The earth as a book: this is the ancient metaphor that animates The Paper Road, anthropologist Erik Mueggler’s majestic meditation upon the earth as a living, social, creative process. Through stories of encounters and relationships between two Western botanists and two generations of Naxi men from the village of Nvlvk’ö in southwest China spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Mueggler contemplates how experiences become archives, and archives order experience.

"Insurgent Public Space" is an anthology of unauthorized appropriations of city spaces, temporary events and guerrilla actions that resist commercial infestation and social exclusion.The volume was conceived in 2007 at the Sixth Conference of the Pacific Rim Community Design Network, a loosely connected group of community-based activists and scholars who meet approximately every two years to discuss grassroots planning and design.

"Education, Conflict and Development" is a timely collection of essays that investigate, through different case studies, the changing contours of international work around the need for the delivery of education in conflict and post-conflict situations. In her new volume Paulson has attracted contributions from an impressive array of authors with a background mainly in Education.

There is so much to carp about regarding "The Last Pictures", the new book by artist and experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, one doesn’t know quite where to begin. The entire notion of the book—or rather, of the project, because "The Last Pictures" is much more of a project than simply a book, the book merely being an adjunct to the project itself—is fraught with all the trappings of grandiosity inherent to any effort to create a monumental memento intended to convey to the future the essence of a civilization.

"The Quantocks" portrays not only in words but also through numerous clear diagrams (by the author) and superb photographs (by his daughter Jackie) the major features that have contributed to the landscape palimpsest and make the region both distinctive and interesting. To do that Peter has mastered the extant sources—including much ‘grey literature’—and woven together material from a wide range of disciplinary specialisms.

While Chen’s experience and scholarship were formed through his participation in the Taiwanese democracy movement, his work speaks also to cognate events such as the Korean June Democratic Uprising of 1987, Tiananmen Square movement in China, People’s Power in the Philippines. These and other events have shaped contemporary Asia and have attempted to address interconnected and overlapping global power relations.

This edited collection comprises mostly non-Anglophone contributions by social anthropologists, historians, scientists, area experts, and practitioners in European and Mediterranean institutions. This valuable and well-written series of urban ethnographies reflects on cases of urban contention all around the Mediterranean, including disputes over metropolitan development and environmentalism, community relations, and ethno-religious conflict.

In "Learning the City" Colin McFarlane retells a story about the political strategies employed by activists involved in the Mumbai Slum Dwellers Federation (MDSF). Jockin Arputham, the founder of MDSF, narrates how the organization discovered that they could use the public phone for free by “inserting a railway ticket into the receiver”. Such technical savvy was not, however, just a strategy used to keep the organization’s phone bill down.

In this book, Koch could well have chosen the Broad Street pump handle as a colophon for each chapter for, despite its broad title, the central theme of the book is the nineteenth-century concern with understanding and halting the spread of cholera.

"Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra" is almost too many things -- a memoir, a biography, an ethnography of experimental jazz in Ghana. Through the lens of acoustemology -- “the agency of knowing the world through sound” (page 49) -- it traverses questions of art, class, nationhood, and cosmopolitan citizenship.