episode 161: Andrew Marble, "Boy on the Bridge: The Story of John Shalikashvili’s Remarkable Success" (UP of Kentucky, 2019)
When President Bill Clinton nominated John Shalikashvili to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993, it represented the climax of a long journey that began in waning days of the Second World War...
episode 61: Catherine Besteman, "Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine" (Duke UP, 2016)
Besteman writes about her ethnographic encounter in the 1980s with Somalis from the village of Banta who she then re-encounters in 2006 in the town of Lewiston,..
episode 52: J. L. Anderson, "Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
Anderson provides a history of pigs in America from the first arrival on the continent in the Columbian Exchange to the modern agribusiness of pork production...
episode 682: Brian Cervantez, "Amon Carter: A Lone Star Life" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
Cervantez has drawn on Texas Christian University’s rich collection of Carter papers to chart Carter’s quest to bring business and government projects to his adopted hometown...
episode 683: Rachel Chrastil, "How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Chrastil explores the most personal of women’s decisions from the 1500s on...
episode 64: Great Books: Rich Blint on James Baldwin's "Another Country"
James Baldwin's appeal and admonition ring as true as they did in the 1960s, when the novelist became the nation's conscience...
episode 43: Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)
The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data?
episode 73: Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019)
Cazenave offers a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final nine and a half-hour 1985 film with which listeners and readers might be familiar...
episode 29: Priya Sharm, "Ormeshadow" (Tor.com, 2019)
Priya Sharm's 'Ormeshadow' is about more about human beasts than the actual dragon that slumbers under the earth...
episode 55: Maria Dimova-Cookson, "Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty" (Routledge, 2019)
Dimova-Cookson offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin...