Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Top 10 OAT Reviews Part Two

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Top Ten OATs Part Two

Posted on December 12, 2024 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight the top ten Outstanding Academic Titles from the past year, part two. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Handbook on inequality and the environment
ed. by Michael A. Long, Michael J. Lynch, and Paul B. Stretesky E. Elgar, 2023

Green criminologists Long (Oklahoma State Univ.), Lynch (Univ. of South Florida), and Stretesky (Northumbria Univ., UK) have on their own and jointly over three decades authored and edited numerous books on environmental harms and socioeconomic inequality, including the groundbreaking The Treadmill of Crime (CH, Mar’14, 51-3916). In this collection,they have very capably solicited and edited a mass of original, cutting-edge research intended to demonstrate the numerous intersections between inequalities and environmental harms. The book’s 32 chapters, which are of uniformly high quality and written by both established and emerging scholars, are efficiently organized into nine parts covering theoretical traditions, rights, race/ethnicity, gender, the economy, the state, climate, natural resources, and food insecurity. This reviewer would have liked more than the cursory attention that is paid here to the current environmental/inequality issues associated with water, seas, and oceans; harms to flora; and the colonization of outer space. Nevertheless, in its length and global coverage, this handbook is a monumental achievement. View on Amazon

2. Believability: sexual violence, media, and the politics of doubt
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. by Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins Polity, 2023

Banet-Weiser and Higgins (both, Annenberg School for Communications) take as the starting point of Believability the notion that sexual violence has never been and will never be a question of the truth. Rather, they assert, it is has been and continues to be a question of the economy of believability, which is contextual: Who is the teller? Who is the accused? What are their identities? and What is the historical context? To interrogate the concept of the economy of believability in the media, the authors analyze several television shows, among them the mini-series Unbelievable and the program The Morning Show, and some public cases, including Amber Heard’s defamation case against Johnny Depp, the trial of R. Kelly, and the rape of Chanel Milller. The analysis is carefully crafted and apt. View on Amazon

3. The beauty of the flower: the art and science of botanical illustration
Harris, Stephen A. Reaktion Books, 2023

The great strength of this book is the way in which it conveys an understanding of the scientific purposes of botanical illustration through historical narrative. Using many examples and historical narratives, Harris (plant sciences and curator of the herbarium at the University of Oxford, UK) helps readers see the importance of detailed illustration to endeavors in science and the important roll the illustrations serve to preserve and record valuable interior and exterior anatomical and functional information visually. The author acknowledges that botanical illustration has the power to please the eye and adorn, but in this book he shifts focus to the scientific merits of this extremely useful art form. Harris never looses sight of the skill, talent, and technique botanical illustration artists possess, and the reader will gain an appreciation for the artist’s collaborative role in scientific progress, dissemination, and preservation. Including many examples, color plates, an appendix of plant names, extensive detailed references, and an enriching list of further reading, this title is a grand addition to the literature. View on Amazon

4. Teach for climate justice: a vision for transforming education Roderick, Tom. Harvard Education Press, 2023

Beyond books merely addressing the issues underpinning environmental education, this interdisciplinary guide to promoting climate justice is perhaps the best education book this reviewer has read in a year. Roderick (independent scholar) places students and the community at the forefront of learning and teaching. The importance of cultivating a deep love of nature is the foundation of this book. The comprehensive strategy of fostering climate and social justice it presents is developmentally on target—and that is no small accomplishment. Topics like climate change, air pollution, land conservation, and biodiversity loss are inherently stressful issues to address in classrooms—even frightening for many students—and although this approach advocates deep understandings of these and other urgent issues, they are dealt with in a way that enhances community and promotes agency. The chapters are well sequenced, and notions of “active hope” and transformative grassroots approaches come on the heels of addressing these timely global challenges. Crossing the boundaries of policy, curriculum, and practice, this easily accessible book will be well received across a variety of contexts in K–16 education. View on Amazon.

5. Toni Morrison: imagining freedom Balfour, Katharine Lawrence. Oxford, 2023

Morrison’s passing has led to a spate of scholarly works assessing her profound legacy in American letters. Balfour (Univ. of Virginia) has produced one of the best examinations of Morrison’s oeuvre to date. Focusing intently on the concept of freedom, Balfour connects multiple works (fiction and nonfiction) to explore Morrison’s vision of freedom as inherently complicated by the racial and gendered oppressions prevalent throughout US history. She explores these difficult political concepts in Morrison by grounding the discussion within the texts’ own specificities, teasing out the tensions that Morrison constantly evokes surrounding responsibility and rights, mobility and situatedness, home and displacement, all with an eye toward understanding Morrison’s constant questioning of abstract notions of freedom in a concretely unequal world. Though not a literary critic per se, Balfour combines her acute political knowledge with keen readings of Morrison’s prose, capturing the multiple layers of connotation that drive Morrison’s fiction. This accessible volume is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the ways in which Toni Morrison’s fiction offers political practices and ideals necessary for the current moment. View on Amazon.

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