Reviews of the Month: July 2026

Spotlighting four book reviews for their relevance or pure reading pleasure

Posted on July 13, 2026 in Reviews of the Month

We begin this month’s selections with Texas Tech’s Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West by Ryan Tan Wander. Exploring American West literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Wander demonstrates the interplay between queerness, masculinity, and nationalism on the American frontier. Next, we commemorate Disability Pride Month with Minnesota’s The Double Bind of Disability. The title investigates the constraints of forcing disabled people to hold autonomy over their own wellness while simultaneously dismissing their lived experiences and insight into new medical technologies. The title dives into the “costs of ableism and exceptionalism within medicine and medical technology development” and embraces a collective approach to medical innovation.

Who’s planning to watch Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey? We celebrate the epic tale with Cambridge’s The World of Homer, which charts the rise of the Greek epic and what it reveals about poetry, memory, and culture in ancient Greece. Finally, we close out the month with the evolution of data archiving. In MIT’s Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms, Amelia Acker explores the growing distance between users and data as we cede control to “the cloud” and private corporations—an “excellent volume for archivists, librarians, and other cultural heritage professionals and memory workers.”

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Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West

Wander, Ryan Tan. Texas Tech, 2024
256p bibl index, 9781682832271 $34.95, 9781682832271

Wander (Valdosta State Univ.) offers a provocative rereading of late-19th and early-20th-century literature of the American West, shifting away from the traditional account of that period as resolutely emblematic of white masculinity to excavate the linkages between queerness and the colonial enterprises that defined American expansion globally and nationally. Wander provides readings of Bret Harte’s regional writings, Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick pulp novels, Frank Norris’s and Jack London’s frontier narratives, and the Westerns of Owen Wister and Zane Grey. In each case, he shows how these authors revealed the queer moments that challenged, and then supported, white settler hegemony in US culture. These narratives offer different configurations by which racial and queer futurity could be managed and the anxieties of colonialism and genocide assuaged or erased. Wander’s writing is challenging, and his rearticulation of this fraught moment in American literary history is sure to open new avenues for discussion of this often marginalized literary period. Wander’s work offers an important contribution to the conversations surrounding race, masculinity, queerness, and colonialist American culture. Scholars of American literature will find this a challenging argument for reading early-20th-century US literature in a different frame.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: D. E. Magill, Longwood University
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Studies
Subject: Humanities – Language & Literature – English & American
Choice Issue: Aug 2025

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The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority

Monteleone, Rebecca. Minnesota, 2025
209p bibl index, 9781517917678 $100.00, 9781517917685 $25.00, 9781452974064 $25.00

Drawing together case studies of the use, or encouraged use, of three types of medical technology, Monteleone (Univ. of Toledo) illustrates the disjuncture between the lived experience and embodiment of disabled people and the medical authorities and institutions meant to help them. The titular double bind refers to the simultaneous expectation that disabled people manage their own conditions and their dismissal by medical authorities as sites of expertise or insight in the development of medical technologies that directly impact their quality of life. Throughout the chapters, which describe the three technologies and their users/potential users, readers see how users are impacted by the double bind and how they fall victim to, or reject, a responsibility for their wellness, which “demands the pursuit of the idealized nondisabled bodymind” (p. 155). Monteleone centers the experience of people whose lives are significantly impacted by medical technologies, contrasting their interviews with those of clinicians and patient education materials related to the technologies: deep brain stimulation implants, artificial pancreas systems, and prenatal genetic testing. This volume makes stark the costs of ableism and exceptionalism within medicine and medical technology development, making it an excellent text for courses in disability studies, philosophy, political science, and, most critically, medicine and allied healthcare.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.
Reviewer: S. Berry-Sullivan, Utica University
Subject: Science & Technology – Health Sciences
Choice Issue: Jun 2026

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The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry

Cosmopoulos, Michael B. Cambridge, 2025
370p bibl index, 9781009582889 $44.99, 9781009582865 $44.99

The aim of this book is to “offer a comprehensive, multidimensional exploration of the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey” by focusing on key scholarly debates, the many contexts of the Homeric poems, and the processes of memory and transmission behind them. Cosmopoulos (Univ. of Missouri) achieves this aim using an interwoven interdisciplinary approach, which entails archaeology, history, philology, performance studies, and oral tradition. The scope of the book is immense. The first of three parts focuses on the history and current state of Homeric studies, discussing Homeric scholarship from antiquity through the Enlightenment, the orality-literary dichotomy approach, oral neoanalysis, language, and Indo-European and Near Eastern influences. Part 2, the longest section, is divided into six subchapters: historical background, society and politics, political geography, economy, war, and religion, all of which are subdivided yet again. Part 3 discusses, in two chapters, history, memory, and the emergence of Greek epic poetry. The book certainly achieves its stated aim. The bibliography is extensive and comprehensive.

Summing Up: Recommended. Faculty only.
Reviewer: H. M. Roisman, emerita, Colby College
Subject: Humanities – Language & Literature – Classical
Choice Issue: Feb 2026

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Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms

Acker, Amelia. MIT, 2025
258p bibl index, 9780262553247 $40.00, 9780262384575

Automation in data archiving means people no longer need technical skills to archive and access their data, widening the distance between human creators and the data they create. Users are conditioned to cede this control and agency to the cloud, as they are simultaneously distanced from where their data lives. In this valuable contribution to information studies, Acker (School of Communication and Information, Rutgers Univ.) examines the invisible power and agency we have afforded to archiving machines through an incredibly layered history of data archiving technology from 1960 to the present. Acker examines data archiving not in traditional archives whose purpose is to steward and provide access to information, but in private corporations, “where much of their assumed value is in their aggregation for reuse and potential for prediction, where the collection of data becomes nearly constant and taken for granted but access is constrained and used to generate profits” (p. 5) This is an excellent volume for archivists, librarians, and other cultural heritage professionals and memory workers, as well as information scholars, historians of technology and politics, and students in these fields.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.
Reviewer: J. Colozza, Merrimack College
Subject: Science & Technology – Information & Computer Science
Choice Issue: May 2026

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