Day: August 19, 2014

A volume in the series: Cornell Studies in Money. The list of books is available on this website: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu Editors: Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner Publisher: Cornell University Press – 250 words Book Review (A Second View) by: Paiso Jamakar With a long list of books published over the last ten years on the dire prospects for the United States dollar, I was surprised to read so many positive-sounding titles of the chapters in this book The Future of the Dollar, published in 2009. The eight contributors (including editors Helleiner and Kirshner) have written ten chapters in this book,...

Author: Julie Stephens Publisher: Columbia University Press – 186 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram Julie Stephens defines maternalism broadly as “the application of values, usually associated with mothering to the society as a whole. According to this view, the principles of nurture, care, and protection are suffused with rich ethical and political meanings and offer an alternative conception of the social.” She laments that “maternalist ideas have been in decline,” especially since the sixties when feminism, woman power, and equal rights for women were big issues in the heydays of  student activism on the Vietnam War, police brutality,...

Author: Jonathan Rees Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press – 236 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram Nowadays, we take refrigerators and freezers in our homes for granted. But preserving food, especially meat, from spoiling was a crucial need until refrigeration was invented in the nineteenth century. So it took a long time to learn how to produce “cold” but its opposite heat, was discovered thousands of years earlier. Cold is the absence of heat, and what a refrigerator (and similarly an  air conditioner) does is remove heat from a confined area. A refrigerator, called a “fridge” for short, consists of a thermally-insulated compartment...