Peter Haas, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts has just published, with co-author James Speth, Global Environmental Governance.   Today's most pressing environmental problems are planetary in scope, confounding the political will of any one nation.   How can we solve them?   Global Environmental Governance offers the essential information, theory, & practical insight needed to tackle this critical challenge.   It examines ten major environmental threats—climate disruption, biodiversity loss, acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation, desertification, freshwater degradation & shortages, marine fisheries decline, toxic pollutants, & excess nitrogen—& explores how they can be addressed through treaties, governance regimes, & new forms of international cooperation.   (2006)

Jennifer Heuer, history professor at the University of Massachusetts, has a new book from Cornell University Press: The Family & the Nation: Gender & Citizenship In Revolutionary France.   In it, Heuer examines the meaning of citizenship during & after the revolution & the relationship between citizenship & gender as these ideas & practices were reworked in the late 1790s & early nineteenth century. She shows the critical importance of relating nationality to political citizenship & of examining the application, not just the creation, of new categories of membership in the nation.   (2006)

Leah Hewitt has a new book due in February from Palgrave Macmillan: Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe.   Hewitt, professor of French at Amherst College, is author of Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig & Maryse Condé.   She has published essays on autobiography, postwar French films, the New Novel, & French Caribbean literature.   Her new book explores French identity as it is articulated through cultural representations of Occupied France in French film.   Hewitt shows how French film has allowed for a public airing of current concerns through the lens of memory’s recreations of the Occupation.   By focusing on the representation of women as the symbol of a collective identity crisis, she links France’s traditional female icon, Marianne, to the multiple unresolved ambiguities that have continued to plague France’s historical reckoning with the war.   (2008)

Noy Holland, professor in the M. F. A. Department at the University of Massachusetts, has just published a new collection of her short fiction, What Begins with Bird.   In her work, Holland creates an exhilarating tension between the satisfactions of meaning & the attenuated beauty of lyric, making her fiction felt as deeply as it is understood.   The Faulknerian echoes of Holland's prose invoke a dreamscape, a panorama enclosing barns & men & guns & Mother, as she trudges the cold hills in her nightgown.   This writing is exquisite, a gorgeousness as unforgettable as a stabbing pain or the after-image of a howl in the pitch of night.   (2005)

Northampton resident Kris Holloway, who spent time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, has written about a midwife she knew there in her new book, Monique & the Mango Rains.   The book tells of Monique’s unquenchable passion to better the lives of women & children in the face of poverty, unhappy marriages, & endless backbreaking work.   Monique’s buoyant humor & willingness to defy tradition were uniquely hers.   As Anne Fadiman observes, “there have been many accounts of studying poeple from other cultures, but few of actually being friends with them.   Anyone who is curious about what such a friendship feels like from the inside should read this respectful but intimate account.”   (2007)

Shel Horowitz, marketing polymath, has a new book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors & Publishers.   A thorough & readable guide to book marketing for authors who publish traditionally, who self–publish, or who use a subsidy publisher (sometimes incorrectly called a “self-publishing company”)—as well as for small to medium–sized publishers of other authors.   Covers not only bookstore marketing but many other areas that may be more profitable.   Ethical marketing expert, speaker, consultant, community organizer, & frugalist, Horowitz is author Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First & Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World.   (2007)