This book offers an excellent guide for thinking through the problems of artificial intelligence and finding ways of making it work for businesses and industries.
—J. J. Janney, University of Dayton
Agrawal, Ajay. Power and prediction: the disruptive economics of artificial intelligence, ed. by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Harvard Business Review Press, 2022. 288p index ISBN 9781647824198, $30.00; ISBN 9781647824204 ebook, contact publisher for price.
How is AI as an innovation similar to electricity? Both took decades to catch on, had many disappointments along the way, and triggered innovation when firms designed their businesses completely around them. The authors of this book argue that managers struggle to understand how best to employ AI. They identify three levels of AI: point system (automating an existing task), application solution (designing devices around AI), and systems solution (redesigning the entire organization). The authors illustrate these differences by explaining how Henry Ford redesigned the automobile manufacturing system, but could not do so without reliable electrical motors. AI has the same potential to redesign business systems, especially in its powerful predictive and decision-making capacities. The challenge lies in industries such as health care, where simply inserting AI into the existing system will not increase doctors’ incomes, for instance. A new industry system is necessary to put the right incentives in place. This book offers an excellent guide for thinking through the problems of artificial intelligence and finding ways of making it work for businesses and industries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. —J. J. Janney, University of Dayton
This volume will interest scholars in the fields of criminology, communication, management studies, and organizational sociology.
—A. J. Trevino, Wheaton College
Del Rosso, Jared. Denial: how we hide, ignore, and explain away problems. New York University, 2022. 312p bibl index ISBN 9781479828968, $26.95; ISBN 9781479815944 ebook, contact publisher for price.
In this book, sociologist Del Rosso (Univ. of Denver) significantly advances the sociological understanding of denial—a concept so capacious that it seems to defy definition. Instructively, Del Rosso posits denial as embodied by distinct sets of strategies that may hide or excuse problems in micro (missing class) and macro (structural racism) contexts. Denial cultivates ignorance of social problems, allowing harm and injustice to intensify. To acknowledge denial is to challenge its effects, argues Del Rosso. He identifies the typical efforts of a person in denial to ignore distressing events by using attention-management strategies or minimize bad behavior though the use of rhetorical strategies. Del Rosso further proposes, however, that collective denial of social problems requires their collective acknowledgement, which in turn can mobilize stakeholders to effect structural change. This book is replete with everyday examples and sociological analyses, supported by empirical studies in social psychology that students and scholars will find valuable for better understanding of a wide array of issues and behaviors from false account-making, organizational misconduct, and white-collar crime to scandal management and the hidden curriculum that “produces unknown unknowns” (p. 155). This volume will interest scholars in the fields of criminology, communication, management studies, and organizational sociology. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers. —A. J. Trevino, Wheaton College
Capitalism in the Anthropocene is a compendium of Marx’s ecological thoughts and wisdom that will continue to shine for decades to come.
—T. Niazi, University of Wisconsin
Foster, John Bellamy. Capitalism in the Anthropocene: ecological ruin or ecological revolution. Monthly Review, 2022. 576p bibl index ISBN 9781583679753, $89.00; ISBN 9781583679746 pbk, $29.00; ISBN 9781583679760 ebook, contact publisher for price.
Foster is the Newton of Marxian ecology and has devoted his life to uncovering and mainstreaming Marx the ecologist. In this book, he assembles the Marxian ecological critique of capitalism into a theoretical whole, especially Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. Foster argues that capitalism has occasioned the metabolic rift between humanity and nature, rushing the world into the Anthropocene or Capitalinian Age, in which capital’s zeal for accumulation has crossed the not-to-be-crossed planetary boundaries. Despite the subsequent dire ontology of the human condition, Foster points to a hopeful future that he names the Communian Age “of substantive equality and ecological sustainability.” The environmental proletariat usher in this age with the revolutionary reconstitution of society into an ecological civilization. Foster accomplishes this analysis in three parts: (1) weaving of Marxian ecology and Earth’s crisis, (2) evaluating past and present environmental debates and questions of history, and (3) documenting global eco-social struggles for an equal and sustainable world. Capitalism in the Anthropocene is a compendium of Marx’s ecological thoughts and wisdom that will continue to shine for decades to come. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and general readers. —T. Niazi, University of Wisconsin
Including an extensive bibliography and a very good concluding chapter summarizing the arguments, this is an excellent work for both students of community and community development practitioners.
—A. A. Hickey, emeritus, Western Carolina University
Fulkerson, Gregory M. Community in urban-rural systems: theory, planning, and development. Lexington Books, 2022. 194p bibl index ISBN 9781666917536, $95.00; ISBN 9781666917543 ebook, $45.00.
Fulkerson (SUNY, Oneonta), a sociologist whose work focuses on globalization, rurality, community, agriculture, and the environment, aims to promote systemic understanding of the relationships that tie together urban and rural areas. In this volume he explicates the issues surrounding the seeming powerlessness and dependence of rural areas in relation to urban areas in an urban-oriented global world. The beginning of the book outlines how thinkers have conceptualized the idea of community, while the rest treats community development and planning. The approach is very logical, and rural sociologists will find it both comprehensive and suggestive. It brings together a wide range of literature relevant to how humans organize themselves economically, politically, and socially. An important dimension of this discussion is the concept of environmental sustainability. Including an extensive bibliography and a very good concluding chapter summarizing the arguments, this is an excellent work for both students of community and community development practitioners. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals. —A. A. Hickey, emeritus, Western Carolina University
In this, her third book on the subject, she addresses how perceptions of the Holocaust have shifted in recent years, focusing on its minimization, with roots in the reemergence of anti-Semitism in modern Europe.
—B. Osborne, emeritus, Queen’s University at Kingston
Hughes, Judith M. The perversion of Holocaust memory: writing and rewriting the past after 1989. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 160p bibl index ISBN 9781350281875, $114.00; ISBN 9781350281912 pbk, $39.95; ISBN 9781350281899 ebook, contact publisher for price.
Hughes (Univ. of California, San Diego) is a much-published scholar whose research in recent decades has focused on the Holocaust and the history of psychoanalysis and the insights it provides into the memory of the Final Solution. In this, her third book on the subject, she addresses how perceptions of the Holocaust have shifted in recent years, focusing on its minimization, with roots in the reemergence of anti-Semitism in modern Europe. She pays particular attention to France, Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Following an introduction that contextualizes the perversion of Holocaust memory since 1989 in each nation, the remaining chapters explore the topic in greater detail. Hughes concludes with the central question, “Why [the] Jews?” (p. 106). Recognizing their minority position, she argues that the image of the Jew throughout modern Europe is based on traditional anti-Semitic clichés and finds that the stereotypical “figure of ‘the Jew’ turns out to be alive and kicking” (p. 106). Hughes’s final sentence underscores her central thesis in this excellent study: “Contemporary political battles can undo—can pervert—an understanding of the past that was hard won and once widely shared” (p. 106). Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty. —B. Osborne, emeritus, Queen’s University at Kingston
This spotlight on big data will hopefully bring these companies out of the shadows and into the public eye.
—R. I. Saltz, independent scholar
Lamdan, Sarah. Data cartels: the companies that control and monopolize our information. Stanford, 2022. 224p index ISBN 9781503615076, $85.00; ISBN 9781503633711 pbk, $26.00; ISBN 9781503633728 ebook, contact publisher for price.
In this book, Lamdan (law, CUNY) aims a spotlight on Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg, three companies that silently amass, traffic, and control digital data. She provides well-researched conclusions that these information dealers are the culmination of information market consolidation, which placed troves of academic publications, business profiles, personal information dossiers, and the corpus of US law behind paywalls. Lamdan divides the troves of information into markets: personal data, scholarly research, legal information, financial data, and news information. She describes each and provides penetrating discussions of the issues that the unchecked practices of information dealers create. For instance, Lamdan argues that information dealers inappropriately place scholarly research—which public money often funds—behind costly paywalls that only large organizations can afford to access. She presents similar problems in the other markets. This book—including the footnotes—is an engaging and insightful read. This spotlight on big data will hopefully bring these companies out of the shadows and into the public eye. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty and general readers. —R. I. Saltz, independent scholar
Martens’s rich cache of stories reveals new insight into women as they saw themselves.
—J. M. Morris, Mount St. Joseph University
Martens, Lorna. As told by herself: women’s childhood autobiography, 1845–1969. Wisconsin, 2022. 328p bibl index ISBN 9780299339104, $79.95
The question of which women wrote childhood autobiographies is simpler to answer than why they chose to write those accounts, according to this thoroughly researched and analyzed study. Including almost 200 narratives by professional women of letters in multiple languages over more than a century, the result is the first historical examination of the female childhood autobiography of its kind. Martens (German and comparative literature, Univ. of Virginia) organizes the autobiographies chronologically into distinct periods based on important events, such as wars, and on shifts she notes in the works themselves. Though only a few autobiographies appeared prior to 1900, women began writing them more frequently from the 1920s onward. The genre exploded with the arrival of second-wave feminism, which Martens notes has much to do with gender. Women’s literacy expanded over time as did women’s access to publishing houses. Reflecting on childhood constituted a suitable genre for women writers, who wrote not just about themselves but also about their surroundings and the events they experienced. Painting a widely varied picture of women’s childhood, these autobiographies defied easy categorization as “trivial, fluffy, or boilerplate” (p. 17). Martens’s rich cache of stories reveals new insight into women as they saw themselves. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals. —J. M. Morris, Mount St. Joseph University
Acknowledging the need to go beyond legal reformism, Nussbaum nevertheless concludes that the biggest obstacle to justice for animals lies in their lack of legal standing. This book is a must read.
—P. Beirne, emeritus, University of Southern Maine
Nussbaum, Martha C. Justice for animals: our collective responsibility. Simon & Schuster, 2023. 400p bibl index ISBN 9781982102500, $28.99; ISBN 9781982102524 ebook, $14.99.
Distinguished professor of philosophy and law Nussbaum (Univ. of Chicago) is author of over 20 books, among them Frontiers of Justice (CH, Dec’06, 44-2056) and Anger and Forgiveness (CH, Nov’16, 54-1138).At the heart of the work under review is Nussbaum’s guiding principle, the capabilities approach, extended here to posit that each sentient creature should have the opportunity to flourish in the form of life characteristic for that creature. Who are sentient creatures? Nussbaum’s answer: all those beings who can have a subjective point of view on the world and who can feel pain and pleasure. Following this theorem, “justice for animals” lies in the actualization of such opportunities in animals’ everyday lives. In the course of advocating for animals and their well-being, Nussbaum has plenty of interest to say about, e.g., puppy mills, factory farming, the plight of whales and other wildlife, and the responsibilities we bear with respect to our non-human animal friends. Acknowledging the need to go beyond legal reformism, Nussbaum nevertheless concludes that the biggest obstacle to justice for animals lies in their lack of legal standing. This book is a must read. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers. —P. Beirne, emeritus, University of Southern Maine
This catalogue reflects—from varied and complex perspectives—on Persian ideology and culture in its own diverse lands and shows that a full picture of the Greek and Roman empires is incomplete without considering Persia.
—P. Karimi, University of Massachusetts
Persia: ancient Iran and the classical world, ed. by Jeffrey Spier, Timothy Potts, and Sara E. Cole. J. Paul Getty Museum, 2022. 432p bib index ISBN 9781606066805, $65.00.
Capably edited by Getty director Timothy Potts and curators Jeffrey Spier and Sara Cole, Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World is a magnificent catalogue of a thoughtfully curated exhibition at the Getty Villa (2022). The exhibition revealed the convoluted ways in which Persia was connected to its rival empires, Greece and Rome, from the seventh century BCE to the Arab conquest of 651 CE. The catalogue features sculpture, jewelry, luxury vessels, seals, coins, medallions, carved plaques, fragmented textiles, reliefs, and mosaics, along with inscriptions from the Getty collection and on loan from notable museums around the world. Coupled with more than 300 superb illustrations are trailblazing essays by leading experts on ancient Iran’s three main kingdoms: the Achaemenid (550–330 BCE), stretching from the Balkans to the Indus Valley; the Parthian (247 BCE–224 CE), encompassing the silk route to China; and the Sasanian (AD 224–651), which spread from the Euphrates to the Indus and had an enduring impact on such unlikely regions as modern-day Armenia. This catalogue reflects—from varied and complex perspectives—on Persian ideology and culture in its own diverse lands and shows that a full picture of the Greek and Roman empires is incomplete without considering Persia. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers and faculty; professionals; general readers. —P. Karimi, University of Massachusetts
This is one of the best studies so far on the ecology of trade policy.
—I. Walter, emeritus, New York University
Staiger, Robert W. A world trading system for the twenty-first century. MIT, 2022. 352p bibl index ISBN 9780262047302, $55.00; ISBN 9780262371308 ebook, contact publisher for price.
A rules-based international trading system has been a keystone of the global economy since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was launched in 1947—with the principles of reciprocity, nondiscrimination, and mutual benefit at its core—and was later made more robust in the World Trade Organization (WTO), which improved dispute settlement, automaticity, and implementation. It has survived the creation of bilateral trade deals around the world, regional trade blocs discriminating between participating and nonmember countries, and the transformation of trade to encompass services, components, and parts. Some countries, of course, push the rules; for instance, China ignored key WTO rules after its accession in 2001. Even so, this book reflects full-on support for the rules-based trading system and its base of underlying legal constructs and rigorous applications of trade models. It is an authoritative affirmation that, despite dramatic technological changes and policy shocks, trade theory and policy are as relevant as ever. This is one of the best studies so far on the ecology of trade policy. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. —I. Walter, emeritus, New York University
