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 has been selected by Jo Gardner, Bodleian Social Science Librarian and Subject Consultant for Politics and International Relations.

The back sliders: why leaders undermine their own democracies

Susan C. Stokes

Princeton University Press, 2025

JC495.STO 2025

It was chosen because the author provides a timely analysis of the erosion of democracy, especially among consolidated democracies.

Book Overview

First, the book provides an up-to-date account of erosion research, synthesising disparate theories into a clear narrative. Second, Stokes evaluates the “why now” question, identifying structural openings that make democracies vulnerable. Finally, the book offers a set of action steps to put the brakes on democratic erosion.

Reviews

“This splendid book is a model of well-argued, timely, and accessible scholarship. Stokes draws on an impressive range of methods and evidence to teach us about the economic and institutional roots of democratic backsliding, the ideas that would-be autocrats use to gain support, and the psychological bases of supporters’ responses. Her argument deserves a global audience of academics and activists alike.”
Nancy Bermeo, University of Oxford

“The most important book on the most urgent and compelling topic in political science.”
James A. Robinson, co-author of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JC495.STO 2025. We also have an eBook of the title available via SOLO. The eBook can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer or can be used 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.

Marcus Banks; edited by David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab.

Understanding social images: essays on visual methods and teaching anthropology

Berghahn, 2025

GN347.BAN 2025

Book Overview

This edited volume celebrates the work of Marcus Banks (1960-2020). It showcases his contributions to contemporary anthropology and demonstrates the importance of integrating visual methods into social and cultural anthropology. 

Reviews

“This book ambitiously addresses a wide array of topics, including ethical issues and presents a diverse range of perspectives.” 

Aleksandra Gracjasz, Leiden University

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is GN347.BAN 2025. We also have an eBook of the title available via SOLO. The eBook can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer or can be used 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.

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

Following the Bend: how to read a river and understand its nature

Ellen E. Wohl

Princeton University Press, 2025

GB1203.7.WOH 2025

Why was it chosen?

When we look at a river, either up close or while flying over a river valley, what are we really seeing? Following the Bend takes readers on a majestic journey by water to find answers, along the way shedding light on the key concepts of modern river science, from hydrology and water chemistry to stream and wetland ecology.

Book Overview

In this accessible and uniquely personal book, Ellen Wohl explains how to “read” a river, blending the latest science with her own personal experiences as a geologist and naturalist who has worked on rivers for more than three decades. She charts how water travels through the hydrologic cycle around the globe and downstream to distribute energy, move sediment, and shape river channels, and how living organisms adapt to life in flowing water to create vibrant river ecosystems. Wohl looks at the role of disturbances such as floods and droughts and discusses how geologists interpret the sedimentary records of past river processes. She illustrates how river networks interact with Earth’s surface and considers issues for rivers in the future, such as progressive drying, river restoration, and advocating for the legal personhood of a river to maintain its distinctive spirit, identity, and integrity.

Sharing a new understanding of how rivers function as both physical systems and ecosystems, Following the Bend enables us to observe rivers with fresh eyes and more fully appreciate the beauty, vibrancy, and complexity of our planet’s vital waterways.

Reviews

“An impassioned guide to interpreting rivers. . . . [Wohl’s] accessible scientific explanations alternate with lyrical passages that pack an emotional punch.”

Publishers Weekly

“Wohl’s passion for her subject shines through throughout. . . . A thorough primer on understanding rivers.”

Genevieve Williams, Library Journal

“Wonderfully engaging. Wohl’s storytelling is rich with the deep insights about rivers that she has cultivated over decades of research, fieldwork, and experiences.”

Joann Mossa, University of Florida

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is GB1203.7.WOH 2025.

It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed 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.

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

Open secrecy: how technology empowers the digital underworld

Isak Ladegaard

University of California Press, 2025

HV6773.LAD 2025

It was chosen because of the way it employs sociological and empirical analysis to describe how contemporary information technology expands the digital underworld, generating new social practices and movements.

Book Overview

This book examines technology in relation to three ‘digital underworlds’; drug trading on the darknet; groups developing technologies to evade state censorship; and digitally networked far-right movements. By conducting a cross-cutting analysis of these seemingly disparate phenomena, the author proposes the concept of “open secrecy,” where the seemingly contradictory forces of “secrecy” and “openness” intertwined to produce new social forms.

Ladegaard presents many insights into contemporary digital society, sketching a portrait of the freedoms and vulnerabilities generated by technological progress, the limits of state and corporate control, and the emergence of new social practices. These themes are explored through meticulous data analysis and rich qualitative materials. While the book is indispensable for readers in sociology, information society studies, and political science, its significance extends well beyond these fields.

Reviews

“A compelling work for anyone seeking to fundamentally rethink the nature of control in the digital age and the evolving relationship between the state, corporations, and civil society.” 

Haruhi Abe, International Criminal Justice Review

“Compared to the many qualitative and journalistic studies of these groups, Ladegaard’s work stands out for the range and depth of his data collection”

Sam DiBella, LSE Review of Books

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is HV6773.LAD 2025.

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 and Forced Migration.

Forced migration and humanitarian action: operational challenges and solutions for supporting people on the move

Edited by Lorenzo Guadagno and Lisette R. Robles

Routledge, 2025

HV640.FOR 2025

It was chosen because it highlights the challenges faced by agencies in helping forced migrants access support and assistance.

Book Overview

This book focuses on the diversity of operational modalities and types of assistance provided by both traditional and non-traditional humanitarian agencies to address the specific needs of displaced children, women, people with disabilities and older people, as well as trafficked migrant workers.

Reviews

‘[This book] brings together a wealth of experience and much-needed knowledge on how humanitarian action can be improved to more effectively meet the specific and differentiated need of displaced people who are all too often lumped together under the label of ‘vulnerable groups’.

Walter Kalin, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bern

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is HV640.FOR 2025. It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed 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.

Bakhmut

Myroslav Laiuk, translated by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan

Kyiv: Ukraïner, 2025

Shelfmark: DK5479.B35.LAI 2025

Book Overview

Myroslav Laiuk was a poet and academic before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; he continues to teach at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. However the invasion caused Laiuk to abandon the publication of fiction in favour of war reporting, in common with many of Ukraine’s leading writers. He often writes his articles in the car, as he travels away from the scene he has just witnessed: it is generally impossible to use voice recorders on the front line. Bakhmut is one result of his work, which has just been translated into English. It offers perfectly judged vignettes of the battle of Bakhmut – a town in Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine – interspersed with photographs by Danylo Pavlov, and followed by Laiuk’s own reflections.

Laiuk depicts the interactions he had as faithfully as he can, retaining the language of his interlocutors. Hence Bakhmut presents a series of vivid encounters with the people and animals caught up in the fighting – ranging from Oleksandra, the elderly citizen of Bakhmut whose story forms one of the book’s central themes, to two unnamed Russian prisoners of war. Laiuk is masterful in his selection of powerfully evocative details; for example, the solder who advised him to avoid looking at the skinny ginger cat trembling in its box.

The chapter on army Chaplains offers a moment of hope and encouragement. Maksym and Oleh are clear-eyed, determined, and prepared to help throughout the war and beyond; Laiuk is sure that they will “carry others on their shoulders” (Laiuk 2025, 61). Laiuk’s own care and determination is another inspiration. His book is an essential reminder of the human experience that lies behind all the news stories, social media feeds, and high-level negotiations – and of the infinitely complex struggle between good and evil that is manifested by the war in Ukraine, although it encompasses the world.

Reviews

Peter Pomerantsev:

“…this is a writer who knows not only how to observe war, but also how to think about it. There exists no better tribute, in any language, to the world of Ukraine’s frontlines – a world that is fast disappearing under Russian shells.”

https://www.ukrainer.net, accessed on November 25, 2025 at 13.45.

How can I access it?

You can currently find this book around the corner from our Issue Desk, above our New Books display. This title is loanable for University card holders. Its shelfmark is DK5479.B35.LAI 2025

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.

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

Democracy and the politics of silence

Mónica Brito Vieira

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025

JC423.BRI 2025

It was chosen because the author investigates the largely overlooked role of silence in democratic politics.

Book Overview

The author challenges the long-standing tradition of political theory as constituted by speech, drawing on a wide range of sources and disciplines. She provides a nuanced, and insightful account of political and democratic life that explores the spaces for both speech and silence.

Reviews

“An audacious and curious thinker, Brito Vieira goes off the beaten track and combines exemplary scholarship with refreshing insights into the unexpected political mechanics of silence.”
Mihaela Mihai, author of Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance

“This illuminating contribution to the performative and normative aspects of silence will grace the bourgeoning sphere of silence studies and be required reading for political theorists, historians, cultural sociologists, and ethicists intent on enriching their fields of scholarship.”
Michael Freeden, author of Ideology Studies: New Advances and Interpretations

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JC423.BRI 2025.

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.

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

McClaurin, Irma (editor)

Black feminist anthropology: theory, politics, praxis, and poetics

25th Anniversary edition

Rutgers University Press, 2024

GN33.8.BLA 2024

Book Overview

In 2001 McClaurin edited a groundbreaking volume that brought together a group of Black feminist Anthropologists to interrogate and evolve the discipline. This 25th Anniversary Edition celebrates this scholarship and provides a new Forward to contextualise these essays and the impact they had on Anthropology.  

Reviews

“What is so powerful about these women’s voices is that their theory is based not only on a self-reflexive and autobiographical framework, but it is positioned in a framework that boldly declares its commitment to scholarship, theory-making, and social justice. It is a very important book for anthropology, for feminist studies, for African American studies—and ultimately for all of us.”

Anthropological Quarterly

“Black Feminist Anthropology makes a provocative and important contribution to contemporary Black feminism. For the authors in this book, the premise that scholarship and social justice agendas must inform one another fosters a new anthropology that promises to stimulate new questions for us all.”

Patricia Hill Collins, author of Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is GN33.8.BLA 2024.

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.

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

Myths of geography: eight ways we get the world wrong

Paul Richardson

The Bridge Street Press, 2025

GF41.RIC 2025

Why was it chosen?

Our maps may no longer be stalked by dragons and monsters, but our perceptions of the world are still shaped by geographic myths. Myths like Europe being the centre of the world. Or that border walls are the solution to migration. Or that Russia is predestined to threaten its neighbours.

Book Overview

In his punchy and authoritative new book, Paul Richardson challenges recent popular accounts of geographical determinism and shows that how the world is represented often isn’t how it really is – that the map is not the territory.

Along the way we visit some remarkable places: Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park, where you can swim between two continents, and Bir Tawil in North Africa, one of the world’s only territories not claimed by any country. We follow the first train that ran across Eurasia between Yiwu in east China and Barking in east London, and scale the US-Mexico border wall to find out why such fortifications don’t work.

Reviews

As continents, borders, nations, economic growth and sovereignty become the buzzwords of today’s global conflicts, Paul Richardson’s Myths of Geography skewers each one with elegant precision. His book places political geography at the heart of how we understand the challenges of the twenty-first century. A bracing and important book 

Jerry Brotton, author of Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction

Our world can sometimes seem upside-down. Perhaps it is. In detailed and fervid prose, Paul Richardson dismantles eight myths we have come to tell ourselves about geography. By revealing important truths this folklore conceals, he shows us how our geographical imagination has far-reaching consequences. From Hadrian’s Wall to the US-Mexico border, from the Eastern Sahara to the ice of Antarctica, from silk roads to Ethiopian castles, Richardson takes us to places that invite reflection – and action. After reading Myths of Geography, no news report, no map, no journey will appear quite the same again 

David Rooney, author of About Time

In this original and stimulating challenge to our assumptions about the shapes of our geographies, Paul Richardson changes the way we see the world – from how many continents there really are to the myths and realities of border walls and the nations they seek to contain

Isabel Hilton, contributing editor of Prospect

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is GF41.RIC 2025.

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.

Machine Learning for Econometrics

Christophe Gaillac & Jérémy L’Hour

Oxford University Press, 2025

HB139.GAI 2025

It was chosen as a book for economists seeking to explore modern machine learning techniques when establishing causal relationships from data.

Book Overview

This new work – published June 2025 – covers automatic variable selection in various high-dimensional contexts, estimation of treatment effect heterogeneity, natural language processing (NLP) techniques, as well as synthetic control and macroeconomic forecasting.

The foundations and techniques of machine learning methods are introduced to provide a thorough theoretical treatment of how they can be used in econometrics and numerous economic applications, and each chapter contains a series of empirical examples, programs, and exercises to facilitate the reader’s adoption and implementation of the techniques.

Authors

Christophe Gaillac is an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, GSEM. He was a postdoctoral prize research fellow at Oxford University and Nuffield College and received his PhD in Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics.

Jérémy L’Hour is a quantitative researcher at Capital Fund Management (CFM), a Paris-based systematic hedge fund. He received his PhD in Economics from Université Paris-Saclay.

How can I access it?

We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is HB139.GAI 2025. It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed 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.