Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: The Americas

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to the Americas

Posted on May 1, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on North America and South America. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Latin American comics in the twenty-first century: transgressing the frame
Scorer, James. Texas, 2024

Scorer (Univ. of Manchester, UK) explores visual and textual analysis of the Latin American comics field in the 21st century including the networks, publishing houses, comic festivals, and recent debates around the subject. The author examines works by artists from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, among other countries. However, the book is structured by thematic focal points rather than country, artist, or period. Scorer examines the interplay between form and content in comics, examining their potential to express public opinions on politics and society in various national and regional contexts. The book interrogates thematic aspects of transnationalism, regional transgender identity, nonbinary feminism, transgressive pierced punk bodies, the “frontiers of neoextractivism,” and the limits of the comic form, among other topics. The author argues that comics participate in transgressions that disrupt social, political, and cultural boundaries. This groundbreaking scholarly work provides a detailed account of Latin American comics in the 21st century, offering rich details, data, and solid information. View on Amazon

2. An introduction to Mesoamerican philosophy
McLeod, Alexus. Cambridge, 2023

With this volume, McLeod (religious studies, Indiana Univ.) makes an exciting contribution to world philosophy and sheds new light on Latin American philosophy in particular. McLeod is an excellent comparatist, and he delivers a welcome dose of hermeneutic justice to a tradition that has too long eluded the attention of scholars of philosophy. In the volume’s eight rich chapters the author examines the nature of philosophy in Mesoamerica, including language, time, identity, creation, being, knowledge, and ethics. The historic sweep of the work is impressive. In the detailed introduction McLeod writes that the “traditions discussed in this book represent four of the five linguistic families of Mesoamerica: Mixe-Zoquean (Olmec), Oto-Manquean (Zapotec, Mixtec), Mayan, and Uto-Aztecan (Aztec)” (p. 8). He also provides helpful context for a deeper understanding of American philosophy before colonization. In the conclusion McLeod points to connections between Mesoamerican philosophy and the contemporary world, reminding the reader that Mesoamerican people and their thought never disappeared.  View on Amazon

3. A field guide to the larger mammals of South America
by Richard Webb and Jeff Blincow Princeton, 2024

Don’t be put off by the title. Just the larger mammals? While Mammals of North America (Kays & Wilson 2009) features 462 North American species, (versus 420 here) they include bats (45 species) and mice (86 species). That difference is what makes this book so fantastic. Pink armadillos! Mustached monkeys (a.k.a. Bearded Emperor Tamarin). Kinkajous! Jaguarundis! In the end, one is thankful they did not include bats and mice or this book would have been unwieldy. By restricting themselves to diagnostic photographs of just the larger, more easily seen mammals (Note: there are 186 species of highly photogenic monkeys here) the authors have created a kind of bird book for fur-following tourists (with maps). Each of these species can be distinguished with a pair of binoculars rather than with a microscope. It might have been better if the authors had provided notes on the habits and foods of each species, but they couldn’t because those facts are not known. That alone adds to the mystery and appeal for future South American Mammologists. View on Amazon

4. The archaeology of Patagonia and the Pampas
by Gustavo G. Politis and Luis A. Borrero Cambridge, 2024

This is the first summary of 14,000 years of the archaeology and early history of South America’s Southern Cone (today’s Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Early nomadic inhabitants interacted with now extinct animals and explored and settled the prairies and steppes of most available habitats. Politis (Univ. Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Borrero (Univ. de Buenos Aires, Argentina), renown Argentinian university researchers, were asked by the editors of the “Cambridge World Archaeology” series to prepare a volume spanning the end of the Pleistocene to European colonization. Supplemented by 12 figures and an extensive bibliography, this well-illustrated narrative covers 140 years of investigations, focusing on similarities and differences in the Pampas and Patagonia and tracing technological advances, including the development of pottery, bows and arrows, and horticulture. Initial chapters illuminate the historical background, geography, natural resources (fauna, flora, lithic tool materials), excavations, and cultural interpretations. Highly detailed chapters document geology and ecology, caves and open-air sites, and tool manufacture. Others detail human adaptation, demographic dynamics, diversification of technologies, ethnicity, and territoriality. View on Amazon.

5. Before Canada: northern North America in a connected world
ed. by Allan Greer McGill-Queen’s, 2024

Before Canada the nation was formed, northern North America was engaged for millennia with continental trade and population movements and for almost a millennium with cross-Atlantic traffic. These well-written essays—pleasures to read—document in detail a series of broad areas of exchange in eastern North America from 12,300 BCE, followed by the movement of Athabascans from the Northwest to the US Southwest, and later European commercial fishers, whalers, and traders interacting with Northeastern First Nations, which comprises the bulk of the book. Competitive and independent, these poorly documented thousands of Europeans are partly known from archaeology; the book weaves artifact and site data with letters and descriptions into rich tapestries. A theme repeats: First Nations had economies with practices as firm as those of Europeans, but not congruent with capitalist debt bookkeeping. The well-documented Hudson’s Bay Company used that system; in contrast, the numerous Basques and other mariners onshore every summer traded directly, their goods including hardy small boats integrated into First Nations’ lives. With its fully documented sources and endnote clarifications, Before Canada is a must-read volume for everyone teaching Canadian history before Confederation (1871). View on Amazon.

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