Princeton UP Ideas Podcast
New Books Network
A series of interviews with authors of new books from Princeton University Press
Episodes
Mentioned books
Mar 19, 2019 • 24min
Michael C. Desch, “Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security” (Princeton UP, 2019)
Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. Desch and much it comes from his recent book Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton University Press, 2019)....
Mar 11, 2019 • 40min
David Colander and Craig Freedman, “Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago’s Abandonment of Classical Liberalism” (Princeton UP, 2018)
If you are reading this, you have probably run into the “Chicago” model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena where theoretical abstractions about human behavior (generally but not exclusively about or derived from economics) have...
Feb 6, 2019 • 39min
Adrienne Mayor, “Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology” (Princeton UP, 2018)
The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek...
Jan 29, 2019 • 59min
Monica Kim, “The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History” (Princeton UP, 2019)
Monica Kim provides a fresh look at the Korean War with a people-centered approach that studies the experiences of prisoners of war. As the first major conflict after the 1949 Geneva Conventions, POW repatriation during the Korean War became a new battleground for the recognition of state sovereignty and a...
Jan 28, 2019 • 1h 5min
George R. Boyer, “The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain” (Princeton UP, 2019)
The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it...
Jan 18, 2019 • 1h 8min
Volker Berghahn, “Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany” (Princeton UP, 2018)
What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as “internal emigrants”? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their government and publishers? Volker Berghahn examines the lives and careers of three media giants with his latest book...
Jan 4, 2019 • 50min
Helena Rosenblatt, “The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century” (Princeton UP, 2018)
How is it that “liberalism” is a word so ubiquitous and yet we can hardly seem to agree on its meaning? In her book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Helena Rosenblatt traces the history of the words “liberal” and “liberalism”...
Jan 3, 2019 • 1h 32min
Michael Cotey Morgan, “The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War” (Princeton UP, 2018)
Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Michael Cotey Morgan to tell you that you are profoundly wrong. Based upon voluminous archival research in eight countries and...
Jan 3, 2019 • 39min
Hassan Malik, “Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution” (Princeton UP, 2018)
Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there? The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there? It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes. In Dr. Hassan Malik‘s meticulously researched new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University...
Dec 17, 2018 • 50min
Seth Anziska, “Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo” (Princeton UP, 2018)
The question of Palestinian autonomy has been a key element of Middle Eastern and Arab politics for much of the last century. A new history, by Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018) redefines our understanding of the peace process and its ultimate failure:...
