Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Left, 1967–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. $29.99. 493 pp.

Herf, professor of history at the University of Maryland, provides new insights into the West German radicals who collaborated in 'actions' with Palestinian terrorist groups, and confirms that East Germany, along with others in the Soviet Bloc, had a much greater impact on the conflict in the Middle East than has been generally known. Having already written extensively on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, he now offers a new chapter in this long, sad history.

Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin, Coming of Age in the Other America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2016. $35.00. 296 pp.

Three sociologists show that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth achieve upward mobility. Their ten years of fieldwork following 150 impoverished kids to adulthood from inner-city Baltimore lead them to conclude that there is a remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and that the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.

Barbara Katz Rothman, A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization. New York: New York University Press, 2016. $28.00. 256 pp.

Rothman, professor of sociology, public health, and women’s studies at the City University of New York, examines the trajectories of two social movements intended to transform the ways in which food production and consumption and the management of birth presently operate. She traces the rise of these consumer-based movements and their growing impact on society.

Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. $45.00. 368 pp.

Bashford, professor of imperial and naval history at the University of Cambridge and Chaplin, professor of early American history at Harvard University, reveal how Malthus, long vilified as the scourge of the English poor, drew from his principle of population to conclude that the extermination of native populations by European settlers was unjust. One reviewer argues that their book is an indispensable guide to the structure of the environmental crisis and its long-term genealogy.

Philip J. Ivanhoe and Sungmoon Kim, eds., Confucianism, A Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016. $80.00. 246 pp.

Can Confucianism be regarded as a civil religion? This book explores this question, bringing the insights of Robert Bellah to a consideration of various expressions of the contemporary Confucian revival. Edited by Ivanhoe and Kim, both of the City University of Hong Kong, the book brings together nine contributors, including an essay by the late Bellah, to explore this question in detail.