Published this week

ANTHROPOLOGY

- Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place

By Rupert Stasch, associate professor in anthropology, University of California, San Diego. University of California Press, £35.00 and £14.95. ISBN 9780520256859 and 6866

This study aims to upset the assumption that human relationships in small-scale societies are based on shared experience, showing that in the Korowai society of West Papua, Indonesia, people organise their connections to each other around otherness.

- Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge

By Jonathan Marks, professor of anthropology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. University of California Press, £32.95 and £13.50. ISBN 9780520259591 and 9607

Marks examines biological anthropology, the history of the life sciences, and the literature of science studies in an attempt to upend common understandings of science and culture.

HISTORY

- Inventing Autopia: Dreams and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles

By Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod, adjunct assistant professor of history and cultural studies, Occidental College. University of California Press, £38.95 and £14.95. ISBN 9780520252844 and 2851

Los Angeles was anything but unplanned, as Axelrod reveals in this history of the metropolis during its formative years, showing how the clash of irreconcilable Utopian visions and dreams resulted in the invention of an unforeseen new form of urbanism.

- 428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire

By Giusto Traina, professor of Greek history, University of Rouen. Princeton University Press, £14.95. ISBN 9780691136691

By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, Traina provides a look at a civilisation in the midst of enormous change, as Christianity takes hold in rural areas, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine east, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople.

LITERATURE

- Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel

By Alan Shockley, assistant instructor in theory and composition, California State University. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754661993

Shockley studies whether a novel can follow the form of a symphony and still succeed as a text and whether musical counterpoint can be mimicked by words on a page by examining the works of, among others, Anthony Burgess, James Joyce and William Gaddis.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple

By John W. Welch, Robert K. Thomas university professor of law, Brigham Young University. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754651642

Welch offers insights into the Sermon on the Mount by analysing it in the shadow of the all-pervasive Temple in Jerusalem, which dominated the religious landscape of the world of Jesus and his earliest disciples.

- Nishida and Western Philosophy

By Robert Wilkinson, senior lecturer in philosophy, The Open University in Scotland. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754657033

This book is a work of comparative philosophy, and attention is given to the consequences of Nishida's metaphysics in the areas of ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and notably the implications of Nishida's example for the question of pluralism.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

- Children and the Internet

By Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology, London School of Economics. Polity, £55.00 and £17.99. ISBN 9780745631943 and 1950

This is a study of the role the internet is playing in the lives of children that interprets children's everyday practices of internet use in relation to the complex and changing historical and cultural conditions of childhood in late modernity.