Front Table 8/12/2022

Affinities
(Thames & Hudson Press)
Adam Green

A remarkable collection of over five hundred images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence that unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads--hatching eggs paired with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep sea coral. At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. A compelling art object and visual experience in its own right, this collection provides a launchpad for further exploration and inventive engagement across all forms of visual culture and expression.

An Immense World
(Random House Press)
Ed Yong

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. In An Immense World, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.


The Book of Minds
(University of Chicago Press)
Phillip Ball 

Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them--including in plants, aliens, and God--Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the "space of possible minds." By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will?
 

Dollars for Life
(Yale University Press)
Mary Ziegler 

The modern Republican Party is the party of conservative Christianity and big business--two things so closely identified with the contemporary GOP that we hardly notice the strangeness of the pairing. Legal historian Mary Ziegler traces how the anti-abortion movement helped to forge and later upend this alliance. Beginning with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo, right-to-lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spending--and the First Amendment--work. The anti-abortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in U.S. politics and persuaded conservative voters to fixate on the federal courts. Ultimately, the campaign finance landscape that abortion foes created fueled the GOP's embrace of populism and the rise of Donald Trump. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politics--and explains how it had everything to do with the strange intersection of right-to-life politics and campaign spending.


Fire & Steel 
(USA Oxford University Press)
 Peter Caddick-Adams

Fire & Steel covers the war's final 100 days-beginning in late January 1945 and continuing until May 8th, 1945, when the German high command surrendered unconditionally to all Allied forces. Caddick-Adams' previous two volumes in the acclaimed series-Sand & Steel, which covers the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, and Snow & Steel, the definitive study of the Battle of the Bulge, the German's final offensive in the war-have set the stage for this concluding volume. In these final months of World War Two, all of Germany is ablaze, from daily bombing runs launched from just across its borders and incessant artillery fire from the east. In the west, the Allied progress was inexorable, with Eisenhower's seven armies taking on Germany's seven armies, town by town, bridge by bridge. Fire & Steel ends with the return of prisoners, demobilization of servicemen, and the beginning of the occupation of Germany.
 

Gastronativism
(Columbia University Press)
Fabio Parasecoli 

The Italian political right is outraged by halal tortellini and a pork-free lasagna served at the Vatican. In India, Hindu fundamentalists organize attacks on Muslims who sell beef. European anti-immigrant politicians denounce couscous and kebabs. In an era of nationalist and exclusionary movements, food has become a potent symbol of identity. Why has eating become so politically charged-and can the emotions surrounding food be redirected in a healthier direction? Fabio Parasecoli identifies and defines the phenomenon of "gastronativism," the ideological use of food to advance ideas about who belongs to a community and who does not. As globalization and neoliberalism have transformed food systems, people have responded by seeking to return to their roots. Featuring a wide array of examples from all over the world, Gastronativism is a timely, incisive, and lively analysis of how and why food has become a powerful political tool.


Remaindered Life
(Duke University Press)
Neferti X M Tadiar
 
In Remaindered Life , Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life--practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.