Notables 2021 : simplebooklet.com

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high-security prison. He wasreleased eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fthanniversary of a prison education program he participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others atFishmongers’ Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hiddenthere: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: SaskiaJones and Jack Merritt. Preti Taneja taught ction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her pro-gram; Khan was one of her students. “It is the immediate aftermath,” Taneja writes. “’I am living at the centreof a wound still fresh.’ The I is not only mine. It belongs to many.” In this searching lament by the award-win-ning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the ctions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy,she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atroc-ity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture apolitics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.Aftermath (Transit Books)Preti TanejaNotable Top 128 Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Notable Top 129Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependence on municipal debt or how the terms of municipal nance structure racial privileg-es, entrench spatial neglect, elide democratic input, and distribute wealth and power. In this passionate and deeply researched book, Destin Jenkins shows in vivid detail how, beyond the borrowing decisions of American cities and beneath their quotidian infrastructure, there lurks a world of politics and nance that is rarely seen, let alone understood. Focusing on San Francisco, The Bonds of Inequality offers a singular view of the postwar city, one where the dynamics that drove its creation encompassed not only local politicians but also banks, credit rating rms, insurance companies, and the national municipal bond market. Moving between the local and the national, The Bonds of Inequality uncovers how racial inequalities in San Francisco were intrinsically tied to municipal nance arrangements and how these arrangements were central in determining the distribution of resources in the city.The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (University of Chicago Press)Destin JenkinsShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering chil-dren’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary U.S. discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces--climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of rac-ism, patriarchy, and colonialism--inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.The Breaks (Coffee House Press)Julietta SinghNotable Top 1210 Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Notable Top 1211The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capi-tal, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest—social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, mar-ginalized, and forgotten—prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him “a clairvoyant of the small.” His revolutionary use of short prose forms won him the admiration of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others. He was long believed an outsider by conviction, but Susan Bernofsky presents a more nuanced view in this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography. Setting Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, she provides illuminating analysis of his extraordinary life and work, bearing witness to his “extreme artistic delight.”Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale University Press)Susan BernofskyShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter — all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek. One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most elds, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (Bold Type Books)Chanda Prescod-WeinsteinNotable Top 1212 Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Notable Top 1213Francis Bacon created an indelible image of mankind in modern times, and played an outsized role in both twentieth century art and life--from his public emergence with his legendary Triptych 1944 (its images so unre-lievedly awful that people ed the gallery), to his death in Madrid in 1992.Bacon was a witty free spirit and unabashed homosexual at a time when many others remained closeted, and his exploits were as unforgettable as his images. Through hundreds of interviews, and extensive new research, the authors probe Bacon’s childhood in Ireland (he earned his father’s lasting disdain because his asthma prevented him from hunting); his increasingly open homosexuality; his early design career--never before explored in detail; the formation of his vision; his early failure as an artist; his uneasy relationship with American abstract art; and his improbable late emergence onto the international stage as one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century.Francis Bacon: Revelations gives us a more complete and nuanced--and more international--portrait than ever before of this singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his equally eruptive, extraordinary art. Francis Bacon: Revelations (Knopf)Mark Stevens and Annalyn SwanShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record. Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-edge member of society is one of America’s most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they’ve paid their debt to society. Informed by Miller’s experience as the son and brother of incarcer-ated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities ghting against a system that is designed for them to fail. It is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations ex-tract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy. As Miller search-ingly explores, America must acknowledge and value the lives of its formerly imprisoned citizens.Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (Little, Brown)Reuben Jonathan MillerNotable Top 1214 Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind: while still in his twenties, he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Next he directed four consecutive hit plays, won back-to-back Tonys, ushered in a new era of Hollywood moviemaking with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and followed it with The Graduate, which won him an Oscar and became the third-highest-grossing movie ever. At thirty-ve, he lived in a three-story Central Park West penthouse, collected Arabian horses, and counted Jac-queline Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor as friends. Born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he was sent along with his younger brother to America on a ship in 1939. He was bullied and ostracized–an allergic reaction had rendered him permanently hairless–and his father died when he was just twelve, leaving his mother alone and overwhelmed. In an incomparable portrait that follows Nichols from Berlin to the US, Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion. Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always attering, but it presents the full story of one of the most richly interesting, complicated, and consequential gures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. Mike Nichols: A Life (Penguin Press)Mark HarrisNotable Top 1216 Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Notable Top 1217Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world’s largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world’s biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people--es-pecially those living in disputed border regions. Suchitra Vijayan traveled India’s vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. In this stunning work of narrative reportage--featuring over 40 original photographs--we hear from those whose stories are never told: from children playing a cricket match in no-man’s-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the oodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer nd their family history in India.With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country we’ve long been missing.Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of India (Melville House Publishing)Suchitra VijayanShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Notable Top 1218When Moya Bailey rst coined the term misogynoir, she dened it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time. In Misogynoir Transformed, Bailey delves into her ground-breaking concept, highlighting Black women’s digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, decient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used so-cial-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous—and, most importantly, effective—ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs. Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press)Moya BaileyShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (Yale University Press)Soyica Diggs ColbertNotable Top 1219In this acclaimed biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert narrates a life at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and intellec-tual work. Celebrated for her play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was also the author of innovative journalism and of plays touching on slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom movements. Hansberry was deeply involved in the Black freedom struggle during the Cold War and in the early civil rights movement, and here Colbert shows us an artist’s life with the background of the Greenwich Village art scene in the 1960s, the homophile movement, Black diasporic freedom movements, and third-wave feminism. Drawing from Hansberry’s papers, speeches, and interviews, this book provides a new point of entry in the his-tory of Black radicalism, and a new perspective on Black women in mid-twentieth-century political movements.Drawing from Hansberry’s papers, speeches, and interviews, this book provides a new point of entry in the his-tory of Black radicalism, and a new perspective on Black women in mid-twentieth-century political movements.Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Notable Top 1221For a century, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School has been a home to immigrant and refugee students. In 2017, during the worst global refugee crisis in history, its immigrant population numbered close to three hundred—or nearly half the school—and many were refugees new to the country. These young people came from thirty-ve different countries, speaking among themselves more than thirty-eight different languages. For these refugee teens, life in Chicago is hardly easy. They have experienced the world at its worst and carry the trauma of the horric violence they ed. In America, they face poverty, racism, and xenophobia, but they are still teenagers—irting, dreaming, and working as they navigate their new life in America. Refugee High is a riveting chronicle of the 2017–8 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday chal-lenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique education needs of refugee and immigrant children: Alejandro may be deported just days before he is scheduled to graduate; Sha-hina narrowly escapes an arranged marriage; and Belenge encounters gang turf wars he doesn’t understand. Equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring, Refugee High raises vital questions about the priorities and values of a public school and offers an eye-opening and captivating window into the present-day American immigration and education systems.Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (The New Press)Elly FishmanShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Agents of Change: Political Philosophy in Practice (Harvard University Press)The appeal of political philosophy is that it will answer questions about justice for the sake of political action. But contemporary political philosophy struggles to live up to this promise. Since the death of John Rawls, political philosophers have become absorbed in methodological debates, leading to an impasse between two unattractive tendencies: utopians argue that philosophy should focus uncompromisingly on ab-stract questions of justice, while pragmatists argue that we should concern ourselves only with local efforts to ameliorate injustice. Agents of Change shows a way forward. Ben Laurence argues that we can combine utopian justice and the pragmatic re-sponse to injustice in a political philosophy that unies theory and practice in pursuit of change.Laurence shows that the task of political philosophy is not complete until it asks the question “What is to be done?” and deliberates actionable answers.By Ben LaurenceAges of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House)In this ambitious single-volume history of the United States, economic historian Jonathan Levy reveals how capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages and how the country’s economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life itself. The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era through the out-break of the Civil War, and the Age of Capital traces the lasting impact of the industrial revolution. The volatility of the Age of Capital ultimately led to the Great Depression, which sparked the Age of Control, during which the government took on a more active role in the economy, and nally, in the Age of Chaos, deregulation and the growth of the nance industry created a booming economy for some but also striking inequali-ties and a lack of oversight that led directly to the crash of 2008. In Ages of American Capitalism, Levy argues that capitalism in the United States has never been just one thing. Instead, it has morphed through the country’s history—and it’s likely changing again right now.By Jonathan LevyAimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, day-dreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilied by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages—intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected. Aimlessness (Columbia University Press)By Tom LutzSeminary Co-op 2021 Notables22 Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Since the inventions of porcelain and gunpowder, Chinese artists have experimentedwith unconventional artistic materials and used conventional materials in unorthodoxways. This groundbreaking volume is the rst publication to expound the trans-histor-ical importance of materiality in Chinese art by bringing together essays from leadingscholars, curators, and conservators. Essayists Anne Feng, Yuhang Li, Wei-ChengLin, Catherine Stuer, and Yusen Yu examine how materials including lacquer, crystal,paper, and gold stimulated advances in premodern Chinese art. Alex Burchmore, Ori-anna Cacchione, Nancy P. Lin, Sara Moy, and Rachel Rivenc analyze several instanc-es of material experimentation in contemporary Chinese art in essays that considermaterials as varied as gunpowder, plastic, and water. This book builds upon scholar-ship originally presented at the Art and Materiality Symposium, held on the occasion ofthe Smart Museum of Art’s exhibition The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China.The Allure of Matter: Materiality Across Chinese Art (Smart Museum Of Art)Edited by Wei-Cheng Lin and Orianna CacchioneAcclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates that the nationwide George Floydprotests of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our currentcrisis requires a reckoning with the past. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfullyillustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, most immediately in reac-tion to the presence of militarized police forces in impoverished Black neighborhoodsduring the launch of “the War on Crime” in the 60s. Facing increasing surveillance andbrutality, residents threw Molotov cocktails at ofcers, plundered local businesses, andvandalized exploitative institutions. The central lesson—that police violence invariablyleads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond byfurther criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomiccauses.America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellionsince the 1960s (Liveright Publishing Corporation)By Elizabeth HintonHistorian John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of the relations between thesetwo nations back to the Persian Empire of the eighteenth century—the subject of greatadmiration by Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams—and an America seen byIranians as an ideal to emulate for their own government. Drawing on years of archivalresearch both in the United States and Iran—including access to Iranian governmentarchives rarely available to Western scholars—the Iranian-born, Oxford-educatedhistorian leads us through the four seasons of U.S.–Iran relations: the spring of mutualfascination; the summer of early interactions; the autumn of close strategic ties; and thelong, dark winter of mutual hatred. Ghazvinian makes clear where, how, and when it allwent wrong. America and Iran shows why two countries that once had such heartfeltadmiration for each other became such committed enemies—and why it didn’t have toturn out this way.America and Iran: A History (Knopf)By John GhazvinianSeminary Co-op 2021 Notables23Shop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your bodyfrozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporateyour remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremationshave more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise.American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and searchfor a different kind of afterlife. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdyembarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeraldirectors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, andordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death,Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection acrossgenerations.American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press)Shannon Lee DawdyIn the late 1960s, the American city found itself in steep decline. An urban crisis fueledby federal policy wreaked destruction and displacement on poor and working-classfamilies. The urban drama included religious institutions, that debated whether to stayin the city or move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Powermovements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, youngLatino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel churchcommunities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, andracism. Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and articulates theactivists’ bold, new vision for the church and the world. Through case studies, FelipeHinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements frequently crossed boundariesbetween faith and politics and argues that understanding the history of these radicalpolitics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groupsfrom the late 1960s to the early 1980s.Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fightto Save the Barrio (University of Texas Press)Felipe HinojosaIn the 2010s, the term “autotheory” began to trend in literary spheres, where it wasused to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory andphilosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applyingit to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account ofautotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice thatis indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works bywriters and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics,aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Press)Lauren Fournier24Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In Bettering Humanomics economic historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey continues her intellectually playful and rigorous analysis with a focus on humans rather than the institutions. Going against the grain of contemporary neo-institutional and behavioral economics which privilege observation over understanding, she asserts her vision of “humanomics,” which draws on the work of Bart Wilson, Vernon Smith, and most prominently, Adam Smith. She argues for an economics that uses a comprehensive understanding of human action beyond behaviorism. In an engaging and erudite manner, she reafrms the global successes of market-tested betterment and calls for empirical investigation that advances from material incentives to an awareness of the human within historical and ethical frameworks. Bettering Humanomics offers a cri-tique of contemporary economics and a proposal for an economics as a better human science.Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (University of Chicago Press)Deirdre Nansen McCloskeyDarkness is not empty,” writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity--and witness the humanity of others--in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience--not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t. Wide-ranging but thematically unied, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (University of Chicago Press)Teju ColeIn The Black Buttery, Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country. Putting the city of Baltimore under a microscope, Brown looks closely at the causes of segregation, many of which exist in current legislation and regulatory policy. Drawing on social science research, policy analysis, and archival materials, Brown reveals the long history of racial segrega-tion’s impact on health, from toxic pollution to police brutality, and shows how Baltimore’s history inuenced actions in sister cities like St. Louis and Cleveland, as well as its adop-tion of increasingly oppressive techniques from cities like Chicago. Not content to simply describe and decry urban problems, Brown offers up a wide range of innovative solutions to help heal and restore redlined Black neighborhoods, including municipal reparations.Black Buttery: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Johns Hopkins University)Lawrence T. Brown25Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) stands out as one of the most widely regarded and inventive authors in world literature. Yet the details of his employment history throughout the early part of the twentieth century, which foreground his efforts to develop a worldly reading public, have received scant critical attention. From li-brarian and cataloguer to editor and publisher, this writer emerges as entrenched in the physical minutiae and social implications of the international book world.Drawing on years of archival research coupled with bibliographical analysis, this book explains how Borges’s more general involvement in the publishing industry inuenced not only his formation as a writer, but also global book markets and reading practices in world literature. In this way it tells the story of Borges’s pro-found efforts to revolutionize and revitalize literature in Latin America through his varying jobs in the publishing industry.Borges and the Literary Marketplace: How Editorial Practice Shaped Cosmopolitan Reading (Yale University Press)Nora C. BenedictIn this radiant dual biography, Jonathan Bate explores the fascinating parallel lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writers who worked separately--on different continents, a century apart, in distinct genres--but whose lives uncannily echoed. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly inuenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two shared similar fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their rst love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation, and decadence. Both were outsiders and Romantics, longing for the past as they sped blazingly into the future. Using Plutarch’s ancient model of “parallel lives,” Jonathan Bate recasts the inspired lives of two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers. Com-memorating both the bicentenary of Keats’ death and the centenary of the Roaring Twenties, this is a moving exploration of literary inuence.Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and the Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Yale University Press)Jonathan BateMartha C. Nussbaum brings necessary clarity to the societal challenges of sexual abuse and harassment, illuminating the pride and greed that lead men to objectify and dominate others and the thirst for revenge that can distort the aims of justice.In the context of a clear and bracing legal history of accountability for sexual as-sault and the legal recognition of sexual harassment, Nussbaum confronts three “citadels of pride”—the judiciary, the arts and sports. Exposing prideful privilege in the intellectual world, unpunished narcissism in the arts, and toxic masculinity and corruption in sports, she discusses egregious cases of male entitlement leading to sexual abuse and exploitation. Laying out a hopeful way forward, Nussbaum offers a path to accountability without malice and generosity without capitulation.Citadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accountability, and Reconciliation (W.W. Norton & Company)Martha C. Nussbaum26Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most inuen-tial scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsid-er—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals. Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward. Climate of History in a Planetary Age (University of Chicago Press)Dipesh ChakrabartyIn Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a sys-tematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely con-sideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.Complaint! (Duke University Press)Sara AhmedJust recently, the Supreme Court rejected an argument by plaintiffs that police ofcers should no longer be protected by the doctrine of “qualied immunity” when they shoot or brutalize an innocent civilian. “Qualied immunity” is but one of several judicial inventions that shields state violence and thwarts the vindication of our rights. But aren’t courts supposed to be protectors of individual rights? As Aziz Huq shows in The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, history reveals a much more tangled relation-ship between the Constitution’s system of independent courts and the protection of constitutional rights.The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (Oxford University Press)Aziz Z. Huq27Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a mist child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the rst of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its inten-sity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up—in this sense, it’s Copenhagen’s answer to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependence (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Tove DitlevsenDrawing from a vast array of creation myths—Babylonian, Greek, Aztec, Maya, Inca, Chinese, Hindu, Navajo, Polynesian, African, Norse, Inuit, and more—this concise illustrated book uncovers both the similarities and differences in our attempts to explain the universe. Anthony Aveni, an award-winning author and professor of astronomy and anthropology, examines the ways various cultures around the world have attempted to explain our origins, and what roles the natural environment plays in shaping these nar-ratives. The book also celebrates the audacity of the human imagination. Whether the rst humans emerged from a cave, as in the Inca myths, or from bamboo stems, as the Bantu people of Africa believed, or whether the universe is simply the result of Vishnu’s cyclical inhales and exhales, each of these fascinating stories reects a deeper under-standing of the culture it arose from as well as its place in the larger human narrative.Creation Stories: Landscapes and the Human Imagination (Yale University Press)Anthony AveniIn three critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, Igbo belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji reveals the harrowing yet resolute truths of their own life. Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal. Electrifying and inspiring, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes their ction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival. Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (Riverhead Books)Akwaeke Emezi29Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Euclid’s Elements of Geometry is one of the fountainheads of mathematics—and of culture. Written around 300 BCE, it has traveled widely across the centuries, generating countless new ideas and inspiring such gures as Isaac Newton, Bertrand Russell, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein. Encounters with Euclid tells the story of this incomparable mathematical masterpiece, taking readers from its origins in the ancient world to its continuing inuence today.Encounters With Euclid: How an Ancient Greek Geometry Shaped the World (Princeton University Press)Benjamin WardhaughEssays Two collects Lydia Davis’s writings and talks on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reects on her expe-rience translating Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation. Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her ction, here focuses her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding on the endlessly complex relations between languages. Together with Essays One, this provocative and delightful volume cements her status as one of our most origi-nal and beguiling writers.Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Lydia DavisA literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff and his son Niko. Kurt Wolff was born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, whose desire to demand satisfaction in a duel sparked off bloody antisemitic riots. Always bookish, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own rm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. Fleeing Germany in 1933, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, sought refuge in France, Italy, and ultimately New York, where in a small Greenwich Village apartment they founded Pantheon Books. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.Endpapers (Grove Press)Alexander Wolff30Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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For centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realism in English literature. But as the push for teaching and learning global literature grows, this narrative is insufcient for studying novel forms. In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska explores how the emergence and growth of world literature studies has challenged the centrality of British ction to theories of the novel’s rise. She argues that a historicist approach frequently reinforces the realist paradigm that has cast other traditions as minor, conceding a normative vision of the novel as it seeks to explain why historical forces produced different forms elsewhere. Recasting the standard narrative by looking at different novelistic literary forms, including the Gothic, travel writing, and queer ction, Bartoszyńska offers a compel-ling comparative study of Polish and Irish works published across the long nineteenth century that emphasize ctionality, or the problem of world-building in literature.Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Johns Hopkins University)Katarzyna BartoszynskaThe body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoan-alyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medi-cine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most signicant and complicated gures of the past cen-tury—among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X. Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriv-ing at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.Everybody: A Book About Freedom (W.W. Norton & Company)Olivia LaingAt the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade’s end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman. Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these dening moments–from her rst awed encounter with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings to her rst solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg–comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man’s world. Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York’s 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin Press)Alexander Nemerov31Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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The Wall of Respect, a work of public art created in 1967 at the corner of Forty-third Street and Langley Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, depicted Black leaders in mu-sic, literature, politics, and sports. The Wall sparked a nationwide mural movement, provided a platform for community engagement, and was a foundational work of the Black Arts Movement. There is no longer any physical indication of its existence, but it still needs to be remembered. Through the intimate and portable format of a book, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect recognizes and pays tribute to the Wall while proposing new strategies for commemoration and public memory that inspire us today as we endeavor to preserve the recent murals, installations, and other forms of public art created to support racial justice.Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect (Green Lantern Press)Edited by Romi CrawfordThe Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broad-est sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. Stressing the rich ow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and inuencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Louis MenandThe world we engage with is brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is through the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed—this is where religious scholar Michael Fishbane dwells in his latest contribution to Jewish thought. In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classical types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis. The rst focuses on worldly experience, the second on communal forms of practice and thought in the rabbinical tradition, the third on personal development, and the fourth on transcendent, cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. Written from within the Jewish tradition, Fragile Finitude is intended for readers across the religious spectrum.Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology (University of Chicago Press)Michael Fishbane32Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Black education was a subversive act from its inception. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Black people passed down this educational heritage. So de-veloped what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and prac-tice of Black education in America. Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles Woodson’s efforts to ght against the “mis-education of the Negro” by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s mate-rials and methods as they fought for power in schools and continued the work of fugitive pedagogy. Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press)Jarvis R. GivensFulllment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that compa-ny’s growing shadow. As Alex MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated. Fulllment also shows how Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos’s lavish Kalorama mansion. With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality--not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contempo-rary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click.Fulllment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Alex MacGillisYou know the scene: amateur soccer players battling over the ball, spectators cheering from the sidelines, vendors selling their wares from carts. Over the past half century, im-migration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. In Fútbol in the Park, David Trouille takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighbor-hood where they are not always welcome. Together on the soccer eld, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men build relation-ships and a sense of who they are. Through these engrossing, revealing, and at times immortalizing activities, they forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the United States becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of migrants.Fútbol in the Park: Immigrants, Soccer, and the Creation of Social Ties (University of Chicago Press)David Trouille33Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Vir-ginia Woolf in the afterlife. Eisendrath holds out her manuscript—an innite moment passes—and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reective pieces linked through meta-phors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne’s practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the rst African American head librarian in the Chicago public library system; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grand-mother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Walter Benjamin’s “scholarly romance,” The Arcades Project. Eisendrath’s wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and abounding grace.Gallery of Clouds (New York Review of Books)Rachel EisendrathIn George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life, Tom Jones provides a comprehensive ac-count of the life and work of the preeminent Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment. Jones brings vividly to life the complexities and contradictions of Berkeley’s life and ideas. He advanced a radical immaterialism, holding that the only reality was minds, their thoughts, and their perceptions, without any physical substance underlying them. But he put forward this counterintuitive philosophy in support of the existence and ultimate sovereignty of God. Berkeley was an energetic social reformer, deeply interested in educational and economic improvement, including for the indigenous peoples of North America, yet he believed strongly in obedience to hierarchy and defended slavery. Jones draws on the full range of Berkeley’s writings, from philo-sophical treatises to personal letters and journals, to probe the deep connections between his life and work. The result is a richly detailed and rounded portrait of a major Enlightenment thinker and the world in which he lived.George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life (Princeton University Press)Tom JonesIn the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation’s registered minorities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” folk medical knowl-edges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of traditional Chinese medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of knowledge development while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of southern China. Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority nationality groups in China’s southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local heal-ing systems codied. This ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China is a testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, one that theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the popu-lar authority of the wild.Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South (University of Chicago Press)Judith Farquhar34Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the trans-Pacic tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have inuenced daily habits. Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Jap-anese tastes. The inux of Japanese imports democratized green tea: Americans of all classes, particularly Midwesterners, made it their daily beverage—which they drank hot, often with milk and sugar. In the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on their home and imperial markets, transforming it into an icon of Japanese culture. Green with Milk and Sugar offers not only a social and commodity history of tea but also new insights into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions.Green With Milk and Sugar (Columbia University Press)Robert HellyerIn Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we grieve, and how grief can ultimately lead us to a richer self-understanding and a fuller realization of our humanity. Drawing on psychology, social science, and literature as well as philosophy, Cholbi explains that we grieve for the loss of those in whom our identities are invested, including people we don’t know personally but cherish anyway, such as public gures. Their deaths not only deprive us of worthwhile experiences; they also disrupt our commitments and values. Yet grief is something we should em-brace rather than avoid, an important part of a good and meaningful life. Although grief can be tumultuous and disorienting, it also reects our distinctly human capacity to rationally adapt as the relationships we depend on evolve. An original account of how grieving works and why it is so important, Grief shows how the pain of this experience gives us a chance to deepen our relationships with others and ourselves.Grief: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press)Michael CholbiThe Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a se-cret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on folklore, explores how heroines have own beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm. In a broad-ranging volume, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor, and how their “mischief mak-ing” evidences compassion and concern. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, deance, and, above all, care. The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. This, then, is a historic volume and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.The Heroine With 1,001 Faces (Liveright Publishing)Maria Tatar36Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Successful word-coinages--those that stay in currency for a good long time--tend to conceal their beginnings. We take them at face value and rarely when and where they were rst minted. Engaging, illuminating, and authoritative, Ralph Keyes’s The Hidden History of Coined Words explores the etymological underworld of terms and expressions and uncovers plenty of hidden gems. Keyes also nds some fascinating patterns, such as that successful neologisms are as likely to be created by chance as by design. A remarkable number of new words were coined whimsically, originally intended to troll or taunt. Keyes considers all contenders, while also leading us through the fray between new word partisans, and those who resist them strenuously. He concludes with advice about how to make your own successful coinage. The Hidden History of Coined Words will appeal not just to word mavens but history buffs, trivia contesters, and anyone who loves the immersive power of language.The Hidden History of Coined Words (Oxford University Press)Ralph KeyesThe Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. In the rst comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire that arose after the death of Chinggis Khan, Marie Favereau shows that the accomplishments of the Mongols extended far beyond war. For three hundred years, the Horde was no less a force in global development than Rome had been. Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. The Horde was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was a conduit for exchanges across thousands of miles. From its capital at Sarai on the lower Volga River, the Horde provided a governance model for Russia, inuenced social practice and state structure across Islamic cultures, disseminated sophisticated theories about the natural world, and introduced novel ideas of religious tolerance. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment.The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Belknap Press)Marie FavereauIn 2008 Geoghegan--then an established labor lawyer and prolic writer--embarked on a campaign to represent Chicago’s Fifth District in the U.S. House, in a special elec-tion called when the sitting congressman, Rahm Emanuel, stepped down to serve as newly elected President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. For ninety days leading up to the election Geoghegan, a political neophyte at age sixty, knocked on doors and shook hands at train stations and made fundraising calls. On election night he lost, badly. But this humbling experience helped him develop a framework for re-imagining American government in a way that is truly just, fair, and Constitutional. Taking its title from Whit-man, The History of Democracy Is Yet to Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again, combines tales from the campaign trail with an incisive vision of how we might get there. The History of Democracy Has Yet to Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again (Belt Publishing)Tomas Geoghegan37Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Antitrust law is well-known for its role in combatting mergers, price-xing arrange-ments, and other anticompetitive actions in product markets. By opposing these practices, antitrust law enhances competition among rms and keeps prices low for goods and services. Less well-known, antitrust law also applies to anticompetitive conduct by employers in labor markets, which pushes wages below the competi-tive rate. Yet there have been few labor market cases or enforcement actions, and almost no scholarly commentary on the role of antitrust law in labor markets. This book lls the gap. In How Antitrust Law Failed Workers, Eric Posner documents the failure of antitrust law to address labor market concentration. Only through reforming antitrust law can we shield workers from employers’ overwhelming market power. Essential reading for anyone interested in ghting economic inequality, How Antitrust Failed Workers also offers a sharp primer on the true nature of the American econo-my—one that is increasingly uncompetitive and tilted against workers.How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford University Press)Eric A. PosnerDrawn to trees’ wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with lone-liness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photogra-phers, scientists, and spiritual gures have gleaned through their engagement with trees—from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves. Hailed upon its original publication in India as “a love song to plants and trees” and “an ode to all that is unnoticed, ill, neglected, and yet resilient,” How I Became a Tree blends literary history, theology, philosophy, botany, and more, and ultimately prompts readers to slow down and to imagine a reenchanted world in which humans live more like trees.How I Became a Tree (Yale University Press)Sumana RoyWhen a company’s workers are literally dying on the job, and its business model relies on preying on local businesses and even their own companies, and its CEO is the richest person in the world while its workers make minimum wage with impossi-ble quotas...wouldn’t you want to resist? Danny Caine, owner of Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, compiled this zine about his commitment to ghting Amazon. Includes: the open letter he wrote to Jeff Bezos, examples of successful social media activism, links to other resources, and some sobering words about boycotting.How to Resist Amazon and Why: the Fight for Local Economics, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future! (Microcosm Publishing)Danny Caine38Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In Humane, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the 19th century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled to make war less lethal while acknowledging its inevitabili-ty. Post 9/11, the US military embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where tactics of war were litigated but its foundation-al assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies, ushering in the second decade of the “forever” war. Humane is the story of how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Samuel MoynAn Innite History offers a panoramic look at an extended family over ve generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about inquisitive, sociable individuals, Emma Rothschild unfurls an innovative modern history of social and family networks, emigra-tion, immobility, the French Revolution, and the transformation of nineteenth-century economic life. Rothschild spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive, and whose destinies were profoundly unequal. Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also uses new technologies, including the visualization of social networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of genealogical research. An Innite History demonstrates how the ordinary lives of one family over three centuries can constitute a remarkable record of deep social and economic changes.An Innite History: A Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries (Princeton University Press)Emma RothschildEvery society has its cultures: patterns of how people live and express themselves and how they value objects and thoughts. Recently, there has been considerable debate about what constitutes Indian culture and heritage and about how much diversity those categories ought to contain. Romila Thapar begins by explaining how denitions of culture have changed over the past three centuries. She suggests that cultures can be dened as a shared understanding of selected objects and thoughts from the past, but this understanding is often stripped of its historical context. Thapar touches on a few of these illuminating contexts, such as social discrimination, the role of women, and attitudes toward science and knowledge. This thought-provoking book is sure to spark productive debate about some current shibboleths in India’s culture.Indian Cultures as Heritage (Seagull Books)Romila Thapar39Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel’s famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true—yet never provable—continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life. Stephen Budiansky’s Journey to the Edge of Reason is the rst biography to fully draw upon Gödel’s voluminous letters and writings to explore Gödel’s profound friendships, his relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. Eloquent and insightful, Journey to the Edge of Reason is a fully realized portrait of the odd, brilliant, and tormented man who has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, and illuminates the far-reaching impli-cations of Gödel’s revolutionary ideas for philosophy, mathematics, articial intelli-gence, and man’s place in the cosmos.Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel (W.W. Norton & Company)Stephen BudianskyKabbalah and the Founding of America traces the inuence of Kabbalah on early Christian Americans. It offers a new picture of Jewish-Christian intellectual ex-change in pre-Revolutionary America, and illuminates how Kabbalah helped to shape early American religious sensibilities. The volume demonstrates that key g-ures, including the well-known Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and Increase Mather and Yale University President Ezra Stiles, developed theological ideas that were deeply inuenced by Kabbalah. Some of them set out to create a more universal Kabbalah, developing their ideas during a crucial time of national myth building, lay-ing down precedents for developing notions of American exceptionalism. This book illustrates how, through fascinating and often surprising events, this unlikely inter-re-ligious inuence helped shape the United States and American identity.Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Inuence of Jewish Thought in the New World (NYU Press)Brian OgrenFrom the beginning of his career, Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) was often in conict with the spirit of his times. While during the First World War German poets and philosophers became intoxicated by the experience of community and transcendence, Barth fought against all attempts to locate the divine in culture or in-dividual sentiment. This freed him for a deep worldly engagement: he was known as “the red pastor,” was the primary author of the founding document of the Confessing Church, the Barmen Theological Declaration, and after 1945 protested the rearma-ment of the Federal Republic of Germany. Christiane Tietz compellingly explores the interactions between Barth’s personal and political biography and his theology. This is an evocative portrait of a theologian who described himself as “God’s cheer-ful partisan,” who was honored as a prophet and a genial spirit, was feared as a critic, and shaped the theology of an entire century as no other thinker.Karl Barth: A Life in Conict (Oxford University Press)Christiane Tietz, translated by Victoria J. Barnett40Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most cele-brated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, reveal-ing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an uninching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nerses-sian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Ner-sessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will nd its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago Press)Anahid NersessianSlave traders are peripheral gures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafcked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery’s expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States.In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armeld, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital ows connecting southern elds to northeastern banks. Bringing together entrepre-neurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (Basic Books)Joshua D. RothmanI write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female esh. And if I’m starting here it’s because I want to be crystal clear: I’m not here to make excuses, I’m not here to bitch. I wouldn’t swap places with anyone because being Virginie Despentes seems to me a more interesting gig than anything else out there. Powerful, provocative, and personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-Moi and Vernon Subutex came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes about sex and gender. An autobiography, a call for revolt, a manifesto for a new punk feminism, King Kong Theory is Despentes’s most beloved and reviled work, and is here made available again in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.King Kong Theory (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux Originals)Virginie Despentes41Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all backgrounds changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them. Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration of the coalition’s inner workings, conicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, examines how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993 (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Sarah SchulmanFamed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or lled with bean bags and children’s drawings—the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world’s great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts. In doing so, they reveal that while collections themselves are fragile, often falling into ruin within a few decades, the idea of the library has been remarkably resilient as each generation makes—and remakes—the institution anew. Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Library is essential reading for booklovers, collectors, and anyone who has ever gotten blissfully lost in the stacks. The Library: A Fragile History (Basic Books)Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der WeduwenDaphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspec-tive on these acclaimed gures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contribu-tions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism, making lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith. With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectu-als.Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Belknap Press)Daphne A. Brooks43Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolic days. But in her speech she was in a mood to con-sider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reection on how Black performance is inextricably wo-ven into the fabric of American culture. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specic moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (Random House)Hanif AbdurraqibMahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women’s culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quint-essentially American game. Heinz also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game to gain access to respectable leisure. Drawing on photographs, advertising, popular media, and dozens of oral histories, Heinz’s rich and colorful account offers the rst history of the wildly popular game of mahjong.Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture (Oxford University Press)Annelise Heinz44Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (Harvard University Press)David Livingstone SmithIn Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn’t. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: we believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphor—dehumanization really does happen in our minds. Meticulous but highly readable, Making Monsters suggests that the process of dehumanization is deeply seated in our psychology. It is pre-cisely because we are all human that we are vulnerable to the manipulations of those trading in the politics of demonization and violence. Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 CE) was the sixteenth emperor of Rome—and by far the most powerful man in the world. Yet he was also an intensely private per-son, with a rich interior life and one of the wisest minds of his generation. He collected his thoughts in notebooks, gems that have come to be called his Meditations. Never intended for publication, the work has proved an inexhaustible source of wisdom and one of the most important Stoic texts of all time. In often passionate language, the entries range from one-line aphorisms to essays, from profundity to bitterness. This annotated edition offers the denitive translation of this classic and much beloved text, with copious notes from world-renowned classics expert Robin Watereld. It illu-minates one of the greatest works of popular philosophy for new readers and enriches the understanding of even the most devoted Stoic.Meditations: The Annotated Edition (Basic Books)Marcus AureliusMeir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish De-fense League in 1968, immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party, and would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial gure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought. Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly inuenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenge he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment.Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press)Shaul MagidThe civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the 20th century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it pregured the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in America. In The Movement, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the initiatives of the ordinary, grass-roots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders.The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford University Press)Thomas C. Holt45Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees. But many care jobs bear little resem-blance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color. Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-rst-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-rst century.The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press)Gabriel WinantBlack women’s strength is intimately tied to their unacknowledged suffering. An estimated eight in ten have endured some form of trauma--sexual abuse, domes-tic abuse, poverty, childhood abandonment, victim/witness to violence, and regular confrontation with racism and sexism. Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen shows that trauma often impacts mental and physical well-being. It can contribute to stress, anxiety, PTSD, and depression. Unaddressed it can lead to hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, overeating, and alcohol and drug abuse, and other chronic health issues. Dr. Burnett-Zeigler explains that the strong Black woman image does not take into account the urgency of Black women’s needs, which must be identied in order to lead abundant lives. This informative guide to healing, is life-changing, showing Black women how to prioritize the self and nd everyday joys in self-worth, as well as discover the fullness and beauty within both her strength and vulnerability.Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women (Amistad Press)Inger Burnett-ZeiglerLess than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, thirty-one-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the rst night King had ever spent in jail--and the time that King’s family most feared for his life. Stephen and Paul Kendrick tell the story of what happened next. Based on fresh interviews, newspaper accounts, and extensive archival research, Nine Days is the rst full recounting of an event that changed the course of one of the closest elections in American history. Much more than a political thriller, it is also the story of the rst time King refused bail and came to terms with the dangerous course of his mission to change a nation. At once a story of electoral machinations, moral courage, and, ultimately, the triumph of a future president’s better angels, Nine Days is a gripping tale with important lessons for our own time. Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 Election (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Paul Kendrick46Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Revered by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch as one of Switzerland’s most commanding writers, Ludwig Hohl spent most of his waking hours with a pen in hand, collecting quotes from others and recording ruminations of his own. Composed between 1934 and 1936 during his residence in the Netherlands in a state of “extreme spiritual desolation,” The Notes is Hohl’s magnum opus: an assemblage of his epiphany-like observations, disparate in subject yet threaded together by a relentless exploration of the nature and origins of creativity. Inspired by Spinoza, Goethe, and many others, The Notes contends with the purpose of work, the vitality of art, and the inevitability of death--a valiant, uncompromising exercise in hope against the devastating backdrop of twentieth-century Europe. This abridged edition, expertly translated by Tess Lew-is and with an illuminating foreword by Joshua Cohen, introduces the reader to this remarkable work and its writer.The Notes: Or On Non-premature Reconciliation (Yale University Press)Ludwig Hohl, translated by Tess LewisWeaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cow-boys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed--herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s--forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all. As our nation verges on recognizing June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the ght for equality is exigent and ongoing.On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing)Annette Gordon-ReedPortuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heter-onyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpub-lished papers. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet’s life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius. Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa’s imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa simulta-neously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and conrms the enduring power of Pessoa’s work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.Pessoa: A Biography (Liveright Publishing)Richard Zenith47Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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An astonishingly versatile instrument, the piano allows just two hands to play music of great complexity and subtlety. For more than two hundred years, it has brought solo and collaborative music into homes and concert halls and has inspired com-posers in every musical genre--from classical to jazz and light music. Charting the development of the piano from the late eighteenth century to the present day, pianist and writer Susan Tomes takes the reader with her on a personal journey through 100 pieces including solo works, chamber music, concertos, and jazz. Her choices include composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Gershwin, and Philip Glass. Looking at this history from a modern performer’s perspective, she acknowledges neglected women composers and players including Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Szymanowska, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach.The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces (Yale University Press)Susan TomesPolice put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned avored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (University of Chicago Press)Keith WailooEvery porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the be-ginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive eldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers’ creative strategies as pro-phetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what’s wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (University of North Carolina Press)Heather Berg48Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In Queer Tidalectics, Emilio Amideo investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of uidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics. Water recurs as a gurative and material site to express the Black queer experience within the diaspora, a means to explore malleability and overowing sexual, gender, and racial boundaries. Amideo triangulates language, the aquatic, and affect to delineate a Black queer aesthet-ics, one that uses an idiom of uidity, slipperiness, and opacity to undermine and circumvent gender normativity and the racialized heteropatriarchy embedded in En-glish. The result is an outline of an ever-expanding affective archive of experiential knowledge. Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis--a major scholarly contribution.Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature (Northwestern University Press)Emilio AmideoIt is hard to think of two philosophers less alike than St. Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet, for philosopher Joseph S. Catalano, the two are worth bringing to-gether for their shared concern with a fundamental issue: the uniqueness of each in-dividual person and how this uniqueness relates to our mutual dependence on each other. Both thinkers, as Catalano shows, bring us closer to the reality that surrounds us, and both are centrally concerned with the place of the human within a temporal realm and what stance we should take on our own freedom to act and live within that realm. Catalano shows how freedom, for Sartre, is embodied, and that this freedom further illuminates Aquinas’s notion of consciousness. Catalano offers a fruitful space for thinking through some of the central questions about faith, conscience, freedom, and the meaning of life.The Saint and the Atheist: Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre (University of Chicago Press)Joseph S. CatalanoShelved for over 20 years, Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, stands alongside Otis Redding’s Live in Europe and James Brown’s Live at the Apollo as one of the nest live soul albums ever made. It also reveals a musical, spiritual, emotional, and social journey played out over one night on the stage of a sweaty Miami club, as Cooke made music that encapsulated everything he had ever cut, channeling forces that would soon birth “A Change is Gonna Come,” the most important soul song ever written. Fleming explores how this towering soul artist came to reconcile so many disparate elements on a Florida stage on a winter night in 1963-a stage that extended well into the future, beyond Cooke’s own life, beyond the 1960s, and into a perpetual here-and-now. Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 (Bloomsbury Academic)Colin Fleming50Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In the surprising, often ercely feminist and always fascinating The Secret History of Home Economics, Danielle Dreilinger traces the eld of Home Economics’ history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa, from a Betty Crocker brigade to DIY techies. These women—and they were mostly women—became chemists and mar-keters, studied nutrition, health, and exercise, tested parachutes, created astronaut food, and took bold steps in childhood development and education. Home economics followed the currents of American culture even as it shaped them. Dreilinger brings forward the racism within the movement along with the strides taken by women of color who were inuential leaders and innovators. She also looks at the personal lives of home economics’ women, as they chose to be single, share lives with other women, or try for egalitarian marriages. This engaging history restores a denigrated subject to its rightful importance, as it reminds us that everyone should learn how to cook a meal, balance their account, and ght for a better world.The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live (W.W. Norton & Company)Danielle DreilingerIn Studying with Miss Bishop, Dana Gioia discusses six people who helped him become a writer and better understand what it meant to dedicate one’s life to writing. Four were famous authors―Elizabeth Bishop, John Cheever, James Dickey, and Robert Fitzgerald. Two were unknown―Gioia’s Merchant Marine uncle and Ronald Perry, a forgotten poet. Each of the six essays provides a vivid portrait; taken together they tell the story of Gioia’s own journey from working-class LA to international literary success.Studying With Miss Bishop: Memoirs From a Young Writer’s Life (Paul Dry Books)Dana GioiaOne might say that the womb of death—the Middle Passage, slavery, and coloniza-tion—gave birth to Black populations. Taking this observation as her point of departure, Nathalie Etoke examines Black existence today in her riveting new book, Shades of Black. In a white supremacist world, Black bodies hold a specic position, invested with a range of meaning that maintains them in a xed role, with a script they did not write. The white world has invented and dened the Black person according to its own interests, endowing her with a bereaved humanity. The Black person is confronted with an essential paradox—exist as Black or as a human being? Does the Black person exist for herself or for the other? In the white world, is the Black race the embodiment of a sub-humanity? Situated at the crossroads of three countries—Cameroon, France, and, now, the United States—Nathalie Etoke is uniquely positioned for this polyphonic reection on race. She examines what happens when race obliterates historical, social, cultural, and political differences among populations of African descent from different parts of the world. Shades of Black (Seagull Books)Nathalie Etoke 51Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anar-chists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions. Reecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (University of Chicago Press)Robert ZaretskyFrom the nancial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastruc-ture, Heather McGhee found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just for people of color; racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee nds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: the benets we gain when people come together across race to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own. The Sum of Us is not only a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here but also a heartfelt message, delivered with startling empathy, from a black woman to a multiracial America. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Publishing)Heather McGheePassionate, liberated, ercely independent, Sybille Bedford was a writer and a journal-ist, the author of ten books and four novels, all of which ctionalized her extraordinary life. Born in Berlin, she grew up in Baden, rst with her distant, aristocratic father, and then in France with her intellectual, narcissistic, morphine-addicted mother and her lover. She was a child with a German Jewish background who survived two world wars and went on to spend her adult life in exile in France, Italy, New York, and Los Ange-les, before nally settling in England. Bedford was ahead of her time in many ways, with great enthusiasm for life and all its sensual pleasures, including friendships with bold faced names in the worlds of literature and food as well as a literary network of high-powered lesbians. In this major biography, Selina Hastings has brilliantly captured the erce intelligence, wit, curiosity, and compassion of the woman and the writer.Sybille Bedford: A Life (Knopf)Selina Hastings 52Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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In Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism, Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth asks us to consider ancient religious and traditional cultural solutions to such present-day issues. Roth presents thirty-six case studies featuring third-party peacemakers drawn from Jew-ish classical, medieval, and early-modern rabbinic literature, and explores each case through three layers of analysis - text, theory, and practice. The rst layer offers histor-ical and literary analysis of textual case studies, many of which are critically analyzed here for the rst time. The second layer examines the theoretical model of third-party peacemaking imbedded within the selected cases and comparing them to other cultural and religious models of third-party peacemaking and conict resolution. The nal layer of analysis, based upon the author’s personal experience of religious conict resolution and peacemaking, looks at the practical implications of these case studies as models for modern peacemaking.Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice (Oxford University Press)Daniel RothHow do we heal today’s grief and loss to become the leaders the world needs now? Ac-tivist Jen Bailey offers heartfelt letters of encouragement, comfort, revelation, and hope for young activists and emerging faith leaders aspiring to build a better world amidst its violence, trauma, and loss - and who may wonder if they’re up to the task or unsure if they’ll ever see the change they seek. Considering three central questions - what is dy-ing, what wants to emerge, and what is already blooming beautifully - Bailey’s poignant letters inspire us to imagine how our grief and despair can be composted into new life lled with courage, hope, and purpose for our shared future.To My Beloveds: Letters on Faith, Race, Loss, and Radical Hope (Chalice Press)Jennifer BaileyBerdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning--from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encour-aging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice. These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs ew in the face of America’s racist practices and led to ramications for all three families’ safety. The ght for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers.The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation (Flatiron Books)Anna Malaika Tubbs53Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno’s failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaris-tic, transgressive work, the rst in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault. The rst half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook docu-menting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature. Zambreno investigates Guibert’s methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert’s work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classiable genre. To Write As If Already Dead (Columbia University Press)Kate ZambrenoSurfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical eld. In Trans Medicine, stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this eld and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today. Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-afrming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments with-out widescale clinical trials to back them up. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (NYU Press)stef m. shusterThe Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapid-ly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar gures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Robert A. Gross54Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is frequently paired with The Tale of Genji as one of the most important works in the Japanese canon. Yet it has also been marginalized within Japanese literature. In Unbinding The Pillow Book, Gergana Ivanova offers a reception history of The Pillow Book and its author from the seventeenth century to the present that shows how various ideologies have inuenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions. Ultimately, Ivanova argues for engaging the work’s plurality in order to achieve a clearer understanding of The Pillow Book and the importance it has held for generations of readers. The rst book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon, Unbinding The Pillow Book sheds new light on the construction of gender and sexuality, how women’s writing has been used to create readerships, and why ancient texts continue to play vibrant roles in contemporary cultural production. Unbinding the Pillow Book: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic (Columbia University Press)Gergana IvanovaA User’s Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton’s encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (rst published in 1621) as a guide to one of the most perplex-ing, elusive, attractive, and aficting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton’s Anatomy is perhaps the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever written. En-gaging with the rich cultural and literary framework of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures through Burton’s writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of melancholy - from the man who was afraid to urinate in case he drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel - as a way into exploring the many facets of this mental afiction. A User’s Guide to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes to contem-porary discussions about wellbeing by revealing the earlier history of mental health conditions.User’s Guide to Melancholy (Cambridge University Press)Mary Ann LundOur knowledge of mathematics has structured much of what we think we know about ourselves as individuals and communities, shaping our psychologies, sociologies, and economies. In pursuit of a more predictable and more controllable cosmos, we have extended mathematical insights and methods to more and more aspects of the world. Today those powers are greater than ever, as computation is applied to virtually every aspect of human activity. Yet, in the process, are we losing sight of the human? When we apply mathematics so broadly, what do we gain and what do we lose, and at what risk to humanity? These are the questions that David and Ricardo L. Nirenberg ask in Uncountable, a provocative account of how numerical relations became the corner-stone of human claims to knowledge, truth, and certainty. The result is a powerful les-son in what counts as knowledge and its deepest implications for how we live our lives.Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press)David Nirenberg55Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Faith Hillis examines how émigré communities evolved into revolutionary social ex-periments in the heart of bourgeois cities in post-1917 Russia. Feminists, nationalist activists, and Jewish intellectuals seeking to liberate populations oppressed by the tsarist regime treated the colonies as utopian communities, creating new networks, in-stitutions, and cultural practices that reected their values and realized the ideal world of the future in the present. The colonies also inuenced their European host societies, informing international debates about the meaning of freedom on both the left and the right. Émigrés’ efforts to transform the world played crucial roles in socialism, liberal-ism, anarchism, and Zionism across borders. But they also produced unexpected--and explosive--discontents that dened the course of twentieth-century history. This transnational work demonstrates the marks the Russian colonies left on Europe, while underscoring their role during a pivotal period of Russian history.Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Emigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s (Oxford University Press)Faith HillsIn Vera Rubin: A Life, prolic science writers Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton provide a detailed, accessible overview of Rubin’s work, showing how she leveraged immense curiosity, profound intelligence, and novel technologies to transform our understanding of the cosmos. But Rubin’s impact was not limited to her contributions to scientic knowledge. She also helped to transform scientic practice by promoting the careers of women researchers, advocating for hiring women faculty, inviting women speakers to major conferences, and honoring women with awards that were historically the exclusive province of men. Rubin’s papers yield vivid insights into her life and work. Deftly written, with both scientic experts and general readers in mind, Vera Rubin is a portrait of a woman with insatiable curiosity about the universe who never stopped asking questions and encouraging other women to do the same.Vera Rubin: A Life (Belknap Press)Jacqueline Mitton and Simon MittonWe Are Not Born Submissive offers the rst in-depth philosophical exploration of female submission, focusing on the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, and more recent work in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and political theory. Manon Garcia argues that to comprehend female submission, we must invert how we examine power and see it from the woman’s point of view. Garcia demonstrates that only through the lens of women’s lived experiences--their economic, social, and political situations--and how women adapt their preferences to maintain their own well-being, can we understand the ways in which gender hierarchies in society shape women’s experiences. Ultimate-ly, she asserts that women do not actively choose submission. Rather, they consent to--and sometimes take pleasure in--what is prescribed to them through social norms within a patriarchy.We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives (Princeton University Press)Manon Garcia57Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then guring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punish-ment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and nding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relent-less belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books)Mariame KabaWe take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are not dictated by the natural order. They are, in fact, an articial construction of the modern world. With meticulous archival research that draws on a wide array of sources--including newspapers, restaurant menus, theater schedules, marriage records, school curricula, folklore, housekeeping guides, courtroom testimony, and diaries--David Henkin reveals how our current devotion to weekly rhythms emerged in the United States during the rst half of the nineteenth century. Reconstructing how weekly patterns insinuated themselves into the social practices and mental habits of Americans, Henkin argues that the week is more than just a regimen of rest days or breaks from work, but a domi-nant organizational principle of modern society. Ultimately, the seven-day week shapes our understanding and experience of time.The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are (Yale University Press)David M. HenkinIn We Need New Stories, Nesrine Malik explains that all of these arguments are political myths--variations on the lie that American values are under assault. Exploring how these and other common political myths function, she breaks down how they are employed to subvert calls for equality from historically disenfranchised groups. Inter-weaving reportage with an incendiary analysis of American history and politics, she offers a compelling account of how calls to preserve free speech are used against the vulnerable; how a xation with wokeness, political correctness, and cancel culture is in fact an organized and well-funded campaign by elites; and how the fear of racial minorities and their “identity politics” obscures the biggest threat of all--white terrorism. What emerges is a radical framework for understanding the crises roiling American contemporary politics.We Need New Stories: The Myths That Subvert Freedom (W.W. Norton & Company)Nesrine Malik58Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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Dorothy A. Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girlgrowing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited lives. Her law schoolclasses offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only colorthat mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for herparents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and anurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes.In The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary researchto show that tax law isn’t as color-blind as she’d once believed. She introduces us tofamilies across the economic spectrum whose stories demonstrate how American taxlaw rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black peo-ple further behind. From attending college to getting married to buying a home, blackAmericans nd themselves at a nancial disadvantage compared to their white peers.The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americansand How We Can Fix It (Crown)Dorothy A. BrownEven as our world suffered through successive upheavals, McCarthy contends, “some-thing was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility atevery level of black art making.” Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons withthis resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an ageof widening inequality and moral crisis. McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as aspace not only for argument but for experimental writing. In “Notes on Trap,” he bor-rows a conceit from Susan Sontag to reveal the social and political signicance of trapmusic, the drug-soaked strain of Southern hip-hop that is “the funeral music that theReagan Revolution deserves.” McCarthy takes on the question of reparations, arguingthat true progress will not come until Americans remake their institutions in the ser-vice of true equality. McCarthy’s essays portray a brilliant critic at work, making senseof our disjointed times while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art,identity and representation.Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays (Liveright Publishing)Jesse McCarthyIn Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a beautiful reection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves. Drawing onthe insights of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, Why We Are Restless explores the modern vision of happiness that leads us on, and the disquiet that followsit. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne inspired people to see themselves as individu-als dedicated to seeking contentment in the here and now, but Pascal argued that wecannot nd happiness through pleasant self-seeking, only anguished God-seeking.Rousseau later tried and failed to rescue Montaigne’s worldliness from Pascal’s attack.Steeped in these debates, Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 and, observinga people “restless in the midst of their well-being,” discovered an entire nation seekingworldly contentment--and nding mostly discontent.Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press)Benjamin and Jenna Storey59Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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William Greaves is one of the most signicant and compelling American lmmakers of the past century. Best known for his experimental lm about its own making, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, Greaves was an inuential independent documentary lmmaker who produced, directed, shot, and edited more than a hundred lms on a variety of social issues and on key African American gures ranging from Muham-mad Ali to Ralph Bunche to Ida B. Wells. This volume provides the rst comprehensive overview of Greaves’s remarkable career. It brings to-gether a wide range of material, including a mix of incisive essays from critics and scholars, Greaves’s own writings, an extensive meta-inter-view with Greaves, conversations with his wife and collaborator Louise Archambault Greaves and his son David, and a critical dossier on Sym-biopsychotaxiplasm. Together, they illuminate Greaves’s mission to use lmmaking as a tool for transforming the ways African Americans were perceived by others and the ways they saw themselves. This landmark book is an essential resource on Greaves’s work and his inuence on independent cinema and African-American culture.William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission (Columbia University Press)Edited by Scott MacDonald and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart60Seminary Co-op 2021 NotablesHorses are not indigenous to India. They had to be imported, making them expensive and elite animals. How then did Indian villagers--who could not afford horses and often had never even seen a horse--create such wonderful horse stories and brilliant visual images of horses? In Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares, Wendy Doniger, called “the greatest living mythologist,” examines the horse’s signicance throughout Indian history from the arriv-al of the Indo-Europeans, followed by the people who became the Mughals (who imported Arabian horses) and the British (who imported thoroughbreds and Walers). Along the way, we encounter the tensions between Hindu stallion and Arab mare traditions, the imposition of European standards on Indian breeds, the reasons why men ride mares to weddings, the motivations for murdering Dalits who ride horses, and the enduring myth of foreign horses who emerge from the ocean to fertilize native mares.Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History (University of Virginia Press)Wendy DonigerShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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61James Suzman charts a grand history of work from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are. Drawing insights from anthro-pology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, zoology, physics, and eco-nomics, he shows that while we have evolved to nd purpose in work, for most of human history our ancestors worked far less and thought very differently about work than we do now. Our sense of what it is to be human was transformed by the transition from foraging to food production, and, later, our migration to cities. Since then, our relation-ships with one another, our environment, and our sense of the passage of time have not been the same. Arguing that we are in the midst of a similarly transformative point in history, Suzman shows how automation might revolutionize our relationship with work and in doing so usher in a more sustainable and equitable future for our world and ourselves.Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (Penguin Press)James SuzmanSeminary Co-op 2021 NotablesAs a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s revisionism that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called bourgeois forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to under-standing those years’ lasting inuence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)Yang JishengShop Anytime at semcoop.com

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