Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Academics as public intellectuals.
At the July 2005 conference of the International Institute of Sociology, in Stockholm, sessions were held on the types and roles of public intellectuals, from which the 15 essays here emerged. Sociologists with various specialties and interests, as well as other social scientists, look at individuals and groups who combined academic and public concerns — or in some cases who tried and failed. Among their topics are sociologists as public intellectuals during three centuries in the Norwegian project of Enlightenment, Franz Boas' critique of the role of the US in World War I, Alva Myrdal in the service of the United Nations 1949-55, Emre Kongar Nilgun Celebi as an intellectual from 20th-century Turkey, and scientific enlightenment and social activism in India. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
African mosaic; political, social, economic, and technological development in the new millennium.
This collection of essays by Africans and non-Africans addresses the challenges Africa now faces and strategies for dealing with them. Topics include: development and the democratization process, human rights and ethnicity, corruption, education, health systems, gender and migration, and information communication and technology. The book would be suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, policy makers, and NGO professionals in political science, development, sociology, history, anthropology, education, and technology. It is uniformly well-written by a very qualified slate of authors. Editors Zack-Williams (sociology, UCLAN), Udogu (African, comparative and international politics, Appalachian State U.), and eight co-authors contributed to the book. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
After neorealism; Italian filmmakers and their films; essays and interviews.
During the middle to late 1940s, World War II and its aftermath, a group of filmmakers reacted against the banality that had long ruled Italian cinema, and the socio-economic conditions of the country, using minimal resources and real people and locations. That was neorealism. The essays and interviews here explore what happened to that trend, and to Italian cinema generally, when the forces that begat neorealism were gone. Among the topics are more from less in the art of Michelangelo Antonioni, neorealist art versus operatic acting in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma, Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto and I Fidanzati, forbidden games in Gianni Amelio's Stolen Children and Lamerica, and Nanni Moretti's The Mass Is Ended and The Son's Room. All of these filmmakers are also interviewed, as are Luchino Visconti, and Mario Monicelli. There are no illustrations. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Anáil an Bhéil Bheo; orality and modern Irish culture.
The first Galway Conference of Irish Studies, held at the National University of Ireland-Galway in June 2006, focused on the manner in which modern Irish culture has navigated through the surrounding sea of orality. Scholars of literature, art, music, and other fields present 19 essays from the gathering on ballad, song, and visual culture; testimony, identity, and performance in speaking the self; and origins, revivals, and myths in orality and literary production. Among specific topics are folk versus literary in 18th-century Irish song, images of orality in Jack B. Yeats' A Broadside, storytelling and the construction of local identities on the Irish border, narrative encounters with the Irish in Birmingham, James Joyce's "The Dead" and Tomás Ó Criomhthain's An tOileánach, and talkers and eyewitnesses in the theater of the bar. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Anglicisms in Europe; linguistic diversity in a global context.
The articles printed here were first presented at a conference on Anglicisms held i9n Regensburg in 2006. Fischer (English linguistics, University of Regensburg) and Pulaezewska (English linguistics, Academy of International Studies, Lodz, Poland) have arranged the papers by the reaction of the various cultures to the English lexical invaders. The first part suggests that the loan words are often adapted to the grammar of the dominant language and the meaning altered [as "le snack" is not something to eat but a place to buy fast food in France]. The second section evaluates the attempts of academicians and governments to replace the loan words with native terms. This is generally considered to be a losing battle. In the third section the authors focus on the use of English in specific subcultures: sports, military, music, business, IT and even the homosexual community of Spain. The final section examines the ways in which Anglicisms are defined in foreign dictionaries. While linguistic analysis is the base for this collection, the socio-cultural implications are obvious making this work of interest to sociologists and political scientists as well as students of language. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Architecture and royal presence; Domenico and Giulio Cesare Fontana in Spanish Naples (1592-1627).
Art historian de Cavi looks at a pivotal moment in Neapolitan art and politics through the lives of father and son architects, Domenico and Giulio Cesare Fontana, covering the period 1592-1627. She first gives biographies of the two men and their work in Rome before coming to Naples in the service of the Spanish Hapsburgs, Phillip II and Phillip III. De Cavi contends that it was through their commissioning of public art that the kings established a Hapsburg style in their Italian possessions. Alternating chapters focus on the politics and the art, including the jostling for control between the pope and Spain at the death of Phillip II and the building of the palace of Naples. The history of Spanish Naples is brought to life in this absorbing story. The original Italian city documents are given in an appendix for those who wish to review them. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Authority of expression in early modern England; proceedings.
Keinänen and Sallenius, both of the Department of English at the University of Helsinki, have organized this series of essays on the authority of expression in early modern English literature. Authority to many of the contributors resides in the individual interpretation of information received through their senses. The metaphors of sight and smell in Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell are addressed before the topic of gendered authority is looked at, again in Shakespeare, and also Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy in which authority is fluid. Spenser's treatment of the traditional authority of a host over a guest is a new way of looking at The Faerie Queen. The final two articles are reflections on how Ben Jonson and John Donne, in their last years, created a geography of authority based on New World symbolism. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Benefiting by design; women of color in feminist psychological research.
Fifteen essays, presented by Raghavan (a consultant for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund), Vaz (women's studies, The U. of South Florida), and Edwards (Emory U. School of Medicine), explore recent contributions of women of color to feminist psychology. Topics addressed include trends in participant representation; frameworks for theorizing about poverty and US welfare policy; a faith-based intervention for cocaine-dependent African American women; marginalization experiences of African American lesbian youth; cultural influences on the body image development of Latina girls; racialized sexism in the lives of Asian American women; the effects of racism on the emotional well-being of Caribbean immigrant women; parental beliefs about gender identity in Asian-Indian immigrant families; and multicultural competency of students in clinical psychology, counseling, and social work graduate programs. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Beyond lexical variation in modern standard Arabic; Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco.
Ibrahim (PhD, Georgetown U.) presents the results of her research into whether Modern Standard Arabic is undergoing language drift in different areas of the Arabic world. She tested Moroccan, Lebanese, and Egyptian readers of Arabic in terms of their ability to understand lexical and syntactical variation in newspapers of other countries (Al-Hayaat of Lebanon, Al-`Anbaa' of Morocco, and Al-Ahram of Egypt). She also addresses the implications of her findings for language planning in the Arabic world. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Beyond the hijab debates; new conversations on gender, race, and religion.
Most of them specialists in women's or gender studies, Australian social scientists explore contesting images of Muslim women; gender, violence, and protection; and future possibilities at the intersection of gender, race, and religion. They consider such topics as public attitudes toward hijab-wearing in Australia, indigenous women and Islam, the moral politics of white hegemonic masculinity in Australia, the undirected scripts of sexual morality, a secular feminist response to interfaith dialogue in Australia, and recognizing each other in conversations between Anglo feminists and Muslim women. The 15 papers are from a December 2006 conference in Sydney. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
"Celebrating confusion"; the theatre of Frank McGuinness.
Nally has revised his Ph.D. dissertation (no date noted) in English at the National University of Ireland-Galway exploring the work of compatriot playwright McGuiness, who has written over 30 plays since his first in 1982. His topics include the imaginative unity of Sons of Ulster, the diversity of the homosexual temperament in Innocence and Gates of Gold, and gender and intertexualilty in Carthaginians and Someone Who'll Watch Over Me. The poem "The Bread Man" is also considered in a chapter on deregulating the family unit and symbolizing inclusiveness, along with plays Dolly West's Kitchen and The Bird Sanctuary. There is no index. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Co-operatives in a global economy; the challenges of co-operation across borders.
Co-operatives, businesses owned by their members, are no less affected by the competitive pressures of globalization than other types of businesses. Yet, their particular issues are not often addressed in economic literature. This collection of essays, largely an outgrowth of a 2006 conference on "Co-operating in a Global Economy," held in Toronto, attempts to fill address the scarcity of literature on the subject. What role co-operatives play in the world economy, and the effects of globalization on the governance of co-operatives are examined in detail in the reports presented. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Comparative stages; essays in the history of Euro-American drama.
Cardullo (media and communications, Izmir U. of Economics, Turkey) charts some of the high points in the history of Western drama from Athenian tragedy through Shakespearean historical comedy, and French neoclassicism to modern and avant-garde Euro-American drama. He also considers postwar Italian plays and surveys German-language comedy from its origins to the 20th century. The ten essays are linked, he says, by a critical approach that acknowledges the historical context but is intrinsically or organically analytical. His primary concern is with the history of dramatic form — the formal permutations that drama has undergone and why during the long period. Only names and titles are indexed. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Cosimo I de' Medici as collector; antiquities and archaeology in sixteenth-century Florence.
Sixteenth century Italy was an era of city states and princely domains. Florence was ruled by Duke Cosimo I de' Medici who, like many of his contemporaries, gathered huge collections of classical art and artifacts as a means of demonstrating a higher order of culture and power. In doing so, he was carrying on a well-established characteristic of de' Medicis before him. This book, part historical overview, part catalog of specific artifacts in the Cosimo I de' Medici collections, will be of interest to art historians of the era. A working knowledge of Italian will be necessary for those wanting to understand the descriptions of many of the artifacts. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Culture and power; the plots of history in performance.
It was during the Culture and Power Conference at the University of Oveido in September 2007 that the live delivery of papers suggested the performative aspect of history, and the deperformation of 25 of the presentations began that led eventually to their appearance in print here. They cover ends and perspectives, visual rhetoric, reading performance, historic fabrications of national identities, and literary employments of history. Specific discussions include plotting a 21st-century history from an environmental perspective, representations of World War II and the Holocaust in three Polish comics, Monty Python's 1969 Hells' Grannies as a case of reading history into comedy, nationalist common sense in Scotland and Catalonia, and the power of a conspiracy master narrative as illustrated by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Current trends in human ecology.
Biological and medical, social, and earth and environmental sciences contribute to human ecology, a discipline concerned with interactions between people and their surroundings. Researchers from those areas look at human ecology and the environment, knowledge and management, and integrating human ecology. Their topics include slash-and-burn agriculture as a system in transition, the ethnobotany of artisanal fishers, adaptation and indigenous knowledge as a bridge to sustainability, an integrative modeling approach to human-marine nature interactions, and new directions in human ecology education. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Death and fantasy; essays on Philip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and R.L. Stevenson.
Gray (literary history and hermeneutics, U. of Chichester) provides nine articles and book chapters that he found himself mentioning frequently to readers as he was writing Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDoland, and Hoffmann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), then realized that at least some of them might be difficult to track down outside of an academic or good metropolitan library. They discuss such topics as George MacDonald, Julia Kristeva, and the black sun; the incomplete fairy tales of Robert Louis Stevenson; psychoanalysis and Narnia revisited; the anxiety of influence; and witches' time in Pullman, Lewis, and MacDonald. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Early farmers, late foragers, and ceramic traditions; on the beginning of pottery in the Near East and Europe.
For a hundred years, anyone with even a smattering of knowledge about archaeology knew that early people stopped roaming around, settled down, planted crops, and started raising cattle before they had time — or intelligence, maybe — to start thinking about the crockery. During the second half of the 20th century, however, stubborn evidence kept being unearthed that Mesolithic and even Palaeolithic societies had ceramic objects. The 10 papers here describe elements and examples that can no longer be dismissed as error or anomaly. Among them are the earliest use of pottery in Anatolia, relationships between pottery technology and production organization in early Neolithic southern Italy, the pottery of the Swifterbant culture in the Netherlands as an example of hunter-gatherers in transition to agriculture, and evidence and consequences of exchanging bone and antler and pottery designs between Ertebølle and Funnel-Beaker Danubian communities. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
English and empowerment in the developing world.
This volume presents 17 papers from an eponymous 2007 seminar at the Aga Khan U. Centre of English Language, Pakistan, on the relationship between language and power, particularly in reference to English as a global language and education in Pakistan. The editors (all of the Centre) have organized the collection into sections on empowerment and language, women and empowerment, teaching and learning in the classroom, and information technology and language teaching. Specific topics include the role of English language teacher education in the developing world, professional development of English language teachers in higher education in Pakistan, speech recognition technology as a possible cure for test anxiety, English and women's empowerment, pedagogical implications of authenticity in the English classroom, English and self-directed learning, using technology to support in-service English language teachers' field experiences, and gender-related discourse style of non-native English speakers in computer-mediated communication. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
English language and literature; cross cultural currents.
In 21 peer-reviewed essays, scholars of language and literature mostly from Botswana but also elsewhere in southern Africa, explore the precarious positions of English and African languages at a time when English is increasingly becoming the dominant language across the continent but resistance to it is growing. They emphasize the tension African's feel between pride in their cultural heritage as expressed in African languages, and the economic and social benefits of English. They also look at how people are able to make the two language worlds enhance each other and so also their own lives. Within sections on conflict and culture, discourse, English as a medium of instruction, and nationalism and internationalism, they discuss specific topics such as whether English in Botswana is a blessing or a curse, language planning and policy in Botswana, the burdens and hurdles of English orthography, and reading race and humanity in Shakespeare's Othello from a postcolonial perspective. There is no index. (Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
