Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

When inspiration struck Robert McCrum to write a book about the Bard, it came while watching one of the playwright’s plays in Central Park, New York. Here, McCrum realized that we, today, are undoubtedly living in Shakespearean times. Joe Krulder, a British Historian, interviews Robert about his latest book, Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption (Pegasus Books, 2021)

Current events such as the Covid-19 Pandemic, the election and then four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, and this twenty-first-century obsession with conspiracy theories, mirror London’s many plagues from 1592 to 1603, Shakespeare’s Caesar and Richard III, and of course our post-modern social media outlets are simply riddled with conspiracies. Shakespearean, indeed.

What Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption accomplishes is to place the reader in William Shakespeare’s London. There is danger at Bishops Gate, the neighborhood the Bard chose to reside in; danger appeared both from below and above. Sword fights, punch ups, and stabbings demarcate a rough “from below” existence while political intrigues from the execution of the Earl of Essex to the Gun Powder Plot of 1605 imperilled all of London’s theatre productions if not William Shakespeare himself.

Robert McCrum is the author of dozens of works, fiction as well as non-fiction, plus he’s an Emmy Award-winning documentarian. A long-time editor for Faber and Faber and The Observer, McCrum career continues on despite a stroke. His recovery gave him time to read and Shakespeare, once again, filled his gaze.

Joe Krulder is the author of The Execution of Admiral John Byng as a Microhistory of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Routledge 2021) teaching college History in Northern California. Joe earned his doctorate at the University of Bristol in West England.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Superman, Batman, Captain America, and Iron Man are names that are often connected to the expansive superhero genre, including the multi-billion-dollar film and television franchises. But these characters are older and have been woven into American popular culture since their inception in the early days of comic books. The history of these comic book heroes are histories that include bulging muscles, flashy fight scenes, four-color panels, and heroic rescues of damsels in distress. Esther De Dauw’s new book,

Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic (Rutgers UP, 2021),analyzes these characters with a critical lens to explore what exactly these figures teach the readers and the public about identity, embodiment, and sexuality. De Dauw, a comics scholar, focuses her research on the intersectionality of race and gender in comic books.

Hot Pants and Spandex Suits takes the audience through the 80-year evolution of comic books to discuss the changes in identity and culture, and explore what these heroes say about and to the American people. As an expert in Comic Studies and Cultural Studies, De Dauw uses theories of structural power relations to explain the disenfranchisement of women, LGBTQIA+, and the Black community in comics. As she notes, superheroes are often metaphors for the concerns of the dominant culture, and are informed by the dominant gender ideology and the American cultural landscape. Hot Pants and Spandex Suits unpacks superhero actions to examine who these heroes are serving, how, and what this has to say about American culture and identity. These questions frame the discussion throughout the book as De Dauw traces the changing perceptions of identity, cultural, and historical shifts through comic books and their many different heroes. A significant avenue of analysis focuses on the fragility of white masculinity, and how the superheroes essentially became an antidote to the cultural sense that white men were “losing” in American society. With a fascinating tour of the history of comic books, De Dauw welcomes both the academic community and comic-book lovers to venture through this analysis to better understand the role of superheroes within our culture and our politics.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

The current opioid epidemic in the United States began in the mid-1990s with the introduction of a new drug, OxyContin, viewed as a safer and more effective opiate for chronic pain management. By 2017, the opioid epidemic had become a full-blown crisis as over two million Americans had become dependent on and abused prescription pain pills and street drugs.

The Opioid Epidemics in the United States: Missed Opportunities and Policy Failures (Routledge, 2021) examines the origins, development, and rise of the opioid epidemic in the United States from the perspective of the public policy process. The authors, political scientists Kant Patel and Mark Rushefsky, discuss institutional features of the American political system that impact the making of public policy, arguing that the fragmentation of that system hinders the ability to coherently address policy problems, taking the opioid epidemic as an example. The book begins with a brief historical examination of the history of the problem of opioid addiction and crises in the United States and public policy responses to past crises, but the main focus is on the current national public health emergency.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued that modern history has witnessed a dramatic decline in human violence of every kind, and that in the present we are experiencing the most peaceful time in human history. But what do top historians think about Pinker's reading of the past? Does his argument stand up to historical analysis?

In Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale's book The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence (Bloomsbury, 2021), seventeen scholars of international stature evaluate Pinker's arguments and find them lacking. Studying the history of violence from Japan and Russia to Native America, Medieval England and the Imperial Middle East, these scholars debunk the myth of non-violent modernity. Asserting that the real story of human violence is richer, more interesting and incomparably more complex than Pinker's sweeping, simplified narrative, this book tests, and bests, 'fake history' with expert knowledge.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

It's time to rethink how we create and allocate money

In Outgrowing Capitalism: Rethinking Money to Reshape Society and Pursue Purpose (Fast Company Press, 2021), Marco Dondi sheds light on the fact that most people do not have the economic security to focus on purpose and life fulfillment. He proposes that this is not the way things have to be; there is an alternative. 

In a quest to change our economic system to cater for everyone, he identifies deep issues in how money is created and allocated and connects these to capitalism. He shows that the assumptions and circumstances that made capitalism a success are no longer true today and then describes a new socio-economic model, Monetism. 

Dondi's solution is to provide a pragmatic roadmap to institutionalize Monetism and solve societal issues that seemed as permanent as time.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining.

Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton UP, 2021) explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

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/adchoices

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

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews author Hannah Zeavin about her new book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021). Among Zeavin’s central interventions in the book is to reframe what is normally understood as the “therapeutic dyad” as always already a triad: therapist, patient, and mediating communication technology. Across the book’s chapters, she traces teletherapy’s history from Freud’s epistolary treatments to contemporary algorithmic therapies. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” characteristic of all therapeutic encounters complicates narratives of technologically mediated treatments as somehow inherently “less than.”

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Called the “quarterback of the new anti-drug movement,” Kevin Sabet received his Ph.D. in social policy from the University of Oxford and has worked in drug policy for over two decades. He’s served as an advisor for three presidential administrations, Pope Francis and the United Nations, and in 2013 he founded the group he still leads, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, better known as SAM, which opposes cannabis legalization and commercialization. His new book, Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know, was released by Forefront Books earlier this year.

 Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Everyone has heard of Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia's opposition to Putin's rule. But what do we really know of him? Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? (Oxford, 2021) provides the first detailed description of Navalny's history and trajectory. Most importantly, Ben Noble, Morvan Lallouet, and Jan Matti Dollbaum turn the one-dimensional, cartoon-like image of Navalny in the West into a nuanced portrait, properly situated in the context of modern Russia.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans.  Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States (U Minnesota Press, 2021) examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis--and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams--author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes' bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States. Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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