New Books Network
18,660 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 128 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books
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Episodes
David Corbett, "The Truth Against the World" (Square Tire Books, 2023)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesThe Truth Against the World (Square Tire Books, 2023) is a brilliant literary fantasy about a divided, dystopian America on the verge of war. Shane, a former Irish combat soldier with a murky past, wants to save his young friend Georgie O’Halloran, who turned his stories of Celtic history and folklore into a beautifully illustrated book. She gave the book to her professor, who published it under his name and earned millions. It became a wildly popular video game that continues to inspire a vi...
Sony Coráñez Bolton, "Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines" (Duke UP, 2023)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesIn Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke UP, 2023), Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and ...
Christopher Ewing, "The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany After 1970" (Cornell UP, 2024)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesThe Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany After 1970 (Cornell UP, 2024) tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, Christopher Ewing charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations. Far from being discret...
M. Steven Fish, "Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge" (Rivertowns Books, 2024)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDefeating the forces of authoritarianism is the political combat task of our age, and we must take it up with the certitude and boldness that our eminent forebears did. Rebuilding the Democrats’ appeal by reestablishing reputations for superior strength and patriotism is a challenge. But the fact that democracy’s plight is due to flaws in liberals’ leadership and messaging rather than economic crises, popular prejudices, or a faulty Constitution is good news. It means that the Democrats can t...
Lauren Horn Griffin, "Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England: History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity" (Brill, 2023)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesFabricating Founders in Early Modern England: History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity (Brill, 2023) argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how earl...
Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourForest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy prac...
Inhuman
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 20 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Rasheed Tazudeen tells us about the inhuman. The inhuman offers a way of moving beyond the legacies of humanism and across categories and scales of being. Thinking with the inhuman world, from spools of thread to microplastics, helps us try and think otherwise about the complex assemblages that shape our lives. If you want to learn more, check out Rasheed’s new book, Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds (Cornell UP, 2024). The book explores the centrality of ecological p...
Karen Sullivan, "Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesKaren Sullivan of Bard College talks to Jana Byars about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (U Chicago Press, 2023). A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "It was said" or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired. ...
Julia A. Cassiday, "Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesRussian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) provides a critical and nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Vladimir Putin’s first two decades in power. It traces how the performance of Russian citizenship has been remolded according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian pop...
Dancing Parkinson's and Queering Science with John Noel Viaña
May 14, 2024 08:00 - 34 minutesIn this episode Pat speaks with Dr John Noel Viaña. Dr John Noel Viaña’s work is focused on the social and ethical aspects of neuroscience and biotechnology. He has interests in a range of bioethical issues and has engaged with researchers, clinicians and science communicators to explore justice, equity and diversity considerations in health research and promotion. They discuss the use of art to present research, how art can help to express identities and perspectives, and its resonances with...
Katya Hokanson, "A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesA Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores a new dimension of Russian imperialism: women actively engaged in the process of late imperial expansion. The book investigates how women writers, travellers, and scientists who journeyed to and beyond Central Asia participated in Russia's "civilizing" and colonizing mission, utilizing newly found educational opportunities while navigating powerful discourses of femininity as well as male-dominated...
Scott W. Gregory, "Bandits in Print: The Water Margin and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel" (Cornell UP, 2023)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesBandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel (Cornell UP, 2023) uses the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan) to examine the world of print in early modern China. Scott W. Gregory traces the way this beloved novel about outlaw heroes, honor, corruption, and brotherhood was adapted and changed by different editor-publishers. While in other contexts print and printing brought stability to texts, Scott shows how in the Ming print itself was an agent ...
First Reformed
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesIn a recent interview, Paul Schrader said he was lucky with Taxi Driver because he “caught the zeitgeist.” He may have done so again with First Reformed (2017), a film that reflects the age of extremism in which we now live. Join us for a long conversation about a person who might be called the “green Travis Bickle” and who trades in one religion for another, only to find that he can’t give his new set of beliefs as much as he thought he could. Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) is an admirer of T...
City of Voices
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesThis episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School’s Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (U of Minnesota Press: 2018). And lucky for us on Phantom Power, a large portion of Mattern’s story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves to Ro...
Shelley X. Liu, "Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesGoverning After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Shelley X. Liu explores how wartime processes affects post-war state-building efforts when rebels win a civil war and come into power. Post-war governance is a continuation of war--although violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation towards development and se...
David Winner, "Master Lovers: A Twisted Puzzle of Love and Fascism" (Outpost 19, 2023)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesIn Master Lovers: A Twisted Puzzle of Love and Fascism (Outpost 19, 2023) author David Winner examines the complications of learning about the completex lives of family after they've passed. While clearing out his great aunt's midtown apartment after her death, Winner discovered artifacts of her storied existence: notes from opera stars, love letters and artifacts from the Middle East of the 1930's. His Aunt Dorle had been a co-founder of Angel Records and a prominent figure in the mid-centur...
Courtney Thorsson, "The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture" (Columbia UP, 2023)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how an incredible group of Black women writers, including Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and writers and intellectuals convened an informal group called “The Sisterhood” and how they transformed American writing and cultural and educational institutions in the decades that followed. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and poli...
Ketaki Chowkhani, "The Limits of Sexuality Education: Love, Sex, and Adolescent Masculinities in Urban India" (Routledge, 2024)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesThe Limits of Sexuality Education: Love, Sex, and Adolescent Masculinities in Urban India (Routledge, 2024) explores different strands of thinking about sexuality education in contemporary urban India. It interrogates the limits of sexuality education as we know it today by rethinking adolescent masculinities in middle-class urban India. This book contributes to the wide gap in theorising sexuality education and adolescent masculinities in urban India. It presents an adolescent perspective on...
Courtney Thorsson, "The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture" (Columbia UP, 2023)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how an incredible group of Black women writers, including Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and writers and intellectuals convened an informal group called “The Sisterhood” and how they transformed American writing and cultural and educational institutions in the decades that followed. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and poli...
Kevin Woodson, "The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesAmerica's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling." Sociologist and law professor K...
What does Biden’s temporary suspension of offensive arms transfers mean for US-Israeli relations?
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesCharles Blaha, a former State Department expert on the vetting of U.S. weapons transfers to other countries, helps us understand this important moment in the Israel-Hamas conflict. After an extended period of tension between U.S President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has decided to freeze some transfers of weapons to Israel, at least temporarily. In his conversation with RBI director John Torpey, Blaha explains United States law and policy governing weapons t...
Siân E. Grønlie, "The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesThe historical narratives of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible have much in common with Icelandic saga literature: both are invested in origins and genealogy, place-names, family history, sibling rivalry, conflict and its resolution. Yet the comparison between these two literatures is rarely made, and biblical translations in Old Norse-Icelandic have been neglected as a focus of literary study. The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling (Boydell & Brew...
Görkem Akgöz, "In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey" (Brill, 2023)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, 2023) offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialization through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secr...
Cecily N. Zander, "The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era" (LSU Press, 2024)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCecily N. Zander’s The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (LSU Press, 2024) is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. It examines how prominent political figures, especially in the new Republican Party, interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractur...
Jaime M. Pensado, "Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico" (U California Press, 2023)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe 21st century has witnessed a revolution in how historians approach the study of Roman Catholicism. Long trapped in an unbridgeable chasm between confessional scholars taking revealed truth as a point of departure & secular scholars ignoring the intellectual and experiential richness of religion, Catholicism has increasingly benefited from vibrant dialogues that are working to break down this divide, as scholars look beyond their local and national sites of research to think globally about...
Maria Cristina Garcia, "State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change" (UNC Press, 2022)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesNatural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (UNC Press, 2022), there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective...
Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming, "Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life" (Routledge, 2023)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourGender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations. It also draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response. The authors look to large-scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address how electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are resh...
Yasmine Ramadan, "Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesIn 1960s Egypt, a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Yasmine Ramadan’s Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) explores how this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment with the project of the postcolonial nation-state in Egypt. Combining a sociological approach to literature with detailed close readings, Yasmine Ramadan exp...
Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesIn this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023). The book is available Open Access, click here to download. The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear s...
Denise Von Glahn, "Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation Composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourFounded in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provides support to what their current website says are "exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions." In Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Denise Von Glahn studies the institution between its founding and the late 1930s, with specia...
Kimberley Moore and Janis Thiessen, "Mmm... Manitoba: The Stories Behind the Foods We Eat" (U Manitoba Press, 2024)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesIn 2018, Janis Thiessen, Kimberley Moore, and collaborator Kent Davies refashioned a used food truck into a mobile oral history lab. Together they embarked on a journey around Manitoba, gathering stories about the province’s food and the people who make, sell, and eat it. Along the way, they visited restaurant owners, beer brewers, grocers, farmers, scholars, and chefs in their kitchens and businesses, online, and on board the food truck. The team conducted nearly seventy interviews and indul...
Joanne Edge, "Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death" (York Medieval Press, 2024)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhen will I die? What is the sex of my unborn child? Which of two rivals will win a duel? As today, people in the later Middle Ages approached their uncertainties about the future, from the serious to the mundane, in a variety of ways. One of the most commonly surviving prognostic methods in medieval manuscripts is onomancy: the branch of divination that predicts the future from calculations based on the numbers that correlate to the letters of personal names. However, despite its ubiquity, i...
"Did You Miss My Comment or What?": Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Courtney Miller, PhD student in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about her paper "Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions (ICSE 2022). Courtney Miller : "One of the things I really enjoyed after publication was the interest of other communities in our work. I mean, just the summer after we published, I went and gave a talk at the Linux Open Source conference, and it was really great to learn tha...
Alyxandra Vesey, "Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century" (Oxford UP, 2023)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDespite the hypervisibility of a constellation of female pop stars, the music business is structured around gender inequality. As a result, women in the music industry often seize on self-branding opportunities in fashion, cosmetics, food, and technology for the purposes of professional longevity. Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships in the contemporary music industry...
Alissa Quart, "Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream" (Ecco Press, 2023)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left with shame and self-blame for our condition....
Kate Maclean, "Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia's Pluri-economy" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHow do alternative economic ideas and practices develop? In Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-economy (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Kate Maclean, an Associate Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, considers the Pluri-economy of Bolivia to rethink ideas about gender, politics, development and the state. The book uses three core case studies, money, clothing, and construction, to explore how economic alternatives have emerg...
Dan Chapman, "A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land" (Island Press, 2022)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesIn 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place...
Marie-Louise Gay, "Walking Trees" (Groundwood Books, 2024)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesMarie-Louise Gay is an internationally-acclaimed, multi-award winning Canadian author and illustrator of over 60 books. In our interview, we celebrate the recent launch of her newest book, Walking Trees (Groundwood Books, 2024), and discuss her youth, her studies and professional career, and several of her leading books, including the series featuring Stella and Sam, and her secret recipe for doing things her way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...
African Cosmologies with Dr. Butterfly
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode we speak with EWP adjunct professor Dr. Butterfly, along with students, Tayina Fenelus and Cameron Rice, who both took his class on African Cosmologies last semester. We speak of intergenerational transfer of knowledge in African traditions, and other important ideas in African cosmologies such as consubstantiation, ritual, story and song, and practices of divination. Dr. Butterfly shares his views on how African cosmologies can “help one rediscover ways in which one can be so...
Gina Sipley, "Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice" (Bristol UP, 2024)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesWe all sometimes ‘lurk’ in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions. Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice (Bristol UP, 2024) by Gina Sipley challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. ...
Donald Opitz and Derek Melleby, "Learning for the Love of God: A Student's Guide to Academic Faithfulness" (Brazos Press, 2014)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesToday I talked to Donald Opitz and Derek Melleby about their book Learning for the Love of God: A Student's Guide to Academic Faithfulness (Brazos Press, 2014). Most Christian college students separate their academic life from church attendance, Bible study, and prayer. Too often discipleship of the mind is overlooked if not ignored altogether. In this lively and enlightening book, two authors who are experienced in college youth ministry show students how to be faithful in their studies, app...
Hippokratis Kiaris, "The End of the Western Civilization?: The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood" (Vernon Press, 2022)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesToday I talked to Hippokratis Kiaris about his book The End of the Western Civilization?: The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood (Vernon Press, 2022). The podcast episode delves into the intellectual and philosophical exploration of the Western civilization's journey from its inception to its current "adulthood" stage, guided by the insightful narrative and analysis of Professor Hippokratis Kiaris. Framing the development of Western civilization in stages akin to human development,...
Y. Tzvi Langermann, "Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew" (Brill, 2023)
May 11, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesAll can agree that the achievement of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) set the standard for subsequent works of "Jewish philosophy". But just what were the contours of philosophical-scientific inquiry that Maimonides replaced? A fairly large array of diverse texts have been studied, but no comprehensive picture has yet emerged. The newly discovered Hebrew dialogue published here, Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew (Brill, 2023), has points of contact of various depth with mos...
Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis, "Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away" (Vernon Press, 2023)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutes'Star Wars' is a global phenomenon that in 2022 celebrated its 45th year of transmedia storytelling, and it has never been more successful than it is today. More 'Star Wars' works than ever are currently available or in simultaneous development, including live-action and animated series, novels, comics, and merchandise, as well as the feature films for which the franchise is best known. 'Star Wars' fandom is worldwide, time-tested, and growing; academic interest in the franchise, both inside ...
Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesCarl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, an...
Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman, "Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesThe British Army won a convincing series of victories between 1916 and 1918. But by 1939 the British Army was an entirely different animal. The hard-won knowledge, experience and strategic vision that delivered victory after victory in the closing stages of the First World War had been lost. In the inter-war years there was plenty of talking, but very little focus on who Britain might have to fight, and how. Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman's book Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40 ...
Hilary White, "Holes" (MA Bibliotheque, 2024)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesHoles splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi ...
Hala Auji et al., "The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesWhat was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (r...
Robert K. D. Colby, "An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesThe Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting th...
Thomas A. Garrity, "All the Math You Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School)" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesBeginning graduate students in mathematical sciences and related areas in physical and computer sciences and engineering are expected to be familiar with a daunting breadth of mathematics, but few have such a background. This bestselling book helps students fill in the gaps in their knowledge. Thomas A. Garrity explains the basic points and a few key results of all the most important undergraduate topics in mathematics, emphasizing the intuitions behind the subject. The explanations are accom...