Published This Week

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

- Forest Wildlife Ecology and Habitat Management

By David R. Patton, emeritus professor of forest wildlife ecology, Northern Arizona University. CRC Press, £57.99. ISBN 9781439837023

Patton aims to provide an integrated understanding of the relationship between forests and wildlife for both foresters and the wildlife biologists responsible for managing forest resources. He shows readers how to see forests as ecological systems and wildlife as part of the energy flow and nutrient cycling process within those systems, in order to provide a fundamental understanding of the natural processes that occur in a forest.

CHEMISTRY

- Organic Chemistry: An Acid-Base Approach

By Michael Smith, professor of chemistry, University of Connecticut. CRC Press, £59.99. ISBN 9781420079203

The individual steps in many important mechanisms rely on acid-base reactions, and the ability to see these relationships makes understanding organic chemistry easier. Using several techniques to develop a relational understanding, this textbook seeks to help students fully grasp the essential concepts at the root of organic chemistry.

HISTORY

- The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550-1850

By John Bohstedt, professor emeritus in the department of history, University of Tennessee. Ashgate, £65.00. ISBN 9780754665816

Provision politics was a core ingredient of both state-formation and the emergence of the first market economy and society in England. Bohstedt undertakes to offer the first synthesis of the many dispersed studies of three centuries of marketing and "negotiations by riot" over subsistence. By explaining such long-term shifts in patterns of political negotiation from parish pump to Privy Council, he offers a new view of why food riots were a more compelling and lasting bone of contention than enclosures, wages or votes.

LITERARY STUDIES

- The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics

By Carol Stewart, lecturer in 18th-century literature, Queen's University Belfast. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754663485

Stewart links the decline in church authority in the late 17th and early 18th centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, and proposes a new perspective on the rise of the novel. Readings of works by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin and Jane Austen shed light on an evolving literary marketplace and the changing status of writers.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith

By Carole M. Cusack, associate professor of studies in religion, University of Sydney. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754667803

This book draws on contemporary scholarship on secularisation, individualism and consumer capitalism to explore religious movements founded in the West that are intentionally fictional, including Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius and Jediism. The continued success of these groups of invented religions, chiefly via underground publishing and the internet, offers a unique opportunity to explore the nature of late modern and postmodern religious forms, including the use of fiction as part of a bricolage for spirituality, identity formation and personal orientation.

- Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination

By Malcolm Guite, chaplain, Girton College, Cambridge. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754669067

Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and considers the contribution it makes to our religious knowing. He explores the poetic imagination as a way of seeing reality more clearly, and analyses the poetic visions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. Working towards a theology of imagination, the book considers varieties of truth that complement more rational ways of knowing.