Curl up with a good book: New reads by College faculty and alumni (fall 2018)

Prius or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2018) by Marc Hetherington, Raymond Dawson Distinguished Bicentennial Professor of Political Science, and Jonathan Weiler, teaching associate professor of global studies. What’s in your garage: a Prius or a pickup? What’s in your coffee cup: Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts? What about your pet: cat or dog? As award-winning political scholars Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler explain, even our smallest choices speak volumes about us — especially when it comes to our personalities and our politics. Liberals and conservatives seem to occupy different worlds because we have fundamentally different worldviews: systems of values that can be quickly diagnosed with a handful of simple parenting questions, but which shape our lives and decisions in the most elemental ways. Read a Publisher’s Weekly review of the book.

Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies (Wiley, July 2018) by Arne L. Kalleberg, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology. Employment relations in advanced, post-industrial democracies have become increasingly insecure and uncertain as the risks associated with work are being shifted from employers and governments to workers. Kalleberg examines the impact of the liberalization of labor markets and welfare systems on the growth of precarious work and job insecurity for indicators of well-being such as economic insecurity, the transition to adulthood, family formation and happiness, in six advanced capitalist democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Spain and Denmark. Read about Kalleberg’s work in the University Gazette.

Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, July 2018) by Frank R. Baumgartner, Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science; Derek A. Epp; and Kelsey Shoub. Twenty million people are pulled over annually in traffic stops throughout the United States. New data outlined in Suspect Citizens shows a disproportionate number of those motorists in North Carolina are black. The book suggests practical policy reforms that police administrators can implement today to reduce disparities, improve police-citizen relations and help fight crime. Listen to an interview with Baumgartner on “The State of Things.”

The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle (UNC Press, September 2018) by Malinda Maynor Lowery, associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of the American South. As the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and one of the largest in the country, the Lumbees have survived in their original homelands, maintaining a distinct identity as Indians in a biracial South. In this passionately written, sweeping work of history, Lowery narrates the Lumbees’ extraordinary story as never before. Their journey as a people sheds new light on America’s defining moments, from the first encounters with Europeans to the present day. Listen to an interview with Lowery on “The State of Things.”

Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, June 2018) by Konrad H. Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization. Broken Lives is a gripping account of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did. Drawing on six dozen memoirs by the generation of Germans born in the 1920s, Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany’s astonishing postwar recovery, reunification and rehabilitation.

Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll (Columbia University Press, June 2018) by Florence Dore, professor of English and comparative literature. The 1950s witnessed both the birth of both rock and roll and the creation of Southern literature as we know it. Around the time that Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley put their electric spin on Southern vernacular ballads, a canonical group of white American authors native to rock’s birthplace began to write fiction about the electrification of those ballads, translating into literary form key cultural changes that gave rise to the infectious music coming out of their region. In Novel Sounds, Dore tells the story of how these forms of expression became intertwined. Listen to an interview with Dore on “The State of Things.”

Smoke in the Sun (Penguin Random House, June 2018) by Renée Ahdieh (political science and English ’05). Smoke in the Sun is the sequel to the New York Times bestselling Flame in the Mist. After Okami is captured in the Jukai forest, Mariko has no choice — to rescue him, she must return to Inako and face the dangers that have been waiting for her in the Heian Castle. She tricks her brother, Kenshin, and betrothed, Raiden, into thinking she was being held by the Black Clan against her will, playing the part of the dutiful bride-to-be to infiltrate the emperor’s ranks and uncover the truth behind the betrayal that almost left her dead. Listen to an interview with Ahdieh on the “Your Biggest Fangirl Podcast.”

Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920 (UNC Press, December 2018) by Angela Calcaterra (Ph.D. English ’12). Countering the prevailing notion of the “literary Indian” as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Calcaterra reveals how Native people’s pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, she locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature and culture.

Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership between America and its Colleges and Universities (UNC Press, September 2018) by Holden Thorp, provost at Washington University in St. Louis (and former chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences), and Buck Goldstein, University Entrepreneur-in-Residence. There is a growing sense of crisis and confusion about the purpose and sustainability of higher education in the United States. In Our Higher Calling, Thorp and Goldstein draw on interviews with higher education thought leaders and their own experiences, inside and outside the academy, to address these problems head on, articulating the challenges facing higher education and describing in pragmatic terms what can and cannot change —and what should and should not. Watch a trailer about the book.

Armageddon Insurance: Civil Defense in the United States and Soviet Union, 1945–1991 (UNC Press, January 2019) by Edward M. Geist (M.A. ’08, Ph.D. ’13, history). The dangerous, decades-long arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War begged a fundamental question: how did these superpowers actually plan to survive a nuclear strike? In Armageddon Insurance, the first historical account of Soviet civil defense and a pioneering reappraisal of its American counterpart, Geist compares how the two superpowers tried, and mostly failed, to reinforce their societies to withstand the ultimate catastrophe.

The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State (revised and expanded edition) (UNC Press, September 2018) by Hannah Gill (BA anthropology ’99), anthropologist, director of the Latino Migration Project and associate director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas. Now thoroughly updated and revised — with a new chapter on the Dreamer movement and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA) — this book offers North Carolinians a better understanding of their Latino neighbors. Drawing on the voices of migrants as well as North Carolinians from communities affected by migration, Gill explains how larger social forces are causing demographic shifts, how the state is facing the challenges and opportunities presented by these changes, and how migrants experience the economic and social realities of their lives.

Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (UNC Press, November 2018) by E. Patrick Johnson (B.A. ’89, M.A. ’91, communication studies). Drawn from the life narratives of more than 70 African-American queer women who were born, raised and continue to reside in the American South, this book reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender and class identities — all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society.

Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right (The University of Chicago Press, January 2018) by Lawrence Grossberg, Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication. One of the ways that people — voters, other politicians, and members of the media — have dealt with the rise of Donald Trump has been to dismiss him as an outlier, treating his actions as marks of his own character rather than signs of anything larger. Grossberg’s Under the Cover of Chaos makes that argument impossible. In the book, he lays bare the deep roots of Trumpism in the broader history of postwar US conservatism.

The Children of Harvey Milk: How LGBTQ Politicians Changed the World (Oxford University Press, November 2018) by Andrew Reynolds, professor of political science. Part political thriller, part meditation on social change, part love story, The Children of Harvey Milk tells the epic stories of courageous men and women around the world who came forward to make their voices heard during the struggle for equal rights. Featuring LGBTQ icons from America to Ireland, Britain to New Zealand; Reynolds documents their successes and failures, heartwarming stories of acceptance and heartbreaking stories of ostracism, demonstrating the ways in which an individual can change the views and voting behaviors of those around them. Learn about a Nov. 7 book launch event through Carolina Public Humanities.

Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition (Harvard University Press, November 2018) by Fitzhugh Brundage, William Umstead Distinguished Professor of History.Most Americans believe that a civilized state does not resort to torture, and yet, as Brundage reveals in this essential and disturbing study, there is a long American tradition of excusing as well as decrying its use. From the Indian wars to Civil War POW prisons and early penitentiaries, from “the third degree” in police stations and racial lynchings to the War on Terror, U.S. institutions have proven to be far more amenable to torture than the nation’s professed commitment to liberty would suggest. Legal and racial inequality fostered many opportunities for state agents to wield excessive power, which they justified as essential for American safety and well-being. Listen to an interview with Brundage on “the State of Things.”

Read a Q&A with Asian studies chair Nadia Yaqub about her new book, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution.