Janet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University...

Back in the early 70s, Eli Zaretsky wrote for a socialist newspaper and was engaged to review a recently released book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell. First, he decided, he’d better read some Freud. This started a life-long engagement with psychoanalysis and leftist politics, and his new book Political Freud: A History (Columbia University Press, 2015) conveys the richness of his decades of reading Freud. Following his 2004 Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, Zaretsky’s latest book, some would call it a companion, is comprised of five essays analyzing the complexity of the mutual influencing of capitalism, social/political history, and psychoanalysis, with particular attention to how and whether people conceive of their own interiority as political. (Particularly timely is chapter two: “Beyond the Blues: the Racial Unconscious and Collective Memory” which explores African American intellectual engagement with psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding oppression.) “Whereas introspection did once define an epoch of social and cultural history– the Freudian epoch– there were historical reasons for this, and it was bound to pass” says Zaretsky. But Political Freud is also a compelling argument for how badly we still need a conception of the self–or ego– with a critical and non-normalizing edge. Eli Zaretsky is a professor of history at The New School, writes and teaches about twentieth-century cultural history, the theory and history of capitalism (especially its social and cultural dimensions), and the history of the family. He is also the author of Why America Needs a Left, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis and Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life.

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as case studies. The book is both compelling and readable, and argues that the fantasy and depiction of torture play a role as an ideology in national politics and policy, and that it’s all more complicated than it seems–once you stop averting your eyes. Hilary Neroni teaches in the Film and Television Studies Program at the University of Vermont and is also the author of The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Her areas of interest include representations of gender and race in contemporary American film, violence in film, women directors, documentary film/video, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and on issues surrounding gender and violence in the cinema.

Sarah H. Jacoby‘s recent monograph, Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on the extraordinary life and times of the Tibetan laywoman Sera Khandro and uses her story to examine a number of important issues in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. Sera Khandro was born in 1892 to well-off parents in cosmopolitan Lhasa, but ran-away to eastern Tibet at the age of fifteen, hoping to fulfill her religious aspirations. After enduring various hardships, she eventually became the consort of a monk at the age of twenty. After a tumultuous nine years during which she was subjected to the ill-will of many residents of the monastery where she resided and during which time she bore two children, she moved in with the lama under whom she had originally studied, a man whom she considered her original teacher, whose consort she became (attaining spiritual liberation in the process), and whose biography she would eventually write after his death. After three years, her spiritual partner died, and Sera Khandro spent the last sixteen years of her life teaching widely throughout eastern Tibet and engaged in writing. She died in 1940. Jacoby’s study is based in large part on two previously unexamined sources: a biography that Sera Khandro wrote of her male teacher, and Sera Khandro’s own autobiography.  There are very few pre-1950s’ Tibetan primary sources authored by women, and these two documents allow Jacoby a unique view of a period usually seen through male eyes. In her discussion of Sera Khandro’s writings, Jacoby locates the aforementioned autobiography in the context of Tibetan literature, on the one hand, and explains autobiography’s role in the construction of religious identity in Tibet, on the other. Related to this issue is what Jacoby calls “autobiographical ventriloquy”: claims that one makes about ones own spiritual attainments by putting words in the mouth of another character. In the case at hand, Sera Khandro records conversations that she has with dakinis in which these celestial beings, in response to Sera Khandro’s expressions of doubt about her own progress along the Buddhist path, assert that she has in fact attained a high level of spiritual attainment. In addition to her interactions with dakinis, Sera Khandro established relationships with the semi-legendary Yeshe Tsogyel and with autochthonous deities in eastern Tibet. Drawing on the theory of “relational selfhood,” by which an autobiographical subject’s identity is constructed through that subject’s depiction of his or her relationships with other social actors, Jacoby shows that Sera Khandro’s own identity as a treasure revealer depended on the relationships she had with both those in her immediate environment (e.g., the local deities) and those in the mythic past (e.g., Yeshe Tsogyel). In this way, religious legitimacy–at least in the case of Sera Khandro–depended on both local and pan-Tibetan associations. In the final two chapters of the book Jacoby discusses Sera Khandro’s role as a consort. She looks at the various ways in which Sera Khandro herself understood such practices and in which she used men as consorts for practices aimed at furthering her own spiritual progress. This close analysis provides the reader with a much more nuanced view of Tibetan Buddhist attitudes towards sexual practices. And in the final chapter Jacoby shows that while we usually think of such practices as thoroughly impersonal and soteriological in character, in the case at hand Sera Khandro’s own feelings of affection for her partner Drime Ozer cannot be easily disentangled fr...

Although recent decades have brought with them many critiques of international development projects worldwide, Sophal Ear is especially well positioned to have written a book addressing the successes and failures of foreign donor assistance to countries emerging from long periods of violent conflict. A Cambodian trained in political science in the United States who also spent time working at the World Bank, Ear brings a no-nonsense approach to Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2013). Yet, this book is also informed by his personal experiences and reflects his aspirations for himself and his family, as well as for his country of birth. Beginning in the early 1990s with the United Nations’ transitional authority and concentrating on the 2000s onwards, Ear asks: has foreign aid made Cambodia’s government worse? How can evidence of rapid economic growth be reconciled with the country’s patently inefficient and corrupt public institutions? And how might things be done differently? Drawing on a range of data from primary and secondary sources, his answers invite the reader to be more sensitive both to the particulars of Cambodia and to the larger questions with which he is engaged. The book’s case studies of how the garment sector succeeds in overcoming state capture where others fail, top-down responses to avian flu, and efforts of donors to subsidize courageous yet constantly threatened civil society groups in the face of persistent authoritarian rule both illuminate and inform. Described as “an important book on the perverse effects of development aid on governance” (James Robinson, Harvard University), and one that is “both passionate and level-headed” (Michael Doyle, Columbia University), Aid Dependence in Cambodia is a “refreshing and badly needed effort at teasing out the relationship between governance and aid” (Sophie Richardson, author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence), in Cambodia, and in general.

In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a masterful account of the importance of the stereotype in English language South Asian literature. Mrinalini Chakravorty explores such tropes as the crowd in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; slums in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger; and death in Michael Ondaatje’s book Anil’s Ghost, amongst others. The focus on the stereotype’s enticing explanatory power casts fresh light on some of the most important contemporary works of South Asian literature and the book is a pleasurable yet challenging read.

Blood. It is more than a thing and more than a metaphor. It is an effective concept, an element, with which, and through which, Christianity becomes what it is. Western Christianity – if there is such a thing as “Christianity” singular – embodies a deep hemophilia (a love of blood) and even a hematology (a theology of blood) that divides Christianity from itself: theology from medicine, finance from politics, religion from race, among many other permutations. This is the claim of Gil Anidjar, Professor in the Departments of Religion and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His recent book, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a wide-ranging, challenging monograph that is both searing and poetic, taking the reader on a journey through biblical texts, medieval controversies, and contemporary critical theory. It asks what Anidjar calls “the Christian Question” in order to destabilize taken for granted assumptions about the naturalness of certain categories related to blood and contextualize them instead within the particular history of post-Medieval Christianity.

Greg Barnhisel‘s new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia UP, 2015) examines how modernism was defanged, re-packaged, and resold during the Cold War. Barnhisel, an Associate Professor at Duquesne University, reveals that–from its incendiary beginnings–modernism was made safe for the bourgeois West thanks to the intervention of unlikely contributors like the CIA, the Department of State, and even major corporations. Barnhisel’s extensive archival research unearths the thinking that went into the repurposing of modernism to support American cold-war ideology.

Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,’ is not a new one. In Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (Columbia University Press, 2014), Marion Holmes Katz, Professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, traces the juristic debates around women’s mosque attendance. Katz outlines the various arguments, caveats, and positions of legal scholars in the major schools of law and demonstrates that despite some differing opinions there was generally a downward progression towards gendered exclusion in mosques. were engaged in at the mosque, the time of day, the permission of their husbands or guardians, attire, and the multitude of conditions that needed to be met. Later interpreters feared women’s presence in the mosque because they argued it stirred sexual temptation. Katz pairs these legal discourses with evidence of women’s social practice in the Middle East and North Africa from the earliest historical accounts through the Ottoman period. In our conversation we discuss types of mosque actdivities, Mamluk Cairo, women’s educational participation, the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the transmission of knowledge, European travelers accounts of Muslim women, night prayers, mosque construction, debates about the mosque in Mecca, and modern developments in legal discussions during the 20th century.

Nicholas B. Dirks‘ Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (Columbia University Press, 2015) is a wonderful collection of essays, loosely arranged along the line’s of the author’s scholarly life. The chapters touch upon themes such as empire and the politics of knowledge, as well as the experience of archival research. Illuminating, lucid and always challenging, Autobiography of an Archive is a stimulating and pleasurable read.  

Asaad al-Saleh is assistant professor of Arabic, comparative literature, and cultural studies in the Department of Languages and Literature and the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. His research focuses on issues related to autobiography and displacement in Arabic literature and political culture in the Arab world. His Book Voices of the Arab Spring: Personal Stories from the Arab Revolutions (Columbia University Press, 2015) is narrated by dozens of activists and everyday individuals, documenting the unprecedented events that led to the collapse of dictatorial regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields.

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a...

What’s not to love about Jie Li‘s new book? Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) explores the history and culture of Shanghai alleyway homes by focusing on two physical spaces, both built in the early twentieth century by Japanese and British companies, and both located in...

Wilt Idema‘s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) collects and translates variations of the tale of Master Zhuang in his encounter with a skeleton who comes back to life...

The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousness is undertaken within various Indian religious traditions, in which subtle states of consciousness and transitions between such states can be revealed through meditation. In Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014), Evan Thompson draws on neuroscience and these meditative traditions to illuminate consciousness and the nature of the self while avoiding both neuro-reductionist and spiritualist agendas. Thompson, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, develops a view of our sense of self as an emergent process of “I-making” that is constructed in relation to our environment and the body on which it depends.

In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyō and ko-jōruri.

One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don’t have language and, if they have culture, it’s extraordinarily primitive in comparison to the human form. What we have between apes and humans is not really a continuum; it’s a break. So how did this break occur? The answer, of course, is evolutionarily. It stands to Darwinian reason that our distant ancestors must have been selected for symbolic use and cultural production, and it was in this natural selective way that they became human. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it presents us with another puzzle: why is human language and culture so astoundingly complex? In order to prosper in the so-called “era of evolutionary adaptation,” neither needed to have been complex at all. A Hominin with a smallish fraction of the symbolic and cultural abilities of Homo sapiens would easily have emerged (and maybe did emerge) as a completely dominant alpha predator. Imagine, if you will, a chimp that could talk a bit and produce reasonably effective missile weapons. How much selection pressure would such a talking, armed chimp face? Not much, at least from other animals. Such an Hominin would not, ceteris paribus, need to evolve new and more complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms. But complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms did evolve. So, we have to ask, where do Shakespeare and Large Hadron Colliders come from? Daniel Cloud has an answer: domestication. In his fascinating and thought-provoking new book The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal (Columbia University Press, 2014), Cloud argues that over the millennia proto-humans and humans have been selecting mates who were good with symbols and selecting symbols themselves. This process–a kind of runaway sexual selection and domestication–rapidly (in evolutionary time-scales) produced both a huge expensive brain and an ornate culture to match. Listen in.

“This is a book that wants you to surpass and destroy it.” Eric Hayot‘s new book has the potential to transform how we teach and practice academic writing, and it invites the kind of reading and engagement that makes such a transformation possible. The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a style guide geared specifically toward academic writers in the humanities, paying special attention to the field of literary and cultural theory but applying equally well across humanistic disciplines. At turns funny, moving, and brilliant – not always qualities we associate with writing style guides – Hayot’s book treats writing as a process that encompasses “behavioral, emotional, & institutional parameters.” The first section of the book treats writing as a form of life, addressing the contexts and habits of the writer and the institutional contexts in which we teach and write. It also offers some strategies for getting writing done in the course of the typically crazy, packed life of the academic writer, and includes some great advice for thinking about the relationship between a dissertation and a book. The second section addresses strategies of academic writing, introducing the scalable “Uneven-U” model for conceptualizing the structure of paragraphs, essays, and beyond. It also includes some helpful ways to understand and craft openings and closings, and reminds us how important it is to keep the experience of our readers in mind as we write. The third section offers great advice on some of the elemental tactics of writing practice, including citation, sentence rhythm, and much more. The final section suggests a way to think about the writing in terms of “becoming”: a writer, a written work, a form of life. The Elements of Academic Style is a book well worth reading and rereading. I’ve already been using it in my teaching and writing, and it’s a fitting work to inaugurate the New Books Network Seminar!

Amrita Pande‘s Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) is a beautiful and rich ethnography of a surrogacy clinic. The book details the surrogacy process from start to finish, exploring the intersection of production and reproduction, complicating and deepening our understanding of this particular form of labour.

Paul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dharani during the last few centuries of the first millennium. Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dharani took, Copp departs from a tradition of scholarship that focuses on the sonic quality and spoken uses of these spells, drawing our attention instead to how written and inscribed dharani were used to adorn and anoint the body. A central theme is Copp’s assertion that the diffuse dharani practices that appeared centuries prior to the flowering of a high Esoteric Buddhism in the eighth century were not simply a crude precursor to the later development of a fully systematized Esoteric Buddhism, but rather were a set of loosely related practices and ideas that continued to develop alongside Esoteric Buddhism. Through rich descriptions of dharani use and interpretation, and liberal use of Dunhuang materials, he shows that dharani were ubiquitous in all sectors of Chinese Buddhism: before, during, and after the eighth century. In this way Copp challenges the teleological view of early dharani-based practices as being but one stage leading to the eventual triumph of a comprehensive Chinese Esoteric Buddhism. In addition, Copp demonstrates how material dharani practices were a product of both Chinese and Indic input. Drawing on archeological evidence, he notes that the way in which dharani were actually worn reflects Indian precedents, while on the other hand Chinese textual records describe and prescribe the wearing of dharani in terms borrowed from Chinese practices of wearing amulets, seals, medicines, and talismans. The book contains thirty-two illustrations of amulets, written dharani, dharani stamps, dharani pillars, and funerary jars that help the reader to better visualize and understand the material practices at the center of Copp’s work. This book will be of particular interest to those researching or wishing to learn more about the history of scholarship on dharani, Chinese practices of wearing enchanted objects, Chinese interpretations and uses of dharani (particularly outside of a systematized, ritual-philosophical Esoteric Buddhism), theories about the role of writing and inscription in religious practice, and Chinese Buddhist material culture.

Any person who turns on CNN or Fox News today will see that the United States faces a number of critical problems in the Middle East. This reality should surprise few. Stunned by the Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, the George W. Bush administration sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan as part of a larger “war on terror” and invaded Iraq in 2003 to “disarm” Saddam Hussein. At this very moment, the United States still has troops in Afghanistan and continues to employ drones to kill “terrorists” in places like Yemen. It has put together a coalition of states, including some Arab governments, to begin the process of taking back the huge swaths of territory that the extremist jihadi group ISIS has taken in Iraq and Syria. The Middle East has also not just “stood still” for U.S. policymakers to find their bearings. The “Arab Spring” and “Green movement” in Iran have raised profound questions about the future of government and authority in the region. In his work Shifting Sands: The United States and the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2014), Joel Migdal addresses the question of why U.S. policymakers have had so many problems accomplishing their goals in the region since the end of World War II. Employing clear prose without the polemics and scholarly jargon that so many books on this subject contain, he explains how the U.S. government has far too often ignored the complexities and history of the Middle East when acting in the region. While Migdal’s periodization of events in the Middle East and the place of Israel in U.S. foreign policy may strike some as too revisionist, he offers a number of valuable suggestions about how U.S. policymakers can best navigate the shoals of the region in the coming years Even if readers do not find all of these arguments persuasive, they will benefit from grappling with his critiques and insights. Shifting Sands stands out a useful reminder of what can go wrong when policymakers ignore historical trends and assume the universal applicability of the American experience.

Where can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, offers a genealogy of multiple-world cosmologies that demonstrates these terms pliability and the debated relationship between 'Science' and 'Religion.' In Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014), Rubenstein wonders why there is a proliferation of multiverse theoretical cosmologies by contemporary scientists. While the cosmos are generally considered to be singular and finite many well-respected physicists explain the universe's complexities as evidence of a multiverse. These explanations argue that our world is just one of the infinite number of universes existing simultaneously. Worlds Without End shows that multiple-world cosmologies have had currency among many thinkers for over 2500 years. What draws philosophers, religious practitioners, and scientists together on these questions is there appeal to metaphysical postulates, which serve as pseudo-theologies for the contemporary age. In our conversation we discuss the Greek philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the Atomists, and the Stoics, medieval Christian interpreters such as Thomas Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, the Telescopic discoveries of Galileo, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, the Big Bang debate, cosmic shredding, the fine-tuning problem, dark energy, Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Quantum Mechanics, and Intelligent Design.

Exploring everything from the impact of her own psychoanalysis on her mode and mien to the effect of consumer culture on the psyche, the delightful Mari Ruti keeps the ball rolling. We pondered with her so many things that the interview feels like xmas morning! Traversing the advent of self-help books, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, the super ego, the repetition compulsion, hegemony, trauma, love and more, there is seemingly no topic germane to psychoanalysis and daily life that Ruti shies away from. In The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (Columbia University Press, 2013)–a book akin in spirit to McDougall’s Plea for a Measure of Abnormality albeit without the case studies–Ruti argues that a bit of madness is an agreeable thing. Loving one’s symptom lessens its impact for sure. As such, Ruti embraces Lacan rather fully as she argues for the ways in which desire can produce forms of human subjectivity that don’t reproduce the normative. By helping us to identify what lures us away from listening more carefully to the “call” of our own “characters”, Ruti plots a course to live a life worth living.

In Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Nabil Matar masterfully edits an important piece of scholarship from seventeenth-century England by scholar and physician, Henry Stubbe (1632-76). Matar also gives a substantial introduction to his annotated edition of Stubbe’s text by situating the author in his historical context. Unlike other early modern writers on Islam, Stubbe’s ostensible goals were not to cast Islam in a negative light. On the contrary, he sought to challenge popular conceptions that understood Islam in negative terms, and although there is no evidence that Stubbe entertained conversion, he admits many admirable characteristics of Islam, ranging from Muhammad’s character to the unity of God. The English polymath was well versed in theological debates of his time and therefore equipped all the more to write the Originall, given the benefit of his comparative framework, which in part explains why the first portion of his text devotes itself to the history of early Christianity. Strikingly, however, it seems that Stubbe never learned Arabic, even though he studied religion with a leading Arabist of his time, Edward Pococke. Indeed, one novelty of Stubbe’s work was precisely his re-evaluation of Latin translations (of primary texts) that were already in circulation. Stubbe’s contributions to scholarship also speak to the history of Orientalism–a word that did not yet exist at Stubbe’s time–or how scholars in the “West” more broadly have approached Islam. Stubbe’s Originall offers insights into present-day Western discourses that still struggle–at times with egregious incompetence–to make sense of Islam and Muslims. In this regard, Matar’s detailed scholarly account of Henry Stubbe and his carefully edited version of the Originall remains as timely as ever. Undoubtedly, this meticulously researched book will interest an array of scholars, including those from disciplines of English literature, History, and Religious Studies.

In her fourth book, Lynne Huffer argues for a restored queer feminism to find new ways of thinking about sex and about ethics. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia University Press, 2013) brings forth a breadth of sources — known and less well-known, French and American, primary and secondary — ranging from Colette, Violette Leduc, and Marcel Proust to the book of Genesis, from Supreme Court cases to Virginie Despentes’ rape-revenge film Baise-moi, from Irigaray to Foucault, through which Huffer reads and writes toward a queer feminist future. Beautifully written and stimulating for the theorist and non-theorist alike, Huffer’s new book combines the personal and the scholarly in experimental ways, such as her analysis of the Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham story. Carefully navigating the couloirs of queer and feminist theory, this is a book about sexuality, ethics, alterity, betrayal, and love.

Reading Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter‘s book Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (Columbia Press, 2013) is the most fun I have had doing this podcast. Maguire makes a point during the interview that police officers preferred to arrest marijuana smugglers because they were so laid back and safe to handle. You get the same feeling reading his account of the members of the roaming hippy/surfer community who fund their lifestyle through ‘scams’, that is, smuggling marijuana into Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. Maguire is a former pro-surfer and he communicates the culture of the surfer and their dedication to their past-time. Drug smuggling has a very utilitarian role. While the surfers smoke drugs and have the connections to buy them; a good smuggling run can fund many years on the international surfing trail. Thus they are not drug smugglers who surf but surfers who take advantage of the profit margin of smuggling. Reading the book made me think that they were almost outside the scope of the podcast; this is not organised crime but the occasional foray into crime. It is also the story of invincible young men taking on the impossible in an often amateurish manner and succeeding. However, as Maguire explains, the lure of money can change people and some of the people in the story reverse this equation. This is a story of a time that has passed. There was an innocence in the story during the 1960s and 70s that has been overtaken by the hard edge of the international drug trade. This is an important and overlooked story in the history of crime. The book provides an insight into how people can turn to crime in a manner that contradicts the strongly held theories of the life-course criminologists. I hope the book inspires others to study these marginal areas of crime. As you will hear in the interview, I have volunteered to do so myself.

Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. Spanning literature, film, visual and performance art, design, and architecture, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (Columbia University Press, 2014) uses the sinograph as a frame to...

Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sold more than six million copies worldwide, is seen as a popular handbook on how to relate to others and how to overcome the narcissism ingrained in every human being. In his book The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (Columbia University Press, 2013), Harvard professor Lawrence J. Friedman explores the life of this towering figure of psychoanalytic thought, and his position in the humanistic movement, which he belonged to. He gives an overview of the religious thought Fromm was inspired by, from Judaism to the Old Testament to Buddhist philosophy. Fromm’s credo was that true spirituality is expressed in how we relate to others, and how to bring joy and peace to the global community. His plea that love will be the vehicle to realize one’s true purpose was the central message of his view on spirituality.

Philip Kretsedemas is the author of The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation, and the Limits of the Law (Columbia UP 2012). He is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The book begins with a discussion of the conventional explanations, justifications, and advocacy for and against immigration. That background frames the current debate now occurring at the federal level on immigration reform. The book addresses that larger context but focuses a lot on the increasingly important role played by local lawmakers and local enforcement. Arizona 1070 is one example of this. Kretsedemas analyzes this shift to local enforcement and what its implications are for immigrants living in a patchwork of immigration laws and enforcement practices. Toward the end of the book, Kretsedemas tries to reconcile what the country can do to move forward. He suggests whiteness and race has been closely intermingled with national identity.

“If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of Western thought, then non-human, non-animal living beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin”, a “zone of absolute obscurity” in which their mode of existence from a philosophical perspective is not even question-worthy. So writes Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in the Basque autonomous region of Spain, in his new book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). The metaphor of “ground-breaking” has never been so apt. Contrasting his view with the Aristotelean perspective in which plants are basically defective animals, Marder initiates inquiry into the nature of vegetal life on its own terms, and into how human life currently encounters, and how it should encounter, this radically foreign mode of existence. Marder’s goal is nothing less than a sort of Nietzschean “revaluation of values” when it comes to vegetal life.

I have read quite a few books on terrorism but always from an English language perspective. This has meant that I was missing the alternative stories from other nations. Guido Steinberg has done me a favour by publishing his German study in English. German Jihad: On the Internationalisation of Islamist Terrorism (Columbia UP, 2013)provides an excellent, detailed analysis of the recent history of the growth of Jihad inspired terrorism by German residents of both European and Asian heritage. He begins the book with one of the best explanations of the near enemy (apostate Islamic governments) and the far enemy (Western nations who are seen as supporting the near enemy), that I have read. He then explains the importance of the demographics of migration to Germany and its role in the Jihadist movement. Germany has a largely Turkish migrant population. As such they did not have the same influences or inspirations as Jihadists from an Arabic background. Importantly, they also did not have the same network of connections which allowed them to easily join international organisations such as Al Qaeda. These circumstances led to a particular series of connections and a lack of awareness by local law enforcement of the growing threat of terrorist activity. Guido gives us a professional and thorough analysis of this history and has sufficient detail to keep a research student engrossed for weeks. I highly recommend the book.

Anyone who studies police corruption will be aware of the Knapp Commission that examined allegations of police corruption in New York City in the 1970s. Not only was this famous because of the movie Serpico, but also most of the terminology used in corruption studies of police came from the report of the commission. Michael F. Armstrong was the chief counsel to the commission and this book is a history of the formation and operation of the inquiry. Holding a major commission of inquiry is not something that is done routinely. In his own words, Armstrong says they “fumbled” along working out how one discovers, let alone investigates corrupt police. They Wished they were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption (Columbia Press, 2012)reads like an extended episode of The Wire, combining political elements with investigative planning and transcripts of surveillance recordings of bribe negotiations. It is very revealing of the nature of corruption that existed at the time. The book follows some key from Xavier Hollander, the Happy Hooker, through small time corrupt officers (grass eaters) through to hardcore predatory corrupt police (meat eaters). Not only does Armstrong provide an entertaining history of the inquiry but he reveals the full gamut of social forces that make such inquiries difficult to implement successfully. Police corruption is an essential factor in any form of large scale illicit activity, be it prostitution, gambling or drugs. Police have a service to sell, namely protection, and there are many illegal operators who are willing to pay for it to ensure their business runs without interruption. While the Knapp Commission happened 40 years ago, the corruption still exists at varying levels in all communities. Armstrong’s book helps us understand how and why it happens and, especially, how difficult it can be to stop.

The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully researched, elegantly written, and thoughtful consideration of the emergence of “students” as a category in twentieth-century China. Urging us to...

Inderjeet Parmar‘s Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (Columbia University Press, 2012) navigates the history of US foreign policymaking in the twentieth century. Parmar is President of the British International Studies Association and Professor in the Department of International Politics School of Social Sciences, City University London. His new book examines foreign policy making from the perspective of philanthropic foundations and the ways foundations sought to influence policy through the creation of foreign policy ideas and institutions. Parmar dissects the role foundations played in US foreign policy toward Indonesia, Chile, and elsewhere through institutions such as the Council of Foreign Relations and various University-based international relations programs. The book ends with an examination of the development of the “democratic peace” doctrine and post 9/11 foreign policy making. Foundations have increasingly moved to the center of political science research (see recent podcast with Sarah Reckhow). Dr. Parmar’s wide-ranging book follows in this approach and is a major contribution to scholarship on philanthropy and public policy making.

Chocolate fans out there may know all about the latest chocolate happenings, from Hershey’s “Air Delight,” a bar of aerated milk chocolate, to Cadbury’s new melt-resistant chocolate, which apparently remains solid even after three hours at 104 degrees. But unless you happen to be a chocoholic who follows the financial news, you may not have heard of “ChocFinger,” a British hedge fund manager named Anthony Ward. In 2010, Ward purchased 240,000 tons of chocolate–seven percent of the global production–and stashed it inside refrigerated warehouses throughout Europe. Ward has been accused by other investors of driving up the price of a commodity that had already seen two year’s worth of price increases. Their worries might be valid. ChocFinger is in a position to influence the market for some time to come: he can continue to store or sell all that chocolate, enough to make over five billion candy bars, until 2030. This is just one of the “secrets” Kara Newman reveals in The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets (Columbia University Press, 2013), in which she examines how commodities markets influence what we eat and how much we pay for food. Newman brings a range of talents to her story. She’s a former vice president of strategic research at Thomson Reuters who’s versed in the world of finance. She’s also the Spirits Editor for Wine Enthusiast, writes the weekly “Spirited Traveler” column for Reuters, and has authored two books of cocktail recipes. She’s the sort of writer who can make the history of trading pork bellies or the volatility of global coffee production into a rich and lively read. Join us as Newman takes us into American’s culinary and financial history and gives us a glimpse into our global future.

On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross published a book about the subject that, very shortly thereafter, started a huge controversy about Polish participation in the Holocaust. In the furor that followed, many simply took it for granted that Gross’s interpretation of what happened–that radically anti-Semitic Poles murdered the Jews with little prompting from the Germans–was simply correct. But was it? This is the question Marek Jan Chodakiewicz tries to answer in The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After (Columbia University Press; East European Monographs, 2005). After an exhaustive and meticulous investigation of the sources (which are imperfect at best), Chodakiewicz concludes that we don’t and will never know exactly what happened on that horrible July day in Jedwabne, but it was certainly more complicated and mysterious than Gross imagines. Chodakiewicz puts the massacre in its wider context or, perhaps more accurately, contexts. These include: Jedwabne itself, Polish life there, Jewish life there, the interaction between the two communities in the town, the Soviet occupation, the coming of the Germans, German policies toward Poles and Jews, the Polish resistance, Polish anti-Semitism, Polish anti-Communism, and the intersection of the two (“Zydokomuna“). No punches are pulled: Chodakiewicz places much of the blame for the atrocity squarely on the Poles (or, rather, some faction of them) in Jedwabne. But he puts their actions–insofar as we can know them–into a much wider frame and therefore helps us understand why they did what they did.

Today we talked to Blake Mobley about his new book Terrorism and Counter-Intelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude Detection (Columbia University Press, 2012). There have been many books examining the intelligence operations of counter-terrorist agencies. Also there are books about how terrorist groups operate. This is a book about how terrorist groups conduct intelligence, specifically counter-intelligence designed to protect themselves from the gaze of the government based counter-terrorist agencies. Blake presents us with a varying set of levels of counter-intelligence sophistication that these groups practice as well as the social, geographic and structural elements that affect the success of these practices. He demonstrates that both these tactics and elements are two edged swords; success in one aspect can create a weakness in another. Blake points out that this is good news for counter-terrorist agencies and recommends that they focus on these weaknesses of the terror groups as a means of disrupting their operations.

When most people think of Buddhism they begin to imagine a lone monk in the forest or a serene rock garden. The world of ghosts, amulets, and magic are usually from their mind. They may even feel some aversion to the notion that the meditative calm of monks from the East could have anything to do with these superstitious ideas and practices. Justin Thomas McDaniel, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, challenges many of theses preconceived ideas about what constitutes the substance of modern Buddhism in Thailand. In his new book, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (Columbia University Press, 2011), McDaniel begins his journey of contemporary Buddhism at one of the regular funerals for our lovelorn ghost (Mae Nak). Despite the compelling nature of this scene, as a skilled linguist and practicing scholar-monk for many years, McDaniel never imagined that he would be examining the supernatural world of ghost stories. However, after living in Thailand for several years as an academic and practitioner he realized that the specter of modern Thai Buddhist practices and believes would not leave him alone. McDaniel has catalogued much of hat he has found about Thai Buddhism on his wonderful project in digital humanities, the Thai Digital Monastery. Instead of looking for Buddhism, he let Buddhists tell, show, describe and recount what they do, chant, hold, and value. McDaniel uses the story of the lovelorn ghost and the magical monk, who we find out, is the infamous Somdet To, as an opening to explore the various aspects of contemporary religious Buddhist practices and how they shape Thai society. The six degrees of separation (from Somdet To) takes us through an erudite analysis of biographies, hagiographies, film, statues, amulets, murals, texts, magic, chants, and photographs, in the coproduction of religious knowledge. While McDaniel’s book is a key contribution to Thai, Theravada, and modern Buddhism, it is also valuable in the study of religion more generally. His approach provides a template for the “pragmatic sociological study of cultural repertoires,” which examines what a particular person carries, recites, and respects, how they do something, how they say they do something, and the material and social contexts they do it in. This allows us as researchers to unshackle our study from the expectations of certain terminology. He also problematizes a number of other categories, such as, magic, cult, localization, folk, popular, local, syncretism, synergy, domestication, hybridity, and vernacularization, by demonstrating their limited usefulness when attempting to describe a Thai monastery, shrine, liturgy, or ritual. These innovative moves in methodology should be motivational to others in the field more generally. Overall, McDaniel produced a highly readable and enjoyable portrait of Buddhism in contemporary Thailand.

Many people believe that the current Islamic resurgence is not necessarily a “return of religion,” but rather a continuation of tradition. According to this line of thought, therefore, Islam is essentially resistant to modernity and incompatible with contemporary secular societies. But is this really the case? Abdulkader Tayob, professor of Religion at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, examines this question in his new book Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse (Columbia University Press, 2010). In the book, Tayob offers a fresh look at Muslim intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Treatments of modern Islam often portray it as uniformly antithetical to modernity, but this book presents divergent Muslim voices on this score. Tayob employs religion not as an essential category of examination, but rather as a guiding mode through which he explores Muslim debates on identity, science, politics, law, and gender. The characters involved in these dialogues span the globe from South Asia, the Middle East, and North America, and give voice to both male and female perspectives. We are left with a nuanced examination of modern Islamic thought, which has been carefully contextualized in a critical, disruptive, and engaging way. Overall, Tayob presents a wonderful thematic resource for understanding the adaptation and resistance to modernity as Muslims began to reconcile Islam with the forces of modernization and secularization. It should be useful for readers and listeners interested in modern Islam and the study of religion more generally.

Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective. In Carool Kersten‘s Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam (Columbia University Press, 2011), we learn about a few modern Muslim thinkers who engage their Islamic intellectual heritage with the philosophical apparatus of contemporary Western thought. Kersten, a professor of Religious and Islamic Studies at King’s College London, has tracked Muslim thinkers for years (follow his blog Critical Muslims), and book reflects a deep understanding of the wider dialogues occurring in contemporary Islamic thought. His analysis also traverses geographical limitations of much of the scholarship on contemporary Islam by discussing figures from both the eastern and western regions of Islam. We are introduced to the thought of Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesia), Hasan Hanafi (Egypt), and Mohammad Arkoun (Algeria). Through these thinkers Kersten explores how phenomenology, hermeneutics, secularization, and postcolonial vocabulary can assist us in approaching religion generally. He frames his work through Russell McCutcheon’s model of theological, phenomenological, and critical-anthropological strategies for engaging religion in order to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in the study of Islam. Altogether, we have the first book length analysis of these important modern Muslim thinkers and their critique of both western scholarship and Muslim intellectualism.

In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008), Houston A. Baker makes the argument that many contemporary black public intellectuals, otherwise known as African American “academostars,” are self-serving individuals who distort the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and belie the overall aims of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. He calls out five main figures: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and even Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson. Betrayal has been described both as a “brave and funny vernacular broadside” and “an important and absorbing meditation” on contemporary discussions of American politics. This book is immensely important not only for the way it clarifies the often misconstrued and misapplied rhetoric of Dr. King, but also the way in which it takes pains to historicize the plight of African Americans. I am personally persuaded by this book, and I highly recommend it. While Betrayal was published in the same year as the election of America’s first president of African descent, it offers us a framework for understanding our “now”: the upcoming 2012 election season, much of the Tea Party rhetoric, and even the political challenges that Barack Obama faces in relation to contemporary racial conflict. Baker is a distinguished university professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and he is a well-known literary and cultural critic, focusing on African American arts and politics. He is also a creative writer, with a recently published volume of poetry entitled Passing Over. I hope to have him on the show again to discuss that book. Till then, I’m certain you’ll be thoroughly engaged in this lively interchange.

It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just people you don’t like very much. Not so in post-War West Germany. There, too, it was common to call people “fascists. But in the Federal Republic they may well have been fascists, that is, Nazis. Despite the efforts of the most thorough-going de-Nazifiers, post-war West German government, business and society was shot through with ex-Nazis. Young people, and especially university students in the BRD, were keenly aware of this fact, and they wondered how it could be that the so-called “Auschwitz generation” could have changed their tune so quickly. Under the influence of some rather clever left-leaning philosophers (those of the Frankfurt School), some of them came to the conclusion that they hadn’t and that, therefore, Germany was still a fascist state. This conclusion (erroneous as it was) gave them striking moral clarity: there was only one thing to do when faced with fascism–resist it by any means necessary. And that is what they did. In his enlightening Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia UP, 2010), veteran journalist and policy analyst Hans Kundnani tells their story. It’s somewhere between a farce and a tragedy, at least in my reading. On the one hand, to think that West Germany was a fascist state, to classify Zionism as a kind of Nazism, and to believe that the leftist students were persecuted “new Jews” is of course absurd. At least some of the West German radicals were so out of touch with reality that it defies understanding. On the other hand, they were in fact surrounded by ex-fascists, keenly aware that Israel was (to put it delicately) “asserting itself” in the middle east, and constantly on the run from Federal authorities. In such a situation I might lose touch with reality too. For the terrorists, who never regained their senses, it all ended badly. But for those whose heads cleared (Joschka Fisher, for example), it ended in power, though a different power than they had imagined in 1968. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or maybe the idea was to frighten the rain gods. Who knows? In any case, none of it worked: the massive, loud, and surely expensive operation had, according to most experts, no measurable effect on the weather around the Chinese capital. You might say you can’t blame them for trying. But according to James Rodger Fleming, you can. In his incisive new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia UP, 2010), Fleming shows that although people have always dreamed of controlling the weather, and many have tried to do so, no one has ever succeeded. The reason is simple: the atmosphere of the Earth is not like your refrigerator or oven. It’s just too big and complex to be man-handled by any known or even realistically imagined technology. But, as Fleming demonstrates, there are always desperate people who refuse to accept this intuitive fact. So we are presented with a gallery of rain-making mountebanks, charlatans, and swindlers ever-ready to part rain-seeking fools and their rain-seeking money. In Fleming’s excellent telling, the story is entertaining though a bit sad. It’s sadder still that the weather-controlling con is still being run by seemingly well-intentioned people who claim they can “fix” global warming by means of some out-sized, outrageous, and out-of-this-world engineering scheme. Fleming, who both knows the science and has looked at the history, is more than dubious. The only way we can “fix” the sky is to leave it alone and hope for the best. It turns out, however, that leaving the sky alone is hard. It’s actually easier to attack it, proclaim victory, and continue as before. Just ask the Chinese. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.