Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Communitarian Foreign Policy: Amitai Etzioni’s Vision. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016. $49.95. 322 pp.

Gvosdev, professor of national security studies at the US Naval War College, establishes Amitai Etzioni’s communitarian approach to international relations, tracing Etzioni’s ideas and relevance to current challenges in Asia and the Middle East. Gvosdev outlines Etzioni’s efforts to find new common ground with Russia and China.

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown Publishers, 2016. $28.00. 418 pp.

Desmond, associate professor of social science at Harvard University offers a compelling perspective on American poverty, describing the stories of people losing shelter in Milwaukee. William Julius Wilson calls it “a striking account of a severe and rapidly developing form of economic hardship,” arguing that “it will broaden the perspective of experts on urban poverty.”

Rachael A. Woldoff, Lisa M. Morrison, and Michael R. Glass, Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods. New York: New York University Press, 2016. $28.00. 240 pp.

The authors from West Virginia University, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the University of Pittsburgh, respectively, address the heated battle as a transitioning neighborhood wrestles with contemporary housing development strategies and the struggle to preserve renters’ rights.

Joel Kotkin, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. Evanston, IL: Agate Publishing, 2016. $24.95. 304 pp.

Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, explores the problematic realities of today’s dense city cores and the importance of finding planning designs that help to preserve families, neighborhoods, and local communities. He argues that dispersion - and not high-density living - provides the means to build a more sustainable, human-scaled urban environment.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York, Penguin, 2015. $27.95. 436 pp.

Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, describes how our passion for technology in all its varieties tempts us away from face-to-face conversation and interaction which are the cornerstone to human empathy, and she argues, democracy. She offers a wide range of illustrations of the flight from conversation that threaten the necessary pursuits of solitude and self-reflection.