Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

An Ungovernable Foe is an important addition to understanding the complex history of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI). Natalie B. Aviles (sociology, Univ. of Virginia) describes the dramatic ups and downs of the NCI, its significant successes and failures, and the way it has handled the challenging relationships among the private sector, government, in-house and external scientists, and a host of other interested individuals and groups. Within the National Institutes of Health, the NCI was understood to be a single-disease-focused organization. It was given a dual mission to seek basic knowledge of living systems and to apply that knowledge for the good of human health. The NCI has certainly been a leader in both of these areas and has particularly advanced information on cancer viruses and vaccines. The NCI did much in the 1990s to provide leadership to translational research programming (working from bench to the bedside). The public often gives too much credit to the private sector for the knowledge and health benefits produced by government programs. The wrong turns and complex issues confronted by the NCI are well covered. The text is supported by a strong Methodological Appendix and an extensive notes section.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and practitioners.

A new concept coalesced in mid-19th-century Britain. "Applied science" befitted an industrializing power in which specialized technical knowledge was cultivated in service of social, economic, and imperial aims. The concept was rapidly institutionalized, guiding the growth of professional organizations, science education, funding allocation, long-term national research strategy, and the structure of industry before receding in the late 20th century following the rise of "innovation" and "technology." This arc gets masterful treatment from Robert Bud (Science Museum London) in his "biography of a concept" (p. 1). Like Eric Schatzberg's Technology: Critical History of a Concept (CH, May'19, 56-3575), this book demonstrates the importance of tracing the origin and evolution of the categories that organize knowledge, and it will likewise become required reading for anyone interested in the connections between science and technology in the modern world. Bud's is a British story, and he studiously avoids rash generalization, instead encouraging others to investigate how applied science and similar concepts were inflected by other local values and imperatives. This is a highly readable contribution to core themes in the history of science and technology. Though it is targeted to practicing historians, it remains accessible to students at all levels.Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through professionals.

In this meticulously researched work, British historian Brown (Lancaster Univ., UK) traces the emotional landscape of British surgery from the pre-anesthetic era of Romantic sensibility to the mid-19th-century dawn of Listerian antisepsis and a new "regime of scientific modernity" (p. 3). The specter of pre-anesthetic surgical pain, disfiguration, and mortality loomed large. Contrary to simplistic images of pre-anesthesia surgeons as detached torturers, Brown finds evidence of their compassion and emotional introspection. Surviving correspondence between private patients and their physicians reveals how emotions were deployed in negotiating treatment. In responding to frightened and uncertain patients, a trusted surgeon was himself prone to lingering uncertainties as he gauged his patient's capacity to withstand pre-anesthetic surgery. Potentially malignant breast masses in particular prompted professional compassion. Thomas Wakley, founding editor of The Lancet journal, deployed his powerful, flamboyant prose to expose surgical incompetence and corruption in London hospitals as part of a campaign to reform metropolitan hospital surgery. A mid-19th-century shift in emotional regimes from Romantic sensibility to scientific modernity shaped British surgical culture as the Anatomy Act (1832) and the introduction of inhalational surgical anesthesia (c. 1840s) ushered in an age of scientific modernity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty.

Linn's Irish Fever employs the techniques of historical archaeology to examine the lives and experiences of Irish immigrants in 19th-century New York. Drawing from primary and secondary documents, artifacts, folklore, and graphic sources, Linn (historical archaeology, Bard Graduate Center) paints a compelling and disturbing picture of Irish immigrant life. Meticulously researched and clearly argued, this volume stands out for its readability. "Irish Fever," or typhus, and its impact on new immigrant communities is explored in detail, with implications for better understanding the history of race, ethnomedicine, folk remedies, the professionalization of medical care, and the extreme challenges faced by new immigrants. Irish Fever makes an important contribution to readers' understanding of the lives of immigrants in 19th-century New York specifically and the US more broadly.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Maritime Animals provides a readable, highly entertaining, fascinating look at the roles animals and other non-human agents played in the making of the maritime world. Eight of the ten chapters examine specific non-human animals--e.g., tortoises, sheep, horses, shipworms, sponges--that were taken onto or attached themselves to a maritime vessel. The other two chapters examine whales and terrestrial snails. It is clear that some animals attached themselves to ships despite sailors' efforts to prevent that. Although sometimes severely troublesome, they could be important sources of calories during times of extreme scarcity. Other animals were brought onboard as sources of food, as companions, as mascots, or to study, although these categories were not rigid. This collection advances readers' understanding of how different species have shaped how humans have understood, navigated, and perceived the maritime world. By using what scholars call the oceanic turn, which privileges the sea as a distinct area of cultural development, Maritime Animals convincingly argues that a fundamental and overlooked aspect of this culture was the relationship between humans and animals--the ship facilitated multispecies linkages and helped create a multifaceted and diverse maritime world. This book is ideal for scholars interested in the maritime world or the history of non-human animal and human interaction.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Organizing Color explores how color's multiplicities are used as an organizing force in our social, economic, historical, material, and political lives and modulate our everyday sense experiences in ways we often don't consciously register. Using sensory media (art, dress, film, literature) as the touchstone and a framework of critical theory, the book's 10 chapters explore color's "disorderly nature," which oscillates between control and management and liberation and disruption. Chapters are ordered from past to present, starting with mercantile capitalism and colonial exploitations of the natural dye indigo. Timon (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana Univ., Luneburg) then delves into synthetic dyes, revealing the management of color science and how the synthetic dye industry precipitated the 20th-century war machine and the rise of chemical poisons. The book directly addresses colorism and racism and explores how color hierarchies are used in societal stratification, inequity, and discrimination. Concluding with the technology of programming and the development of commercial color charts, Timon explores aesthetic capitalism, digital color, algorithmic ordering, and discriminating data. The book delves into fascinating questions about our color experiences and concludes by asking, "Can we allow color to "rattle the cage of what is taken for granted?" Best for upper-level readers who have some background in color and critical theories.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty.

Bookended by a 1995 scandal where postural photos (mostly nude) from elite colleges were discovered to be in the Smithsonian archives (and deleted), Linker (Univ. of Pennsylvania) has produced an engaging book on the science of posture. Each chapter recounts a phase of interest in posture, from the paleontology of the late 19th century, through postural photos in schools, to contemporary imaginations of "natural", especially "paleo-" posture to hawk chairs, foundation garments, exercise practices, diets, orthotics, and discourses of health. Each generation of posture "scientists" used ideas about hominid bipedalism to frame an ideal of stature, embodying normative ideas shot through with racialized, colonial, sexist, and ableist assumptions about character and type. Each generation is in conversation with implicit evolutionary theories and social panics about citizenship and nation, whether in relation to ideas about empire and its enabling primitivism, eugenics, and racial theories, or the Cold War and gender and sexuality. Linker thoughtfully engages the problem of the archive and argues that privacy is often a privilege. She provides a sophisticated critique of identifying postural problems as an "epidemic", which engages modes of surveillance and control, often internalized by each generation.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

This delightful, well-referenced book is a journey through history, detailing how humans came to learn that the Earth is not flat. Hannam (Royal Historical Society, UK), the author of God's Philosophers (2009), claims that the discovery that the Earth is a sphere was humanity's first successful scientific theory. The book begins with a tour through Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and Persia--civilizations that all assumed the Earth was flat. Ancient Greeks also shared this belief initially, but the book discusses how this view was challenged over time. Aristotle was the first to justify the belief that the Earth is a sphere, for instance by noticing curved shadows during lunar eclipses. Hannan believes that Aristotle deserves immense credit for this achievement, as this theory did not arise independently elsewhere. Hannam then discusses how the theory of the globe spread slowly throughout the world, influenced by geography; trade routes; and the cultural beliefs of India, Persia, Judea, China, and Europe. Hannam interweaves many interesting stories, like the "tall tale" that everyone laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round--by 1492 this idea was not controversial in Europe (p. 12). The Globe will fascinate a variety of readers.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.