New Books in Popular Culture

How did people exist and resist in their daily lives under Soviet control in the Cold War period? Rebellious Cooks and Recipe Writing in Communist Bulgaria (Bloomsbury, 2021) shows how in communist Bulgaria many women passionately exchanged recipes with friends and strangers, to build substantial and impressive private collections of recipes. This activity was borderline contraband in going against the general disapproval of home cooking that formed part of the ideology of communism, in which home cooking was considered household slavery and an agent of patriarchalism. Private recipe collections were by far the preferred written source of culinary information, more popular than the state-approved commercial cookbooks. Shkodrova shows how these recipe collections held many different meanings for the women who collected them, from helping to navigate the communist economy, to enabling new friendships to be developed while engaging safely in power relations, and cultivating a sense of individual identity in a society where collective existence was prioritised and exalted. Drawing on primary sources including scrapbook cookbooks and working from the establishment of cookery classes before communism and their obliteration thereafter, Shkodrova presents a structured outline of the meanings of recipes exchange and home cooking for Bulgarian women under communism.Roland Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a book about inequalities, social hierarchies, and privilege in contemporary Mexico. Based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Cerón-Anaya’s book focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege. This study makes use of rich qualitative data to demonstrate how social hierarchies are relations reproduced through a multitude of everyday practices. The vast disparities between club members and workers, for example, are built on traditional class indicators, such as wealth, and on more subtle expressions of class, such as notions of fashion, sense of humour, perceptions about competition, and everyday oral interactions. The book incorporates race and gender perspectives into the study of inequalities, illustrating the multilayer condition of privilege. Although Mexicans commonly attributed racial relations a marginal role in the continuation of inequities, the book explains how affluent individuals frequently express racialized ideas to describe and justify the impoverished condition of workers. In doing so, Privilege at Play demonstrates the necessity of considering the role of racialized dynamics when studying social inequalities in Mexico. An analysis of gender relations shows how men maintain a dominant position over their fellow female golfers despite the similar upper-class origins of both male and female golf club members. This book pays particular attention to the spatial dynamics that reinforce social inequalities, arguing that the apparent triviality of space makes it a highly effective way to mark social inequalities and, hence, emphasise privilege.Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Too often, vaudeville is seen from the perspective of its decline: it is the corny, messy art form that predated the book musical, or that gave us Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. Rarely is it seen as the populist avant-garde form it was at its height. David Hajdu and John Carey's graphic history, A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge (Columbia University Press, 2021), corrects this misconception, giving us illustrated biographies of three of the genre's most outré and successful stars. Eva Tanguay challenged contemporary gender roles through her outrageous behavior and sexually suggestive songs. Julian Eltinge also subverted gendered expectations of femininity by performing them to the hilt -- but as a man. And Bert Williams, a black man who performed in black face, tried to use his fame to soften the hard edges of Jim Crow bigotry but eventually became exhausted by the racism he encountered within the entertainment industry. These three performers truly were revolutionary, and their stories should be known to any theatre fan or historian.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/popular-culture

In In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2022), Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, aims to make the case for the value of spaces devoted to books and the value of the time spent browsing their stacks. It is a defense of serious bookstores, but more importantly, it is a paean to the spaces that support them; the experience of readers as they engage with the books, the stacks, and each other; and the particular community created by the presence of such an institution. Drawing on his lifelong experience as a bookseller and his particular experience at Sem Co-op, Deutsch aims, in a series of brief essays, to consider how concepts like space, time, abundance, measure, community, and reverence find expression in a good bookstore, and to show some ways in which the importance of the bookstore is both urgent and enduring. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. Sherryl Vint's Science Fiction (MIT Press, 2021)focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness.Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991-2017 (Brill, 2021) explores the rise of a new body of literature for children and teens following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent transformation of the publishing industry. Lanoux, Herold, and Bukhina first consider the Soviet foundations of the new literature, then chart the influx of translated literature into Russia in the 1990s. In tracing the development of new literature that reflects the lived experiences of contemporary children and teens, the book examines changes to literary institutions, dominant genres, and archetypal heroes. Also discussed are the informal networks and online reader responses that reflect the views of child and teen readers. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

The All About Birds Regional Field-Guide Series brings birding enthusiasts the best information from the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website, AllAboutBirds.org, used by more than 21 million people each year. These definitive books provide the most up-to-date resources and expert coverage on bird species throughout North America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury, 2020), historian Jessica Clark takes the reader on a tour through the shifting commercial and cultural landscape of London in the second half of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th. The business of beatification––aimed at both men and women, and conducted by both men and women­––was influenced by and reflective of shifting attitudes towards women in public spaces, the influx and success of immigrants in the nation’s capital, the development of wholesale production processes and the standardization of commodities, and the cultural competition between European nations that accompanied the growing political and military competition at the fin de siècle, among other things. In other words, Jessica Clark shows us that The Business of Beauty intersects with an amazing array of historical subjects.Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-host of the Lies Agreed Upon podcast and author of Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

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/popular-culture

“Sketch comedy – more than any other television genre – lays bare the process of identity formation, pokes fun at its contradictions, and invites us to debate its terms.” In Sketch Comedy: Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television (Indiana University Press, 2019), author Nick Marx makes this argument and goes on to systematically prove it through a series of case studies dating from the earliest days of network television through to our post-network era. While sketch is an understudied form of television expression and a genre that rarely garners full-throated network support, it remains one of the most playful, political, and experimental kinds of programming in U.S. television. Close readings of the on-screen representations and off-screen politics of shows including Saturday Night Live, The State, and Key & Peele drive home how vital it is that television scholars and fans recognize the power of sketch in forming what we watch, what we think, and what we believe.In this conversation, Nick Marx discusses this book, his first solo-authored monograph, in conjunction with his prior publications, defines his term “reflexivity flexibility,” gives it up for Mr. Show with Bob and David, and gives it to Pete Davidson.Nick Marx is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. His most recent book (with Matt Sienkiewicz) is That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them due out this spring from University of California Press.Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura. You can follow her on Twitter @sayanniething. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture