Published this week

? = Review forthcoming

ARTS AND DESIGN

- Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights

By Bill Ivey, founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy, Vanderbilt University. University of California Press, £14.95. ISBN 9780520241121

Ivey blends personal and professional memoir, policy analysis and deeply held convictions to explore and define a co-ordinated vision for art, culture and expression in American life.

BIOGRAPHY

- ?In the Shadow of Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story

By Andrea Weiss, professor of film and video production, City College of New York. University of Chicago Press, £14.50. ISBN 9780226886725

This dual biography of Thomas Mann's two eldest children offers a fascinating view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil and shifting sexual mores of their times, from pre-Second World War Germany to their exile in the US.

CLASSICS

- The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel

Edited by Tim Whitmarsh, E. P. Warren praelector in Classics at Corpus Christi College and lecturer in Greek language and literature, University of Oxford. Cambridge University Press, £55.00. ISBN 9780521865906

Nineteen original essays by international experts in the field emphasise the critical interpretation of texts within historical settings, both in antiquity and in later generations that have been inspired by them.

COMPUTER SCIENCE

- 3D Shape: Its Unique Place in Visual Perception

By Zygmunt Pizlo, professor of psychological sciences and electrical and computer engineering, Purdue University. The MIT Press, £24.95. ISBN 9780262162517

An account of how we perceive the 3D shapes of objects and an exploration of how to design machines that can see shapes the way we do. Pizlo argues that the uniqueness of shape as a perceptual property lies in the fact that it is both complex and structured.

ECONOMICS

- Pension Strategies in Europe and the United States

Edited by Robert Fenge, senior research fellow, Ifo Institute for Economic Research, and assistant professor of economics, University of Munich, Georges de Menil, professor of economics, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociale, and Pierre Pestieau, professor of economics, University of Liege, Belgium. The MIT Press, £22.95. ISBN 97802620625

Leading economists analyse topical issues in pension policy, including the political sustainability of pension reforms and the need for privately funded systems

ENGLISH

- Anthony Burgess and Modernity

Edited by Alan Roughley, associate professor of English literature, Liverpool Hope University. Manchester University Press, £55.00. ISBN 9780719078866

A range of international scholars and critics explore the writer's novels, music and linguistic productions to discuss and define how Burgess contributed to modernist and postmodernist art.

- John Donne, Body and Soul

By Ramie Targoff, associate professor of English and American literature, Brandeis University. University of Chicago Press, £15.00. ISBN 9780226789637

In chapters that range from Donne's earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that the poet's obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.

HISTORY

- The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945

By Harold B. Segel, professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature, Columbia University. Columbia University Press, £44.00. ISBN 9780231133067

This history of Eastern European literature examines literary responses to the oppression of the region between 1945 and 1991, the impact of the downfall of communism and the challenges of the postcommunist period.

- Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics

By Daniel Hurewitz, assistant professor of history, Hunter College, City University of New York. University of California Press, £11.50. ISBN 9780520256231

Portraying life over a period of more than 40 years in Edendale, near downtown LA, Hurewitz considers the work of painters and printmakers, looks inside the Communist Party's intimate cultural scene and examines the social world of gay men.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

- Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

By John T. Hamilton, professor of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature, New York University. Columbia University Press, £23.50. ISBN 9780231142205

This study examines how literary, philosophical and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a crisis of language.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life

By Steven M. Tipton, director of the graduate division of religion, Emory University. University of Chicago Press, £18.00. ISBN 9780226804743

This book examines the political activities of Methodists and mainline churches in a generation characterised by denominational strife among church officials, lobbyists and activists.

POLITICS

- Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

By Larry M. Bartels, Donald E. Stokes professor of public and international affairs and director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University. Princeton University Press, £17.95. ISBN 9780691136639

This book offers an analysis of the political causes and consequences of America's growing income gap and a sobering assessment of the capacity of the American political system to live up to its democratic ideals.

- ?China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society

By Daniel A. Bell, professor of political philosophy, Tsinghua University. Princeton University Press, £15.95. ISBN 9780691136905

Bell observes the rituals, routines and tensions of daily life in China, making the case that as the nation retreats from communism, it is embracing a new Confucianism that offers a compelling alternative to Western liberalism.

- The Great Satan vs the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other

By William O. Beeman, professor and chair of the department of anthropology, University of Minnesota. University of Chicago Press, £9.00. ISBN 9780226041476

Beeman explores how the political leaders of both countries have used historical references, religious associations and the mythology of evil to inflame their own citizens against the "enemy" and proposes a way out of this dangerous impasse.

PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY

- Midbrain Mutiny: The Picoeconomics and Neuroeconomics of Disordered Gambling

By Don Ross, professor of philosophy and professor of economics, University of Alabama at Birmingham and professor of economics, University of Cape Town, Carla Sharp, assistant professor in the Menning department of psychiatry and behavioural sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, Rudy E. Vuchinich, professor of psychology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and David Spurrett, professor of philosophy and director of the cognitive science programme, Howard College Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The MIT Press, £24.95. ISBN 9780262182652

This analysis of how economic models can explain pathological gambling uses empirical evidence about behaviour and the brain to argue that addictive gambling is the basic form of all addiction.

Arts and design

Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology

By Susan Kozel, associate

professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University

The MIT Press, £22.95

ISBN 9780262113106

Kozel presents a phenomenological analysis of the interaction between the performing body and technology.

Computer science

Digital Integrated Circuit Design: From VLSI Architectures to CMOS Fabrication

By Hubert Kaeslin, head,

VLSI front-end, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

Cambridge University Press, £45.00

ISBN 9780521882675

This book uses a top-down approach, reflecting the way circuits are designed in industry, moving from VLSI architecture design to CMOS fabrication with practical hints and tips, case studies and checklists to provide a how-and-when guide to design.

Economics

Microeconomics of Banking: Second Edition

By Xavier Freixas, dean of the Undergraduate School of Economics and Business Administration and professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and Jean-Charles Rochet, professor of mathematics and economics, School of Economics, University of Toulouse

The MIT Press, £38.95

ISBN 97802620601

A textbook that examines the latest research in banking theory.

History

Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America

By Molly McGarry, assistant professor of history, University

of California, Riverside

University of California Press, £16.95

ISBN 9780520252608

McGarry guides readers through the uncanny world of 19th-century American spiritualism, tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, and bringing a once marginalised practice to the centre of American cultural history.

Social sciences

Sociology for Social Workers

By Anne Llewellyn, senior lecturer in health and social care; Lorraine Agu, senior lecturer in social work; and David Mercer, senior lecturer in social work, Leeds Metropolitan University

Polity, £65.00 and £18.99

ISBN 9780745636979 and 6986

Llewellyn et al aim to show how sociology can inform professional social-work practice in the 21st century with a book designed to support and extend students’ learning.