New Books Network (New Books)

Hitler’s Hunting Squad in Southern Europe: The Bloody Path of Fritz Schubert through Occupied Crete and Macedonia (Pen and Sword, 2024) traces the violent path of Fritz Schubert and his Greek 'hunting squad' across occupied Crete and Macedonia, offering a complete translation (by Stratis A. Porfyratos) of Thanasis Fotiou's comprehensive study on the German Lieutenant during World War II. The author's research reveals previously unknown aspects of Schubert's life and his actions as an officer, including the murder and torture of civilians, and the looting and burning of homes. Fritz Schubert, born in 1897, joined the German Forces in 1914 and concluded his service in Turkey, where he settled and married. By 1934, he had joined the National Socialist Party, influenced by Nazi ideology and propaganda. Fluent in several languages, he trained at the School of Interpreters under the reserve army's administration, attaining the rank of Unteroffizier. Hitler intended for Crete to play a significant role in the Middle East and Egypt due to its strategic oil reserves. In 1947, a special commissioner's report on Schubert's hunting squad stated, 'They murdered, they tortured in the most brutal ways numerous civilians, they looted and burned many homes. Generally, the arrival of Schubert's gang signaled unrelenting plunder, marked by tears, pain, and bloodshed.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What is the function of the wilderness narratives for understanding the Pentateuch and Israel and Judah’s historical experience? Drawing from literary and historical criticism, Angela Erisman creates a synthesis to offer a novel journey through the narratives of Exodus and Numbers. Join us as we speak with Angela Erisman about her recent book, The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 2024). Angela Roskop Erisman earned her MA in Hebrew and Northwest Semitics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her PhD in Bible and Ancient Near East from Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. She uses her position as a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai to find books, has one friend she can trust, and is tormented by her older brother. After being involved in the violence of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, she loses hope in China and raises Lin, her daughter, to pursue a life in the West. Both Lemai and Lin suffer from unnamed mental anguish at various points in their life and are both haunted by the past. In Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Toronto, they grapple with people from their former lives, and Lin’s attempts at erasing her Chinese identity nearly make her go mad. This is a passionate debut novel about the mother-daughter bond, Chinese cultural identity, and the struggles of being a foreigner in America. SU CHANG is a Chinese Canadian writer, born and raised in Shanghai. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors Association National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, and the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest. Her plays have been performed in various festivals and theatres across Canada. More essays and fiction are forthcoming in the Toronto Star, Electric Literature, Hamilton Review of Books, Ex-Puritan, Open-Book, 49th Shelf, etc. Su is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Canadian Authors Association. She devotes her interstices of time between writing and a full-time job to reading, playing the piano, nature walks, and wrestling with her children. Connect with her at https://www.instagram.com/suchangwrites/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today I’m speaking with Shimon Shetreet, Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University and a former politician. We are discussing his recently published work, co-edited with Hiram Chodosh, titled Judicial Independence: Cornerstone of Democracy. Democracies around the world, from Israel and Mexico to Poland and Hungary, are grappling with challenges to judicial independence. Attacks on judicial independence often masquerade as attempts to strengthen democracy, despite the necessity of judicial independence to uphold constitutionality, hold no one above the law, and protect the most vulnerable people. This volume offers a truly comprehensive view of the global challenges facing judicial independence. Shimon Shetreet is an Israeli former politician who held several ministerial portfolios between 1992 and 1996. He is currently the Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

When we think about "red tape" and the cost of regulation it's hard to overstate the impact of professional licensing. According to Professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, it's bigger than unions and more expensive than sales taxes. Millions of American workers are required - by law - to obtain a license in order to work. This barrier of entry depends on requirements set by licensing boards staffed mainly by members of the profession they oversee. It limits the number of people who can serve and also confers on licensees a certain degree of prestige and trust.  In The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong (Harvard UP, 2025), Allensworth goes deep into a complex web of conflicting priorities.  Whether it's hair stylists or doctors, plumbers or lawyers, licensing board members are asked to simultaneously represent their personal practice, fellow professionals, and the public. They have to literally "wear three hats", which leads to well-intentioned, but deeply flawed and biased, decision making. Consumers depend on licensing boards to ensure that professionals maintain high quality and reliability standards by creating - and enforcing - licensing standards.  In reality, their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to hopeful practitioners while simultaneously failing to protect the public from bad actors who abuse the trust placed in them. Despite good intent, board members lack the resources and sometimes the will to investigate even serious disciplinary cases. The consequences include, but are not limited to, the failure of medical licensing boards to remove the abusive doctors who fueled the opioid crisis and a system that allows unethical predatory lawyers to continue to practice, often targeting clients who are unable to protect themselves. While in some areas licensing is deeply flawed, in others it is critical to a well-functioning society. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and reform where it is most needed. See Professor Allensworth's faculty profile video Author recommended reading: - Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - Drug Dealer, MD by Anna Lembke, MD Hosted by Meghan Cochran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This special issue of Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies  is the product of a collective experiment with materials that are assembled, imagined, and agentive in the context of South Asian religions. The articles are available here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history. Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage. As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago conflicts have unexpected resonances in our own time. To read The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (Henry Holt, 2020) is to see past and present in a new and unnerving light. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a major work that provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programs of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style – became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia. Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and East Asia. Miles Glendinning is a Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh and the Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies. This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor to the City of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, I spoke with Janie Nitze, co-author of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law (Harper, 2004), a book written alongside Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Janie, a Harvard-educated attorney and former clerk for Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, discussed the growing complexity of laws in America and their impact on everyday citizens. The book shares stories of ordinary Americans—fishermen in Florida, families in Montana, monks in Louisiana, and more—who find themselves caught in legal mazes created by an overwhelming and often opaque system of regulations. Janie explained that while laws are necessary to maintain order and freedom, the sheer volume and complexity of modern regulations can undermine those principles. She highlighted how excessive laws, many of which are created by unelected agency officials, disproportionately affect those without wealth or power. Through these stories, Over Ruled shows how overregulation can erode trust in the legal system and create unintended consequences for individuals navigating their lives. Janie’s perspective, shaped by her work at the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, provided a clear look at the challenges of balancing regulation and individual liberty. Over Ruled is a timely exploration of these issues, and this episode offers a deeper understanding of the human cost of too much law. Tune in to hear Janie’s insights and learn more about the stories behind the book. Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode, I talked to Corinne Sugino, whose book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines how mainstream stories about Asian American success have come to serve harmful ideas about progress. At the turn of the century, Asian Americans have come to embody meritocracy and heteronormative family values, and more recently, some Asian Americans have become the face of law and order. These ideas become solidified in a variety of narratives, from blockbuster movies such as Crazy Rich Asians, to (supposedly) myth-busting documentaries such as Seeking Asian Female, to legal arguments against Affirmative Action. But these stories—usually stories about American citizens of East Asian descent—erase the diverse lived experience of Asian America. In this conversation, Corine Sugino also explains how we can draw on Black Studies, including scholarship by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, to develop a more capacious understanding of “the human” and antiracism. This provides a foundation for imagining solidarity across racial lines. About Corinne Sugino: Corinne Sugino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies. Their research focus lies at the intersections of Asian American studies, cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and media studies. Corinne's first book project, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers University Press, November 2024) explores how cultural and media narratives about Asian American racial and gendered difference naturalizes a limited understanding of what it means to be human. Beyond this project, her research interests also include discourses of false inclusion, Asian American grassroots media during the Asian American movement, and transnational racialization in Japan. About Weishun Lu: Weishun Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanitities & Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Her research focus is contemporary poetry, avant-garde writing, the history of multiculturalism, and critical ethnic studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. In Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19 (UNC Press, 2025), Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history. Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores's narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores's contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought--and is still fighting--against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2024), Dr. Neil Fox considers a broad range of music documentaries, delving into their cinematic style, political undertones, racial dynamics, and gender representations, in order to assess their role in the cultivation of myth. Combining historical and critical analyses, and drawing on film and music criticism, Fox examines renowned music films such as A Hard Day's Night (1964), Dig! (2004), and Amazing Grace (2006), critically lauded works like Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018) and Mistaken for Strangers (2013), and lesser-studied films including Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959) and Ornette: Made in America (1985). In doing so, he offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, situating these films within their wider cultural contexts and highlighting their formal and thematic innovations. Discussions in the book span topics from concert filmmaking to music production, the music industry, touring, and filmic representations of authenticity and truth. Overall, Music Films traces the evolution of the genre, highlighting its cultural significance and connection to broader societal phenomena. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces a complex history of caste, race, education, and Christian missions in colonial south India. It draws upon the vast Protestant Christian missionary archives of the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society to showcase the processes of negotiation, tensions, and underlying violence in the encounters between European 'outsiders' and local populations on the question of education. It examines the interplay of caste and education in reshaping ideas and norms of modern childhood and lower-caste community building in the regions of Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar. Set against a comparative historical perspective, the book argues for a greater focus on subaltern histories, especially the meanings and practices associated with educating poor, lower-caste children within the confines of formal schooling and beyond. Divya Kannan teaches in the Department of History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, India. She is a historian of South Asia with particular interests in histories of childhood and youth, gender and sexuality, empires and colonial violence, histories of education, curriculum and pedagogy, Christian missions, and public and oral histories. Khadeeja Amenda is PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Beowulf is the product of a profoundly religious imagination, but the significance of the poem’s Christianity has been downplayed or denied altogether. The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary (Angelico Press, 2023) is the first translation and popular commentary to take seriously the religious dimension of this venerable text. While generations of students know that Beowulf represents a confluence of Christianity and paganism, this version—informed by J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of language as the repository of myth—opens the hood to track the poem’s inner religious workings. It brings to light the essential Old English vocabulary, incorporating into the translation the divine titles used for God, specific names for evil and nonhuman creatures, and the precise language employed for providence and fate, along with terminology for kinship and heroism. Such features are not found in any other modern English translation, including Tolkien’s, whose text was never intended for publication. The Word-Hoard Beowulf draws upon Tolkien’s ideas and commentaries, however, to render a poem whose metaphysical vision takes front and center, delivering a richly restorative version of this early medieval masterpiece. The text is preceded by an introduction detailing the poem’s religious motivations and cultural context, and is accompanied by an expansive commentary. In short, this version allows readers to perceive precisely how in Beowulf (as Tolkien puts it) “the new Scripture and the old tradition touched and ignited” to produce the earliest English epic. Peter Ramey is Associate Professor of English at Northern State University, where he teaches courses on medieval English literature, Latin, and linguistics. He has published articles on Beowulf and on Old and Middle English in Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, and other scholarly journals, while also writing for a broader audience in his essays in Public Discourse and Front Porch Republic. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Hidden Libraries: The World’s Most Unusual Book Depositories (Lonely Planet, 2024) by Diana Helmuth, discover 50 of the world's most magnificent hidden libraries - each with a unique and uplifting story to tell - featuring a foreword by librarian, bestselling author, and literary critic Nancy Pearl. Book swap your latest read in a cool 1950s style fridge in New Zealand or hike through the ethereal woodlands of Eas Mor in Scotland where a hidden library in a small log cabin awaits. Each entry shares the library's mission and impact on the local community and offers fascinating stories from its resident caretaker. From the rare to the romantic, this extraordinary guide explores our planet's hidden libraries. Nothing brings people together quite like a good book This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped build an empire From plebeians refusing to join the Roman army to bakers withholding bread, this is the first book to explore how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion to get their voices—and their labor—acknowledged. Sarah E. Bond explores Ancient Rome from a new angle to show that the history of labor conflicts and collective action goes back thousands of years, uncovering a world far more similar to our own than we realize. Workers often turned to their associations for solidarity and shared identity in the ancient world. Some of these groups even negotiated contracts, wages, and work conditions in a manner similar to modern labor unions. As the world begins to consider the value—and indeed the necessity—of unionization to protect workers, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire (Yale UP, 2024) demonstrates that we can learn valuable lessons from ancient laborers and from attempts by the Roman government to limit their freedom. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Sarah E. Bond is the Erling B. “Jack” Holtsmark Associate Professor in the Classics in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean. She lives in Iowa City, IA. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

China’s Heritage through History employs a longue durée approach to examine China’s heritage through history. From Imperial to contemporary China, it explores the role of practices and material forms of the past in shaping social transformation through knowledge production and transmission. The art of collecting, reproducing, and reinterpreting the past has been an enduring force shaping cultural identity and political legitimacy in China. Offering a unique, non-Western perspective on the history of heritage in China, Zhu considers who the key players have been in these ongoing processes of reconfigured pasts, what methods they have employed, and how these practices have shaped society at large. The book tackles these questions by delving into the transformation of practices related to heritage through examples such as the book collection at Tianyi Private Library, the reproduction of the Orchid Pavilion Preface calligraphy and its associated sites, and the dynamics of exchange within the Liulichang antique market. Zhu reveals how these practices, once reserved for elites, have become accessible to the broader public. These processes of transformation, embodied in various forms of reconfigured pasts, have given rise to modern approaches to preservation, digitisation, museums, and the burgeoning heritage tourism industry. China’s Heritage through History will be an invaluable resource for academics, students, and practitioners working in the fields of heritage, museum studies, and art history. Yujie Zhu is an associate professor at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University in Australia. He obtained his PhD in anthropology from Heidelberg University, Germany. His research focuses on the cultural politics of the past within diverse heritage and memory spaces. Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this conversation, we sit down with John D. Wilsey, Professor of Church History and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Senior Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, to tackle the urgent and often contentious topic of religious freedom in America. Drawing from his forthcoming book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (William B. Eerdmans, 2025), Wilsey examines how conservatives have historically understood religious freedom, how those views have evolved, and why the gap between past and present perspectives matters in today’s culture, and how it is the bedrock of American Government. Wilsey addresses issues at the heart of this debate: How has the conservative understanding of religious freedom shifted, and what are the consequences of that shift? Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy across the globe. The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam UP, 2024) addresses these early modern problems in three sections: first, states' attempts to exercise jurisdiction over seafarers and their actions; second, the multiple predatory marine practices considered 'piracy'; and finally, the many representations made about piracy by states or the seafarers themselves.  Across nine chapters covering regions including southeast Asia, the Atlantic archipelago, the North African states, and the Caribbean Sea, the complexities of defining and criminalizing maritime predation is explored, raising questions surrounding subjecthood, interpolity law, and the impacts of colonization on the legal and social construction of ocean, port, and coastal spaces. Seeking the meanings and motivations behind piracy, this book reveals that while European states attempted to fashion piracy into a global and homogenous phenomenon, it was largely a local and often idiosyncratic issue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions frequently contend with destruction caused by earthquakes, floods, landslides and debris flows, and sea-level rise and coastal erosion. As Dr. Gary Griggs demonstrates in California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State (University of California Press, 2024), few years go by without a disaster of some kind, and residents often rebuild in the same locations that were just destroyed. Considering the current climate crisis and increasing environmental inequalities, the stakes are growing ever higher. This book dives into the history of the state’s vulnerability to natural hazards, why and where these events occur, and how Californians can better prepare going forward. A mix of photographs and maps both historical and contemporary orients readers within the state’s sprawling landscapes and provides glimpses of some of the geologic risks in each region. With the final chapter, Dr. Griggs issues a call to action and challenges readers to envision a safer, more equitable, and sustainable future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Cinepoems, tape recorder poems, protest performance poems, music video poems, internet sign language poems, and augmented reality poems: these poems might exist at the margins of conventional poetic practice, but they take center stage in Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media (University of California Press, 2024) by Andrew Campana. Expanding Verse explores the role of experimental poetic practice in Japan from the 1920s to the present, investigating how such poems engaged in the media cultures in which they were made and how poetry allowed poets to rethinking what media was. Expanding Media is expansive, engaging, and a delight to read, even if you don’t (yet) know what a cinepoem is. This book engages with the fields of literary, media, and disability studies, all while serving as an accessible introduction to the outer edge of contemporary Japanese literature. Expanding Media should appeal to readers interested in Japanese literature, poetry more broadly, and media studies, as well as those looking for a book that will send them down rabbit holes searching for "augmented reality roses" and "pop star lobster princess."  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus of Middle English crusade romances. In English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Marcel Elias places these romances in dialogue with multifarious European writings to offer a novel account of late medieval crusade culture: as ambivalent and self-critical, animated by tensions and debates, and fraught with anxiety. These romances uphold ideals of holy war while expressing anxieties about issues as diverse as God's endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of Christians to Islam, the sinfulness of crusaders, and the morality of violence. Reinvigorating debates in medieval postcolonialism, drawing on emotion studies, and excavating a rich multilingual archive, this book is a major contribution to the cultural history of the crusades. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first comprehensive work in English on the three major regional styles of Uzbek women's dance – Ferghana, Khiva and Bukhara – and their broader Silk Road cultural connections, from folklore roots to contemporary stage dance. The book surveys the remarkable development from the earliest manifestations in ancient civilizations to a sequestered existence under Islam; from patronage under Soviet power to a place of pride for Uzbek nationhood. It considers the role that immigration had to play on the development of the dances; how women boldly challenged societal gender roles to perform in public; how both material culture and the natural world manifest in the dance; and it illuminates the innovations of pioneering choreographers who drew from Central Asian folk traditions, gestures and aesthetics – not Russian ballet – to first shape modern Uzbek stage dance. Written by the first American dancer invited to study in Uzbekistan, this book offers insight into the once-hidden world of Uzbek women's dance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

For three decades, Kenneth Roth led Human Rights Watch, transforming it from a small advocacy group into one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world. In Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments (Knopf, 2025), he offers a gripping inside account of the relentless fight against some of the world’s most abusive governments—from war crimes in Syria and Russia’s authoritarianism to China’s crackdown on dissent and the global erosion of democratic norms. Part memoir, part strategic guide, and part call to action, Righting Wrongs reveals the behind-the-scenes battles to hold governments accountable, the difficult choices human rights activists must make, and the lessons learned from engaging with autocrats, diplomats, and international institutions. With keen insight, Roth shows how pressure and advocacy can curb abuses and spark change—even against the most powerful forces. A must-read for anyone passionate about justice, democracy, and global affairs, Righting Wrongs is both an inspiring chronicle of courage and a crucial roadmap for the challenges ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Factual misinformation is spread in conflict zones around the world, often with dire consequences. But when is this misinformation actually believed, and when is it not?  Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Daniel Silverman examines the appeal and limits of dangerous misinformation in war, and is the go-to text for understanding false beliefs and their impact in modern armed conflict. Dr. Silverman extends the burgeoning study of factual misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news in social and political life into a crucial new domain, while providing a powerful new argument about the limits of misinformation in high-stakes situations. Rich evidence from the US drone campaign in Pakistan, the counterinsurgency against ISIL in Iraq, and the Syrian civil war provide the backdrop for practical lessons in promoting peace, fighting wars, managing conflict, and countering misinformation more effectively. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality. Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain (Cornell UP, 2024) examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s. By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe and that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating eastern and western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe, but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this NBN episode, I am joined by anthropologists Eva van Roekel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University) to talk about theit edited book, A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories. This beautiful collection brings together a series of creative work of anthropologists who share the art of writing that arises from ‘ordinary’ engagement and reveals its potential for the reimagining of anthropological futures and alternative worlds. This is a collection of creative anthropology anchored in experimentality and encouragement. A book that defies imaginaries of academic convention through the cultivation of a mundus imaginalis requiring moments of pause, of introspection, and of discomfort. This centring of creativity at the heart of anthropology subtly conveys how the complex ethical and moral issues around fieldwork and anthropological theorising can be reflected on through writing otherwise, in creative spaces such as this book. A Collection of Creative Anthropologies fits the current call for radical revisions of the academic canon in anthropology, and the social sciences and humanities more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, about their book, Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America (MIT Press, 2024) Politics Recoded examines the history and culture of Code for America, an organization that, as one of its leaders put it, aimed “to promote ‘civic hacking,’ and to bring 21st century technology to government.” The book describes how the organization has changed over time from a “tech-forward” vision rooted in techno-libertarianism to an organization that provides something like digital consulting services to governments. The pair also talk about Aure’s writing and editing company, the Indelible Voice, and what it’s like helping scholars refine their vision and voice in academic writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Resistance to feminist, queer, and antiracist pedagogies can take many forms in the composition class: silence during class discussion; tepid, bland writing that fails to engage with course content; refusal to engage with feminist and queer ideas; open and direct challenges to professors’ authority. According to Wilton Wright, Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies (Lexington Books, 2024) argues that composition studies has not adequately addressed the complex and deeply local contexts and causes of resistance. Therefore, the author argues that resistance research must first understand the origins and purpose for a student’s resistance, interrogating the language used to name and describe students who resist. Composition instructors must then give students the tools to uncover and investigate their reasons for resistance themselves, challenging students to continually interrogate their resistances. This book utilizes feminist composition pedagogies, masculinity studies, and queer pedagogies to engage student resistance in the writing classroom. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between oneself, identification of place, and the attachment/s they have to those places. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social),Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world. By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.” In Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (Yale UP, 2024), Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global movement set far outside Europe or America. Long before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and well before climate change, ten remarkable individuals wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an Indian context.  In strikingly contemporary language, Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukerjee, J. C. Kumarappa, Patrick Geddes, Albert and Gabrielle Howard, Mira, Verrier Elwin, K. M. Munshi, and M. Krishnan wrote about the forest and the wild, soil and water, urbanization and industrialization. Positing the idea of what Guha calls “livelihood environmentalism” in contrast to the “full-stomach environmentalism” of the affluent world, these writers, activists, and scientists played a pioneering role in shaping global conversations about humanity’s relationship with nature. Spanning more than a century of Indian history, and decidedly transnational in reference, this book offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today. About the Author: Ramachandra Guha is the author of many books, including India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He lives in Bangalore. About the Host: Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions. What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought. Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Before the Deluge (Princeton), Sans-Culottes (Princeton), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity. Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state. Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered. Nima Bassiri is assistant professor of literature at Duke University, where he is also the codirector of the Institute for Critical Theory. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

When we think of the sixteenth-century arrival of European missionaries in East Asia, there is a tendency to imagine this meeting as a civilizational clash, a great meeting of two fixed cultures. This clash is symbolized in the ‘Ricci map(s)’: a map created by a Jesuit missionary to bring scientific cartography to East Asia. Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of the “Ricci Maps” (Hawai’i University Press, 2024) rethinks these maps and this encounter. By taking a global approach, Remapping the World in East Asia explores how the ‘Ricci map,’ far from being one map by one man, was not only collaboratively made, but was also endlessly reinterpreted and contextualized through copying, circulation, and reproduction across East Asia. Editors Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky have put together a broad range of chapters that explore different kinds of maps, mapping practices, and connections. This book highlights the interconnectedness of China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom, Vietnam, and the Philippines, as well as the importance of paying attention to materiality. This edited volume should be of interest to those in East Asian studies and early modern history, as well as anyone interested in maps, mapping, and what is possible when you pay close attention to issues of production, circulation, and reception.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) by Dr. Amanda Lagji reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency. Drawing from critical time and postcolonial studies alike, this book argues that the temporality of waiting is an essential concept to theorise the relationship between time and power in postcolonial fiction across the long twentieth century - one that illuminates the contradictory temporalities that underlie narratives of progress, modernization and development. The book contributes to the resurgence of interest in time within literary studies by demonstrating that waiting is also integral to postcolonial temporalities, from anticolonial nationalist movements for independence to forms of reconciliation after conflict. In addition to innovative readings of both classic and contemporary postcolonial novels, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time of acceleration and movement by arguing for the centrality of waiting to time-consciousness in the postcolonial world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (UNC Press, 2024) is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Two of the women were his wives, two he enslaved, and one was a servant in his household. All were determined to make their way in a world that vastly and differentially circumscribed their life choices. From a Barbados plantation to the center of England’s empire in London, Hester Tomkyns, Frances Knights, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Ashcroft, and Dorothy Spendlove built remarkable lives for themselves and their children in spite of, not because of, the man who linked them together. Mining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court records, deeds, wills, church registers, and estate inventories, Jenny Shaw centers the experiences of the women and their children, intertwining the microlevel relationships of family and the macrolevel political machinations of empire to show how white supremacy and racism developed in England and the colonies. Shaw also explores England’s first slave society in North America, provides a glimpse into Black Britain long before the Windrush generation of the twentieth century, and demonstrates that England itself was a society with slaves in the early modern era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this, our third interview, we celebrate the brand new picture book of Bea Birdsong, Goat Is the G.O.A.T. (Nancy Paulsen Books, Feb. 2025), illustrated by Kelly Murphy. Bea is also the author of I Will Be Fierce!, Sam’s First Word, How to Spot a Best Friend, Boop!, with many more books coming out over the next two years. We talk about Bea's meteoric career, and how her unconventional approaches led her to find her agent, to book deals with major publishers, and international success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

“No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the reality. According to Noam Leshem in Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land (U Chicago Press, 2025), the term also reveals radical abandonment by the state. From the Northern Sahara to the Amazon rainforests, people around the world find themselves in places that have been stripped of sovereign care. Leshem is committed to defining these spaces and providing a more intimate understanding of this urgent political reality. Based on nearly a decade of research in some of the world’s most challenging conflict zones, Edges of Care offers a profound account of abandoned lives and lands, and how they endure and sometimes thrive once left to fend for themselves. Leshem interrogates no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. To understand the ramifications of such uncaring, Leshem takes readers through a diverse series of abandoned places, including areas in Palestine, Syria, Colombia, Sudan, and Cyprus. He shows that no man’s land is not empty of life, but almost always inhabited and, in fact, often generative of new modes of being. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The U.S. government, military, and industry once saw ocean incineration as the safest and most efficient way to dispose of hazardous chemical waste. Beginning in the late 1960s, toxic chemicals such as PCBs and other harmful industrial byproducts were taken out to sea to be destroyed in specially designed ships equipped with high-temperature combustion chambers and smokestacks. But public outcry arose after the environmental and health risks of ocean incineration were exposed, and the practice was banned in the early 1990s. Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement (Columbia UP, 2023) traces the rise and fall of ocean incineration, showing how a transnational environmental movement tested the limits of U.S. political and economic power. Dario Fazzi examines the anti-ocean-incineration movement that emerged on both sides of the Atlantic, arguing that it succeeded by merging local advocacy with international mobilization. He emphasizes the role played at the grassroots level by women, migrant workers, and other underrepresented groups who were at greatest risk. Environmental groups, for their part, gathered and shared evidence about the harms of at-sea incineration, building scientific consensus and influencing international debates. Smoke on the Water tells the compelling story of a campaign against environmental degradation in which people from marginalized communities took on the might of the U.S. military-industrial complex. It offers new insights into the transnational dimensions of environmental regulation, the significance of nonstate actors in international history, and the making of environmental justice movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Few towns in America are as famous as Woodstock, New York—although Woodstock may be most famous for an event that happened many miles away! Long before the 1969 Woodstock festival put the town on the map, it had been a center for artists and free thinkers who found refuge in its rural setting. Longtime citizens were often shocked by the arrival of these newcomers who brought new values and attitudes to their once-isolated village. From the transformative arrival of artists in the early twentieth century to the influx of musicians and young people in the 1960s, Woodstockers worked and struggled to balance everyday life in a small, rural community with the attention and notoriety the outside world brought to it.  Presented chronologically, Woodstock: From World War to Culture Wars (SUNY Press, 2024) examines the nature of change within Woodstock's uncommon story as it emerges from the Great Depression, confronts the realty of World War II, moves through the 1950s and into an unimagined and unintended future with the arrival of the Sixties through today. At its core, this is a story of how Woodstock's cultural and political institutions, its citizens, and its physical landscape met the ever-changing challenges of changing times. It is a story of community, resilience, conflict, and transition into a world its early settlers could not have imagined. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Shortly after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th American president, he issued 37 executive orders and, subsequently, the Trump administration has – through formal processes and also through extra-governmental extraordinary practices – triggered what many are calling a governmental and/or constitutional crisis. Dr. Christina Pagel has published two important Substack articles in which she groups the activities of the Trump administration into authoritarian and proto-authoritarian actions – and maps the opposition. Her unbelievable Venn diagram reveals which actions are being met with organized resistance – and which are being left unchallenged. She is a data hound – and her data not only clarifies what is happening in the United States but provides tools for those who wish to effectively oppose it in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Christina Pagel is Professor of Operational Research in Health Care, University College London. Operational Research is a pragmatic branch of mathematics to help people solve real-life problems. She is a member of Independent SAGE providing accessible updates on the national and international Covid-19 situation since May 2020. She has published in public-facing venues such as The Conversation and her free Substack, Diving into Data & Decision making. You can follow her on social media. Mentioned in the podcast: Christina’s 2/13/25 Substack, "So this is how liberty dies… " Making sense of Trump's first three weeks (categorizing 76 Trump administration actions and demonstrating how they align with authoritarianism). Christina’s 2/17/25 Substack, How to fight back: charting opposition to the actions of the Trump administration (showing how Blue states, labor organizations, and civil rights groups are doing the most – and what can be learned from them). The Just Security’s Litigation Tracker based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. Vox’s 2/12/25 Unexplainable podcast, “Is Science in Danger?” (20 minutes) Noam Hassenfeld interviewing Derek Dowe (chemist/science writer) Transcript or podcast. Susan’s interview with Corey Brettschneider on his new Norton book The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of animals. In 1858, the city adopted the Greensward Plan and began the long process of reshaping the 843 acres of land into a park where everything—from the trees to the trails to the inhabitants—would be meticulously planned to benefit New Yorkers and to promote the city as a global metropolis among the likes of London and Paris. But this vision of Central Park embodied white elite European values, and disagreements about which creatures belonged in the park’s waters and green spaces have often perpetuated systems of oppression. Illuminating the multispecies story of Central Park from the 1850s to the 1970s in Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History (University of Washington Press, 2024), Dr. Dawn Day Biehler examines the vibrant and intimately connected lives of humans and nonhuman animals in the park. She reveals stories of grazing sheep, teeming fish, nesting swans, migrating warblers, and escaped bison as well as human New Yorkers’ attempts to reconfigure their relationships to the land and claim spaces for recreation and leisure. Ultimately, Dr. Biehler shows how Central Park has always been a place where animals and humans alike have vied for power and belonging. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this engaging interview, young scholar Dr, Joel Z. Garrod explains his book's main argument, with a personal touch. In Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022 (U Toronto Press, 2025), Garrod presents a historical analysis of the Royal Bank of Canada, illustrating how Canadian capitalism and the Canadian banking industry have transformed as they have consolidated nationally and expanded abroad. Emphasizing how national institutions and rules are increasingly becoming capabilities for transnational forms of capital accumulation, the book draws on extensive primary and secondary sources to document the transformation of the assemblage of territory, authority, and rights that have supported the bank’s activities over time. Linking the bank’s history to the policy regimes of the welfare state and neoliberalism, Garrod contends that our present period of globalization severely limits the extent to which nation-states can absorb capitalist crises or be a site of successful social reform. Connecting the Canadian experience to the wider transformation of global capitalism, Royal Histories illuminates the effects of globalization and the changing landscape of banking and finance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK. The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence of new middle classes after economic liberalization, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the 2008 crisis in capitalism, and the spread of new communications technologies. The trio discuss the growth of Hindutva in the US and UK since the 1990s and its further consolidation. Social media has been key to Modi’s brand of authoritarian populism, with simultaneous messaging across national borders producing a globally dispersed audience for Hindutva. Particularly useful to transnational political mobilizations has been the manufacture of wounded Hindu sentiments: a claim to victimhood that draws on the legitimizing language of religious minority rights in the US and UK. They also note more hopeful signs: Dalit and other oppressed caste politics have begun to strengthen in the diaspora; the contradictions between lived Hinduism and Hindutva have become clearer; there are some demographic and structural barriers to Hindutva’s further growth in the UK and US. Subir’s Recallable Book is Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop:The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (Harper Collins India, 2023), which looks at the proliferation of Hindutva Pop, a genre of music that is made to go viral and whip up mob violence against religious minorities. Mentioned in this episode: Subir Sinha, “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media, and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 4158–4180. Subir Sinha, “‘Strong leaders’, authoritarian populism and Indian developmentalism: The Modi moment in historical context.” Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.019 Subir Sinha, “Modi's People and Populism's Imagined Communities.” Seminar, 7 5 6 – A u g u s t 2022, pp.18-23. Edward T. G. Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism. London: Hurst & Co., 2023. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, is the parent organization of the Sangh Parivar, or Hindu nationalist family of organizations. It espouses principles of Hindu unity and aims to transform India into a Hindu supremacist nation-state. Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Organization, is a branch of the Sangh Parivar. Its stated aims are to engage in social service work, construct Hindu temples, and defend Hindus. On the anti-caste discrimination bill in the UK parliament, see David Mosse, Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom The Ganesh Puja period is a 10-day festival that honors the Hindu god Ganesha, and usually takes place in late August or early September. Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso; Revised edition, 2016. Yohann Koshy, “What the unrest in Leicester revealed about Britain – and Modi’s India.” The Guardian, 8 February 2024. Richard Manuel, Cassette Culture in North India: Popular Music and Technology in North India. University of Chicago .Press; 2nd ed. Edition,1993. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Cosmology and cosmic journeys play a significant role in biblical and extra-biblical texts, especially in apocalyptic narratives. What about for the book of Revelation? The answer is yes. Join us as we speak with Joel Rothman about his recent book, The Cosmic Journey in the Book of Revelation: Apocalyptic Cosmology and the Experience of Story-Space (T&T Clark, 2023). Joel Rothman recently earned his PhD at the University of Divinity in Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

As Nazi tanks roll toward Leningrad in August 1941, an unmarried nineteen-year-old ballerina gives birth to twin girls in the soon-to-be besieged city. Bereft of hope, the dancer—once a rising star at the Kirov—slashes her wrists, but her babies survive, rescued by the devoted friend who arrives just too late to save their mother. The friend, too, is a dancer with the Kirov, and her tutelage and self-sacrifice ensure that the girls, Maya and Natasha, become students at the Vaganova Academy after the Siege of Leningrad is broken. We meet the twins as they enter their senior year in 1958. At once inseparable and competitive, Maya and Natasha have developed quite different personalities, with Natasha the leader and future star, Maya her loyal follower. But as they turn seventeen, various factors pull them apart: boys; the changing climate of Khrushchev’s USSR; and the approaching end to their schooling, which even in a state-run economy doesn’t guarantee anyone a specific place in the world. But it’s when the state declares that, in response to recent defections by artists to the West, only one member of any given family can join the Kirov Ballet that Maya and Natasha must confront the reality that one sister’s success will come at the cost of the other’s. How each of them responds to that challenge drives the rest of this thoroughly engrossing novel. And although neither girl really recognizes it until near the end of the book, the choices each makes are driven at least in part by their determination to fulfill the goals their mother never had the chance to achieve. Weaving together such disparate elements as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War competition that drove the exchange between the New York City Ballet’s visit to Moscow and the Kirov’s tour of the United States in 1962, the filming of Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental version of War and Peace, and the difficult yet rewarding training that produces elite dancers, Maya and Natasha (Mariner Books, 2025) explores the eternal bond between sisters while prompting readers to consider just how far they would go to achieve a cherished goal. Elyse Durham, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, who is a Greek Orthodox priest. Maya & Natasha is her debut novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Cinema under National Reconstruction (Rutgers UP, 2024) calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961-1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive's digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorship was not simply a tool for authoritarian dictatorship. Through such case studies as Yu Hyun-mok's The Stray Bullet (1961), Ha Kil-jong's The March of the Fools (1975), and Yi Chang-ho's Declaration of Fools (1983), the author defines censorship as a dialogical process of cultural negotiations wherein the state, the film industry, and the public fight out a battle over the definitions and functions of national cinema. In the context of Cold War Korea, one cannot fully understand or construct film history without reassessing censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

As Brazil moves toward trying former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup against democracy, the United States grapples with constitutional challenges from the new administration as well. Are these two cases of democratic backsliding comparable?  In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with José Maurício Domingues, Professor of Social and Political Science at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, about the resilience of democratic institutions, the role of the judiciary, and the evolving strategies of authoritarian leaders. Domingues unpacks the historical and institutional factors that shaped Bolsonaro’s failed power grab and contrasts them with Trump’s approach to executive power. What can these cases tell us about the future of democracy in both countries? Tune in for a deep dive into the politics of resistance, accountability, and the shifting nature of authoritarianism in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the ‘soft-ethical’ inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their ‘hard-ethical’ symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror.  Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical ‘abjection’ and ethical ‘agency.’ In this frame, Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema (Oxford UP, 2023) explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues––including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia––through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology. Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University who researches and teaches in film and media theory. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016) and ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2023). He is the co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019) and editor of the Handbook for Violence in Film and Media (2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form (Cambridge University Press, 2024) is a collection of Peter Boxall's essays over twenty years, the earliest from 1996. These essays cover a vast timespan, from the 17th century to contemporary times; a multiplicity of authors ranging from canonical, such as Cervantes, to underappreciated, such as Kelman; and various traditions, from realism to 'deathwriting'. Despite the richness of material, Boxall's penetrating and refreshing vision never loses sight of two central questions: what makes literature possible and what does literature generate? The essays are clustered into three sections, 'On Writers', 'On Literary Tradition', and 'On the Contemporary'. Exploring questions such as 'The Idea of Beauty', the nature of 'Mere Being', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself – those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.  Peter Boxall is the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at New College, University of Oxford. His publications include Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2002), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009) and The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942-1943 (Routledge, 2021) narrates the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Focusing on the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki, this book maps the reactions of the authorities, the Church and the civil society as events unfolded. In so doing, it seeks to answer the questions, did the Christian society of their hometown stand up to their defense and did they try to undermine or object to the Nazi orders? Utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes, this book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway, seeking to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honour the victims of the Holocaust. The first study to examine why 95 percent of the Jews of Thessaloniki perished--one of the highest percentages in Europe--this book will appeal to students and scholars of the Holocaust, European History and Jewish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexican American activists. Uncovering nearly one hundred years of struggle, Lina-Maria Murillo reveals how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border fought to reclaim autonomy and care for themselves and their communities. Faced with a family planning movement steeped in eugenic ideology, working-class Mexican-origin women strategically demanded additional health services and then formed their own clinics to provide care on their own terms. Along the way, they developed what Murillo calls reproductive care— quotidian acts of community solidarity—as activists organized for better housing, education, wages, as well as access to birth control, abortion, and more. In Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2025), Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women's long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive freedom in Texas once again hangs in the balance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This volume utilises the personal papers of Sir Ronald Storrs, as well as other archival materials, to make a microhistorical investigation of his period as Governor of Jerusalem between 1917 and 1926. It builds upon Edward Said’s work on the Orientalist ‘determining imprint’ by arguing that Storrs took a deeply personal approach to governing the city; one determined by his upbringing, his education in the English private school system and his service as a British official in Colonial Egypt. Burnham recognises the influence of these experiences on Storrs’ perceptions of and attitudes towards Jerusalem, identifying how these formative years manifested themselves on the city and in the Governor’s interactions with Jerusalemites of all backgrounds and religious beliefs. It also highlights the restrictions placed on Storrs’ approach by his British superiors, Palestinians and the Zionist movement, alongside the limitations imposed by his own attitudes and worldview. Placing Storrs’ personality at the centre of discussion on early Mandate Jerusalem exposes a nuanced and complex picture of how personality and politics collided to influence its everyday life and built environment. Sir Ronald Storrs: Personality and Policy in Mandate Palestine, 1917-1926 (Routledge, 2024) is aimed at historians and students of the late-Ottoman Empire and British Mandate in Palestine, colonialism and imperialism, and indeed microhistory. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Tim Blacket about his award-winning debut short story collection, Grandview Drive (Nightwood Editions, 2024). Grandview Drive won two Saskatchewan Book Awards—the Fiction Book Award and the First Book Award. This is a pensive and darkly stunning collection that investigates the strange and unexpected intersections of loneliness and connection. From his car, a lonely, heartbroken man secretly watches strangers going about their lives in the comfort of their own homes; when caught, he wrecks his car in an attempt to escape. A man hears a car wreck outside his home and has a wild night of romance with a strange woman he meets at the scene. A reclusive old writer starts to believe he is becoming his own characters as he writes. A college student looks to his girlfriend's diary for pointers on how he should act. A mother confronted with her estranged son's death by car wreck organizes a memorial service for a list of attendees she has never met. This collection of sixteen connected short stories investigates the ways we humans so often feel lonely and alone, yet cannot avoid having our lives be contingent upon others--often in ways we can neither see nor understand. Blackett's characters long for meaningful connection and struggle to find it; they are too often unaware of the connections that are right in front of them. Grandview Drive is a collection that builds on itself; the stories stand on their own, but they are strengthened by the (sometimes secret) connections they hold with each other. Blackett's debut asks the reader to think about love and loss, loneliness and heartbreak, redemption and starting life anew. About Tim Blackett: Tim Blackett is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Briarpatch, [spaces], Grain Magazine and a small Saskatchewan journal called Swift, Flowing. He holds a Bachelor of Theology and a BA in English from the University of Regina, as well as a certificate in creative writing from Humber College. His short story collection, Grandview Drive, was shortlisted for two Saskatchewan book awards, and a pre-publication version placed second in the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award (2019). The titular story, "Grandview Drive" was longlisted for the Carter v. Cooper Short Fiction Award (2012). Blackett lives in Regina, SK. About Hollay Ghadery: Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project. Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all. Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life. Mentioned in the Episode: 119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents. Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. The Beinart Notebook podcast Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism. Kwame Nkrumah's African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge the extant imperial forces: the US empire of liberty, the Soviet empire of equality, and the European empires of exploitation. In the 1950s, the goal of proving the potency of a pan-African ideology shaped the agenda of the Bandung Conference and Ghana's support for African liberation, while also determining what was at stake in the Congo crisis and in the fight against white minority rule in southern and eastern Africa. In the 1960s, the attempt to remake African psychology was abandoned, and socioeconomic development came into focus. Anticolonial nationalists did not simply resist or utilize imperial and Cold War pressures but drew strength from the example of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which Toussaint Louverture demanded the universal application of Europe's Enlightenment values. The liberationists of the postwar period wanted to redesign society in the image of the revolution that had created them. The Ideological Scramble for Africa demonstrates that the Cold War struggle between capitalism and Communism was only one of two ideological struggles that picked up speed after 1945; the battle between liberation and imperialism proved to be more enduring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Viktoriya Fedorchak's The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power (Routledge, 2024) provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides during the first year of the full-scale invasion. The Russian war in Ukraine began in 2014 and continued for eight years, before the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022. It is not a new war, but the intensity of the warfighting revived many discussions about the conduct of inter-state warfare, which has not been seen in Europe for decades. This book does not aim to offer an exhaustive operational analysis of the war, but rather provides a preliminary systematic analysis across various domains of warfare using the concept of fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides. First, the book discusses the conceptual component and the post-Cold War adaptations of the Soviet strategic tradition by both the Ukrainian and the Russian Armed Forces. Following that, it gives an evaluation of the various aspects of warfighting in the land, air, maritime and cyber domains. Then, the book examines the role of international allied assistance, sanctions and weapons delivery in strengthening the resilience of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The book concludes with some comments on the role of inter-state warfare in the current strategic environment and future warfare. This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, defence studies, foreign policy, Russian studies and international relations. Viktoriya Fedorchak is a lecturer in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. She is the author of British Air Power (2018) and Understanding Contemporary Air Power (2020). Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of Publish My Book, we break down the key components of a strong book proposal. We discuss essential elements like a well-structured table of contents, a compelling cover letter, a carefully chosen sample chapter, and a narrative author bio that connects emotionally with acquisitions editors. We also explore the importance of a persuasive prospectus that highlights your book's novelty, market relevance, and target audience. Whether you're approaching an editor at a conference or via email, being prepared with these components will boost your chances of success. Relevant links Watch the recording: Interview with Laura Portwood Stacer, “Crafting a Winning Book Proposal” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son (Atria, 2024), the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond to see how Son’s firm SoftBank has defied conventional wisdom and imposing odds to push global tech and commerce into the future. From the dizzying highs of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack to the epic lows of WeWork and tech-infused dogwalking app Wag Son and SoftBank have been at the center of cutting-edge capitalism’s absolute peaks and valleys. In the process, Son, son of a pachinko kingpin who grew up in a slum in Japan, has been a hero, a villain, and even a meme-ified hero to the internet tech- and finance-bro set all at once. Based on in-depth research and eye-opening interviews, Gambling Man is an unforgettable character study and alarming true story of twenty-first-century commerce that will stick with you long after you turn the final page. Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times. As editor, he interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Barber has co-written several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettling truth: the British Empire and Great Britain are primarily English constructions, and the Church of England benefited from English enterprise and exploitation, serving as the spiritual arm of the imperial project. English Anglicanism has cast itself as the lead character in its own ‘serious fiction’—the main religious player in a drama of Church and Empire. Yet, in collusion with colonialism, it is now trapped by historical amnesia. Dr. Percy examines the English interests concealed in appeals to Britishness, showing how slavery, exploitation, classism and racism upheld elitist and hierarchical worldviews that bolstered both Empire and Church. By viewing the rest of the world as lesser, both institutions have declined in global standing, now reduced to minor national players on the world stage. Religious, social and political imperialism thrived on deprecating others, but those once marginalised have fought for equality and independence. Today, the worldwide Anglican Communion faces a new era of moral reckoning. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on walls and ceilings adorn the most important spaces of early modern religious and political performance. Scene by scene, histories of holy sites, portraits that incorporate historical figures into mythic landscapes, and Tamil and Telugu inscriptions that evoke the imagined topographies of devotional poetry unfold before the mobile spectator. Body, History, Myth reconceives the relationship between art and devotion in South India by describing how the extraordinary sensory experience of a viewing body in motion unfurls a sacred narrative exquisitely designed to teach, impress, and inspire. Anna Lise Seastrand offers new insights into the arts of early modern southern India, bringing to life one of the most culturally vibrant yet least understood periods in Indian art. She shows how temple visitors become active participants in the paintings through their somatic engagement with visual stories and devotional landscapes. Seastrand highlights the significance of textuality in early modern South Asia by examining the status of professional scribes and the prominence given to authorship of religious literature and art. Her insights are presented alongside new translations of the texts that accompany mural paintings. Featuring a wealth of stunning images published here for the first time, Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India (Princeton UP, 2024) provides a multidimensional reading of temple art that fundamentally reframes the artistic, intellectual, religious, and political histories of early modern India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis. As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world. With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them. Nora Lange’s debut novel Us Fools is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. An earlier iteration of it was shortlisted for The Novel Prize, a prize to recognize novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. Nora’s writing has appeared in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family. And look for Nora’s in The Believer. Recommended Books: Miranda July, All Fours Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today I talked to Saad T. Farooqi about his new novel White World (Cormorant Books, 2024). Allah has burned the sky away. A mysterious snow falls over everything. Is it an endless winter? Is it the result of a nuclear exchange with India? A celestial impact? Now a barren wasteland, what little is left of Pakistan is heavily segregated along religious lines. For Avaan, a gun in the hand feels as natural as breathing. An apostate pariah living under martial law and religious bigotry, violence has become a way of life. What respite he had from this terrifying world — his brother, his family, and Doua, the love of his life — was snatched away in military raids. Now broken, Avaan finds himself involved in a civil war that poisons everything he’s ever believed in. The army shadows his every move, a mob boss wants him dead, and a legendary resistance leader has taken a keen interest in him. But there is a ray of hope: Avaan discovers that Doua is alive. Obsessed with finding her, he takes a stand against the army, the mob, and Pakistan itself with the only thing he has ever been able to count on: the gun in his hand. About Saad T. Farooqi: Saad T. Farooqi holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Kingston University London and a BA in English Literature from the American University of Sharjah. His short stories and poems have appeared in various international magazines. His shining moment on stage was accidentally setting his poem on fire by standing too close to a candle. When not writing, Saad enjoys boxing, experimenting in the kitchen to varying levels of success, and devouring anything film noir. Saad spent the majority of his life as a Pakistani expat in Dubai. He immigrated to Canada in 2015 and currently resides in London, Ontario. About Hollay Ghadery: Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What history skills can be useful in leading a company? The CEO of ReUp Education Terah Crews shared her experiences leveraging her History MA degree in various leadership roles. Terah talked about what drew her to studying history, what pushed her into business, and how she found ways to connect the two domains. She discussed how her history training has been helping her connect with colleagues and clients, and how it shaped her efforts to build a robust company culture built on trust and shared goals. We chat about the resonances between leaders' personal experiences and their companies' missions, and what universities are doing right (and what they could be doing better) to help history grads position themselves successfully in today's economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.  A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she craved. In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem in her wake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The future ain't what it used to be. Is nostalgia revitalizing or killing 21st-century culture? The concept of nostalgia has seeped into almost all aspects of modern-day media, none more so than horror culture and its borderlands of Hauntology, Folk Horror, and found footage film. From film and TV franchises building endlessly on past glories, to musicians whose work now spans decades, modern media borrows heavily from the past. Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia examines the use and effect of nostalgia in the Horror and Hauntological realms. It asks why these genres hold such a fascination in popular culture, often inspiring devoted fanbases. From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? How has nostalgia become linked to other concepts (psychogeography, residual haunting) to influence Hauntological music such as Boards of Canada, The Rowan Amber Mill, Hawksmoor, or The Caretaker? What can the 'urban wyrd' or faux horror footage tell us about our idealized past? And how will these cultures of nostalgia shape the future? Combining the author's analysis with first-hand accounts of fans and creators, this book offers a critical analysis of our cultural quest to recognize, resurrect, and lay to rest the ghosts of past and present, also summoning up those spectres that may haunt the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector. Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Dr. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need. Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, Dr. Mirca Madianou examines a range of practices: from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Trevor Wilson about his new book, Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Their conversation delves into the intellectual currents of interwar Europe, placing the enigmatic figure of Alexandre Kojève into this unique cultural landscape. The conversation touches on how key philosophical concepts shift in translation, the influence of émigré culture, and the broader currents of Russian philosophy, including the philosophy of Sophia and Kojève’s vision of the "end of history." Dr. Wilson also reflects on the challenges of translating philosophical texts written in multiple languages (and Kojève’s notoriously illegible Russian handwriting). Beyond philosophy, the conversation explores writing routines and the often-overlooked infrastructures that make academic work possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Narrative strategies, immersion, interaction, participation, identification, multimodality, characters and the connection between physical and fictional or virtual worlds: the fields of inquiry into the complex relationship between live performance and video games are numerous and diverse. For the first time, Live Performance and Video Games: Inspirations, Appropriations and Mutual Transfers (Transcript Publishing, 2024) brings together international researchers and artists to explore this relationship in a variety of essays. The contributors to this volume focus on reciprocal inspirations, appropriations and transfers applied by theatre artists, game designers and researchers. They analyze several artistic forms such as VR performance, immersive theatre, speedrunning or game theatre. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

We are witnessing the collapse of the postwar consensus, the implosion of the caring society. In times of social, economic, and political insecurity, egotism spreads. Many popular videogames follow a logic of consumerist self-gratification and self-empowerment. Deeply political, videogames contribute to the transformation of players, causing a need for change in what game designers do and how and why they do it. Awareness of the socio-political and cultural contexts can be promoted by the mainstream videogame market for critical active participation. A New Virtual Ethics: Interconnectedness and Interrelationality in Videogames (McFarland, 2024) focuses on the need for individual self-realization in Western societies and how it manifests in the various dimensions of videogames. Videogames remind us that we can never be isolated in a world defined by complexity and interlaced systems. Connecting videogames and new Neo-Kantian virtual ethics builds upon notions of agency, mutual respect, and obligation. This addresses humans in their entirety as thinking, acting, and feeling agents through engagement, immersion, and involvement. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners (Pluto Press, 2024), uncovers the unique experiences of Muslim political prisoners held in Egypt and under US custody at Guantanamo Bay and other detention black sites. This groundbreaking book explores the intricate interplay between their religious beliefs, practices of ritual purity, prayer, and modes of resistance in the face of adversity. Highlighting the experiences of these prisoners, faith is revealed to be not only a personal spiritual connection to God but also a means of contestation against prison and state authorities, reflecting larger societal struggles. Written by Walaa Quisay, who has worked closely with prisoners in Egypt, and Asim Qureshi, with years of experience supporting detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the authors' deep connections with prisoner communities and their emphasis on the power of resistance shine through. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Dr. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Dr. Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record. Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected. Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton University Press, 2025), Professor Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, and weaving together personal, institutional, and intellectual narratives, Dr. Owens documents key moments and locations in the effort to forge international relations as a separate academic discipline in Britain. She finds that women’s ideas and influence were first marginalised and later devalued, ignored, and erased. Examining the roles played by some of the most important women thinkers in the field, including Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Eileen Power, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, and Susan Strange, Dr. Owens traces the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism. She argues that the creation of international relations was a highly gendered and racialised project that failed to understand plurality on a worldwide scale. Acknowledging this intellectual failure, and recovering the history of women in the field, points to possible sources for its renewal. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

'The king can do no wrong' remains one of the most fundamental yet misunderstood tenets of the common law tradition. Confusion over the phrase's historical origins and differing meanings has had serious consequences, making it easier for the state to escape liability for the harm caused to individuals by governmental officials or institutions. In The King Can Do No Wrong: Constitutional Fundamentals, Common Law History, and Crown Liability (Oxford University Press, 2024), the first dedicated monograph on the topic, Dr. Marie-France Fortin traces the historical evolution of 'the king can do no wrong' in constitutional and public law to shed new light on our current understanding of crown liability. The different meanings conveyed by the phrase in the common law world are clarified; the contradictions between them revealed. Adopting a historical constitutional approach, the book delves deep into traditional legal sources to develop an intellectual history of this key legal idea. It explains the mutation from 'the king can do no wrong' to 'the crown can do no wrong' at the end of the nineteenth century, analyzing the resulting departure from core tenets of the constitutional arrangement of the seventeenth century. The study of the evolution of 'the king can do no wrong' in English legal thinking, mirrored in Canada, is complemented by a comparative analysis of the idea in Australia, Ireland, and the United States, where its relationship with the concept of sovereign immunity is scrutinized. Retracing the evolution of the king can do no wrong in legal thinking, this book enhances academics', students', practitioners', and judges' understanding of the law of governmental liability in the common law world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. In Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces of opportunity. Rather than turning exclusively to cognitive science and contemporary ethical theories, Hershock shows how classical Confucian and Socratic philosophies help to make visible what a history of choices about remaking ourselves through control biased technology has rendered invisible. But it is in Buddhist thought and practice that Hershock finds the tools for valuing and training our attention, resisting the colonization of consciousness, and engendering a more equitable and diversity-enhancing human-technology-world relationship. Focusing on who we need to be present as to avoid a future in which machines prevent us from either making or learning from our own mistakes, Hershock offers a constructive response to the unprecedented perils of intelligent technology and seamlessly blends ancient and contemporary philosophies to envision how to realize its equally unprecedented promises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts passed laws mandating Lancaster's methods, and cities such as Albany, Savannah, Detroit, and Baltimore soon followed. In Mr. Lancaster's System: The Failed Reform That Created America's Public Schools (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Adam Laats tells the story of how this abusive, scheming reformer fooled the world into believing his system could provide free high-quality education for poor children. The system never worked as promised, but thanks to real work done by students, teachers, and families, Lancaster's failed reforms eventually led to the creation of the modern public school system. Lancaster's idea was simple: instead of hiring expensive adult teachers, Lancasterian schools made children teach one another to read, write, and behave properly. America's city leaders poured the equivalent of millions of dollars into the scheme, built specialized school buildings featuring Lancaster's teaching machines, and offered him a huge salary. In London, where Lancaster opened his first school, the enthusiasm of city leaders was quickly and similarly followed by scandal and dismay. Lancaster borrowed money—even from the king of England—and spent it on fancy carriage rides and cases of champagne. Even worse, Lancaster proved to be a sexual predator. Kicked out of London, Lancaster brought his simplistic plan to the United States. His school model didn't work any better in US cities than it had in London, and Lancaster himself never changed his abusive ways. Mr. Lancaster's System details how American cities created their first public schools out of the wreckage of Lancasterian failure. In the end, the most important people in this story are not self-proclaimed geniuses like Lancaster or elites like New York's mayor De Witt Clinton, but rather the thousands of parents and children who forced urban public schools to assume their modern shape. Adam Laats is a professor of education and history at Binghamton University. He taught high school for many years in Milwaukee and is the author of The Other School Reformers and Fundamentalist U. Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Houria Bouteldja on decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

“Brain Rot,” the 2024 Oxford word of the year captures the essence of our new podcast that is being created as a special series on the New Books Network (NBN). The full title is “Brain Rot: What Our Screens Are Doing to Our Minds.” In this second podcast Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and NBN host discusses the problems the emerge when children watch screens and digital devices too much. Dr. Messina talked about this topic with Dr. Harry Gill, a well-known psychiatrist who also has a PhD. in neuroscience. In this episode the focus was on Erik Eriksson’s 5th stage of development, Industry versus Inferiority. They discussed one of the greatest difficulties they see in their young patients who contend with way too much screen time. Dr. Gill talked about white matter in the brain where research has shown that children who spend more than the recommended amount of screen time exhibit lower levels of white matter development. In children exposed to excessive screen time, the white matter tracts supporting language, literacy, and cognitive skills show lower microstructural integrity. This means the white matter is less organized and structurally developed, potentially leading to slower and less efficient neural transmission. The impact on white matter development can have far-reaching consequences. White matter acts like cables, connecting various brain regions and is crucial for efficient brain functioning. Dr. Gill also talked about synaptic pruning and the implications that excessive screen time can interfere with this process. He explained that synaptic pruning is the process by which the brain eliminates unnecessary or underused synaptic connections, optimizing neural networks and improving the efficiency of brain function. Screen time, especially when it displaces other important developmental activities, may interfere with the experiences necessary for proper pruning. Dr. Messina focused on the task that is essential to acquire during the 5th phase of Eriksson’s development stage which is competence. It go hand-in-hand with acquiring self-esteem. If these qualities are not developed in childhood, a person can be effected in negative ways throughout life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. In Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge UP, 2024), Xiangli Ding provides a historical understanding of China's ever-growing energy demands and how they have affected its rivers, wild species, and millions of residents. River management has been an essential state responsibility throughout Chinese history. In the industrial age, with the global proliferation of concrete dam technology, people started to demand more from rivers, particularly when required for electricity production. Yet hydropower projects are always more than a technological engineering enterprise, layered with political, social, and environmental meaning. Through an examination of specific hydroelectric power projects, the activities of engineers, and the experience of local communities and species, Ding offers a fresh perspective on twentieth-century China from environmental and technological perspectives. Xiangli Ding is an associate professor of history at the Rhode Island School of Design. He considers himself a historian of modern China and environmental history. At RISD, he teaches courses on East Asian and Chinese histories. His research interests lie at the intersection of the environment, technology, politics, and human life in modern China. He is the author of Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and multiple research and review articles in both English and Chinese. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

When he was 23 years old, Dale Allison almost died in a car accident. That terrifying experience dramatically changed his ideas about death and the hereafter. In Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things (Eerdmans, 2016) Allison wrestles with a number of difficult questions concerning the last things -- such questions as What happens to us after we die? and Why does death so often frighten us? Armed with his acknowledged scholarly expertise, Allison offers an engaging, personal exploration of such themes as death and fear, resurrection and judgment, hell and heaven, in light of science, Scripture, and his own experience. As he ponders and creatively imagines -- engaging throughout with biblical texts, church fathers, rabbinic scholars, poets, and philosophers -- Allison offers fascinating fare that will captivate many a reader's heart and soul. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state-formation for almost a millennium. The 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century is argued here as having fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies - sacral monarchy - and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivised and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards. Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500. Jørgen Møller, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism--a submerged counternarrative--that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women. Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism (Oxford UP, 2024) is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women. Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, the five women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Steven Brint, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Riverside, about the early days of the second Trump administration and its impact on higher education. Brint discusses the administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape federal governance, including its attacks on DEI programs, proposals to tax university endowments, and moves to condition federal funding on ideological compliance. The conversation explores how these policies could undermine academic freedom, international student enrollment, and the global reputation of U.S. universities. Brint also examines the broader crisis of public confidence in higher education, tracing concerns over cost, curriculum relevance, and perceptions of political bias. The episode concludes with a discussion of the risks facing the American university system in an era of rising authoritarianism and political polarization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Dr. Simkovich taught in a Catholic University and now is at JPS and YU. She continues her interfaith dialogue throughout. But here we spoke, among other things, about the concept of diaspora and exile - what is a Judean, a Judahite, and an Israelite. These are terms that are often thrown around interchangeably, but understanding the meaning and etymology of each helps us understand the spatial and temporal elements of being Jewish, of Judean roots, and in the context of today.  Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity (Eisenbrauns, 2024) is an analysis of letters from Jewish Antiquity and spans the Persian and Babylonian Empires in space and time and touches upon the Greek and Roman Empires. Is diaspora curse? If a main prohibition was for Israelites to return to Egypt, how is one of the most ancient Jewish communities found in Egypt? How and why did they get there? Was it a negative or positive evolution of the exile?  As the conversation evolved Dr. Simkovich let out a call for suggested readings on the term and concept of "golah" as opposed to "galut", diaspora and exile. Please reach out if you want to share your thoughts on this and the significance of the diaspora as a phenomenon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance. Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi. In Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Zone Books, 2024) Dr. Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing, in particular, on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complementary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint and debt issuance without guilt, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth. Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Dr. Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the question: Is another politics of extravagance possible? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.” Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic?  To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother. The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life. Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and faculty at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Peninusula Press, UK; Catapult, US), as well as, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Vintage Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, as well as, many psychoanalytic publications. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor in the Somatic Psychology program at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Kaika & Dr. Luca Ruggiero reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Dr. Kaika and Dr. Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a “lived” process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land’s material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of complex human disasters, vulnerability, and resilience to explain how these famines occurred and to describe more accurately who suffered and why.  Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon details the social causes and responses to three events of varying magnitude that struck the western Mediterranean: the minor food shortage of 1372, the serious but short-lived crisis of 1384–85, and the major famine of 1374–76, the worst famine of the century in the region. Shifts in military action, international competition, and violent attempts to control trade routes created systemic panic and widespread starvation—which in turn influenced decades of economic policy, social practices, and even the course of geopolitical conflicts, such as the War of the Two Pedros and the papal schism in Italy. Providing new insights into the intersecting factors that led to famine in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, this deeply researched, convincingly argued book presents tools and models that are broadly applicable to any historical study of vulnerabilities in the human food supply. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval Iberia and the medieval Mediterranean as well as to historians of food and of economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor Laureen Hom in The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles (California UP, 2024). They're also communities where people live, organize, and argue over politics. Chinatowns are vital political actors, places where culture, history, and community come together to form bulwarks of power as places that have historically had considerable agency in shaping their own destiny. In this close study of Los Angeles' Chinatown neighborhood in the early twenty first century, Hom argues that the neighborhood is a complex places, where urban trends such as gentrification and displacement have been at once both pushed against and, at times, encouraged, both from within and without.  The Power of Chinatown puts people at the center of the story, arguing that for all its tourist appeal, it is those who live in this place who care about it the most, and thus are willing to fight the hardest to protect what makes this neighborhood truly a community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today we explore the mythology around John Cage’s visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage’s experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review, Mack Hagood explores the relationship between sound, self, and meaning-making. To use a term Cage loved, the truth is indeterminate.  For our Patreon members we have bonus content: Mack’s “What’s Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.  Writing and media content featured in this episode:  Mack’s essay “Cage’s Echoes of the Anechoic,” in AHR Issue 70 (2022).  Nam June Paik’s 1973 video Global Groove  John Cage’s 1959 album with David Tudor, Indeterminacy  John Cage’s book Silence (Wesleyan, 1961). The video Can Silence Actually Drive you Crazy by Veritasium  Terry Gross’s 2014 Fresh Air interview with Trevor Cox  The album Naxi Live by Jang San and the Dayan Naxi orchestra  Shani Diluka’s performance of “Glassworks: Opening” by Philip Glass  Amit Pinchevsky’s book Echo (MIT, 2022) Helen Rees’ book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford, 2011) Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.  Original music and sound design by Mack Hagood.  Special thanks to Monique Rooney and Australian Humanities Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) tells her moving story—and argues for a more compassionate and effective approach to addiction treatment. Weaving together a personal narrative and a sociological perspective, Surviving Alex describes how people become addicted. She highlights the toll that addiction took on Alex and all members of a family. Drawing from interviews with Alex’s friends, family members, therapists, teachers, and police officers—as well as files from his stays in hospitals, rehab facilities, and jails—Roos paints a compelling portrait of a young man whose life veered between happiness, anxiety, success, and despair. The book is part memoir, part sociological case study, and part policy proposal because it provides a strong challenge to extant treatment and policy options. As she explores how a punitive system failed her son, Dr. Roos calls for a community of action that would improve care for substance users and reduce addiction, realigning public health policy to address the overdose crisis. Dr. PATRICIA ROOS is a Professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University. Among her many publications are the books Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations (coauthored with Barbara Reskin) from Temple University Press and Gender and Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies from University of Albany Press. After her son's death, Dr. Roos realigned her research and advocacy interests to explore mental health and substance use disorders, turning her grief into activism. Mentioned: David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America from University of Chicago Press. Pat Roos on Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden addiction: Joe, Jill continue to show compassion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Theological seminaries and Bible institutes find themselves at the crossroads of preserving biblical faithfulness and of maintaining contextual relevance. What does faithful contextual relevance look like? How can theological institutions steer a course that will engage and serve the church through the men and women they equip for ministry and service? In The Fruits of Listening (Wipf and Stock, 2024), Colleen Weaver designed a qualitative research project in the Protestant evangelical community in Madrid, Spain. Intentional listening was conducted on three seminary campuses and in the faith community. Seminary faculty and students and church attenders shared their perspectives, experiences, and hopes for transformative theological education. Congregants envisioned theological education that equips leaders to relationally empower the church to give witness in the society. Faculty and students described the contextual challenges they face as Protestant believers in Spain. They voiced narratives of how they must find ways to persevere amid pervasive scarcity and in a rapidly changing society. Seminaries and churches around the world may recognize details of their own experiences in these stories and, importantly, receive resources for being contextually responsive in their situations. Dave Broucek is a retired cross-cultural missionary/coordinator of continuing education/international ministries director. He interviews authors who provide critical reflection on the theology and practice of Christian mission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereignties shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered. From these observations, the authors derive a historical conceptualisation which makes change and contingency core aspects of the understanding of sovereignty. Rather than understanding sovereignty as a characteristic of individual states, Mihatsch and Mulligan propose the notion of “sovereignty regimes”: frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody what the authors call “system sovereignty.” Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent. This process of change forms the core of the book. Shifting Sovereignties thus contributes a practical, historical perspective on a concept which is foundational in political science, international relations, and international law. If purchased from De Gruyter, you can get the book with a 30% discount for €41.96 / £38.15 / $46.19 by ordering with discount code DGBSS30 Moritz Mihatsch is Assistant Professor in World History at the University of Cambridge. Michael R. Mulligan is an Assistant Professor in Law at the Euro University of Bahrain. The book has a X/Twitter page, @ShiftingSovs. Benjamin Goh (@BenGohsToSchool) is an independent scholar and humanities educator in Singapore. He holds a MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. (Hons.) in History from Yale-NUS College. He is a historian of education, and has published on the history of sex education in Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War (Auckland University Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Wanhalla, Dr. Sarah Christie, Dr. Lachy Paterson, Dr. Ross Webb and Dr. Erica Newman tells the story of the profound transformation in Māori life during the Second World War. While the Māori Battalion fought overseas, the Māori War Effort Organisation and its tribal committees engaged Māori men and women throughout Aotearoa in the home guard, the women’s auxiliary forces, and national agricultural and industrial production. Māori mobilisation was an exercise of rangatiratanga and it changed how Māori engaged with the state. And, as Māori men and women took up new roles, the war was to become a watershed event for Māori society that set the stage for post-war urbanisation. From ammunition factories to kūmara fields, from Te Puea Hērangi to Te Paipera Tapu, Te Hau Kāinga provides the first substantial account of how hapori Māori were shaped by the wartime experience at home. It is a story of sacrifice and remarkable resilience among whānau, hapū and iwi Māori. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this, our first interview with Sam Arthur, co-founder and creative director of Flying Eye Books, talks about his love for visual books led him into children's publishing, how he decides on which manuscripts to pursue, and his tips for aspiring authors of picture books: play close attention to the picture book format, usually 12 or 13 double spreads, write stories with humor and characters that we feel for, and write primarily for the children, not the adults. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Peter Hill has been working as a resource manager with a specialty in stream restoration for over two decades, first for Washington DC and then as a consultant for Great Lakes Watershed Opportunities. Currently, he is Senior Policy Advisor for Green Infrastructure at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in Milwaukee, WI. His many years of experience in managing major, multi-agency stream and river restoration projects which necessarily needed to include building partnerships to support such multi-faceted ecological restoration efforts. Many of these resource management projects have been located in underserved areas. With River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways (Columbia UP, 2024), Pete reaches out to both the layperson, as well as the practicing professional. His goal is to build a more comprehensive understanding regarding restoration best practices that can be tapped to meet a community’s desire for a healthy and sustainable riparian environment. But Pete’s perspective and professional practice goes beyond just understanding different restoration approaches. He is also quite cognizant about the need to build community understanding and support for their local rivers and streams, both in rural and urban settings. To this latter point, he does feel strongly that stream and river restoration can be tied directly to a community’s environmental justice efforts. Michael Simpson has been actively working, researching and teaching in the watershed management and wetlands fields for 40 years. He is a licensed wetlands scientist where he has conducted numerous delineations, wetland assessments, employing a variety of assessment approaches and data collection procedures, as well as designing wetlands for treatment of non-point source run-off, agricultural liquid wastes and municipal generated waste water. Currently, his primary research for both US EPA and NOAA has focused upon impact to natural systems and built infrastructure in riparian corridors and estuaries, from changes in land-use on the watershed combined with increases in storm intensity and frequency due to projected climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales’ lively and often risqué style have made his name more synonymous with bawdy humor. But beyond his poetic achievements, Chaucer assumed various roles including those of royal attendant, soldier, customs official, justice of the peace, and more. In this book, Mary Flannery chronicles Chaucer’s life during one of the most turbulent periods of English history, illuminating how he came to be known not only as the father of English poetry but also as England’s “merry bard.” Mary Flannery is the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellow at the University of Bern. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, her publications include Practising Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Studies show that students who have a positive outlook on their lives outperform students who don’t. Is positive thinking a skill? Can it be taught? Our article is: “Teaching Positive Psychology Skills at school may be one way to help student mental health and happiness,” by Dr. Kai Zhuang Shum, published in The Conversation, which explores how the components of happiness and connection can be applied to classroom settings around the world. Amid the reduced access to mental health services for many students, and the rising rates of student stress and depression, researchers are finding that positive psychology interventions make a real difference. “Students who’ve been introduced to science-based ideas about happiness,” Dr. Shum writes, “feel more satisfied with life.” She joins us for this episode to explain more. Our guest is: Dr. Kai Zhuang Shum, who is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP) and a Licensed Psychologist. She serves as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville School Psychology Program. She specializes in positive psychology, motivation, anxiety (including OCD), attention, time management, and well-being (happiness). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Mindfulness The Well-Gardened Mind Inside Look at Campus Mental Wellness Services You Will Get Through This Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD Make a Meaningful Life Meditation Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Our book is: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) by Dr. Amy Reading, which is a lively and intimate biography of trailblazing and era-defining New Yorker editor Katharine S. White. White helped build the magazine’s prestigious legacy and transform the 20th century literary landscape for women. In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.  This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words. White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life. Based on years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community. Our guest is: Dr. Amy Reading. Her book, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She is also the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in upstate New York, where she serves on the board of her local independent bookstore, Buffalo Street Books. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She uses her PhD in history to explore what stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Claire Myers Owens and the Banned Book Dear Miss Perkins Leaving Academia The Misadventures of A Rare Bookseller We Take Our Cities With Us Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network