Museum Mercenary: A Handbook for Independent Museum Professionals by Rebecca Migdal. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020. REVIEWED BY MARISSA HAMM Every aspiring museum professional has heard about the multitude of difficulties they will face when trying to enter the field. In Museum Mercenary, Rebecca Migdal presents her solution to this issue of limited full-time museum …

Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker, written by Mike Murawski. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. REVIEWED BY PEYTON REICHERTS Mike Murawski’s Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker is about how museum workers can become changemakers. Murawski has had many roles in the museum profession. Currently, …

Curating America’s Painful Past, by Tim Gruenewald. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2020. REVIEWED BY MADELINE GRIEM The United States is a place of deeply painful pasts. However, there are few prominent spaces in which these subjects are explored where they will contribute to national memory. In his 2020 book, Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, …

Museum Objects, Health and Healing, edited by Brenda Cowan, Ross Laird, and Jason McKeown. New York: Routledge, 2020. REVIEWED BY ELISE DAUGHERTY   Humans interact with and value objects in every aspect of our lives. In many interactions, objects hold meaning and power, impacting our health and wellbeing. Brenda Cowan, Ross Laird, and Jason McKeown …

Museum Development in China: Understanding the Building Boom, edited by Gail Lord, Guan Qiang, An Laishun &  Javier Jimenez. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. REVIEWED BY CAMILLE COMBAUD This book, compiled by three museum planners with plenty of experience, aims to explore the recent changes in museum development in the country of China: through four …

Museum Activism, edited by Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell. London, New York: Routledge, 2019. REVIEWED BY PIA SCHWAIGER   The anthology Museum Activism gathers contributions from museum actors from all over the world and from a variety of professional groups. The book contributes to the discussion on the changing social, political and cultural significance …

The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums & Why We Need to Talk About It, by Alice Procter. London: Cassell, 2020. REVIEWED BY MORGAN COFFMAN   How many times have we wandered through the halls of museums, marveling at the art hanging upon the walls and squinting to read the …

Heritage Management: The Natural and Cultural Divide. Edited by Heleen van Londen, Marjo J. Schlaman, and Andrea Travaglia. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing, 2020. Reviewed by Mathilde Sbinne   Nature and culture are often seen, perceived, and studied as two opposite and separate poles – especially in the Western world. Edited by landscape, archeology and heritage experts …

Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation, by Hannah Turner. Vancouver-Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2020. Reviewed by Sarah Terheide Museum documentation practices have had a central role in reinforcing colonialist knowledge and ideologies in collections’ records and interpretation. This may be surprising to some considering how mundane systems of documentation can appear …