Alumni Services

September 2019

Books on the economy, utopia and religious architecture are included in this month's alumni-penned selection.

1.

Author D. Margaret Avery
Degree

European Prehistory

Book A Fossil History of Southern African Land Mammals

There is an ever-growing wealth of mammalian fossil material being collected from palaeontological and archaeological sites in southern Africa. This reference provides comprehensive information on the taxonomy and distribution in time and space of all currently recognised southern African fossil mammals. After an introductory background chapter on southern Africa, mammals, sites and dating, the following chapters are presented by epoch, covering the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene. Individual maps provide information on where in the landscape specific taxa have been found, and a comprehensive index lists all the fauna and site locations. It ends with a chapter on how the book can be used, and lines of future research. Collecting a vast amount of information together in an accessible format, this is an essential reference for non-specialist taxonomists and palaeontologists, as well as for those using fossil data for other applications, such as archaeology, neontology and nature conservation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A Fossil History of Southern African Land Mammals

2.

Author

Yoke Sim

Degree Applied Linguistics
Book

Learners in Transition: Chinese Students’ Journeys from EFL to ESL and EIL

As the number of Chinese students learning English increases worldwide, the need for teachers to understand the characteristics and challenges facing this group of learners grows. This is particularly true for those students moving from an English as a Foreign Language context to an English as a Second Language/International Language one where they experience academic, linguistic and sociocultural transitions. Drawing on over 20 years’ experience teaching English courses to Chinese learners, the author aims to highlight key findings to aid understanding, improve teachers’ practice and offer pedagogical recommendations. Using students’ voices, the book covers: how the traditional Chinese culture of learning plays a role; how new learning contexts provide opportunities and empowerment; how learners’ beliefs and strategies are interconnected; how their motivation and identity underscore the power of real and imagined communities, and finally, that affect matters, showing how learners are propelled by the trajectory of their emotions. The book cites from the rich data collected over a five-year period to authenticate the findings and recommendations but also to give voice to this group of learners to challenge the stereotype of the passive "Chinese learner". The essential insights contained within are useful for pre- and in-service teachers of English and researchers interested in language education around the world.

Learners in Transition: Chinese Students’ Journeys from EFL to ESL and EIL

3.

Author Alice Hoyle
Degree Biological Sciences
Book

Great Relationships and Sex Education: 200+ Activities for Educators Working with Young People

Great Relationships and Sex Education is an innovative and accessible guide for educators who work with young people to create and deliver Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programmes. Developed by two leading experts in the field, it contains hundreds of creative activities and session ideas that can be used both by experienced RSE educators and those new to RSE.

Drawing on best practice and up-to-date research from around the world, Great RSE provides fun, challenging and critical ways to address key contemporary issues and debates in RSE. Activity ideas are organised around key areas of learning in RSE: Relationships, Gender and Sexual Equality, Bodies, Sex and Sexual health. There are activities on consent, pleasure, friendships, assertiveness, contraception, fertility and so much more. All activities are LGBT+ inclusive and designed to encourage critical thinking and consideration of how digital technologies play out in young people’s relationships and sexual lives.

Great Relationships and Sex Education

4.

Author Andrew Lownie
Degree MSc History, PhD
Bookt The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves

To mark the 40th anniversary of Lord Mountbatten’s assassination by the IRA, comes a nuanced portrayal of two remarkable people and their complex marriage. Drawing on four years of research around the world, prize-winning and bestselling historian Andrew Lownie provides a fresh and revealing portrait of the glamorous couple behind the modern royal family.  A major figure behind his nephew Philip’s marriage to Queen Elizabeth ll and instrumental in the royal family taking the Mountbatten name, Dickie Mountbatten’s career included being Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia during World War Two and the last Viceroy of India. Once the richest woman in Britain and a socialite who enjoyed numerous affairs, Edwina Mountbatten emerged from World War Two as a much loved and very effective charity worker. From British high society and the South of France to the battlefields of Burma and the Viceroy's House in India, this is a rich and filmic story whose characters include all the key figures of the Second World War from Churchill and Montgomery to Roosevelt and Eisenhower as well as  the Duke of Windsor, George VI, the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles, Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward,  Salvador Dali, George Gershwin, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Barbara Cartland, Grace Kelly and Merle Oberon.

The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves

5.

Author James Meek
Degree Arts
Book To Calais, In Ordinary Time

Three journeys. One road. England, 1348. A gentlewoman is fleeing an odious arranged marriage, a Scottish proctor is returning home to Avignon and a handsome young ploughman in search of adventure is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers' past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires. A tremendous feat of language and empathy, it summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien and eerily reflective of our own. James Meek's extraordinary To Calais, In Ordinary Time is a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender and desire - set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history.

To Calais, In Ordinary Time

6.

Author Sindhu Rajasekaran
Degree Creative Writing
Book So I Let It Be

Kayal is a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. She moves to a new neighbourhood in her small village. She meets and befriends the mysterious and unconventional Damini, who turns her world upside down. Mehr is a conventional woman, married to Ahmed who cares for her but cannot communicate with her. Mehr's life changes after a short trip to Paris. What is the price we pay for freedom and what is freedom, when we get it? Suggi is sentenced to burn for witchcraft but she does not know that the evil Kadru has no intention of going anywhere. Computer technician Kaliki has come to America from India to escape the clutches of her culture and all its expectations. Yet is she any different from the computers she programmes? In this short story collection, the themes of love, loss of individuality, madness, and an overwhelmingly poignant and profound sense of saudade are explored. Where do you go to find yourself if everything you are is a product of something else?

So I Let It Be

Read Sindhu Rajasekaran's alumna profile

7.

Author Carlos Raúl Sosa Siliezar
Degree PhD Divinity
Book

Savior of the World: A Theology of the Universal Gospel

The Gospel of John has long been understood as a sectarian text, one that reinforces the social and religious isolation of a Johannine community. Savior of the World: A Theology of the Universal Gospel directly challenges this reading, arguing that John’s Jesus does not belong to just one community. John’s Jesus came for all and spans the universe.

In  Savior of the World, Carlos Raúl Sosa Siliezar carefully reconsiders the often-overlooked passages and motifs that emphasize Jesus as a figure of universal significance and as universal Savior. John’s introduction of Jesus as the Word sets the stage for universal language by identifying Jesus as the rightful owner of all creation. Sosa Siliezar emphasizes that John’s Jesus, in his public ministry, offers an all-inclusive love of God to anyone who will receive it. In his private ministry, Jesus bears witness to a nuanced world, tasking his disciples with preaching and expanding the love of Christ to all. Jesus’ all-embracing mission is sustained by the Spirit, who models, through the disciples, the reality and promise of the world that is to come.

Sosa Siliezar shows how John, though deeply indebted to Judaism, crafts a universal Gospel precisely because his Jesus is deeply rooted in the particularity of monotheism. John portrays Jesus, a Jew from Nazareth, as the world’s Savior, the one sent by the one God to bring light into a universe of darkness.

Savior of the World: A Theology of the Universal Gospel

8.

Author David C. Weinczok
Degree International Relations
Book

The History Behind Game of Thrones: The North Remembers

A wall in the distant north cuts the world in two. Ruthless seaborne warriors raid the coasts from their war galleys, yearning to regain lost glories. A young nobleman and his kin are slaughtered under a banner of truce within a mighty castle. A warrior king becomes a legend when he smites his foe with one swing of his axe during a nation-forging battle. Yet this isn’t Westeros – it’s Scotland. Game of Thrones is history re-imagined as fantasy; The History Behind Game of Thrones: The North Remembers turns the tables, using George R. R. Martin’s extraordinary fictional universe as a way to understand the driving forces and defining moments from Scotland’s story. Why were castles so important? Was there a limit to the powers a medieval king could use – or abuse? What was the reality of being under siege? Was there really anything that can compare to the destructive force of dragons? By joining forces, Westeros and Scotland hold the answers. Writer and presenter David C. Weinczok draws on a vast array of characters, events, places, and themes from Scottish history that echo Game of Thrones at every dramatic turn. Visit the castle where the real Red Wedding transpired, encounter the fearsome historical tribes beyond Rome’s great wall, learn how a blood-red heart became the most feared sigil in Scotland, and much more. By journey’s end, the cogs in the wheels of Martin’s world and Scottish history will be laid bare, as well as the stories of those who tried to shape – and sometimes even break – them.

The History Behind Game of Thrones: The North Remembers

 

9.

Author Sophie White
Degree French
Book

Voices of the Enslaved

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.

Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators.

Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

Voices of the Enslaved

Your book

If you are a member of the alumni community and have recently published a book, we would be delighted to include it in the Alumni Bookshelf. Email the information, along with your degree details, to Brian Campbell:

Email Brian Campbell

Please note

Books are added to the bookshelf in order of submission. All of the further information links listed are the external websites of the book publisher, the author, or the bookseller. The University of Edinburgh is not responsible for the content and functionality of these sites.