NBN Book of the Day

Since the beginning of European colonization, the sun-drenched land of California has always attracted dreamers and schemers. Whether it was Spanish missionaries, Russian fur traders, or American argonauts, the myth - or perhaps brand - of California has long been a place here one's wildest dreams can come true. Starting in the late nineteenth century and accelerating in the twentieth, that myth also attracted a wide array of starry eyed spiritualists. In Golden States: How California Religion Went from Cautionary Tale to Global Brand (U California Press, 2024), Cal State Long Beach history professor Eileen Luhr explains how and why this state has been such a haven for utopianists, gurus, and spiritual seekers of all kinds. Explaining the stories of individuals from Katherine Tingley to Emmanual Bronner (of soap fame) to Steve Jobs, Luhr shows how the reputation of California as a haven for deep thinkers and outside the box ideas is both well earned, and was carefully crafted over the course of many strange and wonderful decades. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In my conversation with Professor Pablo F. Gómez about his new book, Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026.Our conversation explored the unsettling relationship between slavery, the body, measurement, and knowledge. What does it mean to measure a human body within a system that has already reduced that person to a commodity? And what happens when numbers that appear neutral become entangled with violence, commerce and exploitation?What stayed with me is the book's invitation to think differently about numbers. Behind measurements of height, weight, health, disease and mortality were human beings whose lives could not be contained by the data recorded about them.These questions are not only historical. We live in an increasingly quantified world, where bodies, health, productivity and risk are constantly measured and transformed into data.So perhaps one question we should keep asking is: Who is doing the counting, why are they counting, and what happens to the people being counted?I invite you to listen to our conversation and reflect with us on the histories behind the numbers we encounter today. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sociology of Gender in India brings together feminist and queer scholarship to chart the changing landscape of gender debates in Indian sociology. Spanning over five decades of disciplinary evolution, this volume interrogates how gender, caste, sexuality, class, and digitalisation intersect in shaping contemporary social life. With chapters by a new generation of scholars, it critically engages with foundational debates in kinship, marriage, labour, media, nationalism, and pedagogy, while foregrounding neglected areas such as femtech, queer infrastructures, and digital precarity. The volume not only reanimates classic concerns of Indian feminist sociology but also aims to intervene in global conversations on intersectionality, decolonial knowledge, and the sociology of everyday life.Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues. Rituparna Patgiri teaches Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research explores questions of culture, food, media, gender, and pedagogy. Deepali Aparajita Dungdung teaches in the Department of Sociology, Ranchi University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and care work within contemporary capitalism, with her more recent work focusing on language, education, and development.Priyam Sinha is an Early-Career Fellow at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, where her work sits at the intersection of critical media industry studies, production cultures, disability studies, gender studies, and digital media development in Asia. She previously held a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, and her doctoral research was awarded by the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Her articles appear in the European Journal of Cultural Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; and South Asian Diaspora, among others. Committed to public scholarship, she is a regular host on the New Books Network and has written for the Economic and Political Weekly, the Asian Film Archive, and FemAsia. Her work can be found at here and you can follow her on X here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jerome Sauvage served as the United Nations Resident Coordinator and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Resident Representative in North Korea from 2009 to 2013. In this capacity, he was the most senior UN official in North Korea during one of the most eventful political periods on the Korean peninsula in recent memory. Amidst the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan, shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, and death of Kim Jong-il, Sauvage had to resurrect and strengthen UNDP's—and the UN overall's—presence in North Korea by delicately navigating the politics of not only Pyongyang, but also the overall international development ecosystem. In this NBN episode, we talk with Sauvage about those experiences, which he recounts in his memoir Witness to North Korea: Three Years on the Ground in the DPRK (Bloomsbury, 2026). The book offers an on-the-ground record of what diplomatic engagement in North Korea actually looks like, for instance regarding how one negotiates employment contracts and handles payroll in a country with no formal labor market. Especially with the DPRK's borders largely closed to foreigners—including UN staff—after COVID, Witness to North Korea provides not only a look back at a past era, but also learnings for future engagement with North Korea. Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies. For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Dr. Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren't only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order. But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about—provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity. The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Dr. Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid palette of colors—and a colorful lifestyle to match. Before the war, Vietnam would have seemed like an unlikely place for a beauty industry to thrive. Virtuous young women were expected to hide their natural beauty, not manipulate it with makeup or flaunt it at a beauty contest. Yet ordinary women began seeking out the latest fashions—to great public consternation.In Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia UP, 2025), Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture in this period, showing how women's faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world. She considers dress patterns, lip-lining tutorials, hairstyles, physiques, and beauty pageants alongside new technologies of media, transportation, and leisure and the anxieties they provoked. The everyday decisions women made about their appearance, Firpo argues, were ways to stake a claim to the roles they wanted to play in the new society taking shape around them. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia University Press, 2026) offers fresh insight into the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept across Vietnam during this crucial period.Christina E. Firpo is professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is the author of Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2016).Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on 20th-century Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation in Vietnam across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The United States has no hate speech laws; hate speech is generally considered to be free speech under the First Amendment. In Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma (U California Press, 2026), acclaimed legal historian Samantha Barbas chronicles the country's legal and cultural battles over the regulation of hate speech in the last hundred years. Charting the historical context for current debates, she ultimately argues that, however emotionally appealing they may seem, hate speech laws undermine civil rights and democracy.The American policy on hate speech evolved from influences such as the civil rights movement, which contended that the most effective way to combat hate speech wasn't through proposed laws. Rather than imposing restrictions, the US has developed an array of mechanisms other than law, including counterspeech and public education, that have been relatively effective at dealing with hate speakers and hate groups. Though not perfect, our method of addressing hate is less dangerous than government censorship and less likely to be weaponized against the powerless. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kabwe, Zambia: Sali, a working mother of three, stands trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. The prosecutor claims Sali shot him after a heated fight in their bedroom. There are no witnesses. Sali pleads not guilty. But her story does not begin with a gun. It begins fourteen years earlier--with her rebellion against the pressure to find a husband, her affair with a wealthy married man called Doc, and her discovery that she's pregnant on the same day of Doc's unexpected death.To avoid the shame of being an unwed mother, Sali accepts Kasunga's proposal, and finds herself suddenly thrust into the shipikisha club: her society's expectations that it is a wife's duty to endure. Over the years, Sali navigates her husband's infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, and her postpartum depression in silence. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face. The trial is a national scandal. Many are called to testify--the maid, Kasunga's mother, and Ntashé, Sali's fifteen-year-old daughter. Even after Sali's diary is dissected and laid bare for all to see, Sali calls no witnesses to her defense. With Kasunga gone, only Sali will ever know the truth. But is the truth enough? Told through the rotating perspectives of Sali, Ntashé, and Sali's mother Peggy, The Shipikisha Club (Cassava Republic Press, 2026) is a riveting story of gender politics in Zambia and the world at large--a must-read for fans of Peace Adzo Medie, Abi Daré, and Tayari P. Jones. Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and award-winning editor and writer, known for her novel The Mourning Bird and her collection of short stories titled Obligations to the Wounded. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree in law, as well as a master's in fine arts. She is currently pursuing a PhD in gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota. Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in African History. She is the Editor-In-Chief of the New Books Network.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?" Presence is her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and printed sources to illustrate the realities of women's physical experiences in early modern Europe, from eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, nursing, sleeping, working, and dying. Maglaque intersperses her historical narrative with personal accounts, demonstrating the ways in which studying the past can impact our lives today. For anyone interested in women's history, the history of labor, early modern health and medicine, or simply the purpose and potential of historical study, Presence is the book to read. Erin Maglaque is a historian of early modern Europe and gender. She teaches at Durham University and writes for publications including the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women's intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more hereSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine (U Chicago Press, 2025) traces the emergence of trans medicine in Scandinavia in the twentieth century, exploring the construction and negotiation of medical expertise among medical professionals, patients, and activists in the media and government bureaucracy. The book combines the author's analysis of medical records and other archival sources with oral history interviews with former patients, activists, doctors, psychologists, and civil servants. Physician-historian Ketil Slagstad uses the Scandinavian story of sex reassignment to anchor not only the role of the state but also bureaucracy and social rights. Scandinavian countries, he shows, played a foundational role in the emergence of trans medicine internationally. As a result, Standardizing Sex tells a transnational history of medicine that sheds light on a set of relations and problems that continue to impact discussions of trans medicine and trans rights around the world.Slagstad's sources offer a rare opportunity to explore the emergence of trans medicine in action in the clinic, laboratory, waiting room, and operating room, as well as in the bureaucrat's office, on the psychologist's couch, and in the publications and meetings of activist groups. Together, these sources allow for the analysis of the increasingly complex negotiations of nosological criteria, medical knowledge, and medical practices in a formative period for transgender medicine. More generally, the book offers a story about the reshaping of the normal and the pathological in modern societies. Ketil Slagstad is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité: Universitätsmedizin Berlin.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

They were perhaps an unlikely trio: professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our time. In The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet (MIT Press, 2026), Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 2018, to the bill's near-certain defeat by Senator Joe Manchin in the winter of 2021, to the surprise passage of the landmark legislation in August 2022. During this critical time, the author was pregnant or in the NICU with her premature twins, and Aggarwal and Deveny were new parents too. Interlacing personal narratives with stories from Congress, the White House, and outside activists, Stokes shows how dogged perseverance and collective action can still bend the course of history. The book concludes with an update from the second Trump administration, explaining the parts of the bill that were—and were not—rolled back, and why we should remain hopeful that progress is still being made. Everyone has been told to shrink their carbon footprint and lighten their load on our planet by changing their behavior. But what if instead of making ourselves smaller, we joined with others to maximize our impact? That's the carbon wave. And this book shows us how to make it.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Leah Kim about her powerful book, Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom Through Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2026). A deeply personal examination of the dire state of our maternal and postpartum care for mothers.For expecting and new parents, too often the care is so focused on a healthy baby that the mother's physical and mental needs are overlooked. Mothers face intense pressure to have the perfect birth plan, breastfeed with ease, and immediately bond with their baby. Unfortunately, these expectations can lead to anxiety, depression, and overwhelm. But it doesn't have to be that way. In Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom Through Motherhood, Leah Kim explores her own pregnancy and early motherhood experience as a person of the global majority, the ways society fails new mothers, the mental health struggles of expecting and new mothers, the systemic neglect in care for mothers with marginalized identities, and how motherhood can be the inspiration for getting help and healing. Her story, enhanced with expert interviews, valuable resources, and the testimonies of other mothers, not only illuminates the impact of insufficient maternal care but also shows readers what can be done to improve care for mothers.Mom, Unfilteredis profoundly personal and brutally honest, yet it is ultimately deeply hopeful. It is about survival and growth, an invitation to move beyond our current social, cultural, and familial realities to support mothers in a meaningful way-physically, mentally, and spiritually. Leah 수진 Kim is a storyteller, author, consultant, podcaster, and community organizer. She is a recovering yoga teacher and spent 10 years as Nike's Global Yoga Ambassador. Her first book "Mom, Unfiltered" will be published in April 2026. About the host: Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children's book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets (Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Nikhil Kalyanpur examines a striking feature of today's global legal order: the use of foreign courts by elites to settle domestic disputes. On the surface, the "outsourcing" of disputes by elites from countries with fragile judiciaries looks like a search for fair treatment unavailable at home. Yet extraterritorial dispute resolution varies across such countries. Russian plutocrats, for instance, frequently litigate abroad, whereas Chinese and South African ones rarely do. Dr. Kalyanpur argues that the pursuit of extraterritorial litigation depends on the balance of power between a state and its plutocracy. In contexts of state capture or state control, the transparency costs associated with transnational law deter plutocrats from seeking resolution abroad. But when the state and the plutocracy have relatively equal power, competing interests can lead to political clashes, with different actors asserting themselves. "Losers" of these clashes, locked out of their institutions, now have less to lose from those transparency costs and so seek resolution abroad. As these elites often escape with much of their wealth abroad, "winners" respond by weaponizing transnational legal institutions to seize rivals' offshore assets and ensure defeated rivals stay defeated. Through cases from Russia and elsewhere, Dr. Kalyanpur unravels the connections between offshore finance, transnational litigation, and intra-elite warfare. He exposes how liberal courts serve as arenas for emerging market power struggles, globalizing conflicts begun at home. As billionaires continue amassing unprecedented power across democracies and autocracies alike, Legal Weapons of the Wealthy lays out how the architects of the liberal economic order defeated themselves by enabling rule by the rich. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Edward Blum interviews Holly White on her new book Constructing American Childhood: Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States. As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime while in many states it's illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry while the legal drinking age remains twenty-one. Are these age-based laws really protecting children, and if not, why do they exist? Holly White uncovers the answers to these questions through a history of America's first age-based laws. Analyzing trial records, newspapers, personal letters and diaries, as well as legal statutes from the founding era to the Civil War, White shows how restrictive age-based laws were implemented to benefit those who already held power. Over time, these new laws—coming out of child murder and rape trials as well as guardianship and underage marriage disputes—increasingly circumscribed the rights of young Americans in the early republic. As White shows, race, class, status, and gender influenced who came to benefit from the label of “child” in post-revolutionary America. In so doing, Constructing American Childhood explains why Americans continue to be guided by the age-based legal definitions of childhood and adulthood of our past.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (Duke University Press, 2023), Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Davis follows forensic archaeologists and anthropologists who attempt to locate, identify, and return to relatives the remains of Cypriots killed in those conflicts. She turns to filmmakers who use archival photographs and footage to come to terms with political violence and its legacies. In both forensic science and documentary filmmaking, the dynamics of secrecy and revelation shape how material remains such as bones and archival images are given meaning. Throughout, Davis demonstrates how Cypriots navigate the tension between an ethics of knowledge, which valorizes truth as a prerequisite for recovery and reconciliation, and the politics of knowledge, which renders evidence as irremediably partial and perpetually falsifiable. Elizabeth Anne Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. * This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we're highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hear "American Girl" or "Born in the U.S.A." and, like it or not, chances are you begin to hum along. The soundtrack of grocery stores, pool halls, bowling alleys, flea markets, chain restaurants, drug stores, and political rallies--heartland rock, while beloved by some and derided by others, is inescapable even today. As rollicking as the music it describes, acclaimed music critic Erin Osmon's Won't Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) tells the story of the origins, chart-topping development, and tangled legacy of heartland rock, the music that ruled the airwaves of the 1980s and remains instantly recognizable to millions. Spinning an entertaining and eye-opening account, Osmon delves into the complicated afterlife of heartland rock's classic albums and songs, including Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run," Bob Seger's "Against the Wind," John Mellencamp's "Small Town," and Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down." She demonstrates the centrality of often-overlooked women like Melissa Etheridge, Bonnie Raitt, and Lucinda Williams--explaining how some of the most popular music of the time was made beyond its white-male stereotypes. She traces the genre's connections to country and Americana, and reveals how legendary figures like Prince were inspired by and expanded heartland rock. And she shows how its success revitalized the careers of figures like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Through it all, she explores the '80s cultural developments that fostered the genre--such as the rise of MTV and the switch to CDs--and argues that the music played a vital role in opposition to '80s conservatism and in support of LGBTQ rights, labor issues, and the environmental movement. A fair-minded critic with an ear for a great behind-the-scenes story, Osmon makes clear that at its best, heartland rock connected with millions of overlooked people longing to be heard. Erin Osmon is a music journalist, critic, and author of books on John Prine and Jason Molina. Her writing appears in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Rolling Stone, and others. She won the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Award for album notes in 2023 and several LA Press Club Southern California Journalism awards. She lives in Nashville. Erin Osmon's website and Instagram. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became the latest in a long line of forces affecting human-animal relations. Grey parrots travelled the world as pets; rats used global shipping infrastructure to spread to far-off islands and became the object of cross-border extermination campaigns; and California sea otters were relocated to accommodate global oil transportation needs. The language of globalization, however, is rarely used to understand the history of these creatures. Globalizing Wildlife (UNC Press, 2026) shows how wild animals were not simply affected by globalization but shaped its concrete trajectories at local, national, and international scales. The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies. Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr. Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he's currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why do people read? In The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object (Manchester University Press, 2026) María Angélica Thumala Olave, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science, explores people's relationship to books and to reading, demonstrating the pleasure and importance books provide in contemporary life. Moving beyond a narrow focus on the social status offered by books and reading, the analysis shows the role of material objects, along with the emotional engagements and social bonds forged by the practices associated with books and reading.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America (Rutgers University Press, 2025) is an ethnographic study of the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island, New York, home to the largest per capita concentration of Liberians in the U.S., that sheds light on the racialization of Black refugees and the racism they have experienced at every step of their migration journey. In this pioneering study, sociologist Bernadette Ludwig explores how Liberians have responded to such racist exclusions, noting how members of this community reject the informal refugee label once they are resettled in the United States. Liberian migrants often view the label as a liability since the larger general public, the media, and the U.S. government tend to regard Black refugees as an economic and social burden unworthy of assistance. Indeed, Black refugees' humanity is often ignored, Ludwig contends, in favor of overemphasizing presumed barbaric violence, endemic wars, cultural backwardness, and diseases. By detailing the lack of aid and support for Black refugees and describing how Liberian refugees in particular have had to overcome various struggles and barriers in coming to the U.S. and while living here, Unwelcome Shores highlights the overarching role of race and anti-Black racism in American society. Dr. Bernadette Ludwig is a Sociologist and the Assistant Dean of the Macricostas School of Arts and Sciences at Western Connecticut State University. She is also an Affiliated Faculty with The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration & Mobility.  Host: Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, studying racial politics, media, and democracy. His most recent book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside Grassroots Political Organizing, is now available with the University of North Carolina Press. In this episode, Dr. Ludwig mentioned an opportunity to get involved in asylum and deportation cases. Here is the link for scholars to submit their information or attend trainings to become country conditions experts.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For years, LGBTQ+ policies worldwide have been crafted based on heteronormative views, needs, and practices. However, this has gradually changed over the last two decades as LGBTQ+ individuals have become key players in the development of gender-based policies. Diego Galego's Queering Public Policy: A Disruptive Yet Inclusive Framework for Policymaking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) examines these political and social changes, evaluates how actors have successfully integrated LGBTQ+ needs into the mainstream policy agenda, and provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the policymaking processes from an LGBTQ+ perspective. Drawing on data from Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and the USA, it presents a systematic framework for understanding "queering public policy" as a policy process. The final chapter offers a roadmap for scholars interested in exploring this evolving field further. This book will appeal to anyone interested in public policy, public administration, and queer studies.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In our recent conversation about Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia, the editors Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden reflect on the need to move beyond treating the pandemic as a singular, isolated shock. Our discussion reflected on the deeper mechanics of knowledge production, how we reflect on crisis beyond its immediate occurrence, how we conceptualize South Asia today, and the process of bringing such a dynamic volume together. A central theme was the necessity of examining crisis as a revealing, prolonged condition rather than a temporary disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed pre-existing structural vulnerabilities across Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Theorizing through this moment meant examining how state strategies and worker realities collided when formal safety nets faltered, forcing us to rethink South Asia not merely as a fixed geographic region, but as a shared space of cascading socio-economic pressures and labor struggles. While this volume traces state policy and institutional shifts, the core strength of the volume lies in highlighting the resourcefulness and claim-making capacities of workers fighting for justice. Assembling these regional perspectives provides a critical blueprint for rethinking state-society relations, labor rights, and collective action in post-pandemic South Asia.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas. On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored–and successful–movie franchises of all time. Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones in George Lucas: A Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2016) If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound. Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched. Brian Jay Jones is the author of the New York Times bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography, as well as Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of An American Imagination and Washington Irving: An American Original. His most recent book is The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building. He continues to believe that Han shot first. Daniel Moran's writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In 2021, the NAACP Image Award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers made her fiction debut with The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, a magisterial epic of African American historical fiction—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—chronicling the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War, to our own tumultuous era. Five years, and numerous awards and best-of lists later, Honorée joins the podcast on the anniversary of the novel's publication to talk about what it meant then, what it means now, and that call from Oprah that shifted everything. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and a student of United States history. She is the author of seven books spanning three genres, including the NAACP Image Award-winning poetry collection, The Age of Phillis. She was on the podcast on June 20, 2025 to discuss her book, Misbehaving at the Crossroad: Essays and Writing. You can find Honorée on Substack, Facebook, and Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Edward Goldring delves into one of the key tactics that autocrats deploy to maintain power: the removal of individuals from within the regime. From Kim Jong Un's execution of his uncle to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's removal of over a hundred Turkish generals, purges bear significant consequences for the survival and endurance of autocrats. Yet much remains unknown about why dictators use purges and whether they achieve their intended effects. Drawing on an original global dataset on civilian and military elite purges in dictatorships in addition to case studies spanning North and South Korea as well as Turkey, Dr. Goldring examines the logic behind purges and their consequences. He shows that dictators purge to consolidate power, punish disloyalty, and scapegoat elites to alleviate popular threats. But even as purges help dictators consolidate power early in their tenure, purges actually weaken their position when they have been in power for a long time, prompting pushback. In the face of an increasing global shift toward authoritarian norms, Purges offers critical insight into how autocrats maintain—and sometimes lose—power. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steve Feldstein's Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare (St. Martin's Press, 2026) opens with a juxtaposition: China spending vast sums to reach the far side of the moon, and Ukraine using cheap drones to blunt a far larger military. Both are stories about technology and power, but they point in opposite directions. In our conversation, Feldstein argues that the outcome of technological competition is not predetermined. Small states, non-state actors, and private companies with the right engineers can now challenge much stronger adversaries. We discuss Iran, whose military innovation grew out of decades of sanctions rather than in spite of them, and why Western analysts dismissed what was in plain sight. We then turn to China and Feldstein's concern that the United States is making unforced errors, hollowing out the basic research on which its edge depends. Bytes and Bullets resists both technological determinism and the claim that nothing has changed. But this book is also candid about what cannot be predicted: as machines take on decisions humans once made, who, if anyone, will set the limits? Our guest is Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesan recounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperative. Vaheesan does not hesitate to critique the successes and failures cropping up along the way; rather, he lays them all bare in service of paving an actionable path toward the decarbonization and democratization of power. Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads their legal research and advocacy, including the amicus program. He has written and spoken widely on antimonopoly law and policy and building a fair economy. Previously, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Antitrust Institute. Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Food justice is defined as the understanding that our food system is unequal and that something needs to be done about it. But how can we create a world where everyone has enough? What does it mean to truly nourish ourselves and our communities? In Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness (Norton, 2026), anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a vibrant new vision of food justice that places Black communities at the center and offers us a visionary, delicious path forward. Reese reveals that to truly create equity in our food systems, we must embrace the abundance that already exists around us—and recognize that the social body is as important as our individual health Gather presents rich, on-the-ground stories of gathering around food in four spaces—gardens, family reunions, repasts, and protests. Blending rich storytelling with analysis, these chapters argue for the political power of food and invite us to learn from the tactics Black communities have long used to create sustainable, systemic change. There are no simple solutions to the problems of acute need. But by recognizing that food justice is already all around us, we can start working together to create a more nourishing, joyful world. Gather is an intimate and urgent invitation to embrace local power, build better food systems, and nourish ourselves, body and soul. Ashanté M. Reese is a writer, anthropologist, and associate professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Raised in Cooper Settlement, Texas, she lives in Austin and is involved in food justice movements nationwide. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Her book, Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to survive long winters, experiment with translated recipes and curious ingredients from abroad, and embrace the conveniences of industrial life, their consumption habits and cooking practices created a new product landscape. Throughout this transitional era of history, individuals visibly communicated their self-understandings through food. The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910 (Berghahn, 2026) by Dr. Claudia Kreklau provides a study of central European food modernity and middle-class identity aims to provide fresh footing for discussions in our own changing global era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A bold critique of conventional economics that reveals why the time and money we devote to care work is vital to our economic future. Our economy is much bigger than the dollar value of things we buy and sell. It depends on us—our health, our creativity, and our moral commitments. These capabilities don't have price tags but are crucial to a sustainable future. We need to acknowledge and reward the value of caring for ourselves and others, especially our children, our elderly, and those experiencing illness or disability. From leading feminist economist Nancy Folbre, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First (University of California Press, 2026) provides a compelling historical and economic account of care provision in the United States. Folbre traces the long and colorful history of resistance to bogus claims that only paid work "counts" and that employees in care services are always paid what they deserve. Explaining why care providers remain economically vulnerable today, she argues that more attention to the public benefits of care provision could help build the political coalitions needed to implement policies that put people first. In this comprehensive and bold book, Folbre upends conventional economic thinking and maps a hopeful path toward a more equitable and sustainable economy. Nancy Folbre is Director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute and Professor Emerita of Economics at UMass Amherst. She is the author of many books, including The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Asymmetric Warfare: Politics and Cultures of Violence in the Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The forces that fight asymmetric wars are so distinct that one side avoids direct military confrontation in favor of political, social, or otherwise unorthodox means of resistance. These conflicts have been a mainstay of modern times, though scholars have often separated them into various designations by era. Observers have referred, in chronological order, to Indian warfare, petite guerre (small war), guerrilla warfare, irregular or revolutionary war, and terrorism. The proliferation of labels over time has obscured the continuity of asymmetric wars throughout modernity. Stark distinctions in resources and capabilities have shaped the reasons why states and societies have decided to fight, and the manner in which they have fought. Across the modern era, mismatches arose in the domains of technology, intelligence production, and law. But in recent decades, so-called weak powers have neutralized many of the typical advantages of strong military states. Jacob Hagstrom is an army veteran and historian. He earned a PhD in history from Indiana University, Bloomington, and taught courses at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. Chris Millington is Professor of Modern European History and lead of the Histories and Cultures of Conflict research group at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of eight books including Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe ((Manchester University Press, 2025), The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford University press, 2023), and France in the Second World War Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Fort Bend County, Texas, looks like the America we claim to want: a suburb where Black, White, Asian, and Latinx families share cul-de-sacs, schools, and celebrations. Residents trade dishes, honor one another's traditions, and take pride in their community's diversity. Yet beneath this harmony lies what sociologist Dr. Kiara Wyndham calls "the diversity contract"—an unspoken agreement that racial diversity may be celebrated, but racial inequality must not be named.  Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and more than 150 interviews, Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb (University of California Press, 2026) reveals how the language of inclusion can obscure enduring racial hierarchy. In Fort Bend and communities like it, White advantage adapts to diversity rather than disappearing. Vivid and deeply researched, Diversityland transforms how we understand suburban life and challenges foundational narratives of what racial progress will look like in 21st century America. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Nuclear Archipelago: Secrets, Power and the Biggest Atomic Blast in Australia (NewSouth, 2026) tells the shocking story of the two British atomic weapons test series held at Western Australia's Monte Bello Islands in 1952 and 1956. Operation Hurricane and Operation Mosaic took place at a rugged archipelago 100 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, and each of the three bombs sent fallout over vast distances across the country. One of the tests, Mosaic G2 in June 1956, the largest nuclear weapon test ever held in Australia, sparked panic at the time that it had been a nuclear accident. In both the Mosaic tests, the crew of a British ship was deliberately positioned in the path of fallout. The biodiverse natural environment of the islands was left contaminated and has never been cleaned up. The book explores the politics, the secrecy and the controversies, including the true nature of Mosaic G2 and its role in the clandestine development of the British hydrogen bomb. Elizabeth Tynan is professor in the Graduate Research School at James Cook University, Townsville. She is a prominent writer and researcher of the era of British atomic testing in Australia. Her book Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story (NewSouth, 2016) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award (Australian History) and the CHASS Australia Book Prize in 2017. Her follow-up book The Secret of Emu Field: Britain's Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia was published by NewSouth in 2022. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO, Dr. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics, agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF). By identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to shape the rules of global trade, this book shows that UN organizations chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right to food. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026) centers a different kind of response to the period's newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsession with preserving perfection. Engaging a diverse set of case studies, Dr. Ellery E. Foutch explores the era's desire to forestall the march of time and immortalize the fleeting moment through art and technology. Beginning with an investigation of artist and naturalist Titian Peale's butterfly illustrations and specimen boxes, Dr. Foutch assesses the implications of attempts to fix animal life in the “perfect state.” She then turns to Harvard's Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, botanical models meticulously crafted to serve as instructional tools but most famous internationally as a spectacle for tourists. Finally, she scrutinizes the period's preoccupation with the fragility of the human body, examining artistic representations of the legendary bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, widely known during his time as the “Perfect Man.” Highlighting the paradoxical way in which these attempts at preservation ultimately sap the vitality from the organic processes they seek to arrest, Dr. Foutch uses these curious objects to unpack a deep set of cultural anxieties around decay and death. By analyzing objects of mass culture and natural history using methods typically reserved for works of art, A Perfectionist Impulse provides a unique window into how nineteenth-century scientists, technologists, artists, and entertainers rendered a common desire for perfection and immortality. Itself a wondrous collection of attempts to capture the idealized moment, this extensively illustrated book serves as a shining example of our enduring fascination with the ephemeral. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This is a really good book. Really good. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a fascinating, and perhaps unexpected, journey through Catholic hospitals, the expansion of the carceral state, and corporate and union access to the protections of First Amendment freedom of speech. All the while, Kathleen J. Frydl is rigorously constructing an understanding and positioning of the modern corporation within the governmental structures and protections of the American political system. This is a deeply and thoroughly researched book, with details and information coming from legal decisions, law review articles, political theory, congressional acts, federal government notices, historical data and understanding, medical information, and texts in political science, sociology, and economics. It is indeed a tour de force, but the reader doesn't really notice because it is such a propulsive and captivating narrative about how modern private corporations learned to capture and implement the advocacy practices that the social movements of the postwar period were using to make gains for previously disadvantaged groups (like African Americans, women, those with disabilities, and more). Frydl lays out the foundation for the analysis within the framework of liberalism, classical liberalism and modern liberalism. She takes pains to explain these distinctions and how our understanding of liberalism has also contributed to some of the shifts and adjustments that have transpired. What does become clear in all of the case studies and details is that this is really a story about the United States Congress—not the Judiciary—and that Congress has been responsible for many of these changes, even if these actions seem to elide public attention and scrutiny. In fact, it is very difficult to detect Congress's role in these instances, where Congress acted to essentially remove the Judiciary's powers to deliberate in these policy realms. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is about corporate identity politics, and the ways in which corporations worked to fend off regulatory reform, while not exactly using the expected pathways. Since corporations, unlike, say women or African Americans, do not have a history of exclusion or disadvantage within the American political or economic systems, the concept of corporate identity politics seems a bit odd, but Frydl makes a strong case for this understanding, through the case studies of Catholic hospitals and regulatory reform that provides an avenue towards allowing for more religious freedoms and protections for the hospitals themselves; the legislative reforms with regard to criminal codes in the 1970s and 1980s that instituted harsher sentencing guidelines for individuals but much more lax responses to corporate infractions; and finally in a comparative study of corporate speech regulation and speech regulation of labor unions in the United States. Frydl tells the story from all perspectives and dimensions, including who was working behind the scenes to move these protections forward over the past fifty years. Liberalism and the Reinvention of the Modern Corporation is a very important analysis of the strengthening of the position of corporate entities within the political, legal, and economic systems in the United States. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She is also author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not In My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In this NBN episode, award-winning and celebrated author Farzana Doctor interviews Hollay Ghadery about her novel, The Unravelling of Ou (Palimpsest Press, 2026). Moving on is hard. Even harder when it's from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who's been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo's early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo's struggles to justify the puppet's existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves. About Hollay Ghadery: Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, (Guernica Editions 2021) won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023) and Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay here. The Unraveling of Ou, is her debut novel. About Farzana Doctor: Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and Registered Social Worker/Psychotherapist. Her ancestry is Indian, and she was born in Zambia while her family was based there for five years, before immigrating to Canada in 1971. Learn more here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women's draw of the 1977 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner. Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis's Trans Pioneer (HarperOne, 2026) chronicles Richards's extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Renée remains a complex figure: A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested—and condemned—than ever before. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Writer Naomi Kanakia has spent her adult life reading the so-called “great books,” those classic works of literature which are–depending who you ask–either deeply unfashionable, or a time-honored testament to human accomplishment. With What's So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It May Destroy You) (Princeton UP, 2026) Kanakia, a devoted lay reader, unpacks popular anxieties surrounding classic writers like Milton, Tolstoy, and Proust. Using the unpretentious approach she has cultivated on her popular Substack, Woman of Letters, Kanakia addresses common reservations about the great books, questions about why we should bother with literature with dated politics, or books exceedingly difficult to read. For plenty of readers, particularly those who came of age in the last decade, the answers may not be clear. Kanakia offers an intriguing reminder to challenge ourselves, to look beyond the walls of the ideology we have constructed for ourselves. (Just don't ask her about “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes.) “What's So Great about the Great Books” is out now with Princeton University Press. Megan Peck Shub (AKA Galley Hag) is a writer, journalist, and a producer who has won Emmy and Peabody awards for her work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. She previously worked on Finding Your Roots with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the PBS history docuseries. Megan's eclectic slate runs the gamut from literature to pop culture to politics, with a particular focus where those topics intersect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest (U Nebraska Press, 2026) centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Dr. Margaret E. Farrar and Dr. Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with sections of India's vast and influential diaspora drawn to, or actively supporting, right-wing Hindu nationalism. Indians overseas can be seen as an important, even inextricable, aspect of the movement. This is not a new dynamic—diasporic Hindutva has grown over many decades. Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) explores how and why the movement became popular among India's diaspora from the second half of the twentieth century. It shows that Hindutva ideology and its plethora of organizations have a distinctive resonance and way of operating overseas; the movement and its ideas perform significant, particular functions for diaspora communities.Edward T.G. Anderson argues that transnational Hindutva cannot simply be viewed as an export: this phenomenon has evolved and been shaped into an important aspect of diasporic identity, a way for people to connect with their homeland. He also sheds light on the impact of conservative Indian politics on British multiculturalism, migrant politics and relations between various minority communities. Sachin Nikarge has extensively worked in consultative capacity with prominent foreign/diplomatic missions across both ‘hard' as well as ‘soft' power domains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In the mid-19th century, anyone who was anyone in the American West had heard of the Ute leader Wakara. Yet, by the early twenty first century, his story has been, if not forgotten, at the very least twisted and distorted into something that would have been unrecognizable to him and his contemporaries. In Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books, 2025), University of Nebraska religious studies professor Max Perry Mueller not only sets the record straight on Wakara, his life, and his times, but also explains how and why his narrative grew to be so misused. It's a story of public history gone wrong, of grave robbing and NAGPRA, and above all about the complexities and contingencies of history. Mueller makes a convincing case that our understanding of Utah and the broader West has been incomplete without Wakara near the center of the story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Georgia Kernell examines how party rules determine how parties select candidates, nominate leaders, and set policy goals. Most research on party organisation pays very little attention to what happens within political parties; this book addresses this gap by examining how internal party rules and procedures shape party membership and political responsiveness. Drawing on an original dataset of party statutes covering 65 political parties across 20 parliamentary democracies, the book offers one of the most comprehensive studies of party organisation to date. The book develops a formal model of party membership and tests these hypotheses using cross-national surveys, member studies, experiments, and computer simulations of projected vote shares. The book finds that a party's level of decentralisation - the degree to which it incorporates rank and file members into decision making - determines which voters it best represents. Decentralised parties may attract more members to campaign for the party, but they do so at the cost of adopting more extreme positions that pull them away from moderate voters. The book challenges our understanding of inner-party democracy, it reveals that Parties that are more internally democratic don't necessarily end up being more representative or responsive to the electorate as a whole. This novel and comprehensive research is an indispensable resource not only for party scholars but also for anyone working on comparative politics and multi-method research. And for anyone who wants to sneak a peek into the "secret garden" of party organisation.  Satyaki Barua is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. His research focuses on party organisation, party institutionalisation, and political mobilisation, particularly examining the interactions between the state, society, and political parties in India and South Asia. Outside of academia, Satyaki enjoys watching and discussing movies, as well as practising Hindustani classical music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day