I’m very pleased to receive word that my book review of the sociologist Nicolette Manglos-Weber’s Joining the Choir: Religious Membership and Social Trust Among Transnational Ghanaians (Oxford University Press) is out in the most recent issue of Sociology of Religion. It was a real pleasure to read, especially since it concerned Ghanaians in the city of Chicago, where I was living when I wrote the review.
Many thanks to Grace Yukich for asking me to do this review, and of course to Nicolette Manglos-Weber for writing such a fun book. By way of a more personal recommendation, friends came over around the time I was moving to look for interesting books to pilfer from my collection and thus lighten my load. Joining the Choir was instantly taken from me by a sister and brother in my own church choir — it is not only the Ghanaians who use this terminology among transnational religious communities in Chicago (mine is ‘transnational’ with Kyiv) — though in the throes of packing, it slipped my mind. A few weeks later, I was at these friends’ house and saw the book. Isn’t this mine? I said, and no one could be sure. But it had been read, so they were sure it was theirs now.
Justin K.H. Tse 