Author: Marshall Poe

Using artworks by Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others, The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Justine De Young explores how women and artists in Impressionist Paris (1855-1885) crafted their public images to exploit and resist stereotypes.
French societal expectations and beauty ideals shaped how women were seen and how they chose to present themselves in public – whether on the street, in a photograph, or in a portrait on the walls of the annual Paris Salon. On Paris's broad new boulevards and in its public parks and theaters, women dressed to impress anonymous strangers as well as their friends. They even circulated aspirational photographs of themselves. Looking at a rich array of visual sources – from portraits to modern-life paintings, and from photographs to fashion plates – Dr. De Young reveals how women were seen, how they aspired to be seen, and how they navigated public life in Second Empire and Belle Époque Paris.
This book considers how fashionable feminine “types” made famous in books, caricatures, and paintings created a visual lexicon and stylistic guide for women. Men and women alike relied on these types – cocotte (mistress), jeune veuve (young widow), amazone (independent equestrienne), demoiselle de magasin (shopgirl), and Parisienne (chic Parisian woman) – to judge the class, character, morality, and worth of strangers. With a rich set of illustrations from the Impressionist canon and beyond, The Art of Parisian Chic shows how modern women used fashion and these stereotypes to construct and reinvent their identities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The story behind Dr. Gerta Keller’s world-shattering scientific discovery that dinosaur extinction was NOT caused by asteroid impact, but rather by volcanic eruptions on the Indian peninsula, a discovery that highlights today’s existential threat of greenhouse gasses and climate change—and one that sparked an all-out war waged by the scientific establishment.
Part scientific detective story, part personal odyssey, The Last Extinction: The Real Science Behind the Death of the Dinosaurs (Diversion Books, 2025) is the definitive account of a radical theory that has reshaped how we understand our planet’s past and, as we face the possibility of a sixth extinction, how we might survive its future.
For decades, the dominant theory held that an asteroid impact caused the dinosaurs’ extinction. But Princeton Geologist Dr. Gerta Keller followed the evidence to the truth: Deccan volcanism, a series of massive volcanic eruptions in India, triggered a long-term climate catastrophe and Earth’s fifth mass extinction. Her findings upended the field and ignited a bitter feud in modern science—what became known as the “Dinosaur Wars.”
Raised in poverty on a Swiss farm and told she could never be a scientist, Keller defied expectations, earning her PhD at Stanford and battling her way into the highest ranks of Geology, eventually becoming a Professor of Paleontology and Geology at Princeton University. Her refusal to back down in the face of ridicule, sabotage, and sexism makes her story as thrilling as her science, which offers urgent insight into today’s climate crisis: Sustained planetary upheaval—not a single cataclysmic event—can plunge the planet into an age of death.

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Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) explores Christian discourses of sex and sexuality in Singapore to argue that metanoia, the theological concept of spiritual transformation, can be read as a form of neo-homophobia that coaxes change in the queer individual.

In Singapore, Christian discourses of sex and sexuality have materialised in the form of testimonials that detail the pain and suffering of homosexuality, and how Christianity has been a salve for the tribulations experienced by the storytellers. This book freshly engages with Michel Foucault's posthumous and final volume of The History of Sexuality by revitalising his work on biblical metanoia to understand it as a form of neo-homophobia. Drawing on Foucauldian critical theory and approaches in discourse studies, it shows how language is at the centre of this particular iteration of neo-homophobia, one that no longer finds value in overt expressions of hate and disdain for those with non-normative sexualities, but relies extensively on seemingly neutral calls for change and transformation in personal lives.
Queer Correctives takes Singapore as a case study to examine neo-homophobic phenomena, but its themes of change and transformation embedded in discourse will be relevant for scholars interested in contemporary iterations of Foucault's concepts of discipline and technologies of the self. Together with interview data from religious sexual minorities in Singapore, it captures a burgeoning form of homophobic discursive practices that eludes mainstream criticism to harm through change and transformation.

About Vincent Pak:

Vincent Pak is Assistant Lecturer at The University of Hong Kong. His work is located in the fields of sociocultural linguistics and linguistic anthropology, where he’s interested in matters of gender, sexuality, and race. His monograph, Queer Correctives, considers the emergence of neo-homophobia in Singapore.

About Pavan Mano:

Pavan Mano is Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London. He works at the intersections of critical & literary theory, politics and culture. His first monograph, Straight Nation (Manchester UP, 2025), interrogates postcolonial nationalism and the governance of sexuality in Singapore.

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The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail (Heresy Press, 2025) constitutes a bulwark against the persistent censorial efforts from both the political left and right. At a time when conformist pressures threaten viewpoint diversity, and when political attacks on free expression are mounting, this book is a valuable resource for all who seek to understand and defend the right that is central to both individual liberty and our democratic self-government. This concise volume is organized around 10 claims that proponents of speech restrictions regularly assert, such as: “words are violence,” “free speech is right-wing,” and “hate speech isn’t free speech.” In lively, clear, and persuasive prose, the authors examine the flaws in these pro-censorship assertions. The book also includes an insightful introduction by Jacob Mchangama, shedding additional light on the topic from historical and international perspectives.

Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, New York Times best-selling author, and the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and was the national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. She is a Senior Fellow at FIRE and serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and National Coalition Against Censorship.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest. In this episode, we sit down with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández, editors of meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts (U Arizona Press, 2025). In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes.
From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class.
As the inaugural publication of the Arizona Crossroads series, readers will find Arizona featured as a central node of borderlands roots and routes. Each section of the book intentionally centers Arizona within broader comparative and cross-state dialogues. Throughout, this volume highlights the ways in which personal experience, community building, and scholarly perspectives can provide a powerful space for community voices.
Contributors:

• Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
• Lillian Gorman
• Gloria Holguín Cuádraz
• Anita Huízar-Hernández
• Christine Marin
• Valerie A. Martínez
• Alina R. Méndez
• Karen R. Roybal
• Yvette J. Saavedra
• Liliana Toledo-Guzmán
• Andrea Tovar

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In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of innovative experimental surveys and 75 in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. A powerful new theory of how conditions shape the trajectory of non-state armed groups, this book reshapes our understanding of why such organizations become more moderate over time.

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How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligence

Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More Than We Think, from Proteins to Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving its own solutions to thorny problems.

Taking readers on an astonishing journey, Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the science of evolvable systems. Vellend shows how this Second Science unifies biology and culture and how evolution gives rise to everything from viruses and giraffes to nation-states, technology, and us. He discusses how the idea of evolution had precedents in areas such as language and economics long before it was made famous by Darwin, and how only by freeing ourselves of the notion that the study of evolution must start with biology can we appreciate the true breadth of evolutionary processes.

A sweeping tour of the natural and social sciences, Everything Evolves is an essential introduction to one of the two key pillars to the scientific enterprise and an indispensable guide to understanding some of the most difficult challenges of the Anthropocene.

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From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of the commercial South Atlantic. Navigating this kaleidoscopic world required a remarkable cosmopolitanism--the chameleonlike ability to adapt to new surroundings by developing sophisticated medicinal, linguistic, and navigational knowledge. In Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025) Mary E. Hicks shows how Portuguese slaving ship captains harnessed and exploited this hybridity to expand their own traffic in human bondage. At the same time, she reveals how enslaved and free Black mariners capitalized on their shipboard positions and cosmopolitan expertise to participate in small-scale commodity trading on the very coasts where they themselves had been traded as commodities, reshaping societies and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, as Hicks argues, the Bahian slave trade was ruthlessly effective because its uniquely decentralized structure so effectively incorporated the desires and financial strategies of the very people enslaved by it. Yet taking advantage of such fraught economic opportunities ultimately enabled many enslaved Black mariners to purchase their freedom. And, in some cases, they became independent transatlantic slave traders themselves.
Hicks thus explores the central paradox that defined the lives of the captive cosmopolitans and, in doing so, reveals a new history of South Atlantic slavery centered on subaltern commercial and cultural exchange.

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In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women themselves—saw small business ownership as a viable economic solution. In just five years, US women owned nearly a million of the nation’s businesses. In the decades since, women have moved increasingly into business ownership, often outpacing male start-ups so that today, they own more than fourteen million businesses, 40 percent of all US companies.

She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II (Rutgers UP, 2025) by Dr. Debra Michals chronicles the forces that made entrepreneurship attractive to women. In rich detail, Dr. Michals shares the stories of the countless women of all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities who contributed to this important history. The book also explores the intersection of women’s personal choices within changing social, political, and economic factors, such as the rising divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s, ongoing workplace and credit discrimination, civil and women’s rights activism and activist entrepreneurs, the 1970s recession and 1980s “Reagan Revolution,” and more recently, the internet, crowd-funding, and social entrepreneurship.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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