The Kurds: An Encyclopedia of Life, Culture, and Society. Edited by Sebastian Maisel. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2018. 376 pages. Acid-free $94. (ISBN 978-1-4408-4256-6). Ebook Available (978-1-4408-4257-3), call for pricing.

The Kurds: An Encyclopedia of Life, Culture, and Society is a single-volume resource that attempts to fill the gap in Southwestern Asian literature of comprehensive, critical, and timely information specific to the Kurdish people. The Kurds are a stateless minority split among Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, as well as other nations in the wider diasporic community. A multidisciplinary team of scholars and researchers have divided chapters regarding the historical, sociocultural, and political contexts of the Kurdish people’s struggle into three sections.

“Part I: Thematic Essays” provides an overview of the internal and external tensions that shape Kurdish politics, society, and culture across different states. While broad, these sections (including “Origins and History,” “Geography,” “Language, and “Life and Work”) will assist beginning researchers looking for manageable and discipline-specific points of entry into Kurdish life. For the most part, these brief, accessible, and nuanced essays avoid the easy essentialism that often plagues sociocultural encyclopedias, and a commitment to political and ideological contexts underlying these subjects adds critical rigor beneficial to the beginning researcher. A salient example is Weiss’s chapter regarding gender roles, which provides a succinct yet rigorous analysis of changing gender norms in Kurdish culture along with a brief primer to contemporary gender theory. Though readable in isolation, each chapter builds on the information of prior essays, and the committed reader benefits from a linear approach to this section.

“Part II: Country Profiles” explores the relationship between the Kurds and their nations of origin, nations with prominent diasporic Kurdish communities, and the countries with military involvement in the Kurdish region of origin. Some chapters also provide state-specific supplements to the broader overviews of the first section regarding history, literature, and politics in the nation.

“Part III: Documents” provides selected primary sources, including songs, poems, and political documents. Brief introductions to these materials provide political and cultural context for their relevance.

Each section includes parenthetical citations as well as a bibliography for further reading. A reader who might not wish to engage with this volume linearly benefits from an index, table of contents, glossary, preface, and introduction, the last of which provides the reader with a sense of political urgency that contextualizes the objectives intrinsic to the rest of the volume. The Kurds: An Encyclopedia of Life, Culture, and Society is recommended for academic and public library collections as a rich, critical supplement to this research area.—Lydia Brambila, Remote Reference Assistant, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia