Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2014 -

In this unprecedented exploration of agency in architecture, Wharton (Duke Univ.) has organized six architectural sites into three parts, including two provocatively titled chapters: part 1:Death (Murder andSpoils), part 2:Disease (Amnesia andUrban Toxicity), and part 3:Addiction (Gambling andDigital Play).  The sites, the Cloisters, the Palestine Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem, Las Vegas, Hostal de los Reyes Católicos, and the digital siteSecond Life, are subjected to deep historical analyses that reveal how they have been altered and manipulated over time for political, social, psychological, and economic reasons.  The digital realm functions as a foil in that it is not a conventional space and has only quasi-agency.  This fascinating study is highly accessible to lay readers up to the conclusion, wherein Wharton, who is thoroughly informed about pre- and post-modernist theory and philosophy, demonstrates how the influence of phenomenologists, thing theorists, and mythologists has turned attention away from the reality of buildings even as such post-modern philosophers, sociologists, and materialist literary scholars as Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Henri Lefebvre, and Gilles Deleuze have returned attention to the role of space in the globalized world.  This is an important book for architectural historians and preservationists.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

This extraordinary study of the productive interrelationship of architecture and its market infrastructure is organized around what Zimmerman (Univ. of Michigan) characterizes as "volatile moments in a stepped historical narrative."  She describes these moments as "Paul Zuckers identification [19121913] of intermedial architecture as a component of the history of European architecture, Miess discoveries of the immense propaganda power of photographic images and the immense creative power of architectural montage, the Smithsons' skillful deployment of image in building and building in image, and Stirlings (and Banhams) reinvention of the image as a potent pictorial object of thought and action."  This shorthand, however, does not do justice to the authors thorough command of an array of histories and theories, her incisive eye, her intrepid quest for understanding, and her enviable ability to write history critically and comfortably outside the bounds of architectural historical convention.  This book offers an introduction; three parts, "Architecture after Photography," "Architects and Architectural Photographs," and "Imageability"; and a conclusion.  It is an indispensable repository of scholarly understanding of modernism in architecture, its photography, and the intricacies of their mutual relationship.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.

History always illuminates the present but seldom so clearly and compellingly as outlined in this splendid study of shrines dedicated to members of the family of Ali, the nephew and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad.  The subtitle explains both the contemporary relevance and the historical contribution.  Respect for Ali, the fourth caliph, is shared by all Muslims, but special devotion to him and his family is generally thought characteristic of the Shia as opposed to the Sunni tradition, today so much in daily headlines.  Through painstaking archaeological and textual research, Mulder (Univ. of Texas at Austin) shows that many sites that today are especially associated with Shia believers and practices were patronized and sometimes founded by Sunnis.  The distinction between the two groups, though present in 11th to 13th-century Syriathe period and place covered by this bookhas been constructed as a sharp divide only by modern scholars.  After a series of case studies of monuments in Balis, Aleppo, and Damascus (some relatively well-known but many almost unstudied heretofore), the book offers a concluding synthesis on the sacred topography of the Islamic world.  Very scholarly and richly illustrated, often with the authors photographs. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above.