Selected New Books in Ekstrom Library: 2022

While Immanuel Kant's account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant's vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious. Kant on the Human Animal offers the first systematic analysis of this central but neglected dimension of Kant's philosophy.

The Creole Rebellion tells the suspenseful story of a successful mutiny on board the slave ship Creole. En route for a New Orleans slave-auction block in November 1841, nineteen captives mutinied, killing one man and injuring several others. After taking control of the vessel, mutineer Madison Washington forced the crewmen to sail to the Bahamas. Despite much local hysteria upon their arrival, all of the 135 slaves aboard the ship won their freedom there. The revolt significantly fueled and amplified the slave debate within a divided nation that was already hurtling toward a Civil War.

The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books. It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.

Over the course of the last half century, queer history has developed as a collaborative project involving academic researchers, community scholars, and the public. Through a collection of essays written over three decades by award-winning historian Marc Stein, Queer Public History charts the evolution of queer historical interventions in the academic sphere and explores the development of publicly oriented queer historical scholarship. A manifesto for renewed partnerships between academic and community-based historians, strengthened linkages between queer public history and LGBT scholarly activism, and increased public support for historical research on gender and sexuality, this anthology reconsiders and reimagines the past, present, and future of queer public history.

In a context marked by the virulent return of patriarchal and white supremacist attitudes, a new generation of feminist activists are continuing the struggle: these are very feminist times. But how do these and other movements relate to the contemporary posthuman condition? In this important new book, Rosi Braidotti examines the implications of the posthuman turn for feminist theory and practice. Braidotti claims that mainstream posthuman scholarship has neglected feminist theory, while in fact feminism is one of the precursors of the posthuman turn, through diverse social movements and political traditions.

An incisive, intersectional look at the mother of all gender biases: a resistance to women's authority and power. Every woman has a story of being underestimated, ignored, challenged, or patronized in the workplace. These stories remain true even for women at the top of their fields; in the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, female justices are interrupted four times more often than their male colleagues--and 96 percent of the time by men. Despite the progress we've made toward equality, we still fail, more often than we might realize, to take women as seriously as men. The Authority Gap," journalist Mary Ann Sieghart examines the wide-ranging implications of this critical gender bias. She explores its intersections with race and class biases and the measures we can take to bridge the gap.

Based on author Kate Kelly's acclaimed podcast of the same name, Ordinary Equality recounts a story centuries in the making. From before the Constitution was even drafted to the modern day, she examines how and why constitutional equality for women and Americans of all marginalized genders has been systematically undermined for the past 100-plus years, and then calls us all to join the current movement to put it back on the table and get it across the finish line. Kate Kelly provides a much-needed fresh perspective on the ERA for feminists of all ages, and this engaging, illustrated look at history, law, and activism is sure to inspire many to continue the fight.

Spreading Hate examines the evolution of the white power movement around the world, explaining its appeal and the threat it poses as well as many failures. The modern white power movement is now a global, transnational phenomenon. In this sweeping, authoritative account, Daniel Byman traces the key moments in the white power movement's evolution in the United States and around the world and then details its many facets today. Using a wide range of sources, Byman explodes several myths about white power terrorism and exposes dangerous gaps in current policies. Considering policy solutions as well as synthesizing a vast body of scholarly research, Spreading Hate will be essential reading for anyone worried about this an increasingly networked movement that threatens to grow more dangerous in the years to come.

Food for Thought empowers and inspires readers to make informed and healthier choices to create a better world for themselves and our planet. Food for Thought seeks to enlighten people about their power as individuals to shape industry and society starting from the food they eat. The reader is invited to question who is really benefiting from our present food system through a detailed science-based analysis of food production and consumption. Perussello discusses how the production and consumption of animal products go well beyond the blatant violence against non-human animals: she posits that animal agriculture is procuring a world of disease, unhappiness, injustice, and environmental depletion.

A critical resource for K-12 educators that serve BIPOC and first-generation students that explores why inclusive and culturally relevant pedagogy is necessary to ensure the success of their students. The practices and values in the US educational system position linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse children and families at a disadvantage. BIPOC dropout rates and levels of stress and anxiety have linked with non-inclusive school environments. In this collection, 3 educators tell and will draw on their experiences as immigrants and educators to address racial inequity in the classroom and provide a thorough analysis of different strategies that create an inclusive classroom environment.

Several generations of scientists sought to understand how the rules of language could be hardwired in the brain. It was a colossal mistake. Chater and Christiansen show that language is hardly about rules at all, let alone those welded into our brain by evolution, but rather about near-total freedom, where the only real constraints are our imaginations and our desire to be understood. And with that as the point of departure, they are able to find compelling solutions to old riddles and new puzzles, including why chimpanzees don't understand pointing fingers; whether having two words for "blue" changes what we see; why Danish is so much harder to learn than Norwegian; how words change meanings; and whether computers will ever truly understand a human.

This untold origins story of the filmmaker excavates the first true Hitchcock film and explores its transatlantic history. Hitchcock called The Lodger "the first true Hitchcock movie," anticipating all the others. And yet, the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, including by Hitchcock himself. The truth-revealed in new archival discoveries-is stranger still.

Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre: populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her next collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken -- fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history -- with unsettling urgency.

Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: wondrously diverse, deeply interconnected, and critically imperiled. They sustain entire ecosystems and protect vulnerable coasts. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off, beset by warming oceans, pollution, human damage, and their own devastating pandemic. Even under stress, they are out-of-this world gorgeous, sending out warning flares in fluorescent bursts of yellow, pink, and indigo. Juli Berwald fell in love with coral reefs as a marine biology student, entranced by their beauty and complexity. While she was concerned by bleaching events and coral disease, she didn't fully understand what a dead reef meant until she experienced one on a dive: barren, decaying, and coated in slime. Deeply alarmed, she traveled the world desperate to discover how to prevent their loss.

The Accidental Ecosystem tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more large and charismatic wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities--the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth's ecosystems--grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet?

In this book, distinguished psychologists Melba J. T. Vasquez and Josephine D. Johnson offer a carefully constructed overview of the history, theory, and practice of multicultural therapy, with case examples and ties to current events that bring the text to life. While multicultural competence in psychotherapy has become part of the mainstream fundamental knowledge and skill set required for effective practice, now more than ever, it requires increased understanding and sophistication on the part of the professional. The multiculturally competent therapist must be prepared to address their own behaviors and cultural assumptions, those of their clients, and the relationship between the two.