Engineering
Continuous Signals and Systems with MATLAB, Second edition
By Taan S. El Ali, professor of engineering at Benedict College, Columbia, and Mohammad A. Karim, vice-president for research at the Old Dominion University, Virginia. CRC Press. ISBN 9781420054743, £39.99
This text has been designed to complement a one-semester undergraduate course in continuous linear systems and goes into detail about all of the aspects of this particular field.
Optimization Algorithms on Matrix Manifolds
By P. A. Absil, associate professor of mathematical engineering at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium; R. Mahony, reader in engineering at the Australian National University; and R. Sepulchre, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Liège, Belgium. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691132983, £26.95This text offers techniques with broad applications in linear algebra, signal processing, data mining, computer vision, and statistical analysis for graduate students.
Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh
By Ian Duncan, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691043838, £23.95
Walter Scott was a key figure in the development of Romantic Scottish fiction, and this book aims to demonstrate that Scott’s style provides a powerful alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean view of the imagination.
Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980-2000
By Alistair Iain Johnson; Governor James Noe; and Linda Noe Laine, professor of China in world affairs at Harvard University. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691050423 and 134536, £35.00 and £14.95
Since the Clinton era, America has made concerted efforts to bring China in line as a responsible player in the international community. This book examines why players on the world stage may be moved to cooperate when doing so is not in their material power interests.
Cultural studies
Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue
By Yumna Siddiqi, associate professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231138086, £26.50
By exploring 19th and 20th-century colonial and post-colonial texts, Siddiqi examines how the fiction of intrigue was used both to support imperial rule and to undermine it.
History
Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad
By Marnia Lazreg, professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691131351, £17.95
Lazreg looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962.
Literature
American Hungers: The Problems of Poverty in US Literature, 1840-1945
By Gavin Jones, associate professor of English at Stanford University. Princeton University Press. ISBN 97806911538, £19.95
Jones combines social theory with literary analysis to explain how authors such as Herman Melville, Edith Wharton and Richard Wright managed to confront and address poverty while literary critics failed to do so.
Philosophy
Physicalism, or Something Near Enough
By Jaegwon Kim, William Herbert Perry Faunce professor of philosophy at Brown University
Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691133850, £9.95
Kim aims to end half a century of debate on physicalism by determining how much we can lay claim to, and what kind of physicalism that may be.
Social studies
Inherited Wealth
By Jens Beckert, director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691134512, £23.95
Using a sociological perspective, Beckert investigates whether democracy suffers when people inherit power and money. There is a focus on the inheritance laws of Britain, Germany and the US.