Books

How much does the average American actually know about Mexico, our neighbor to the south? Beyond geography, how entwined are Mexico and the U.S., policy-wise? To answer, do you first need to understand Mexico’s political environment? The questions might sound daunting, but a new book by Roderic Camp, Philip M. McKenna Professor of the Pacific Rim at CMC, answers them fully.

UPDATE 12/16: Read the Foreign Affairs review of Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment.

The Marc Raeff Book Prize has been awarded to Gary M. Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas at CMC, for his book Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801.

Prof. Minxin Pei's new book, China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (Harvard University Press) received a positive review in The Economist.

Prof. Lee Skinner's new text, Gender and the Rhetoric of Modernity in Spanish America, 1850–1910, looks at how 19th-century Spanish American writers re-imagined gender roles, modernization, and national identity during Spanish America’s uneven transition toward modernity.

It’s not often that an author writes what may come to be considered a seminal work. But that’s what Gary Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas at CMC, has done with his new book: Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801.

Published by Yale University Press in June, the book offers an in-depth examination of every important Russian thinker and their ideas regarding faith, politics and reason over a period of three centuries.

Prof. Amy Kind has started blogging about imagination in support of Knowledge Through Imagination, a new Oxford University Press book she co-edited with Peter Kung.

Kind's first post is an exploration of the power of imagination in which she asks "Sure, imagination is powerful. But can it really change the world?"

Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics.

With autism a contentious and growing concern in America, Professor Jack Pitney has published the first book to focus exclusively on the politics of this complex diagnosis.