New Books in Biography

I had the privilege of speaking with writer Samantha Ellis about her deeply moving new book, Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture (Pegasus Books, 2026). Our discussion explored not only the story of a disappearing language, but also the broader questions of memory, identity, and what it means to inherit a fragile cultural legacy. At the heart of Ellis's book is Judeo-Iraqi Arabic—also known as Baghdadi Jewish Arabic or Hakimalna—a language once spoken by the Jews of Iraq. Rich with layers of Hebrew and Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic, it reflects over two millennia of Jewish life in the region. Today, however, it stands on the brink of extinction. As Ellis shared, a language is considered endangered when it is no longer passed on to children, and Judeo-Iraqi Arabic may have only about a thousand speakers remaining worldwide. Within a generation, it could fall silent. Ellis described a powerful turning point in her own awareness: a casual question from another parent about why she was not sending her son to a nursery that spoke “her language.” Her spontaneous response—“my language is dead”—became the catalyst for the journey that led to this book. That moment captures the quiet grief of linguistic loss, but also the urgency of preservation. Our conversation traced the long arc of Iraqi Jewish history, beginning with the Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. Iraqi Jews lived in the region long before the arrival of Arabic, shifting over centuries from Hebrew to Aramaic and later to Arabic, while preserving distinctive linguistic features from earlier eras. This layered history lives on in the language itself. Yet the mass departures of Iraqi Jews in the mid-20th century—particularly the 1950–51 airlift—fractured this continuity. Today, only a handful of Jews remain in Iraq. And yet, as Ellis emphasized, culture does not disappear all at once. Language may fade, but other forms of transmission endure. Food, in particular, becomes a powerful vessel of memory. Ellis initially resisted including recipes in her book, but came to understand that cooking is itself a kind of language—a sensory bridge to the past. The image of her mother carrying three rolling pins from Iraq is emblematic of this continuity: tangible objects that hold intangible heritage. Even the book's title gesture—“always carry salt”—evokes protective practices familiar across Mizrahi communities, small rituals that encode belief, memory, and identity. We also discussed the remarkable story of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, discovered in 2003 in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police headquarters. The archive contains hundreds of thousands of documents—school records, letters, communal registers—offering an intimate portrait of everyday Jewish life in Iraq. Today, innovative projects are using AI to transcribe and translate these materials across multiple scripts, making them accessible to descendants and scholars alike. Yet the archive's ultimate fate remains uncertain, raising complex questions about ownership, memory, and cultural restitution. A particularly resonant theme in our conversation was Ellis's struggle with authenticity. As a second-generation Iraqi Jew raised in the UK, she grappled with whether she had the “right” to tell this story, especially without having visited Iraq herself. Her resolution—to be “authentic to me”—offers an important model for thinking about diasporic identity. Preservation, she suggests, does not require perfect replication. It allows for adaptation, creativity, even reinvention. One can honor tradition while also “messing with it,” whether by adjusting a recipe or reimagining inherited practices. Ellis introduces a beautiful concept she calls “milk language”—the language absorbed in early childhood, through intimacy and care, even if it is not the dominant language of one's environment. This idea invites us to reconsider how language lives within us, not only as a tool of communication but as a carrier of emotional and cultural memory. As an educator, I was especially struck by Ellis's closing insight and her implicit call to action: to speak with our elders while we still can. There is a profound difference between hearing fragments of family stories in childhood and sitting down, as an adult, to listen fully and intentionally. These conversations do more than preserve history; they create connection, continuity, and a deeper sense of self. Always Carry Salt is not only a memoir. It is an invitation—to remember, to document, and to carry forward what might otherwise be lost. In a time when so many cultural threads are at risk of unraveling, Ellis's work reminds us that preservation begins with attention, with curiosity, and with the willingness to listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Duke UP, 2026), Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer's famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar's legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar's archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar's place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Colin Flahive is an American entrepreneur and writer who has spent more than two decades living and running social enterprises in southwestern China. He is best known as one of the founders of Salvador's Coffee House, which is a hub of international exchange in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. In this New Books Network episode, we talk with Colin about his latest book, The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting Gears in Rural China (Earnshaw Books, 2026). The Galaxy's Last Ride is a rich combination of memoir, travelogue, and oral history that explores China's sweeping development through a deeply personal lens. The book weaves together several strands—a 2,500-kilometer solo motorcycle journey that Colin took across rural China during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the personal stories of Salvador's employees, and recollections from Colin's past travels—to paint a part-insider-part-outsider portrait of China's evolutions over the last two decades. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

A memoir of a child's forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin's Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face of extraordinary hardship.  In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman conditions. Looking back, Ida shares their struggles: foraging for food, trying to reunite with her imprisoned father, spending weeks in a desolate hospital with typhoid fever, and adapting to shifts in the political climate to make the long journey home to Poland. Ida published this acclaimed memoir in her native Polish in 2011. Here, Ida's granddaughter, Isabella Skrypczak, translates her babcia's words and provides additional context—including describing the remarkable life Ida has gone on to live as a pioneering doctor. In the vein of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile (Disruption Books, 2026) chronicles Ida's experiences on a lesser-known front of the Second World War. Together, Ida and Isabella reflect on how every small act of kindness contributed to Ida's liberation from exile and ability to build a life and a family. Her story celebrates the capacity of the human spirit to not only survive trauma but thrive beyond it.Ida Kinalska-Pietruska survived childhood exile to Siberia during the Soviet Union's World War II assault on Poland. When she returned to Poland as a teen, she began studying medicine. A pioneering endocrinologist, she founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok and led the region's first endocrinology clinic for twenty years. Ida has authored more than four hundred publications, mentored countless other doctors, and collaborated across the international medical community, including using her research to make widely known the Chernobyl disaster's effects on people's endocrinological health. She has been honored with the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland's second-highest civilian state award, and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles, reflecting her resilience, brilliance, and global impact on science and humanity.Isabella Skrypczak is an author, intuitive healer, and former HR professional in Big Tech whose work bridges the seen and unseen. Born to Polish immigrants and raised in Houston, Texas, she spent every summer with her grandmother in Poland. When her grandmother's memoir gained national attention in Polish media, Iza felt called to translate it into English—an act of love, remembrance, and advocacy. As war returned to Eastern Europe, she recognized the urgency in sharing this history with the Western world. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her daughter, Kamila.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Chaim Grade was born in 1910 in Vilna, Poland. In his youth, Grade was a student of the Novaredok Musar Yeshiva and of Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz. He was also a founding member of the Yung-Vilne literary group, known for its leftist politics, secular Jewish thinking, and literary influence. After losing both his mother and wife during the Holocaust, he emerged as one of the most prolific and defining Yiddish voices in post-war literature. Besides publishing several volumes of poetry, he is best known for his two acclaimed novels, The Agunah and The Yeshiva. In early 2023, YIVO and the National Library of Israel (NLI) completed the digitization of the Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade. The collection helps to illustrate Grade's literary development and impact on Yiddish literature, from his earliest poetic works written in Vilna and the Soviet Union to his prolific and accomplished prose work composed mainly in the United States. Join YIVO and NLI for a panel discussion of Grade's legacy with Ruth Wisse, Ofer Dynes, and Curt Leviant, led by scholar and translator Justin Cammy. This panel discussion originally took place on November 15, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

John Quincy Adams was the great visionary of America's post-founding era, a writer and orator of consummate skill who reframed the origins and principles of the republic for a new generation. It's fitting then that as the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of independence, that Adams should be the focus of renewed attention. One new book in particular caught our eye at Library of America: America's Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick by Bob Crawford (Zando 2026). Crawford is perhaps best known as the bassist for the acclaimed folk-rock band The Avett Brothers, out of Concord, North Carolina. But he is also the host of not one but two popular podcasts: American History Hotline, on iHeart Radio, and The Road to Now, on SiriusXM's POTUS channel. With all this going on, we're very grateful that he could make time to sit down with LOA associate publisher Brian McCarthy for a free-ranging conversation about all things Adams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

John Dewey is among history's most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today. What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times. Revealing the true scope of Dewey's educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Natalia Rogach Alexander's Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey (Columbia University Press, 2025) presents an alternative canon—running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois—that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential. Natalia Rogach Alexander is a lecturer in philosophy at Columbia University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Themistocles is one of the great personages of ancient Athens, known for his heroics in warfare as well as for his overweening and ultimately tragic ambitions. In Themistocles: The Rise and Fall of Athen's Naval Mastermind (Yale UP, 2026), Michael Scott takes a distinctly human measure of this complex figure. As he tells me in our conversation, it would be wrong to see Themistocles, as some ancient scribes were disposed to, as the product of a fixed nature. Born and raised as an outsider in the status-obsessed world of Athens, he shaped his destiny through his own choices, some of them flawed. Scott is professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick, UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Andrea Gunraj about her collection of essays, Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present (McClelland & Stewart, 2026).  The under-told legacy of indentured servitude runs through the blood of countless descendants in the diaspora. In this deeply felt collection of essays, Andrea Gunraj explores the impact of her family's history on her sense of self.Andrea Gunraj delves into the under-told legacy of indentured labour and its lasting impacts on descendants across diasporas, from the Caribbean and Latin America to Canada, the United States, and beyond. She captures the complexities of belonging and the challenges of navigating dichotomies. Through the concept of “go-betweenness,” Gunraj illustrates her path from the intersections of race, class, and identity to a broader understanding of colonial histories.A gripping read that weaves memoir with history and cultural criticism, Go-Between Girl is both accessible and profound, intimate and political. Gunraj invites readers to reconsider their narratives about work, love, and heritage. Her essays are a touching testament to the enduring quest for justice, offering a powerful contribution to contemporary conversations on race, feminism, and the unfinished legacies of colonialism. Andrea Gunraj is an essayist and author of The Lost Sister (Vagrant Press) and The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha (Knopf Canada). She lives in Toronto and loves to write about underseen stories and connections. She is a member of The Writers' Union of Canada. Visit andreagunraj.ca for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838-1902 (U South Carolina Press, 2026), Dr. Mollie Barnes studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Dr. Barnes presents entirely new portraits of these freedom fighters of the nineteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry. Like feminist and anti-racist leaders in our own moment, the women in Paper Heroines were often flawed. White women reformers sometimes created tensions, silences, revisions, and erasures within their print-culture networks, obscuring the lives and contributions of Black women. Black women developed counternarratives and counter-networks as they sought to reclaim their own life histories. What emerges from Barnes's exploration of these textual conversations is a story of complicated relationships that reveal the dynamism of women's lives in a place and time that was equally tumultuous and consequential. Key terms and names is this episode include: close reading, archival silences, the peripheries, life writing, The Penn School, Port Royal, Beaufort, Combahee River, St. Helena, Relief Workers, Harriet Tubman, Fanny Kemble, Psyche, Teresa, Laura Towne, Charlotte Forten, Mr. Holland, and Sarah Hopkins Bradford. Guest: Dr. Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society, and Vice President of Organizational Matters for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on 19th century women writers, and is the author of Paper Heroines, which received funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore which stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell. She is an academic writing coach and editor. She created, produces and hosts of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Writing Biography Running From Bondage Jumping Through Hoops Never Caught Speaking While Female Women Reformers and The House on Henry Street We Refuse Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Here in Episode 9 of Season 5, I interview Mr. Rob Long. A longtime Hollywood professional, he was a writer and producer for the classic sitcom Cheers as well as for over a dozen other shows. A National Review contributor and columnist for both Commentary and Washington Examiner magazine, he has authored two books, Conversations With My Agent (1998) and Set-Up, Joke, Set-Up, Joke (2005), and edited one, Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse (2017). As the co-founder of Ricochet, a media network, he hosts “Martini Shot,” a long-running, bite-size showbiz podcast, as well as cohosts “GLoP Culture.” Drawing on his two comic memoirs—alongside his religious studies as a Master of Divinity student at Princeton Theological Seminary—we discuss his life in Hollywood, religious journey, and current training to become an Episcopal priest. Along the way we dig into the nature of humor, the rise and fall of the TV sitcom, the lost formation of the writer's room, what it is like to be a Hollywood conservative, how technology like streaming and AI has changed show business, the strategy for the perfect sermon, and the spiritual calling of the creative arts. Among the shows that are discussed include the Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Andy Griffith Show, plus films like Twentieth Century, A Night at the Opera, The In-Laws, and Midnight Run; along with guest appearances by Michaelangelo's Pieta, Aristotle's Poetics, Moliere, P.G. Wodehouse, P.J. O'Rourke, plus the wit of Jesus of Nazareth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified “horrifying heresies,” but the precise reasons for his expulsion remain a mystery. When he published his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, which was condemned as “the most atheistic book ever written,” he began to reveal to the world what his heresies may have been. Yet ever since the eighteenth century, most readers and scholars have assumed that Spinoza was a pantheist—even a “God-intoxicated man,” as the poet Novalis put it. After all, how could a person whose books are suffused with talk of God be an atheist? In Spinoza, Atheist (Princeton University Press, 2026), Steven Nadler, one of the world's leading authorities on the philosopher, aims to settle the question and show that that's exactly what he was. Nadler makes a powerful case that there is no real divinity for Spinoza. God is Nature, and isn't an object of worshipful awe or religious reverence but can only be understood through philosophy and science. There is nothing supernatural—no mystery, ineffability, or sublimity. Spinoza does speak of “blessedness” and “salvation,” but these, too, are to be understood in natural and rational terms, as the peace of mind and happiness that come from understanding ourselves and the world. Whether Spinoza believed in God is a fascinating and enduring controversy. Spinoza, Atheist promises to transform our understanding of his views and to make clear just how radical a thinker he was and remains.  Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His many books include Rembrandt's Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Spinoza: A Life, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die, and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age. Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint doctoral program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It's a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it's one that she has taught and observed up close.When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor's worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s.As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn't thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States.A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth's own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me (37 Ink, 2026) follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map. You can find Elizabeth on her website, Instagram, and TikTok. Her viral Ted talk, “Why it's so hard to talk about the N-word,” is here. And Richard Pryor: Live in Concern (1979) can be streamed on YouTube.  Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and 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/biography

In 1806, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return from their journey—having led the Corps of Discovery across eight thousand miles of rapids, mountains, forests, and ravines—they bring an incredible tale starring themselves as courageous explorers, skilled survivalists, underrated scientists, and peaceful ambassadors. While there is truth in those descriptions, there is also distortion. From one of the most exciting new historians to emerge in the past decade, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark (Simon & Schuster, 2026) offers a novel take on the expedition: a gripping narrative that draws on lost documents, stunning analysis, and Native perspectives. Craig Fehrman spent five years visiting more than thirty archives, interviewing more than a hundred sources, and collecting oral history passed down over centuries. He came to see that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than just Lewis and Clark. We all know Sacajawea, and some of us know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But here we meet John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains' hulking barge. We hear from Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men. Each chapter moves to a different person's point of view, describing their desires and contradictions. We see Thomas Jefferson operating in an age of bitter partisan unrest—his secret political maneuvers to fund the expedition, revealed here for the first time, are a case study in presidential power. We witness the strategy and strength of Black Buffalo, completely upending our understanding of Lakota-American diplomacy. York, in his chapters, finds ways to wield power and make choices in an era that didn't allow him much of either. Clark is not a folksy Kentuckian but a student of the Enlightenment. (Fehrman discovered his college notebook; no previous biographer even realized that he went to college.) Lewis is someone willing to sacrifice everything for his country and his mentor, Jefferson. In the end, the captains are men who needed help—from Sacajawea, from the Corps, and from each other. Mile after mile, the expedition pushes on through hailstorms and flash floods, frostbite and infections, rattlesnakes and rabid wolves, with the Spanish cavalry in fierce pursuit. Fehrman balances the story's adventure with the humanity of its protagonists. The result is a thrilling reminder that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us. Craig Fehrman is a journalist and historian. He lives in Indiana with his wife and children. Raymond Williams, PhD is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American History and Politics. You can find Raymond on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter at @rtwilliams16 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson's writings on race that every American should read Among America's Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race: A Reader (Princeton University Press, 2026), Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson's most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects—the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy. These selections come from Jefferson's public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson's ideas about—and self-image in relation to—African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people. Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson's conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history. Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times-bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

A compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn't be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives. The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women's experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield's life—from childhood to adulthood—passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother's history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power. Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House (U Massachusetts Press, 2026) draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body—in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance—and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

For over a century, Alfred Hitchcock has remained one of cinema's most influential directors. Known as the Master of Suspense, this visionary filmmaker directed more than fifty films over six decades. His thriller The Lodger (1927) marked the start of his signature style, which was later exemplified in classic films like Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). Hitchcock's work received tremendous success and critical acclaim. While he never won the competitive Academy Award for Best Director, he received five Oscar nominations, two Golden Globes, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, a BAFTA Fellowship, multiple lifetime achievement awards, and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Nine of his films are preserved in the United States National Film Registry. His mastery of tension, innovative camera techniques, and psychological depth continue to inspire and influence modern filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Jordan Peele, and Bong Joon Ho. Drawing on new archival research, previously unpublished interviews, and a rigorous examination of key biographies, A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy (University Press of Kentucky, 2026) challenges the long-standing narratives that have shaped Hitchcock's legacy. Author Tony Lee Moral revisits controversial claims regarding Hitchcock's alleged abuses, scrutinizing biographer Donald Spoto's interpretations—particularly Spoto's portrayal of the director's relationship with actress Tippi Hedren. With his analysis of Spoto's 1980 interview of Hedren, Moral reveals for the first time how one key document contradicts decades of exaggeration. In this comprehensive reappraisal of Hitchcock's career, Moral encourages readers to explore the complexities of creative collaboration and the risks of relying on a single biographical narrative. Marking one hundred years since Hitchcock's first film, The Pleasure Garden, and fifty years since his last film, Family Plot, Moral reexamines the director's cinematic brilliance, storytelling mastery, creative partnerships, and controversies, offering a fresh perspective on Hitchcock's legacy in the post-#MeToo era. Tony Lee Moral is a British filmmaker and author who specializes in film history, especially the work of Alfred Hitchcock. He is the author of Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie, The Making of Hitchcock's The Birds, The Young Alfred Hitchcock's Moviemaking Master Class, and Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards. 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/biography

I was born in Harbin, Manchuria, (later China), in 1938. At the outbreak of the Second World War my mother, sister and I, along with other non-combatants of the Allied countries, were taken by the Japanese to an internment camp in Tokyo where we would remain four year--to the end of the war. My mother's recollection is that I was a sickly child. By the time I arrived in Japan, according to her, I had survived diphtheria, whooping cough, yellow fever, smallpox and tuberculosis. Such afflictions, to my mother's astonishment, did not keep me from growing to my adult height of 6'6" and muscular weight of 220 pounds. Nor did they keep me from being strong enough and skillful enough to become a professional basketball player and play 10 years for the National Basketball Association, as the first ethnic Russian and immigrant to do so, and the first to be named to an All-Star team. Listen to this interview about The Mad Manchurian: From the Internment Camps of Tokyo to the Hardwood Courts of the NBA (Coffeetown Press, 2025). 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/biography

From the author of The First Lady of WWII comes You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson's Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her (Sourcebooks, 2026), the story of Lady Bird Johnson's groundbreaking trip during the 1964 election, and the women who rode with her. "It takes women to have guts." Deemed “the most important campaign effort ever undertaken by the wife of an American president,” the Lady Bird Special was a whistle-stop tour of the South undertaken by Lady Bird Johnson, in a bid for her husband's reelection in 1964. Never before had a president's spouse taken to the campaign trail so ambitiously. The 1,682-mile trek through the southern United States, from Washington DC to New Orleans, was a deliberate choice by Lady Bird—many in the southern states resented her husband's championing of civil rights. But the first lady, proud of her southern heritage, wanted to appeal to her fellow southerners and bridge the divide. Despite the potential danger, she pressed forward, making speeches, shaking hands, and showing herself to be confident, capable, and impressive. You Can't Catch Us is a story of an election campaign, but it is also a story of a women-led operation and an appeal for understanding and civility. Lady Bird Johnson's exciting journey was monumental in expanding the role of women in politics and progressing the fight for women's rights—a fight we still continue to this day. Hosted by Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College: website here @janescimeca.bsky.social  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

As detailed in The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden (Birlinn, 2026) by Lucy Stewart, at the turn of the twentieth century, Scottish adventurer Ella Christie returned home from a trip to Japan inspired to build her own Japanese garden. As might be expected from a woman who thought nothing of travelling to the other side of the world in search of the unusual, Ella's approach to developing the garden was trailblazing. She chose a female designer – the gifted Taki Handa – to create the seven-acre site in the grounds of Cowden Castle, near the Scottish town of Dollar. In doing so, the Japanese Garden at Cowden became the first and only garden of its size and scale to be designed by a woman. It remains a unique and utterly authentic bridge between British and Japanese culture. This book tells the remarkable story of Ella Christie, her travels and the creation of her garden, its gradual decline and triumphant restoration. 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/biography

In What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To (U Minnesota Press, 2025) an iconic rock DJ of the Twin Cities tells her harrowing story of being stalked while living her very public life What's it like to be in the public spotlight when it just might get you killed? For Mary Lucia, becoming a wildly popular rock DJ meant connecting with a multitude of fans through a shared love of music and deep cuts. But for one listener, that connection became a dangerous obsession, catapulting Lucia into the terrifying three-year nightmare that she chronicles in this raw, wry, and profoundly courageous memoir. With electrifying wit and anger, Lucia shares her experience of navigating constant terror while life absurdly goes on: interview rock stars, curate a radio show song list, judge high school battles of the band, kick a drug addiction cold turkey . . . all while fearing what might be waiting in her mailbox or who might be waiting on her front step or at her back door. Lucia was no stranger to inappropriate or weird contact from fans, but things turned sinister when ten pounds of raw meat were delivered to her at work, followed by a steady stream of ominous letters, cards, packages, and messages. When the letters included threats to her dogs' safety, she tried to get help, but without a name and return address on these communications there was nothing she could do. As the stalker's actions escalated, Lucia felt more and more isolated. Police responding to her 911 calls were insensitive and dismissive, and even her friends implied that being stalked was just a hazard of her high-profile job and her high-energy personality. No one seemed to take seriously the danger she faced. Inseparable from this ordeal is the story of how Mary Lucia became the notorious radio malcontent known by so many avid listeners. From the good, bad, and weird of growing up in her eccentric family to drugs, death, and dogs, Lucia finally shares her life on her own terms in What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To. Applying her signature dark humor to her own traumatic experiences, Lucia's memoir is idiosyncratic, bold, and--ironically--relatable Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

We know who Martin Luther King Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform his outlook and activism? Before Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader, a Nobel Laureate, and a global hero, he was an emotional boy, a middling high school student devoted to fashion, dancing, and dating. Lerone A. Martin, Faculty Director of the Martin Luther King Institute at Stanford University, traces these roots to develop a fuller understanding of the influential preacher's emotional life, his youthful confusion about his future and career direction, his teenage missteps, and his inspiration to fight for justice. Revelatory, humanizing, and compassionate, Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. (Amistad, 2026) unearths MLK's days as “Little Mike,” the ever-eager middle child and a precocious prankster; his early experiences of segregation and the summers he spent on a Connecticut tobacco farm, his first trip outside the Jim Crow South; his transformative time at Morehouse, playing basketball, hosting parties, studying sociology, and joining the Ministers' Union; and his winding path to seminary, his spiritual devotion, and his relationship with Coretta, his wife-to-be. As America undergoes another era of turmoil and change, this powerful biography—and this discussion—provides a vital roadmap for how greatness comes to light, and how history shapes a leader. You can find Lerone Martin, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute on Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and 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/biography

There was no more trenchant and substantive critic of the Left from the Left in the 1960s and 1970s than Bayard Rustin. Some liberals and leftists today valorize Rustin on the basis of his multiple oppressed identities and civil rights organizing. On the other hand, many others dismiss him for being compromised by his commitment to the Democratic Party or by his deep suspicion of the new forms of left activism that appeared in the mid-1960s. While Rustin certainly made some strategic mis-steps later in life, his challenges to the New Left, Black Power, and a regressing liberal establishment from 1964 until his passing in 1987 were insightful, cutting, and often quite prescient. At a time when the Left is in dire need of self-reflection and reorientation, Rustin's work has gained a new relevance and urgency. In a new collection of Rustin's writings from this period, Fong and Prescod gathered together articles and speeches that represent Rustin's Challenge to the Left of his day. Some of the pieces of Rustin's writing chosen for inclusion have been published before, but only in pamphlets or newspapers from many decades ago. Some will be published for the first time here.The volume also includes commentaries on these pieces by Adolph Reed, Jr., Jennifer Silva, Les Leopold, Mark Dudzic, Jen Pan, John-Baptiste Oduor, and many others, all contextualizing Rustin's challenge and demonstrating its continuing applicability. Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In this episode, Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, and University of Puerto Rico professors Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Maritza Stanchich, discuss something deceptively simple: putting one foot in front of the other—and how that act can reshape the way we perceive the world. Seizing an idea from Steve Prefontaine—that running can be an act of creation—this episode considers how running can extend beyond the physical and extend into memory, relationships, and inheritance. They discuss how running can be a way of thinking, a way of loving, and, at times, a way of understanding who we are. The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports (Harper/Random House, 2025). Nuevos Horizontes is the podcast of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Quotes, organizations, books, athletes and scholars mentioned in this conversation: Tony Ruiz, Central Park Track Club “There's a lot you can get from Tony Ruiz's life that you can't get through mine.” -Nicholas Thompson “The dignity of enduring the complexity of my father.…she plays a major role in shaping me.” -Nicholas Thompson, about his mother “It's really hard when people are still alive to write these kinds of books. It takes a lot of courage on everyone's part.” -Maritza Stanchich “Only the disciplined ones in life are free.” -Eliud Kipchoge Steve Prefontaine W. Scott Thompson Puerto Rican boycott of 1980 Olympic Games Bobbi Gibb Yaelis Carmona, University of Puerto Rico  Biomechanics Falmouth Road Race Paul Souza, Wheaton College Souzapalooza, East Falmouth music festival Phil (PJ) Alessi, North Attleboro Bill Jennings, Brockton High School Track Coach William McKay, Falmouth High School English Teacher Mario Watts Sergei Bubka Matt Booth Joe Gohring Phillips Academy Falmouth High SchoolEric Gethers Falmouth Road Race Northfield Mount Hermon Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Frank Shorter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Erich Fromm, the prominent twentieth-century public intellectual and psychoanalyst, was recognized for his courageous stand against fascism, racism, and human destructiveness. Until now, however, little has been known about the extent to which Fromm's personal experience of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust shaped his outlook and work.In Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (Oxford 2024), Roger Frie introduces for the first time the unpublished Holocaust correspondence in Fromm's family. The letters provide insight into Fromm's life as a German-Jewish refugee and help us to understand the effect of Nazi Germany's racial terror on Fromm and his German-Jewish family. In the aftermath of the genocide, Fromm returned again and again to the themes of responsibility, social justice, and human solidarity, yet without revealing his own experience. As this book powerfully shows, Fromm's social, political, and psychological writings take on new meaning in light of the traumas and tragedies that he and his family experienced.The image of Fromm that emerges from this book enriches our understanding of what it means to be both a social critic and practicing psychologist. In light of the racial hatred and antisemitism we see today, Frie demonstrates that a politics of engagement and a psychology of well-being go hand in hand. Frie suggests that there is much to be learned from the urgency in Fromm's writings as we seek to respond to the social crises and the renewed threat of fascism in our present age. Roger Frie is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna in Austria, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, and Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is also Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and associate member of the Columbia University Seminar on Cultural Memory in New York. He is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice as well as a trained historian and social philosopher and brings both of these perspectives to bear in his publications. He is author most recently Wounds of Silence: Legacies of Genocide and Racial Violence (Oxford 2026), Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (Oxford 2024) and Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Oxford 2017). His most recent edited book is Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2022, with Pascal Sauvayre). He is additionally co-editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Your host for this episode, Ben Greenberg, PsyD is a psychoanalytic psychologist and founding director of both the Center for Dynamic Practice (CFDP) in Santa Fe, NM and Southwestern Alliance for Psychoanalytic Psychology (SWAPP). A disabled former symphony French hornist and musical pedagogue, Ben has published several scientific papers among other written media, and is currently working on several manuscripts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Nicholas Tochka analyzes the role of rock music in the life of Charles Manson, the Family, and the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca killings, which also gives larger insight into Sixties counterculture. Failed singer-songwriter. Devious cult leader. A rock Pied Piper. The product of a sick society. Just another dime-a-dozen singing hippy mystic. Did the guitar-playing guru personify the violence that the rock counterculture inflicted on America? Or did his music diagnose the dehumanizing effects of that society's broken institutions? For over five decades, commentators have debated the meaning of Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca killings. Rock music links their narratives: from the acid drenched singalongs at the Spahn Movie Ranch, to a bizarre theology centered on Beatles songs, to his commune's alleged links with Hollywood's elite, to an album, LIE: The Love and Terror Cult (1970). In this first comprehensive examination of the Manson Family's music, Nicholas Tochka writes with, against, and alongside the many authors-true-crime hacks, gonzo journalists, conspiracy theorists, and rock critics alike-who have told and retold the story of "the Manson murders." Playing the truth games that these postwar Americans helped invent, The Musical Lives of Charles Manson: The Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Invention of the Sixties (Bloomsbury, 2026) presents a new take on the story of the commune-and on rock's role in fracturing the possibility of writing trustworthy histories after the Sixties. "They are afraid of it, because it tells the truth," Manson once claimed, describing his music. Just what truths did the Manson Family's music-making tell? Nicholas Tochka is Associate Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the author of several books including Rocking In the Free World: Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America and Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania. His work examines the politics of music-making in the postwar world. Nicholas on the University of Melbourne's website. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Paola de Santo joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy (U Delaware Press, 2026). Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear unrelated, this book demonstrates their shared relation to the body politic, including the relationship of their very bodies to that metaphorical body. One imagines the early modern ambassador as traveling from one center of power to another, gathering news and disseminating it in writing, as well as negotiating in person. The courtesan, in contrast, is normally imagined employing her body in the service of entertaining elite clients in the enclosed space of the urban salon. These characterizations reinforce their very different roles in Renaissance Italian society and culture, but by placing them in dialogue, salient points of convergence emerge detailing how they were integral to the concurrent emergence of a modern subjectivity of the individual and the formation of the modern state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Imad Yusuf Nuwayhid was born in 1944 in the Lebanese village of Ras al-Matn. He came of age in the 1960s, splitting time between Beirut and Europe. And he died in 1975, the start of the Lebanese Civil War. But who was Imad Nuwayhid? Was he a leftist intellectual? A self-interested hotel worker? A fighter dedicated to Palestinian liberation? A tragic symbol of what happened to those caught in the crosshairs during the war? Through archival and oral history, Beirut Radical finds that Imad was none of these things alone, but all of them together.Beirut Radical: A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War (I.B. Tauris, 2026) takes up Imad Nuwayhid as a global microhistory-a window into the global sixties, the war, and its aftermath. Baun argues that Imad's beliefs and actions, crystalized during two tumultuous decades of the Cold War, signal a young generation of what he terms “practical radicals.” While much more is known about their politics and support for left-wing ideologies, Imad's life highlights how they pursued them, equally, alongside their career aspirations. Imad's death in the war, then, shows the twisting path by which some young leftists ceded their autonomy to liberation struggles. Lastly, Beirut Radical follows Imad's afterlife, examining how multiple actors to Lebanon's war, some in concert (party and family members), some in resistance (some family), claim individuals and their memory, during and beyond wartime. More than anything perhaps, Beirut Radical is a meditation on the intimate, the personal, the ethics, and the micro-level of history. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Today I'm speaking with William R. Brody about his book, Uncommon Sense: Rethinking Ordinary Problems in Extraordinary Ways (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026). Bill is an interventional radiologist who served as the President of Johns Hopkins University, from 1996 to 2009, and President of the Salk Institute from 2009 to 2015. When he became president of Johns Hopkins University, Bill set out to teach a course to juniors and seniors that would serve as a crash course for dealing with the messy realities of life. Through stories and anecdotes, Bill explores a variety of important concepts that regularly manifest in all aspects of life: from survivorship bias to why career-planning doesn't often go as planned. Uncommon Sense is one of those books that one can only write after a lifetime of learning, teaching, and doing. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

As detailed in Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay (Penguin, 2026) by Mary Lisa Gavenas, as the only woman in Forbes' Greatest Business Stories of All Time and the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange, Mary Kay Ash has a life story that reads like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel. Growing up in Depression-era Texas, Mary Kathlyn Wagner is a dutiful daughter and diligent student with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. Married at sixteen, she is a grandmother at thirty-four. When she is not cooking or cleaning or taking care of the kids, she peddles cleaning products to other housewives. The work has no salary and no security but she sticks with it, sure that direct selling will make her dreams come true. In 1963, after she has been divorced three times and widowed twice, she sets up her own company, selling second chance and self-invention for the price of a skin care showcase. Soon millions know her as the little lady in the big wig who gives away pink Cadillacs. From its unpromising start in a 500-square-foot Dallas storefront, Mary Kay Inc. grows into a global phenomenon with 3.5 million reps in over 35 countries. She becomes the most famous saleswoman in the world. Maybe the most famous ever. Based on fifteen years of research, Selling Opportunity gives us a page-turning rags-to-riches story set against the background of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory. Here, for the first time, is the definitive history of a peculiarly American industry and a mid-century mindset that ennobled extreme self-reliance, sticking to your guns, and blind faith in the American dream. 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/biography

Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it. Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA's most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War, commanding thousands of clandestine agents around the world.Following an early career marked by exciting escapades as a key World War II spy under General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Wisner quickly rose through the postwar intelligence ranks to lead a newly created top-secret unit tasked--under little oversight--with overseeing massive propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion, and guerrilla operations all over the world, including such daring initiatives as the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala.But simultaneously, Wisner faced a demon few at the time understood: bipolar disorder. When this debilitating disease resulted in his breakdown and transfer to a mental hospital, the repercussions were felt throughout Washington's highest levels of power.Waller's sensitive and exhaustively researched biography is the riveting story of both Frank Wisner as a national figure who inspired a cadre of future CIA secret warriors, and also an intimate and empathetic portrait of a man whose harrowing struggle with bipolar disorder makes his impressive accomplishments on the world stage even more remarkable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and ReconstructionCharles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America's forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post–Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long.An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America's most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Caroline Bicks became the first scholar granted extended access by Stephen King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King's early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by a question millions of Kingʼs enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King's writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we've closed the book? Dr. Bicks focuses on The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ʼSalemʼs Lot, and Night Shift—to reveal how he crafted his language, story lines, and characters to cast his enduring literary spells. While tracking King's margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered cut scenes and alternative endings that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes her interviews with King, that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history. Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archive is unlike anything published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Dr. Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it's also a story about an English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them. Guest: Dr. Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. She is the author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England; co-author of Shakespeare Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas; and co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare Podcast. Show Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Once Upon A Tome The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker Claire Myers Owens and the Banned Book Before and After the Book Deal Your Art Will Save Your Life Becoming The Writer You Already Are The Top 10 Struggles in Writing A Book Manuscript and What To Do About It Do You Need A Developmental Editor? Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

When twenty-three-year-old Ron LeFlore played his first organized baseball game, it was in a yard at the State Prison of Southern Michigan where he was serving five to fifteen years for armed robbery. An extraordinary athlete, the Detroit native had luck on his side: his coach, a convicted felon, had connections to the Detroit Tigers. Within three-and-a-half years, Ron went from a prison inmate to a Tiger centerfielder. In Baseball's Outcast: The Story of Ron LeFlore (Bloomsbury, 2026), Adam Henig tells for the first time in full the unbelievable life and career of Ron LeFlore. Blessed with blinding speed and a powerful swing, Ron shed his jailbird past to become one of the game's premiere hitters and its most dangerous base stealer during the latter half of the 1970s. His rags-to-riches life story became a bestselling book and a made-for-television movie starring actor LeVar Burton, fresh from his performance in Roots. But the good times did not last. Less than a decade after making his Major League debut, Ron was finished with baseball. Baseball's Outcast is not just another book about the rise and fall of a troubled athlete. Henig goes deeper, tracing the star player's family roots, exploring the segregated world that Ron was raised in, examining the criminal justice system he was subjected to, and revealing how childhood trauma shaped his success and downfall. Filled with insight from Ron himself, as well as from former teammates, coaches, front-office personnel, inmates, childhood friends, and relatives, Baseball's Outcast provides unprecedented access into Ron's life story and the obstacles he faced every step of the way. 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/biography

From the moment I began working with the New Books Network, my vision was bigger than author interviews. I envisioned my platform one where people could connect what they were hearing about the past to their own lives in the present and, in that way, perhaps see themselves as an important part of a continually-evolving community. Through this work, I have been fortunate to connect, not only authors, but also with readers and thinkers who, like me, are committed to the preservation and expansion of our collective archive. Raymond Williams is one such person. Raymond has a PhD in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He was an executive board member of Black Readers Con, and is currently an administrator of the Black Men Read Book Club sponsored by Resist Booksellers. I was thrilled to have Raymond on the podcast to talk about the creation of literary community around reading challenges, including those centering Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and, for 2026, what Raymond calls, “The 12 Lives Challenge.” Listen in as we discuss the work he is doing to cultivate an intellectually curious community of real-life readers in the virtual world. You can find Raymond on Instagram, and the 12 Lives Challenge on StoryGraph. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and 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/biography

After escaping the Vilna Ghetto and surviving winter in the forest among partisan fighters, Avrom Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow in 1944. The renowned Yiddish poet turned to memoir to detail his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. In his sobering account, Sutzkever details the Nazi occupation and establishment of the ghetto, daily life in the ghetto, and mass killings at Ponar. He also details armed Jewish resistance, how Jews organized collectively to retain their dignity, and demand for historical justice. The memoir, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony, was originally published in Yiddish in 1946, and has been translated into English for the first time by professor of Jewish studies and world literatures Justin Cammy. Join Justin Cammy and YIVO's Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent for a discussion of the great poet's account of the Holocaust. Buy the book This book talk originally took place on January 27, 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Yanara Friedland is a writer, translator, and educator born in Berlin. She is the author of Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Book Award and Groundswell (2021) selected for Essay Press's Book Award and Thanatographies (U Alabama Press, 2026). Her work explores the effects of dislocation on memory and language, engaging with multilingual and transhistorical spaces through archival research and in collaboration with other artists. She teaches creative writing and literature at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and co-runs the reading series Mutter Courage in the Pacific Northwest. Thanatographies is a genre-defying meditation on disappearance, memory, and the porous boundaries between the living and the dead. In poetic prose, Yanara Friedland weaves together dreamscapes, historical fragments, personal recollections, and philosophical inquiry to explore the afterlives of loss and survival. Moving through rooms, cities, forests, and archives, the text becomes a living document of insomnia, exile, and the spectral presence of women across time, including artists, revolutionaries, caretakers, and ghosts. Structured in four sections titled Room, Night, Medusas, and Burials, the book traverses inner and outer landscapes, from Berlin's haunted streets to the intimate terrain of the body. Friedland's voice is both lyrical and incisive, drawing on figures such as Unica Zürn, Rosa Luxemburg, and Else Lasker-Schüler to illuminate the intersections of gender, violence, and historical erasure. The result is a deeply embodied poetics of wakefulness, where hidden life remembers and speaks. Thanatographies is written for readers of experimental literature, feminist theory, and contemporary poetics. The book resonates with artists, scholars, and seekers who are compelled by the aesthetics of mourning, the politics of memory, and the radical potential of language to hold what is otherwise unspeakable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Nicolas Levi is a researcher at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has authored numerous books related to North Korea and is a regular commentator on the country's elite social and political structures. I Was a North Korean Diplomat: Inside the Secret World of Pyongyang's Foreign Service (Independently Published, 2026) is Levi's tenth book, a collaborative work based on extensive dialogues with Han Jin-myung (a pseudonym),  a former member of the North Korean elite who served in a specialized military drone unit and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, before defecting in 2015. The book provides a rare, ground-level look at the life of the North Korean upper class, tracing Han's journey from a privileged childhood in Pyongyang to the high-pressure world of international diplomacy and illicit regime fundraising in Southeast Asia. Through Han's testimony, the book explores the psychological realities of loyalty, the "golden cage" of the North Korean elite, and the climate of fear following the 2013 execution of Jang Song-thaek, offering readers a unique perspective on the inner workings of the North Korean state. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant (Princeton UP, 2026) provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters.Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat and in Germany at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover. She challenges the image of Leibniz as an isolated genius, revealing instead a man of multiple identities whose thought was shaped by a deep engagement with the social and intellectual milieus of his time. Borowski shows us Leibniz as he was known to his contemporaries, enabling us to rediscover him as an enigmatic young man who was complex and all too human.An exhilarating work of scholarship, Leibniz in His World demonstrates how this uncommon intellect, torn between his ideals and the necessity to work for absolutist states, struggled to make a name for himself during his formative years. Audrey Borowski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of AI. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Kate Crane's new memoir, Whatever Happened to Eddy Crane?: A Memoir and an Investigation" (Hanover Square Press, 2026) starts when Crane was in eighth grade and her father, a truck mechanic in an industrial neighborhood of Baltimore, left for work and didn't come home. City detectives figured he must have run away, but Kate had a deep-rooted instinct: he must have been killed. Kate, her mother, and her younger sister were left stunned, with no answers, no explanation, and no concrete resolution on the horizon. Twenty years later in New York, Kate is determined to unearth the truth. She reopens the investigation with the Baltimore police department, tracks down retired detectives who'd worked on Eddy's case, and chases leads with old friends through the dark back alleys of her hometown, dead set on finding solace, for her family and herself.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Offa: King of the Mercians (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Rory Naismith presents an authoritative biography of Offa of Mercia, revealing his importance as the king who stood at the turning point of Anglo-Saxon history. Offa ruled the Mercian heartland of the west midlands from 757 to 796. But while Alfred the Great and his dynasty are seen as agents of a new beginning that resulted in a unified Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Offa is best remembered as the builder of a great dyke and as a symbol of an older, divided order. In this major new biography, Professor Naismith challenges this view. Professor Naismith reveals how Offa cemented Mercia's position as the dominant force in the southern part of Britain, strengthened the internal cohesion of his domains, and laid the basis for a new model of kingship. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including charters, coins, and chronicles, Professor Naismith reveals Offa as a king who was ambitious and successful, and who carefully constructed his image and that of the royal family. Far from just one in a sequence of overlords, Offa had a lasting impact on how kingship was practised and conceived across England. 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/biography

This illuminating book Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening (Catapult, 2025) weaves personal stories of a multilingual upbringing with recent scientific breakthroughs in interspecies communication, revealing how the skill of deep listening enriches our curiosity and empathy toward the world around us. This book braids personal narrative with scholarly inquiry to examine the power of listening in building interpersonal empathy and social transformation. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rosner recounts growing up in a home where six languages were spoken, exploring how psychotherapy, neurolinguistics, and creativity illuminate the complex ways we are shaped by the sounds and silences of others. Drawing on insights from journalists, podcasters, performers, translators, acoustic biologists, spiritual leaders, composers, and educators, this hybrid text moves fluidly along a spectrum from the molecular to the global, revealing how “third-ear listening” can serve as a collective means of deepening understanding and connection to the natural world. About the Author Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist. Her works include Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and the novel Electric City, named a best book by NPR. Rosner's essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Elle, and numerous anthologies. She lives in Berkeley, California. In my questions, I focus only on certain aspects of your book—especially language. This does not mean that your book lacks other dimensions to explore. It is a beautifully written work that invites discussion from several angles and points of view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography