Published this week

ART AND DESIGN

- Monument Wars: Washington, DC, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape

By Kirk Savage, associate professor and chair of the department of art and architecture, University of Pittsburgh. University of California Press, £24.95. ISBN 9780520256545

Savage's analysis traces the refocusing of Washington DC's monuments from statues of single men, often on horseback, to commemorations of common soldiers or citizens; and from monuments that celebrate victory and heroism to memorials honouring victims.

- Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy

By John Varriano, Idella Plimpton Kendall professor of art history, Mount Holyoke College. University of California Press, £20.95. ISBN 9780520259041

Exploring an array of artworks and drawing on period recipes and menus, Varriano considers the many ways that cooks and artists converged and drew inspiration from each other's worlds.

- Landscapes of Culture and Nature

By Rod Giblett, senior lecturer in media and cultural studies, Edith Cowan University. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230235847

Giblett explores the relationship and interactions between humans, the human landscape and the Earth, looking at a range of case studies from the 19th-century city to the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

FILM STUDIES

- Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War

By Anton Kaes, Class of 1939 professor of German and film studies, University of California, Berkeley. Princeton University Press, £20.95. ISBN 9780691031361

Kaes explores how the classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of the First World War and the trauma of Germany's humiliating defeat. He argues that masterpieces such as Nosferatu and Metropolis, even though they do not depict battle scenes or soldiers in combat, engaged with the war and registered its tragic aftermath.

- Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination

By Vivian P.Y. Lee, lecturer in the department of Chinese, translation and linguistics, City University of Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00. ISBN 9780230221437

Taking as its point of departure the three recurrent themes of nostalgia, memory and local history, this book is an attempt to map out a new poetics - the "post-nostalgic imagination" - in Hong Kong cinema in the first decade of Chinese rule.

HISTORY

- Roman Republics

By Harriet I. Flower, professor of Classics, Princeton University. Princeton University Press, £20.95. ISBN 9780691140438

Flower argues for a completely fresh interpretation of republican chronology, challenging the traditional picture of a single monolithic Roman republic by arguing that there were multiple republics, each with its own clearly distinguishable strengths and weaknesses.

- Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress

By Richard Weikart, professor of modern European history, California State University. Palgrave Macmillan, £52.50. ISBN 9780230618077

In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Adolf Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that his immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the Utopian project of biologically improving the human race.

LITERATURE

- The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

By Mary Helen McMurran, assistant professor of English, University of Western Ontario. Princeton University Press, £19.95. ISBN 9780691141534

Aiming to demonstrate that translation was both the cause and means by which the novel attained success, McMurran shows how the 18th century marked a watershed in translation history, signalling the end of a pre-modern system of translation and the advent of modern literary exchange.

- Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England

By Nicola Parsons, lecturer in 18th-century literature, University of Sydney. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230546714

Parsons analyses the relationship between print cultures and 18th-century literary and political practices. Identifying Queen Anne's England as a crucial moment in the public life of gossip, she offers text readings that demonstrate how gossip's interpretative strategies shaped readers' participation in the literary and public spheres.

- Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England

By Sarah Covington, associate professor of history, Queens College, City University of New York. Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00. ISBN 9780230616011

Covington explores the manner in which the theme of physical and symbolic woundedness was claimed by a range of discourses in a century of turbulence and change.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- Philosophy after Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings

Edited by Michael Ruse, Lucyle T. Werkmeister professor of philosophy, Florida State University. Princeton University Press, £55.00 and £.95. ISBN 9780691135533

Ruse presents writings by modern thinkers and researchers, including some writings never before published, together with important historical documents on Darwinism and philosophy, starting with Charles Darwin himself.

POLITICS

- How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

By Audrey Kurth Cronin, professor of strategy, US National War College. Princeton University Press, £20.95. ISBN 9780691139487

Kurth Cronin examines how terrorist campaigns have met their demise over the past two centuries and applies these enduring lessons to outline a new strategy against al-Qaeda.

- Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy

By Bonnie Honig, Sarah Rebecca Roland professor of political science, Northwestern University. Princeton University Press, £18.95. ISBN 9780691142982

Looking at how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Honig argues that democratic politics are always a struggle to weigh the value of necessities against the achievement of a richer life across the full range of human aspirations.

- Is This a Private Fight or Can Anybody Join? The Spread of Interstate War

By Zachary C. Shirkey, assistant professor of political science, St John Fisher College. Ashgate, £60.00. ISBN 9780754675853

Incorporating a combination of case studies and statistical analysis to illustrate the research, this volume examines why some countries join interstate wars well after the conflicts have begun.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

- The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Africa

By Jeffrey J. Sallaz, assistant professor of sociology, University of Arizona. University of California Press, £37.95 and £14.95. ISBN 9780520259485 and 9492

In this ethnography, Sallaz goes behind the scenes of the global casino industry to investigate the radically different worlds of work and leisure he found in identically designed casinos in the US and South Africa.

- Islamic Spectrum in Java

By Timothy Daniels, assistant professor of anthropology, Hofstra University. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754676263

This empirically grounded work explores the emerging aspects of cultural politics in the world's most populous Muslim region, engaging with complex issues of cultural translation, localisation and globalisation from various perspectives.