In his new book The Stalinist Era(Cambridge University Press, 2018), David L. Hoffmann focuses on the myriad ways in which Stalinist practices had their origins in World War I (1914-1918) and Russian Civil War era (1918-1920). These periods saw mass mobilizations of the population take place not just in Russia and the early Bolshevik state, but in many other nations, too. In order to place Stalinism in this more comparative context, Hoffmann draws on a variety of primary archival sources. The Stalinist Era also provides a broad synthesis of recent work on Stalinism, and so interested readers will be able to follow his bibliography to much of the key historical work on the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Following its treatment of the Russian Civil War, The Stalinist Era takes readers through the NEP (New Economic Policy) period, the “building socialism” era of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, the Purges of the late 1930’s, the Second World War, and the final postwar Stalin years. Finally, Hoffmann suggests, there are important ways in which Stalinism did not die with Stalin himself. The Stalinist Era combines an effective synthesis of the entire Stalin period, while at the same time, putting forth a specific and engaging argument that Stalinism mirrors many broader trends in modern nations. Historical writing should encourage comparative thinking, and Hoffmann’s book does exactly that. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (U Chicago Press, 2024), music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves. Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized "ears." Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses. Gavin Steingo is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is also affiliated with the programs in Media and Modernity, African Studies, and Jazz Studies. Steingo’s research examines sound and music as fundamental features in the construction of global modernity, with research specializations in African music, sound studies, acoustic ecology, and music and philosophy. Methodologically, his work is united by a mode of inquiry where theory, history, and ethnography form part of a shared constellation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic (ILR Press, 2024) goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life.  Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing. Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how post-Fordist unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment. Claudia Strauss is Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College. She is the author of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning with Naomi Quinn and co-editor of Human Motives and Cognitive Models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, 2022) shows how the idea became so powerful, why it succeeded, and why it has failed so spectacularly. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was supposed to be a story of the success of free markets. However, in the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major motor of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Milton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has not proved very clearly to be untrue.  This book shows how we got to the current crisis of free market thought, and suggests how we can find our way out. Contrary to popular free market narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, some free-market thinkers began insisting only pure free markets, without state intervention, could work. A tradition of free-market ideological brittleness emerged, and it has led orthodox free market economics to some spectacular failures. It is a paradox that an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has refused to follow its own precepts. This book shows that we need to go back to the origins of free market thought in order to understand its dynamism, as well as its inherent weaknesses, and to develop new economic concepts to face the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century. Jacob Soll is an American university professor and professor of philosophy, history and accounting at the University of Southern California. Soll's work examines the mechanics of politics, statecraft and economics by dissecting the various elements of how modern states and political systems succeed and fail. 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This year, many countries around the world, including most of the world's most populous democracies, have consequential nation-wide elections. In many of these elections, democracy itself is at stake. The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023) is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, Samuel Ely Bagg explains why we should shift our orientation away from maximizing collective self-rule and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Bagg argues we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture - a vision that is at once more realistic and, he argues, more inspiring. The book presents an ambitious and comprehensive engagement with democracy's foundations, principles, and practices. Make no mistake, this work of political theory is profoundly worldly: it bears reading for those interested in politics across time, space, and scale - from the reconstruction US to contemporary Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela.  Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches courses in political theory. Before coming to UofSC, he taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017. Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His recent publications include co-edited volumes on Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a representation of it, we get lost. If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in others in the series, including Jason and Mark Bevir talking about their Interpretive Social Science, and James C. Scott, who passed away shortly before this episode was recorded, discussing his Against the Grain. Jason recommends Charles Taylor’s sequel to The Language Animal, Cosmic Connections, and Jon Fosse’s novelistic exploration of the human condition, Septology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Returning to the New Books Network is Doug Greene, here to discuss his book The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky (Routledge, 2024). Split into three main parts, the book first surveys Kautsky’s own life and thought, starting with his early interest in socialist politics and turn towards Marxism, followed by a slow but steady turn away from revolution and towards reform, believing parliamentary procedures were the best road to social transformation. The second part looks at the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, all of whom offer critical responses to Kautsky’s reformism, and the reassertion of the importance of revolutionary thought to any Marxist project. The third and final part looks at the contemporary works of Lars Lih, Eric Blanc and Mike Macnair and their attempts to make Kautsky’s reformist practice the central pillar of the contemporary left. Throughout, Greene argues that the real lesson Kautsky offers is the dead-end of reformism to any revolutionary project. Some other relevant readings on this topic include Doug Greene | Why Kautsky Was Wrong (and Why You Should Care) Doug Greene | Why Kautsky Was Wrong (LeftVoice interview) Harrison Fluss | The Prophet Avec Lacan Douglas Greene is a historian in Boston. He is also the author of the books A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism and Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union. His writing has appeared in a number of outlets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Is Orwell still relevant today?  In Orwell’s Ghosts Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century (Norton, 2024), Laura Beers, a Professor of History at American University examines the life and writing of Orwell to offer lessons for contemporary politics and society. The book examines the influences that shaped Eric Blair’s nom de plume, as well as showing how his ideas offer vital insights for the project of equality and social justice today. The book is even handed in its analysis, placing Orwell as a writer and thinker of his time and place, as much as he is relevant today. Moreover, the book offers an important critical perspective on his views about gender and feminism, reminding the reader of the importance of a nuanced perspective even for this hugely significant figure. A fascinating read as well as a vital political intervention, the book will be essential reading across humanities, social science and for anyone interested in politics too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports offered the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The idiom of contemporary politics is a kind of philosophical hodge-podge. While there’s plenty of talk about the traditional themes of freedom, justice, equality, and autonomy, there is also an increasing reliance on ideas like misinformation, bias, expertise, and propaganda. These latter notions belong, at least in part, to epistemology – the area of philosophy that deals with issues concerning knowledge, rationality, evidence, and belief. Relatively recently, the subfield of political epistemology has emerged. Political epistemologists explore philosophical issues of political belief, political expertise, political information and so on. But they also are concerned to examine the ways in which political arrangements can go well or badly, depending on the character of the epistemic practices that prevail in society. Political epistemology is — by philosophy’s standards – a new subfield. Perhaps it is no more than two decades old. Yet the field is organized around a few disputes. In Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge 2024), Oliver Traldi surveys the terrain, often leading the reader to the conclusion that things are more complicated than they might seem. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment. Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm. A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp. Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners. 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR--and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia. Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile--and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton UP, 2024) is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century. Benjamin Nathans's vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents--from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was "simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people." An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR's totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin's Russia--and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as a society we want successful, profitable companies because, as Jan Eeckhout says in The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work (Princeton UP, 2021), “we tend to accept that when firms do well, the economy does well”, even when that's not true.  The rising tide, in some cases, does not lift all boats. Even when a few strong players have outsized gains, the rest of the market can suffer. These trends have a ripple effect over time that effectively separate economic winners, who keep an increasingly large share of benefits, from economic losers who struggle to compete, let alone maintain the standard of living achieved by their parents. In this book, Jan Eeckhout documents how a small number of large firms have been able to gain tremendous market power through a variety of mechanisms such as price manipulation, outsourcing, and leveraging new technical innovations. None of these are inherently wrong, but when used by powerful companies to reduce or eliminate potential competition, they lead to inefficient markets that weaken society.  It is a case of excessive success, as companies narrowly focus on defending and increasing their profits without significant consideration for the externalities or unintended consequences of these market failures.  Eeckhout presents an optimistic outlook of how we can retain the extensive advantages of economic growth while reversing some of these more dangerous trends. His recommendations for the future include leveraging what we've learned from prior generations who faced similar challenges, and building on the incredible technical innovations that have characterized the last few decades, including recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.  Recommended reading: The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

How a new "woke" elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status--without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged. Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton UP, 2024), Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged. We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion. A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left (Akashic Books, 2024) explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive-compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen--just as Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes. When he arrives in January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family's loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he's mutated into a 6'2? tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really high and fly to Nashville. In between--as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside--Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester, threading a path through teachers with arrested development, some oafish peers, and a sullen old maid--a very English freak show. On the way he befriends a cadre of bat-winged teenage prodigies and meets their local guru, the young Brian Eno. At the end of 1967, all the ingredients are in place that will make Robyn Hitchcock a songwriter for life. But then again, does 1967 ever really end? Robyn Hitchcock is a rock 'n' roll surrealist. Born in London in 1953, he describes his songs as "pictures you can listen to." Hitchcock has floated at a tangent to the mainstream for nearly five decades, and his songs have been performed by R.E.M., the Replacements, Neko Case, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Lou Barlow, Grant-Lee Phillips, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead, among others. Hitchcock lives in London with his wife Emma Swift and two cats, Ringo and Tubby. Robyn on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America: Music, Satire, & the Battle Against the Christian Right (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025). Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

War in the 21st century will remain a chameleon that takes on different forms and guises. Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (Oxford University Press, 2024) edited by Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels offers the first comprehensive update and revision of ideas about the future of war since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the war has fundamentally shifted our perspective on the nature and character of future war, but also cautions against marginalising many other parallel trends, types of war, and ways of waging them. World-renowned international experts from the War Studies field consider the impact of the war in Ukraine on the broader social phenomenon of war: they analyse visions of future war; examine the impact of technological innovation on its conduct; assess our ability to anticipate its future; and consider lessons learned for leaders, soldiers, strategists, scholars and concerned citizens. Beyond Ukraine features contributions from Azar Gat, Beatrice Heuser, Antulio Echevarria, Audrey Cronin, T.X. Hammes, Kenneth Payne, Frank Hoffman, David Betz, Jan Willem Honig, and many other pre-eminent thinkers on the past, present and future of war—including an afterword by the late Christopher Coker. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands’ War Studies Research Centre of the Netherlands Defence Academy. Jeffrey H. Michaels PhD is the IEN Senior Fellow in American Foreign Policy and International Security at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in American literature. The so-called “Demon Dog of Crime Fiction,” Ellroy enjoys a celebrity status and notoriety that few authors can match. However, traumas from the past have shadowed his literary success. When Ellroy was ten years old, his mother was brutally murdered. The crime went unsolved, and her death marked the start of a long and turbulent road for Ellroy that has included struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and jail time. In tracing his life and career, Steven Powell reveals how Ellroy's upbringing in LA, always on the periphery of Hollywood, had a profound and dark influence on his work as a novelist. Using new sources, Powell also uncovers Ellroy's family secrets, including the mysterious first marriage of his mother Jean Ellroy, eighteen years before her murder. At its heart, Love Me Fierce in Danger is the story of how Ellroy overcame his demons to become the bestselling and celebrated author of such classics as The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. Informed by interviews with friends, family, peers, and literary and Hollywood collaborators, as well as extensive conversations with Ellroy himself, Love Me Fierce In Danger pulls back the curtain on an enigmatic figure who has courted acclaim and controversy with equal zealotry. Steven Powell is an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the editor of Conversations with James Ellroy (2012) and 100 American Crime Writers (2012). His most recent work is James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction (2016). Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His writing and other interviews about literature and film can also be found on Pages and Frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The war on the Eastern front remains relatively less well explored as compared to the western front of World War II. Yet some of the most titanic battles in modern military history occurred on the steppes of eastern Europe. Stalingrad and Moscow are names known to most but less well-known are the vast battles that occurred in Byelorussia. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched Operation Bagration involving more than two million soldiers marching across fronts hundreds of miles wide. In his latest work, Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Oxford UP, 2024), Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles the military, political, and diplomatic events of the final months on arguably the most crucial front of World War 2. Dimbleby draws on previously untranslated accounts from ordinary Russian and German soldiers to chronicle the curtain call of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Endgame 1944 provides insights into the major German and Russian players balanced off with accounts of the trials of individual soldier.. Dimbleby has enjoyed a long career in television beginning with ITV and BBC where he covered world affairs. He presented ITV's flagship weekly political program This Week for over ten years. He has also worked in radio with BBC 4. His book Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded to the best work of historical non-fiction. He is also Chair of Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund named after his father. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

"Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead". So writes Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Double Day Books, 2024). Applebaum's new book develops the themes she rehearsed in Twilight of Democracy (2020), an analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and national conservatism in the UK and the US. Ranging across the club of authoritarians but with an inevitable focus on China and Russia, Autocracy Inc. examines autocrats' growing sophistication and coordination and how they have been enabled by the naivety (and greed) of business and politicians in liberal democracies. "The vehicles of disruption can be right-wing, left-wing, separatist or nationalist - even taking the form of medical conspiracies or moral panic," she writes. "Only the purpose never changes: Autocracy Inc. hopes to rewrite the rules of the international system itself". Anne Applebaum is an American-Polish historian and staff writer for The Atlantic. Apart from Twilight of Democracy, she has written three histories - Gulag: A History (2003), Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012), and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017). *The author's book recommendations were The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn (Harvard University Press, 50th Anniversary edition 2017) and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (OUP, 2016 - translated by Rosamund Bartlett). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Has fascism arrived in America?  In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated whether Trumpism should be seen as an outgrowth of American conservatism or of a darker – and potentially fascist – tradition. Fascism in America contributes to this debate by examining the activities of interwar right-wing groups like the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and the America First movement, as well as the post-war rise of Black antifascism and white vigilantism, the representation of American Nazis in popular culture, and policy options for combating right-wing extremism. Gavriel David Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University. His areas of academic specialization include the history of Nazi Germany, memory studies, and counterfactual history. 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades – to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-determination. Fair-trade brands narrate consumption as an act of feminist solidarity with women artisans in the global South.  In Capitalist Humanitarianism (Duke UP, 2023), Lucia Hulsether examines these projects and the contexts of their emergence. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and traversing intimate and global scales, Hulsether tracks how neoliberal self-critique creates new institutional hegemonies that, in turn, reproduce racial and neocolonial dispossession. From the archives of Christian fair traders to luxury social entrepreneurship conferences, from US finance offices to Guatemalan towns flooded with their loan products, from service economy desperation to the internal contradictions of social movements, Hulsether argues that capitalist humanitarian projects are fueled as much by a profit motive as by a hope that racial capitalism can redeem the losses that accumulate in its wake. Lucia Hulsether is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (U Minnesota Press, 2024) addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.  Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families. As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Alessandra Montalbano examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilised citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiography, law, literary criticism, trauma studies, phenomenology, and political philosophy. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy traces how and at what price Italians became aware of living in a country that was being blackmailed by criminal organisations that arguably jeopardised the nation even more than terrorism. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Health inequity is one of the defining problems of our time. But current efforts to address the problem focus on mitigating the harms of injustice rather than confronting injustice itself. In Equal Care: Health Equity, Social Democracy, and the Egalitarian State (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Seth A. Berkowitz, MD, MPH, offers an innovative vision for the future of health equity by examining the social mechanisms that link injustice to poor health. He also presents practical policies designed to create a system of social relations that ensures equal care for everyone. As Berkowitz illustrates, the project of social democracy works to improve health by bringing relationships of equality to the sites of human cooperation: in civil society, in political processes, and in economic activities. This book synthesizes three elements necessary for such a project—normative justification, mechanistic knowledge, and technical proficiency—into a practical vision of how to create health equity. Drawing from the fields of medicine, social epidemiology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and more, Berkowitz makes clear that health inequity is social failure embodied, and the only true cures are political. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad, has an interesting legacy, one that is often shaped by sectarian differences and tensions. The sermon of Fatima, which is the focus of Mahjabeen Dhala's Feminist Theology and Sociology of Islam: A Study of the Sermon of Fatima (Cambridge University Press, 2024), though itself riddled with questions of authenticity, is a compelling incident which brings to light various possibilities of analysis and insights. The issue of fadak or inheritance, which prompts Fatima to take a public stance against the male leaders of the community, such as Abu Bakr, after the passing of her father, results in a rich sermon that has theological and social justice implications, as Dhala highlights. In Dhala's reading of the sermon by Fatima and her response to an injustice experienced by her and her family, Fatima is seen as a theologian and a social activist. Moreover, this study also sheds on light of an example of pre-modern history of Muslim woman’s resistance. This book will be of interest to those who think about gender and Islam, social justice, theology, feminism and much more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement. Michael Willrich's book American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2023) tells the gripping tale of the anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how their battles over freedom and power still shape our public life. Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

How the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center informed the PLO's relationship to Zionism and Israel In September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and trucked its complete library to Israel. Palestinian activists and supporters protested loudly to international organizations and the Western press, claiming that the assault on the Center proved that the Israelis sought to destroy not merely Palestinian militants but Palestinian culture as well. The protests succeeded: in November 1983, Israel returned the library as part of a prisoner exchange. What was in that library? Much of the expansive collection the PLO amassed consisted of books about Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. In Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton UP, 2024), Jonathan Marc Gribetz tells the story of the PLO Research Center from its establishment in 1965 until its ultimate expulsion from Lebanon in 1983. Gribetz explores why the PLO invested in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zionism, and how the knowledge they acquired informed the PLO's relationship to Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die. These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data. The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone—past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, Öhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains. As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care (U Chicago Press, 2024) will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past—before it is too late. Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing comparable threats. Members of frenemy alliances are perpetually torn by two powerful opposing forces. Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022) shows that shared material threats push these states together while ideological differences pull them apart. Each of these competing forces has dominated the other at critical times. This difference has resulted in stable alliances among ideological enemies in some cases but the delay, dissolution, or failure of these alliances in others. This book examines how states' susceptibility to major domestic ideological changes and the nature of the ideological differences among countries provide the key to alliance formation or failure. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of critical historical and contemporary cases, from the failure of British and French leaders to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in the 1930s to the likely evolution of the United States' alliance system against a rising China in the early 21st century. In Frenemies, author Mark Haas develops a groundbreaking argument that explains the origins and durability of alliances among ideological enemies and offers policy-guiding perspectives on a subject at the core of international relations. Our guests today is Mark Haas, Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies (Headpress, 2024) by Heidi Honeycutt is the first book-length history of female horror directors from the late 1800s to present day. Having conducted hundreds of interviews and watched thousands of horror films, Honeycutt defines the political and cultural forces that shape the way modern horror movies are made by women. The women's rights and civil rights movements, new distribution technology, digital cameras, the destruction of the classic studio system, and the abandonment of the Hays code have significantly impacted women directors and their movies. So, too, social media, modern ideas of gender and racial equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and a new generation of provocative, daring films that take shocking risks in the genre. Includes short films, anthologies, documentaries, animated horror, horror pornography, pink films, and experimental horror.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will eventually be ordered deported. The Slow Violence of Immigration Court: Procedural Justice on Trial (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Maya Pagni Barak sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large. Grounded in the illuminating stories of people facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, The Slow Violence of Immigration Court invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice and the fear of living with the threat of deportation. Although the spectacle of violence created by family separation and deportation is perceived as extreme and unprecedented, these long legal proceedings are masked in the mundane and are often overlooked, ignored, and excused. In an urgent call to action, Dr. Barak deftly demonstrates that deportation and family separation are not abhorrent anomalies, but are a routine, slow form of violence at the heart of the U.S. immigration system. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords.  In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the outputs of an understanding mind without having actual understanding, the technology can encourage us to surrender the activities of thinking and reasoning. This poses the risk of diminishing our ability to respond to challenges and to imagine and bring about different futures. In her compelling book, Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, critically examines AI Doomers and Long-termism, the nature of AI in relation to human intelligence, and the technology industry's hand in diverting our attention from the serious risks we face. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (U Chicago Press, 2024) is a fascinating and engaging historical tour of those who were gay and active in Republican and conservative politics over the course of the last 80 years. Neil J. Young has written an accessible and deeply sources book that brings forward stories about those in the closet, those out of the closet, and in some cases, the move to come out as gay in Republican politics and in conservative activism. Young explains early on that part of the impetus for the book is the contemporary question: why would anyone be a gay Republican? But the discussion is far from simple, and the book traces more than eight decades of history focusing on the evolution and changing ideology of the Republican Party while also exploring different factions within the party, in a variety of places and regions in the United States. All of this is woven together to provide a lively history. Young himself is part of this history, as he explains his own political evolution and his personal story. One of the points that becomes clear in Coming Out Republican is that there are distinctions between conservativism and Republican politics. It is also undeniable from the research and the history that the individuals who are gay Republicans, either in the 1950s or in the 1980s or in the 2020s, are generally middle- or upper-class white men. The book starts in the 1950s in Washington, D.C., where a number of closeted gay men were instrumental in fundraising and political activism for both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Young also notes that Washington, D.C. at this time had a lively gay community. What is fascinating with this starting point is that these gay men were adamantly anti-Communist, as Young explains it, they were essentially creating a kind of closet for themselves that protected them from many of the homophobic attacks that were made during the McCarthy era. Moving through historical periods and back and forth across the country, Young traces the different kinds of activists and the causes within the Republican party that animated them—personal freedom and liberty, bodily autonomy, fiscal conservativism, anti-statism, etc.—alongside the evolution of the Republican Party itself, which integrates white Evangelical voters, especially from the South, during this same time period.  Coming Out Republican provides the reader with essentially two historical accounts, focusing on the role and place of gay Republicans and conservatives within the party and the conservative movement as a whole, while also delineating the shifts in the conversative movement towards the New Right, and a Republican Party that highlights socially conservative policy, which tends to be more limiting of individual freedom and bodily autonomy. Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right also outlines the other side of the LGBTQ movement, teasing out how those on the left were or were not engaged in the quest for equal rights and full citizenship for LGBTQ individuals. This is a really interesting assessment, since it pulls out competing approaches to rights advocacy and political advocacy, and also spotlights the places and times when advocacy was absent. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Explaining how and why there are such diverging outcomes of UN peace negotiations and treaties, this book offers a detailed examination of peace processes in order to demonstrate that how treaties are negotiated and written significantly impacts their implementation.  Drawing on case studies from the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars, Miranda Melcher demonstrates the critical importance of specificity in peace treaties in understanding implementation outcomes for military integration. Based on unique primary source data, including interviews with key actors who have participated in peace treaty negotiations, as well as thousands of previously unassessed UN archival documents, Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique: The Importance of Specificity in Peace Treaties (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers new insights and policy recommendations for key details whose presence or absence can have a significant impact on how peace processes unfold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In his book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century (PublicAffairs, 2024), Dmitri Alperovitch (with Garrett M. Graff) argues that the United States is in a “Cold War II” with China, and lays out a set of policy recommendations for how the US can win this new Cold War. Alperovitch is currently the Founder and Executive Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank focused on “advancing American prosperity and global leadership in the 21st century and beyond.” Before moving into the think tank world, Alperovitch was the CTO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a multi-billion dollar cybersecurity company that gained public attention for investigating the 2016 DNC email leaks and 2014’s North Korean hack of Sony Pictures. Through his work at CrowdStrike and McAfee before that, Alperovitch was involved in investigating numerous Chinese cyber-intrusions into US and global institutions, for instance Operation Aurora and Operation Shady RAT. Alperovitch’s cybersecurity expertise has also led him to advise numerous US government institutions including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing from his experiences across the private and public sectors, Alperovitch injects World on the Brink with incisive analyses and historical precedents that should spark the interest of those who follow US-China competition.  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/book-of-the-day

What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Tara Ward reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Dr. Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalises on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art. Dr. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence and a preview of the coming decades, based on research and interviews with the world's foremost experts. If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible. This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots (St. Martin's Press, 2024). Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image. Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future. Sophia the Robot Tries to Convince the Experts Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition. 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/book-of-the-day

Daniel Susskind examines the brief and powerful history of economic growth and puts it into perspective with human prosperity in Growth: A History and a Reckoning (Harvard UP, 2024). Susskind acknowledges the tremendous benefits of economic growth, which he credits with freeing billions of people from poverty and allowing us to live longer and healthier lives. He also recognizes the real and substantial costs of our relentless pursuit of growth at the expense of other considerations and moral challenges.  Responding to the degrowth movement, Susskind counters the assumption that simply reducing growth will lead to better outcomes. In particular, Susskind points out that our key measure of growth, GDP, is one imperfect metric that is neither intended nor effective as a proxy for well-being. He recommends a more balanced "dashboard" approach that includes GDP along with other success measures. Reducing our myopic focus on GDP does not mean less growth. Susskind presents an alternate approach, arguing that we should continue to pursue growth through the creative application of new ideas that allow us to use our finite natural resources more effectively and efficiently.  Ideas, he points out, are not a scarce asset but an infinite one; by shifting to focus on new ways of thinking and working Susskind shows how we can continue to pursue the benefits of growth while mitigating the high costs. Book referenced:  GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle Recommended reading:  Planting the Oudolf Gardens by Rory Dusoir Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?  This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling. Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

To give up or not to give up? The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple. Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable. There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment--an attempt to make a different future. In On Giving Up (FSG, 2024), the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton UP, 2022), Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it. “Capitalism” was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labour. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for manoeuvre. The division of labour is still the division of labour and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for. Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Sans-Culottes and Before the Deluge (both Princeton UP). 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung").  Colonial Paradigms of Violence: Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Killing (Wallstein, 2022), part of the European Holocaust Studies series, offers a variety of perspectives on the connections and entanglements of colonialism and mass violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton UP, 2024), Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across postconflict Cambodia. Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate—and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land. Lin argues that the half-century legacy of American bombs has sedimented the war into the layers of contemporary Cambodian society. Policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, whether economic liberalization or authoritarian consolidation, must be realized in an environment haunted by the violence of the past. As the stories Lin captures show, the bombing served as a critical juncture in these farming villages, marking the place in time where development stopped. Our guest today is Erin Lin, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial (Princeton UP, 2022), Dr. Jeremy Schipper tells the story of a free Black man accused of plotting an anti-slavery insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey was found guilty and hanged along with dozens of others accused of collaborating with him. At the center of the book is an examination of how former slave Denmark Vesey used interpretations of the Bible to justify the revolt while members of the white establishment in South Carolina use that same Bible to support the slaveholders view of themselves as benevolent biblical patriarchs.  The book is a riveting account of a key moment in antebellum American history that underscores deep racial inequities and the assumed supremacy of white Christians during a time of violence, fear, and conflicting understandings of moral superiority and biblical truth. Recommended reading:  The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History edited by Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

John T. Maier's The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction (Routledge Press, 2024) defends a comprehensive new vision of what addiction is and how people with addictions should be treated. The author argues that, in addition to physical and intellectual disabilities, there are volitional disabilities - disabilities of the will - and that addiction is best understood as a species of volitional disability. This theory serves to illuminate long-standing philosophical and psychological perplexities about addiction and addictive motivation. It articulates a normative framework within which to understand prohibition, harm reduction, and other strategies that aim to address addiction. The argument of this book is that these should ultimately be evaluated in terms of reasonable accommodations for addicted people and that the priority of addiction policy should be the provision of such accommodations. What makes this book distinctive is that it understands addiction as a fundamentally political problem, an understanding that is suggested by standard legal approaches to addiction, but which has not received a sustained defense in the previous philosophical or psychological literature. This text marks a significant advance in the theory of addiction, one which should reshape our understanding of addiction policy and its proper aims. Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to 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/book-of-the-day

In our interview, I spoke with Donald Stoker about the changes in American grand strategy over the past 250 years and the major themes from his new book: Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024). Across the full span of the nation’s history, Stoker challenges our understanding of the purposes and uses of American power. From the struggle for independence to the era of renewed competition with China and Russia, he reveals the grand strategies underpinning the nation’s pursuit of sovereignty, security, expansion, and democracy abroad. He shows how successive administrations have projected diplomatic, military, and economic power, and mobilized ideas and information to preserve American freedoms at home and secure US aims abroad. He exposes the myth of American isolationism, the good and ill of America’s quest for democracy overseas, and how too often its administrations have lacked clear political aims or a concrete vision for where they want to go. Understanding this history is vital if America is to relearn how to use its power to meet the challenges ahead and to think more clearly about political aims and grand strategy. The interview reflects the opinions of the author and not that of the US government or National Defense University. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day