New Books Network
18,353 episodes - English - Latest episode: 20 days ago - ★★★★ - 128 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Melissa Valentine, "The Names of All the Flowers: A Memoir" (The Feminist Press, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesSet in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir explores siblinghood, adolescence, and grief in a family shattered by loss. Melissa Valentine and her older brother Junior grow up running around the disparate neighborhoods of 1990s Oakland, two of six children to a white Quaker father and a black Southern mother. But as Junior approaches adolescence, a bullying incident and later a violent attack in school leave him searching for power and a sense of self in all the wrong places; he deve...
Kat Arney, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal" (Benbella Books, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesCancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal (Benbella Books, 2020), Kat Arney reveals the secrets of our most formidable medical enemy, most notably the fact that it isn't so much a foreign invader as a double agent: cancer is hardwired into the fundamental processes of life. New evidence shows that this disease is the result of the same evolutionary c...
Joshua Kotin, "Utopias of One" (Princeton UP, 2017)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJoshua Kotin’s Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2017) analyzes a particular and peculiar sub-genre of utopian literature. Kotin identifies works by Thoreau, Dubois, the Mandel’shtams, and the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J.H. Prynne as “utopias of one.” In these works, the authors at one and the same time publish for an external audience, but sketch out modes of living and being that are in important ways both non-accessible and non-replicable. This is much different way ...
Kat Arney, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesWe gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be even more powerful: the way we speak. As the pioneering psychologist Katherine Kinzler reveals in How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You (HMH, 2020), the way we talk is central to our social identity because our speech largely reflects the voices we heard as childre...
Menna Van Praag, "The Sisters Grimm" (Harper Voyager, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 28 minutesToday I talked to Menna Van Praag about her new book The Sisters Grimm (Harper Voyager, 2020)... In a set up reminiscent of the show Orphan Black, four feisty young women struggle to make their way in the world, unaware that they are related. Rather than having genetically identical material from a cloned person in common, these women all have the same father, a demon called Wilhelm Grimm. They differ from each other not only in their culture of origin, and their appearance, but in their elem...
Tamara McClintock Greenberg, "Treating Complex Trauma: Combined Theories and Methods" (Springer, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 41 minutesRelationship problems, struggles with substance abuse, poor memory, and difficulties with emotions are typical symptoms of complex trauma—yet many traumatized individuals have no idea their symptoms share a common cause. Research shows that treating one’s underlying traumatic experiences can yield immense relief from such symptoms and liberate individuals to live freer, more satisfying lives. This has been the focus of Dr. Tamara McClintock Greenberg’s work for 30 years, as she documents in h...
Rita D. Sherma, "Contemplative Studies in Hinduism: Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship" (Routledge, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesWhat counts as contemplative practices in Hinduism? What can Hindu Studies offer Contemplative Studies as a discipline? Contemplative Studies in Hinduism: Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship (Routledge, 2020), edited by Rita D. Sherma and Purushottama Bilimoria, explores diverse spiritual and religious Hindu practices to grapple with meditative communion and contemplation, devotion, spiritual formation, prayer, ritual, and worship. Contemplative Studies in Hinduism covers a wide range o...
R. Rosenberg and R. Rubinstein, "Teaching Jewish American Literature" (MLA, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this interview, Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (editors), engage our listeners in a conversation about different approaches to teaching Jewish American Literature, complicating what it means to be “American”. Teaching Jewish American Literature (MLA, 2020) consciously pushes against the boundaries of the canon, and undermine the stereotype of the immigrant Jewish experience. A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of pe...
Chris Heffer, "All Bullshit and Lies?: Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness, Chris Heffer argues that to analyze untruthfulness, we need a framework which goes beyond these two kinds of speech acts, bullshitting and lying. With his TRUST framework (Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text), Heffer analyzes untruthfulness which includes irresponsible attitudes...
John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbia UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesSince the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats? What does it take to prove that a certain chemical causes cancer? How do we translate academic knowledge of the toxic effects of particular substances into understanding real-world health consequences? The science that answers these questions is toxicology. In The Alchemy of Disease: How Chemicals and Toxins Cause Can...
Hannah L. Walker, "Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesHannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race (Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplines in exploring how individuals are mobilized to engage in political participation by their connection to the criminal justice system in the United States. The fusion between these two academic disciplines, and the focus of their respective studies in this area, answers some questions that are often...
Jasper Fforde, "The Constant Rabbit" (Viking, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 44 minutesIn Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits. The rabbits make fine citizens—more than fine, in fact. They in live harmony with the environment (embracing sustainable practices like veganism, for instance). They have a strong sense of social responsibility. They’re also smart: The average rabbit IQ is about 20 percent higher than the average human IQ. Yet despite their upstanding qualities, the haters k...
Kristin J. Jacobson, "The American Adrenaline Narrative" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesKristin J. Jacobson In her new book, The American Adrenaline Narrative (University of Georgia Press), Kristin Jacobson considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability. To explore these themes, Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after the first Earth Day in 1970, a time frame selected as a watershed moment for the contemporary Ameri...
Jeremy Black, "The Holocaust: History and Memory" (Indiana UP, 2016)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 33 minutesThe event that is commonly labeled as the ‘Holocaust’, was one of the most horrific of the Twentieth Century. It is also one of the most popularly discussed events of both the past and the current century. And like many popular events it is filled with mis-understandings and mis-interpretations. Here to explicate and clarify this most important of events is master-historian and polymath, Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, CMG in his book, The Holocaust: History ...
Patrick Honohan, "Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesFor readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis, s...
Jill Richards, "The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes" (Columbia UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesIn The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP 2020), Jill Richards radically rewrites our understanding of first-wave feminism by demonstrating its proximity to international avant-garde movements including surrealism, Dada, and futurism. Using case studies including the movement for a proletarian birth strike, the anti-Nazi pranks of Claude Cahun, and the theatre of Ina Cesaire, Richards shows that our understanding of early 20th-cent...
Matthew S. Hopper, "Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire” (Yale UP, 2015)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slaver...
Jon Lindsay, "Information Technology and Military Power" (Cornell UP, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourMany assume that information technology will one day clear away the “fog of war.” But as Jon Lindsay shows in Information Technology and Military Power (Cornell UP, 2020), the digitization of warfare can also increase confusion and misunderstanding. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the information age, where computers mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information. On this episode, I talked...
Andrew Krivak, “The Bear” (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourA cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear (Bellevue Literary Press) is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion. In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony ...
John W. Traphagan, "Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan" (Cambria Press, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJohn W. Traphagan’s Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan (Cambria Press, 2020) presents a series of deeply contextualized ethnographies of small-business entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem of contemporary rural Japan. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan has been experiencing an unprecedented decline in population that is expected to accelerate over the coming decades. Rural areas, in particular, have been at ...
Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesLiving, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius. Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the lates...
Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesIn the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, Hodgson believes we need to reintroduce the human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making; and that the application of appropriate concepts and methods, will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncer...
Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesIn her new book Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020), Arleen Tuchman, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, describes the history of how the perception of diabetes has evolved over the past two centuries. She charts the chronology of diabetes, from its beginnings as a disease associated with Jews to one associated with “non-whites.” She explores the connotations that patients, advocates, physicians, and policymakers have attached to diabetes (e.g., di...
Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall" (UBC Press, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWater and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall (UBC Press, 2020) argues that one of the world's most famous natural attractions is not wholly natural but is an engineered landscape. Though the falls have been altered, it's designers seemingly found a balance between preserving its wonder and u...
Benjamin D. Hopkins, "Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State" (Harvard UP, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIntrinsic to the practice of empire is the creation of boundaries. We tend to think of such boundaries as borders, physical lines of demarcation past which the empire’s sovereignty has no purchase. But, in fact, the picture is much fuzzier than that. A foundational task of empire is to define, to categorize, and in so doing, to make peoples and places knowable; only once something is known can it be controlled. For this reason, the peoples that stalk the edges of empire have been a constant s...
Jerry Gershenhorn, "Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2018)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesLouis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) by Jerry Gershenhorn is a history of the struggle for Black equality in North Carolina from 1927 to 1971 as told through the life and activism of Black newspaperman Louis Austin. Austin, as editor of the Carolina Times, was involved in nearly every facet of the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina. He was an outspoken editor and a staunch social justice advocate w...
David Barash, "Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 43 minutesWhat are the similar ways in which animals and people try to intimidate others? In his new book, Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents (Oxford UP, 2020), David Barash explains. Barash is a research scientist and writer who spent 43 years as a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. He’s authored over 240 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and authored or co-authored 41 books. Among his awards is being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
W. Germano and K. Nicholls, "Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything" (Princeton UP, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDo you teach, or do you care about education? Then you have to read this book. At turns radical in the interventions it proposes in educational practice, at turns perspicacious in the views it opens on the act of teaching, at turns inspirational in the words it drops in the teacher's ear, Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything (Princeton UP, 2020) belongs in every teacher's hand, as well as in the hands of many an administrator and policymaker. William Germano...
Sheri Berman, "Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day" (Oxford UP, 2019)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesAt the end of the twentieth century, many believed the story of European political development had come to an end. Modern democracy began in Europe, but for hundreds of years it competed with various forms of dictatorship. Now, though, the entire continent was in the democratic camp for the first time in history. But within a decade, this story had already begun to unravel. Some of the continent's newer democracies slid back towards dictatorship, while citizens in many of its older democracie...
Ravinder Kaur, "Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st-Century India" (Stanford UP, 2020)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesIt is 21st century commonsense that India is an “emerging” economy. But how did this common sense itself emerge? How did India’s global image shift from that of a poverty-infested Third World country to that of a frontier of boundless economic opportunity? In her nimbly researched and lucidly narrated new book Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India (Stanford UP, 2020), Prof. Ravinder Kaur tracks the over two decades of mega-publicity campaign...
Thomas Levenson "Money for Nothing" (Random House, 2020)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourModern finance isn't really all that modern. Three centuries ago, Great Britain's need for money to fight its wars, the appearance of joint stock companies, and the emerging quantification of all aspects of life converged to create new notions and forms of money and investments. And then there was a spectacular bubble in 1720. The South Sea stock rose and fell quickly, but the financing structures remained and last to this day in evolved form. In his new book Money for Nothing: The Scientists...
P. K. Adams, "Midnight Fire" (Iron Knight Press, 2020)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 31 minutesMost novels about the sixteenth century written in English take place in Italy, France, or England—with the occasional foray into Spain or Portugal. P. K. Adams’ Jagiellonian Mystery series is a welcome exception. Set at the glittering Italianate court of King Zygmunt I of Poland/Lithuania and his son, Zygmunt August, these books map fictional plots onto real historical incidents to create fast-paced, fluid stories that are as much about the tensions of a culture in transition as what drives ...
Brandon M. Schechter, "The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects" (Cornell UP, 2019)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesThe Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press) uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon Schechter attends to a diverse array of things―from spoons to tanks―to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians. Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and...
Christopher Capozzola, "Bound By War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century" (Basic Books, 2020)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourEver since American troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the U.S. armed forces. In Bound By War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century (Basic Books, 2020), historian Christopher Capozzola reveals this forgotten history, showing how war and military service forged an enduring, yet fraught, alliance between Americans and Filipinos. As the U.S. military expanded in Asia, American forces confronted...
Harrison Perkins, "Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 31 minutesHistorians of early modern religion recognise the importance of the development of covenant theology in the formation of Calvinism. Harrison Perkins, who teaches systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary and serves as assistant minister of London Presbyterian Church, has recently published what promises to be one of the most important accounts of the development of Reformed covenantal thinking. His new book, Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Trad...
Jennifer J. Carroll, "Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2019)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesAgainst the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2019) considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the ...
John Loughlin, "Human Dignity in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
October 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDignity is a fundamental aspect of our lives, yet one we rarely pause to consider; our understandings of dignity, on individual, collective and philosophical perspectives, shape how we think, act and relate to others. Human Dignity in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition: Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant Perspectives (Bloomsbury Academic) offers an historical survey of how dignity has been understood and explores the concept in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. World-renowned contributors ...
Kelly Harris-DeBerry, "Freedom Knows My Name" (Xavier Review Press, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Freedom Knows My Name (Xavier Review Press, 2020), Kelly Harris-DeBerry creates the world anew from scraps of memories and rhythm. She bounces between the pages, as well as the accompanying audio version of the poems, with confidence. Kalamu Ya Salaam writes in the introduction “The poet’s task is to turn words into song, utter incantations that heal, inspire, be more than ordinary talk” and Harris-DeBerry has a voice that encompasses each other those tasks. It is strong and it is unwaveri...
Chris Fenton, "Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business" (Post Hill Press, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesFor seventeen years, Chris Fenton served as the president of DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, a multi-billion-dollar global media company headquartered in Beijing. He has produced or supervised twenty-one films, grossing $2 billion in worldwide box-office. In his new book, Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business (Post Hill Press, 2020), Fenton shares not only his journey from waiting tables at the Olive Garden to producing s...
Ian Kumekawa, "The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics" (Princeton UP, 2017)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesThe work of Alfred Charles Pigou may not be as well known to people today as that of his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, but as Ian Kumekawa details in his book The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics (Princeton University Press, 2017), over the course of his long career Pigou advanced ideas that remain very relevant today. As Kumekawa describes, Pigou entered the field of economics at an important point in its evolution. As a student of Alfred Marshall, P...
Corey Sobel, "The Red Shirt" (UP of Kentucky, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 42 minutesAt first, Miles Furling plays football to fit in. By eighth grade he realizes that he is both gay and a football player. After an unsuccessful attempt at honesty, he hides who he is and puts all his energy into being a successful high school linebacker. Now it’s the early 2000’s, and Miles earns a full football scholarship to King College, which is known as having the worst Division One football program and one of the best academic programs In the country. When he arrives for the recruiting v...
Jennifer Lisa Koslow, "Exhibiting Health: Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesIn the early twentieth century, public health reformers approached the task of ameliorating unsanitary conditions and preventing epidemic diseases with optimism. Using exhibits, they believed they could make systemic issues visual to masses of people. Embedded within these visual displays were messages about individual action. In some cases, this meant changing hygienic practices. In other situations, this meant taking up action to inform public policy. Reformers and officials hoped that exhi...
Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hour“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins. In Every Life is...
Prita Meier, "Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere" (Indiana UP, 2016)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn the Swahili coast of East Africa, monumental stone houses, tombs, and mosques mark the border zone between the interior of the African continent and the Indian Ocean. In Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press), Prita Meier explores this coastal environment and shows how an African mercantile society created a place of cosmopolitan longing. Meier understands architecture as more than a way to remake local space. Rather, the architecture of this liminal ...
Sophie Richter-Devroe, "Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival" (U Illinois Press, 2018)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesDr. Sophie Richter-Devroe’s book, Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (University of Illinois Press, 2018) offers an analysis of the forms assumed by women’s political resistance in Occupied Palestine and interrogates how an understanding of such activism might be expanded if one attends to the ‘everyday’. During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and, often, informal everyday forms of political activism. Building upon...
Sanjay Lal, "Gandhi's Thought and Liberal Democracy" (Lexington Books, 2019)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesIs religion indispensable to public life? What can Gandhi’s thought contribute to the modern state? With an intense focus on both the depth and practicality of Mahatma Gandhi's political and religious thought this book reveals the valuable insights Gandhi offers to anyone concerned about the prospects of liberalism in the contemporary world. In Gandhi's Thought and Liberal Democracy (Lexington Books, 2019), Sanjay Lal makes the case that for Gandhi, in stark contrast to commonly accepted libe...
Stephen C. Kepher, "COSSAC: Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan and the Genesis of Operation OVERLORD" (Naval Institute Press, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourD-Day, June 6, 1944, looms large in both popular and historical imaginations as the sin qua non, or single defining moment, of the Second World War. Though there were other d-days launched across multiple theaters throughout Europe, Africa, and the Pacific, only one endures as a potent symbol for the war in its entirety: the D-day that saw 156,000 American, British, Canadian, and allied soldiers storm the Normandy beaches and punch an irreparable hole in Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Over the subse...
Ralph Carhart, "The Hall Ball" (McFarland, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 43 minutesRescued in 2010 from the small creek that runs next to Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York, a simple baseball launched an epic quest that spanned the United States and beyond. For eight years, "The Hall Ball" went on a journey to have its picture taken with every member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, both living and deceased. Ralph Carhart visited 34 states, Puerto Rico and Cuba, hundreds of graves, the spots where baseball legends’ ashes were spread and even the cryogenic lab where Ted W...
D. Benge and N. Pickowicz, "The American Puritans" (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 33 minutesOn the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival in the new world of the Mayflower, Dustin Benge and Nate Pickowicz have written a lively and accessible account of America’s earliest English immigrants. Their new book, The American Puritans (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020) presents nine mini-biographies that outline key events in the lives of individuals including Anne Bradstreet, John Eliot, John Cotton and Cotton Mather. Drawing on the rich body of scholarly work that has been developed t...
Denise E. Bates, "Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesBefore the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state’s top private employers—with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises—they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status. After settling in the Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe’s...