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.

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.

July’s Book of the Month was selected by Sarah Rhodes, Subject Consultant for International Development and Forced Migration.

Guilt by location: forced displacement and population sorting in civil war

Adam Lichtenheld

Cambridge University Press, 2025

HV 640.LIC 2025

It was chosen to highlight the increasingly prevalent issue of insurgent groups forcing civilians to relocate to determine their political loyalties.

Book Overview

Population displacement is a devastating feature of contemporary conflict with far-reaching political and humanitarian consequences. This book demonstrates the extent to which displacement is a deliberate strategy of war, not just a consequence of it.

Reviews

‘In this gripping book, Adam Lichtenheld gives us new tools to understand forced migration. Armed groups displace civilians not only to remove rival sympathizers, but also to identify them to begin with. This insight shows why displacement is such a prevalent form of wartime violence.’

Abby Steele, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam

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 HV 640.LIC 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.

June’s Book of the month is:

Patriot

Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel

The Bodley Head, 2024

Shelfmark: DK510.766.N38.NAV 2024

June’s book of the month is Patriot, the autobiography of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. Navalny died in an Arctic Russian prison in February 2024: he was probably murdered by the prison authorities, under the orders of Vladimir Putin. As his prison diary shows, his determination, humour and faith were unconquerable.

Book Overview

Navalny was arrested on his return to Russia in January 2021, after his recovery from an attempted poisoning in August 2020: he had not even stepped out of the aeroplane. Patriot consists of Navalny’s autobiographical writings in prison, his social media posts, and other short texts. Navalny himself describes it as “Gonzo journalism”: nothing else was possible under the circumstances. The prison regimes became more and more severe as time went on, until Navalny was confined almost permanently to a punishment cell.

The book contains humorous and incisive accounts of the late Soviet Union, Perestroika, and Russian political life in the 2000s and 2010s, as Navalny describes his experiences. He is a larger-than-life figure as much because of what was done to him, as because of his own responses. In 2017 he was sprayed green; his organisation’s offices were frequently raided, once apparently by sex workers; in 2020 government agents attempted to murder him by painting nerve agent on his underwear. He and his colleagues in the Foundation Battling Corruption demonstrated the corruption of Russia’s politicians to the population in detailed and colourful YouTube videos, which seem to have turned him into Putin’s personal enemy.

Navalny is a controversial figure within liberal western circles, as well as in the Russian Federation: he developed a connection with Russian nationalist movements in the 2000s, which he was later to drop. His determination to fight for Russia’s political freedom at whatever personal cost however testifies to the unique character he became.

Reviews

Luke Harding (Guardian, October 22 2024, 7.30 am GMT):

“This is a brave and brilliant book, a luminous account of Navalny’s life and dark times. It is a challenge from beyond the grave to Russia’s murder-addicted rulers. You can hear his voice in the deft translation by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel: sharp, playful and lacking in self-pity. Nothing crushes him. Up until the end – his final “polar” entry is on 17 January 2024 – he radiates indomitable good humour.”

Patriot won the category for Narrative Non-Fiction and the overall Book of the Year Award at The Nibbies, the annual British book trade awards.

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 DK510.766.N38.NAV 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.

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

Beyond social democracy: the transformation of the Left in emerging knowledge societies

Silja Häusermann & Herbert Kitschelt, Editors

Cambridge University Press, 2024

JN94.A979.HAU 2024

It was chosen because it brings together leading scholars of electoral politics to examine the declining support for European social democratic parties over the last twenty years.

Book Overview

This edited volume is divided into three parts. The first part analyses voting patterns. The second part presents evidence that voters still embrace social democratic ideas, yet they veer towards newer left-wing parties. The third section describes the difficult choices social democratic leaders have to make. The editors conclude that all political parties face challenges due to global warming and associated distributive conflicts.

Reviews

“.. an edited volume that is exceptionally coherent, theoretically ground-breaking and empirically extremely well conducted.”
Ruth Dassonneville, Université de Montréal

“This book will be an indispensable reference, not only for scholars interested in the fate of social democracy, but for everyone concerned about the state of contemporary electoral politics.”
Peter A. Hall, Harvard University

“Any course that examines the trajectory and likely fate of social democratic politics in Western Europe should have this as a key text.”
Geoffrey Evans, University of Oxford and Co-Director, British Election Study

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 JN94.A979.HAU 2024 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.

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

Casey High

Translating worlds, defending land : collaborations for indigenous rights and environmental politics in Amazonia

Stanford University Press, 2025

Available as an eBook via SOLO

Book Overview

This book is a result of long term fieldwork in Amazonian Ecuador, the author critically explores collaboration as a method for engagement with indigenous communities. It expands on the scholarly debates around engaged anthropology and who ethnography is for. This ethnography is a key contribution to the understanding of the process of anthropological research and the communities they engage with. 

Reviews

“Casey High offers us a brilliant ethnography in the form of fluid and intimate writing, which makes the book a page turner. What we see in these pages is the inauguration of a new line of anthropological reflection, in which collaboration between anthropologists and Indigenous people ceases to be a simple method and becomes the very object of analysis.”

Aparecida Vilaça, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

“In this thought-provoking meditation on the dynamics of collaboration, Casey High explores what it means for anthropology and anthropologists when our epistemic partners start doing ethnography their own way, for their own ends.”

Stuart Kirsch, University of Michigan

“Narrating in Waorani lands (that are also Ecuadorian), this strong and delicate ethnography also narrates us. Relentlessly written from a ‘complex we’ the stories it tells make it clear that ‘we’ have interlocutors and are interlocutors and that therefore, ‘we’ tell stories about ‘them’ that are also about ‘us’… ethnographic relations as moebius strip!”

Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis

How can I access it?

This title is available as an eBook which can be accessed from any Bodleian Library computer or 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.