New Books Network

Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic attitudes across the political spectrum, journalist Osita Nwanevu has spent the Trump era examining the very meaning of democracy in search of answers to questions many have asked in the wake of the 2024 election: Are our institutions fundamentally broken? How can a country so divided govern itself? Does democracy even work as well as we believe?The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Random House, 2025) offers us challenging answers: while democracy remains vital, American democracy is an illusion we must make real by transforming not only our political institutions but the American economy. In a text that spans democratic theory, the American Founding, our aging political system, and the dizzying inequalities of our new Gilded Age, Nwanevu makes a visionary case for a political and economic agenda to fulfill the promise of American democracy and revive faith in the American project.“Nearly two hundred fifty years ago, the men who founded America made a fundamental break not just from their old country but from the past—casting off an order that had subjugated them with worn and weak ideas for the promise of true self-governance and greater prosperity in a new republic,” Nwanevu writes. “With exactly their sense of purpose and even higher, more righteous ambitions for America than they themselves had, we should do the same now⁠—work as hard as we can in the decades ahead to ‘institute new Government’ for the benefit of all and not just the few.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Magdalena Maria Turek is an independent research scholar. She received her PhD from Humboldt University, Germany, and was a Research Fellow with the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies, USA. Her research examines how contemporary reiterations of Tibetan Buddhist orthopraxy, local narratives, and religious historiography shape Buddhist identities among Tibetans in China and the diaspora. She just published Buddhist Hermits in Eastern Tibet: Saint Making and Ascetic Performance (Routledge, 2025), a fascinating ethnography of the meditation school of Lapchi in Kham, which is in Eastern Tibet in modern day Yushu Prefecture in Qinghai Province. This is a relatively modern hermitage founded by a charismatic ascetic master named Tsultrim Tarchen, and populated by various nuns and monks who are studying meditation under Tsultrim Tarchen. Her book explores the rise of Tsultrim Tarchen, the activities practiced by the students there, and the how their contemplative practices and ascetic regimes allow for self-formation and empowerment on the part of the meditators, participate in ethno-religious revival, and articulate a counter-cultural position against Chinese domination of Tibetan culture. I found this book rich with ethnographic detail about the various nuns and why they were there. It was able to help me understand modern Buddhist practices on their own terms, but also how they relate to broader social and historical forces. It's very readable, but also deeply researched both in the field and in terms of the theoretical literature.  Note: Early on in the podcast, we mention a film made by some traveling companions of Dr. Turek's around the same area she did fieldwork. The film was not made by Dr. Turek and does not reflect her views, but gives a sense of the area where she did her fieldwork. The link to the trailer can be found here. Kate Hartmann is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wyoming. She recently published Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage (Oxford University Press, 2025). Her other work can be found on her personal website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery chats with the wonderful Saad Omar Khan about his debut novel, Drinking the Ocean (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). The day after his thirty-third birthday, Murad spots a familiar face at a crowded intersection in downtown Toronto. Shocked, he stands silently as Sofi, a woman he’d fallen in love with almost a decade ago, walks by holding the hand of a small child. Murad turns and descends the subway steps to return home to his wife as the past washes over him and he is taken back to the first time they met. Moving between Lahore, London and Toronto, Drinking the Ocean is a story of connections lost and found and of the many kinds of love that shape a life, whether familial, romantic or spiritual. As Murad’s and Sofi’s lives touch and separate, we see them encounter challenges with relationships, family and God, and struggle with the complexities facing Muslims in the West. With compassion and elegance, Saad Omar Khan delicately illuminates the arcs of these two haunted lives, moved by fate and by love, as they absorb the impact of their personal spiritual journeys Saad Omar Khan was born in the United Arab Emirates to Pakistani parents and lived in the Philippines, Hong Kong and South Korea before immigrating to Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics and has completed a certificate in Creative Writing from the School of Continuing Studies (University of Toronto) where he was a finalist for the Random House Creative Writing Award (2010 and 2011) and for the Marina Nemat Award (2012). In 2019, he was longlisted for the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2025 and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century with a resident opera company that produced the latest European works. In New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Charlotte Bentley considers the thriving operatic life of New Orleans, drawing out the international connections that animated it. She explores the process of bringing opera to the stage, taking a detailed look at the management of New Orleans’s Francophone theater, the Théâtre d’Orléans, as well as the performers who came to the city and the reception they received. Opera’s role was not confined to the theater, however, and Bentley demonstrates that opera permeated everyday life in New Orleans and examines literary works to understand the genre’s significance to the city. Bentley examines the complicated transatlantic dance that brought operas and performers to New Orleans forever influencing the city, and ultimately, American culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests. Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China. Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class--once considered a de facto "white" category--over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations.Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Fake news about the past is fake history. Did Hugo Boss design the Nazi uniforms? Did medieval people think the world was flat? Did Napoleon shoot the nose off the Sphinx? *Spoiler Alert* The answer to all those questions is no.From the famous quote 'Let them eat cake' - mistakenly attributed to Marie Antoinette - to the apocryphal horns that adorned Viking helmets, fake history continues to shape the story we tell about who we are and how we got here. With doctored photographs, AI-generated images and false claims about the past circulating in the news and on social media, separating fact from fiction seems harder than ever before.Today I talked to Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, better known as "The Fake History Hunter." She is on a one-woman mission to hunt down fake history and reclaim the truth for the rest of us. And she is the author of Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened (Ebury Press, 2022).Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse is a widely-recognised historical authority for her work on social media debunking historical 'facts'. For over 20 years, Jo has studied, taught and researched history and is an expert in the daily life of Medieval Europe, life in the 1930s and 1940s, and the history of crime. She has worked as a historical consultant teaching in museums, advising on documentaries and carrying out research for films.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typographical errors, add facts and citations, or clean up the prose on existing articles; others create new articles on topics they find interesting. In Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Thomas goes behind the familiar Wikipedia article page and looks at the unique brand of collaboration that is constantly at work to expand and improve this global resource.James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions--sparking both controversy and discovery. The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word "vector" might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile. You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors are examples of tensors, which can represent even more data. It sounds simple enough--and yet, as award-winning science writer Robyn Arianrhod shows in this riveting story, the idea of a single symbol expressing more than one thing at once was millennia in the making. And without that idea, we wouldn't have such a deep understanding of our world. Vector and tensor calculus offers an elegant language for expressing the way things behave in space and time, and Arianrhod shows how this enabled physicists and mathematicians to think in a brand-new way. These include James Clerk Maxwell when he ushered in the wireless electromagnetic age; Einstein when he predicted the curving of space-time and the existence of gravitational waves; Paul Dirac, when he created quantum field theory; and Emmy Noether, when she connected mathematical symmetry and the conservation of energy. For it turned out that it's not just physical quantities and dimensions that vectors and tensors can represent, but other dimensions and other kinds of information, too. This is why physicists and mathematicians can speak of four-dimensional space-time and other higher-dimensional "spaces," and why you're likely relying on vectors or tensors whenever you use digital applications such as search engines, GPS, or your mobile phone. In exploring the evolution of vectors and tensors--and introducing the fascinating people who gave them to us--Arianrhod takes readers on an extraordinary, five-thousand-year journey through the human imagination. She shows the genius required to reimagine the world--and how a clever mathematical construct can dramatically change discovery's direction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

How does the metaphor of Jesus as king unify the message of the Gospel of John? Tune in as we speak with Beth Stovell about her monograph, Mapping Metaphorical Discourse in the Fourth Gospel. Beth's study shows how John’s Gospel describes the just character of Jesus’ kingship, the subversion of power implicit in his crucified form of kingship, and the necessity of response to Jesus as king and his reign. Beth Stovell is Professor of Old Testament at Ambrose University, and is working on commentaries on Ezekiel, the Minor Prophets, Hosea, and the Gospel of John. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network