Sunday Book Roundup

Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (University of Pennsylvania Press), edited by Nancy J. Hirschmann and Beth Linker, is reviewed on H-Net.

"To aid readers unfamiliar with disability studies or theories of citizenship, the introduction includes concise and helpful discussions of the differences between the medical model of disability and various social models of disability, and of the various senses of citizenship which go beyond national identity to multiple levels of group membership and senses of belonging. These summaries are followed by some helpful illustrations of the ways in which disability and citizenship intersect and how understanding disability and citizenship in the broader ways previously developed may be necessary for working toward justice."

Books & Ideas has a review of Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press) by Intisar A. Rabb.

The Washington Independent Review of Books has a review of Fergus Bordewich's The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (Simon & Schuster).

"Has any Congress ever accomplished as much as the very first one, meeting in three sessions between March 1789 through March 1791, in two temporary capital cities (New York and Philadelphia)? Fergus Bordewich thinks not. His central thesis in The First Congress is that this Congress established the high-water mark for U.S. legislative achievement."

There are many interviews this week worth checking out. The Daily Beast has an interview with Sarah Vowell, who has recently published Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (Riverhead Books).

New Books has interviews with several authors this week, including one with Christopher Phelps, who co-authored Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (Cambridge University Press) with Howard Brick.

New Books also interviews Abram De Swaan, who discusses his book, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder (Yale University Press).

The editors of The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt), Luke Nichter and Douglas Brinkley, talk with New Books as well.

Finally, not quite the traditional book review of our Sunday posts, but too interesting not to mention, is the article, "Black America's Underground Guide to Escaping the Jim Crow South," by Malcolm Jones in The Daily Beast. He looks at The Negro Travelers' Green Book, which has recently been digitalized in the NY Library's digitalization project.