Category: Reviews
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Barr, Philippa Nicole, Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague
Philippa Nicole Barr, Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague (Cambridge Elements: Histories of Emotions and the Senses: Cambridge University Press, 2024) 71 pp. £17.00 Pb. £49.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781108821063 In late 2019 Philippa Barr from the Australian National University signed the contract to write a book about how a pandemic affected the city…
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Gil-Fournier, Abelardo and Parikka, Jussi, Images, Plants and Environments of Media: Living Surfaces
Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, Images, Plants and Environments of Media: Living Surfaces (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2024) 328 pp. $45.00 Pb. $44.99 eBook. ISBN: 9780262547956 This complex but engaging work conducts a media archaeological analysis of the aesthetics of planetary surfaces, exploring the technological, artistic and cultural practices that respond to, but also…
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Farzin, Sina, Gaines, Susan M. and Haynes, Roslynn D., Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel
Sina Farzin, Susan M. Gaines and Roslynn D. Haynes, Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2021) 220 pp. $99.95 Hb. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 9780271089782 Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel is a new collection of essays by Farzin, Gaines and…
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de Groot, Jerome, Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past
Jerome de Groot, Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023) 222 pp. £29.59 Pb. £108.00 Hb. £29.59 eBook ISBN: 9780367512354 Considering the ways in which genetic science has begun to inflect not only what we make of the past but especially how historians investigate the past and what they envision this science…
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Sarkar, Debapriya, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science
Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) 265 pp. $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 97815128-2335-6 In Chapter 4 of Possible Knowledge: The literary forms of Early Modern Science, Margaret Cavendish’s lady with an earring remains unknowing as a whole cosmology comes to life and is annihilated within the…
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Fyfe, Aileen and Kidd, Colin (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914
Aileen Fyfe and Colin Kidd (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023) xii + 273 pp. £85.00 Hb. £24.99 Pb. £24.99 Ebook. ISBN: 9781474493031 David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black, Dugald Stewart, Adam Ferguson, John Leslie, James Hutton, William Cullen, James Watt. These very prominent and influential philosophers, economists,…
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Lehmann, Olga V. and Synnes, Oddgeir (eds), A Poetic Language of Ageing
Olga V. Lehmann and Oddgeir Synnes (eds), A Poetic Language of Ageing (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) 232 pp. $115.00 Hb, $39.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781350256804 A Poetic Language of Ageing brings together the deeply personal experiences of growing older, as expressed through poetry and other creative writing avenues, with research on ageing. It also highlights that…
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Livingstone, David N., The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea
David N. Livingstone, The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024) 552 pp. £32.00 Hb. £22.40 ebook. ISBN: 9780691236704 David Noel Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea offers to his readers an examination of how the concept of climate has shaped human thought, society, and…
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Estreich, George, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
George Estreich, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019) 240 pp. $27.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780262039567 Across ten chapters of Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves, George Estreich applies a rhetorical lens to expose the tactics of persuasion and exclusion employed by…
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Hall, Kersten T., Insulin – The Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold
Kersten T. Hall, Insulin – The Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) 480 pp. £31.49 Hb. ISBN: 9780192855381 Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. — Immanuel Kant Whether you interpret Kant’s famous quote in a moral sense,…
