Published this Week

(?) = Review forthcoming

ARTS AND DESIGN

- Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory

By Peter Read, professor of French, University of Kent. University of California Press, £24.95. ISBN 9780520265929

Read delves into unpublished archive documents to examine the creative interaction and fraternal complicity between the two men, as demonstrated in works such as Picasso's polymorphous portraits of the poet and his 1907 drawings for Apollinaire's Bestiary poems.

ECONOMICS

- Taxation in Developing Countries: Six Case Studies and Policy Implications

Edited by Roger Gordon, professor of economics, University of California, San Diego. Columbia University Press, £31.00. ISBN 97802311486

Looking at Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, Korea and Russia, Gordon considers how the poorest and wealthiest of the developing nations display the diverse fiscal problems of tax reform. Outlining key aspects of current tax codes, he explores their economic and political implications.

FOOD STUDIES

- Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking

By Herve This, physical chemist, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique. Columbia University Press, £11.50. ISBN 9780231141710

Now in paperback, This' book offers an insight into the science of the cooking process. Answering questions including the reasons vegetables change colour when boiled and the best way to keep a souffle from falling, he offers readers a look at the scientific principles of food via practical advice and concrete examples.

- Gastropolis: Food and New York City

Edited by Annie S. Hauck-Lawson, associate professor of foods and nutrition, Brooklyn College; and Jonathan Deutsch, associate professor of culinary arts, Kingsborough Community College. Columbia University Press, £13.95. ISBN 9780231136525

This edited volume explores the personal and historical relationship between residents in the Big Apple and the food they consume. Ranging across icons of cuisine from the Mt Olympus Bagel shop to Puerto Rican lasagne, it covers food and drink before the arrival of Europeans up to the present, telling a story of immigration, amalgamation and assimilation.

GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

- Field Guide to California Agriculture

By Paul F. Starrs, professor of geography, and Peter Goin, professor of art, both at the University of Nevada at Reno. University of California Press, £41.95 and £16.95. ISBN 9780520247642 and 265431

This work explores the full range of the Californian state's agriculture and its environmental context. It considers the darker shadows that have enveloped commercial farming as well as the innovation of boutique producers.

HISTORY

- Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South

By Leslie Brown, assistant professor of history, Williams College; and Anne Valk, associate director for programs of the John Nicholas Brown Centre, Brown University. Palgrave, £58.00 and £17.99. ISBN 9780230619623 and 215

Using first-person narratives gathered, this book looks at black women's memories of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

- The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity

By Monika Bednarek, lecturer in linguistics, University of Sydney, Australia. Continuum, £75.00. ISBN 9781441155856

Bednarek's study aims to address the need for a systematic analysis of television discourse and characterisation within linguistics and media studies. She focuses on communicative context, multimodality, genre, audience and scripted television dialogue and, in the book's second half, addresses televisual characterisation and introduces the concept of expressive character identity.

LITERARY STUDIES

- Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination

By Elana Gomel, senior lecturer in the department of English and American studies, Tel Aviv University. Continuum, £60.00. ISBN 9781441123954

Engaging with science-fictional conventions, including time travel and alternative history, to investigate representations of time in postmodernism, Gomel argues against the notion of postmodern narrativity as atemporal and ahistorical. She claims that postmodernity is characterised by an explosion of heterogeneous narrative "timeshapes".

- Mapping the Wessex Novel: Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870-1940

By Andrew Radford, teacher in British and American literature, University of York. Continuum, £60.00. ISBN 9780826439680

Radford analyses the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts to consider how these writers addressed the relationship between rural periphery and metropolitan centre, the contested ideologies of "Englishness" and the form of the national past.

- Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation

Edited by Adel Iskandar, visiting scholar, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University; and Hakem Rustom, doctoral candidate in the department of anthropology, London School of Economics. University of California Press, £44.95 and £20.95. ISBN 9780520245464 and 258907

This volume spans the life and work of the prominent literary theorist. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, critics and activists, it engages with Said's ideas by exploring key themes of emancipation and representation.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science

By Robert L. Park, professor of physics, University of Maryland. Princeton University Press, £11.95. ISBN 9780691145976

Now in paperback, Park's acclaimed work considers why people persist in superstitious convictions long after science has shown them to be ill-founded. Observing beliefs from religion and the afterlife to New Age spiritualism, he concludes that science is the only way we can understand the world.

POLITICS

- The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics

By Michael C. Horowitz, assistant professor of political science, University of Pennsylvania. Princeton University Press, £52.00 and £18.95. ISBN 9780691143958 and 3965

Horowitz examines some of the biggest military innovations throughout history to demonstrate how expensive modernisations can favour the most powerful nations, but can also cause them to stumble when facing organisationally complicated advancements.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

- (?)Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity

By Gary Cross, professor of history, Pennsylvania State University. Columbia University Press, £17.00. ISBN 9780231144315

By examining attitudes and practices across three generations, Cross traces the rise of the American boy-man to trends in 20th-century advertising, popular culture and consumerism. Arguing that US culture undermines both conservative ideals of male maturity and the liberal values of community and responsibility, he argues for a marriage of personal desire and ethical adulthood.

- Trans People's Partnerships: Towards an Ethics of Intimacy

By Tam Sanger, teaching fellow in gender studies and sociology, Queen's University Belfast. Palgrave, £50.00. ISBN 9780230224643

In a world in which personal lives are increasingly public and discussions of gender and sexuality more complex, Sanger asks whether our intimate desires are limited by social norms and expectations.

- China and the Mortgaging of America: Economic Interdependence and Domestic Politics

By Helen Thompson, senior lecturer in the department of politics and international studies, University of Cambridge. Palgrave, £55.00. ISBN 9780230243590

Thompson explores the near collapse of the economic relationship between China and the US in 2008. Investigating the crises at two American mortgage corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, she explains how the crisis came about and analyses the consequences and implications.