Category: Reviews
-
Durham, Rebecca A., Be Still Mere Molecule
Rebecca A. Durham, Be Still Mere Molecule (Raleigh, NC, USA: Broken Tribe Press, 2025) 120 pp. $14.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781965412107 How does a poet witness the world? How does a scientist? What if a person were to be both at once? Would that experience of the in-betweenness of both worlds aid them in finding, perhaps…
-
Endersby, Jim, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935
Jim Endersby, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 400 pp. $37.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837567 Jim Endersby’s The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935 intervenes in histories of evolution by unearthing the popularity of a largely dismissed theory: mutation. Tracing the diffusion of Hugo de…
-
Carey, Brycchan, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807
Brycchan Carey, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024) 280 pp. $65.00. Hb. IBSN: 978-0300224412 The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807 by Brycchan Carey magnifies the cross-section of eighteenth-century British abolitionist writing that sought to un-naturalize slavery in a part of the world that…
-
Berry, Chelsea, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World
Chelsea Berry, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 273 pp. $49.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781512826494 Chelsea Berry’s work Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World is a deeply interdisciplinary study that reimagines how we understand poison, healing, and power in the context…
-
Hayles, N. Katherine, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts
N. Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 304 pp. $27.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837475 As a species, we Homo sapiens often take it for granted that humanity is separate from, and superior to, the rest of existence. It’s a view that has permeated much of our…
-
Martin, Meredith, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody
Meredith Martin, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) 224 pp. £84 Hb. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780691254678 Meredith Martin’s Poetry’s Data is a large-scale attempt to bring together literary studies, linguistics, digital humanities, and critical archives studies. It presents a compelling case on why we should critically examine…
-
Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee; Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds
Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022) 272 pp. £30 Hb. £16.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780691180472 Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (Random House, 2022), 416 pp. £10.99 Pb. £9.99 e-book. ISBN: 9780141991146 Both books reviewed here are invitations to travel to imagined worlds: to the…
-
Markovits, Stefanie, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Stefanie Markovits, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 240 pp. $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780198937791 ‘Number sense’ is the term Stefanie Markovits uses to describe the numerical thinking that permeates the lines and pages of nineteenth-century novels and poems, crafting patterns across the tapestry of poetic imagery and narrative arcs. As she…
-
Klinger, Sebastian P., Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929
Sebastian P. Klinger, Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) 255 pp. £45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781421450803 In Sleep Works, historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger sets out to provide a ‘comprehensive account’ of early twentieth-century scientific, pharmaceutical and literary understandings of sleep (134). By examining developments in…
-
Desmond, Adrian, Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution
Adrian Desmond, Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024) xii+664 Free e-book. £25.46 Pb. £37.36 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-80511-240-2 In 1851, Admiral Sir John Ross returned to London from the Arctic expedition that had discovered the sad fate of Franklin’s lost expedition.…
