Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Though the meaning of open access is widely debated, and variations on open content licensing abound, the costs and benefits have yet to be weighed completely. Yes, it is wrong to require using paywalls to access scientific research supported with public dollars, but publishing incurs ongoing costs linked to hardware, software, networking, and the human resources necessary to run a quality publishing concern. To facilitate open access, these costs can be borne by authors instead of readers. However, that raises the issue of predatory publishers, who may not only take advantage of well-intentioned scientists desperate to publish but also give access to cranks and cheats who spread reckless or falsified results with little to no oversight or review. However, their so-called research is freely available to all. Will there be enough honest scientists to combat the resulting public fraud that can come from bad actors misusing a more open system? Open scholarship is a double-edged sword whose boundaries are clarified here by Martin, a librarian and the author of Transdisciplinarity Revealed (CH, Nov'17, 55-0901). She discusses licensing; copyright; open data; open educational resources; citizen science; and the barriers, concerns, and future of open information.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

This is a marvelous book, but its title is misleading: though Robinson Crusoe is often mentioned, the book is not really about Defoe. Instead, Bell (Cardiff Univ., Wales, and Univ. of Goettingen, Germany) is concerned with British reading habits in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In a dense theoretical introduction, Bell argues that despite traditional claims that the British Empire depended crucially on literacy, books and reading did not (as is often claimed) spread uniform ideas about morality and rule. Bell then proceeds, in seven fascinating, dazzlingly learned chapters, to survey what is known (and not known) about British reading in a range of contexts: e.g., books taken by emigrants on the long voyage to Australasia, books requested by felons in hulks and prison colonies. (The many requests from the latter were often denied; the common reading matter provided was religious tracts, which often went unread and instead were cut up into playing cards or used as toilet paper.) Other chapters focus on the reading of Scottish emigrants, of the sailors on Robert Falcon Scott's early-20th-century expedition to Antarctica, and of soldiers in WW I seeking to escape the trenches at least in imagination. This is a splendid book.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

This is a broad and reflective history of the Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum), which dates back the Council of Trent. Though censorship existed in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, Roman Catholic systematic censorship did not begin until the invention of printing and the Protestant Reformation. The first indexes appeared in the 1540s. Vose (history, St. Thomas Univ., New Brunswick) starts with a survey of numerous major and minor examples of censorship of religious, scientific, medical, and magical works published before 1800. He then discusses the Index and other papal censorship in the 19th and 20th centuries, a period seldom studied by historians. The Index expanded in an attempt to censor more literary and nonreligious works, although it had little impact beyond Catholic scholars and readers. Despite updates--the last edition appeared in 1948--the Index became an embarrassment to Catholics and Pope Paul VI abolished it in 1966. Vose concedes that moderate forms of censorship can be useful, because some knowledge and expression can have bad consequences: for example, the Index condemned the works of prominent Nazis. But he concludes that perfect censorship is not possible and that the Index was inconsistent, episodic, and harmful. This well-written book includes a comprehensive further reading section.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

A prolific and steadfast literary historian, Beidler (emer., English, Univ. of Alabama) has held sway for the last 30 years as one of the foremost scholars of war literature and of modernism. This intriguing collection of essays has a valedictory quality, even a posthumous air (an attribute Beidler himself recognizes as applicable to the writer W. G. Sebald). This is surely Beidler's most personal work. He reveals that he is now 76, that one of the essays he includes began life as a graduate school paper 50 years ago, and that he still carries a personal, painful sense of outrage toward the German nation of WW II, which forsook its vaunted cultural heritage in favor of murdering artists such as Gertrude Kolmar. Overarching themes of death, despair, loss, and disappointment link the 15 essays, but Beidler casts a wide net--sculpture, music, and literature of the past 130 years. He offers a profound and affectionate backward glance at some of his dearest friends, people he has thought about and communicated with over his lifetime. Like all of Beidler's work, this collection allows readers to live within the mind of this expansive and compassionate scholar.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Plastic is ubiquitous and durable beyond human imagination, and Ghosh (English, Univ. of North India, Bengal) posits it as the defining material of the present age. Plastic is bio-resistant and irreducible: it forms and re-forms and evokes alchemical imagery. It circulates through oceanic movements connecting continents while producing plastiglomerates, natural flotsam of marine and terrestrial origin as well as manufactured materials. Plastic intrigues, disturbs, and haunts. In this volume, Ghosh uses plastic metaphorically and in an innovative way to advance understanding of literature, art, and life in the present. In so doing, he develops a new material aesthetic, one that offers a new way to view history, ontology, and ecology as well as literature and the arts.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this slim volume, part of the Yale series "Why X Matters," Weiss offers a brief, historical account of art museums, intertwining it with personal and institutional anecdotes on the place of the art museum as a cultural phenomenon. As president and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Weiss is well positioned to offer insights into the challenges facing museums (collecting practices, financial health, and assurance of freedom of expression on the part of artists and curators, for instance) and he situates these concerns within the past, present, and future of museums as cultural, social, and political institutions. Weiss identifies museums as sites that can explicate themes of religion and narratives of collective identity, just as they can build community through generating ideas, inspiration, knowledge, and pleasure--all for the public good. He reminds the reader that museums are spaces of consequence, even if they are imperfect institutions. For Weiss, museums are about progress--the "museum idea is about progress, about learning from [the] past, valuing beauty and truth, understanding our place in the world, and, most important, about where [to] go from here" (p. 74). Supported by notes and an index, this accessible book will be of interest to a broad audience.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

This collection serves as a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, guide to the current status of the history of humanities, examining the classifications, methodologies, values, attitudes, intentions, and conclusions from a variety of disciplines. Historical perspectives illustrate how the humanities have developed, providing a clearer, broader picture of what they are and could be. Various fields of study in the humanities and other fields have converged into more interdisciplinary, comparative examinations and applications of knowledge and experience. Further, the increased availability of databases and digitized sources has enabled more comprehensive inclusion of scholarship across disciplines. The essays here are divided into five parts, which examine the historical definitions and developments of the humanities, various approaches in research practices, the movement of ideas and methods across the various humanities and other disciplines, perceptions of humanities scholarship and its place in education, and considerations for the future of the humanities. Chapters cover a broad scope and offer diverse perspectives. Each is well researched, concludes with a thorough bibliography, and is written specifically for individuals new to the study of the humanities as a historically significant phenomenon. Altogether this is a timely addition to modern research on a topic of immense significance for many areas of study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.