Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2016 -

The authors of this timely book investigate the impact that immigrants have on industrial countries, particularly the US and in Europe. They provide an outstanding review of both the theoretical and empirical literature concerning immigration's effect on education, health, and the environment. The chapter on assimilation and integration is particularly noteworthy. Avoiding the polemics swirling around these issues, their approach is dispassionate and analytic. Bohon (sociology, Univ. of Tennessee) and Conley (fellow in civil rights and social justice, Univ. of Mary Washington) are well respected in the field of social justice. The authors conclude that much of the rhetoric surrounding immigration is unsupported by the literature and is counterproductive to rational policy making. They are very careful to discuss the issues where there is agreement, but also where the research is contradictory. The text is jargon-free and accessible to non-demographers. The bibliography is extensive and current. For teaching as well as research libraries.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Schildkraut (public justice, SUNY Oswego) and Elsass (criminal justice, Texas State Univ.) provide a thoroughly researched, well-referenced examination of public mass shootings in the US. They argue that although completely eliminating mass shootings (which are statistically rare) is impossible, an unbiased, empirical approach to understanding their complex nature is best suited to developing effective policies that will reduce both their frequency and lethality. As such, the authors begin by providing a detailed examination of the role of the media and claims-makers in propagating myths, misunderstandings, and moral panics around mass shootings. A discussion of how mass shootings are defined, their history since the 1800s, and their statistical prevalence in the US and the rest of the world follows. This instructive scaffolding is followed by chapters that explore the more complex myths associated with mass shootings, including an examination of the usual causal factors attributed to their occurrence (guns, mental illness, and violent media), the types of safety devices and prevention strategies that have been implemented with varying degrees of success, and how shooters and their fan communities communicate their ideas through modern social media. An important contribution to criminology and the study of mass shootings.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.

Marcel Mauss's classic 1925 workThe Gift (Essai sur le don) appeared in English in 1954, and again in 1990. Guyer's new translation amplifies the text and places it in historical, cultural, and personal context. She has restored the notes to their original place at page bottoms, and accomplished the complex task of locating and inserting the original texts of English sources that Mauss put into French, and that previous translators put back into English without reference to the originals. The context of Mauss's work included traumatic effects of the Great War and the objective of Mauss and his colleagues to revitalize Durkheimian sociology and its journal,L'annee sociologique, in which theEssai first appeared. Guyer (emer., anthropology, Johns Hopkins Univ.) also includes writings that belong with or are relevant to theEssai but had not been previously translated: Mauss's memorial to Durkheim and to colleagues who died in the Great War, and deeply interesting selections from Mauss's English-language reviews of subsequent classics, including works by Radcliffe-Brown, Boas, Radin, Frazer, and Elsie Clews Parsons. Guyer has also explicated the subtleties of Mauss's French. The importance of this book cannot be overstated. For every academic library.Summing Up: Essential. All academic levels/libraries.

Centeno (Princeton) has taught a popular course on the sociology of war for many years. This short book, coauthored by Enriquez (research fellow, Princeton), is the culmination of Centeno's long effort to introduce his students to the social dimensions of war. It revolves around two central theses. First, with the increasing complexity of human society, human warfare has increased in scale and complexity. Second, aside from its destructive dark side, war has been a driving force behind numerous human accomplishments. To make the case for the first claim, the authors devote three chapters to the evolution of human group conflicts, from wars of the warriors to wars of armies and, eventually, wars of societies. To illustrate the second thesis, the authors use a number of historical cases to argue that human society--and human civilization--is a result of the human collective practice of war. The book's most insightful part is the argument that the collective efforts of organized killing have much to do with the very human qualities of love, compassion, honor, and devotion. Engagingly written with exceptional scholarship, this book also excels in coverage, accessibility, and significance. It may well be the best introduction to the sociology of war available.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Sociologists have grappled with the increasing presence of surveillance in everyday life. Early notions about surveillance from Orwell to Huxley suggested apocalyptic doom. In his most recent and grandest work on the subject, Marx (emer., MIT) wrestles with the behemoth that is surveillance, attempting to synthesize the burgeoning field of surveillance studies while maintaining skepticism of its tendency toward pessimism about the implications of surveillance technologies' exponential growth. The book can be summed up with one sentence: "Surveillance is neither good nor bad but context and comportment make it so (most of the time)." (emphasis in original) Where Foucault saw increased social control, Marx acknowledges the fallibility and duality of surveillance as well as the increased possibility of resistance or neutralization. In his conceptual text, Marx is primarily interested in what the new surveillance means for knowledge. As such, he offers a conceptual map for scholars to tackle the murky moments of the new surveillance, from Snowden to polygraphs. Employing unorthodox methods for sociology, including fictional chapters, the work is an important contribution to surveillance studies and to the field of sociology as a whole.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.