New Books: Social Sciences

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for 'containment' of the Soviet Union, Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

When and if oppressive symbols like Confederate monuments are determined not to be worth preserving, the public needs to understand what kind of design alternatives may offer healing in public spaces, healthier social discourse, and stronger community resilience. Editors Kofi Boone and M. Elen Deming hope to assist design and art educators and students to combat endemic racism and other forms of social division.

Growing up gifted and poor in small-town Arkansas, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as they navigated the challenges of their declining town and tumultuous family lives--broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. In the end, Monica got out, but Darci did not. Monica became a journalist while her once talented and ambitious best friend was now a single mother of two, addicted to meth and prescription drugs, jobless and nearly homeless. Why had she escaped while Darci hurtled toward what Monica fears will be a tragic end?

You've been with yourself every waking moment of your life. But who--or, rather, what--are you? In Selfless, Brian Lowery argues for the radical idea that the "self" as we know it--that "voice in your head"--is a social construct, created in our relationships and social interactions. We are unique because our individual pattern of relationships is unique. We change because our relationships change. Your self isn't just you, it's all around you. Lowery uses this research-driven perspective of selfhood to explore questions of inequity, race, gender, politics, and power structures, transforming our perceptions of how the world is and how it could be.

For more than fifty years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee gradually created a mountain of ashen waste sixty feet high and covering eighty-four acres. In 2008, its embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of coal sludge that covered three hundred acres, damaged nearly thirty homes, and claimed the lives of more than fifty cleanup workers who inhaled the toxins it released. Jim Scott, a local lawyer, agreed to represent the workers after they began to fall ill. As the incriminating evidence mounted, the workers seemed to have everything on their side, including the truth—and yet, was it all enough to prevail?

African Americans have had every reason to reject America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin.

Davis's absorbing narrative takes us across four hundred years, from two-spirit people among the Pueblo Indians in the seventeenth century to the gay rights activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya in the twentieth. At every step, she documents the existence of gender nonconformity, queer love, and abortion. At the same time, Davis argues that Americans shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as meaningful but secondary reflections of otherwise nonsexual personal qualities to understanding sexuality as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, essential to what makes a person who they are.

In the United States, we answer some of our most contested questions by presenting them to nine elderly lawyers, the justices of the Supreme Court. The Court was the most powerful court in the world when it was established in the late 1700s, and until recently it has had no competitors for the title. This book is about how the Court acquired so much power, how it has retained its power in the face of repeated challenges, and what it has done with its power over the years. Today's criticism of the Court continues a tradition that has lasted for more than two centuries.

There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradise. But why do we find it so difficult to imagine a way out of the crisis we're in? It is as if the trouble feeds on itself: the march of capitalism has become inexorable, the only game in town. Setting out to diagnose the condition of global capitalism, the ideological constraints we are faced with in our daily lives, and the bleak future promised by this system, Žižek -- one of our most famous, most combative philosophers -- explores the possibilities and the traps of new emancipatory struggles.

America was once a country that could do big things. But today, on issues that touch us each and every day, from housing to clean energy to high-speed rail, we feel stuck, unable to move the needle, ruled by a vetocracy that uses its power to stifle progress. Marc Dunkelman's provocative analysis of the architecture and use of power investigates how we moved from a can-do culture to one in which new red tape is added to a world already hampered by it. As Americans confront massive crises like climate change, rising healthcare costs, crumbling infrastructure, and failing schools, Americans need quick and decisive action.