Browse all reviews
A Brief History of Nakedness / Philip Carr-Gomm
Review Date: 01 September 2010
The history of nakedness deserves a serious history. For organised nudism or ‘naturism’ was a conscious movement initiated by Europeans at the end of the 19th century that has exerted a significant influence over society and politics in the wider world. This book is not that serious academic history. In one respect its aim is much more ambitious.
Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson / James D. Rice
Review Date: 01 July 2010
In the opening of his recent volume, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, historian James D. Rice informs his readers that the idea for the book began with what he perceived as a ‘hole in the map’ (p. 1).
Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment / Joachim Radkau
Review Date: 01 July 2010
For readers like this reviewer, who do not read Germany fluently, the translation of Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment is a major event. This is probably the best available overview of the changing human relationship with the biosphere: a subject whose historiographical and political significance is becoming more and more evident.
A Cultural History of Climate / Wolfgang Behringer
Review Date: 01 July 2010
I received the invitation to review this book during the same week – 16-20 November 2009 – that over 1,000 emails to and from climate scientists in the Climatic Research Unit at my university found their way into the public domain.
An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life / J. Donald Hughes
Review Date: 01 June 2010
Most of us who have tried to write of time and place on a large scale resort to a broad framework of ideas, punctuated by an example or two from the literature or even from our own experience. As in his first edition, Donald Hughes does it differently: a series of footprints rather than a superhighway, as he puts it.
Beauty and the Male Body in Byzantium: Perceptions and Representations in Art and Text
Review Date: 01 May 2010
The product of extensive fieldwork, Beauty and the Male Body in Byzantium; Perceptions and Representations in Art and Text is a revised version of an already polished PhD thesis submitted under the title ‘Unveiling Male Beauty: Perception and Representation in Byzantine Imagery and the Texts from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Centuries’ at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in 2004.
England’s Past for Everyone Series / Nick Holder
Review Date: 01 May 2010
In February 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded over £3 million to the Victoria County History (VCH) – the high priest of England’s local history – to establish an ambitious new local history project, England’s Past for Everyone (EPE).
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia / James C. Scott
Review Date: 30 April 2010
There can surely have been few other books in Asian Studies and certainly not in South East Asian Studies in recent years that have been as widely anticipated as James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).
The Origins of Racism in the West / eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler
Review Date: 01 April 2010
In 1994 I published a now widely cited and highly regarded volume entitled Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1914 (1), which, at the time, faced critical comment.
Children in Slavery Through The Ages / eds. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C. Miller
Review Date: 31 March 2010
As the editors’ introduction notes, this is the first of two volumes examining the subject of children in slavery, in a pioneering attempt to expose at least part of an area that ‘has only recently become the focus of academic research’ (p. 1).