Published this week

ART AND DESIGN

- Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940

By Dianne Sachko Macleod, professor of art history, University of California. University of California Press, £26.95. ISBN 9780520237292

Offering the first feminist analysis of the phenomenon of women art collectors in America, Macleod shows how elite women enlisted paintings in their collections in causes ranging from the founding of modern museums to the campaign for women's suffrage.

EDUCATION

- The Elements of Library Research: What Every Student Needs to Know

By Mary W. George, senior reference librarian, Princeton University Library. Princeton University Press, £19.95. ISBN 9780691131504

Drawing on decades of experience with undergraduates, George arms her readers with the concepts, strategies, tools and tactics needed to approach academic projects with confidence.

HISTORY

- Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution

By Michael Sonenscher, fellow in history, University of Cambridge. Princeton University Press, £26.95. ISBN 9780691124988

Sonenscher aims to tell for the first time the real story of the sans-culottes, whose name is now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics, and the part they played in the French Revolution.

LITERATURE

- The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, Revised and Expanded Edition

By Robin Blaser, professor in English, Simon Fraser University. University of California Press, £14.95. ISBN 9780520258259

"The Holy Forest" is Blaser's lifelong serial poem. This revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, and new work from 1994 to 2004.

MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES

- Life on Air: A History of Radio Four

By David Hendy, reader in media and communications, University of Westminster. Oxford University Press, £14.99. ISBN 9780199550241

Hendy looks at the station's struggle to justify itself in a television age amid passionate disputes with its loyal listeners and provides an insight into British life and culture in the last decades of the 20th century.

- Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches

By Craig Batty, senior lecturer in media writing, University of Portsmouth. Palgrave Macmillan, £14.99. ISBN 9780230550759

Including case studies, in-depth analysis and unique writing exercises, this book explores a wide variety of techniques, from detailed scene writing and non-linear structure, to documentary drama and the short film.

MUSIC

- Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media

By Michael Long, associate professor of musicology, University of Buffalo. University of California Press, £35.00 and £14.95. ISBN 9780520228979 and 57207

Long explores how "classical" music made its way into late-20th-century American culture, surveying a complex cultural field and drawing connections between "classical" and "popular" music.

POLITICS

- Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted

By Eric M. Patashnik, associate professor of politics, University of Virginia. Princeton University Press, £32.95 and £13.50. ISBN 9780691119984 and 38978

Patashnik closely examines what happens to sweeping and seemingly successful policy reforms after they are passed, and provides a more realistic portrait of the possibilities and limits of positive change in American Government.

Art and design

Sargent and Italy

Edited by Bruce Robertson, professor of history of art and architecture, University of California

Princeton University Press, £19.95

ISBN 9780691139449

Evoking the fascination with Italy that glimmers in the work of John Singer Sargent, Robertson adds a new dimension to our appreciation of Sargent’s art and will delight anyone who loves Italy, as Sargent so passionately did.

Politics

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia

By John Garrard, professor of Russian studies, University of Arizona

Princeton University Press, £17.95

ISBN 9780691125732

Garrard considers the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia’s Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today.

On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship

By Nancy L. Rosenblum, professor of ethics in politics and government, Harvard University

Princeton University Press, £17.95

ISBN 9780691135342

Rosenblum paints a vigorous defence of the virtues of parties and partisanship, and their worth as a subject for political theory. She offers an ethics of partisanship that speaks to questions of centrism, extremism and polarisation in American party politics.

Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe

By Stephan Haggard, professor of Korea-Pacific studies, University of California, Robert Kaufman, professor of political science, Rutgers University

Princeton University Press, £46.95 and £17.95

ISBN 9780691135953 and 60

The authors compare the welfare states of Latin America, east Asia and eastern Europe and traces the historical origins of social policy in these regions to crucial political changes in the mid-20th century.

Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes

By M. Taylor Fravel, associate professor of political science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Princeton University Press, £40.95 and £16.95

ISBN 9780691136080 and 97

Fravel’s study of China’s territorial disputes contends that China during the past 60 years has been more likely to compromise in these conflicts with its Asian neighbours and less likely to use force than many scholars or analysts might expect.

Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics

By Jennet Kirkpatrick, lecturer in political science, University of Michigan

Princeton University Press, £23.95

ISBN 9780691137094

Kirkpatrick examines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. She explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and wanting to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence.

The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Professor Stanley G. Payne

Edited by Roger Griffin, professor in modern history, Oxford Brookes University, Robert Mallett, lecturer in modern European history, University of Birmingham, and John Tortorice, director of the Mosse program in cultural and intellectual history, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00

ISBN 9780230537743

Dedicated to scholar of fascism and the Iberian world Stanley G. Payne, the contributors to this volume aim to emulate his spirit of inquiry by offering a new series of theoretical and case study analyses of the “sacred” dimension of politics in the modern era.

Social sciences

Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine

By Jonathan B. Imber, professor of sociology, Wellesley College

Princeton University Press, £17.95

ISBN 9780691135748

Imber attributes the development of patients’ faith in doctors to the inspiration and influence of Protestant and Catholic clergymen during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He explains that as the influence of clergymen waned and as reliance on medical technology increased, trust in doctors steadily declined.