By Professor Kenda Mutongi. University of Chicago Press, June 2017. Available on Amazon. Drive the streets of Nairobi, and you are sure to see many matatus—colorful minibuses that transport huge numbers of people around the city. Once ramshackle affairs held together with duct tape and wire,… Continue reading »
By Jason Josephson-Storm. University of Chicago Press, May 2017. Available on Amazon. A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this… Continue reading »
Co-authored by Jon Bakija. The MIT Press, May 2017. To follow the debate over tax reform, the interested citizen is often forced to choose between misleading sound bites and academic treatises. Taxing Ourselves bridges the gap between the oversimplified and the arcane, presenting the key issues clearly… Continue reading »
By J. Leland Miller Professor of American History, Literature, and Eloquence Jim Shepard. Knopf, February 2017. Available on Amazon. These ten stories ring with voices belonging to–among others–English Arctic explorers in one of history’s most nightmarish expeditions, a young contemporary American negotiating the shockingly underreported hazards of… Continue reading »
By Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry Lawrence Raab. Tupelo Press, December 2016. Available on Amazon. Lawrence Raab has been revered as a quietly magnificent poet. As friends and students have long known, for decades he’s also been a virtuosic teacher. In this first collection of his… Continue reading »
By Lawrence Raab. Tupelo Press, December 2016. Available on Amazon. In this first collection of his contemplative essays, Raab ponders works that keep mattering to him as a working writer, with fresh considerations of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Thomas Hardy, Wislawa Szymborska, Ben Jonson, Henry James,… Continue reading »
By Tirthankar Roy and Williams Professor of Economics Anand Swamy. The University of Chicago Press, September 2016. Available on Amazon. Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, India’s economy has grown rapidly. To sustain growth and foreign investment over the long run requires a well-developed legal infrastructure… Continue reading »
By Samuel Levin and Susan Engel. The New Press, September 2016. Available on Amazon. Engel and her son Levin tell the story of the Independent Project, the first student-run high school in America. Levin, a high school junior who had already achieved international fame for creating… Continue reading »
By Jacqueline Hidalgo. Palgrave Macmillan US, August 2016. Hidalgo’s book examines the “spiritual” rhetoric and practices of the Chicano movement, making the case that peoples, for whom historical memories of displacement loom large, engage scripture in order to make and contest homes. Continue reading »
By Eric Joseph & Eva Ungar Grudin. Hargrove Press, May 2016. Adam and Sarah had planned to get married in high school but ultimately called it off. Now in their late 60s, they reconnect before their 50th high school reunion, but their long-lost love is tested… Continue reading »
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