Fall Harvest Festival, Continued

Last month, while looking over thousands of listings for forthcoming books in dozens of university-press catalogs for this fall, I flagged 300 titles for further consideration as possible topics for future columns. Within that selection, a few clusters of books seemed to reflect trends, or interesting coincidences at least, and I noted a few of them here.

That survey, however unscientific and incomplete, was fairly well received. Here’s part two. As in the first installment, material in quotation marks is from catalog descriptions of the books. I’ve been sparing with links, but more information on each title is available from its publisher’s website, easily located via the Association of American University Presses directory.

Scholarly publishers might count as pioneers of what Jacob H. Rooksby calls The Branding of the American Mind: How Universities Capture, Manage and Monetize Intellectual Property and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins, University Press, October), although the aggregate profits from every monograph ever published must be small change compared to one good research partnership with Big Pharma. Rooksby explores “higher education’s love affair with intellectual property itself, in all its dimensions” and challenges “the industry’s unquestioned and growing embrace of intellectual property from the perspective of research in law, higher education and the social sciences.” (Sobering thought: In this context, “the industry” refers to higher education.)

Making intellectual property more profitable is Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel’s concern in The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard (Yale University Press, October), which treats “existing government regulations and corporate practices” as a menace to economic growth and prosperity: “Capitalism, they argue, has lost its mojo.”

If so, Google is undoubtedly developing an algorithm to look for it. At least three books on Big Data try to chart its impact on research, policy and the way we live now. Contributors to Big Data Is Not a Monolith, edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Hamid R. Ekbia and Michael Mattioli (The MIT Press, October), assess the scope and heterogeneity of practices and processes subsumed under that heading. Roberto Simanowski’s Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies (Columbia University Press, September) warns of the codependent relationship between “algorithmic analysis and data mining,” on the one hand, and “those who -- out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism or passion -- contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves.” Christine L. Borgman focuses on the implications of data mining for scholarly research in Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (The MIT Press, September), first published last year and now appearing in paperback. While “having the right data is usually better than having more data” and “little data can be just as valuable as big data,” the future of scholarship demands “massive investment in knowledge infrastructures,” whatever the scale of data involved.

Events in real time occasionally rush ahead of the publishing schedule. Several months ago David Owen advised the British public to “vote leave” in The U.K.’s In-Out Referendum: E.U. Foreign and Defence Policy Reform (Haus Publishing, distributed by the University of Chicago Press) but it reaches the American market only this month. Christopher Baker-Beall analyzes The European Union’s Fight Against Terrorism: Discourse, Policies, Identity (Manchester University Press, September) with an eye to “the wider societal impact of the ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse” in the European Union and “the various ways in which this policy is contributing to the ‘securitization’ of social and political life within Europe.” Recent developments suggest this will be a growing field of study.

The E.U.’s days are numbered, according to Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, because Europe Isn’t Working (Yale University Press, August). Or rather, more precisely, the euro isn’t. The currency “has failed to deliver on its promise of more jobs, more growth and greater equality,” and the E.U.’s “current policy of kicking the can down the road and hoping that something will turn up” can’t continue forever. A less fatalistic account of The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier et al. (Princeton University Press, August) traces the currency’s vicissitudes to “the philosophical differences between the founding countries of the Eurozone, particularly Germany and France.” But “these seemingly incompatible differences can be reconciled to ensure Europe’s survival.”

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, it’s time to start phasing out paper money, argues Kenneth S. Rogoff in The Curse of Cash (Princeton, August). The bigger denominations ($100 and up) enable “tax evasion, corruption, terrorism, the drug trade, human trafficking and the rest of a massive global underground economy” and have also “paralyzed monetary policy in virtually every advanced economy.” Small bills and coins are not such a problem, but the Franklins (and larger) could be replaced by a state-backed digital currency. For now, Arvind Narayanan et al. reveal “everything you need to know about the new global money for the internet age” in Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction (Princeton, August), complete with “an accompanying website that includes instructional videos for each chapter, homework problems, programming assignments and lecture slides.” Perfectly honest and law-abiding people will find the book of interest, but it seems like a must-read for anyone with a professional commitment to tax evasion, the drug trade and the like.

As it happens, the fall brings a bumper crop of scholarship on crime, punishment and policing, at varying levels of abstraction and grit. Andrew Millie’s Philosophical Criminology (Policy Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, November) is described as “the first book to foreground this emerging field” -- which it certainly is not. Whatever the contribution of the book itself, hype at this level counts as a species of counterfeiting. The anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff compare developments in South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom in The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (University of Chicago, December), while the contributors to Accusation: Creating Criminals, edited by George Pavlich and Matthew P. Unger (University of British Columbia, October) consider “the founding role that accusation plays in creating potential criminals.” Here we find another large claim: “his book launches an important new field of inquiry.” As an armchair criminologist, I am curious to see learn this differs from the venerable and well-worked field of labeling theory.

Closer to the street, Michael D. White and Henry F. Fradella consider Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Policing Tactic (NYU Press, October) -- a practice much in the headlines in recent years, usually in connection with the issue of racial profiling. Their conclusions -- that “stop and frisk did not contribute as greatly to the drop in New York’s crime rates, as many proponents … have argued,” but also that “it can be judiciously used to help deter crime in a way that respects the rights and needs of citizens” -- are sure to provoke arguments from a variety of perspectives.

Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street for questioning 14 times in the first year of field work for Down, Out and Under: Arrest Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row (University of Chicago Press, August), “often for doing little more than standing there.” He finds that the “distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods” is “a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains”; parties on both sides “are genuinely trying to do the right thing, yet too often come up short.”

Another ethnographic dispatch from the extremes of poverty, Christopher P. Dum’s Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel (Columbia University Press, September) reports on the “squalid, unsafe and demeaning circumstances” of the housing of last resort “for many vulnerable Americans -- released prisoners, people with disabilities or mental illness, struggling addicts, the recently homeless, and the working poor.” The catalog entry for the book doesn’t mention it, but you feel the police presence all the same.

The overcrowding of American prisons is often explained as the byproduct of draconian mandatory sentencing laws, but Wisconsin Sentencing in the Tough-on-Crime Era: How Judges Retained Power and Why Mass Incarceration Happened Anyway by Michael M. O’Hear (Wisconsin, January) argues even in “a state where judges have considerable discretion in sentencing … the prison population has ballooned anyway, increasing nearly tenfold over forty years.” Over the same period, long-term solitary confinement has grown increasingly commonplace, as discussed in a column from six months ago concerning an anthology of writings by scholars, activists and prisoners. Keramet Reiter offers a case study in 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (Yale University Press, October). The title refers to how many hours a day prisoners spend “in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators’ discretion.”

The practice signals that prison authorities have not just abandoned the idea of reformation but moved on to something more severe: a clear willingness to destroy prisoners’ minds. By contrast, Daniel Karpowitz’s College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers University Press, February) describes Bard College’s program offering undergraduate education to New York state prisoners. The book serves as “a study in how institutions can be reimagined and reformed in order to give people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities” while making “a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.”

Daniel LaChance’s Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, October) asks why, by “the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low,” a staggering 80 percent of Americans supported the death penalty. “Why did people who didn’t trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death?” The question implies a belief in the consistency and coherence of public opinion that is either naïve or rhetorical; in any case, the author maintains that “the height of 1970s disillusion” led to a belief in “the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty” as “a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do” -- and, presumably, get right. That confidence has been shaken by a long string of reversals of verdict in recent years, which “could prove [the death penalty’s] eventual undoing in the United States.”

Given the brazen, methodical and massively destructive corruption leading to the near collapse of the world’s financial system eight years ago, Mary Breiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez call for a new variety of capital punishment in The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street (NYU Press, January). “Despite overwhelming proof of wide-ranging and large-scale fraud on Wall Street before, during and after the crisis,” the government’s response amounted to “fines that essentially punished innocent shareholders instead of senior leaders at the megabanks.” Crony capitalism and white-collar crime will continue until the danger of corporate conviction -- having the company’s charter revoked, i.e., putting it out of business -- is credibly on the table.

In effect, if corporations enjoy the legal protection granted them by the Supreme Court’s dubious but effective interpretation of the 14th Amendment, they also should face the possibility of being put to death -- after due process, of course. And fair enough, although the last word here comes from that bumper sticker saying “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”