The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

Septembers’s Book of the Month was selected by Andy Kernot Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies.

Understanding the Digital World: what you need to know about computers, the internet, privacy, and security

by Brian W. Kernighan

Princeton University Press, 2021

QA76.KER 2021 (library use only)

It was chosen because it is a must-read for all who want to know more about computers and communications. It explains, precisely and carefully, not only how they operate but also how they influence our daily lives, in terms anyone can understand, no matter what their experience and knowledge of technology.

Book Overview

Computers are everywhere. Some of them are highly visible, in laptops, tablets, cell phones, and smart watches. But most are invisible, like those in appliances, cars, medical equipment, transportation systems, power grids, and weapons. We never see the myriad computers that quietly collect, share, and sometimes leak vast amounts of personal data about us. Through computers, governments and companies increasingly monitor what we do. Social networks and advertisers know far more about us than we should be comfortable with, using information we freely give them. Criminals have all-too-easy access to our data. Do we truly understand the power of computers in our world? Understanding the Digital World explains how computer hardware, software, networks, and systems work. Topics include how computers are built and how they compute; what programming is and why it is difficult; how the Internet and the web operate; and how all of these affect our security, privacy, property, and other important social, political, and economic issues.

Reviews

“This is the clearest and simplest explanation of the world we now all depend on–how it works and why it does what it does—from one of our best-known inventors. Everyone on Earth needs to read it.”

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. and Google

“This book takes the mystery out of computers and the Internet, and everyone can learn from it. With a friendly and accessible style, Kernighan connects what is happening inside machines to the news of the day and developments about the digital world.”

Harry Lewis, coauthor of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion

“Kernighan tells us exactly what we need to know about computers and computer science, focusing on ideas that are useful and interesting for everyday computer users. He covers a fascinating range of topics, including fundamentals such as computer hardware, programming, algorithms, and networks, as well as politically charged issues related to government surveillance, privacy, and Internet neutrality.”

John MacCormick, Dickinson College

How can I access it?

We have one library use only copy of this book, which is currently located in our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is QA76.KER 2021 (library use only). It is also available as an eLegal Deposit Book. The eBook can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer only.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

August’s Book of the Month was selected by John Southall, Bodleian Data Librarian and Subject Consultant for Economics and Sociology.

Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st-Century Economist

by Kate Raworth

Penguin Books, 2022

HB75.RAW 2022

It was chosen because of the way it dissects seven core principles of Economics and considers how they can be updated for the 21^st Century.

Book Overview

Raworth critiques the idea of ‘rational economic man’ and what really makes us act in the modern world. She argues an obsession with equilibrium has left economists helpless when facing the boom and bust of the real-world economy. She highlights the dangers of ignoring the role of energy and nature’s resources – and the far-reaching implications for encouraging economic growth when we take them into account.

Overall, Doughnut Economics is excellent at describing economic concepts in accessible terms. In addition, Raworth’s in-depth summary of climate change is very well argued, and in this sense, the book is also more about sustainable development than economics.

Reviews

“This rigorous collection brings home how we are living through a crucial period in which data is mobilised in increasingly powerful and pervasive ways.”

Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology, LSE.

“An admirable attempt to broaden the horizons of economic thinking.”

Martin Wolf, Books of the Year, Financial Times

 “the book holds multidisciplinary promise and Raworth draws upon appealing and evocative metaphors and examples to convey economic concepts”

Maria Zhivitskaya, LSE Review of Books

How can I access it?

We have 7 copies of this book, one is currently located in our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is HB75.RAW 2022 (see HB75.RAW 2017 and HB75.RAW 2018 for additional copies). All copies are available to be borrowed by Oxford University students and staff members. It is also available as an eLegal Deposit Book. The eBook can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer only.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

Julys’s Book of the Month was selected by Sarah Rhodes, Subject Consultant for International Development, Forced Migration, and African & Commonwealth Studies.

Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights

edited by Jonathan Darling and Harald Bauder

Manchester University Press, 2019

JV6483.SAN 2019

It was chosen in light of Oxford receiving University of Sanctuary status, and signing the City of Sanctuary Organisation Pledge. Find out more at:  https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/organisation/oxford-community-sanctuary

Book Overview

In an era when migrant rights are under attack and nationalism is on the rise, the question of how citizenship, rights, and mobility can be recast at the urban scale is more relevant than ever.

This book makes the first sustained intervention into exploring how cities are challenging the primacy of the nation-state as the key guarantor of rights and entitlements. It brings together cutting-edge scholars of political geography, urban geography, citizenship studies, socio-legal studies and refugee studies to explore how urban social movements, localised practices of belonging and rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary are reshaping the governance of migration. It proposes not a singular alternative but rather a set of interlocking sites and scales of political imagination and practice.  In an era when migrant rights are under attack, the question of how citizenship, rights, and mobility can be recast at the urban scale is more relevant than ever.

How can I access it?

This title is available in hard copy in the library and is currently located in our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JV6483.SAN 2019 and it is available to borrow by Oxford University students and staff members. It is also available as an eBook. For the eBook, access it from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

June’s Book of the month is a ten-volume history of Ukraine by its first President, Mikhailo Hrushevsky (1866 – 1934), and translated into English during the 1990s.

History of Ukraine-Rus’

Mykhailo Hrushevsky ; translated by Marta Skorupsky ; edited by Andrzej Poppe, and Frank E. Sysyn ; with the assistance of Uliana M. Pasicznyk.

All 10 volumes are available to order from the Bodleian Closed Stacks to the SSL, to consult in the library.

It was chosen because Hrushevsky’s inspired and meticulous work demonstrates the power of rigorous scholarship to counteract attempts at cultural erasure.

Book Overview

Hrushevsky set out to write the history of the Ukrainian people during the 1890s, at a time when the Russian Imperial state forbade the publication of Ukrainian-language texts, and even the use of the word ‘Ukraine’. He concentrated on the history of ordinary people, rather than the Imperial elites – and he used every source and methodology he could find, including the new discipline of Sociology. His writing was so careful and detailed that his ten volumes reach only to the seventeenth century – while his lifelong dedication to his project was such that he continued working on it despite arrest, exile and illness.

The History of Ukraine-Rus’ charts the formation and ongoing history of the Ukrainian people, rebutting claims from a succession of Tsarist, Soviet and Russian historians and politicians that the Ukrainian people never really existed prior to the Soviet Union. Hrushevsky’s meticulous scholarship demonstrates the inaccuracy of these accounts, as it also presents sources that are now unavailable, after the destructions of the twentieth century. This book stands as testament both to the continuity of Ukrainian history, and to the political power of detailed, accurate academic work.

Review

‘Hrushevsky’s combination of objectivity and optimism motivated his impressive scholarly productivity. His History stands as a lasting monument both to his scholarship and to his devotion to Ukraine. One can only applaud its wider dissemination…’

Charles J. Halperin, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Bloomington Indiana.

How can I access it?

All 10 volumes of this title are available to order up from the Bodleian Closed Stacks to consult in our library.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

May’s Book of the Month was selected by Jo Gardner, Bodleian Social Science Librarian and Subject Consultant for Politics and International Relations.

Deliberative accountability in parliamentary committees

By Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey

Available on our shelves at JN329.SCH 2022

Also available as an eBook.

It was chosen because it makes a timely contribution to studies of parliaments and how economic policy is debated in public.

Book Overview

This book looks closely at the content, conduct and motivations underpinning select committee hearings of the UK Parliament. The author’s central case study is economic policy, which is timely given the economic challenges we face in the UK and beyond. It also addresses questions of trust in political elites and institutions.

Reviews

“Overall, this is an excellent book. It is wide-ranging both in its content and in its contributions. I am very excited to see what research Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey turns to next.”
Dr Marc Geddes, University of Edinburgh

 “The book is undoubtedly a must-read for all those interested in democratic governance, the quality of accountability, and deliberation in contemporary societies.”
Manuela Moschella, Scuola Normale Superiore and Chatham House

“The strength of Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey’s excellent new book on deliberative accountability – ‘the reason-giving by policymakers for their policy decisions’ (p. 222) – is that it poses an old political science question but answers it in a new way.”
Stephen Holden Bates, University of Birmingham

How can I access it?

This title is available to consult in hard copy and as an eBook. The hard copy is currently on display in on new books display area. For those with borrowing rights, it can be borrowed from the library. Its shelfmark, when returned to the shelves, is JN329.SCH 2022 For the eBook, access it from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

April’s Book of the Month was selected by Helen Worrell, Subject Consultant for Anthropology.

Sian Lazar

How to struggle: a political anthropology of labour

Pluto Press, 2023

HD4901.LAZ 2023

It was chosen to highlight innovative ethnographic research into labour struggles and worker strikes. It illuminates different perspectives within a complex global environment

Book Overview

This comparative ethnography presents a global perspective on labour agency, from heavy industry to the service sectors. Lazar goes beyond looking solely at organised trade unionism, also examining how individuals strive to improve their lives and working conditions.  A coda to the book examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on labour struggles and worker’s political agency.

Reviews

‘Anthropology at its best. Lazar explores how different capitalist strategies for organizing workers’ productivity generate problems that encourage certain solutions that in themselves create more problems, and on and on … Remarkably imaginative in revealing how, in large and small ways, workers of all stripes can organise to create otherwise, generate new possibilities for resistance and lead more fulfilling lives’

lana Gershon, Ruth N. Halls professor of anthropology, Indiana University, US

‘As brilliant as it is useful. Lazar manoeuvres lightly among the opposing schools of labor anthropology and shows with world-wide examples that how we struggle for better lives is deeply embedded in the type of relationships in which we labour, care and serve; relationships that are globally produced, intimately lived, and more often than not divisive. A boon for analysts and activists alike’

Don Kalb, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, author of Expanding Class

How can I access it?

This title is available in hard copy in the library. One of our copies is currently located at  our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). The shelfmark for the title is HD490.LAZ 2023. It is available to borrow by Oxford University students and staff members.

An eLegal Deposit copy of the title is also available on SOLO. This can be viewed on library reading room computers only.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

March’s Book of the Month was selected by Andy Kernot, Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies

Daniel Yergin

The new map: energy, climate, and the clash of nations

Allen Lane, 2020

HD9502.A2.YER 2000

It was chosen because Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future.

Book Overview

The New Map tells a sweeping story about how the role of energy in climate change is shaping geopolitical discussions, challenging our industries and our lifestyles, and accelerating a second energy revolution – the quest for renewables. It also brings realism to the debates over the energy transition.

A master storyteller and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin takes the reader on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world’s new map. He illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.

Reviews

“There are many … stories in this wonderful book, all of them directed at the transformation of the global map of power and wealth that has happened in the 21st century. Don’t waste your time on Boris or Trump, Covid or novichock, just read this to find out what is really happening.”

Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times

“Daniel Yergin won a Pulitzer in 1992 for The Prize, an acclaimed history of petroleum and political power … In The New Map he turns his talents to what might be called geopolitical cartography … Fans of the author’s previous books will appreciate the snappy prose and plethora of well-told anecdotes … revealing and apposite … The book brings the general reader admirably up to date on the many subjects it covers.”

Edward Lucas, The Times

“Yergin is the most respected chronicler of energy history and politics today. Yergin has enviable talents. He writes fluently in a style that brings to life the arcane dynamics of the energy business. He is deeply knowledgeable and analytically prescient… The New Map is an excellent read because, through multiple interconnected storylines, it pulls together the transformative occurrences that have shaped the energy world in recent years into a cogent framework from which the reader can discern the future pathways of the next energy transition.”

Vikram S Mehta, Indian Express

How can I access it?

This title is available in hard copy in the library. One of our copies is currently located at our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). The shelfmark for the title is HD9502.A2.YER 2000 Our copies are available to borrow by Oxford University students and staff members.

An eLegal Deposit copy of the title is also available on SOLO. This can be viewed on library reading room computers only.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

February’s Book of the Month was selected by John Southall, Bodleian Data Librarian and Subject Consultant for Economics and Sociology.

Evelyn Ruppert & Stephan Schell

Data Practices: making up a European people

HB3582.5.A3.DAT 2021

It was chosen because it presents a set of detailed case studies in the practice of statistical data production and research methodologies within the Social Sciences.

Book Overview

This work focuses on data practices that involve establishing and assigning people to categories and goes on to consider how this matters in enacting Europe as a population and people. Five core chapters explore key categories of people – usual residents, refugees, homeless people, migrants, and ethnic minorities – and how they come into being through specific data methodologies. This includes practices such as defining, estimating, recalibrating and inferring. Additional chapters address two key subject positions that data practices produce and require: the data subject and the statistician subject.

Reviews

“The entities we call “Europe” and “European” can be studied in many ways, through history, institutions, language, and cultural practices… How people are counted and who is counted are crucial to both our understanding of populations and of politics.”

Sally Wyatt, Professor of Digital Cultures, Maastricht University

“This rigorous collection brings home how we are living through a crucial period in which data is mobilised in increasingly powerful and pervasive ways.”

Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology, LSE.

How can I access it?

This title is available in hard copy in the library and is currently located in our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is HB3582.5.A3.DAT 2021 and it is available to borrow by Oxford University students and staff members.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

January’s Book of the Month was selected by Sarah Rhodes, Subject Consultant for International Development, Forced Migration, and African & Commonwealth Studies.

Richard Atkinson

When communities design aid: creating solutions to poverty that people own, use, and need

HC79.P63.ATK 2022

It was chosen to highlight the importance of communities struggling with poverty to be involved in the design and planning of programmes to facilitate their own development.

Book Overview

Aid initiatives go wrong for many reasons, but a common and surprising one is that poor people often don’t want the kind of aid that is offered. The importance of radically accelerating the transfer of knowledge, skills and power from outside ’experts’ to communities on the ground is key to resolving this issue.  The author’s twelve proposals for Participative Development Goals hope to stimulate debate and action amongst development practitioners, researchers and organisations interested in developing solutions for the world’s poorest communities.

Reviews

‘This welcome book provides an actionable blueprint for bringing the end-user into the design of interventions.  As such, it effectively challenges the supply-side approach that dominates the field’.

Per Braginski, Insights, Copenhagen

How can I access it?

This title is available in hard copy in the library and is currently located in our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is HC79.P63.ATK 2022 and it is available to borrow by Oxford University students and staff members.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.

The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

December’s Book of the Month was selected by Andy Kernot, Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies.

Ice: Nature and Culture

Klaus Dodds

Available as an eBook.

It was chosen because it provides a wide-ranging exploration of the cultural, natural and geopolitical history of ice, revealing how throughout history human communities have made sense of ice.  For those who are intrigued about our relationship with ice, this book will provide an informative and thought-provoking guide.

Book Overview

Ice has played a prominent role in the history of the earth and its living communities for millennia. We have had fun with and on ice, battled over ice, imagined ice, struggled with ice and made money out of ice. It has transformed our relationship with food, and our engagement with ice has been captured in art, literature, popular film and television, as well as made manifest in sport and leisure. Our lakes, mountains and coastlines have been indelibly shaped by the advance and retreat of ice and snow. Beyond Planet Earth, ice can be found in meteors, planets and moons, and scientists think that ice-rich asteroids played a pivotal role in bringing water to Earth.

Reviews

“Dodds’s addition to the Earth series provides an introduction to the many ways ice can be viewed and understood, and presents the frozen material in a way which is extremely accessible to a non-expert audience. Ice: Nature and Culture is abundantly illustrated, with the 95 illustrations that pepper the 211-page volume providing engaging visual material that supports the prose. The book draws on the history and significance of ice in areas as varied as geopolitics, scientific research, literature, and sport. Despite this eclectic amalgamation of subject matter, Dodds has deftly linked each chapter to the previous one, drawing together the ways in which ice has shaped our understanding of the world, and our relationship to this phenomenon. . . . Fantastically written and well-researched. . . . This is a great book for the lay polar enthusiast.”

Polar Journal

“In Ice: Nature and Culture, Dodds gives the slippery and ephemeral material center stage to show how ice is not only fascinating but fundamental to human life itself. As a part of Reaktion Books’ Earth series, Dodds’s exploration of ice is both a literary and a visual pleasure to read, with beautiful color photographs throughout the book. . . . Wide-ranging.”

Cultural Geographies

“Transform[s] ice from frozen water into something remarkable: a substance always on the edge of our understanding. Once the instability of ice made it something to be claimed and conquered; today, however, this quality is inextricable from human interference. ‘The tone of the conversation’ about ice, Dodds writes, has been imbued with ‘a profound sense of loss.’ With the disappearance of ice comes the loss of cultures and languages that have evolved to express its complexity.”

Times Literary Supplement

How can I access it?

This title is available to consult as an eBook. Access it from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.