Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world’s poorest regions.

In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State’s green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafés and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.

Speculative fiction imagines impossible futures and alternative pasts, alien species and angelic monsters, technological marvels and magical solutions. In recent years, however, many in its fandoms have protested the inclusion of non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual characters as betrayals of their beloved media for the sake of “wokeness.” Nostalgic Futures: The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms examines how contemporary fan controversies— particularly those surrounding gender, race, and sexuality in speculative fiction media—intersect with reactionary movements within and beyond fandom. This book explores how the nostalgic fantasies of fans and far-right movements contribute to broader reactionary discourses, shaping not only the past they long for but the future they fear. From the Hugo Awards and PuppyGate to Star Wars’ #NotMyJedi to Mass Effect and The Last of Us boycotts, Nostalgic Futures reveals how speculative fiction fandom has become a site of contestation over our visions of the past, present, and future.

Between 1890 and 1893, Ignaty Potapenko published a number of works in which he presented the Russian intelligentsia with a new role model, the “mediocre, but common-sensical man,” whose diligence and steady devotion to the improvement of society are depicted as being more productive than the reckless heroism of the regime’s most outspoken, and sometimes violent, intellectual opponents. Not a Hero introduces the twenty-first-century reader to an important debate of the prerevolutionary period, a debate that is still relevant today: how to bring about social change within an oppressive and ossified political system without resorting to violence.

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week

A virulent strain of antifeminism is thriving online that treats women’s empowerment as a mortal threat to men and to the integrity of Western civilization. Its proponents cite ancient Greek and Latin texts to support their claims—from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius—arguing that they articulate a model of masculinity that sustained generations but is now under siege. Not All Dead White Men reveals that some of the most controversial and consequential debates about the legacy of the ancients are raging not in universities but online.

“A chilling account of trolling, misogyny, racism, and bad history proliferated online by the Alt-Right… Zuckerberg makes a persuasive case for why we need a new, more critical, and less comfortable relationship between the ancient and modern worlds in this important and very timely book.”
—Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey

“Explores how ideas about Ancient Greece and Rome are used and misused by antifeminist thinkers today.”
—Time

“Zuckerberg presciently analyzes these communities’…embrace of stoicism as a self-help tool to gain confidence, jobs, and girlfriends. Their adoration of men like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ovid…is founded in a limited and distorted interpretation of ancient philosophy…lending heft and authority to sexism and abuse.”
—The Nation

“Traces the application—and misapplication—of classical authors and texts in online communities that see feminism as a threat.”
—Bitch Media

“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.”
—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal

“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”
—George Soros

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice.

Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality.

“Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse… Sure to provoke a wider discussion.”
—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal

“A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana… Consistently bracing.”
—Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books

“Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal… [A] tour de force.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

In the late 1990s Angels in America,Tony Kushner’s epic play about homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan era, toured the country, inspiring protests in a handful of cities while others received it warmly. Why do people fight over some works of art but not others? Not Here, Not Now, Not That! examines a wide range of controversies over films, books, paintings, sculptures, clothing, music, and television in dozens of cities across the country to find out what turns personal offense into public protest. 

What Steven J. Tepper discovers is that these protests are always deeply rooted in local concerns. Furthermore, they are essential to the process of working out our differences in a civil society. To explore the local nature of public protests in detail, Tepper analyzes cases in seventy-one cities, including an in-depth look at Atlanta in the late 1990s, finding that debates there over memorials, public artworks, books, and parades served as a way for Atlantans to develop a vision of the future at a time of rapid growth and change.

Eschewing simplistic narratives that reduce public protests to political maneuvering, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! at last provides the social context necessary to fully understand this fascinating phenomenon.

How abolitionist businesses marshaled intense moral outrage over slavery to shape a new ethics of international commerce.

“East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism.

Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world. Antislavery affected business operations, as companies in West Africa, including the British firm Macaulay & Babington and the American partnership of Brown & Ives, developed new tactics in order to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Everill explores how the dilemmas of conducting ethical commerce reshaped the larger moral discourse surrounding production and consumption, influencing how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. But ethical commerce was not without its ironies; the search for supplies of goods “not made by slaves”—including East India sugar—expanded the reach of colonial empires in the relentless pursuit of cheap but “free” labor.

Not Made by Slaves illuminates the early years of global consumer society, while placing the politics of antislavery firmly in the history of capitalism. It is also a stark reminder that the struggle to ensure fair trade and labor conditions continues.

“Impressive…[Readers] will be rewarded with greater understanding of historical developments that changed the relationship between consumers and producers in a global economy in ways that reverberate to this day.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Everill repositions West Africa as central to the broader Atlantic story of 18th and 19th century economic morality, its relationship with commercial ethics, and the expansion of capitalism.”
—Financial Times

“Offers a penetrating new perspective on abolition in the British Empire by spotlighting a particular cast of characters: the commercial abolitionists in West Africa who fashioned a consumer-focused, business-friendly antislavery ethics. These figures sought to prove the moral and economic superiority of non-slave labor while profiting from the transition away from slavery…Impressive.”
—Jacobin

“East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words inscribed on a sugar bowl, nineteenth-century consumers were reminded of their power to change the global economy. Determined to strike at the heart of the slave trade, abolitionist businesses throughout the Atlantic used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to make the case for ethical capitalism.

Consumers became the moral compass of capitalism as companies in West Africa, including Macaulay & Babington and Brown & Ives, developed clever new tactics to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Yet ethical trade was not without its problems. The search for goods “not made by slaves” unwittingly expanded the reach of colonial enterprises in the relentless pursuit of cheap labor. Not Made by Slaves captures the moral dilemmas roiling the early years of global consumer society and is a stark reminder of the unintended consequences of relying on consumer self-interest to transform global capitalism.

The mystery of how an ordinary Minnesota girl came to be, briefly, one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States

Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone’s child, an average American whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor’s daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals like Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah) in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a “good girl” like Camilla become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall’s life.

Camilla’s childhood in a tight-knit religious family was marred by loss and grief as, one after another, her three siblings died. Her path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family featured years as an artist and activist—in welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, culminating in a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla’s bewildering transformation from a “gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy” young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

During this time of mounting unrest and violence, Camilla Hall’s story is of urgent interest for what it reveals about the forces of radicalization. But as Hanel ventures ever further into Camilla’s past, searching out the critical points where character and cause might intersect, her book becomes an intriguing, disturbing, and ultimately deeply moving journey into the dark side of America’s promise.

A sweeping look at black athletes through the lens of the black power protests at the Mexico City Olympics—now in paperback!

Jesse Owens. Muhammad Ali. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. All are iconic black athletes, as are Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the African American track and field medalists who raised black-gloved fists on the victory dais at the Mexico City Olympics and brought the roiling American racial politics of the late 1960s to a worldwide television audience. But few of those viewers fully realized what had led to this demonstration—events that included the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., uprisings in American cities, student protests around the world, the rise of the Black Power movement, and decolonization and apartheid in Africa.

In a compelling meditation on the ideas that shape our lives, one of the world’s most provocative and creative philosophers explains how his eccentric early years influenced his lifelong critique of liberalism.

Liberalism is so amorphous and pervasive that for most people in the West it is background noise, the natural state of affairs. But there are nooks and crannies in every society where the prevailing winds don’t blow. Raymond Geuss grew up some distance from the cultural mainstream and recounts here the unusual perspective he absorbed: one in which liberal capitalism was synonymous with moral emptiness and political complacency.

Not Thinking like a Liberal is a concise tour of diverse intellectual currents—from the Counter-Reformation and communism to pragmatism and critical theory—that shaped Geuss’s skeptical stance toward liberalism. The bright young son of a deeply Catholic steelworker, Geuss was admitted in 1959 to an unusual boarding school on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Outside was Eisenhower’s America. Inside Geuss was schooled by Hungarian priests who tried to immunize students against the twin dangers of oppressive communism and vapid liberal capitalism. From there Geuss went on to university in New York in the early days of the Vietnam War and to West Germany, where critical theory was experiencing a major revival.

This is not a repeatable journey. In tracing it, Geuss reminds us of the futility of abstracting lessons from context and of seeking a universal view from nowhere. At the same time, he examines the rise and fall of major political theories of the past sixty years. An incisive thinker attuned to both the history and the future of ideas, Geuss looks beyond the horrors of authoritarianism and the shallow freedom of liberalism to glimpse a world of genuinely new possibilities.

“An instant classic….an intellectual feast and an existential feat!” —Cornel West

“By intertwining autobiography and conceptual critique, Geuss underlines the idea that in order to gain a critical perspective on liberalism, it is necessary to become almost bilingual: able to speak the language of liberalism while also becoming fluent in the vocabulary of its critique.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Fascinating…deserves to be a classic. It is at once relatable and profound, humane and auspicious. In his best moments, Geuss offers his own life as a challenge to readers to think differently and more imaginatively.”—Matt McManus, Jacobin

“[Geuss’s] broad, skeptical account of human powers and interests that is aimed at challenging the hubris of abstract theorizers, is compelling. His account of the unusual formation of his own intellectual and political sensibility is both moving and illuminating.”—Richard Eldridge, Los Angeles Review of Books

Liberalism is so amorphous and pervasive that for many people it is background noise. But there are nooks and crannies in every society where the prevailing winds don’t blow. Raymond Geuss grew up some distance from the cultural mainstream and recounts here the unusual perspective he absorbed: one in which liberal capitalism was synonymous with moral emptiness and political complacency.

The bright son of a Catholic steelworker, Geuss was admitted in 1959 to an unusual boarding school on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where Hungarian priests sought to immunize students against the twin dangers of oppressive communism and vapid liberal capitalism. From there he went on to university in the early days of the Vietnam War and to West Germany, where critical theory was experiencing a major revival. An incisive thinker, Geuss looks beyond the horrors of authoritarianism and the shallow freedom of liberalism to glimpse a world of genuinely new possibilities.

But the majority of women who struggle with fertility avoid treatment. The women whose interviews appear in Not Trying belong to this majority. Their attitudes vary and may change as their life circumstances evolve. Some support the prevailing cultural narrative that women are meant to be mothers and refuse to see themselves as childfree by choice. Most of these women, who come from a wider range of social backgrounds than most researchers have studied, experience deep ambivalence about motherhood and non-motherhood, never actually choosing either path. They prefer to let life unfold, an attitude that seems to reduce anxiety about not conforming to social expectations.

John H. Reagan was one of the most important figures in Texas history; this was the first biography of him to be published. Reagan, who was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1818, came to Texas twenty-one years later—while Texas was still a republic—and stayed to play many major roles in its later economic and political development.

In this excellent biography, Ben H. Procter not only re-creates for us the character of the man, with his forthright integrity and his boundless desire for knowledge, but also places him against the background of the time in which he lived. In vivid language Procter portrays the violence and vigor of pioneer life, the excitement of frontier politics, the dedication, devotion, enthusiasm, and—ultimately—despair of the Civil War, and the bitterness of the struggle with the railroad tycoons and their gargantuan monopolies. Spanning as it does the Republic of Texas, early statehood, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and the era of the "robber barons," the story of John H. Reagan encompasses a panoramic sweep of mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States history.

Throughout his long life, respect came to Reagan almost as a matter of course. The forceful strength of his personality made an impression few people could ignore. From the day when Colonel Durst hired the young Reagan as a tutor for his children, exclaiming, "This man is a scholar," until the day some fifty years later when Governor Hogg persuaded him to leave the U.S. Senate to become chairman of the new Railroad Commission because the Commission "must be above reproach," his extraordinary character and ability were recognized. In fact, the perceptive intelligence that made him examine all aspects of a situation, and the sturdy integrity and courage that made it impossible for him to abandon a position he believed to be right simply because it was for the moment unpopular, frequently gave him the appearance of a prophet. Although this "prophetic gift" occasionally led to interludes of public disfavor, Reagan was accorded honor, even in his own land—and in later years veneration—that any prophet might envy.

The zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened—yet—but zombies are all over popular culture. From movies and TV shows to video games and zombie walks, the undead stalk through our collective fantasies. What is it about zombies that exerts such a powerful fascination? In Not Your Average Zombie, Chera Kee offers an innovative answer by looking at zombies that don’t conform to the stereotypes of mindless slaves or flesh-eating cannibals. Zombies who think, who speak, and who feel love can be sympathetic and even politically powerful, she asserts.

Kee analyzes zombies in popular culture from 1930s depictions of zombies in voodoo rituals to contemporary film and television, comic books, video games, and fan practices such as zombie walks. She discusses how the zombie has embodied our fears of losing the self through slavery and cannibalism and shows how “extra-ordinary” zombies defy that loss of free will by refusing to be dehumanized. By challenging their masters, falling in love, and leading rebellions, “extra-ordinary” zombies become figures of liberation and resistance. Kee also thoroughly investigates how representations of racial and gendered identities in zombie texts offer opportunities for living people to gain agency over their lives. Not Your Average Zombie thus deepens and broadens our understanding of how media producers and consumers take up and use these undead figures to make political interventions in the world of the living.

The publication of the first volumes of Notable American Women in 1971 was a watershed event in women's history. By uncovering and documenting the enormous contributions that women had made--previously overlooked or underappreciated--this important reference work changed the way historians thought and wrote about American history.

This latest volume brings the project up to date, with entries on almost 500 women whose death dates fall between January 1, 1976, and December 31, 1999. The era they shared coincides with the great expansion of opportunities for women in the twentieth century. You will find here stars of the golden ages of radio, film, dance, and television; scientists and scholars; politicians and entrepreneurs; authors and aviators; civil rights activists and religious leaders; Native American craftspeople and world-renowned artists. Women from a broad spectrum of ethnic, class, political, religious, and sexual identities are all acknowledged.

For each subject, Notable American Women offers a substantial interpretive biographical essay by a distinguished authority that integrates the woman's personal life with her professional achievements set in the context of larger historical developments.

This volume will be an indispensable reference for students and scholars of women's history and for anyone interested in the rich and varied lives led by distinguished American women.

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2000
Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association Book Award, the Texas Old Missions and Fort Restoration Association and the Texas Catholic Historical Society, 2001

The Spanish colonial era in Texas (1528-1821) continues to emerge from the shadowy past with every new archaeological and historical discovery. In this book, years of archival sleuthing by Donald E. Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph now reveal the real human beings behind the legendary figures who discovered, explored, and settled Spanish Texas.

By combining dramatic, real-life incidents, biographical sketches, and historical background, the authors bring to life these famous (and sometimes infamous) men of Spanish Texas:

• Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
• Alonso de León
• Francisco Hidalgo
• Louis Juchereau de St. Denis
• Antonio Margil
• The Marqués de Aguayo
• Pedro de Rivera
• Felipe de Rábago
• José de Escandón
• Athanase de Mézières
• The Marqués de Rubí
• Antonio Gil Ibarvo
• Domingo Cabello
• José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara
• Joaquín de Arredondo

The authors also devote a chapter to the women of Spanish Texas, drawing on scarce historical clues to tell the stories of both well-known and previously unknown Tejana, Indian, and African women.

The ending of absolute, centralized monarchy and the beginning of political combat between nobles and commoners make the years 1787 to 1788 the first stage of the French Revolution. In a detailed examination of this critical transition, Vivian Gruder examines how the French people became engaged in a movement of opposition that culminated in demands for the public's role in government.

Gruder traces the growing involvement of the French people in the public issues of the day, leading to increased politicization. The debates of the Assembly of Notables in early 1787 aroused public support against the monarchy and in late 1788 confirmed public opposition to the nobility. The media--including newspapers and newsletters, pamphlets, literary societies, songs, iconography, and festive activities--disseminated messages of opposition and gave voice to popular aspirations for change. At hundreds of community assemblies throughout France in late 1788, people showed remarkable astuteness about such political issues as voting and representation and demonstrated a capacity for mobilization.

The Notables and the Nation contributes to a renewed interest in the political origins of the French Revolution. It argues that a "bourgeois" revolution did take place as a movement for political aspirations, and invites us to witness the birth of popular representative government.

Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion--his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War--as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control.

Edited and annotated by Robert Faggen, the notebooks are cross-referenced to mark thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings.

When the Adjutant General's Office published Raphael Thian's "notes" on U.S. military geography in 1880, it produced an invaluable research tool for generations of military historians to come. In this single documented reference volume, Chief Clerk Thian traced the confusing mutations through which the divisions, departments, and districts of the Army's command had evolved since 1813.

The volume is divided into three parts, beginning with the names of the United States Army Continental Commands, the date and authority for their creation, location of the headquarters, geographical changes and discontinuances, and other details including the geographical boundaries embracing each division, department, and district. Part II is filled with background information on states and territories, and Part III lists the maps contained in The Military Atlas of the United States.

The Addenda to this edition expand and update Thian's work. Notes made by Francis B. Heitman to keep his personal copy current are included, as is the Memorandum published by the government in 1906. This addition lists all changes from 1898 through 1905.

To succeed in law, business, education, government, health care, and many other fields, it is becoming increasingly important to distinguish yourself as a savvy communicator. Social media has only accelerated the ways in which we all must learn to use our words to connect, compete, and create. There are features of the English language, however, that many of us haven’t taken full advantage of yet. Notes on Nuance is designed to help change that.

Drawing on a diverse collection of authors—from novelists to physicists, from ancient Greek historians to modern-day CEOs—it reveals the hidden mechanics that skilled writers use to add style and sophistication to their sentences and slogans. It’s the perfect resource for people who are looking to do more with their written words.

This book includes materials from a popular course called “Good with Words: Writing and Editing” that Professor Patrick Barry created at both the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. An online version of that course is now available through the educational platform Coursera.

“These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function.” This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the process of design.

In the first part of the book, Christopher Alexander discusses the process by which a form is adapted to the context of human needs and demands that has called it into being. He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional un-self-conscious cultures, molded not by designers but by the slow pattern of changes within tradition, are so beautifully organized and adapted. When the designer, in our own self-conscious culture, is called on to create a form that is adapted to its context he is unsuccessful, because the preconceived categories out of which he builds his picture of the problem do not correspond to the inherent components of the problem, and therefore lead only to the arbitrariness, willfulness, and lack of understanding which plague the design of modern buildings and modern cities.

In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct.

The mathematics underlying this method, based mainly on set theory, is fully developed in a long appendix. Another appendix demonstrates the application of the method to the design of an Indian village.

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week

Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions, analyzing what they signify and how.

Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, Butler extends her theory of performativity to argue that precarity—the destruction of the conditions of livability—has been a galvanizing force and theme in today’s highly visible protests.

“Butler’s book is everything that a book about our planet in the 21st century should be. It does not turn its back on the circumstances of the material world or give any succour to those who wish to view the present (and the future) through the lens of fantasies about the transformative possibilities offered by conventional politics Butler demonstrates a clear engagement with an aspect of the world that is becoming in many political contexts almost illicit to discuss: the idea that capitalism, certainly in its neoliberal form, is failing to provide a liveable life for the majority of human beings.”
—Mary Evans, Times Higher Education

“A heady immersion into the thought of one of today’s most profound philosophers of action…This is a call for a truly transformative politics, and its relevance to the fraught struggles taking place in today’s streets and public spaces around the world cannot be denied.”
—Hans Rollman, PopMatters

Updated and revised edition
    As every student quickly learns, merely sitting through a class and paying attention is usually not sufficient to ensure good grades. The proper taking of good notes is essential. Note-Taking Made Easy tells why the student should take his or her own notes (rather than buying them or taping lectures), and tells exactly how to determine what is worth noting, whether during a lecture, classroom discussion, even from a book or during a meeting.
     The authors describe the two most successful methods of organizing notes—outlining and patterning—and provide shortcuts to really make note-taking easy, from shorthand devices to abbreviations.
     Special sections are devoted to taking notes from texts, fiction as well as nonfiction, and handling charts, graphs, and photos. A final chapter shows how to tie together notes from various sources.

This STUDY SMART reference guide series, designed for students from junior high school through lifelong learning programs, teaches skills for research and note-taking, presents strategies for test-taking and studying, provides exercises to improve spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, and reveals secrets for putting these skills together in great essays.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction
A New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” Selection

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations.

“[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War—and which Vietnamese call the American War…As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift—wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity—to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.”
—Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times

“In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war…[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.”
—Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review

“Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Featuring new and revised recipes, photos, and bêtes noires, this culminating book of an illustrious career presents the favorite dishes and personal stories of the world’s foremost authority on traditional Mexican cooking and one of its most-celebrated food writers

Diana Kennedy is the world’s preeminent authority on authentic Mexican cooking and one of its best-known food writers. Renowned for her uncompromising insistence on using the correct local ingredients and preparation techniques, she has taught generations of cooks how to prepare traditional dishes from the villages of Mexico, and in doing so, has documented and helped preserve the country’s amazingly diverse and rich foodways. Kennedy’s own meals for guests are often Mexican, but she also indulges herself and close friends with the nostalgic foods in Nothing Fancy.

This acclaimed cookbook—now expanded with new and revised recipes, additional commentary, photos, and reminiscences—reveals Kennedy’s passion for simpler, soul-satisfying food, from the favorite dishes of her British childhood (including a technique for making clotted cream that actually works) to rare recipes from Ukraine, Norway, France, and other outposts. In her inimitable style, Kennedy discusses her addictions—everything from good butter, cream, and lard to cold-smoked salmon, Seville orange marmalade, black truffle shavings, escamoles (ant eggs), and proper croissants—as well as her bêtes noires—kosher salt, nonfat dairy products, cassia “cinnamon,” botoxed turkeys, and nonstick pans and baking sprays, among them. And look out for the ire she unleashes on “cookbookese,” genetically modified foods, plastic, and unecological kitchen practices! The culminating work of an illustrious career, Nothing Fancy is an irreplaceable opportunity to spend time in the kitchen with Diana Kennedy, listening to the stories she has collected and making the food she has loved over a long lifetime of cooking.

Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.

How Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world
 

While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim. 

Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West. 

Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force. 

A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements

 

Although “mid-century modern” has evolved into a highly popular and ubiquitous architectural style, this term obscures the varied perspectives and approaches of its original practitioners. In Nothing Permanent, Todd Cronan displaces generalizations with a nuanced intellectual history of architectural innovation in California between 1920 and 1970, uncovering the conflicting intentions that would go on to reshape the future of American domestic life.

Focusing on four primary figures—R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames—Nothing Permanent demonstrates how this prolific era of modern architecture in California, rather than constituting a homogenous movement, was propelled by disparate approaches and aims. Exemplified by the twin pillars of Schindler and Neutra and their respective ideological factions, these two groups of architects represent opposing poles of architectural intentionality, embodying divergent views about the dynamic between interior and exterior, the idea of permanence, and the extent to which architects could exercise control over the inhabitants of their structures.

Looking past California modernism’s surface-level idealization in present-day style guides, home decor publications, films, and television shows, Nothing Permanent details the intellectual, aesthetic, and practical debates that lie at the roots of this complex architectural moment. Extracting this period from its diffusion into visual culture, Cronan argues that mid-century architecture in California raised questions about the meaning of architecture and design that remain urgent today.

Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888-1965) was one of America's mostdistinguished and influential historians. The basis of his conception of history, as he put it in anote found among his papers, isthat "nothing stands still," Themoral he drew from this was theneed for "a liberal, flexible attitude" on the part of both the historian and the citizen.

This volume, with an introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., brings together eleven ofProfessor Schlesinger's essays notpreviously collected in bookform. Written between 1929 and1965, they fall into two sections--"The Scholar," which includesessays dealing with historicalquestions, and "The Citizen,"which includes those dealingwith public affairs. Illustratingthe wide range of ProfessorSchlesinger's professional andhumane interests, these essaysset forth some of his views on thenature of the historical enterprise and record his own involvement in and hopes forAmerican democracy.

Advancing asexuality studies in new, queer directions—beyond identity and beyond the human


We’ve all seen the page that states “this page intentionally left blank” or heard an authority figure declare “nothing to see here, folks,” and yet the so-called blank page has writing on it, and folks definitely have something to see. From the entry point of these and other paradoxical declarations of absence, KJ Cerankowski applies the aesthetics of asexuality to theorize silences, nothings, and emptiness. In the process, he explores new ways of making meaning out of the supposedly meaningless.

Throughout this investigation into absences, Cerankowski moves intuitively and idiosyncratically, taking readers along a series of waypoints that include Border, the acclaimed horror film about a customs officer who can smell fear; Jenny Hval’s discomfiting novel Paradise Rot; and disabled artist Finnegan Shannon’s iconic benches. Experimental in form as well as content, Nothing Wanting offers an innovative and mischievous reading experience that plays with structural elements like redaction, erasure, supertext, and repetition. With a deeply anticapitalist, anticolonial motivating ideology, it pushes to the limits of language, subverting commonplace notions of books, knowledge, and what it is to be human.

Moving beyond identity and representation, Nothing Wanting is playful, fascinating, and provocative as it conceives asexuality as additive and expansive rather than lacking. As it reveals the vibrant lifeworlds that hum in silences and thrum in stillnesses, Nothing Wanting pivots from the imposition of wanting nothing to the craving of nothing wanting: satisfied, yet always yearning for more worlds of thriving—for everything and everyone.

Much of the writing in film studies published today can be understood as genre criticism, broadly speaking. And even before film studies emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s, cultural observers within and beyond the academy were writing about genre films and making fascinating attempts to understand their conventions and how they speak to, for, and about the culture that produces them. While this early writing on genre film was often unsystematic, impressionistic, journalistic, and judgmental, it nonetheless produced insights that remain relevant and valuable today.

Notions of Genre gathers the most important early writing on film genre and genre films published between 1945 and 1969. It includes articles by such notable critics as Susan Sontag, Dwight Macdonald, Siegfried Kracauer, James Agee, André Bazin, Robert Warshow, and Claude Chabrol, as well as essays by scholars in academic disciplines such as history, sociology, and theater. Their writings address major issues in genre studies, including definition, representation, ideology, audiences, and industry practices, across genres ranging from comedy and westerns to horror, science fiction, fantasy, gangster films, and thrillers. The only single-volume source for this early writing on genre films, Notions of Genre will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of film genre, film history, film theory, cultural studies, and popular culture.

In this highly topical volume, a group of distinguished scholars explore various aspects of nationalism theory and shed light on the current thinking in this area of great contemporary importance. Such topics as primordialism, institutional plurality in multi-ethnic states, historical problems of nationalism, and the importance of local-level understanding in dealing with such problems, are examined with clarity and vision.

Together the essays provide a valuable insight into an intricate debate which is of crucial relevance to the understanding of contemporary politics not only in Central Europe but in the world at large.

The real story behind the Nushawn Williams case: media distortions, judicial contortions, ruined lives

In the fall of 1997, public authorities in Chautauqua County, New York, were granted an exception to the state’s HIV confidentiality law—and released Nushawn Williams’s name and picture to the press, deeming him a “public health threat,” the source of a “near epidemic” of HIV transmission. Williams, who is HIV-positive, had unprotected sex with many young women and girls and infected at least nine of them.

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.

Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature, Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but “artist practitioners,” men and women who feel “hot love” for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.

Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliché—some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages.