Books of 2014

• Published in: Times Higher Education 2014-12 (2183)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic Libraries; Algorithms; Antisocial Behavior; Architectural Education; Architecture; Autobiographies; Democracy; Education; Employed Women; Exercise; Females; Feminism; History; Humanities; Library collections; Nationalism; Oral History; Resistance (Psychology); Social mobility; Tales; Teacher Improvement; United States History; Upward mobility
• ISSN: 0049-3929

Baulking at the tradition of architect-centric architectural history, Gutman explores a century of building as compelling evidence in the history of childhood. Because it brings back such vivid memories of my own childhood, I enjoyed the exhibition catalogue Architecture and National Identity: The Centennial Projects 50 Years On (Dalhousie Architectural Press). In Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900-1950 (Yale University Press), Paul Ginsborg explains this anomaly, and his innovative approach provides a wealth of other surprises. Since the end of the USSR in 1991 and the "archival revolution" that followed, historians have been able to challenge established Western narratives, as shown in the illuminating and sometimes shocking studies collected by editors Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist and Alexander M. Martin, The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (University of Pittsburgh Press). Allyson Pollock, professor of public health research and policy, Queen Mary University of London Belief in markets may be crumbling but as platoons of mercenaries, lawyers, accountants and management consultants continue to plunder the world's resources on behalf of unaccountable corporations, the tipping point has not yet been reached. Jane Shaw, professor of religious studies and dean for religious life, Stanford University David Bromwich's finely crafted essays in Moral Imagination: Essays (Princeton University Press) investigate justice, sympathy, imagination and the importance of treating strangers as friends (when we act as individuals and as nations) through sensitive yet provocative readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr, among others.