NBN 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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 IsraelIn 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day