Category: General and Theory

Graham Harrison, The African Presence: Representations of Africa in the construction of Britishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2013) 232 pp. £17.99 Pb, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8885-8 Images such as a starving black child, disaster, poverty and famine in Africa are commonly used by Africa campaign organisations in Britain. Despite these representations of Africa and Africans being…

Andrew Sloane, Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark 2016) 224 pp. £84.99 PDF, EPUB , £85.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780567316776 Andrew Sloane’s Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine is a brave attempt to redefine our approach to one of civilisation’s most enduring…

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press) 2016) xii + 191 pp. $30.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-231-17752-8 Drawn from his 2015 series of Wellek lectures, Timothy Morton’s new work by turns fascinates, mystifies, stuns, confuses, and excites. Readers who seek new vocabularies for thinking about the Anthropocene and…

Michael S. Pardo and Dennis Patterson, Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) 276 pp. £16.99 Pb, £59.00 Hb. ISBN:  9780190253103 Recent developments in neuroscience offer new approaches to a plethora of complex challenges surrounding debates about legal responsibility. Medical and legal professionals are engaged in…

Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 240pp. £14.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780199654390 Rick Rylance’s Literature and the Public Good is a monograph in Oxford’s The Literary Agenda series which seeks to investigate the state of literary studies in education and demonstrate the worth of studying literature within the wider world.…

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2016) 196 pp. $15.00 Pb, $22.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0226323039 Considering current political and scientific debates, the topic of the latest book by acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh could not be timelier. The Great Derangement, a relatively small volume…

Ronald R Kline The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 2015) $24.95 Pb, $54.95 EPUB, MOBI, PDF, $54.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781421416717 With The Cybernetics Moment Ronald R Kline presents a comprehensive and compelling intervention into the history of science that highlights the period from the…

Somogy Varga, Naturalism, Interpretation and Mental Disorder (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) 272pp. £39.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780198747253 Naturalism, Interpretation and Mental Disorder is a unique book not only with regard to its title but also to the subject matter within the book. It is one of the first works written on the subject that permits…

Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity 2016) 140pp. £9.99 Pb, £40.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781509500963 In Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory, Graham Harman examines the status of objects as part of his ongoing project of Object-Oriented Ontology. According to Object-Oriented Ontology, as well as the related perspective of Actor-Network Theory, one of the…

Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo, In Praise of Literature (Cambridge: Polity 2016) 180pp.  £14.99 Pb., £50 Hb. ISBN: 9781509502684 Writing this review in April 2017, one ought to respectfully note the death of featured co-author Zygmunt Bauman in January of this year. This long-time sociology professor at the University of Leeds, who emigrated from Poland…