New Books Network

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.” All of this rests upon some uninterrogated (and potentially destructive) assumptions about race and human “origins,” however. In Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kim TallBear asks what’s at stake for Indigenous communities and First Nations when the premises of this ascendant science are put into practice. TallBear, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin and enrolled Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, conducted years of research on the politics of “human genome diversity,” decoding the rhetoric of scientists, for-profit companies, and public consumers. The result is a vital and provocative work, tracing lineages between racial science and genetic testing, “blood talk” and “DNA talk,” and the undemocratic culture of a field which claims it can deliver us from racism.

John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke writes in the preface of his new biography JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, he was “more than most presidents– more than most middle aged men… a work in progress.” This is perhaps also why he’s a perennial favorite of biographers: because he proves such a challenge to pin down and because it is so very tempting to try to imagine who he might have become had he lived. Alas, he didn’t. And so we’re left to wonder, a temptation Clarke resists in JFK’s Last Hundred Days. Instead, he mines that period to see who JFK was then and leaves us to the imagining. For, undoubtedly, he was a changed man in many respects: grieving the death of his infant son, somewhat renewed in his commitment to his wife, moving towards a policy of détente with Russia, re-examining American involvement in Vietnam. Clarke borrows from the journalist Laura Bergquist the idea of JFK as our most “prismatic” president, and systematically examines the various facets that were presented in his final hundred days. The end result is a portrayal that, while doing nothing to quell the unanswerable question of who JFK might have become had he not died, does go a long way towards answering the question of who he was while he lived.

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Thomas traces the history of self-released audio from its origins in mail-art networks of the 1970s to the present day practice of using antiquated media – the humble cassette tape – for the dissemination of experimental sounds. Net-labels, mp3 blogs, tape traders, and their many casts of characters are examined along the way as changing technologies impact the strategies for resilience among self-releasing audio artists.

For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we know the answers to both questions: Oswald killed Kennedy and he did so alone. These facts won’t keep people from speculating–everyone loves a mystery–but they might allow us to focus on more pertinent questions about what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. One such question is this: “Why did Oswald do it?” Obviously, the answer will not be straightforward. Assassinating the President of the United States is, well, not really something a rational person would attempt, so we should not expect a completely rational explanation. Oswald was not crazy, but he was doubtless mentally ill. He had “reasons” for killing the president; it’s just that his “reasons” are not going to make much sense to us. To comprehend why he did what he did, then, we must comprehend how his “reasons” made sense to him. In his insightful, well-researched book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Savodnik helps us do just this by investigating Oswald’s decision to defect to, live in, and ultimately abandon the Soviet Union. He convincingly argues that Oswald’s Soviet Period was part of a larger pattern, one that dominated his entire life: that of taking on and abandoning identities, always unsuccessfully. Even as a child (and, as Peter points out, Oswald had a horrific childhood), “Lee” never really “fit.” He could never find a group of people he could rely on, a social context in which he could thrive, a community that would respect him.  As he matured, he began to search for an identity–in politics, in the Marines, and in the Soviet Union. Yet he was always, as Peter says, an “interloper”: he never lasted long in the skin of any given “Lee.” To this reader, the fact that Oswald was essentially an interloper goes a long way in explaining why he murdered Kennedy. It was his last attempt to fit in, to establish who he really was, to find an identity.

Nicholas Hartlep is the author of The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success (Information Age, 2013). Dr. Hartlep is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Illinois State University Dr. Hartlep’s book, The Model Minority Stereotype, is a sourcebook of annotated bibliographies that offers summaries and sometimes critiques of Asian American scholarship dealing with the model minority stereotype. As the stereotype has continued to be a heated political and social issue among Asian Americans scholars, activists and people, it can be difficult to decipher the thousands of articles, chapters and theses written about it. By framing his project through an aggressive and forward-thinking lens, Dr. Hartlep traces the diverse history and themes pervading model minority scholarship, revealing their presumptions and contributions to the general field.

At the age of five, poet Stephanie Strickland and her sister received a book from their grandmother that included a poem by John Farrar called “Serious Omission.” I know that there are dragons St. George’s, Jason’s, too, And many modern dragons With scales of green and blue;   But though I’ve been there many times And carefully looked through, I cannot find a dragon In the cages at the zoo! The poem stayed with Strickland.  “What is the serious omission?” she asks.  “To not be able to find that dragon?  To fail to discriminate the hugely many implicate orders of life?” These questions, not to mention dragons themselves, drive Strickland’s new book of poems, Dragon Logic (Ahsahta Press, 2013).  Her fiercely intelligent and morally acute work captures e-dragons and sea dragons, as well as a beast she calls the “Hidden Dragon of Unstable Ruin.”  The poems even offer “Dragon Maps,” that take “catastrophic forms and safepaths,” finding and figuring their way through the physical, mechanical, virtual, mythical, chimerical, and hypothetical environments we now inhabit. And if you find yourself wondering just what a dragon is, that’s the right question.  “Dragons are mythical and abstract,” explains Strickland, “mythic embodiments of abstract power, from the snake in Eden, to devouring sea monsters, to the latest special FX apocalyptic creation from Hollywood. The dragon hunt that matters for me is tracking the beast as it slips, dizzyingly, from real to configurational (electronically generated) space, always aware that where we live, in either case, is the belly of this beast.” *Photograph courtesy of Star Black (copyright).

We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies.  Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with Dan Stone about his thoughtful work analyzing and critiquing the current state of our knowledge of the subject. This week is a natural follow-on to that interview.  Peter Hayes and John Roth have edited a remarkable compilation of essays about the Holocaust.  The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010) surveys the field, but does so in a significantly different way than Stone.   Hayes and Roth have recruited dozens of the brightest young researchers to offer a summary of and reflection on what we now know about many of the most important topics in Holocaust Studies.  Each entry is relatively short (12-15 pages) and packed with information useful to newcomers and veterans alike.  Each offers some sense of the trajectory of our knowledge and understanding of the topic.  Almost all are immensely readable.   If you are looking to get a comprehensive understanding of the discipline or simply trying to brush up on a specific subject, this is a wonderful resource.  And, unusually for reference books, it is priced at a level that allows individuals  to add it to their personal libraries. John, Peter and I had a great conversation.  I hope you enjoy the interview.

What is the nature of secularization? How distant are we from the magical world of the past? Perhaps, we are not as far as many people think. In the fascinating new book, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012), we witness some of the discursive practices formulating the Christian myth of disenchantment. Robert Yelle, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Memphis, aims to pull up some of the religious roots of secularism by highlighting the Christian dimensions of colonialism. He achieves this through an examination of colonial British attitudes toward Hinduism and delineates several Protestant projects that assert an ideal monotheism. British colonial discourse in India was integrally tied to religious reform and located false belief in linguistic diversity. Verbal idolatry was specifically addressed through efforts of codification and transliteration. Overall, Yelle’s work on British critiques of South Asian mythological, ritual, linguistic, and legal traditions offer new insights on modernity, secularization, religious literalism, and colonialism. We also discussed The Language of Disenchantment is reflective of Yelle’s interest in semiotics, which he addressed more explicitly in another new book, Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (Bloomsbury, 2013). In our conversation we discussed Orientalism, Modernity, Hindu mythology, literary versus oral cultures, Max Muller, magical dimension of ritual, Christian critiques of Jewish law, scripturalism, mantras, and print culture.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Buddhist Studies] For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origination) as something fearful to be escaped. Many scholars, especially recently, have told this story of the transition from pre-modern to modern Buddhism,  but often with no other purpose than to dismiss modern Buddhism as inauthentic, a departure from the “real” Buddhism of ritual chanting and sacred relics. David McMahan‘s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008) tells the story of Buddhist modernism in a balanced way, one that acknowledges its novelty yet remains sympathetic to its concerns and interests. McMahan, who is a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College, theorizes not only Buddhism but also modernity. Using Charles Taylor’s account of modern life, he explores the forces that changed Buddhism in recent centuries. McMahan discusses typically cited factors (e.g., the emphasis on meditation, the belief in science), but also seldom mentioned (though important) elements of Buddhist modernism like affirmations of nature, interdependence, and everyday life.  

In 476 CE, according to the chronology most of us learned in school, the Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages began. That’s how textbook chronologies work: one day you’re studying the Romans, and next day you’re deep in early feudal Europe, as if a fairy godmother had waved a magic wand. Reality is more complex. The Fall of Rome affected only the western territories of that great world power, which had in fact been weakening for some time. The Eastern Roman Empire—later known as Byzantium or the Byzantine Empire—survived for another thousand years. Recast under Turkish rule as the Ottoman Empire, it lasted five hundred years more. But the Eastern Roman Empire endured shocks and fissures of its own, and its survival was far from assured. Under the rule of Emperor Justinian I and his empress, Theodora, it entered a crucial phase. Justinian began life as a swineherd, Theodora as a bear keeper’s daughter, yet they fought their way to the pinnacle of power in Constantinople and, once there, established a new set of governing principles that for a while almost restored the empire that Rome had lost. In The Eagle and the Swan (Erudition Digital, 2013), Carol Strickland  traces the first part of Justinian’s and Theodora’s journey. Listen in as she takes us through the circuses, streets, brothels, monasteries, and churches of early sixth-century Byzantium, all the way to the imperial court.

Isaac Martin is the author of Rich People’s Movement: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford UP 2013). He is professor of sociology at University of California, San Diego. Martin’s deep archival research into several waves of conservative activism results in a very readable and important scholarly contribution to the literature on social movements, interest groups, and public policy. The sweep of the book is broad, covering movements across over a hundred years of US history. From JA Arnold to Vivien Kellems to Grover Norquist today, Martin combines a historian’s attention to detail with a social scientist’s background in public policy theory and methods. He also uncovers significant links between social movements, explaining how Grover Norquist – and his Americans for Tax Reform —  is not just an ideological off-spring of the estate tax opponents of the early 20th century, but also indebted to the tactical innovations of the 19th-century Populist Movement. Paradoxically, grass roots strategies, rather than traditional lobbying, have been at the center of conservative appeals to lower a variety of taxes on the rich.

In global narratives of modern legal history, Asia tends to fall short relative to Europe and the US. According to these narratives, while individuals in the West enjoyed political participation and protection, people in Japan did not, and this was due largely to the absence of a distinction between public & private law. In Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Darryl E. Flaherty upends this narrative in a fascinating story of nineteenth century legal culture in Edo Japan. Early nineteenth-century Edo society already had a vibrant legal culture of engaged private practitioners, and by the late century they had paved the way for a codification of public and private law, and a transformation in the social meaning of law in Japan. Flaherty guides readers through the spaces of private legal practice in pre-Meiji society, and the careers of individual legal advocates who practiced in the midst of a transforming legal landscape in the early Meiji period and worked to reconcile their notions of morality and law. The book traces the formation of a legal profession in the nineteenth century, the ways that associations of legal advocates paved the way for the first political parties, and the emergence of the first private universities and law schools in Japan. It is a carefully wrought story that informs both the history of Japan and the global history of law. Enjoy!

What if there was an instruction manual for television? Not just for the casual consumer, but for college students interested in learning about the culture of television, written by some of the field’s top scholars? In How to Watch Television (New York University Press, 2013), editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell have put together a collection of 40 original essays from some of today’s top scholars on television culture. Each essay focuses on a single television show, and each is an example of how to practice media criticism on an academic level. Thompson, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and Mittell, professor at Middlebury College, also contributed essays to the collection. As the authors explain: “This book, the essays inside it, and the critical methods the authors employ, all seek to expand the ways you think about television.”

What do most Americans know about Andrew Jackson, apart from that he’s on the $20 bill and that he apparently had great hair? Probably not much. Maybe that he was a two-term president who pioneered the aggressive use of the powers of that office, and that he steadfastly opposed the sectionalizing, states-rights tendencies of the South Carolina nullifiers. In short, most of the conventional image of Andrew Jackson situates him firmly as an American. Mark Cheathem‘s new biography Andrew Jackson, Southerner (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) reminds us that Jackson was born and raised in the South, became a wildly successful plantation owner there, and based his formidable political coalition in the American Southwest. Moreover, many of the signal events of Jackson’s presidency — Indian removal, the Eaton Affair (sometimes called the “Petticoat Affair”), and his war against the “Monster Bank” are only fully understandable when Jackson’s southern background is accounted for. Mark Cheathem’s book will ensure that we will never again take Jackson’s southern roots for granted.

In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In exchange for Schleyer, the RAF demanded the release of its imprisoned leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. Those months in 1977 following the abduction of Schleyer are often referred to as the German Autumn, and they represent a crescendo of leftist political violence that had its origins, in some ways, almost a decade before. Terror prompted a crisis in the 70s for the West German government and German democracy. Of course, 1977 was not the first time in history that a German republic had been tested by a group of radicals intending to bring it down. That had already happened in the 1930s. But 1977 turned out very differently than 1933—when the Nazis “captured” power in a profoundly embattled and dysfunctional democracy. In fact, as Karrin Hanshew argues in her fascinating book, “West Germany’s terrorist crisis helped to usher in the relatively stable civil society that still defines Germany today. Karrin Hanshew‘s new book Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is, at once, a political history of the FRG, a history of democracy, a history of political theory in the abstract and in action, and a history of social movements, among many other things. I learned so much from it and I think that you will too.