New Books Network
18,660 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago - ★★★★ - 128 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books
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Episodes
Finola Austin, "Bronte's Mistress" (Atria Books, 2020)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutesIt seems likely that most of our listeners have at least heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Many also know that Charlotte and Emily had two other talented siblings who grew to adulthood: Anne, author of the novel Agnes Grey, and the only male heir, Branwell—whose early promise evaporated in a haze of alcohol and opiates. Still, it seems likely that Branwell’s affair with his employer—Lydia Robinson, a wealthy, married woman eighteen years older tha...
Oluwakemi M. Balogun, "Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 48 minutesEven as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment. Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation (Stanford UP, 2020) takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests ...
Mike Shanahan, "Ladders to Heaven: How Figs Shaped our History" (Unbound, 2016)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 34 minutesThey are trees of life and trees of knowledge. They are wish-fulfillers … rainforest royalty … more precious than gold. They are the fig trees, and they have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways. Ladders to Heaven: How Figs Shaped our History, Fed our Imaginations, and can Enrich our Future (Unbound, 2016) tells their amazing story. Fig trees fed our pre-human ancestors, influenced diverse cultures and played key roles in the dawn of civilisation. They feature in every major re...
D. T. Lawrence and E. J. Lawless, "When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri" (UP of Mississippi, 2018)
December 04, 2020 05:00 - 1 hourThe town of Pinhook in Missouri was founded in the 1940s by southern Black farmers who were looking for land that they could purchase and own in the face of limited options. It was low land that was often flooded, but the farmers were able to clear it and successfully farm it for decades to come while building up a small town. However, in 2011, after heavy rains and historic flooding, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to breach the Birds Point levee. Pinhook, directly in the flood zone...
Melissa Steginus, "Everyday Mindfulness: 108 Simple Practices to Empower Yourself and Transform Your Life" (TCK Publishing, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 57 minutesEveryday Mindfulness: 108 Simple Practices to Empower Yourself and Transform Your Life (TCK Publishing, 2020) guides you through the most powerful daily mindfulness practices that help you rewire your habits and rewrite your life. This book includes 108 daily mindfulness practices, explanations of the purpose behind each practice, and over 300 reflection questions that encourage profound self-exploration and transformative action. With step-by-step instruction and evidence-based exercises you...
Dealing with the Fs (Fear and Failure)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWelcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: board games, Edge House, how to rethink “fail...
Leigh Thompson, "Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table" (HarperCollins, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 37 minutesLeigh Thompson is a Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. An acclaimed researcher, author, and speaker, she has developed several online and in-person courses on negotiation, leading teams, creativity, and virtual collaboration. Leigh is a best-selling author of 10 books including Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table (HarperCollins, 2020). This episode covers why dividing the pie and suppo...
Diana Darke, "Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe" (Hurst, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 37 minutesVisitors around the world have travelled to Europe to see the tall spires and stained glass windows of the continent’s Gothic cathedrals: in Cologne, Chartres, Milan, Florence, York and Paris. The trappings of Gothic architecture have become shorthand for “medieval Europe”. Yet in Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (Hurst: 2020), Diana Darke investigates the Islamic origins of Gothic architecture, tracing its history through pre-Islamic Syria through the Islami...
Anne K. Bang, "Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform" (Brill, 2014)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices, and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwards to Mozambique, Madagascar, and Cape Town. ...
Mark Somos, "American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775" (Oxford UP, 2019)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 26 minutesIn Federalist no. 2, John Jay considered the ‘wide spreading country’ of the American republic. It was, he argued, as if the land itself was fashioned by the hand of Providence, which ‘in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together’. When we think of early American politica...
Melody E. Valdini, "The Inclusion Calculation: Why Men Appropriate Women's Representation" (Oxford UP, 2019)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 50 minutesThe thematic research question in The Inclusion Calculation: Why Men Appropriate Women’s Representation (Oxford UP, 2019) is whether there is a distinction between women’s power itself and the strategic value of having women in power, and, within this distinction, what is it that men get out of women in power. This is a fascinating interrogation because it approaches the idea of women’s power – particularly what we consider to be political power – from a somewhat novel perspective, the ration...
Michael Brenes, "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourDonald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft ...
Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutesReducing harm or shrinking the likelihood of accidental death are remarkably contentions projects—in areas from sex education, to pandemic management, to drug use. Nancy Campbell’s important new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020) explores how a therapy that can stop an accidental drug overdose, called Naloxone, emerged in the American mainstream in the early years of the new millennium—despite existing in some form for nearly a century. What are now called “opio...
Richard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourFormer social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020) is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive cor...
Transforming Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Vietnam: A Discussion with Professor Patrick Brennan
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 23 minutesGlobally, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women, with over 1 million cases detected annually. The disease is particularly worrisome in Vietnam, where breast cancer incidence has more than doubled over the last two decades, making it the leading cancer among Vietnamese women, ahead of cervical and uterine cancers. It has also demonstrated a high level of aggressiveness, with over 80% of breast cancer patients presenting with local or distant metastases, while only 28% of...
P. Bilimoria and P. Hughes, "The Indian Diaspora: Hindus and Sikhs in Australia" (Manticore Press, 2019)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourSince the late 1990s, the Indian community in Australia has grown faster than any other immigrant community. The Indian Diaspora has made substantial contributions to the multi-ethnic and multi-religious diversity within Australia. The growth of Hinduism and Sikhism through gurus, temples, yoga and rituals of many kind has brought new colours, images, customs and practices to the profile of Australian religion, and the Australian landscape more widely. At the same time, Hinduism and Sikhism h...
Peter Singer, "Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically" (Liveright, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourEven before the publication of his seminal Animal Liberation in 1975, Peter Singer, one of the greatest moral philosophers of our time, unflinchingly challenged the ethics of eating animals. Now, in Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically (Liveright, 2020), Singer brings together the most consequential essays of his career to make this devastating case against our failure to confront what we are doing to animals, to public health, and to our planet. From his 1973 manifesto for animal liberation to his p...
Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, "Monstrous Women in Comics" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesIn their new collection, Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody put together a critical volume on the ways women are made monstrous in popular culture. This edited volume examines the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. The five sections of this book look at th...
Vince Cable, "China: Engage!--Avoid The New Cold War" (Bite-Sized Books, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourAnyone doing business with China will have been shocked by the speed with which political and economic relations with Western, and some other, countries – like India – have deteriorated in 2020, but especially the USA and the UK. A crucial issue for the future is whether this is a passing phase, caused by temporary shocks like the Pandemic and by the personalities of leaders in China and the USA. Alternatively, this could be the beginning of a new Cold War characterised by prolonged hostility...
Roy G. Guzmán, "Catrachos" (Graywolf Press, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutesRoy G. Guzmán’s Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) is a stunning debut collection of poetry that immerses the reader in rich, vibrant language. Described as being “part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story,” this powerful collection blends pop culture, humor, with Guzmán’s cultural experience to explore life, death, and borders both real and imaginary. “This isn’t supposed to be a history book, and yet it is,” says Guzmán in discussing Catrachos. It’s not suppos...
Keith A. Livers, "Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 57 minutesConspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that audiences are not intrigued by them. What can conspiracy theories communicate about those who engage with them and about those who are this way or the other implicated? With Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Keith A. Livers explores the conspiracy theory on the theoretical and...
Dominique Kirchner Reill, "The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire" (Harvard UP, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesThe Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard UP, 2020) recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, who aimed to annex the ter...
Evan Winter, "The Fires of Vengeance" (Orbit Books, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 32 minutesIn order to reclaim her throne and save her people, an ousted queen must join forces with a young warrior in the second book of this"relentlessly gripping, brilliant" epic fantasy series from a breakout author (James Islington). Tau and his Queen, desperate to delay the impending attack on the capital by the indigenous people of Xidda, craft a dangerous plan. If Tau succeeds, the Queen will have the time she needs to assemble her forces and launch an all out assault on her own capital city, w...
Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourChina’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering? In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officia...
Glenn Sauer, "Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth" (Orbis Books, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesAs a scientist and practicing Catholic, Dr. Sauer brings a unique perspective to several of the important issues related to finding a space for dialogue between the at times opposing fields of science and religion. Drawing on insights from Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Kuhn, and many others, Dr. Sauer presents a powerful and important framework for reconciling the historically changing divide between science and religion. His take is that we need to encourage a stance of intellectual hu...
Amanda L. Scott, "The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550–1800" (Cornell UP, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutesJane K. Wickersham (Associate Professor of History, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Amanda L. Scott (Assistant Professor, Penn State University) about her new book The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020). Neither wives nor nuns, the seroras fulfilled an essential religious role in early modern Basque communities. Amanda L. Scott explores the lives of the devout laywomen who cared for and maintained churches and sh...
Harmony Bench, "Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 51 minutesHarmony Bench's Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Minnesota UP, 2020) traces the changing ways dance is distributed and created on the internet from the heady early internet of the 1990s to the ubiquitous social media platforms of today. Bench discusses how flash mobs reclaimed public space in the aftermath of 9/11, how "hyperdance" promised that every viewer would also be a co-choreographer, and how viral dance crazes unite people across borders in ways that are pote...
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, "Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right" (Princeton UP, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesHate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland shows how tomorrow’s far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing...
Daniel Simpson, "The Truth of Yoga: A Comprehensive Guide to Yoga's History, Texts, Philosophy, and Practices" (North Point, 2021)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMuch of what is said about yoga is misleading. To take two examples, it is neither five thousand years old, as is commonly claimed, nor does it mean union, at least not exclusively. In perhaps the most famous text—The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali—the aim is separation, isolating consciousness from everything else. And the earliest evidence of practice dates back about twenty-five hundred years. Yoga may well be older, but no one can prove it. Scholars have learned a lot more about the history of ...
M. T. Mulder and G. Marti, "The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesIn The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry (Rutgers UP, 2020), Mark Mulder and Gerardo Marti offer a compelling look at the rise and fall of one of the most popular and influential Christian evangelists of the twentieth century, Robert H. Schuller. From Midwestern beginnings in the Reformed Church of America, Schuller was sent to California where he started a "drive-in" church that immediately appealed to the car-crazy, white, middle ...
Dinyar Patel, "Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism" (Harvard UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. In this episode we speak to Dinyar Patel, author of Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism (Harvard U...
Anjali Vats, "The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutesThe Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Anjali Vats is an intricate and meticulously researched text on intellectual property history, race, and citizenship from the 1790s to the present. This is a complex narrative that engages multiple fields of knowledge including rhetoric, history, communication studies, law, and critical race theory. With a focus on race and neo-coloniality in American intellectual property ...
Anna Weltman, "Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, these ideas prime mathematicians and the public to see in mathematics the answers—for example, an impartial arbiter, or a meritocratic equalizer—to many urgent societal questions. Anna Weltman's new book, Supermath: The...
Charles A. Kupchan, "Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World" (Oxford UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutesIn the past few years isolationism, which had long been derided in the national discourse, has been making a comeback as a political force. In Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (Oxford University Press, 2020), Charles A. Kupchan traces the history of the concept in American politics and considers its future influence on American foreign policy. As he demonstrates, isolationism was long dominant in shaping American foreign policy, as for decades polit...
Mary Cappello, "Lecture" (Transit Books, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 46 minutesToday I interview Mary Cappello about her new book, Lecture (Transit Books, 2020). Although I almost hesitate to call it a book. It’s much more—like all great lectures are—a performance, one full of erudition and insight, humor and humanity, profound diversions and wry musings, one asking for your most acute attention and simultaneously inviting you to drift and dream. It’s like a lecture in that it resists summing up and instead leaves you throwing up your hands and saying, “You had to be th...
Claire Herbert, "A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality" (U California Press, 2021)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutesBringing to the fore a wealth of original research, A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality (University of California Press, 2021) examines how the informal reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping Detroit for decades. Dr. Claire Herbert, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon lived in the city for almost five years to get a ground-view sense of how this process molds urban areas. She participated in community meetings and tax foreclosur...
College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom: A Conversation with Eddie R. Cole
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutesSome of America's most pressing civil rights issues--desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech--have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that...
Covell F. Meyskens, "Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobi...
Jennifer Valenti, "The Maverick" (Broken Arrow Books, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 28 minutesIn The Maverick (Broken Arrow Books, 2020), author Jennifer Valenti plugs into the current zeitgeist of young women who struggle to defy the casual sexism of men in power. Jane Valiante is elated when the hottest tech company in the world offers to fly her from Florida to New York for the job of her dreams. After a long day of interviews, Jane feels insecure about her chances, but then she receives an invitation to the holiday party from the CEO and Founder, Peter Wright. She happily accepts,...
Jeremy Snyder, "Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us--and Makes Us Vulnerable" (Oxford UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesWe often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations who are preyed upon by someone offering promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned in terms of "exploiting hope." These accusations are made in a range of contexts: human smuggling, employment relationships, unproven medical 'cures.' We hear this concept so often and in so many contexts that, with all its heavy lifting in public discourse, its actual meaning tends to lose focus. Despite its common use...
Paul Morrow, "Unconscionable Crimes: How Norms Explain and Constrain Mass Atrocity" (MIT Press, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe moral horrors of genocide and mass atrocity lead us to wonder how such things are even possible. A common and understandable reaction is to see events of this kind as arising from the collapse and eventual disappearance of norms. That is, because we find genocide and mass atrocity so difficult to comprehend, we grasp for an explanation that ascribes to such episodes the absence of compressibility. In Unconscionable Crimes: How Norms Explain and Constrain Mass Atrocity (MIT 2020), Paul Mor...
Rachel Hall, "Heirlooms: Stories" (BkMk Press, 2016)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutes“It turns out there are things that cannot be left. The very nature of secrets, for instance, insists that they be kept.” On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Rachel Hall (s) about her collection of stories about a Jewish family crossing worlds amidst wars. Heirlooms (BkMk Press, 2016) begins in the French seaside city of Saint-Malo, in 1939, and ends in the American Midwest in 1989. In these linked stories, the war reverberates through four generation...
Rebecca Harrison, "The Empire Strikes Back" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 45 minutesWhy does The Empire Strikes Back matter? In BFI Classics Series's The Empire Strikes Back (Bloomsbury, 2020), Rebecca Harrison, a lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, tells the story of the film’s production and reception, and analyses the film’s on-screen representations. The book is framed through the idea of disruption, with The Empire Strikes Back discussed as a film that disrupted the industry, genre and cinematic conventions, and critical expectation. Mo...
Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales, "Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense" (Abbreviated Press, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesToday I talked to Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales about their book Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense (Abbreviated Press, 2020). The Códice Casanatense, or Codex Casanatense 1889 as it is formally known, is a 16th-century Indo-Portuguese collection of some 76 captioned watercolours now held in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. Deposited there at the beginning of the 18th century, it resided in almost complete obscurity for two and half centuries and was ...
Tom Rastrelli, "Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary" (U Iowa Press, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourTom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary (University of Iowa Press, 2020) divulges the clandestine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexual and spiritual dynamics of celibacy and lays bare the “formation” system that perpetuates the cy...
Paul Jankowski, "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War" (Harper, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 50 minutesIn his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled account of a critical period of world history, the interwar years, in which the world transitioned from postwar to the prewar and saw the disintegration of collective security and international institutions created after the First World War. Drawing on international history’s methodology of multi-archiva...
S. Newcombe and K. O'Brien-Kop, "Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies" (Routledge, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 49 minutesThe Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (Routledge, 2020) is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary resource, which frames and contextualises the rapidly expanding fields that explore yoga and meditative techniques. The book analyses yoga and meditation studies in a variety of religious, historical and geographical settings. The chapters, authored by an international set of experts, are laid out across five sections: Introduction to Yoga and Meditation Studies History of Yoga and...
Jill Watts, "The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt" (Grove Press, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWhen did Black Americans move from stalwart party of Lincoln Republicans to dedicated New Deal Democrats? How did a group of self-organized Black economists, lawyers, sociologists, and journalists call out inequality in the New Deal and push President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to consider the relief of Black Americans? Dr. Jill Watt’s The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (Grove Press, 2020) traces the origins of a group of self-orga...
Jinee Lokaneeta, "The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutesUsing case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of “truth serum,” Sodium Pentothal) represe...
Jonathan Boyarin, "Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side" (Princeton UP, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourNew York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. In Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton University Press, 2020), Jonathan Boyarin presents a uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem,...