Booker Prize-winning Research Articles

“The Past is a Foreign Country”: Time Shelter and exploring dementia and memory impairment representation in literature and the arts

Abstract Background Due to ageing populations, the WHO estimates that by 2050 the number of people living with dementia worldwide will more than triple to 152 million. For those working in geriatric medicine and memory services, we regularly interact with and advocate for patients coming to terms with memory impairments. One common theme often encountered during the patient dementia and cognitive impairment diagnosis journey is fear of loss of the sense of “self”, which can be informed by the negative and often inaccurate cultural narrative around dementia. Methods Recent promising breakthroughs in the development of disease modifying medications for Alzheimer’s disease, as well as greater emphasis on lifelong brain health and earlier diagnosis, represents a potential source of hope. This presentation will aim to explore the cultural narrative around the “lived experience” of dementia, which is often extremely negative and emphasises hopelessness. We look to some of the most commonly referenced narrative works, which can often form the foundation of many patient's prior knowledge of cognitive impairment and dementia before coming to the memory clinic. Results This presentation aims to examine the narrative works familiar to many patients (such as “The Father” and “Still Alice”) as well as some more recent efforts, including this year’s International Booker Prize-winning novel “Time Shelter” by Georgi Gospodinov. This darkly humorous book describes the arrival of a strange new ‘clinic for the past’ offering promising treatment for people with dementia. Conclusion Many works of narrative fiction explore dementia and memory impairment. While some are well-informed and researched, many lack empathy or even clinical accuracy. Narrative works can have an enormous impact on the widespread perception and understanding of diseases such as dementia. By exploring the potential for sensitive and accurate representation of dementia in popular culture, we aim to promote equity in this vulnerable and growing population.

FOOD AND COOKING AS COMIC RELIEF IN IRIS MURDOCH’S THE SEA, THE SEA

As a literary term, comic relief is the appearance of humorous and funny episodes or scenes in otherwise serious literary works. The aim of comic relief is to reduce the anxiety or distress that the audience feels as a result of the depiction of the painful and pitiful events or incidents. The joy and laughter that comic relief provides balance the intensity of the misery and sadness which are inherent in the narrative. Although comic relief is mostly associated with dramatic works, the scenes of food and cooking in Iris Murdoch’s 1978 Booker Prize winner novel The Sea, the Sea illustrate some proper examples of the term. Murdoch’s protagonist, the retired playwright and director Charles Arrowby, cheerfully cooks and eats whenever the mental anxiety rises to a critical level. Charles displays his enjoyment of preparing and having food so intensely that his happiness and thrill easily neutralise the uneasiness of the reader. This paper aims to illustrate how a protagonist’s delight at food and cooking serves as comic relief which reduces the intensity of the unease caused by a sad story.

“Being / together”: Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and the Black British Women’s Movement

Abstract This essay locates Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) within the sociopolitical history and written lineage of the Black women’s movement in Britain. It identifies contextual resonances with the 1970s and 1980s praxis of collaboration and collectivity and traces intertextual connections with Evaristo’s own early writing (including theater, verse fiction, and the radio story from which the novel evolved) and the periodicals, anthologies, and organization newsletters of the time. These references illuminate the novel’s structure, lineation, and narrative mode. I argue that Girl, Woman, Other reanimates the rallying call “we are here,” affirming the presence and diversity of Black lives in Britain, while its distinctive “fusion fiction” form actively engages readers, realizing the Black feminist political principle of “speaking out.”

Peter Carey’s “Homo Australiensis” in A Long Way from Home

The paper examines Peter Carey’s first book about Indigenous Australians, a topic which he had neglected for decades. Until A Long Way from Home (2017) was written, the two-time Booker Prize winner renowned for portraying Australian identity had yet to confront this crucial matter which he believed was a fundamental issue of the country. Reasons behind this seemingly contradictory and lengthy absence are highlighted along with certain methods with which the author gradually exposes Australia’s shameful past in the treatment of First Nations people. Carey’s approach stays true to his body of work, namely the Aboriginal subject is complemented or intertwined with his portrayal of another layer of Australia’s history: the pan-European heritage of non-Indigenous Australians. But why and in what manner does he integrate European topics into a novel aiming to shed light on the maltreatment and neglect of First Nations Australians? Does this addition not dilute the original aim of paying homage to Indigenous Australia? My paper argues that Carey successfully utilises certain European identity themes to help show the gravity of sins committed against Australian Indigenous people. The author’s modus operandi is to piece together seemingly neglected fragments of the European legacy with First Nations Australia to reveal a unified entity. Via Willie Bachhuber, a character who most Australians can connect or identify with, Carey joins together various Australian identities which may not have been connected beforehand. With this technique Carey helps ensure the novel is about and for all Australians. I believe that A Long Way from Home crowns Peter Carey’s career as fully depicting Australianness without including Aboriginal people has up until now meant a quite incomplete oeuvre. An ultimate Australian character so-far elusive to Carey, a Homo Australiensis has come to life via a pseudo-German-Balt-Hungarian-Australian, who is actually a First Nations Australian with a white biological father.

On Courting India

Nandini Das, winner of the British Academy Book Prize 2023, discusses her experience of writing her prize-winning book Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023). Courting India offers a fascinating history of Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal Empire, and his four years in India (1615–19), a mission generally judged to be a failure, with Roe failing to make much headway in securing diplomatic relations or trade agreements. Roe did, however, leave an extensive account of his time in India in the form of a journal, which has proved helpful in reconstructing the nature of his encounter with the Mughal court. The Mughal emperor, Jahangir, and his courtiers, seem to have had little interest in Roe, who was regarded as something of an exotic curiosity or an irrelevance. This ground-breaking book provides an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. At an event held at the British Academy in January 2024, Professor Das discussed the book with Professor Charles Tripp FBA, chair of the Book Prize panel of judges.

How supranational literary prizes shape translation flows

Abstract This article explores how literary prizing shapes translation flows by comparing bibliographic data on the translations of prize-winning books. It focuses on two prizes in particular, the Booker Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), both of which generate significant numbers of translations but for very different reasons. The article develops the idea of ‘prizing logics’ to help explain these differences, singling out factors that appear to play a role: (1) the prize’s translation policy (especially important for the EUPL) and (2) the prize’s prestige and focus on commercial success (particularly relevant for the Booker). It shows that translations of EUPL winners are largely a result of state support, which is linked to the prize’s aim of spreading European diversity and reinforcing unity through literature, while the Booker is more focused on literary quality and stimulating commercial success, thereby leading to many translations of its winners.

Unraveling the Multifaceted Narratives of Mixed-Race Identity in Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq’s Ophelia and Thrall

Trethewey's poetry is an intervention into a worldwide debate about defining and socially restricting mixed-race identities; therefore, this research addresses these issues. In Gulfport, Mississippi, Trethewey was raised by relatives whose mixed-race marriage was unlawful. Her poetry has several allusions to both her dad, a writer, academic, and Canadian immigrant, and her mom, a caseworker. Trethewey's poetry intertwines the tale of her personal mixed ancestors with the racial history of America, even while combining this story with lyricism. "I'm capable of getting closer to the inner reality of a poem when the poetry leans towards the poetic," Trethewey remarked in her address. She used a poem entitled "Incident" from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Native Guard as an instance. Her grandma sponsored a voting registration campaign for disadvantaged African Americans in the 1960s, and the Ku Klux Klan burned a symbol in her family's yard as a result. Trethewey reconstructed an early form of the poem to encapsulate the complete tale of the occurrence in the first four lines. This allowed her to utilize the rest of the poem to emphasize additional psychological realities. Unraveling the Multifaceted Narratives of Mixed-Race Identity in Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq’s Ophelia and Thrall is the ground upon which this study stands.

Long Journey to Freedom: An Interpretation of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard from the Perspective of Existentialism

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the debut work of the 2006 Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai. There are many discussions on the novel from the perspective of ecocriticism, but existentialism in the work has received less attention. This article intends to start with Sartre’s existentialism, expounding how the protagonist Sampath lives in an absurd world, gets rid of the control of others and seeks the freedom he desires in his heart. This paper believes that by shaping Sampath’s image of pursuing freedom, Kiran Desai embodies his exposure to the absurd society of India and her yearning for spiritual freedom.

Geetanjali Shree's 'Ret Samadhi': Reflection of the Psychology of the Elderly

Human psychology is meaningfully expressed through literature. The human mind is very strange and mysterious. Some of this diversity and mystery can be seen through creative literature. Like child psychology, adolescent psychology, and women's psychology, geriatric psychology has also provided a vast field of literature. Many stories and novels are based on the psychology of the elderly. The recent Booker Prize-winning novel 'Ret Samadhi' by Geetanjali Shree is a meaningful reflection of the psychology of the elderly. The novel is a new perspective on the mood of the elderly.

MATRIX OF POWER POLITICS IN NOVELS OF ARAVIND ADIGA

Aravind Adiga, a Man Booker Prize winner, aims at depicting a realistic picture of Indian society along with its root cause of evil. He attempts to bring the dark side of India over the ‘shining India’. He criticised the moral decadence and lack of basic principles among Indians. In The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower he portrays the power game in metropolis like; Delhi and Mumbai. This paper studies the socio-political realities of Indian society through the lens of power politics. Adiga makes an effort to showcase the experiences which underprivileged Indian people go through their entire lives. This paper also describes how Adiga depicts socio-cultural encounters in India; especially in power-politics, the Caste system, and master-servant society. It demonstrates the colossal fight between the common man and the dominating political issues such as the caste system, democracy and justice. The research depicts the miscarriage of justice, corruption and other alarming issues of contemporary Indian society. Adiga spotlights modern India by comparing India of darkness and India of light. Adiga’s work of fiction unveils the dark web of politics behind the frame of globalisation and development.

ANOTHER BORDER, BEYOND THE BORDER: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE WOMAN CHARACTERS IN TOMB OF SAND

In the age of digital humanities and post-memory studies, literature records the affective information that is subsumed by the grand narratives of history. In the genre of partition literature fiction explores the domain of unfulfilled possibilities thereby presenting the alternative paths that could have been taken. Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize-winning novel Tomb of Sand explores the journey of an eighty-year-old woman revisiting her childhood home in Pakistan along with her daughter. It is a tale of an individual, who has been de-territorialized, reaching a negotiation with the trauma of partition. This article attempts to analyse the debates on motherhood, identity formation, and gender performance by conducting a critical appreciation of the text. It takes up as its subject the three most dominant woman characters in the novel, Ma, the protagonist; Beti, the daughter; and Rosie, the hijra. In comparing and contrasting the inherent womanhood of the three characters, it also tries to explore the position of women inhabiting the boundaries.

Revisiting Norse Mythology: the Case of A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarök

"Revisiting Norse Mythology: The Case of A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarök. In 2011, British author and Booker-prize winner A. S. Byatt publishes Ragnarök, her rewriting of the Norse myth about the death of the gods. Seen through the eyes of a thin child who is forced to witness the terrors of World War II, the story and characters of the Norse myth are reinterpreted and retold in accordance with the child’s vision, imagination and feelings. The paper here focuses on the association of the Scandinavian imaginary with specific moments in A. S. Byatt’s personal history, and highlights the use of certain patterns and ideas that are present in both, trying to pinpoint the elements that make possible the transformation of the mythical into the actual. The aim of this study is to explore the evolution of the mythological events as they are rewritten in Byatt’s 21st century book, in close connection with the main character’s personal development. To that end, the paper will also dwell upon the comparison drawn by Byatt herself between the Norse and the Christian mythological imaginary – a vision filtered through the eyes and thoughts of the focalizer of the text, the thin child. Keywords: Ragnarök, A. S. Byatt, reinterpretation, Norse myths, death of the gods"

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Reviewed by: Victory City by Salman Rushdie Yagnishsing Dawoor SALMAN RUSHDIE Victory City New York. Random House. 2023. 352 pages. PAMPA KAMPANA, the demigoddess of Victory City, Salman Rushdie's incredible new novel, envisions the kingdom she builds from enchanted seeds and whispers as a first-rate utopia. Women treated on a par with men, the flourishing of the arts, religious tolerance in perpetuity. Pampa will live for 247 years. In that time, the kingdom, known to all as Bisnaga, will pass through the hands of a series of rulers, some progressive, others bigoted, all of them men. Bisnaga thrives, falters, picks itself up again, enjoys a few golden ages (some long-lived, others transient), and then wastes away beyond repair. Pampa's "immortal masterpiece" in verse, the Jayaparajaya, survives to tell the history of Bisnaga "from its creation to its destruction." Victory City is presented as a retelling of the events recorded in Pampa's poem. Its author, we are informed, is "neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns . . . who offers this version for the simple entertainment and possible edification of today's readers." Fortunately for us, Rushdie is a terrific raconteur. Bisnaga is an exaggerated, occasionally Marvelesque rendition of Vijayanagar, the historical empire that covered a significant swathe of South India between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rushdie shakes it to life through an extraordinary admixture of facts and religious lore (the Ramayana and the Mahabharata being Rushdie's most obvious, constant sources of inspiration); side-splitting jokes and instructive asides; people real and fictional (the first two kings of Bisnaga, Hukka and Bukka, are based on the real Sangama brothers, the cowherds-turned-founders of Vijayanagar); and a ladleful of magic. At the time of its birth, when Bisnaga is still empty of people, Hukka and Bukka sit atop a mountain, surveying the cityscape. Their subjects emerge from the earth "shaking the dirt off their garments and thronging the streets in the evening breeze. Stray dogs and bony cows walked in the streets, trees burst into blossom and leaf, and the sky swarmed with parrots, yes, and crows." Within a day, the city is socially functional. The people of Bisnaga behave as if "they possessed memories and histories, and formed a long-established community, a city of love and death, tears and laughter, loyalty and betrayal." It is a delightful passage. World-building made flesh for the reader. Victory City, like Midnight's Children, Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning novel, revels in magical realism. There are shapeshifters; pink monkeys with colonial ambitions; a well-meaning panther; spying birds; and an enchanted forest where "the conventions of the outside world lost their meaning and melted away." Yet for all its fantastical elements, Victory City remains deeply invested in the real world. Bisnaga, after it comes to be ruled by the disowned fanatical son of Pampa and Bukka, Hukka the Second, recalls the fissiparous state of present-day India: "tensions between communities were running high. Now there were areas of town where it was not safe for the once-godly to go, and there were unprovoked attacks at night." Hinduism becomes the religion of the hour. Dissent is quickly quashed. Hukka the Second's reign does not bode well for women either. "A woman's place," he declares, "is, and will henceforth be, in the home." Pampa and her daughters leave Bisnaga. This grim state of affairs does not last forever, thanks to the novel's brisk linearity. Resistance grows. A sect with "an inclusive kindly syncretist worldview" racks up followers. (Its members will occupy some of the highest positions in the empire.) Pampa returns to Bisnaga to persuade the people and the new king, Hukka the Second's son, that "the cultured, inclusive, sophisticated narrative of Bisnaga that she was offering them was a better one than the narrow, exclusionary, and, to her way of thinking, barbarian official narrative of the moment." Forty years to the fall of Bisnaga, Pampa becomes the victim of a terrible lie and has her eyes put out by hot iron rods. Reading about Pampa's fate, I couldn't help but think of the vicious assassination attempt...

"A Great Time to Be a Zimbabwean Writer": A Conversation with Siphiwe Ndlovu

"A Great Time to Be a Zimbabwean Writer"A Conversation with Siphiwe Ndlovu Anderson Tepper (bio) and Siphiwe Ndlovu Click for larger view View full resolution If—as Booker Prize–winner Damon Galgut said—2021 was a good year for African writing, 2022 was especially good for Zimbabwean writers. I spoke with novelist Siphiwe Ndlovu, author of The History of Man, about her work, her contemporaries, and Zimbabwe's impressive and deep-rooted literary tradition. Anderson Tepper: This year both you and Tsitsi Dangarembga were awarded the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for fiction, and NoViolet Bulawayo was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. What do these honors say about the state of Zimbabwean writing today? Siphiwe Ndlovu: I have said it before and I will say it again: this is definitely a great time to be a Zimbabwean writer. There are just so many writers out there telling the story of a country that is often maligned or, worse still, written off as a "failed state." These writers often help us think critically about the overly simplified way that the media tends to write about Zimbabwe. Those of us who come from Zimbabwe understand the complexity, knottiness, and messiness that the many forms of violence and injustice—the product of exploitative and extractive settler colonialism and rampant postcolonial corruption and greed—create. The media narratives and portrayals of Zimbabwe both within the country and internationally tend to be limited and limiting and create the need for alternative narratives—and this is where storytelling comes in. In Zimbabwe's fiction, there is anger, outrage, disappointment, disillusionment, hope (and the loss of it), but most importantly, there is a call for reckoning and change that the politics of the country have failed to successfully address. All this makes for a literature that is concerned with many of the issues that globally plague our twenty-first century: the erosion of civil rights; the rise of a dangerous, exclusionary, and myopically inward-looking populism; and the persistence of racism and other forms of hate. The international recognition of Zimbabwean writers, via such awards as the Windham Campbell Prize and the Booker Prize, shows that we are not simply telling stories about a pariah state but about a world living and fighting its way through various crises and inheritances from the past—stories that, although they are about a country, are really of the world. Tepper: Who were some of the authors who played a role in inspiring you to first write about your country and its history? Ndlovu: Even though I grew up in Zimbabwe and spent all my years of primary and secondary education there, I didn't really encounter Zimbabwean fiction until I was a college student in the US. I remember reading Charles Mungoshi's wonderful collection of short stories, Coming of the Dry Season, in high school for one of the national exams. But I believe that was the sum total of my engagement with local fiction. In college, when I told one of my professors that I had never read Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, she was rightly appalled and aghast that I, a Zimbabwean creative writing student, had never read the book. She [End Page 23] immediately gave me her own copy of the novel to read … and everything changed. I could relate to the experiences of all the characters in that novel—Tambudzai, Nyasha, Babamukuru, Lucia, Takesure. I knew and was related to people just like them. All of a sudden literature became not just something I loved but something that was familiar. That experience led to a journey of discovery that brought me into contact with such brilliant works as Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger, Shimmer Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns, Peter Godwin's Mukiwa, Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing—these works helped me understand my country and its history. However, it was not until I devoured Yvonne Vera's entire oeuvre, especially Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins, that I realized that one could write about my city, Bulawayo, a city that I love very much, and make it come alive—make its absolute richness known to the world (see WLT, Sept...

The Politics of Emotion in Damon Galgut’s The Promise

The “affective turn” of Western literary criticism arose at the beginning of the 21^st century as a result of new discoveries in neuroscience, cognitive science, and other disciplines. As one of the main fields of Affect Studies, discourses of the emotion pry into the emotional dimensions of literary texts to reveal the embodiment, sociality, and politics of emotions. South African writer Damon Galgut constructs a series of affective scenes with both individuality and representativeness in his 2021 Booker Prize-winning novel The Promise and thus turns the fictional world into an affective field. The novelist focuses on the titular event “promise” and takes it as the thread running through four funerals of the white Swart family. Through the lens of Affect Studies, the author attempts to interpret shame, anger and compassion behind the Swarts’ making, breaching, and honouring of the promise and examines how those emotions are dictated by South Africa’s gender, racial and class politics. The author concludes that the compassion-based African Ubuntu philosophy may lead South Africa to the promised land of national reconciliation.

A Feminist Study of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand

A renowned Indian writer and the International Booker Prize winner(2022) Geetanjali Shree (1957-) is a prominent novelist inCommonwealth literature who explores various themes in her novels.The portrayal of the conditions of women in a patriarchal society hasbeen the subject of many Commonwealth writers and Shree is noexception. Her novels throw a light on issues such as genderdiscrimination, exploitation and suppression of women in a maledominatedsociety. The present paper is an attempt to analyse herrecently published novel Tomb of Sand from a feminist perspective. Thenovel is a family saga that depicts how its female protagonist becomesselfish at the age of eighty and crosses the border to find a meaning oflife. It also throws a light on the psychological impact of pains andsufferings on women. The paper explores how the female characters inthe novel challenge gender stereotypes and try to break tradition in theirown ways.

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

<i>The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable</i>, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

The Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre up close

Abstract This review article discusses how Jérémie Foa’s prize-winning book Tous ceux qui tombent: visages de la Saint-Barthélemy (2021) gives a history of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre up close. It examines how Foa takes a fresh approach to the Massacre, one that ‘turns its back on the Louvre, sets aside the monarch as well as the Guise and their intrigues, and ignores Coligny and the Queen Mother’. Instead, it evaluates Foa’s powerful interpretation of Saint Bartholomew’s Day as a neighbourhood massacre (‘massacre de proximité’), an act of extreme violence committed by killers who often lived on the same road as their victims.

Michael Christopher Low, Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj

Reviewed by: Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj by Michael Christopher Low John Slight Michael Christopher Low. Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xx + 392 pp. Paper, $35.00. ISBN: 9780231190770. This excellent work is an important landmark publication in both Ottoman and Indian Ocean studies. Low has painstakingly mined the Ottoman archives, alongside extensive investigations into British archives, to provide us with not just a missing piece of the puzzle in the study of the Hajj, but something akin to the riches of the Ottoman surre sent to the Hijaz every pilgrimage season. This is a book that significantly enhances our understandings of Ottoman, Indian Ocean, imperial and global histories. While Ottoman and Turkish historians are notably omnivorous in their intellectual grazings, they are encouraged to recommend this book to their colleagues as a model of scholarship and research. One of the book's major achievements is to provide historians with the Ottoman side of the story to the Hajj, as it was administered and experienced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Hijaz. This was a period of considerable turbulence in the global history of empires, one that the Ottomans responded and adapted to, as is superbly set out in the book. In the case of the Hajj, the Ottomans rightly emerge as not merely reactive actors in a narrative driven by European imperial activities, but as proactive administrators operating in a challenging environment. In terms of the historiography, there has been an efflorescence of works related to nineteenth and twentieth century empires and the Hajj over the last ten years. While the book under review may seem a late entry, Low is one of the pioneers in the field, evidenced by his excellent journal articles on the topic from 2007 onwards. Reading the book, Low has ably rode the wave of these [End Page 334] subsequent publications, bringing in insights from them while not detracting from his own excellent research into, especially, the Ottoman archives. While this reviewer is not an Ottoman or Turkish studies historian, this book strikes me as a major accomplishment in bringing together a deep knowledge of the Ottoman Turkish archival materials into dialogue with British imperial sources in a highly productive manner. It hopefully paves the way for further studies that encompass both Ottoman and British imperial histories that bring to light inter-imperial entanglements, which, in turn, might suggest to us new ways of writing imperial histories. The book focuses on a justifiably broad variety of areas in relation to the Hajj. Part One of the book on "extraterritorial frontiers" examines colonial imaginations about the Hijaz and the exercise of the "unequal treaties" in this space, with particular focus on the operations of European colonial powers' consular officials in the Hijaz. The book's excellent treatment of this issue is of particular value not just to Ottoman historians who have studied locations such as Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia, but also to imperial and global historians interested in the exercise of global legal inequalities that encompass sites from Qing China to Central America. Legal history is a thorny field which Low navigates exceptionally well, with very few scratches. Part Two on "ecologies of empire" moves the older debate on cholera and the Hajj significantly forward by engaging with newer works on environmental history, utilizing Ottoman archival sources. This is possibly the best part of a book that is a feast for any historian, regardless of period or place specialisation. Moving on from the preoccupation with cholera, Low's examination of the provision of water to Mecca for the Hajj and its attendant pilgrims is highly significant for the past, present and our uncertain human future. The book's final part engages with issues of pilgrim mobility and its attendant bureaucratic infrastructure, alongside the issue of how pilgrims moved to and from the Holy Cities. As with the rest of the book, this is equally well-researched and presented cogently. This deservedly prize-winning book can be recommended to everyone. The fact it is exceptionally well-written and reads like a charm should ensure its inclusion on any undergraduate...

Moral Sensitivity, Moral Transformation, and Evolutionary Scientist David Loye: An Introduction

This article introduces the two major themes of this issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies: moral sensitivity and transformation, and honoring the late evolutionary systems scientist David Loye. The article shows how these two themes are integrally interconnected. Loye introduced the term “moral sensitivity” as well as the distinction between “partnership moral sensitivity” and “dominator moral insensitivity” or “moralism,” showing how the latter has been used to push us back to “strong-man” rule, violence, and injustice. He was the first to reclaim what he called “Darwin’s lost theory” based on Charles Darwin’s long-ignored writings about human evolution, including what Darwin called “the moral sense.” Quoting from some of Loye’s more than 30 published books as well as a sampling of articles, the article highlights his gift of bringing to life the people and times he wrote about, including the men and women he called “the great scientific explorers of the better world.” Colorful examples from his many writings illustrate how Loye advanced the study of human evolution through his offerings on moral sensitivity, clarifying much that is otherwise obscured, and showing his enormous contributions to a better understanding of our past, present, and the possibilities for our future. The article provides new terms and new ideas for building a more equitable, less violent, more sustainable future through the works of a man first known for his prize-winning book on the immorality of racism, whose later works focused on how we can create a future where we not only survive, but thrive.