Alan J. Heeger
World Scientific Press

See it as ¡°a pleasure and an honour¡± to mentor students, don¡¯t buy the myth that Asian postdocs are uncreative, go to the theatre, especially if Michael Frayn or West Side Story is involved, have faith in the necessity of risk-taking in doing groundbreaking science, pay tribute to your parents¡¯ life lessons and, above all, pay homage to your brilliant, beautiful wife: an uxorious physicist-turned-chemist and Nobel laureate shares his secrets in this charmingly conversational memoir.

Celeste-Marie Bernier
Temple University Press

Horace Pippin¡¯s First World War experiences in the 369th Infantry Regiment ¨C the Harlem Hellfighters ¨C informed some of the self-taught painter¡¯s most haunting works. In this generously illustrated intellectual history and cultural biography, Bernier makes a persuasive case for his being one of the 20th century¡¯s most groundbreaking artists, a writer of ¡°hard-hitting and imagistic prose¡± and a ¡°memorialist-witness to the experiences of the Black World War I combat soldier¡±.

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John Macnicol
Cambridge University Press

Neil Kinnock¡¯s warnings over a second Thatcher victory in 1983 ended with: ¡°I warn you not to get old.¡± Three decades on, social policy scholar Macnicol reveals the ¡°old age agenda¡± to be the stuff of nightmares. His tightly argued study takes in pension reform, the ¡°new retirement¡± (hollow laughs) and Anthony ¡°Third Way¡± Giddens as he unpicks the ¡°hard-nosed macro-economic strategy¡­accompanied by soothing neoliberal mood music relating to the enhancement of rights, choice, opportunity and empowerment¡±. Meanwhile, he adds, a majority of Britons say the poorest pensioners will be the hardest hit by a rise in the state pension age.

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Jessica Martucci
University of Chicago Press

Martucci, a medical ethics and health policy scholar, here traces ¡°the emergence, rise, and fraught continuation of breastfeeding in the twentieth century into the twenty-first¡± in the US, via La Leche League, Dr Spock, ¡°abnormal¡± nipples, the ¡°cult of natural motherhood¡±, electric breast pumps and the reach of the ¡°male medical model¡±, and the activist group Moms (Making Our Milk Safe).

Oonagh McDonald
Manchester University Press

A financial regulatory expert follows her Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Turning the American Dream into a Nightmare with a sober, blow-by-blow account of one money-evaporating weekend in September 2008 and the whole tangled tale of ¡°the largest bankruptcy in American history¡±. Interviews with cashiered employees speak volumes, and her concluding warning that ¡°attention should have been paid to the real world ¨C not chasing chimeras¡± is followed by an appendix listing the Lehman dramatis personae and the sizeable payoffs they departed with.

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Gilles Carbonnier
Hurst

In a volume ¡°somewhere between a primer and an essay¡±, Geneva-based scholar Carbonnier surveys the multibillion-dollar industry that is ¡°the humanitarian market¡±, taking in altruists and bureaucrats, the global war on terror, disaster risk insurance and survival economics, and, adding a note of hopefulness, ¡°the transformative power of humanitarian crises¡±. The book is dedicated to the author¡¯s cousin, Laurent Du Pasquier, an aid worker killed in Donetsk, Ukraine in 2014.