NBN Book of the Day

In January 2020, the UK became the first country to leave the European Union after a troubled 47-year membership.What was at the core of the country’s semi-detachment to the EU? Was the UK’s eventual inevitable or was it a tragedy of errors and misunderstandings borne of divergent political cultures? What does the future hold for the relationship?In his new book Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit (Oxford UP, 2020), Stephen Wall provides unique insight with this narrative political history, having served in the foreign office from 1968, worked for two prime ministers, and ended his career as the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU in Brussels then as head of the European policy for Tony Blair.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. 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

Hannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race (Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplines in exploring how individuals are mobilized to engage in political participation by their connection to the criminal justice system in the United States. The fusion between these two academic disciplines, and the focus of their respective studies in this area, answers some questions that are often omitted or passed over by the individual disciplines given the kinds of questions posed by each discipline. Thus, the topics and issues explored in Mobilized by Injustice focuses on political mobilization, advocacy, and activism, often beyond the issue of voting, to tease out how individuals who have been incarcerated or their friends and relatives are involved in the political system. The American criminal justice system is often seen as imposing the “prison beyond the prison” in how formerly incarcerated individuals are constrained and limited in their lives after they leave prison, including limits on voting rights in many states, limits on access to federal policies, and the myriad other ways in which these citizens are essentially marginalized with our society. Walker’s research digs into these constraints and also the stigmatization that individuals experience because of incarceration. At the same time that she is trying to discern how these individuals respond within the political system itself, Walker is also trying to get at how communities are impacted by the criminal justice system, exploring the ways in which this system can be particularly corrosive in certain communities.The research explores political participation by a number of different and often intersecting groups, specifically the individuals who have been incarcerated or directly experienced the criminal justice system, and those who have proximate contact with that system, through their family member’s direct experience. Within these two umbrella groups, Walker also digs into distinctions across racial groups (white, black, Latinx) and across socio-economic categories (examining class distinctions in this context). Mobilized by Injustice finds interesting results in the multi-method research approach, discerning different kinds of political involvement that is not captured by questions about whether an individual does vote or can vote. Rather, the research highlights that those with proximal contact with the criminal justice system have lower barriers to political engagement, which may lead them more naturally into politics because these individuals find themselves working as advocates for their family member who is incarcerated. Those who have been incarcerated face a variety of higher barriers, both structural and psychological, and they often need more support to engage in politics, because of the “dignity deficit” they may suffer because of societal stigmatization.Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race will likely be of interest to those who study political science, criminal justice, sociology, public policy, social science methodology, and race and class.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 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

Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius.Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the latest social science research on creativity and its cultivation.The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places (Simon and Schuster, 2016) is an intellectual odyssey that examines the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas, and has fun doing it. What inspires genius? Why do certain urban settings – and certain historical challenges – foster innovation?Would geniuses like Socrates, Michelangelo, Einstein and Disney have flourished, had they found themselves in other locations and other historical circumstances?Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom. 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

“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins.In Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things (Basic Books, 2020), England presents, for the first time for a general audience, his groundbreaking theory of dissipative adaptation. Described simply, in any disordered system, matter clumps together and breaks apart mostly randomly. But some of the clumps that form momentarily dissipate more energy, and these structures are less likely to fall apart. Over time, they become better at both withstanding the disorder surrounding them and creating copies of themselves. From this deep insight, grounded in thermodynamics, England isolates the emergence of the first life-like behaviors. As he shows, rather than being a stroke of miraculous luck, life-like fine-tuning can emerge in matter under a variety of fairly generic experimental conditions.In this fascinating account, England walks readers through a range of different concepts in physics and biology to sketch out his novel description of how life might emerge. One of the beauties of his approach is the way it matches recognizably with the messy complexity of the everyday world, from the way sleet slides down a windshield in cold rain to how salt and pepper grains dance together in a pan of heated oil.But that is not the whole story. While the difference between being alive or not may seem as obvious as night and day, physics does not in fact make a clear distinction. That, as England argues, is a matter of perspective, and throughout the book he describes what he sees as the remarkable synergy between the account of life’s origins given by physics, and the account given in the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, England reckons with what, if anything, science can really tell us about life’s great mysteries.Full of scientific and philosophical insight, Every Life is on Fire is a singular book from one of the most exciting physicists of his generation.Jeremy England is senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and is the former Thomas D. & Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a Hertz Fellow, and was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Rising Stars in Science. He lives in Brookline, MA.Galina Limorenko is a post-doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch 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 Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral Remembrance', and explores what happens once this agenda becomes implemented.Based on evidence from the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine, she argues that the human rights memorialization agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights but, contrary to what would be expected, it merely serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and leads to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms of corruptions.Lea David is Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology at University College Dublin.Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London 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

Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (W. W. Norton & Company) is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff.Her story and others like it—from dogs “adopting” the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones—show that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. Frans de Waal opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected.Frans de Waal, author of Mama's Last Hug and Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, is a professor of psychology at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. 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

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the criminalization of all aspects of reproduction, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and motherhood in the United States. In her extensively researched monograph, Michele Goodwin recounts the horrific contemporary situation, which includes, for example, mothers giving birth shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, even in prison toilets, and in some states, women being coerced by the State into sterilization, in exchange for reduced sentences. She contextualises the modern day situation in America’s history of slavery and oppression, and also in relation to its place in the world. Goodwin shows how prosecutors abuse laws, and medical professionals are complicit in a system that disproportionally impacts the poor and women of color. However, Goodwin warns that these women are just the canaries in the coalmine. In the context of both the Black Lives Matter movement, and in the lead up to the 2020 Presidential election, her book could not be more timely; Not only is the United States the deadliest country in the developed world for pregnant women, but the severe lack of protections for reproductive rights and motherhood is compounding racial and indigent disparities.Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics. 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

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin American countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change. This book, timely as no other, asks readers to question the narrative that portrays taking children as something that is done in the benefit of the child, and instead to see it as a strategy that seeks to control and dominate communities that are deem dangerous to the social order. As Prof. Briggs tells us by the end of the interview, in this summer of racial reckoning the BLM movement has asked to eliminate the foster care system for this has been another vehicle for the policing and criminalization of African American communities in the United States. This demand has everything to do with the long history of talking children that is so thoroughly documented in this book.Yet this is not only a “History of American Terror” as the title suggests, it is also a history about how individuals, families, communities and organizations have resisted this terrorizing strategy. Make no mistake: this is not a story with a happy ending, still, it is one that teaches us that in our past lies both the ghostly hauntings that explain why taking children has been a strategy used for terror, but also why therein we can find the seeds to resistance and transformation. Definitely a must for these troubling and convoluted times.Bonus: Prof. Briggs’s son makes a short but hilarious appearance in our conversation. We have decided not to delete this portion of the interview because it demonstrates one of Prof. Briggs main scholarly arguments: the distinction between the private and public is illusory. As with many other topics, the COVID-19 pandemic has only rendered visible the realities that were already there. 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

Gene Ludwig cares. The former banker, government regulator, and serial entrepreneur cares deeply about the hollowing out of the American middle class over the past several decades, not least of all in his hometown of York, PA. So he gathered the country's best and brightest in 2019 for a conference at Yale Law School to come up with specific policy proposals that can reverse that process.The details of what has happened make for difficult but necessary reading. In The Vanishing American Dream: A Frank Look at the Economic Realities Facing Middle- and Lower-Income Americans (Disruption Books) the policy proposals to rebuild the middle class are divided into those at the federal level, and those at the local level.Many readers will find the former typical and expected, but the latter constitute the most engaging part of the book. Both sorts of policies will be hard to implement given the country's current state of division, but Ludwig does not back down from the challenge.Gene Ludwig is the founder of the Promontory family of companies and Canapi LLC, the largest financial technology venture fund in the United States. He is the CEO of Promontory Financial Group, an IBM company, and chairman of Promontory MortgagePath, a technology-based, mortgage fulfillment and solutions company.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com 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

Democratic socialism is on the lips of activists and politicians from both the left and the right. Some call it extremism; some call it common sense. What are we talking about?At a time when the capitalist experiment has made fewer people richer than ever before and seems to be well on the way to killing the planet, a new generation is reassessing old-fashioned principles of community. Millions are looking to democratic socialist values-much as they are now championed by the Squad's Green New Deal and once were espoused by FDR's New Deal-to address economic inequalities and environmental devastation.An Inheritance for Our Times: Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism (OR Books) is a reader that includes original essays in the form of both personal accounts and intellectual arguments from activists and theorists (including Bernie Sanders) advocating a democratic socialist outlook.Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker is managing editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. He is the editor of seven books, his most recent being Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy (with Michael J. Thompson) and The Political Thought of African Independence.Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University. His most recent books include The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment as well as the forthcoming, Twilight of the Self: Cybernetic Society and the Eclipse of Autonomy.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. 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