Molly Robinson Kelly, assistant professor of French, presents an innovative study of how the spaces described in a literary work contribute dynamically and profoundly to that work’s meaning. She focuses on three seminal works of the Middle Ages—The Life of Saint Alexis, The Song of Roland, and Tristan and Iseult.

Catholic University of America Press, 2009. 320 pages. $75.

Gregory Smith, professor of teacher education, coauthors a primer and guide for educators and laypeople who are interested in advocating for or incorporating local content and experiences into schools. Place and community-based education addresses two critical gaps in the experience of many children now growing up in the United States: contact with the natural world and contact with community.

Routledge, 2010. 184 pages. $29.

Bob Mandel, professor of international affairs, examines when and how transnational organized crime is likely to use corruption and violence to achieve its ends, and when and how these criminal activities most affect individual and state security.

Stanford Security Studies, 2010. 272 pages. $24.

Robert J. Miller, professor of law, coauthors a text that explains and compares how England used the international legal principle known today as the Doctrine of Discovery to colonize North America, New Zealand, and Australia. The book provides insight into how the doctrine was—and continues to be—used to justify sovereign and property claims over indigenous lands and peoples.

Oxford University Press, 2010. 350 pages. $132.

Roger Nelsen, professor emeritus of mathematics, co-edits this useful resource for those who teach calculus in high schools or colleges. The authors present a collection of remarkable proofs in elementary mathematics, which they find exceptionally elegant, full of ingenuity, and succinct.

Mathematical Association of America, 2010. 295 pages. $60.

Adam Bradley B.A. ’96 surveys the expansive geography of Ellison’s unfinished second novel while revisiting the more familiar, but often misunderstood, territory of Invisible Man. He works from the premise that understanding Ellison’s process of composition imparts important truths not only about the author himself but about race, writing, and American identity.

Yale University Press, 2010. 256 pages. $18.

Peter Ames Carlin B.A. ’85 tackles the life of music legend Paul McCartney, drawing on recent interviews with his friends and former bandmates and on original research. The book chronicles McCartney’s life from his childhood in Liverpool, to his rise to fame with the Beatles, to his marriage to Heather Mills and their divorce.

Touchstone, 2010. 384 pages. $11.

Marie Kelleher B.A. ’94 explores the complex relationship between women and legal culture in Spain’s Crown of Aragon during the late medieval period. Drawing on hundreds of unpublished court records, Kelleher examines how women engaged with patriarchal assumptions to shape their legal identities, thereby playing a crucial role in the formation of gendered legal culture that shaped women’s lives throughout Europe for centuries afterward.

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. $55.

House Nick Lantz B.A. ’03, who won the 2010 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for this collection, explores the transformative power of the tragic and the miraculous in these poems. He plunges headfirst into worlds that are both eccentric and familiar, alarming and hopeful.

University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. 80 pages. $11.