence on governance. This system led to a peculiar national understand of “democracy” that colored the behavior of El Salvador’s military rulers. Marshaling a wide range of documents, including electoral records, political correspondence, and press articles, Ching presents pre-1931 Salvadorian politics as controlled by networks of political patronage that controlled voting at the local level. Rather than disenfranchising poor and indigenous citizens, these networks provided them a limited degree of political influence. Ching argues that the incorporation of poor and indigenous Salvadorians into regional and eventually national political networks was a key factor in some of the most distinctive features and events in the country’s early-20th Century history: the actions of the paramilitary Liga Roja, composed largely of peasants; the 1932 uprising of indigenous farmers, which he locates partly in response to a sense of electoral disenfranchisement; and the actions of the post 1931 military regime, which brutally surpressed the 1932 uprising, but went on to promote land reform and other measures to keep the peasantry in the political fold.

Donald P. Haider-Markel and Jami K. Taylor are the editors of Transgender Rights and Politics: Groups, Issue Framing, & Policy Adoption (University of Michigan UP, 2014). Haider-Markel is professor of political science and chair at the University of Kansas, Taylor is associate professor of political science and public administration at the University of Toledo. Last week, Frank Baumgartner came on the podcast to talk about his newest book on policy process theory at the national level of US government. Haider-Markel and Taylor’s new edited volume draws on similar literature, but applies it to state and local politics. They also have collected up an array of excellent research on an understudied issue: transgender politics. Chapters by Anthony Nownes on transgender interest groups and Mitchell Sellers and Rod Colvin on how local governments have adopted transgender policies are particularly noteworthy.

Martyrdom, writes Emma Anderson, is anything but random. In beautiful prose and spectacular historical detail, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard University Press, 2013), takes readers on a journey of more than 300 years, exploring how a group of eight Frenchmen were selected from the amongst the thousands of victims of a brutal seventeenth-century encounter between natives and Europeans to become celebrated martyrs. Anderson explores the details of the deaths themselves, as well as the meaning of ‘good deaths’ in Iroquois and European cultures, before turning to the saints’ afterlives, their continual remembering and reinvention in the “popular, protean collective imagination from their time to our own.” Myriad voices come together in the book’s pages, each one claiming and contesting the meaning of the Jesuits’ deaths, continually refashioning the religious and national identities bound up in the politics of martyrdom.

The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of everyday illnesses—not only prevent the lurking killers, like polio. Medical historian Elena Conis shows that Americans’ gradual acceptance of vaccination was far from a medical fait accompli: it was—and remains—a political accomplishment that has stemmed from a patchwork of efforts to expose children, in particular, to compulsory vaccine programs. Grown in the culture of postwar American politics, vaccines deliver more than prophylactics. They succor a set of assumptions about economic inequality, racial difference, sexual norms, and gendered divisions of labor. Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (University of Chicago, 2014) is a timely and accessible social history of American policy and practices towards vaccination that shows how support for vaccination has rarely advanced for medical reasons alone.