With neighborhoods annihilated by foreclosure, city budgets stretched thin, and cookie-cutter suburbs dulling the landscape, the future of the American city is far from certain. As the U.S. launches hundreds stimulus-funded municipal projects, several urban planning experts suggest books (old and new) for insight on rebuilding the American city for the 21st century and beyond.

Jeb Brugmann, faculty of the University of Cambridge’s Business and Poverty Leadership Program. Brugmann is the author of Welcome to the Urban Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Urban nations, like the United States, need honed practices of urbanism, not just industrial-scale building delivery systems. Urbanisms are nuanced approaches to design, technology, building and governance (including community engagement) that create robust and resilient place-based systems of economic and social life. The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream (Island Press, 2007) by Christopher B. Leinberger perhaps tops the list. He provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of “industrial batch” (my term) city building as a thin substitute for robust urbanism. Douglas Rae’s City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, 2003) explores the history of early 20^th century urbanism in New Haven, Conn. My argument (and I presume his as well) is that urbanisms need to be renewed in the face of new challenges, and that the U.S. gave up doing urbanism when in got into government-subsidized suburban sprawl and inner-city “urban renewal,” rather than engaging a true urbanist revival. Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City (MIT Press, 2007) by Robert Gottlieb documents local efforts to evolve a particularly “green” urbanism in that metropolis. He highlights the social and political dimension of creating urbanisms. And the all-time masterwork on the political dimension of urbanism in the U.S. is Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta 1946-1988 (University of Kansas Press, 1989). Stone was a founder of a political theory about how cities are made governable, called “regime theory.” Since his historical interpretation of the informal alliances between Atlanta’s business leaders, the media, local political party organizations, property developers, and the Black middle class that allowed Atlanta to develop into such a unique economic center in the South, regime theory has gone a bit overboard with trying to categorize cities. But the basic explanatory power of Stone’s book about the political conditions required for progressive change is unsurpassed. Finally, Zoned Out (Resources for the Future Press, 2006) by Jonathan Levine provides a more contemporary political analysis that complements the arguments made by Leinberger and me. In this book he responds to those who argue that suburban sprawl is a rational “free market” response to empowered consumers. He shows the extent to which government zoning is at the heart of the industrial production of suburbs as a form of city building. He goes on to argue that in a more unregulated market, the United States would develop much more diverse kinds of mixed-use urban areas. In other words, there would be more economic space in which new American urbanisms could evolve.

David Bell, co-author of the upcoming book Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces (Syracuse University Press, 2009) teaches cultural studies at Staffordshire University, where he explores how sexuality defines urban space, including everything from gay/lesbian neighborhoods to red-light districts.

First, I’d suggest Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl (W.W. Norton, 2004), which tells us everything that’s wrong with American cities today. The book shows a dehumanized landscape where buildings and planning have been reduced to pure function, and the result is alienating. Its photos show starkly how the American landscape now looks. One recent retrospective (and also future-spective) that’s full of rich ideas is Neil Bingham et al’s Fantasy Architecture 1500-2036 (Hayward Gallery/Royal Institute of British Architects, 2004). It posits alternative to sprawl—an optimistic, utopian idea that architecture can be amazing and also livable, and make people’s lives better. For a different way of thinking about the future, I’m always drawn back to past utopian projects, and to continuing to hold out some hope that we might get renewed inspiration there. Finally, on the future of planning, Leonie Sandercock’s Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004) is pretty visionary (though I don’t agree with all of it). Sandercock does similar to Bingham with planning as a process—to re-enchant it, maybe, through things like participation. My main quibble with her is her faith in community arts.

Richard Florida is the author of Cities of the Creative Class (Routeledge, 2004) and Who’s Your City (Basic Books, 2008), both of which explore the relationship between creativity and city development. He is a columnist, professor of business and creativity at the University of Toronto, and researcher exploring the interplay of economics, demographics and innovation.

One answer: Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (Vintage, 1970). It is the MOST important book on cities, and in my view, maybe the most important book for understanding economy and society since Marx. The book provides the basic theory, not just for how cities work or why they are important social and economic entities, but for how they are key drivers of economic and social development.

James Howard Kunstler is a writer and lecturer who studies urban planning in the modern city. His books include The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster/Free Press, 1994) and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (Simon & Schuster/Free Press, 2002).

By far the best book for this purpose is Leon Krier’s new one, The Architecture of Community (Island Press, 2009). This new book is a much-better-organized edition of writings and diagrams of his than had been published previously in books that were not well-edited. His ideas, however, remain the same. They are presented most coherently in this. I’d also include one of my latest, The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), which sets out the limitations and problems we face vis-à-vis the permanent energy predicament. ♦

Corey Creekmur, Associate Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, coauthor with Mark Sidel of Cinema, Law, and the State in Asia.

It’s now common to view the Partition of India as the most significant, and traumatic, event in modern South Asian history, and a few critics have noted its muted presence or striking absence in popular Indian cinema, but Bhaskar Sarkar’s Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press) is the first full-scale study of the deep impact of the Partition—whether treated directly or, more often, repressed—on Indian film.

Another, quite different, exploration of the cultural politics of representation in popular Indian cinema is the project of Neepa Majumdar’s Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-50s (Indiana University Press). Arguably, the star is the most important feature of Indian cinema, and Majumdar’s book is a long-overdue account of the debates and negotiations around the controversial creation of female stars in Indian film. Her study is even more remarkable because it creates a vivid sense of an era from which many key films no longer survive. While contemporary “Bollywood” film gets increased scholarly attention, works like these—both genuinely ground-breaking works of historical interpretation—provide the necessary background to think about popular Indian cinema in its present incarnations.

Tejaswini Ganti, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Culture & Media at New York University and author of Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema.

Though the near ubiquity of elaborately choreographed and lavishly produced song sequences have become the marker of popular Indian cinema’s distinctiveness in the global media landscape, the significance of music in Indian cinema had not warranted much scholarly attention until recently. Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minnesota 2008) edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti redresses this serious gap in the scholarship. What I appreciate about this volume is that it examines film music from a variety of dimensions—production, consumption, economic, narrative, musicological, and performative. Though I was aware of the circulation and influence of Hindi film songs on local music in sites like Nigeria and Greece, I was surprised and intrigued to learn from this volume that the Israeli state used Hindi song and dance sequences in a series of promotional commercials in the mid-1990s.

Another book that also deals with an understudied aspect of Indian cinema is Preminda Jacob’s Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India (Lexington Books 2008). Most of the scholarship on Indian cinema has focused on Hindi cinema—aka “Bollywood,” to the neglect of the rich diversity of filmmaking in other languages in India – and primarily on the narrative elements and thematic significance of these films rather than their associated material and visual culture. Jacob’s book deals with the vibrant visual culture associated with Tamil cinema and its very intense culture of celebrity by focusing on the production and reception of the gigantic, hand-painted billboards that advertise films and the towering portraits of political leaders that dominate the urban landscape of Chennai.

Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema, SOAS, University of London, and author of 100 Bollywood Films.

I’ve just started to edit two series of books on South Asian Cinemas. They largely overlap although some titles will appear only with Oxford University Press, Delhi, and others only with Indiana University Press. The first book in the series with Oxford University Press is Valentina Vitali’s book on action cinema, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies. It looks at the economic factors working in India at various times, their implications for the film industry—chiefly production, distribution and exhibition – and how this impacted specifically upon films of the respective periods as cultural products. The approach reconciles an account of the economy of the film industry with an analysis of cinema.

The second book is Greg Booth’s Behind the Curtain. Although Hindi film music is India’s popular music, there has been little serious academic research into this unique form until the recent work of a handful of ethnomusicologists (Arnold, Manuel, Morcom). In Behind the Curtain, Greg Booth presents a fascinating oral history of the Hindi film music industry, allowing the words of the musicians who performed this music to be heard for the first time. Behind the Curtain cannot be ignored by any student of Indian cinema, public culture or the history of film music.

Sudhir Mahadevan, Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington.

I would recommend Priya Jaikumar’s Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Duke University Press, 2006). I’m increasingly convinced that the history of Indian cinema, or of the cinema in India (are they the same? I think not, at least at the level of historical method) cannot be narrated without a foot in Britain and one in the U.S. Although its focus is primarily on what she calls “the intertwined histories of British and Indian film policy and culture in the 1930s”, what the book actually does is to narrate the dynamics of a triangulation—India, Britain and the U.S. Jaikumar reveals the extent to which British and Indian film policies were entangled in the 1930s, when Hollywood dominated both British and Indian screens.

Drawing on a variety of archival sources—memoranda, legislative bills, policy proposals and publicly recorded debates—Jaikumar exposes the fractious and sometimes incoherent architecture of imperial bureaucracy. What makes Jaikumar’s book essential reading? At a historical moment when the British empire was being questioned in public opinion on the home front, and was subject to nationalist agitation in India, Jaikumar shows how British film policy—beleaguered by Hollywood’s dominance—sought to recast empire as a space of proto-global trade rather than as territories conceived as fixed points of production. This should be of enormous interest to those who are interested in debates on globalization and its history, as well as film historians seeking a comparative history that is productively dispersed across multiple locations. ♦

I would place Joseph Witek’s breakthrough study Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (University Press of Mississipi, 1990) at the top of the list as a text that shows how graphic novels can be analyzed formally and ideologically with style and precision. Thierry Groensteen’s recently translated theoretical work System of Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2007) establishes the most comprehensive set of semiotic protocols that currently exists for confronting the complex dimensions of comic book and graphic novel ontology. The crucial essay collection Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000) edited by Magnussen and Christiansen is one of the most important and wide-ranging collections of essays by international comics scholars that has yet been published.

Matthew Gregory, joint author of Graphic Novels in Academic Libraries: From Maus to Manga and Beyond (Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2006)

Stating which titles have defined the study of graphic novels is a risky proposition. People who read graphic novels are usually passionate about what kinds of works deserve the label and which titles are essential. Nevertheless, Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (Norton, 2009) remains the classic introduction to the field and continues to inform most critical work on graphic novels. Anyone interested in reading graphic novels that are simply great stories, on the other hand, might take a look at Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2000) and Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat (Pantheon, 2005-2008). Ware’s book is a beautifully-rendered, sober meditation on the title character’s seemingly humdrum and possibly damaged life that ultimately raises questions about who we are and the forces that shape an identity over the course of a lifetime. Published in two volumes, Sfar’s extraordinary work celebrates the expatriate experiences of his Jewish Algerian forebears in France in the 1930’s. Narrated by a speaking cat that studies Kabbalah and consorts with prostitutes, The Rabbi’s Cat is a magical exploration of the transformative and sometimes divine effects of love and creativity.

Dr Rocco Versaci, Palomar College, author of This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics As Literature (Continuum, 2007)

Comics scholarship has come in a variety of forms but tend to fall predominantly into one of three categories: history, formal analysis, and critical study. For me, three books stand out as outstanding representatives from each category. In terms of history, Roger Sabin’s Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (Phaidon, 1996) provides a useful (and richly-illustrated) survey of the development of this medium across its various genres. For formal analysis, one of the most influential books has been Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (reprinted by Norton, 2008). In this book, Eisner dissects the intricate relationship between words and images in order to demonstrate how they combine to create a unique medium. My own research interests lie in the field of literary analysis, and there is none more illuminating than Joseph Witek’s Comic Books as History (University of Mississippi, 1989), where the author examines how various cultural and ideological tensions are embedded and negotiated within comics that seek to represent the “real.”

Of course, it’s the medium itself that inspires all such studies, and I’ve been inspired by several. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (DC, 1989-1996) is a rich celebration of story-telling that was my first encounter with how literate and complex comics could be; on the independent side of things, two memoirs by Chester Brown—The Playboy (Drawn and Quarterly, 1992) and I Never Liked You (Drawn and Quarterly, 1994)—were bracing examples of how the lonely angst of adolescence could be transformed into art.

Roger Sabin, Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Central St Martin’s College, London and author of Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (Phaidon, 2001)

From an educator’s point of view, Martin Barker’s Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (Manchester University Press, 1989) was a landmark volume. It tested some of the then-prevalent ideas about comics and their effects, using a cultural studies methodology – and came up with some startling new conclusions. Before then, David Kunzle’s magisterial two-volume The History of the Comic Strip (University of California Press, 1973, 1989) brought the form into the orbit of art history. ‘Comics scholarship’ as we now know it didn’t really exist until the late 1990s, Barker, Kunzle and Witek laid the foundations. I ought also to mention Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (HarperCollins, 1994), a lively and entertaining explanation of how comics work – from panel transitions to page layouts, etc. It was produced in the form of a graphic novel (which seemed very daring at the time) and has been criticised for some of its theoretical assumptions, but it has also been an inspiration – no other way of putting it—to successive generations of my students.

My favourite graphic novels? Off the top of my head, I remember laughing a lot at Ed the Happy Clown (Vortex, 1989) by Chester Brown: black humour and ultraviolence conveyed with the logic of nightmares. I also enjoyed the collections of Robert Crumb strips (Fantagraphics Books), arguably the only true genius the comics form has produced. As for today, I’m enjoying anything by Anders Nilsen and Rutu Modan.

Johanna Draper Carlson, graphic novel reviewer and author of Comics Worth Reading

One of my inspirations is Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder series (Kogan Page, six volumes), which uses anthropological science fiction to explore concepts ranging from the love of reading and the nature of creativity to the danger of cultural appropriation by corporations. She’s also a genius artist. Hope Larson’s flowing line anchors poetic meditations in Salamander Dream (Adhouse Books, 2005) and Gray Horses (Oni Press, 2006). Lucy Knisley uses a clear-line style to convey a trip to Paris and relationship-building with her mother in the gorgeous French Milk (Toushcstone, 2008); she also tackles what it means to be an artist in her journal comic collection Radiator Days (Epigraph Publishing, 2008). And then there’s Jen Sorensen’s editorial cartooning. In her Slowpoke series (Ig Publishing, 2008), she’s unafraid to call for ethical journalism, sensible economic decision-making, and sexual freedom. ♦

We asked four experts to recommend the best books in the area of networks and social media.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Cultural historian and media scholar in the Department of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and author.

The Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler

It’s a formidable manifesto about the ways the digital technologies will alter our sense of value and our understanding of how we build things in the world. Benkler wants us to think beyond scarcity. What he ‘saying is that the tradition of political economy has been, for centuries, about managing scarcity. Coming up with models about efficient distribution of resources, his book sort of blows all of that away and shows a very different picture of world. One in which value is subject to the ability to manage abundance.

It’s too easy to say that we live in a world of unlimited information or information overload. What Benkler is pointing out is that real value is determined by the ways that people leverage this abundance to create huge and functional structures that don’t depend on the old reward systems where you had to pay somebody with goods, services, money, to get them to do something. Benkler points out that there are some really elaborate and valuable experiments in an electronic networked economy that don’t require you to reward people with those sorts of things. The reward is sociality, being part of something. The two best examples or Linus and Wikipedia. The reward for them is the deep reward of human beings working with each other.

Whether you buy his argument 1, 50 or 100 percent, you can’t ignore this book. It’s a great conversation starter about the changes we’re going through.

Josh Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky

It’s about how the internet makes organizing groups trivially easy and how that process changes the kinds of groups that get formed and how it disrupts business and other structures that are based on doing that group formation in the old, expensive way.

I’m most interested in it from a journalism perspective since that’s what I do. Fundamentally, it gets at how the internet eliminates a lot of the power that comes with owning a distribution channel. Before, if you had a group of people who wanted to know about City Council in Boston and you had a group of people when knew about City Council in Boston, to connect those two people you needed to have a journalist in the middle who would talk to the people who know what they’re talking about and would then share that knowledge with a large audience of people who buy the newspaper or watch the TV broadcast. That channel isn’t as important anymore. It’s easier to get around that channel, it’s easier for groups with like interests to assemble themselves without the intervention of a middle man, which is unfortunate for those folks who’ve made a living being quality, competent middle men.

It adds an academic heft that a lot of books on social media do not. A lot of the books on social media are focused on teaching people how to game the system or just explaining what the new system is, as opposed to Clay who really tries to explain why it is and what the ramifications are in the short term and the long term. It’s a book I typically recommend to journalists trying to figure out how things are shaking out.

Brian Reich, Managing Director of little m media and author of Media Rules!: Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience.

Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser

The book is not about how to master social media or the technologies that will fuel engagement and change in the future. Rather, Palfrey and Gasser dig deep into “the future opportunities and challenges associated with the Internet as a social space,” as well as “the legal and social ramifications of the Internet with regard to the generation of “Digital Natives” born after 1980. I don’t think technology is the answer and too much of the attention in social media is paid to the tools, the channels, and the like. For example, Twitter is not, itself, important—it is what short-form/micro communications represent about our society and how our communications are changing that we must understand. A first and important step to understanding how to engage, educate, mobilize and social effectively is to understand the audience you are trying to reach. Few books do as good a job as Born Digital at breaking down how digital natives communicate and what their expectations are for those who try to communicate with them.”

Howard Rheingold, writer and critic on the topic of the social, cultural and political implications of modern communication media.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner

Fred Turner makes a strong historian-journalist-media-analyst case that the Whole Earth Catalog and several of the countercultural ideals and driving forces that merged in it, and especially the WELL, set the scene for personal computing and Web culture. Any number of cyberculture historians and theorists have come up with their analytic frameworks for understanding the importance of the WELL, but Fred Turner is the only one who really got it right.

He invokes some ideas that come from the sociology of science. He speaks about “network forums” that bring together networks that had not intersected before, in ways that lay the groundwork for people to create new sociotechnical forms. The Whole Earth Catalog readers and contributors, and later the WELL, are examples of network forums that brought together the people who were interested in self-sufficiency—an old American tradition that goes back to Emerson’s “Self Reliance” with the old-tech people interested in self-sufficient energy systems like windmills.

It’s not only an excellent historical analysis of the roots of digital culture, but it offers analytic frameworks for looking at social-cultural change. It is also a great example of how someone can go through two primary source materials, seek out people to interview and come up with an explanation of what a particular group of people did 25 years ago—so accurately that those people agree it is a good portrayal. It’s important to understand the dynamics of the historical emergence of web culture.” ♦

Over the last decade, a growing number of both fiction and non-fiction books have attempted portray and explain sex scientifically. Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex (2003), for instance, chronicles the sexual development of a hermaphrodite with hard-earned clinical accuracy. Steven Angelides’s A History of Bisexuality (2001) provides an historical background to the ongoing, and often candid, debate over whether bisexuality is a choice. And Mary Roach’s Bonk (2008) reviews the literature on such questions as why Viagra doesn’t work for women. Acknowledging this new inclination for sexing up science while demystifying sex, we asked five experts to spotlight the best recent books on the science of sex.

Geoffrey Miller, professor evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico and author of the forthcoming Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (Viking, May 2009).

The Evolution of Desire, 4th Ed. by David Buss (Basic Books, 2003) is an excellent introduction to the evolutionary psychology research, especially the origins of mate preferences: why men and women are attracted to certain traits and people. Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff, on the science of beauty and physical attractiveness, offers a nice clear review of the research on sexual selection in relation to physical attractiveness, and the evolution of the human face and body. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (Anchor, 2001), by me, is still a pretty good review of sexual selection theory applied to humans, and focuses on the mental traits that are sexually attractive. Lastly, I should mention The Game (William Morrow, 2005) by Neil Strauss, which is on the pick-up artist scene, and the practicalities of seduction and the psychology of contemporary sex. For some reason, pick-up artists have proven especially avid consumers of evolutionary psychology research, for better or worse.

Melissa Hines, professor of psychology in the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge (UK), studies prenatal influences on gender development. She is the author of Brain Gender (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin’s classic, The Psychology of Sex Differences, (Stanford University Press, 1974) is still a great introduction to understanding the breadth of factors that contribute to sex differences in human behavior, as well as the pitfalls that readers and researchers often forget when trying to understand these sex differences. Steve Ceci and Wendy Williams’s edited volume, Why Aren’t More Women in Science? (American Psychological Association Press, 2007) is a collection of confident, but surprisingly conflicting, answers to the question by researchers active in different aspects of the field. I loved Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003), a beautifully written novel about gender identity, indeed human identity more broadly, and unusual in providing almost perfectly accurate clinical information about disorders of sex development—an A+ on both literary and scientific grounds. Finally, for those confused about what is useful in the realm of evolutionary psychology, I recommend the fine volume, Sense and Nonsense, by Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown (Oxford University Press, 2002). It provides the tools for sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Sharon Moalem holds a Ph.D. in human physiology and neurogenetics, and is the author of How Sex Works (Harper, April 2009).

Chances are you heard of this book, but you’ve probably never read it. At least not cover to cover. Well, it’s time that you go out and get your very own copy of the Kama Sutra. It’s a cheap buy, and there’re a few translations to choose from. It’s a book with something for everyone. For men it describes how to practice copulation by using a pumpkin. And women will not feel left out either, with a lengthy discussion of what must be one of the earliest descriptions of “bend over boyfriend.” A true classic. You may also be surprised to hear that you need to thank the medical profession for the invention of the vibrator. According to Rachel Maines, the vibrator was invented to increase the efficiency and lend a “hand” to 19th century physicians treating “hysteria.” Maines’ book, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (John’s Hopskins University Press, 2001) is a provocative take on this most celebrated piece of technological comfort. A book not to be missed.

Gail Hawkes in currently a lecturer at the School of Behavioral, Cognitive and Social Sciences at the University of New England, and the author with R. Danielle Egan of the forthcoming Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Serious sexuality scholars cannot go far without consulting history. In this respect, Sexuality, 2nd Edition by Jeffrey Weeks (Taylor and Francis, 2003) remains the starting point for student and interested layperson alike. Weeks weaves the past into the present, engaging with new sexual identities, sexual rights, and globalization. He demonstrates that erotic rights remain conditional in an otherwise sex-saturated world. A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain by Robert Darby (University of Chicago Press, 2005) offers an example a largely unaddressed dimension of sexual history. Fascinating in its historical detail, this nineteenth century case study exemplifies the mix of the medical and the moral, and how ideas about ‘the sexual’ move a long way from the bedroom, both then and now. A History of Bisexuality by Steven Angelides (University of Chicago Press, 2001) addresses bisexuality, not as a fashion fad, a political cop-out or a joke, but historical background, giving readers a chance to decide if erotic ambidexterity is a radical sexual choice. The International Handbook of Sexuality Health and Rights edited by Peter Aggleton and Richard Parker (Routledge, forthcoming November 2009) belies its matter-of-fact title by its kaleidoscopic content. It comprises short essays on topics ranging from strip clubs to global sexual health from teenage fertility to histories of incest, which will entertain as well as inform both the professional and lay reader.

Maryanne Fisher, assistant professor of psychology at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, is co-author most recently of “The influence of relationship status, mate seeking and sex on intrasexual competition” in the Journal of Social Psychology (2008)

One of the most important books of my career was The Woman that Never Evolved (Harvard University Press, 1999) by Sarah Hardy, which provocatively reviews female primates’ behavior. This book and Anne Campbell’s A Mind of Her Own (Oxford University Press, 2002) inspired my doctoral research and the work I have performed for the past decade on women’s intra-sexual competition for mates. Currently, I am reading Evolution and the Social Mind edited by Forgas, Haselton and von Hippel (Psychology Press, 2007) in the hopes that it will bring me up to date on evolutionary social psychology. I am also engrossed in Richard Bribiescas’s Men: Evolutionary and Life History (Harvard University Press, 2008). I am trying to better understand men’s mating strategies.

Tim Dean is professor of English at the University at Buffalo. His book Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (University Of Chicago Press) will be published in June.

Intimacies (University of Chicago Press, 2008) offers a fascinating dialogue between philosopher Leo Bersani and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips about the possibilities of less familiar kinds of relationships, sexual and otherwise. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany (New York University Press, 1999) is a marvelous analysis of Manhattan’s now destroyed porn theaters and the erotic communities formed among their patrons. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, by Michael Warner (Free Press, 1999), describes changes in New York’s public sexual culture in the context of a progressive critique of same-sex marriage, arguing that marriage is a discriminatory institution not just because lesbians and gays still do not have full access to it, but because marriage legitimates one kind of sexual relationship at the expense of others. The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Grove Press, 2002) provides an astonishingly frank autobiographical account of one contemporary Frenchwoman’s erotic adventures. In their different ways, these four books succeed in the difficult task of finding a forthright yet non-pornographic language for the vagaries of sexual experience. ♦