Oxford University Press

Book Reviews

• Africa's Discovery of Europe: 1450-1850 (David Northrup)
  - African perspectives on encounters with Europeans
• *Against Marriage (Clare Chambers)
  An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State
• The Ancient Olympics (Nigel Spivey)
  - history, archaeology, mythology, politics, ...
• The Baburnama (Zahiruddin Babur)
  Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor
• Baggara Arabs (Ian Cunnison)
  Power and the Lineage in a Sudanese Nomad Tribe
• Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 (Gordon Campbell)
  - from its precursors to the 21st Century
• The Biology of African Savannahs (Bryan Shorrocks)
  - species, populations, interactions, communities
• Bismarck: A Life (Jonathan Steinberg)
  - an engaging but uneven biography
• A Bitter Revolution (Rana Mitter)
  - China's May Fourth Movement and its legacy
• Bridges (David Blockley)
  The Science and Art of the World's Most Inspiring Structures
• *The Bridges of Medieval England (David Harrison)
  Transport and Society 400-1800
• Britain Begins (Barry Cunliffe)
  - from the Ice Age to the Norman Conquest
• Buddhism in the Modern World (Steven Heine, Charles S. Prebish)
  Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition
• *Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy (Mel Greaves)
  - cellular biology and human evolution, history and society
• The Caucasus: An Introduction (Thomas de Waal)
  - the modern history of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia
• Chaos and Fractals (David P. Feldman)
  An Elementary Introduction
• *Chemical Evolution (Stephen F. Mason)
  Origin of the Elements, Molecules, and Living Systems
• Children of the French Empire (Owen White)
  Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895-1960
• Classical Mythology (Helen Morales)
  A Very Short Introduction
• Colliding Continents (Mike Searle)
  A Geological Exploration of the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibet
• The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology (Harvey, Pagel)
• *Development as Freedom (Amartya Sen)
  - broad-ranging popular economics
• The Dutch Republic (Jonathan I. Israel)
  Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806
• *The Emerald Planet (David Beerling)
  How Plants Changed Earth's History
• Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Eric Pawson, Tom Brooking)
  - papers on ecology, economics, conservation, and ideas
• *The Evolution of Plants (K.J. Willis, J.C. McElwain)
  - fossils, phylogenetics, environments, biogeography, ...
• *Evolutionary Genetics (John Maynard Smith)
  - a readable introductory text
• Explorers of South-East Asia (Victor T. King)
  - Mouhot, Bock, Burns, Nieuwenhuis, Garnier, and Scott
• The External Trade of the Loango Coast 1576-1870 (Phyllis M. Martin)
  The Effects of Changing Commercial Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango
• **Faces in the Clouds (Stewart Guthrie)
  A New Theory of Religion
• *The Fifth Queen (Ford Madox Ford)
  - a novel about Henry VIII's fifth wife, Katharine Howard
• **The Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Camilla Townsend)
  - using indigenous Nahuatl sources
• Financing the First World War (Hew Strachan)
  - gold, taxation, domestic and foreign borrowing
• The First World War in Africa (Hew Strachan)
  - Togoland, the Cameroons, South-West Africa, East Africa
• Fractals: A Very Short Introduction (Kenneth Falconer)
  - the obvious starting point for lay readers
• French Literature (John D. Lyons)
  A Very Short Introduction
• Genetics, Speciation and the Founder Principle (Giddings, Kaneshiro, Anderson)
  - essays on founder effects, genetic revolutions, karyotype evolution, ...
• German Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Nicholas Boyle)
  - between the bourgeoisie and officialdom
• Higher Speculations (Helge Kragh)
  Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology
• A History of German (Joseph Salmons)
  What the Past Reveals About Today's Language
• A History of Russia (Nicholas V. Riasanovsky)
  - Kievan, Appanage, Muscovite, Imperial, and Soviet Russia
• A History of the Peoples of Pakistan (J. Hussain)
  Towards Independence
• How Dead Languages Work (Coulter H. George)
  - a linguistic, historical + literary potpourri covering six languages
• How to Read a Latin Poem (William Fitzgerald)
  If You Can't Read Latin Yet
• Human Biology (G.A. Harrison et al.)
  An Introduction to Human Evolution, Variation, Growth and Adaptability
• Inequality Reexamined (Amartya Sen)
  - equality in political and economic philosophy
• An Introduction to Auction Theory (Flavio M. Menezes, Paulo K. Monteiro)
  - mathematically rigorous techniques and methods
• An Introduction to Children's Literature (Peter Hunt)
  - a lively and opinionated history
• An Introduction to Historical Linguistics (Terry Crowley)
  - a straightforward text
• *Islam (John L. Esposito)
  The Straight Path
• Letters from the Malay Archipelago (Alfred Russel Wallace)
  - travelling, observing, collecting, theorising, ...
• The Major Transitions in Evolution (John Maynard Smith, Eörs Szathmáry)
  - from prebiotic chemistry to the origins of society
• *Medieval Warfare (Maurice Keen)
  A History
• Microbial Phylogeny and Evolution (Jan Sapp)
  Concepts and Controversies
• *Music, Language, and the Brain (Aniruddh D. Patel)
  - links in rhythm, melody, syntax, meaning, evolution
• The Mystery of Numbers (Annemarie Schimmel)
  - an unstructured collection of numerological beliefs
• Myths from Mesopotamia (Stephanie Dalley)
  Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
• **The Nature of Computation (Christopher Moore, Stephan Mertens)
  - L, P, NP, EXP, co, SPACE, TIME, BPP, BQP, ...
• Neutral Models in Biology (Matthew H. Nitecki, Antoni Hoffman)
  - in genetics, ecology, evolution, and paleontology
• *Notebooks from New Guinea (Vojtech Novotny)
  Fieldnotes of a Tropical Biologist
• The Nuer (E.E. Evans-Pritchard)
  A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People
• *On the Wing (David E. Alexander)
  Insects, Pterosaurs, Birds, Bats and the Evolution of Animal Flight
• *Once Upon a Time (Marina Warner)
  A Short History of Fairy Tale
• One Illness Away (Anirudh Krishna)
  Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty
• Oxford (Jan Morris)
  - a potpourri of information about the town and university
• The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (Daniel Hahn)
  - an encyclopedia covering authors in English and their work
• *The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson)
  - a gloriously erudite encyclopedia of biology, culture, history
• Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology 1 (Richard Dawkins, M. Ridley)
  - sex, signalling, fireflies, epistasis, hierarchy, phylogeny, and more
• Pakistan - A Dream Gone Sour (Roedad Khan)
  - a high-ranking civil servant looks back
• Pakistan in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence Ziring)
  A Political History
• The Populist Temptation (Barry Eichengreen)
  Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era
• Projective Geometry: An Introduction (Rey Casse)
  - a formal, coordinate-based approach
• The Riches Beneath Our Feet (Geoff Coyle)
  How Mining Shaped Britain
• The Ring of Words (Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, Edmund Weiner)
  Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary
• Shivaji (James W. Laine)
  Hindu King in Islamic India
• Snake Oil Science (R. Barker Bausell)
  The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (Helen Bynum)
  - the social and medical history of a disease
• The Structure of Soviet History (Ronald Grigor Suny)
  Essays and Documents
• Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (Ralph A. Austen)
  - Maghreb, Sudan and Sahara; Islam, empires and trade
• Trial and Error (Edward J. Larson)
  The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution
• Tundra-Taiga Biology (R.M.M. Crawford)
  Human, Plant, and Animal Survival in the Arctic
• *An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections (Barrett, Armelagos)
  - subsistence, settlement, and social organisation
• Viruses, Plagues, and History (Michael B. A. Oldstone)
  Past, Present, and Future
• Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Dorothy H. Crawford)
• *Visual Complex Analysis (Tristram Needham)
  - a genuinely geometric perspective
• The Voice of the Nightingale (Sabine Felmy)
  A Personal Account of Wakhi Culture in Hunza
• The Way of the Pathans (James W. Spain)
  - hospitality, revenge, and sanctuary in Pakistan and Afghanistan
• Who We Are and How We Got Here (David Reich)
  Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
• *Women in Late Antiquity (Gillian Clark)
  Pagan and Christian Lifestyles