Published this week

? = Review forthcoming

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

- The Theory of Island Biogeography Revisited

Edited by Jonathan B. Losos, professor in organismic and evolutionary biology, Harvard University, and Robert E. Ricklefs, Curators' professor of biology, University of Missouri, St Louis. Princeton University Press, £69.95 and £30.95. ISBN 9780691136523 and 6530

In The Theory of Island Biogeography Revisited, biologists assess the continuing impact of Robert MacArthur's and Edward O. Wilson's book four decades after its publication, evaluating how the field has extended and confirmed, as well as challenged and modified, their original ideas.

FILM STUDIES

- Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents

By Tom Kemper, visiting lecturer in film studies, University of Southern California. University of California Press, £37.95 and £14.95. ISBN 9780520257061 and 7078

Kemper mines agency archives to present an insider's view on their tooth-and-claw rise to power during the studio era, locating Hollywood agents at the crossroads of talent and profit, and capturing their central role in the burgeoning film industry.

HISTORY

- ? Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

By Crystal N. Feimster, assistant professor of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Harvard University Press, £25.95. ISBN 9780674035621

Feimster pairs the lives of two Southern women to show how both black and white women sought protection and political power in the New South.

LAW

- An Islamic Court in Context: An Ethnographic Study of Judicial Reasoning

By Erin E. Stiles, assistant professor of anthropology, California State University. Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00. ISBN 9780230617407

Stiles utilises ethnographic study of judicial reasoning and litigant activity in an Islamic family court in Zanzibar, Tanzania to draw conclusions on how people understand and use Islamic legal ideas in marital disputes.

LITERATURE

- Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

By Joseph Frank, professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature, Stanford University and University of Princeton. Princeton University Press, £24.95. ISBN 9780691128191

This condensed version of Frank's five-volume biography is a cultural history of 19th-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world Dostoevsky inhabited and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- Hegel and the Analytic Tradition

By Angelica Nuzzo, professor of philosophy, The City University of New York. Continuum, £65.00. ISBN 9781441139504

Placing Hegel at the intersection between the continental and analytic traditions, these essays present current contemporary debates to offer a new perspective on his philosophy.

POLITICS

- Post-Queer Politics

By David V. Ruffolo, lecturer, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754676751

Ruffolo looks at the work of Foucault, Butler, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Guattari and others in his creative refocus on the queer/heteronormative dyad that has largely consumed queer studies and contemporary politics.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

- The Making of Law

By Bruno Latour, professor of sociology, Ecoles des mines. Polity, £60.00 and £18.99. ISBN 9780745639840 and 9857

In this book, Latour pursues his ethnographic inquiries into the different value systems of modern societies. After science, religion and art, now law is being studied by using the same comparative ethnographic methods.