In this daring book, Julie Guthman peels back layers of entrenched thought on “obesity” and its “epidemic” extent, showing how “problem closure” has propelled science and debate into inaccurate and harmful cul-de-sacs. Combining her groundbreaking research on aspects of alternative food with secondary material from the health sciences, she moves the book toward the concluding argument: in fatness and obesity panic, the body is an accumulation strategy.

One can't help but be stunned by the range of work being done in the nexus connecting the humanities to geography. As a reference tool for collating such information, "GeoHumanities: art, history, text at the edge of place" certainly succeeds, assembling between covers source material and web-links to send off the curious reader for months of profitable digging through the archives.

In 2011, as the scramble from above for a status-quo-preserving scheme to deleverage the global economy entered its third year, two books approaching debt from a less lofty angle were released. "The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber, both ask what it ought to mean to live with debt today, and, in Graeber’s case, what it has meant historically.

"Gourmets in the Land of Famine" argues that during the construction of the modern Chinese nation-state, scientific approaches to grain policy and rice production were central to constructing national identity.

Wendy Brown's project in her recent book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty is to reveal paradoxical features of contemporary wall-building. As one of the few theoretical accounts of this phenomenon so far, the book delivers an original and open-ended speculative thesis of barrier building, both at borders and within sovereign nation-states.

From the subtitle, "The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International", one might assume "The Beach Beneath the Street" is yet another winking, frolicking romp through the voluptuous Saint-Germain existence of the ever-titillating Situationist International (SI; 1957-72). However, Wark’s wonderfully written, brilliantly researched, expansive, and decidedly timely monograph about the movement is no less of a manifesto than are his earlier contributions.

Adrian Franklin’s book is a well-crafted, and often loving, homage to the urban form. A welcome palliative for at times anthropocentric and ahistoric urban studies, Franklin traces the development of the lived city.

In her most recent book geographer Jennifer Hyndman argues that government and international responses to natural disasters cannot be understood outside of global geopolitics and local histories. Hyndman makes an impassioned call for the place of a distinctly feminist geopolitical approach to understanding and practicing humanitarian aid, which takes into account relations of power wherever they occur.

If there is a universal theme to this volume it is a call back to the micro. Not in a reductionist, ever-smaller building blocks kind of way, but a whispering that is humble, grounded, and embracing, rather than seeking to flee or supersede the limitations of our earthly condition.

While disparate in their content and approaches, both of these books give a comprehensive sense of Ai’s diversity and international appeal, and are especially useful in gaining a better understanding of Ai’s relationship to China and his Chinese audience.