Lucy Adlington, "Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories Of Women And The Holocaust" (HarperCollins, 2025) New Books Network podcast

59:35

John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds , which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions. Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence organize space, and the importance of a humble, responsive, and empathetic approach to speaking with people touched by gun violence. Mentioned in this episode: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (1991) Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004) Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) tr. by Lisa Dillman, see RTB episode 48 "Transform, not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation , 2019 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1998) and the "state of exception" Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the "zone" Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023) Recallable Books/Films Ieva suggested E.P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (1975) for its thoughtful framing of state violence and its incredible detail, and also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000), for the ways in which the book's structure enacts its argument. Elizabeth went with the documentary by Raul Paz Pastrana, Border South (2019), which also weaves together the stories of those affected, including the anthropologist Jason De León, in ways that account for the multidimensionality of human experience. John prasied the contested Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns' novel Milkman (2018) Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

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Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, "Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember" (Princeton UP, 2025) 43:50

17 hours ago43:50

43:50

Today I’m speaking with Ciara Greene, co-author with Gillian Murphy of the new book, Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember (Princeton UP, 2025). Ciara is associate professor in the School of Psychology at University College Dublin, where she leads the Attention and Memory Laboratory. The scientific study of human memory has become even more relevant in an age where we have every technology under the Sun to alleviate us of the need to remember. It makes sense that we worry about losing the ability to remember today, but even Socrates 2,500 years ago lamented that the recently invented technology of writing harmed people’s ability to remember. Memory not only connects us with our past, but it instructs us in how we should behave, what we should believe, and underlies the patterns of our everyday thoughts. Memory Lane takes readers behind the most up-to-date scientific research on memory. How memory actually works versus how we think it works is a wide chasm, and Ciara and Gillian are excellent guides for bridging the gap. Caleb Zakarin is editor at 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/new-books-network…

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Jonathan Rauch, "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy" (Yale UP, 2025) 53:23

17 hours ago53:23

53:23

Today I’m speaking with Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. We are discussing his latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale UP, 2025). The enmity between secular liberals and religious conservatives is a source of chaos in American democracy. Religious conservatives blame secular liberals for creating a decadent society without traditional norms. Secular liberals accuse religious conservatives of intolerance and hatred. Both sides want to do away with the other, when we actually need to try to understand each other. Jonathan’s book offers a powerful critique of our uncompromising ways. Caleb Zakarin is editor at 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/new-books-network…

1
Kornel Chang, "A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation" (Harvard UP, 2025) 55:15

17 hours ago55:15

55:15

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.’s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books , including its review of A Fractured Liberation . Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia . Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

1
Lavanya Vemsanim, "Reframing India in World History" (Lexington Books, 2024) 39:17

17 hours ago39:17

39:17

Reframing India in World History breaks the stereotypical portrayal of India based on misconstrued historical theories. Prevalent constructions of Indian history are tinged with colonial historical frameworks and presentation. It is important to understand India for what it is in the past based on self-determined frameworks derived from Indian history to reclaim India’s place in the world history. Based on new evidence-based research, Lavanya Vemsani explores patterns of civilization that are indigenous to India to investigate its history from the beginning to the present. This book covers topics central to a comprehensive understanding of the nation including a discussion of long held cultural notions, civilization continuity, and the historical crises deriving from conquests and colonization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

1
Lauren Elkin, "Scaffolding" (FSG, 2024) 58:13

17 hours ago58:13

58:13

Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, ﬁnds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective. Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is ﬁnishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their ﬁrst child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood. Two couples, ﬁfty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, ﬁdelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the diﬃculty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us. Lauren Elkin is also the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse , a New York Times Books Review notable book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times , Le Monde , Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London. Recommended Books Italo Calvino, U nder the Jaguar Sun Garth Greenwell, Small Rain Catherine Lacey, Möbius Strip The novels of Elizabeth Bowen Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature , is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival , a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

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Benjamin P. Davis, "Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics" (Edinburgh UP, 2023) 57:26

17 hours ago57:26

57:26

Benjamin P. Davis’s Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh University Press 2025) provides one of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist. What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded? Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: ‘You must choose your bearing.’ Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present – an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility. A sequel to the book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt , is forthcoming this year. Benjamin P. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University and a Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition. He is the author of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins (Rowman & Littlefield 2023) as well as Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics (2023) and a sequel, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt (2025), both published by Edinburgh University Press. Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

1
Nathalie Cooke, "Tastes and Traditions: A Journey Through Menu History" (Reaktion, 2025) 59:02

17 hours ago59:02

59:02

Menus are invaluable snapshots of the food consumed at specific moments in time and place. Tastes and Traditions: A Journey through Menu History (Reaktion, 2025) by Nathalie Cooke provides glimpses into the meals enjoyed by royalty and rogues, and by those celebrating special occasions or sampling new culinary sensations. It describes food prepared for the great and the good, meals served during sieges and tablescapes immortalized in art. It explores how menus entertain adults, link food with play for children, reflect changing notions of health and highlight the enduring human need to make meals meaningful. Lavishly illustrated, this book offers an engaging exploration of why menus matter and the stories they tell, appealing to food lovers and general readers, as well as professionals in the food industry. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes 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/new-books-network…

1
Golden Age: Long after Retirement, these Professors are still Publishing 1:18:16

17 hours ago1:18:16

1:18:16

" Golden Age ” by Heidi Landecker appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 4 September 2024. The article discusses the scholarship of Jean H. Baker, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Lucy Freeman Sandler, three scholars who produce significant work in their nineties. Landecker highlights their enduring passion for scholarship and addresses broader societal conversations about the academy, age, and the lives of retired academics. This conversation includes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera , professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez; Heidi Landecker, former Deputy Managing Editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education ; Jenny Wilson, a Trustee of the London u3a (university of the 3rd Age) and the Chair of Croydon u3a ; and MIT linguist Samuel Jay Keyser (Jay); Keyser spent 9 years as associate provost at MIT, and he is the founder and editor of Linguistic Inquiry , housed at MIT Press. This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPR-M have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. Topics mentioned in this conversation include: How does age impact knowledge, creativity, identity, kinship, language, cognition, emotions, and how we experience life? What role does age have in culture and in the academy? How do the age of our students, faculty colleagues, and community collaborators influence our activities and the knowledge we develop at universities? “ Lingua Franca: Language and writing in academe ,” The Chronicle of Higher Education , edited by Heidi Landecker. “ Age, Creativity and Culture : Reconsidering how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation,” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Scholarship Listening Experiences Accents Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors at North Carolina State University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

1
Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women's Health 1:01:58

17 hours ago1:01:58

1:01:58

Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies. Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health (NYU Press, 2025), by Dr. Wylin D. Wilson, addresses this crisis from a bioethical standpoint. It offers a critique of mainstream bioethics as having embraced the perspective of its mainly white, male progenitors, limiting the extent to which it is positioned to engage the issues that particularly affect vulnerable populations. This book makes the provocative but essential case that because African American women—across almost every health indicator—fare worse than others, we must not only include, but center, Black women’s experiences and voices in bioethics discourse and practice. Womanist Bioethics develops the first specifically womanist form of bioethics, focused on the diverse vulnerabilities and multiple oppressions that women of color face. This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable. It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances. At its core, the volume offers a new, broad-based approach to bioethics that is meant as a corrective to mainstream bioethics’ privileging of white, particularly male, experiences, and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women. Our guest is: Dr. Wylin D. Wilson , who is associate professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School. Her work lies at the intersection of religion, gender, and bioethics. Her academic interests also include rural bioethics and Black church studies. Prior to joining Duke Divinity School in 2020, she was a teaching faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. She is the theologian-in-residence for the Children's Defense Fund and is a member of the American Academy of Religion’s Bioethics and Religion Program Unit Steering Committee. Among her publications is her book, Economic Ethics and the Black Church . Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler , who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast. Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ 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/new-books-network…

1
History and Geopolitical Risk Analysis with Tinatin Japaridze 1:13:36

1 day ago1:13:36

1:13:36

I sat down with Tinatin Japaridze to explore how history shapes her work as a geopolitical risk analyst at the Eurasia Group. We discussed the role of historical context in forecasting geopolitical risks and how historical training fosters deep curiosity about the world. Tinatin shared her unconventional path to the field—one that took her from composing a Eurovision song to journalism, a regional studies MA at Columbia, and even New York's local politics. She reflected on balancing the personal and professional in her work and how these diverse experiences ultimately made her a stronger analyst. We also dove into her book Stalin’s Millennials (2022) and why talking to taxi drivers can be more insightful than you might think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

1
Miriam Haughton, "The Theatre of Louise Lowe" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 58:46

1 day ago58:46

58:46

Louise Lowe is a theatre and performance director, writer, choreographer, dramaturge, and, more recently, a television director and short film writer/director, working in Ireland and internationally. She is the Co-Artistic Director of ANU Productions, established with Owen Boss in Dublin in 2009. Lowe is known for facilitating and creating moments of interior reckoning for audiences through immersive performance techniques. These techniques engage spectators in affectively realised moments of understanding that the stories unfolding through performance reflect living histories in need of greater socio-political engagement and intervention. The Theatre of Louise Lowe (Cambridge UP, 2025) assesses Lowe's creative practice and production history since her days as a drama facilitator in women's prisons and resource centres in Dublin, paying particular attention to the economic struggle of Dublin's north inner-city, the markings of which are potently visible in the work she makes, and how she makes it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

1
Sam Klug, "The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization" (U Chicago Press, 2025) 1:11:44

1 day ago1:11:44

1:11:44

In The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. Sam Klug reveals the central but underappreciated importance of global decolonization to the divergence between mainstream liberalism and the Black freedom movement in postwar America. Dr. Klug reconsiders what has long been seen as a matter of primarily domestic policy in light of a series of debates concerning self-determination, postcolonial economic development, and the meanings of colonialism and decolonization. These debates deeply influenced the discord between Black activists and state policymakers and formed a crucial dividing line in national politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The result is a history that broadens our understanding of ideological formation—particularly how Americans conceptualized racial power and political economy—by revealing a much wider and more dynamic network of influences. Linking intellectual, political, and social movement history, The Internal Colony illuminates how global decolonization transformed the terms of debate over race and social class in the twentieth-century United States. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes 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/new-books-network…

1
Stacie A. Kent, "Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire" (Hong Kong UP, 2024) 57:48

1 day ago57:48

57:48

In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global economic entanglements intruded on Qing territory and governance. Previously understood as an era of “semi-colonialism,” Stacie A. Kent reframes this century of intervention by shedding light on the generative force of global capital. Based on extensive research, conducted with British and Chinese government archives, Coercive Commerce (Hong Kong University Press, 2024) shows how commercial treaties and the regulatory regime that grew out of them catalyzed a revised arts of governance in Qing-administered China. Capital, which had long been present in Chinese merchants’ pocketbooks, came to shape and even govern Chinese statecraft during the “treaty era.” This book contends that Qing administrators alternately resisted and adapted to this new reality through taxation systems such as transit passes and the Imperial Maritime Customs Service by reorganizing Chinese territory into a space where global circuits of capital could circulate and reproduce at an ever greater scale. Offering a deep dive into the coercive nature of capitalism and the historically specific ways global capital reproduction took root in Qing China, Coercive Commerce will interest historians of capital and modern China alike. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network…

1
Sally King, "Menstrual Myth Busting: The Case of the Hormonal Female" (Policy Press, 2025) 47:33

1 day ago47:33