Earl Smith, Race, Sport and the American Dream (Carolina Academic Press, 2007) This book reports the main findings of a five-year research project investigating the scope and consequences of the deepening relationship between African American males and the institution of sport. While there is some scholarly literature on the topic, author Smith tries to understand through this project how sport has changed the nature of African American Civil Society and has come to be a major influence on economic opportunities, schooling and the shaping of African American family life.
Mary F. Foskett, Jeffrey Kah-jin Kuan (Editors), Ways of Being, Ways of Reading: Asian American Biblical Interpretation (Chalice Press, 2006) This is a collection of essays that address biblical interpretation and the Bible’s role from an Asian North point of view. Beginning with the history of biblical interpretation in Asian countries and cultures, this impressive collection by noted contemporary scholars address issues and themes as cultural hermeneutics, the politics of identity, and what constitutes Asian American theology.
Shannon Gilreath, Sexual Identity Law in Context, Cases and Materials (American Casebook), (West Law School, 2007) This book puts the law concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into a social context. The result is that students better understand the law by understanding the social issues underlying the legalities. Material providing background discussion (law review articles, journal articles from other disciplines, journalism, history, science, philosophy, traditional prose, and comparative law materials) supplements cases that involve all major aspects of sexual identity law. The book provides a detailed course designed for an upper-level law school seminar, but introductory explanation provided for major legal concepts makes it suitable for beginning students as well.
Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (Editors), A Place to Believe in: Locating Medieval Landscapes (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006) The essays in A Place to Believe In reveal places real and imagined, ancient and modern: Anglo-Saxon Northumbria (home of Whitby and Bede’s monastery of Jarrow), Cistercian monasteries of late medieval Britain, pilgrimages of mind and soul in Margery Kempe, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in 1940, and representations of the sacred landscape in today’s Pacific Northwest. A strength of the collection is its awareness of the fact that medieval and modern viewpoints converge in an experience of place and frame a newly created space where the literary, the historical, and the cultural are in ongoing negotiation with the geographical, the personal, and the material.
Journal of Internation Women’s S al tudies
Laura Roskos and Patricia Willis (Editors), Special Issue of the online Journal of International Women’s Studies (Vol 8, #3, April 2007) The vision for this special issue emerged out of experiences that the co-editors had during Women’s B od and after their involvement in organizing for the Boston Social Forum in July 2004. They were Gender An ies, interested in discovering how other women/feminists had experienced and negotiated social and Femin alysis, ist fora around the globe in order to create a deeper context for understanding various forms of at the Fór Politics um Social feminist engagement. Mundial Vol 8, #3, A p
ril 2007 Dean J. Franco (Editor), Special Issue of Philip Roth Studies on Roth and Race (Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 2006) As the articles in this issue make clear, asking if Roth writes about race is a little like asking if Jews are white. The answers—”yes,” “no,” and “it depends”—apply to both questions and point to the wide arena wherein race itself is defined, described, performed, negotiated, and deconstructed: America itself. And Philip Roth does write about America. Not just “Jewish America,” unless one considers that Roth’s America is always underwritten by the (raced) experience of Jews in this country, which is itself marked by the intertwining of blacks and Jews in American public and cultural life. In short, writing about Jews, or writing about America itself, is already writing about race.
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