This week’s episode features Sam Miller and Jason Wojciechowski, editors of the Baseball Prospectus’ 2014 (Wiley, 2014), a yearbook that both previews the upcoming baseball season and provides readers a look into the state of the art in baseball analysis, both in terms of advanced statistical metrics and, increasingly, subjective player scouting.

Though the book is not a traditional work of scholarship, it offers many of the virtues that one hopes to find in the best academic projects.  It questions our assumptions, showing that what we think leads to success on the diamond, often does not.  It builds on previous insights, positioning itself in the tradition begun by the legendary Bill James’ baseball abstracts from the 1980s.  And, perhaps most importantly, the book has shown itself to be increasingly willing to be self-critical, evolving in its methodology as new evidence and ideas come to light.  It is also, of course, a lot of fun.

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Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televised miniseries was a must-watch event of the day, and it remains an important production in television history. However, a little more than a decade after his success, Haley was in trouble. His wealth had dwindled and he had strained relationships with other writers. What happened? Adam Henig tells us in his new book Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey (2014). Listen to this lively interview with the author.

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If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways, it might be said to go back to Tacitus’ Germania – or at least, to 19th-century Germans’ readings of Germania – but it was also indelibly shaped by the writings of explorer Alexander von Humboldt and by James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which were enormously influential in Germany and on Germans abroad. German landscape painters also created some of the most enduring and iconic images of the American West. When Germans in America fought with American Indians over land, their compatriots in Europe tended to side with the Indians. Later, over the successive ruptures of 20th century German history, Germans always found new ways of engaging with American Indians, whether through hobbyist organizations, Wild West shows, through their political commitments to Indian political causes – like the American Indian Movement – or through the astoundingly popular novels of Karl May.

Exploring with great verve the transnational connections between various groups of Germans and Native Americans over two centuries, H. Glenn Penny‘s Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) engages in a wide-ranging set of discussions that open up new and unexpected vistas onto questions of modern German history, the history of European and American colonialism, histories and legacies of genocide, and a host of other key topics.

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Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ruler, scholar, patron, and human being. Emperor Huizong (Harvard University Press, 2014) explores the person and the reign of the eighth emperor of the Song Dynasty, who ascended the Song throne in 1100 (at age 17) and ruled almost 26 years until 1125. Huizong is perhaps best known as a ruler who was so caught up in a sensual life (painting, calligraphy, Daoism, etc.) that he failed to properly govern and left the dynastic door open to invading Jurchen forces. Ebrey offers us a much more complex and even-handed account of this fascinating figure and his world, following the life and rule of Huizong in intricate detail to try to understand the circumstances that ultimately led this man to pretend to have a stroke so that his son could ascend the throne and try to succeed where the father had failed to avert a Jin takeover. (Both were unsuccessful, and as Jurchen forces sacked Kaifeng the remnants of the Song fled southward while Huizong and his son were taken into captivity.) We learn not only about Huizong’s childhood and family life, but also about his negotiation of reforms (political and musical) at court, his faith in and relationship to Daoism, and his practice and patronage of the arts of medicine, architecture, painting, and calligraphy. Ebrey brings a masterful reading of a diverse archive of sources to bear on creating this imperial portrait, which is both an incredible feat of careful scholarship and an absolute pleasure to read.

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Rebecca Williams‘ book Muhammad and the Supernatural: Medieval Arab Views (Routledge, 2013) is one of the newest additions to the Routledge Studies in Classic Islam series. Despite the Qur’anic proclamation that the only “miracle” which served as proof of Muhammad’s propethood was the Qur’an itself, miracles and supernatural events have been ascribed to Muhammad in numerous Islamic literary and intellectual genres. Professor Williams, of the University of South Alabama, delivers a unique and fresh look at the supernatural in Islam.

Restricting her analysis to the works of Qur’anic exegesis and the biography, she focuses on four events in the life of Muhammad. Muhammad’s conception, his first occasion of public preaching, a vignette concerning a warning sent by one of Muhammad’s followers to the residents of Mecca prior to an attack, and a failed assassination attempt upon Muhammad’s life each contain some type of supernatural occurrence. Each of these events is connected to an important theme for Muslims in the medieval era, sex, politics, betrayal, and wrath, respectively. Professor William’s fascinating comparative investigation of the treatment of these supernatural occasions demonstrates important similarities and differences between these two scholars. Moreover, the reader becomes conscious of the milieu in which each scholar constructed their texts. While this is a significant contribution to the field of the study of Islam, the topics addressed are of great benefit to scholars of literature and folklore and its contents are accessible to a wide spectrum of readers.

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Do black mayors face a different governing challenge than other mayors? Ravi K. Perry explores this question in his Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Perry is assistant professor of political science at Mississippi State University.

Using the cities of Toledo and Dayton, Ohio as his starting point, Perry’s book investigates the ways black mayors govern in majority white cities. He compares how Jack Ford, mayor of Toledo from 2002-2006, and Rhine McLin, mayor of Dayton from 2002-2010, use targeted universalism to balance the need to represent black and white constituents. This balancing act is a tenuous one for black mayors with such high expectations and often limited authority to deliver the range of needs of the community. Perry’s research ranges from historical analysis of election results and rhetorical analysis of speeches to deliver a thoughtful look at two interesting political figures and an understudied area of political science scholarship.

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Being an academic is usually a forward-looking career.  You are generally focused on the next book or the next project (or perhaps the next class period).  Certainly, there may be times when you rethink an old judgment or return to a subject you’ve ignored for years.  But this re-engagement is usually limited.  Even a  festschrift (a volume of essays published in honor or in memory of a well-known researcher) is written by other people and usually offers new insights rather than reflections.

So Adam Jones‘ self-described mid-career retrospective is pretty unusual.  And valuable.  Jones, as many of the readers know, has contributed enormously to the study of genocide in the past decade.  The Scourge of Genocide:  Essays and Reflections (Routledge, 2013) is a combination of reprints of previously published articles and reviews and original writing.  The original writing is fascinating.  And the essays reprinted here complement each other in ways they almost certainly didn’t when scattered in a variety of publications.    The result is to give us a much fuller sense of Jones’ ideas and opinions.  In particular, Jones’ reflection on the choices he made when writing and revising his widely used textbook (Genocide:  A Comprehensive Introduction) should inspire all textbook authors to undertake a similar project.

The book is well worth reading.  I hope the interview gives you the flavor of the book and Jones’ ideas and persuades you to read more deeply in his work.

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Everybody knows the author of The Jungle was Upton Sinclair (or, if they’re a little confused, they might say Sinclair Lewis). As Lauren Coodley shows in her new biography Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), there was a lot more to Upton Sinclair. For one thing, he was the author of nearly eighty books that were not entitled The Jungle. One of those, Dragon’s Teeth (part of the World’s End series), won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sinclair was also a socialist, feminist, anti-communist, dietary reformer, and prohibitionist. And, as Coodley reminds us, he was a prominent celebrity, a born contrarian who took almost as much pleasure at defying his fellow socialists as he did infuriating the rich, powerful, and complacent.

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Thuy Linh Tu‘s The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (Duke University Press, 2010) considers the recent rise of Asian Americans working in New York’s fashion industry, and explores how Asian-inspired fashions speak to American anxieties concerning the growing economic and cultural power of Asian nation-states. Rather than see Asian American designers as either complicit or subversive to the growing trends of Asian chic, The Beautiful Generation investigates how these designers continue to change American perspectives of fashion by making relationships between the product and the manufacturing process more intimate.

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It is commonly assumed that states have a right to broad discretionary control over immigration, and that they may decide almost in any way they choose, who may stay within the territory and who must leave.  But even supposing that there is such a right, we may ask the decidedly moral question about how it may be exercised.  And this query calls us to try to bring our views about the ethics of immigration into equilibrium with our other moral convictions about citizenship, liberty, and equality.   Can our common views and practices concerning immigration be rendered consistent with these deeper commitments?

In The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013), Joseph Carens argues that our common commitment to democratic principles requires us to revise much of our thinking about immigration.  Beginning with the uncontroversial practice of granting citizenship immediately to those born within a country’s territory, Carens argues that claims to social membership and thus to citizenship strengthen as individuals stay in a state; consequently, there is a point at which not extending citizenship to those living within a state’s borders is grossly immoral, even for those who have settled without the state’s permission.  Carens’ arguments about the moral constraints on the state’s rights to exclude eventuate in an argument in favor of open borders.

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