Recent Purchases

I just ordered the following books for my highly anticipated summer reading list. Some of them are research related, but I am not in a rush to read any of them. In fact, I'm looking forward to reading Francois Cusset's French Theory. Distinguished scholar, and now NY Times contributor, Stanley Fish blogged a really favorable review about it that generated over 600 responses and a second post about the impact and political value of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the United States. I'm also interested in Richard Thaler's and Cass Sunstein's book Nudge and their concept of "choice architecture," that is, how productive and positive decision-making can be best achieved from coercive social forces ... sounds like how hegemony functions. I'm sorry to say but there's no fiction thus far; there's nothing that caught my eye but I also haven't been looking either.

• Hay, Colin, Michael Lister, David Marsh, eds. The State: Theories and Issues (2005).

• Malthus, Thomas K. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

• Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (2008).

• Fish, Stanley. There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too (1994).

• Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975 (2004).

• Thaler, Richard and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008).