NBN Book of the Day

In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society, and the revolution, they felt, needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family—and monogamous marriage—would free people from the repressive forces of their parents. In its first two decades, the movement attracted many brilliant, creative people as patients: the painter Jackson Pollock and a swarm of other abstract expressionist artists, the famed art critic Clement Greenberg, the singer Judy Collins, and the dancer Lucinda Childs. In the 1960s, the group evolved into an urban commune of three or four hundred people, with patients living with other patients, leading creative, polyamorous lives. But by the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Saul Newton, the Institute had devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients’ lives, from where they lived and the work they did to how often they saw their sexual partners and their children. Although the group was highly secretive during its lifetime and even after its dissolution in 1991, the noted journalist Alexander Stille has succeeded in reconstructing the inner life of a parallel world hidden in plain sight in the middle of Manhattan. Through countless interviews and personal papers, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (FSG, 2023) reveals the nearly unbelievable story of a fallen utopia.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. 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

Who was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (FSG, 2023) reveals, Smith was all of these and more. Best known for editing The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith was also a pioneer in experimental film who Jonas Mekas considered one of the leading lights of the New American Cinema. He created paintings that attempted to transcribe bebop recordings. He acted as mysticism consultant on the 1967 effort to levitate the Pentagon. But he also spent years living in poverty, in SROs, at the Chelsea Hotel, or at the apartments of famous friends like Allen Ginsberg. The story of Harry Smith is thus also a story of a vanished New York Bohemia that mixed high and low, the street and the gallery, the Bowery and MOMA, to create one of the most remarkable outpourings of cultural production this country has even seen. And Smith was at the center of it all.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. 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 Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don't just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how they weaken the law to make data-extractive products the norm. In contrast to those who claim that privacy law is getting stronger, Waldman shows why recent shifts in privacy law are precisely the kinds of changes that corporations want and how even those who think of themselves as privacy advocates often unwittingly facilitate corporate malfeasance. This powerful account should be read by anyone who wants to understand why privacy laws are not working and how corporations trap us into giving up our personal information.Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and an AY23-24 affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). 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

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there. This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America (Mariner Books, 2023) is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. 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

Sarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023) focuses much less on the often-discussed physical border between the United States and other countries, and more so on the internal touchpoints where immigration federalism takes place. Coleman does a number of things in this book, including providing a fascinating overview of immigration policies and prohibitions throughout U.S. history, but not in a linear mode—instead, she integrates the historical record into the discussion of the domestic policies that were developed over the past 70 years. These policies are the central focus of the book, since it is the structure, execution, and implementation of these policies that constrain and impact citizens and non-citizens in the United States. The Walls Within examines education policy and court decisions, labor policy and the debate about employer sanctions, welfare policy and questions of immigrant contributions and benefits, and, finally, civil liberties and localized immigration enforcement regimes.Given the current political debate around immigration, the complexity of the politics within and around that debate, and the constantly looming image of “the wall” at the southern border, Coleman’s book explains and clarifies so much of the history, political conversations, policies, and implementation of immigration inside the United States. Sifting through demographic changes, economic shifts, congressional legislation, and court challenges, Coleman weaves together the different policies and outcomes, and the different forms of enforcement. This is what contributes to immigration federalism, since restrictions, prohibitions, and denial of opportunities generally happen at a state or local level. Thus, where immigration policy is actually touching people—citizens and non-citizens alike—is not, per se, where a Border Control officer examines a passport or a document, but in implementing sanctions against employers or in denying a second-grader breakfast before school. The exploration of these touchpoints highlights the themes running through The Walls Within: political culture, electoral politics, and political economy. Coleman notes that there are approximately 24 million immigrants in the United States, and about half that number are unauthorized. Most of the unauthorized immigrants are not coming across either the northern or southern border of the United States but are overstaying visas. Thus, the imaginary that often wraps around these questions is disconnected from the reality of authorized and unauthorized immigration in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America works to clarify our current situation and how we ended up where we are, while also explaining the policies and actions that were put into place along the way and how those policies and actions shape the actual immigration landscape in the U.S.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

In the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans in positions of influence who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by idealistic university professors and social scientists, these surveys came to define much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen Questionnaire and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticized vetting program impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from dictatorship and war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by recounting a more comprehensive history of denazification, one of mid-level planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history.Mikkel Dack is Assistant Professor of History at Rowan University and Director of Research at the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. 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 my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power. Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exigencies like the balance of power. In his committed opposition to the Wilsonian creed—the missionary idea of America’s role in the world—Kissinger was decidedly in the camp of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a fellow German-Jewish immigrant and mentor of sorts. Barry Gewen, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, deserves to be heard, and his book deserves to be read, for his judicious, textured appraisal of Kissinger. His Kissinger is neither a war criminal nor a diplomatic magician but one guided by the stern maxim that order is prior to justice in the affairs of an ever-perilous world. Our talk closes with Gewen’s assessment of Kissinger’s thinking on the present-day foreign-policy challenges for the U.S. of China and the Russia-Ukraine war.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. 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

Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak,And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her. In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (FSG, 2023) – a joint exercise in history and literary criticism, Dr. David Waldstreicher writes that Wheatley is “Homer and Odysseus and the slaves and the women they knew or imagined. She aimed for the universal without forgetting who was suffering most and why.” Reading Wheatley’s poetry in historical context reveals the extent to which the American Revolution both strengthened and limited black slavery – and also how Wheatley herself affected the debates about American slavery and independence.Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, Wheatley composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, and praised warriors. Despite her skill, knowledge, and fame, she often had to write indirectly about subjects that mattered deeply to her – race, slavery, and discontent with British rule. During a period in which writing was central to political conversation, she used her verse to lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. As Waldstreicher demonstrates, Wheatley wrote about events and people – turning what was available and acceptable for a person in her position into poetry that could be read for its art – but also subversively for its political ideas. He concludes that her work proves that the story of the American revolution and Phillis Wheatley are inextricably joined – and that story is one of “resilience and creativity, of antislavery and antiracist possibilities, and of backlash and loss, dreams dashed and deferred.” Dr. David Waldstreicher is distinguished professor of history, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests include U.S. cultural and political history, colonial and early US, African American history, slaver, and antislavery. He is the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang) and Runaway American: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). His public facing writing includes contributions to The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, and The Atlantic.Susan Liebell is a 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

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers.Using a wide range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community.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 reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. 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

Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender (Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with regard to legal gender. Based on empirical research conducted in Denmark, the book engages in some of the most controversial issues surrounding trans and gender diverse rights. The theoretical analysis draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability and governmentality, to cross jurisdictional boundaries between law and medicine. The book reflects on the limits of progress that legislative reform may make, and the way that increased regulation can actually limit access to rights protections. Broadly transferrable beyond its specific field, this book will be useful to socio-legal scholars, feminist scholars, trans scholars, policy makers and practitioners.Dr Chris Dietz is a Lecturer at the Centre for Law & Social Justice at The University of Leeds. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK 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