NBN Book of the Day

Elizabeth and John talk about fantasy's power of world-making with Edinburgh professor Anna Vaninskaya, author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 ( 2010) and Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien ( 2020). Anna uncovers the melancholy sense of displacement and loss running through Tolkien, and links his notion of "subcreation" to an often concealed theological vision. Not allegory but "application" is praised as a way of reading fantasy.John asks about hopeful visions of the radical politics of fantasy (Le Guin, but also Graeber and Wengrow's recent work); Elizabeth stresses that fantasy's appeal is at once childish and childlike. E. Nesbit surfaces, as she tends to in RtB conversations. The question of film TV and other visual modes comes up: is textual fantasy on the way out?Mentioned in the Episode: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. In "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" Ursula Le Guin perhaps surprisingly praises the otherworldly prose style of Anna's beloved E. R. Eddison, best known for The Worm Ouroboros (1922) J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories" E. Nesbit The Phoenix and the Carpet Lord Dunsany, King of Elfland's Daughter Ursula Le Guin The Books of Earthsea Recallable Books: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin (and read this lovely Ivan Kreilkamp article on her earlier strange great Lolly Willowes) Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season Read transcript hereElizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious dissidence, independent learning, and self-legitimating rulership. Crossley finds that political traditions of Central Asia insulated rulers from established religious authority and promoted the objectification of cultural identities marked by language and faith, which created a mutual encouragement of cultural and political change. As religious and social hierarchies weakened, political centralization and militarization advanced. But in the spheres of religion and philosophy, iconoclasm enjoyed a new life.The changes cumulatively defined a threshold of the modern world, beyond which lay early nationalism, imperialism, and the novel divisions of Eurasia into “East” and “West.” Synthesizing new interpretive approaches and grand themes of world history from 1000 to 1500, Crossley reveals the unique importance of Turkic and Mongol regimes in shaping Eurasia’s economic, technological, and political evolution toward our modern world.Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) is an expansive work of global history that implies a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualise not only the nomadic peripheries of sedentary societies, but those very sedentary societies themselves. An eye-opening read for those interested in the premodern history of the Eurasian continent. Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen where they work on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty. They are interested in questions of identity, and the complexities of working with different kinds of sources textually and materially. They can be reached at lance.pursey@abdn.ac.uk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

An interview with Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author most recently of The Candy House (Scribner, 2022), the story of the intersections across space and time of characters desperate to understand their interior lives. At the hub of these stories, a machine capable of capturing and sharing memories, and even offering the possibility of joining a collectivity of consciousness. Jennifer Egan, as always, balances perfectly the profound intellectual problems of existence with characters who feel deeply real by virtue of their uncommon minds. We get to talking about how her process is one of discovery through the unconscious practice of writing, and the ways in which certain ideas of what the reader should feel and experience guide her structure. We discuss her creation of the futuristic machine in The Candy House that, in the end, fashions what only the novel can produce: a window into the minds and memories of another. On the subject of movement back and forth through time and place, Jennifer credits a marvelous children’s novel for the concept of parallel worlds into which characters can dip in and out of. In an incredibly wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon Dungeons and Dragons, the longest and possibly best 18th century novel, the possibility of reading The Candy House as the predecessor to A Visit from the Goon Squad, and so much more.Jennifer Recommends: Lauren Groff, Matrix Samuel Richardson, Clarissa Rye Curtis, Kingdomtide Henry Fielding, Tom Jones Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This is an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what? And how do we get out of it? Many on the right call for tax cuts and deregulation. Others on the left rage against the top 1 percent and demand wholesale economic change. Voices on both sides line up against globalization: restrict trade to protect jobs. In The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It (Harvard UP, 2020), two leading political analysts argue that these views are badly mistaken.Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what really worries people: not what the rich are making but rather their own insecurity and that of people close to them. Americans are concerned about losing what they have, whether jobs, status, or safe communities. They fear the wolf at the door. The solution is not protectionism or class warfare but a return to the hard work of building coalitions around realistic goals and pursuing them doggedly through the political system. This, Graetz and Shapiro explain, is how earlier reformers achieved meaningful changes, from the abolition of the slave trade to civil rights legislation. The authors make substantial recommendations for increasing jobs, improving wages, protecting families suffering from unemployment, and providing better health insurance and child care, and they guide us through the strategies needed to enact change.These are achievable reforms that would make Americans more secure. The Wolf at the Door is one of those rare books that not only diagnose our problems but also show us how we can address them.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In popular understandings of the modern history of Vietnam we are familiar with Ho Chi Minh’s anti-imperialism, but we know much less about the anticommunist nationalism of South Vietnam – officially the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The RVN tends to be viewed as a creation of the French and later a “puppet” of the Americans. But as Nu-Anh Tran shows in her book, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (U Hawaii Press, 2022), the RVN was heir to a revolutionary tradition that developed out of the anti-French resistance, that was quite distinct from the communist one to the north. Although the many different political and religious factions in the south shared a fierce anticommunism, the RVN was plagued by disunity. And ironically, despite the democratic ideals that these groups claimed to advocate, the RVN was subject to authoritarian rule for most of its brief existence.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2022) is a bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the constitution imposes a duty on government to fight oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth. In this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, Dr. Joseph Fishkin and Dr. William Forbath show that a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.Dr. Fishkin and Dr. Forbath argue that “The constitutional order does rest and depend on a political-economic order. That political-economic order does not maintain itself. It requires action (as well as forbearance from action) from each part of the government. The content of what is required changes radically over time in a dynamic way in response to changes in the economy and in politics. But we believe the basic principles of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition remain affirmative constitutional obligations of government today: to prevent an oligarchy from emerging and amassing too much power; to preserve a broad and open middle class as a counterweight against oligarchy and a bulwark of democratic life; and to include everyone, not just those privileged by race or sex, in a democracy of op- portunity that is broad enough to unite us all.”Dr. Fishkin and Dr. Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this “democracy-of-opportunity” tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. During Reconstruction, Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of the Slave Power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the “economic royalists” and “industrial despots.”The book argues that our current understanding of what counts as a constitutional argument is anachronistic and limiting. In fact, the authors argue that “advocates of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition and their opponents throughout the long period from the founding through the New Deal disagreed about many things, but they agreed that part of arguing about the Constitution is making claims about what it requires of our political economy. “This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In the United States, the national debate over public monuments often frames the removal of statutes as a revision of history. But Dr. Thompson suggests that we need to interrogate both the creation and removal of monuments to understand the essential role they play in creating national narratives and determining who is seen as an American. Using a set of remarkable case studies, Dr. Thompson demonstrates the complex ways in which these statutes were suggested, contested, funded, physically created, and used symbolically by future groups. Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments (Norton, 2022) aims to create a toolkit to interrogate how Americans represent what they have built and what they need to rebuild in the American public landscape – and the nation as a whole.Erin L. Thompson is an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College, City University of New York. She is an expert in the deliberate destruction of art, analyzing the ways in which this destruction has sometimes harmed and sometimes benefited communities. Her first book, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors (Yale University Press, 2016) was named an NPR Best Book of 2016 and her impressive public facing scholarship includes the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, CNN, NPR, BBC, Freakonomics and Smithsonian Magazine.In the podcast, Dr. Thompson mentions her article, “Ghosting the Confederacy” and references the Confederate Sailors and Soldiers Monument in Birmingham, AL. Dr. Liebell highlights Howard University’s grant to digitize and archive Black newspapers required for research across disciplines.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2020) weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.Valerie A. Kivelson teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History. Christine D. Worobec is professor emerita at Northern Illinois University. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) is a fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom. Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By the mid-twentieth century, American institutions led the world. How did America become the center of excellence in higher education? And what does that story reveal about who will lead in the twenty-first century?In Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Emily Levine presents the first history of the ascent of American higher education seen through the lens of German-American exchange. “This book treats transatlantic culture exchange and competition as its topic, methodology, and causal historical mechanism. It uncovers the origins of the research university by pulling apart the strands of parallel, comparative, and intertwined stories that unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapters pair individuals and institutions from Germany and America to reveal side-by-side stories about how idealists made compromises to create universities they hoped would bring tangible benefits to their respective communities.”In a series of compelling portraits of such leaders as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martha Carey Thomas, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Levine shows how academic innovators on both sides of the Atlantic competed and collaborated to shape the research university. Even as nations sought world dominance through scholarship, universities retained values apart from politics and economics. Open borders enabled Americans to unite the English college and German PhD to create the modern research university, a hybrid now replicated the world over.Dr. Levine argues that “the university did not emerge in isolation nor was it ever a finished project. Rather, the compromises were constantly renegotiated by these innovators and other social actors amid changing contexts. As the society that the university served evolved, the university coevolved into such forms as the central state university in Berlin, the land grant in California, and the privately funded urban university in Baltimore, and each time the academic social contract was reconstituted.”In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Dr. Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring the contemporary university to its rightful place in history. In so doing she reveals that innovation in the twentieth century was rooted in international cooperation—a crucial lesson that bears remembering today.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day