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Edible Insects and Human Evolution investigates insects in the human diet from an evolutionary perspective. This book argues that insects were just as important as meat in the past and that today they offer a sustainable alternative to meat.

Researchers who study ancient human diets tend to focus on meat eating because the practice of butchery is very apparent in the archaeological record. In this volume, Julie Lesnik highlights a different food source, tracing evidence that humans and their hominin ancestors also consumed insects throughout the entire course of human evolution. Lesnik combines primatology, sociocultural anthropology, reproductive physiology, and paleoanthropology to examine the role of insects in the diets of hunter-gatherers and our nonhuman primate cousins. She posits that women would likely spend more time foraging for and eating insects than men, arguing that this pattern is important to note because women are too often ignored in reconstructions of ancient human behavior. Because of the abundance of insects and the low risk of acquiring them, insects were a reliable food source that mothers used to feed their families over the past five million years. Although they are consumed worldwide to this day, insects are not usually considered food in Western societies. Tying together ancient history with our modern lives, Lesnik points out that insects are highly nutritious and a very sustainable protein alternative. She believes that if we accept that edible insects are a part of the human legacy, we may have new conversations about what is good to eat—both in past diets and for the future of food.

Family Violence: Legal, Medical, and Social Perspectives examines the entire spectrum of family violence, focusing on social processes and social relationships. The Ninth Edition of Family Violence is a comprehensive updated version of the classic text on family violence. In addition to the updates to each chapter, the new edition features new research, comments, and discussions on the #MeToo Movement, same gender couples, elder abuse, stalking, partner abuse, and law enforcement’s updated responses to these incidents. The new edition, however, still retains the coverage of the seminal research studies that are the bases of popular theories on partner and family violence. In the new edition, the authors have sought to make the material more understandable to the readers so that instructors will not need to waste valuable class time explaining the text.

During the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War, from 1941 to 1945, as many as 24 million of its citizens died. 14 million were children ages fourteen or younger. And for those who survived, the suffering was far from over. The prewar Stalinist vision of a “happy childhood” nurtured by a paternal, loving state had given way, out of necessity. What replaced it—the dictate that children be prepared to sacrifice everything, including childhood itself—created a generation all too familiar with deprivation, violence, and death. The experience of these children, and the role of the state in shaping their narrative, are the subject of this book, which fills in a critical but neglected chapter in the Soviet story and in the history of World War II. In Sacrificing Childhood, Julie deGraffenried chronicles the lives of the Soviet wartime children and the uses to which they were put—not just as combatants or workers in factories and collective farms, but also as fodder for propaganda, their plight a proof of the enemy’s depredations. Not all Soviet children lived through the war in the same way; but in the circumstances of a child in occupied Belarus or in the Leningrad blockade, a young deportee in Siberia or evacuee in Uzbekistan, deGraffenried finds common threads that distinguish the child’s experience of war from the adult’s. The state’s expectations, however, were the same for all children, as we see here in children’s mass media and literature and the communications of party organizations and institutions, most notably the Young Pioneers, whose relentless wartime activities made them ideal for the purposes of propaganda. The first in-depth study of where Soviet children fit into the history of the war, Sacrificing Childhood also offers an unprecedented view of the state’s changing expectations for its children, and how this figured in the nature and direction of post-war Soviet society.