Welcome to my Universities Press Review. Each edition is a short list of new books (somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen) that have come to my attention, which I think are noteworthy, and which are published by University Presses.
University Press books, often with very short print-runs, do not always receive the media coverage they deserve, although some of them – in my view – are often very interesting and sometimes quite important. I am including them here because you may not know of their existence. I shall try to give notice of them somewhere between two months before publication date, and two months after, so they are topical.
Universities Press Review 9 (September 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. (If you have done so recently then you are doing your best to lead a normal life at an abnormal time – good for you.) I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher at the end of September 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- Things Come Together: Africans Achieving Greatness in the Twenty-First Century, by Robert Rotberg
- The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance, by Catherine Fletcher
- History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, by Bruno Maçães
- Substate Dictatorship: Network, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union, by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk
- Fire: A Very Short Introduction, by Andrew C. Scott
- Restaging the Past: Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain, by Angela Bartie (Editor), Linda Fleming (Editor), Mark Freeman (Editor), Alexander Hutton (Editor), Paul Readman (Editor)
- The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible History of New England, by Meg Muckenhoupt
Universities Press Review 8 (July/August 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. (If you have done so recently then you are doing your best to lead a normal life at an abnormal time – good for you.) I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in September 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- The Year of Peril: America in 1942, by Tracy Campbell
- Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, by Andrew B. Lui
- Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey Through the AIDS Crisis, by Ross A. Slotten
- Today Sardines are Not For Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris, by Paula Schwartz
- God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare, by Mark Juergensmeyer
- Empire of the Black Sea: The Rise and Fall of the Mithridatic World, by Duane W. Roller
- The New Book of Opera Anecdotes, by Ethan Marsden
Universities Press Review 7 (May/June 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. (If you have done so recently then you are doing you best to lead a normal life at an abnormal time – good for you.) I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in September 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- Idleness at a Time of Crisis: A Philosophical Essay, by Brian O’Connor
- Elizabeth I and Her Circle, by Susan Doran
- T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination, by Sarah Kennedy
- James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, by Catherine Flynn
- Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter, by Luke Fernandez
- Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City, by Lukasz Krzyzanowksi, translated by Madeleine G. Levine
- Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, by Zena Hitz
Universities Press Review 6 (April 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. (If you have done so recently then you are doing you best to lead a normal life at an abnormal time – good for you.) I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in September 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- The Lives of Houses, by Various authors
- Ballet Class: An American History, by Melissa R. Klapper
- Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon, by Eric H. Cline
- The Art of the Bird: The History of Ornithological Art through Forty Artists, by Roger Lederer
- The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s, by Amelia Rauser
- Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion, by Vanessa R. Schwartz
- Divided Armies: Inequality & Battlefield Performance in Modern War, by Jason Lyall
Universities Press Review 5 (March 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. (If you have done so recently then you are doing you best to lead a normal life at an abnormal time – good for you.) I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in September 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- Around the World in 80 Words, A Journey Through the English Language, by Paul Anthony Jones
- Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It, by By Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food, by Edited by J. Michelle Coghlan
- Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him, by Mariella Guzzoni
- Taking America Back for God, Christian Nationalism in the United States, by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry
- Is Europe Christian?, by Olivier Roy, translated by Cynthia Schoch
- The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, by David Kilcullen
- The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader, by Stephen G. Fitz
- Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, by Justin Farrell
- Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life, by John Kaag
Universities Press Review 4 (February 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in September 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- The Cambridge World History of Violence, by Four volumes edited by Garrett G. Fagan, of Pennsylvania State University and others
- The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase, by Nigel Spivey
- Waters of the World: The Story of the Scientists Who Unraveled the Mysteries of Our Oceans, Atmosphere, and Ice Sheets and Made the Planet Whole, by Sarah Dry
- Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance, by Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely
- The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, by Leo Damrosch
- High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America, by James Wellman Jr., Katie Corcoran and Kate Stockly
- A Child of the Century, by Ben Hecht with an Introduction by David Denby
Universities Press Review 3 (January 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in April 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace, by Lynn Meskell
- Art of the Non-Western World: Asia, Africa, and the Americas, by Nancy Kelker
- Competing for Control: Gangs and the Social Order of Prisons, by David Pyrooz and colleagues
- The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, by Laurence Ralph
- Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures, by Pierre Boulez
- The Hacker and the State, by Ben Buchanan
- Napoleon & De Gaulle: Heroes and History, by Patrice Gueniffey
- Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe, by Anthony Grafton
- How the Old World End: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800, by Jonathan Scott
- Vanguard of the Revolution: Melancholy, Remorse and Resignation in a Year of Communist Anniversaries, by A. James McAdams
Universities Press Review 2 (December 2019)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in April 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed this month
- Why Women Read Fiction, by Helen Taylor
- Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia, by Eleanor Robson
- Old Man Country: My Search for Meaning Among the Elders, by Thomas R. Cole
- Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping, by Roger Faligot, translated by Natasha Lehrer
- None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, by Lawrence Capello
- Will You Be Alive 10 Years from Now?, by Paul Nahin
- Westminster Abbey: A Church in History, by Edited by David Cannadine
- Ingenious: The Unintended Consequences of Human Innovation, by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson
- Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists, by Audrey Kurth Cronin
Universities Press Review 1 (November 2019)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher in April 2020, and released – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas. These new University Press books are, I think, worth sharing.
Titles reviewed this month
- The Conversational Enlightenment, by David Randall
- Einstein on the Run, by Andrew Robinson
- Music and the New Global Culture: From the Great Exhibition to the Jazz Age, by Harry Liebersohn
- Gilgamesh: The life of a Poem, by Michael Schmidt
- Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Direct Major Economic Events, by Robert Shiller
- Why America Loses Wars, by Donald Stoker
- Creativity in Research: Cultivate Clarity, Be Innovative, and Make Progress in Your Research Journey, by Nicola Ullbarri et al
- When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, by Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis (eds)