Jeffrey S. Dill, The Longings and Limits of Global Citizenship Education: The Moral Pedagogy of Schooling in a Cosmopolitan Age. New York: Routledge, 2013. $125.00. 186pp.

Dill, Research Assistant Professor of Social Thought in the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University in St. Davids, PA examines the growth of efforts to prepare students for the conditions of globalization. Looking at ten secondary schools in the US and Asia, Dill raises concerns about the goals of such education and possible unintended consequences.

Robert Wuthnow, Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. $35.00. 498pp.

Princeton University sociologist, Wuthnow, describes an America as much in the imagination as in reality. Thirty million Americans live in small towns. In the grand tradition of sociological work on the nature of gemeinshaft and gesellschaft, he provides an updated portrait of the kinds of gravity that pulls people away from large urban centers and keeps others in place in small communities.

Augustine Brannigan, Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013. £65.00. 288pp.

Positioning itself within significant developments in genocide studies arising from misgivings about two noteworthy observers, Arendt and Milgram, Brannigan, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary, asks what lies “beyond the banality of evil”? He suggests the answer lies within criminology, and frames the genocidal events within a general theoretical approach to crime before applying his own revised model, specifically to the case of Rwanda.

Zygmunt Bauman, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? New York: Politybooks, 2013. $12.95. 100pp.

Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, lists and scrutinizes the tacit assumptions and unreflected-upon convictions upon which opinions about wealth and inequality are grounded, finding them one by one to be false, deceitful and misleading. Their persistence in Bauman’s view could be hardly sustainable were it not for the role they play in defending—indeed, promoting and reinforcing—the current, unprecedented, indefensible and still accelerating growth in social inequality and the rapidly widening gap between the elite of the rich and the rest of society.

Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2013. $24.95. 268pp.

Mary Eberstadt, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, proposes a new theory about the decline of religion in the Western world. The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head, arguing that the reverse has also been true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself.