The Lima Reader: History, Culture, Politics edited by Charles Walker, professor of history, covers more than 500 years of history, culture, and politics, this volume captures the multiple viewpoints of the diverse peoples of Peru’s capital city. The volume traces Lima’s transformation from a pre-Columbian religious center, to the colonial “City of Kings,” to today's vibrant and deeply divided metropolis of almost ten million people.
Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream by Sasha Abramsky, a lecturer in the University Writing Program, sets out to uncover what things frighten us most: from terrorist attacks to illegal immigrants to the Zika virus, and posits why our fears are in many cases misplaced.
Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet by Michael J. Lazzara, associate professor of Spanish, argues that today's Chile is a product of both complicity and complacency. Combining historical analysis with deft literary, political, and cultural critique, he scrutinizes the post-Pinochet rationalizations made by politicians, artists, intellectuals, bystanders, former revolutionaries-turned-neoliberals, and common citizens.
A sweeping history by Professor Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, was a finalist for a 2016 National Book Award. “All the time that I spent writing this book, I kept thinking about the 2.5 to 5 million Native Americans held in bondage whose voices were almost completely silenced and whose stories we have mostly chosen to forget,” said Reséndez.
God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America by Louis Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of U.S. Western History. This book offers a startling new view of the religion known as the Ghost Dance, from its origins in the visions of a Northern Paiute named Wovoka to the Army's killing of more than 200 Lakota Sioux.
Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from present-day London to North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: laborers, travelers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed.
Coercion and Responsibility in Islam: A Study in Ethics and Law by Mairaj Syed, associate professor of religious studies, explores how classical Muslim theologians and jurists from four intellectual traditions argue about the thorny issues that coercion raises about responsibility for one's action.
The Exile’s Song: Édmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World by Sally McKee, professor of history. In 1855, Dédé, a free black composer from New Orleans, emigrated to Paris. There he trained with France’s best classical musicians and went on to spend 36 years in Bordeaux leading the city’s most popular orchestras.
Landfalls by Naomi Williams, a 2010 graduate of the College of Letters and Science masters in creative writing program, is inspired by a map she purchased . She recreates an actual doomed 18th Century attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Each chapter is told from a different point of view and set in a different part of the world. It is the Davis resident’s first novel.
Young people of South Asian, Afghan and Arab descent growing up in a post-9/11 world feel constantly under suspicion and surveillance. Their lives are the focus of the book The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror by Sunaina Marr Maira, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Asian American Studies.
