‘Books of the month’ spotlights recent releases authored by University of Liverpool staff.
If you’d like your new or recent (2023 or 2024) publication to be featured, please email the details to the Research Communications Team at rescomms@liverpool.ac.uk.
The University of Liverpool Library has curated a reading list for Book of the Month which is publicly available and searchable. The newest titles are added at the top of the list for visibility and further information can be found in the notes area.
Birkenhead Park: The People’s Garden and an English Masterpiece
Published: April 2024
Professor Robert Lee is Emeritus Honorary Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of Liverpool.
When it was officially opened on Easter Monday, 5 April 1847, Birkenhead Park became the first municipally funded park in Britain. It was a pioneer in the development of urban public parks, designed for use by everyone, irrespective of social class, ethnicity or age. In terms of town planning, it demonstrated the importance of including green infrastructure in urban development as a vital contribution to public health and well-being. Paxton’s design for the park was heralded as ‘a masterpiece of human creative genius’: it served as a vehicle for the global transmission of the English landscape school and led to the creation of numerous public parks everywhere, most famously Central Park, New York, incorporating many of Paxton’s design features. This book addresses a long-standing gap in the Park’s historiography. Regarded as ‘one of the greatest wonders of the age’, the Park is an important contribution to nineteenth-century landscape history with a local focus, but of international significance. The book also seeks to interpret the Park’s development until 1914 within a political and cultural context, drawing on economic and social history, as a means of explaining why it was not until the late nineteenth century that it finally became a focal point for recreation and public health.
The Poverty of Strategy: Organization in the Shadows of Technology
Mike Zundel and Robin Holt
Published: July 2023
At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits behind grand generalities. The situation is exacerbated when machines and algorithms, not humans, organize. Holt and Zundel draw on philosophy, literature, media theory, art, mathematics, computing and military thinking in an attempt to rescue strategy by isolating what, they argue, remains its essence: strategy is a continual organizational struggle towards authenticity. This, too, is a condition of poverty, but one that sets in place an unhomely condition of questionability as opposed to one of distinctive settlement. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse rather than impose, organizational imperatives.
Love me fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy
Steven Powell
Published: January 2023
Dr Steven Powell is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool. He is the editor of Conversations with James Ellroy (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) and 100 American Crime Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). His most recent work is James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Shortlisted for several awards and named as one of The Telegraph’s best books of the year, Love Me Fierce in Danger is the first critical biography of one of America’s greatest crime writers. Steven Powell traces Ellroy’s life and career and reveals how his upbringing in LA, always on the periphery of Hollywood, had a profound and dark influence on his work as a novelist. Using new sources, Powell also uncovers Ellroy’s family secrets, including the mysterious first marriage of his mother Jean Ellroy, eighteen years before her murder. At its heart, Love Me Fierce in Danger is the story of how Ellroy overcame his demons to become the bestselling and celebrated author of such classics as The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential.