Blackwell Publishing
The eastern Mediterranean in the age of Ramesses II.
So successful was Ramesses II's self-aggrandizement program, reports Van de Meiroop (Ancient Near Eastern studies, U. of Oxford), that he is today one of the best known people of the ancient world. The focus here, however, is not the pharaoh himself, but the world of 1279 BC that he had to deal with. The topics include primary states, political organizations and social structure, food and drink, metals, trade, and cultures in contact. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Economic and legal issues in intellectual property.
Part of the Surveys of Recent Research in Economics series, this volume's 10 essays examining a range of economic and legal issues connected to the question of intellectual property rights. Topics include the legal framework for the calculation of patent infringement damages in the United States; copyright and alternative incentives for music creators; the economic theory of trademark law; intellectual property and indigenous knowledge; university research, intellectual property rights, and European innovation systems; and intellectual property litigation activity in the United States. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The emotional organization; passions and power.
Fineman (organizational behavior, U. of Bath, UK) collects 13 essays on emotion in organizations and the implications for social identity, from the standpoint that emotions are social resources or commodities and that they are produced through interpersonal work that is conditioned by culture and the social rules that mandate what is appropriate to feel and express. Contributors discuss how emotion is produced and reproduced by structural and social conditions. They explore different emotional arenas — hospitals, prisons, crisis work with rape victims, service jobs in the US, job centers in the UK, outsourced call centers, website work, telecommuting, and management consultancy — and gender, peer pressure, abuse, and humor, for instance. The second part of the volume addresses the emotionalization of identity, with essays on corporate character, gender and the emotion politics of emotional intelligence, transnationalization, and the effect of workplace aesthetics. Contributors are from Europe, the US, and Australia and work in management, business, communication, psychology, sociology, education, and other fields. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Employment law, 2d ed.
Wolkinson (labor and industrial relations, Michigan State U.) gives students of employment law and human resource management a basic understanding of the relevant statutes, judicial decisions, executive orders and administrative policies that affect the basic rights of managers and workers. He addresses equal employment opportunity law, including evidence and proof in such cases, gender and leave issues and the employment of the disabled, health and safety issues, including workers' compensation and new developments in the law of unjust discharge, employee privacy and drug testing. This edition has been extensively updated and now includes such information as the EEOC's program for the mediation of EEO disputes and cases illustrating the continued application of disparate treatment and disparate impact analysis. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The end of work; theological critiques of capitalism.
Most of the many theological critiques of capitalism on the street these days focus on features of late capitalism, such as global economy, outsourcing, increasing income and wealth gap, spiraling debt, and privatization, says Hughes, and work is definitely not one of them. However, he considers writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when people admitting working for a living, and looks particularly at Marx and the British Romantics, whose critiques of capitalist labor are sensitive to the cultural and aesthetic concerns that have risen during recent years. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Environmental anthropology; a historical reader.
The anthology presents 24 readings from the whole history of anthropology for an introductory course in environmental anthropology. The recent popularity of the sub-discipline tends to be driven by current crises, so the material has been selected to provide both historical and theoretical background. They cover the nature-culture dichotomy, ecology and social organization, methodological challenges and debates, the politics of natural resources and the environment, and knowing the environment. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Ethics in finance, 2d ed.
Boatright (business ethics and management, Loyola U. Chicago) provides a volume on finance ethics, with a focus on issues in financial services and markets and investment decisions. This edition contains discussions of conflict of interest (replacing the section on philosophical ethics), soft-dollar brokerage, the problems of market timing, late trading in mutual funds, and the financial theory of the firm. Discussion of the duties of fiduciaries and agents has been expanded, as has the section on bankruptcy, which now covers personal and corporate types. The chapter on the theory of the firm has been rewritten. The book is aimed at students of finance and business ethics and anyone involved in financial activities. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Europe in the global age.
Giddens unveils a third and more personal volume to emerge from a pan-European research project he took part in. Formed in 2005, it was charged with analyzing the state of health of the European social model and with suggesting reforms that might be made. His topics include change and innovation in European, from negative to positive welfare, and lifestyle change. Distributed in the US by Blackwell Publishing. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Food & philosophy; eat, think, and be merry.
Allhoff (philosophy, Western Michigan U.) and Monroe (Applied Ethics Institute, St. Petersburg College), a former chef, restaurant consultant, and caterer, compile 19 essays by philosophers, culinary professionals, food critics, sociologists, and anthropologists from the US, Canada, Italy, and Australia (including an afterword from the New Yorker by Woody Allen), who connect ideas about what we eat to philosophical concerns. They address topics such as food in culture and society, taste and food criticism, edible art and aesthetics, eating and ethics, and the views of chefs about ideas such as food and sensuality and the duties related to home cooking. Discussions run the gamut from vegetarianism as a social choice, the language that describes food, and eating disorders, to picky eating as a moral failing and ethical issues linked to genetically modified foods and hunting. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Gayatri Spivak; ethics, subalternity and the critique of postcolonial reason.
Indian-born (1942) Spivak is best known for her critique of post-colonial studies, and though Morton (English literature, U. of Southampton) has no problem with that in itself, he thinks that in this era of computer cross-referencing, there is no reason she should not also be recognized for her contributions in such fields as post-structuralist thought, continental philosophy, Marxism, disempowered people in post-colonial nation states (India, for example), and criticism of literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. He samples a little of each. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Globalization and sport.
One of the goals of the anthology is to increase the visibility and reputation of the social science study of sport, so invitations to contribute were sent not necessarily to social scientists who specialize in sport, but to those with recognizable names in sociology. A second goal is to advance understanding of transnational processes by examining the role of sport in global change. The nine articles were first published as Global Networks, vol. 7, no. 2. They are not indexed. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Global corporate finance; text and cases, 6th ed.
This textbook describes global financial problems and techniques, for undergraduate and graduate students in courses on international finance in any country. Suk Kim (international finance, U. of Detroit Mercy) and Sueng Kim (international finance, St. Louis U.) combine theory and applications and do not adopt any specific national viewpoint. They explore why companies increase profits as they boost foreign presence and why they are more successful than domestic firms. Shareholder value and corporate governance are the volume's foundation, with an emphasis on global strategy and the fundamental concepts of international finance. This edition, which has been fully revised, has more on corporate finance and governance, international markets, global financial dynamics and strategies, and risk management techniques. Each chapter includes a real and current case study, many of which are new. Four chapters have been omitted, while two are new. Other added topics include the impact of 9/11, the growing economic power of China, new trends in stock markets, and the rotation from debt to equity in developing countries. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
How to read the Victorian novel.
Levine (English, Rutgers U.) introduces the Victorian novel to students through books such as The Pickwick Papers, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and The Woman in White. Concentrating on the most familiar volumes, he considers common characteristics, how they are historically conditioned, and how they are both books of their time that also challenge conventions. He discusses dominant elements and problems raised by the genre, including publication practices, realism, and the Bildungsroman and the sensation novel, ending with a study of Middlemarch that particularly examines the common elements previously covered. Topics such as gender, empire, and materiality of the Victorian culture are beyond the scope of the book. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The idea of evil.
In an era in which even inanimate objects (such as your PC) can be called "evil" with impunity, is the idea of evil still real? Dews (philosophy, U. of Essex) finds that despite the word's devaluation, evil still exists, and we cannot do without it. He points out that in all our modern sophistication, we still fear evil but find it hard to understand its motivating power. In a series of elegant essays he describes how the question of evil affected Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Levinas and Adorno, and how they (and we) tried to put religious insights into secular, philosophical terms. The result is a fascinating take on what constitutes good and evil, self-imprisonment and freedom, and despair and hope. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Iraq; people, history, politics.
Why did Iraq descend into communal sectarian violence with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and under while US occupation? That's the question Stansfield (Middle East politics, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, U. of Exeter, UK) proposes to answer by analyzing four interrelated debates: those focused on the supposed "artificiality" of Iraq as a state; those focused on questions of national, religious, and ethnic identity; those focused on the nature of Iraqi politics and the contingency versus inevitability of authoritarianism and dictatorship; and those focused on the mechanics of state building in plural societies or countries emerging from under authoritarianism. Overall, Stansfield argues that current communal violence results from pre-existing communal cleavages that may have been mitigated by the emergence of a state-based civic nationalism following 1958 but were then exacerbated by Saddam Hussein's divisive policies, the sanctions regime of the 1990s, and the polarization of sectarianism and ethnicity in the chaotic politics of the occupation. Distributed in the US by Blackwell Publishing. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Linguistics in a colonial world; a story of language, meaning, and power.
Errington (anthropology and international and area studies, Yale U.) investigates colonial dictionaries, grammars, and related texts written over three centuries of the colonial era, viewing them as "a means for adapting and exploiting familiar categories in ways which enabled power and legitimized authority in unfamiliar tongues" and as means of supporting other categories of colonial difference. Such an investigation is made possible by the recognition that matters of linguistic identity such as "dialect" and "accent" can disguise complex social categories of region, race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and age, as well as the complexities of people's intersubjective orientations that are sometimes subsumed under the linguistic label of "style." He traces the shifting colonial purposes and values of linguistic descriptive work done by Spanish Catholic missionaries in 17th century Mexico and the Philippines, Protestant missionaries in 19th century sub-Saharan Africa, and in the Belgian Congo and the Dutch East Indies. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The making of modern South Africa; conquest, apartheid, democracy, 4th ed.
Worden (history, U. of Cape Town, South Africa) introduces themes and debates in South Africa's history, beginning with the pre-colonial period, with a focus on the period of racial segregation between the 1910s and the 1970s. He also describes the end of apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s. He focuses on key themes since the historical understanding of South Africa has changed to be more inclusive of race and gender. These include the dynamics of colonial conquest in the late nineteenth century, the mineral revolution of the 1880s, white worker militancy in the late 1910s, black rural protest in the 1920s, and the roots and emergence of segregation. This edition contains a rewritten final chapter that extends the account from 1994 to the present, as well as new and revised maps and an updated further reading section. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Mao Zedong; a political and intellectual portrait.
Meisner (emeritus history, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) does not aspire to compete with the full biographies of Mao (1893-1976), but provides a sketch of his public life for readers who are unfamiliar with it. He emphasizes the Chinese revolutionary leader's encounter with and interpretation of Marxist-Leninist theory, and the relationship between his sinified Marxism and his political practice. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Media and morality; on the rise of the mediapolis.
Silverstone (media and communications, London School of Economics and Political Science) deals with what he sees as the second great environmental crisis confronting human society: the crisis in the world of communication. It is a moral and ethical as well as political crisis, he says, that not only pollutes the mediated environment, but also accelerates the downward spiral towards increasing global incomprehension and inhumanity. He picks up where his 1999 Why Study the Media? left off. Distributed in the US by Blackwell Publishing. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Modern literary theory and ancient texts; an introduction.
Primarily for students of the classics, but also other scholars who have the impression that literary theory is a closed room accessible only to initiates, Schmitz (Greek language and literature, U. of Bonn) introduces both the idea of literary theory and some current examples of it as applied to texts he knows and loves the best. He himself translated the 2002 Moderne Literutheorie und antike Texte, published by Wissenschaftliche Buchgellschaft, Darmstadt, making few changes beyond updating references. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
