16 October 2024

The best of the academic presses for autumn 2024

The New Statesman’s highlights, from Greek mythology to 1980s pop-synth and drawing to Christian nationalism

The Greatest of All Plagues by David Lay Williams

Inequality is a topic that has preoccupied some of the greatest political thinkers of the Western tradition. David Lay Williams describes how variously Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and others saw inequality as a clear and present threat to both personal character and political stability.
Princeton University Press, 424pp, £30. Buy the book

AI Morality edited by David Edmonds

In this study of the ramifications of artificial intelligence, 24 philosophers examine the ethical problems that come in its wake. AI reaches everywhere – medicine, advertising, business, politics, work – but, conclude the contributors, not all its moral consequences are malign.
Oxford University Press, 256pp, £14.99. Buy the book

The Right to Oblivion by Lowry Pressly

We are surveilled as never before, our data scrutinised and sold – but, says Lowry Pressly, privacy in a hyperconnected world is not a lost cause. It is, rather, a vital element to a meaningful life, the key to relationships with both ourselves and with others.
Harvard University Press, 240pp, £29.95. Buy the book

Bedsit Land by Patrick Clarke

The DJ and music journalist Patrick Clarke looks at the trajectory of Soft Cell, the 1980s pop-synth duo of Marc Almond and David Ball. Through more than 60 interviews, including with the duo themselves, he puts together a full and breezy account of their career and the influences – from Soho to post-Franco Spain – behind songs such as their “Tainted Love” reboot and “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”.
Manchester University Press, 256pp, £12.99. Buy the book

Just Following Orders by Emilie A Caspar

The reason sentient human beings are able to commit atrocities they recognise as such is that direct orders circumvent individual decision-making. This mental quirk, says the neuroscientist Emilie A Caspar, is why genocide – from the Holocaust to Rwanda – happens. Her book is a lucid study of the “brain science” of obedience and its consequences.
Cambridge University Press, 262pp, £30. Buy the book

The Story of Drawing by Susan Owens

In this history of the graphic arts from pre-history to the present, Susan Owens argues that drawing has always been more than a mere preparatory stage in the creation of paintings. It is, she says, the key element of art. As the medium free from the influence of patrons and public, paper has been the place where artists have been best able to express themselves. Drawing is where artists are at their most unguarded.
Yale University Press, 256pp, £25. Buy the book

Centaurs and Snake-Kings by Jeremy McInerney

The Greeks, says the classics professor Jeremy McInerney, were fascinated by hybrids. From centaurs and griffins to gorgons and Medusa, composite creatures had a hold on their imagination, not least because they were an expression of dual personality traits: dangerous and alluring, sexualised and civilised. Through them, McInerney argues, disorder became wonder.
Cambridge University Press, 350pp, £30. Buy the book

Playing Possum by Susana Monsó

Many animals, not just the human one, have their own death rituals – ants that attend their own funerals, whales that carry their dead babies for weeks, chimps who clean the teeth of their dead. In this study of animal attitudes to mortality and what it can teach us, Susana Monsó, an expert in animal cognition, intriguingly combines behavioural science, comparative psychology and zoology.
Princeton University Press, 264pp, £22. Buy the book

Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions by Alain Aspect

The French Nobel laureate Alain Aspect explains there has been not just one quantum revolution but two. The second is ongoing, with the results being felt in areas such as computing and communications. This, says Aspect, is the science of the future; the full potential of “entangled particles” which interact at distance is
still unfolding.
University of Chicago Press, 122pp, £13. Buy the book

The Religion of Whiteness by Michael O Emerson and Glenn E Bracey II

Christian nationalism is a potent force in contemporary America and, say the authors of this revealing study, race is arguably a more important component than religion itself. National survey data, interviews and focus groups reveal that whiteness shapes many believers’ faith, a finding that has political and societal consequences.
Oxford University Press, 208pp, £18.99. Buy the book

Campus Free Speech by Cass R Sunstein

Universities, especially in America, have become the testing ground for the concept of free speech. In this primer, a Harvard law professor looks at the legal status of universities in promoting – or restricting – free speech. The First Amendment, he says, presents anomalies but the right to voice unpopular opinions is “a core component of the educational enterprise”.
Harvard University Press, 160pp, £19.95. Buy the book

World of the Right by Rita Abrahamsen et al

The authors of this study of radical conservatism argue that while the global right is not a unified consensus, it does have a common enemy: “The ‘New Class’ of global managerial elites” it accuses of “undermining national sovereignty, traditional values, and cultures”. It is an outlook that allies adherents with illiberal states such as Russia and China, and so is cause for alarm.
Cambridge University Press, 220pp, £22.99. Buy the book

Overshoot by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton

The commitment to limiting the global temperature rise to 1.50C is, say the authors of this sobering account of “how the world surrendered to climate breakdown”, wavering. A fatalism has intruded which holds that the limit will be overshot. Capital, especially in the guise of the fossil fuel industry and those who pander to it, is the main culprit. According to Malm and Carton, there is hope – but it is fading.
Verso, 416pp, £25. Buy the book

Analog Superpowers by Katherine C Epstein

Shortly before the First World War, two British inventors developed an analogue computer that enabled battleships to fire with unprecedented accuracy. Their breakthrough was promptly pirated by the British and US navies and the ensuing lawsuits were rebuffed with the claim of “national security”. Katherine C Epstein’s narrative positions this as the birth of the security state.
University of Chicago Press, 368pp, £28. Buy the book

Upstart by Oriana Skylar Mastro

How did China build its current position of superpower in an international system dominated by the US? The answer, according to the political scientist Oriana Skylar Mastro, was through a combination of strategic emulation, exploitation and entrepreneurship. Beijing, she says, has been adroit in navigating its expansion without triggering an international backlash.
Oxford University Press, 366pp, £22.99. Buy the book