Notables 2023 : simplebooklet.com

8Shop anytime at semcoop.comAnimal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Jackson LearsInAnimal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history bytracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universeagainst the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears tracesideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and thebetting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to AndrewJackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “godwithin—rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am.” Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed thereliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religionof embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulsewould be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and hislegatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s countercultureimagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalisttradition—permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our under-standing of the cosmos.Notables 2023 - Top 12

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9Shop anytime at semcoop.comNotables 2023 - Top 12August Wilson: A Life (Simon & Schuster)Patti HartiganAugust Wilson wrote a series of ten plays celebrating African American life in the 20th century, one play for eachdecade. No other American playwright has completed such an ambitious oeuvre. Two of the plays became suc-cessful lms, Fences, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis; and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring ViolaDavis and Chadwick Boseman.Through his brilliant use of vernacular speech, Wilson developed unforgettable characters who epitomized the tri-als and triumphs of the African American experience. He said that he didn’t research his plays but wrote from “theblood’s memory,” a sense of racial history that he believed African Americans shared. Author and theater criticPatti Hartigan traced his ancestry back to slavery, and his plays echo with uncanny similarities to the history of hisancestors. She interviewed Wilson many times before his death and traces his life from his childhood in Pitts-burgh to Broadway. She also interviewed scores of friends, theater colleagues and family members, and conduct-ed extensive research to tell the story of a writer who left an indelible imprint on American theater and opened thedoor for future playwrights of color.

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comChoosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance(Abrams Press)Francesca T. RoysterAs a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of FrancescaT. Royster and her family’s world, inuencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family trulymeans. This lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife, Annie, who’s white; andCecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their 40s and 50s.Choosing Familychronicles this journeyto motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer,and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homesthese women created in Chicago’s South Side--itself a dynamic character in the memoir--where “family” was uid,inclusive, and not necessarily dened by socially recognized contracts. Calling upon the work of some of her fa-vorite queer thinkers, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to arguethat many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: congurationsthat sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their exibility and generosity of spirit. Apowerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance,Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy--about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.Notables 2023 - Top 12
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12Shop anytime at semcoop.comNotables 2023 - Top 12Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change (Flatiron Books)Ben AustenThe United States, alone, locks up a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people. And yet apart from clichés--pay-ing a debt to society; you do the crime, you do the time--there is little sense collectively in America what consti-tutes retribution or atonement. We don’t actually know why we punish.Ben Austen’s powerful exploration offers a behind-the-scenes look at the process of parole. Told through theportraits of two men imprisoned for murder, and the parole board that holds their freedom in the balance, Austen’suninching storytelling forces us to reckon with some of the most profound questions underlying the country’s val-ues around crime and punishment. What must someone who commits a terrible act do to get a second chance?What does incarceration seek to accomplish?An illuminating work of narrative nonction, Correction challenges us to consider for ourselves why and who we
punish—and how we might nd a way out of an era of mass imprisonment.
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Shop anytime at semcoop.comMagus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Belknap Press)Anthony GraftonIn literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus,however, was something quite different: a magus--a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currentsand public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus insixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval coun-terparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reform-er. Alongside these better-known gures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.Magus
details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, JohannesTrithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, theservices they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired--often, the circlesof kings and princes. During the late fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debatesabout licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time,they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology,probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self andexploit the cosmos.Notables 2023 - Top 12
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Shop anytime at semcoop.comNotables 2023 - Top 12Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Christina SharpeA singular achievement,Ordinary Notesexplores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life thatemerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfullyweaves artifacts from the past with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersiveportrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages--sometimes aboutlanguage, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature--always attend, with exqui-site care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.At the heart ofOrdinary Notesis the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned tosee in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother giftedme a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons achorus of voices and experiences to the page. She collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictio-nary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. In the process, sheforges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.
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Shop anytime at semcoop.comRediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale Univer-sity Press)Ned BlackhawkThe most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus onEuropeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with anew generation of scholars insisting that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence ofAmerican Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.Ned Blackhawk interweaves ve centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial explorationto the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century.Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peo-ples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.Notables 2023 - Top 12
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Shop anytime at semcoop.comNotables 2023 - Top 12The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do theRight Thing to Black Panther (Chronicle Books)Ruth E. CarterRuth E. Carter is a living legend of costume design. For three decades, she has shaped the story of the Blackexperience on screen--from the ‘80s streetwear of Do the Right Thing to the royal regalia of Coming 2 America.Her work on Marvel’s Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever not only brought Afrofuturism to themainstream, but also made her the rst Black winner of an Oscar in costume design and the rst Black woman towin two Academy Awards in any category. In 2021, she became the second-ever costume designer to receive astar on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.In this denitive book, Carter shares her origins--recalling a trip to the sporting goods store with Spike Lee tooutt the School Daze cast and a transformative moment stepping inside history on the set of Steven Spielberg’sAmistad. She recounts anecdotes from dressing the greats: Eddie Murphy, Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett,Halle Berry, Chadwick Boseman, and many more. She describes the passion for history that inspired her periodpieces--from Malcolm X to What’s Love Got to Do With It--and her journey into Afrofuturism.
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17Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture(Columbia University Press)Courtney ThorssonOne Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Blackwomen writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about theirwork. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group—which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall,Margo Jefferson, and others—would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space forBlack women to discuss literature and liberation.The Sisterhoodtells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institu-tions. Drawing on original interviews with Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, andreadings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group’s everyday collaboration and profound legacy. Sheconsiders the popular and critical success of Sisterhood members in the 1980s, the uneasy absorption of Blackfeminism into the academy, and how younger writers built on the foundations the group laid. Highlighting the orga-nizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, this book demonstrates that The
Sisterhood offers an enduring model for Black feminist collaboration.Notables 2023 - Top 12

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comNotables 2023 - Top 12Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature(University of California Press)Max K. StrassfeldTrans Talmudplaces eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn fromthem about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these gures as anomalies to bejustied or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues that they profoundly shaped ideas about law, as the rabbisconstructed intricate taxonomies of gender across dozens of texts to understand an array of cultural tensions.Showing how rabbis employed eunuchs and androgynes to dene proper forms of masculinity, Strassfeld empha-sizes the unique potential of these gures to not only establish the boundary of law but exceed and transform it.Trans Talmudchallenges how we understand gender in Judaism and demonstrates that acknowledging nonbinarygender prompts a reassessment of Jewish literature and law.
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19Shop anytime at semcoop.comVoices of Dissent: An Essay (Seagull Books)Romila ThaparPeople have argued since time immemorial. Disagreement is a part of life, of human experience. But we now livein times when any form of protest in India is marked as anti-Indian and met with arguments that the very conceptof dissent was imported into India from the West. As Romila Thapar explores in her timely historical essay, how-ever, dissent has a long history in the subcontinent, even if its forms have evolved through the centuries.InVoices of Dissent: An Essay, Thapar looks at the articulation of nonviolent dissent and relates it to variouspivotal moments throughout India’s history. Beginning with Vedic times, she takes us from the second to the rstmillennium BCE, to the emergence of groups that were jointly called the Shramanas--the Jainas, Buddhists, andAjivikas. Going forward in time, she also explores the views of the Bhakti sants and others of the fteenth and six-teenth centuries and brings us to a major moment of dissent that helped to establish a free and democratic India:Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha. Then Thapar places in context the recent peaceful protests against India’s new,controversial citizenship law, maintaining that dissent in our time must be opposed to injustice and supportive ofdemocratic rights so that society may change for the better.Notables 2023 - Top 12

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comNotables 2023 - Top 12We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir (Other Press)Raja ShehadehAziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestsellingauthor and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and com-plexities of their relationship.A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, nally,under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father’s courage and, in turn, his father does not appre-ciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changesRaja irrevocably.This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait ofa particular father and son relationship.
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22Shop anytime at semcoop.comA Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again (Ecco)Joanna BiggsA few years into her marriage and feeling societal pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joan-na Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. Was this all there was? Shedivorced without knowing what would come next. Newly untethered, Joanna returned to thefree-spirited writers of her youth and was soon reading in a fever—desperately searching forevidence of lives that looked more like her own, for the messiness and freedom, for a possi-ble blueprint for intellectual fulllment. InA Life of One’s Own, Mary Wollstonecraft, GeorgeEliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison,and Elena Ferrante are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in anew light. Joanna wanted to learn more about the conditions these women needed to writetheir best work, and how they addressed the questions she herself was struggling with: Isdomesticity a trap? Is life worth living if you have lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman?Why is it so important for women to read one another?A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life (Cambridge University Press)Zena HitzWhat is happiness? Does life have a meaning? If so, is that meaning available in an ordinarylife? The philosopher Zena Hitz confronted these questions head-on when she spent sever-al years living in a Christian religious community. Religious life -- the communal life chosenby monks, nuns, friars, and hermits -- has been a part of global Christianity since earliesttimes, but many of us struggle to understand what could drive a person to renounce wealth,sex, children, and ambition to live a life of prayer and sacrice. Hitz’s lively and accessiblebook explores questions about faith, sacrice, asceticism and happiness through philosophy,stories, and examples from religious life. Drawing on personal experience as well as lm,literature, history, biography, and theology, it demysties an important element of contempo-rary culture, and provides a picture of human ourishing and happiness which challenges andenriches modern-day life.Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso)Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (eds.) Abolition Geography brings together Gilmore’s essays, articles and interviews from over the past two decades. One of the foremost contemporary theorists and activists in movements forprison abolition and social justice, Gilmore’s essays comprise searing analyses of the originsof mass incarceration and racial violence.This collection reveals her to be a major theorist of the state, which she shows has todaymorphed into an ‘anti-state state’ organising the abandonment of racialised and exploitedpopulations. Countering these new formations of power, Gilmore presents us with a power-ful model for the radical articulation of scholarship and activism, and a novel way of askingourselves the question: ‘What is to be done?’ Edited and introduced by Brenna Bhandar andAlberto Toscano.Notables 2023

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23Shop anytime at semcoop.comAfrican Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude(Other Press)Souleymane Bachir Diagne; Chike Jeffers, trans.Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who becamethe rst president of the Republic of Senegal. In African Art as Philosophy, Souleymane Bachir Diagne uses a unique approach to reading Senghor’s inuential works, taking as thestarting point for his analysis Henri Bergson’s idea that in order to understand philosophers,one must nd the initial intuition from which every aspect of their work develops. In the caseof Senghor, Diagne argues that his primordial intuition is that African art is a philosophy. Tofurther this point, Diagne looks at what Senghor called the “1889 Revolution” (the year Berg-son’s Time and Free Will was published), as well as the inuential writers and publications ofthat period—specically, Nietzsche and Rimbaud. The 1889 Revolution, Senghor claims, iswhat led him to the understanding of the “Vitalism” at the core of African religions and beliefs
that found expression in the arts.
Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass PoliticsBetween the World Wars(W. W. Norton & Company)Tara ZahraBefore the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. Internation-al travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rightsto world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction wasgrowing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Againstthe World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, Tara Zahra examines how nationalism,rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century.Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of theglobal economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment. Richwith detail, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sourcesof resistance to globalization and an essential reading to grapple with our divided present.An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and YoungAdulthood in Malawi(University of Chicago Press)Jenny TrinitapoliAn Epidemic of Uncertainty advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasiz-ing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–whatpeople know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jen-ny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-relatedmortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawianyoung adults don’t know their HIV status. Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty ismeasurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that ex-pand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health. Insistingthat known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientic models of human be-havior, An Epidemic of Uncertainty treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHORFACULTYAUTHOR

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24Shop anytime at semcoop.comAn Ethos of Blackness: Rastafari Cosmology, Culture, and Consciousness (Columbia University Press)Vivaldi Jean-MarieRastafari is an Afrocentric social and religious movement that emerged among Afro-Jamaicancommunities in the 1930s. This book is an account of Rastafari, demonstrating that it pro-vides a normative conception of Blackness for people of African descent that resists Eurocen-tric and colonial ideas. Vivaldi Jean-Marie examines Rastafari’s core beliefs and practices,arguing that they constitute a distinctively Black system of norms and values—at once anethos and a cosmology. He traces Rastafari’s origins in enslaved people’s strategies of resis-tance, Jamaican Revivalism, and Garveyism, showing how it incorporates ancestral religioustraditions and emancipatory politics. However, he insists, before Rastafari can fulll its prom-ise of liberation for people of African descent, it must confront its failure to include women andredress sexism. Through rigorous and sensitive reections, this book offers deeply originalinsights into the Black theological imagination.Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE (Princeton University Press)Christopher EhretThis book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping globalhistory of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technolog-ical, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilization. Christopher Ehret takes read-ers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climateallowed for the transition from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of crops and raising oflivestock, to the rise of kingdoms and empires in the rst centuries of the common era. Ehrettakes up the problem of how we discuss Africa in the context of global history, combiningresults of multiple disciplines. He sheds light on the rich history of technological innovationby African societies—from advances in ceramics to cotton weaving and iron smelting—high-lighting the important contributions of women as inventors and innovators. Ehret lays out thedeeply African foundations of ancient Egyptian culture, beliefs, and institutions and discussesearly Christianity in Africa.Archaism and Actuality: Japan and the Global Fascist Imaginary(Duke University Press)Harry HarootunianIn Archaism and Actuality Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascismin Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism. He applies his theori-zation of subsumption to examine how capitalism integrates and redirects preexisting social,cultural, and economic practices to guide the present. This subsumption leads to a globalcondition in which states and societies all exist within different stages and manifestations ofcapitalism. Drawing on Japanese philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, Marxist theory,and Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution, Harootunian shows how the Meiji Restoration of1868 exemplied a unique path to capitalism. Japan’s capitalist expansion in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, rise as an imperial power, and subsequent transition to fascism sig-nal a wholly distinct trajectory into modernity that forecloses any notion of a pure or universaldevelopment of capitalism. Harootunian offers both a retheorization of capitalist developmentand a reinterpretation of epochal moments in modern Japanese history.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR

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25Shop anytime at semcoop.comAustria 1867-1955 (Oxford University Press)John W. BoyerAustria 1867-1955 connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the AustrianRepublic that emerged in 1918. John W. Boyer presents the case of modern Austria as afascinating example of democratic nation-building.Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages (Oxford Univer-sity Press)Mark Gregory PeggMark Gregory Pegg’s history of the Middle Ages opens and closes with martyrdom, the rstthat of a young Roman mother in a North African amphitheater in 203 and the second aFrench girl burned to death beside the Seine in 1431. Both Vibia Perpetua and Jeanne laPucelle died for their Christian beliefs, yet that for which they willingly sacriced their livesconnects and separates them. Both were divinely inspired, but one believed her deity sharedthe universe with other gods, and the other knew that her Creator ruled heaven and earth.Between them, across the centuries, lives were shaped by the ebb and ow of the divine andthe human. Here is the story of people struggling in life and in death to understand them-selves and their relationship to God. Beatrice’s Last Smile interweaves vivid portraits of suchindividuals to offer a sweeping and immersive story. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song (W. W. Norton & Company)Judith TickBecoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depthfamily interviews shed new light on the singer’s difcult childhood in Yonkers, New York, thetragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls’ reformatory school—where shesang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen proles from theBlack press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimina-tion and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury.From the singer’s rst performance at the Apollo Theatre’s famous “Amateur Night” to theSavoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb’s big band in the 1930s,Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. A masterful biography,Becoming Ella Fitzgerald
describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatchedin the twentieth century.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR

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26Shop anytime at semcoop.comBig Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry andAmerican Literature (Columbia University Press)Dan SinykinIn the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison orchat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his ofce. By the 1970s, editors were poringover prot-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers.As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature—andliterature itself—transformed.
Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected ction, literary
form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines,
personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what
kinds of books and writers are published. Written in gripping and lively prose, this deeply
original book recasts the past six decades of American ction.Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton University Press)Juliet HookerIn democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in theUnited States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally.Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they havegenerally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citi-zens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enablesprogress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy andrace, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States to-day are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplied by current protests againstpolice violence—the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourningspurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, whichis also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege.Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (University of Chicago Press)Charisse Burden-StellyIn the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare wasrooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, andpolitical equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare established anticapitalism asa force capable of inltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctionedpanics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domina-tion. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and viceversa. Illuminating the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shininga light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation, this book incorporatesemancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black politicalminorities and their legacy.Notables 2023

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27Shop anytime at semcoop.comCare: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books)Premilla NadasenSince the earliest days of the pandemic, care work has been thrust into the national spot-light. The notion of care seems simple. Care is about nurturing, feeding, nursing, assisting,and loving human beings. It is “the work that makes all other work possible.” But as PremillaNadasen argues, we have only begun to understand the massive role it plays in our lives andour economy. Nadasen traces the rise of the care economy, from its roots in slavery, wherethere was no clear division between production and social reproduction, to the present carecrisis, experienced acutely by more and more Americans. Today’s care economy is an insti-tutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’sprot. Yet this is also a story of resistance. Low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of col-or in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for BlackLives have fought for and practiced collective care. These groups help us envision how, giventhe challenges before us, we can create a caring world as part of a radical future.Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology(Yale University Press)Kevin W HectorKevin W. Hector argues that we can understand Christianity as a set of practices designedto transform one’s way of perceiving and being in the world. Hector examines practices thatreorient us to God (imitation, eating together, and likemindedness), that transform our wayof being in the world (prayer, lament, and vocation), and that reshape our way of being withothers (benevolence, looking for God in others, forgiveness, and activism). Taken together,the aim of these practices is to transform one’s way of perceiving and acting in the face ofsuccess and failure, risk and loss, guilt and shame, love, and loss of control. These transfor-mations can add up to a transformation of one’s very self. To make sense of Christianity asa way of life these practices must be understood within the context of Christian beliefs aboutsin, Jesus, redemption, and eternal life. Understanding them thus requires a systematic theol-ogy, which Hector offers in this clear-eyed and elegant interpretation of the Christian tradition.Conversations with Birds (Milkweed Editions)Priyanka Kumar“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this livelycollection of essays by acclaimed lmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar. Growing up atthe feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lushnatural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasinglydistanced from more than human life and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributingto its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on lms, thatshe began to rediscover her place in the landscape—and in the cosmos—by way of watch-ing birds. At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides arecausing widespread extinction of species, Kumar’s reections on these messengers fromour distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that“seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right birdto awaken us.”Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR

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28Shop anytime at semcoop.comDancing in the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Thriving in Turbulent Times(Simon & Schuster)Otis Moss IIIOnce again, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rst observed in the 1960s, it is midnight in Amer-ica—a dark time of division and anxiety, with threats of violence looming in the shadows.“We’re going to kill you” rang in Reverend Otis Moss’s ears when he suddenly heard a noisein the middle of the night. He grabbed a baseball bat to confront the intruder in his home.When he opened the door to his daughter’s room, he found that the source of the noise washis own little girl, dancing. At that moment, Pastor Moss saw that the real intruder was withinhim. Caught in a cycle of worry and anger, he had allowed the darkness inside. But seeing hisdaughter evoked Pslam 30: “You have turned my mourning into dancing.” He set out to writethis sermon. Dancing in the Darkness helps us tap into the spiritual reserves we all possessso we can slay our personal demons, confront our civic challenges, and reach our highestgoals.Daodejing (Liveright)Laozi; Brook Ziporyn (trans.)Grounded in a lifetime of research and interpretive work and informed by careful study ofrecent archeological discoveries of alternate versions of the text, Brook Ziporyn, one of thepreeminent explicators of Eastern religions in English, brings us a revelatory new trans-lation—and a radical reinterpretation—of the central text of Taoist thought. Ziporyn offersan alternative to the overly comforting tone of so many translations, revealing instead theelectrifying strangeness and explosively unsettling philosophical implications of this famouslyambiguous work. In Ziporyn’s hands, this is no mere “wisdom book” of anodyne afrmationsor mildly diverting brain-teasers—this pathbreaking Daodejing will forever change how thetext is read and understood in the West.Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press)Tina PostArguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert withblackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning“dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance ofself in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is acritical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of AfricanAmerican aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expres-sionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to earlytwenty-rst-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aes-thetic within and beyond black embodiments. Through this varied archive, Post reveals howdeadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation,excess and insensibility.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHORFACULTYAUTHOR

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29Shop anytime at semcoop.comDiscourses of the Elders: The Aztec Huehuetlatolli A First English Translation(W. W. Norton & Company)Sebastian Purcell, trans.Western philosophers have long claimed that God, if such a being exists, is a personal forcecapable of reason, and that the path to a good human life is also the path to a happy one. Butwhat if these claims prove false? The Aztecs of central Mexico had a rich philosophical tradi-tion, recorded in Latin script and passed down for centuries in the native Nahuatl language-one of the earliest transcripts was Huehuetlatolli, or Discourses of the Elders. Novel in its form,the Discourses consisted of short conversations between elders and young people on how toachieve a meaningful and morally sound life. The Aztecs considered the mind an embodiedforce, present not just in the brain but throughout the body. Their core values relied on collec-tive responsibility and group wisdom, not individual thought and action, orienting life aroundone’s actions in this realm rather than an afterlife. Discourses of the Elders brings light to theAztec ethical landscape in brilliant clarity, and proves philosophy can be active, communal, &grounded in a pursuit of a meaningful life.Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Knopf)Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes EdwardsHenry Threadgill has had a singular life in music. At 79, this saxophonist, autist, and cele-brated composer is one of three jazz artists to have won a Pulitzer Prize. In Easily Slip into Another World, Threadgill recalls his childhood and upbringing in Chicago, his family life and education, and his brilliant career in music. Here are riveting recollections of the music scenein Chicago in the early 1960s, when Threadgill developed his craft among friends who wouldgo on to form the core of the highly inuential Association for the Advancement of CreativeMusicians. We appreciate his genius as he travels to the Netherlands, Venezuela, Trinidad,Sicily, and Goa enriching his art. In the 70s and 80s, we follow him to New York as he im-merses himself in the volatile downtown scene, collaborating with choreographers, writers,theater directors and musicians. He shares his impressions of the recording industry, hisperspectives on music education and the history of Black music in the United States, and, ofcourse, accounts his work with the various ensembles he directed over the past ve decades.Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better(Princeton University Press)Myisha CherrySages from Cicero to Oprah have told us that forgiveness requires us to let go of negativeemotions and that it has a unique power to heal our wounds. In Failures of Forgiveness,Myisha Cherry argues that these beliefs couldn’t be more wrong—and that the ways we thinkabout and use forgiveness can often do more harm than good. She presents a new andhealthier understanding of forgiveness—one that will give us a better chance to recover fromwrongdoing and move toward “radical repair.” Examining how forgiveness can go wrong,Cherry addresses forgiveness and race, canceling versus forgiving, self-forgiveness, andmore. She takes the burden of forgiveness off those who have been wronged and offers guid-ance both to those deciding whether and how to forgive and those seeking forgiveness. Byshowing us how to do forgiveness better, Failures of Forgiveness promises to transform howwe deal with wrongdoing in our lives, opening a new path to true healing and reconciliation.Notables 2023

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Notables 202330Shop anytime at semcoop.comForeign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations (Ecco)Simon SchamaWith the devastating effects of COVID-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civiliza-tion, we live in unprecedented times—or so we might think. But pandemics have been aconstant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease have lived side by sidefor millennia. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved,most notably through medical breakthroughs that include the development of vaccines. Thestory of disease eradication, however, has never been one of simply science—it is political,cultural, and deeply personal. Ranging across continents and centuries, in Foreign Bodies ac-claimed historian Simon Schama unpacks the stories of the often-unknown individuals whosepioneering work changed the face of modern health care. Questioning why the occurrence ofpandemics appears to be accelerating at an alarming rate, Schama looks into our impact onthe natural world and how that in turn is affecting us, all while interrogating how the geopoli-tics of recent decades has had a devastating effect on global health.Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality(Cambridge University Press)Sarah NooterThis book suggests that poetry offers a way to remain in the world - not only by declarationsof intent or the promotion of remembrance, but also through the durable physicality of itspractice. Whether carved in stone or wood, printed onto a page, beat out by a mimetic orrhythmic body, or humming in the mind, poems are meant to engrave and adhere. AncientGreek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and the ephemeral-ity inherent in mortality. Yet it couples its presentation of this awareness with an offering ofmeaningful embodiment in shifting forms that are aligned with, yet subtly manipulative of,mortal time. Sarah Nooter’s argument ranges widely across authors and genres, from Ho-mer and the Homeric Hymns through Sappho and Archilochus to Pindar and Aeschylus. Thebook will be compelling reading for all those interested in Greek literature and in poetry morebroadly.How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age ofAlgorithms (W. W. Norton & Company)Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. JonesFrom facial recognition—capable of checking people into ights or identifying undocumentedresidents—to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail,each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But thesetechnologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from thecensus enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of Google search. Expanding on thecourse they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminatethe ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what istrue, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. How were new technical andscientic capabilities developed; who supported, advanced, or funded these capabilities ortransitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what, and to whom? Wigginsand Jones focus on these questions as they trace data’s historical arc and look to the future.
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31Shop anytime at semcoop.comHow Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope andSurvival in the American South (Convergent Books)Esau McCaulleyFor much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someonewho, through hard work, faith and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black rac-ism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.This account was the one he was conditioned to give, the story America demands from Blacksurvivors. When preparing the eulogy at his estranged father’s funeral, McCaulley was forcedto face the shortcomings of that narrative about his own path to prosperity. No one “escapes”poverty; it marks us. He came to see that people, even those who harm us, are more com-plicated than the roles we create for them in our imagination. The way to the promised landis not a trip from poverty to success, but the journey to nding beauty even in dark places.Written with profound honesty and compassion, How Far to the Promised Land is a weightyexamination of our most pressing societal issues and the hope that keeps us alive.How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Adam NicolsonIn How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the be-lief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces usto our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations ofHomer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and nd landscapes not over-whelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nic-olson uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradoxin southern Italy with Zeno, the world’s rst absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus,burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes. Sparkling with maps, photographs, andartwork, How to Be provides a vital new way of understanding the origins of Western thought,and makes the questions of the ancient world new again. What are the principles of the physi-cal world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions?How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (37 Ink)Saya SinclairThroughout her childhood, Saya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militantadherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with thethreat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting inuences of the Westernworld outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Saya and her sistersmorally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience. In aneffort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. The women in herfamily were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps tocover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Saya’s mother, while loyalto her father, nonetheless gave Saya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, towhich Saya latched on for dear life. And as Saya watched her mother struggle voicelesslyfor years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used hereducation as a sharp tool with which to nd her voice and break free.Notables 2023

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32Shop anytime at semcoop.comHow Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature(Princeton University Press)Emily HauserWhen Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a maleone—aoidos, or “singer-man.” The most famous woman poet of ancient Greece, whose craftwas one of words, had no words with which to talk about who she was and what she did. InHow Women Became Poets, Emily Hauser rewrites the story of Greek literature as one of gender, arguing that the ways the Greeks talked about their identity as poets constructed,played with, and broke down gender expectations that literature was for men alone. Bringingtogether recent studies in ancient authorship, gender, and performativity, Hauser offers anew history of classical literature that redenes the canon as a constant struggle to be heardthrough, and sometimes despite, gender.I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader (OR Books)Gerald Horne, T.A. Parris (ed.)Horne approaches his study of history as a deeply politically engaged scholar, with an insight-ful and necessarily partisan stance, critiquing the lasting reverberations of white supremacyand all its bedfellows—imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism—which continue towreak havoc to this day. Drawing on a career that spans more than four decades, The GeraldHorne Reader will showcase the many highlights of Horne’s writings, delving into discussionsof the United States and its place on the global stage, the curation of mythology surround-ing titans of 20th Century African American history like Malcolm X, and Horne’s thoughts onpressing international crises of the 21st Century including the war in Afghanistan, and the warin Ukraine. As we continue to observe the chaos of our current times, I Dare Say foregroundsa rmly rooted, consistent analysis of what has come to pass—and provides illuminatinginsight that better informs where we may be headed, and outlines what needs to be done tostem the tide of growing fascism across the Western world.Ignorance: A Global History (Yale University Press)Peter BurkeThroughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last.Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenmentthinkers tried to sweep superstition away with reason, the modern welfare state sought toslay the “giant” of ignorance, and in today’s hyperconnected world seemingly limitless infor-mation is available on demand. But what about the knowledge lost over the centuries? Arewe really any less ignorant than our ancestors? In this highly original account, Peter Burkeexamines the long history of humanity’s ignorance across religion and science, war andpolitics, business and catastrophes. Burke reveals remarkable stories of the many forms ofignorance—genuine or feigned, conscious and unconscious—from the willful politicians whoredrew Europe’s borders in 1919 to the politics of whistleblowing and climate change denial.The result is a lively exploration of human knowledge across the ages, and the importance ofrecognizing its limits.Notables 2023

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33Shop anytime at semcoop.comIn a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems(Penguin Press)Giorgio ParisiFrom the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, an enlightening and personal journey into thepractice of groundbreaking science. With In a Flight of Starlings, celebrated physicist GiorgioParisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work, starting with investigating theprinciples of physics by observing the ight of ocks of birds. Studying the movements ofthese communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complexsystems of all kinds--collections of everything from atoms and planets to other animals, suchas ourselves.In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility(Harvard University Press)Costica BradatanIn Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spir-itual and biological. It begins by examining the deant choices of the French mystic SimoneWeil, who, in sympathy with exploited workers, took up factory jobs that her frail body couldnot sustain. From there we turn to Mahatma Gandhi, whose punishing quest for purity drovehim to ever more extreme acts of self-abnegation. Next we meet the self-styled loser E. M.Cioran, who deliberately turned his back on social acceptability, and Yukio Mishima, who rev-eled in a distinctly Japanese preoccupation with the noble failure, before looking to Seneca totease out the ingredients of a good life.Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things(University of Chicago Press)Peter CovielloThis is a book about loving things—books, songs, people—in the shadow of a felt, loomingdisaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter Coviello considers pieces ofculture across a fantastic range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute,romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him, we reencounter movieslike The Shining, shows like The Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, SallyRooney, and Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pave-ment, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.Notables 2023

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35Shop anytime at semcoop.comJoseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press)Richard Lyman BushmanA vibrant history of the objects that gave birth to a new religion. In this book renownedhistorian of Mormonism Richard Lyman Bushman offers a cultural history of the gold plates.Bushman examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and critics--andby treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others--from Smith’s rst encounter withthem to the present. Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? Andwhy do they remain objects of fascination to this day? By examining these questions, Bush-man sheds new light on Mormon history and on the role of enchantment in the modern world.Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press)Peter BrownThe end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, de-cline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and path-breaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the “neglected half-millennium”now known as late antiquity was in fact crucial to the development of modern Europe and theMiddle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his effortsto recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the clas-sical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discov-ered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundationalinstitution-building. With Journeys of the Mind, Brown offers an essential account of the

"grand endeavor" to reimagine a decisive historical moment.
.Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law(Liveright)Richard Rothstein and Leah RothsteinAs recent headlines informed us, twenty million Americans participated in racial justicedemonstrations in 2020, though few considered what could be done to redress inequality intheir own communities. Page by page, Just Action offers programs that activists and theirsupporters can undertake in their own communities to address historical inequities, based
on decades of study and experience, in a nation awash with memes and internet theories.
Often forced to respond to social and political outrage, institutions have apologized for past
actions. But their pledges--some of them real, others thoroughly hollow--to improve cannot
compensate for existing damage. Just Action shows how community groups can press rms

that imposed segregation to nally take responsibility for reversing the harm, creating victories
that might nally challenge residential segregation and help remedy America’s profoundly
unconstitutional past.Notables 2023

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comJustice by Means of Democracy (University of Chicago Press)Danielle AllenAt a time of great social and political turmoil, when many residents of the leading democ-racies question the ability of their governments to deal fairly and competently with seriouspublic issues, and when power seems more and more to rest with the wealthy few, this bookreconsiders the very foundations of democracy and justice. Scholar and writer Danielle Allenargues that the surest path to a just society in which all are given the support necessary toourish is the protection of political equality; that justice is best achieved by means of democ-racy; and that the social ideals and organizational design principles that ow from recognizingpolitical equality and democracy as fundamental to human well-being provide an alterna-tive framework not only for justice but also for political economy. Allen identies this para-digm-changing new framework as “power-sharing liberalism.”Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio’s Decameron: Realism on Trial(Cambridge University Press)Justin SteinbergIn Boccaccio’s time, the Italian city-state began to take on a much more proactive role inprosecuting crime – one which superseded a largely communitarian, private approach. Theemergence of the state-sponsored inquisitorial trial indeed haunts the legal proceedingsstaged in the Decameron. How, Justin Steinberg asks, does this significant juridical shift alterour perspective on Boccaccio’s much-touted realism and literary self-consciousness? Whatcan it tell us about how he views his predecessor, Dante: perhaps the world’s most powerfulinquisitorial judge? And to what extent does the Decameron shed light on the enduring role ofverisimilitude and truth-seeming in our current legal system? The author explores these andother literary, philosophical, and ethical questions that Boccaccio raises in the Decameron’snumerous trials. The book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modernstudies, literary theory and legal history.Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Live Audio Essays (Primary Information)Lawrence Abu HamdanThis volume compiles transcripts from performances and lms by Beirut-based LawrenceAbu Hamdan (born 1985), an artist known for his political and cultural reections on soundand listening. Taken from seven works dating from 2014 to 2022, Abu Hamdan’s intricatelycrafted monologues are at times intimate, humorous and entertaining, yet politically disqui-eting in their revelations. Utilizing personal narratives, anecdotes, popular media and tran-scripts rooted in historic and contemporary moments, the artist leads the reader through hisinvestigations into crimes that are heard but not seen. His live audio essays are an exercisein listening to acoustic memories, echoes of reincarnated lives, voices that leak through wallsand borders, the drone of warfare, cinematic sound effects, atmospheric noise, the resonantfrequencies of buildings and the sound of hunger. Collected here for the rst time, all the textswere transcribed from performance documentation and edited with the artist.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR
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37Shop anytime at semcoop.comA Legacy of Discrimination: The Essential Constitutionality ofAfrmative Action (Oxford University Press)Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. StoneIn A Legacy of Discrimination, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, two of America’s leading constitutional scholars, trace the policy’s history and the legal challenges it has facedover the decades. They argue that in order to fully comprehend afrmative action’s originalintent and impact, we must re-acquaint ourselves with the era in which it arose, beginningwith the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, 1954’s Brown v. Boardof Education of Topeka, Kansas. Assessing this history, Bollinger and Stone introduce subse-quent, and evolving, afrmative-action case law that had the intent and effect of constrainingsocial, educational, and economic progress for Black people and other minority groups. Theydemonstrate how and why afrmative action policies stand on rm legal ground and mustremain protected. Further, they explain why Americans must view afrmative action as a long-term moral commitment to secure justice, especially for Black Americans, after three and ahalf centuries of grave injustice that violates the most essential aspirations of our nation.Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of OurTimes(Yale University Press)Samuel MoynBy the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernityhad brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclearterror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of theEnlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historianof political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trill-ing—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. Moyn presents a timelycall for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damageof the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences (The MIT Press)Raghuram RajanCentral banks took extraordinary measures to stabilize markets and enhance growth after thenancial crisis of 2008, but without giving much thought to the long-term consequences. Itwas a response, Raghuram Rajan argues, that set a dangerous precedent: the more centralbanks did, the more they were expected to do, and the more they ended up doing. Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences looks back at what this meant for where we are now. Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences is the most thorough account yetof the choices central banks have made to meet the economic challenges of our century andwhy they must rethink these choices.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHORFACULTYAUTHOR

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comNihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (Belknap Press)Wendy BrownOne of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading—and confound-ing—political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures,she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political respon-sibility.How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university becomean ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at thecenter of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God andtradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, includingthat of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere todisplays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the futureunimportant, and corruption banal.On Czeslaw Milosz: Visions from the Other Europe (Princeton University Press)Eva HoffmanCzesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because helived through and wrote about many of the most extreme events of that extreme century, fromthe world wars and the Holocaust to the Cold War. Over a seven-decade career, he producedan important body of poetry, ction, and nonction, including classics such as The CaptiveMind, a reection on the hypnotic power of ideology, and Native Realm, a memoir. In thisbook, Eva Hoffman, like Miłosz a Polish-born writer who immigrated to the West, presents aneloquent personal portrait of the life and work of her illustrious fellow exile.On Marriage (Yale University Press)Devorah Baum“As far back as our history books go, we have no record of a time preceding marriage. Isn’tthat an extraordinary fact?” So writes Devorah Baum in this searching and revelatory book.But when confronted with the question “What do intellectuals think of marriage?” Baumconcludes that most philosophers have preferred to avoid the subject. Is marriage then anintellectual blind spot? To ll in the gaps, she draws on a wide range of cultural material, fromthe classical to the contemporary, while interweaving reections on her own experiences ofmatrimony to both critique and celebrate marriage’s many contradictions and its profoundeffects on us all. Entertaining, illuminating, consoling, and candid, On Marriage is an unprece-dented investigation of what we are really talking about when we talk about marriage.Notables 2023
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39Shop anytime at semcoop.comOn Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe(Knopf)Caroline Dodds PennockWe have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the “OldWorld” encountered the “New”, when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492.But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens ofthousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others—enslaved people, diplomats, ex-plorers, servants, traders—the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. Drawing on theirsurviving literature and poetry and subtly layering European eyewitness accounts against thegrain, Pennock gives us a sweeping account of the Indigenous American presence in, andimpact on, early modern Europe.Osip Mandelstam: A Biography (Verso)Ralph DutliThis full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam combines an analysis of his poetry with adescription of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolution-ary Russia to his nal fate as a victim of Stalinism. His evolution as a poet naturally occupiesa large place in the biography, which quotes many of his most famous poems, including hisdevastating anti-Stalin epigram. He produced wonderful poetry before the October Revolu-tion, but did not reach his full poetic stature until the 1930s when in exile in Voronezh. He wasnever an ofcial Soviet poet, and it was only thanks to the intervention of Bukharin that hewas brought back from utter impoverishment.Part: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality (Princeton Uni-versity Press)David EdmondsDerek Part (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of.Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Part wasanything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think aboutthings that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even whatit means to be a person. In Part, David Edmonds presents the rst biography of an intrigu-ing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.Notables 2023

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comPaved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin Press)Henry GrabarParking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of trafcand the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal nance, the quality of pub-lic space, and even the course of oodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our niteresources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really moreimportant than anything else?These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mes-merizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern Americancity. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabarbrilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to DisneyWorld to New York, stopping at every major American city in between.Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire(Columbia University Press)SherAli TareenIn this groundbreaking book, SherAli Tareen explores how leading South Asian Muslimthinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the lateeighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslimscholarly discourse and debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship were unresolved tensions andssures over the place and meaning of Islam in the modern world. Perilous Intimacies consid-ers a range of topics, including Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theo-logical polemics, the question of interreligious friendship in the Qur’an, intra-Muslim debateson cow sacrice, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits.Period: The Real Story of Menstruation (Princeton University Press)Kate ClancyMenstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years onend, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual’s period asuseless, and some doctors still believe it’s unsafe for a menstruating person to swim in theocean wearing a tampon. Period counters the false theories that have long dened the study of the uterus, exposing the eugenic history of gynecology while providing an intersectionalfeminist perspective on menstruation science.Notables 2023
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41Shop anytime at semcoop.comPlato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism(Princeton University Press)Shadi BartschAs improbable as it may sound, an illuminating way to understand today’s China and how itviews the West is to look at the astonishing ways Chinese intellectuals are interpreting—oris it misinterpreting?—the Greek classics. In Plato Goes to China, Shadi Bartsch offers a provocative look at Chinese politics and ideology by exploring Chinese readings of Plato,Aristotle, Thucydides, and other ancient writers. She shows how Chinese thinkers have dra-matically recast the Greek classics to support China’s political agenda, diagnose the ills of theWest, and assert the superiority of China’s own Confucian classical tradition.Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy (Oxford University Press)Robin WatereldConsidered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fth century BCE. In his teens, he honedhis intellect by attending lectures from the many thinkers who passed through Athens andtoyed with the idea of writing poetry. He nally decided to go into politics, but became disillu-sioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrates, to death. Instead,Plato turned to writing and teaching. He began teaching in his twenties and later founded theAcademy, the world’s rst higher-educational research and teaching establishment. In thisrst ever full-length portrait of Plato, Robin Watereld steers a judicious course among thesestories, debunking some while accepting the kernels of truth in others. He explains why Platochose to write dialogues rather than treatises and gives an overview of the subject matter ofall of Plato’s books. Clearly and engagingly written throughout, Plato of Athens is the perfectintroduction to the man and his work.Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media(University of Illinois Press)Kristie SoaresJoy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratication to challenge norms of gen-der, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Ricoand Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, andother areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinxcreators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colo-nialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence.Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy onlyexists outside politics and activist struggle.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comPoverty, by America (The Crown Publishing Group )Matthew DesmondIn Poverty, By America acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research,and original reporting to show how afuent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poorpeople poor. Those of us who are nancially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wageswhile forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize thesubsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that givesthe most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities,creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Elegantlywritten and ercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about amorally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly origi-nal and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists,engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and,at last, true freedom.Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivorsfrom the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas Press)Alex Pappademas; Joan LeMaySteely Dan’s songs are exercises in ctional world-building. Pulling from history, lived expe-rience, pulp ction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations,Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed peo-ple with complicated pasts, scars they don’t talk about, delusions and desires and memoriesthey can’t shake. Quantum Criminals presents the world of Steely Dan as it has never beenseen, much less heard. Artist Joan LeMay has crafted lively, color-saturated images of herfavorite characters from the Daniverse to accompany writer Alex Pappademas’s explorationsof the famous and obscure songs that inspired each painting, in short essays full of culturalcontext, wild speculation, inspired dot-connecting, and the occasional conspiracy theory.Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America(Johns Hopkins University Press)Kathleen M. CrowtherIn Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America, historian KathleenM. Crowther discusses the deeply rooted medical and philosophical ideas that continue toreverberate in the politics of women’s health and reproductive autonomy. From the idea that adetectable heartbeat is a sign of moral personhood to why infant and maternal mortality ratesin the United States have risen as abortion restrictions have gained strength, this is a histori-cally informed discussion of the politics of women’s reproductive rights.Notables 2023
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43Shop anytime at semcoop.comSecrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s HiddenPast and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder (Oxford University Press)Bruce LincolnIn early 1991, Ioan Culianu was on the precipice of a brilliant academic career. Culianu haded his native Romania and established himself as a widely admired scholar at just forty-oneyears of age. He was teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he wasseen as the heir apparent to his mentor, Mircea Eliade, a fellow Romanian expatriate andthe founding father of the eld of religious studies, who had died a few years earlier. But thenCulianu began to receive threatening messages. As his fears grew, he asked a colleague tohold onto some papers for safekeeping. A week later, Culianu was in a Divinity School men’sroom when someone red a bullet into the back of his head, killing him instantly. The casewas never solved. What was in those mysterious papers? And what connection might they
have to Culianu's death? In this book, author Bruce Lincoln explores what the articles reveal
about
Eliade’s past, his subsequent efforts to conceal that past, his complex relations with
Culianu, and the possible motives for Culianu’s shocking murder.Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah(Wendy’s Subway/Carpenter Center for the Visual Art)Morgan Bassichis, Jay Saper, Rachel Valinsky (eds.)Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educatorJay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 36 writers, artists, scholars and activists to offer accessible reections on 36 questions to helpyoung Jews--and anyone else who picks up this book--feel grounded in the Jewish radicaltradition, unlearn Zionism and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians.Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife(University of California Press)Tonia SutherlandIn Resurrecting the Black Body, Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records thatdocument them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evi-dence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten. From the popularimage of Gordon (also known as “Whipped Peter”) to photographs of the lynching of JesseWashington to the video of George Floyd’s murder, from DNA to holograms to posthumouscommunication, this book traces the commodication of Black bodies and lives across time.If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggres-sion, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possi-ble, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against erasure and oblivion.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comShakespeare in Bloomsbury (Yale University Press)Marjorie GarberThis is a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury—about the role Shakespeare played inthe lives of a charismatic and inuential cast, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, VanessaBell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and LydiaLopokova Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and James and Alix Strachey. All arebrought to sparkling life in Marjorie Garber’s intimate account of how Shakespeare providedthem with a common language, a set of reference points, and a model for what they did nothesitate to call genius. Among these brilliant friends, Garber shows, Shakespeare was ineffect another, if less fully acknowledged, member of the Bloomsbury Group.Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive PrecariousTimes(University of California Press)Alexandrea J. RavenelleThis is the story of what the most vulnerable wage earners—gig workers, restaurant staff,early-career creatives, and minimum-wage laborers—do when the economy suddenly col-lapses. In Side Hustle Safety Net, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle builds on interviews with nearlytwo hundred gig-based and precarious workers, conducted during the height of the pandemic,to uncover the unique challenges they faced in unprecedented times.Spinoza, Life and Legacy (Oxford University Press)Jonathan I. IsraelThere have been surprisingly few biographies of Spinoza, given his fundamental importancein intellectual history and history of philosophy, Bible criticism, and political thought. JonathanI. Israel has written a biography which provides more detail and context about Spinoza’s life,family, writings, circle of friends, highly unusual career and networking, and early receptionthan its predecessors. Weaving the circumstances of his life and thought into a detailedbiography has also led to several notable instances of nuancing or revising our notions ofhow to interpret certain of his assertions and philosophical claims, and how to understand thecomplex international reaction to his work during his life-time and in the years immediatelyfollowing his death.Notables 2023
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45Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-FirstCentury (Princeton University Press)Nicholas DamesWhy do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames em-barks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial tech-nique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to registerthe sensation of time. Ranging from ancient tablets and scrolls to contemporary ction andlm, The Chapter provides a compelling, elegantly written history of a familiar compositional mode that readers often take for granted and offers a new theory of how this versatile meansof dividing narrative sculpts our experience of time.Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation(Princeton University Press)Paula Marantz CohenTalking Cure is a timely and enticing excursion into the art of good conversation. Paula Ma-rantz Cohen reveals how conversation connects us in ways that social media never can andexplains why simply talking to each other freely and without guile may be the cure to whatails our troubled society. Drawing on her lifelong immersion in literature and culture and herdecades of experience as a teacher and critic, Cohen argues that we learn to converse inour families and then carry that knowledge into a broader world where we encounter diverseopinions and sensibilities. Blending the immediacy of a beautifully crafted memoir with theconviviality of an intimate gathering with friends, Talking Cure makes a persuasive case forthe civilizing value of conversation and is essential reading for anyone interested in the chat-ter that fuels culture.Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke University Press)I. Augustus DurhamDrawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the blackmother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a culturallegacy of genius across history. He analyzes the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison,Marvin Gaye, Octavia E. Butler, and Kendrick Lamar to show how black cultural practices andaesthetics abstract and reveal the lost mother through performance. Using psychoanalysisto develop a theory of racial melancholy while “playing” with affect theory to investigate racialaesthetics, Durham theorizes the role of the feminine, especially the black maternal, in theproduction of black masculinist genius.Notables 2023

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic (Oxford University Press)Jean-Manuel Roubineau; Malcolm DeBevoise (trans); Phillip Mitsis (ed.)In this book, Jean-Manuel Roubineau paints a new portrait of an atypical philosopher whoselife left an indelible mark on the Western collective imagination and whose philosophy cours-es through various schools of thought well beyond antiquity. Roubineau sifts through themany legends and apocryphal stories that surround the life of Diogenes. Was he, the son of abanker, a counterfeiter in his hometown of Sinope? Did he really meet Alexander the Great?Was he truly an apologist for incest, patricide, and anthropophagy? And how did he actuallydie? To answer these questions, Roubineau retraces the known facts of Diogenes’ existence.The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning(Johns Hopkins University Press)Peter J. HotezDuring the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one renowned scientist, in his famous bow-tie, appeared daily on major news networks such as MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, and others.Dr. Peter J. Hotez often went without sleep, working around the clock to develop a nonprotCOVID-19 vaccine and to keep the public informed. By weaving his personal experiencestogether with information on how the anti-vaccine movement became a tool of far-right polit-ical gures around the world, Hotez opens readers’ eyes to the dangers of anti-science. Heexplains how anti-science became a major societal and lethal force: in the rst years of thepandemic, more than 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly died despite the wide-spread availability of COVID-19 vaccines. Even as he paints a picture of the world under ashadow of aggressive ignorance, Hotez demonstrates his innate optimism, offering solutionsfor how to combat science denial and save lives in the process.The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Knopf)Peter FrankopanIn a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that naturehas always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Mochecivilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño tovolcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to itsknees, climate change and its inuences have always been with us. Blending brilliant histori-cal writing and cutting-edge scientic research, The Earth Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.Notables 2023
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48Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human (Belknap Press)Joseph E. LeDouxHumans have long thought of their bodies and minds as separate spheres of existence.The body is physical—the source of aches and pains. But the mind is mental; it perceives,remembers, believes, feels, and imagines. Together, LeDoux shows, these four realms
make humans who and what we are. They cooperate continuously and underlie our capacity
to live and experience ourselves as beings with a past, present, and future. The result,
LeDoux shows, is not a self but an “ensemble of being” that subsumes our entire human
existence, both as individuals and as a species.The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America(University of Chicago Press)John CorriganThe dual traumas of colonialism and slavery are still felt by Native Americans and AfricanAmericans as victims of ongoing violence toward people of color today. In The Feeling of For-getting, John Corrigan calls attention to the trauma experienced by white Americans as per-petrators of this violence. By tracing memory’s role in American Christianity, Corrigan showshow contemporary white Christian nationalism is motivated by a widespread effort to forgetthe role race plays in American society. White trauma, Corrigan argues, courses throughAmerican culture like an underground river that sometimes bursts forth into brutality, terror-ism, and insurrection. Tracing the river to its source is a necessary rst step toward healing.The End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse and Transcendence(University of Chicago Press)Ernesto de Martino; Dorothy Louise Zinn (trans.)Examining apocalypse as an individual as well as a cultural phenomenon, treating subjectsboth classic and contemporary and both European and non-Western, ranging across ethnog-raphy, history, literature, psychiatry, and philosophy, de Martino probes how we relate to ourworld and how we might be better subjects and thinkers within it. This new translation offersEnglish-language readers their rst chance to engage with de Martino’s masterwork, whichcontinues to appear prescient in the face of the frictions of globalization and environmentaldevastation.Notables 2023

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The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment(Oxford University Press)S. Frederick StarrIn The Genius of their Age, S. Frederick Starr follows up his acclaimed Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age with a portrait of the Arab enlightenment and its key gures--Abu-Ali al-Husayn ibn-’Abdallah Ibn-Sina and Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. Athousand years ago, these two intellectual giants--known as Ibn Sina and Biruni for short--achieved stunning breakthroughs in elds as diverse as medicine, astronomy, mathematics,philosophy, geography, and physics. Though scholars have long dissected the works of IbnSina and Biruni, S. Frederick Starr focuses also on their lives and the times in which theylived. By contextualizing their work and by making the age palpable to the reader, S. Fred-erick Starr gives the achievements of Ibn Sina and Biruni a holistic and unforgettably humandimension.
49Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus (Princeton Univer-sity Press)Gunnar Broberg; Anna Paterson (trans.)The Man Who Organized Nature describes Linnaeus’s childhood in a landscape of striking natural beauty and how this inuenced his later work. Linnaeus’s Lutheran pastor father,knowledgeable about plants and an enthusiastic gardener, helped foster an early interest inbotany. The book examines the political connections that helped Linnaeus secure patronagefor his work, and untangles his ideas about sexuality. These were not, as often assumed, anattempt to naturalize gender categories but more likely reected the laissez-faire attitudesof the era. Linnaeus, like many other brilliant scientists, could be moody and egotistical; thebook describes his human failings as well as his medical and scientic achievements. Writ-ten in an engaging and accessible style, The Man Who Organized Nature—one of the onlybiographies of Linnaeus to appear in English—provides new and fascinating insights into thelife of one of history’s most consequential and enigmatic scientists.The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex (Belknap Press)Manon GarciaIn The Joy of Consent, French philosopher Manon Garcia upends the assumptions thatunderlie this very American debate, reframing consent as an ally of pleasure rather than alegalistic killjoy. In doing so, she rejects conventional wisdom on all sides. As a legal norm,consent can prove rickety: consent alone doesn’t make sex licit—adults engaged in BDSMare morally and legally suspect even when they consent. And nonconsensual sex is not, asmany activists insist, always rape. People often agree to sex because it is easier than thealternative, Garcia argues, challenging the simplistic equation between consent and noncoer-cion. Drawing on sources rarely considered together—from Kantian ethics to kink practices—Garcia offers an alternative framework grounded in commitments to autonomy and dignity.Notables 2023

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50Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789(W. W. Norton & Company)Robert DarntonMost historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcomeof underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the inuence of En-lightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did theyunderstand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions?In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decadesof close study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news. He explores eighteenth-centuryParis as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, onpark benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow. Here is a riveting narrative thatsucceeds in making the past a living presence.The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Clare CarlisleIn her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot—an author celebrat-ed for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she alsofound her life partner, George Lewes—writer, philosopher, and married father of three. After“eloping” to Berlin in 1854, they lived together for twenty-four years: Eliot asked people to callher “Mrs Lewes” and dedicated each novel to her “Husband.” Though they could not legallymarry, she felt herself initiated into the “great experience” of marriage—”this double life, whichhelps me to feel and think with double strength.” In The Marriage Question, Clare Carlisle re-veals Eliot to be not only a great artist but also a brilliant philosopher who probes the tensionsand complexities of a shared life. Through the immense ambition and dark marriage plots ofher novels, we see Eliot wrestling—in art and in life—with themes of desire and sacrifice,
motherhood and creativity, trust and disillusion, destiny and chance.The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You WillBecome (NYU Press)Syed Ali; Margaret ChinFor decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off abridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremen-dous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist oth-erwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers isnot just a story about kids; peers can also affect adult behavior—they affect what we do andwho we are well into old age. Noted sociologists Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin call this “thepeer effect.” In their book, they take readers on a tour of how our peers, and the peer culturesthey create, shape our behavior in schools and the workplace.Notables 2023

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51Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Righteous and People of Conscience of the Armenian Genocide(Hurst)Gérard Dédéyan, Ago Demirdjian, Nabil Saleh; Barbara Mellor (trans.)This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a coura-geous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the rst moderngenocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness and rescuevictims, sometimes sacricing their lives. Unlike the Righteous of the Holocaust, these heroeshave been systematically ignored and erased—a major injustice. Based on fresh research,and hoping to repay a moral debt to Ottoman Muslims who braved everything to rescue theauthors’ forebears, this book is an important, moving testament to a grievously overlookedaspect of the Armenian tragedy.The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (University of Chicago Press)Adrian JohnsReading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has beenseen as key to both personal fulllment and social progress, and millions today depend onit to participate fully in our society. Yet, at its heart, reading is a surprisingly elusive practice.This book tells for the rst time the story of how American scientists and others have soughtto understand reading, and, by understanding it, to improve how people do it.The Sickness Unto Death (Liveright)Soren Kierkegaard; Bruce H Kirmmse (trans.)The “greatest psychologist of the spirit since St. Augustine” (Gregory R. Beabout), SørenKierkegaard is renowned for such richly imagined philosophical works as Fear and Tremblingand The Concept of Anxiety. Yet only The Sickness unto Death condenses his most essentialideas—on aesthetics, ethics, and religion—into a single volume. With his “historian’s eye”(Vanessa Parks Rumble) and “lucid and informative” (George Pattison) introduction, BruceH. Kirmmse deftly situates The Sickness unto Death in the historical context of the European revolutions of 1848, reminding us that even Kierkegaard was a product of his time and place.Yet as Kirmmse ultimately shows, The Sickness unto Death is as apt for our times as formid-nineteenth-century Europe, speaking to the human soul across generations and centu-ries.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR

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52Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (W. W. Norton & Company)Jeff SharletAn unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeysinto corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphedinto delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence. Exploring a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midstof plague and rising fascism, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with our precariouspresent that brings to light a decade of American failures as well as a vision for Americanpossibility.The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World(Princeton University Press)Karl SchlögelThe Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges leftbehind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel,smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading histo-rians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world ofa unique lost civilization. Drawing on Schlögel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Sovi-et world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate,and grounded in rsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result isan unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption(Simon & Schuster)Katy KelleherIn these dazzling and deeply researched essays, Katy Kelleher blends science, history, andmemoir to uncover the dark underbellies of our favorite goods. She reveals the crushedbeetle shells in our lipstick, the musk of rodents in our perfume, and the burnt cow bonesbaked into our dishware. She untangles the secret history of silk and muses on her problem-atic prom dress. She tells the story of countless workers dying in their efforts to bring us shinyrocks from unsafe mines that shatter and wound the earth, all because a diamond compa-ny created a compelling ad. With prose as stunning as the objects she describes, Kelleherinvites readers to examine their own relationships with the beautiful objects that adorn theirbody and grace their homes.Notables 2023

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53Shop anytime at semcoop.comThe Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philos-ophy in Dark Times (Penguin Press)Wolfram Eilenberger; Shaun Whiteside (trans.)A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophersSimone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimedauthor of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger. The period from 1933 to 1943 was oneof the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded withunthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some ofhistory’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideaswould come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in strikingcontrast with one another. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers—in-domitable women who were refugees and resistance ghters—each putting forward a visionof a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war.The World Itself: Consciousness and the Everything of Physics(Bellevue Literary Press)Ulf DanielssonCan we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness andthe wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf Danielsson, an acclaimed theoretical physicistwho has dedicated his career to probing the deepest mysteries of nature, thinks not. As hedismantles the arguments of esteemed mathematicians and scientists, who would substi-tute their mathematical models for reality and equate the mind to a computer, he makes alucid and passionate case that it is nature, full of beauty and meaning, which must compelus. In challenging established worldviews, he also takes a fresh look at major philosophicaldebates, including the notion of free will. Fearless, provocative, and witty, The World Itselfis essential reading for anyone curious about the profound questions surrounding life, theuniverse, and everything.They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press)Carlos M. N. EireAccounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales oflevitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical sciencewere starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos Eire exploreshow a culture increasingly devoted to scientic thinking grappled with events deemed impos-sible by its leading intellectuals. Using as his case studies stories about St. Teresa of Avila,St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and three disgraced nuns, Eirechallenges readers to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and ofthe supernatural’s relationship with the natural world.Notables 2023

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54Shop anytime at semcoop.comThings That Go Bump in the Universe: How Astronomers Decode Cos-mic Chaos (Johns Hopkins University Press)C. Renée JamesIn Things That Go Bump in the Universe, astronomer and science writer C. Renée James introduces us to her colleagues around the world, who are using pioneering research tech-niques to explore everything from the very rst explosions in the universe to the dark energy that could destroy it all. Along the way, James describes the history of transient astronomy, how the universe presents itself through various astronomical messengers, and the unex-pected connections between different phenomena. Things That Go Bump in the Universe explores the incredible discoveries being made in this revolutionary eld, the tools used to detect cosmic events, and the astronomical mysteries that continue to puzzle observers and theorists.Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Ges-tures Shape Our Thoughts (Basic Books)Susan Goldin-MeadowIn Thinking with Your Hands, esteemed cognitive psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow argues that gesture is vital to how we think, learn, and communicate. She shows us, for instance, how the height of our gestures can reveal unconscious bias, or how the shape of a student’s gestures can track their mastery of a new concept—even when they’re still giving wrong an-swers. She compels us to rethink everything from how we set child development milestones, to what’s admissible in a court of law, to whether Zoom is an adequate substitute for in-per-son conversation.  Sweeping and ambitious, Thinking with Your Hands promises to transform the way we think about language and communication. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press)Orisanmi BurtonTip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York pris-ons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison paci-cation: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls. Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of deant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.Notables 2023FACULTY AUTHOR

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55Shop anytime at semcoop.comTo Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care(Princeton University Press)Christopher Paul HarrisWhen #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-ledmobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cryis but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and politicalthought. To Build a Black Future examines the spirit and signicance of this insurgency, offer-ing a revelatory account of a new political culture—responsive to pain, suffused with joy, andpremised on care—emerging from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition thattraces back to the Black slave. Drawing on his own experiences as an activist and organizer,Christopher Paul Harris takes readers inside the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) to chartthe propulsive trajectory of Black politics and thought from the Middle Passage to the presenthistorical moment.To Speak a Deant Word: Sermons and Speeches on Justice and Trans-formation (Yale University Press)Pauli Murray; Anthony B. Pinn (ed.)The religious thought and activism that shaped the late twentieth century is typically de-scribed in terms of Black men from the major Black denominations, a depiction that fails toaccount for the voices of those who not only challenged racism but also forced a confronta-tion with class and gender. Of these overlooked voices was Pauli Murray (1910–1985), a non-binary Black lawyer, activist, poet, and Episcopal priest who went on to inuence icons likeRuth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. Anthony B. Pinn has collected Murray’s mostimportant sermons, lectures, and speeches, showcasing her religious thought and activism aswell as her original and compassionate literary voice. In highlighting major themes in Murray’swriting Pinn’s collection reveals the evolution in Murray’s religious ideas and her sense ofministry, unpacking her role in a tumultuous period of American history, as well as her thrivinglegacy.Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (Basic Books)Judith Lewis HermanThe #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the mediafocused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far lessabout the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse. The conventional retribu-tive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned traumaexpert Judith L. Herman argues that the rst step toward a better form of justice is simply toask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them. In Truth and Repair, shecommits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alter-native vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities.Notables 2023

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56Shop anytime at semcoop.comTurn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black FolkCulture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia University Press)Imani D. OwensTurn the World Upside Down explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly—that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, ormanaged. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive—from Harlem to Havana,from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince—Owens considers the short stories of EricWalrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars;the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the es-says, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these gures depictfolk culture—and Blackness itself—as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and ux. Their worksreveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from itspromises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthyof assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making.Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things(University of Chicago Press)Sarah NewmanGarbage is often assumed to be an inevitable part and problem of human existence. Butwhen did people actually come to think of things as “trash”—as becoming worthless over timeor through use, as having an end? Unmaking Waste tackles these questions through a long-term, cross-cultural approach. Drawing on archaeological nds, historical documents, andethnographic observations to examine Europe, the United States, and Central America fromprehistory to the present, Sarah Newman traces how different ideas about waste took shapein different times and places. Newman examines what people consider to be “waste” and howthey interact with it, as well as what happens when different perceptions of trash come intoconict. This book is not only a broad reconsideration of waste; it is also a call for new formsof archaeology that do not take garbage for granted. Unmaking Waste reveals that waste isnot—and never has been—an obvious or universal concept.Vergil: The Poet’s Life (Yale University Press)Sarah RudenThe Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramati-zation of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil(70–19 BCE) became the world’s rst media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil isa shadowy gure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a privateand solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, heworked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. Vergil’s most famous work, theAeneid, was commissioned by the emperor Augustus, who published the epic despite Vergil’sdying wish that it be destroyed. Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid,uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make carefuldeductions to reconstruct his life. Through her intimate knowledge of Vergil’s work, she bringsto life a poet who was committed to creating something astonishingly new and memorable,even at great personal cost.Notables 2023FACULTYAUTHOR

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Notables 202357Shop anytime at semcoop.comVienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World(Yale University Press)Richard CockettViennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood West-erns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender conrmation surgery, nuclearssion to tted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some wayshaped by Vienna. The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting potat the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise offascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna homedispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact. RichardCockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. This is the panoramic account of howone city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.Vincent’s Arles: As It Is and as It Was (University of Chicago Press)Linda SeidelOnce admired as “a little Rome” on the banks of the Rhône, the town of Arles in the south ofFrance had been a place of signicance long before the painter Vincent van Gogh arrived inFebruary of 1888. Aware of Arles’s history as a haven for poets, van Gogh spent an intensefteen months there, scouring the city’s streets and surroundings in search of subjects topaint when he wasn’t thinking about other places or lamenting his woeful circumstances. InVincent’s Arles, Linda Seidel serves as a guide to the mysterious and culturally rich town of Arles, taking us to the places immortalized by van Gogh and cherished by innumerable visi-tors and pilgrims.Virgin Mary and the Neutrino: Reality in Trouble (Duke University Press)Isabelle Stengers; Andrew Goffey (trans.)In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, rst published in French in 2006 and here appearing in English for the rst time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressingmodern practices not as a block but through their divergence from each other. Drawing onthinkers ranging from John Dewey to Gilles Deleuze, she develops what she calls an “ecolo-gy of practices” into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of culturaland political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers rst advocates for an approach tosciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationshipsdemanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling sci-entic/nonscientic binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. Anecology of practices instead stimulates an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but aswhat we can relate to through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.Notables 202FACULTYAUTHOR

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Shop anytime at semcoop.comWandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home(University of Massachusetts Press)S. L. WisenbergEven as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S. L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost ofEurope dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six,she’s sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take heraway, she’ll die without her asthma meds. In her late twenties, she inltrates sorority rush ather alma mater, curious about whether she’ll get a bid now. Later in life, she makes her rstand only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast biopsy (benign this time), promptingan exploration of misogyny, shame, and woman-fear in rabbinical tradition. With wit, verve,blood, scars, and self-deprecation, Wisenberg wanders across the expanse of continents,through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. Her travelstake her from Selma, Alabama, where her Eastern European Jewish ancestors once settled,to Vienna, where she tours Freud’s home and gures out what women really want, and shevisits Auschwitz, which—disappointingly—leaves no emotional mark.We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal inAmerica (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Roxanna AsgarianOn March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of twowomen and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacic Coast Highway. Investi-gators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story:Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted sixBlack children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family’s lovingfacade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couplewithdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State ofTexas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children.Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family isa revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoptionsystems that produced this tragedy.Notables 2023With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism(University of Illinois Press)Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer (eds.)Jewish anarchism has long been marginalized in histories of anarchist thought and action.Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer edit a collection of essays that recovers manyaspects of this erased tradition. Contributors bring to light the presence and persistence ofJewish anarchism throughout histories of radical labor, women’s studies, political theory, mul-tilingual literature, and ethnic studies. With Freedom in Our Ears brings together more than adozen scholars and translators to write the rst collaborative history of international, multilin-gual, and transdisciplinary Jewish anarchism.FACULTYAUTHOR
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Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the Worldand Mapped the Cosmos (Harvard University Press)Travis ZadehDuring the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyā Qazwīnī authoredwhat became one of the most inuential works of natural history in the world: Wonders and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above, the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and everything in between, Qazwīnī offered a captivat-ing account of the cosmos. With ne paintings and leading science, Wonders and Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and courts, unveiling the magicalpowers of nature. Yet after circulating for centuries, rst in Arabic and Persian, then inTurkish and Urdu, Qazwīnī’s compendium eventually came to stand as a strange, if beau-tiful, emblem of medieval ignorance. Recovering Qazwīnī's ideas and his reception, Zadeh
invites us into a forgotten world of thought, where wonder mastered the senses through the
power of reason and the pleasure of contemplation..Notables 2023 59Shop anytime at semcoop.com

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