Author: Marshall Poe

The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers' 30 years of advocacy, research and work in and around China. Opening with his rollicking adventures as an 18 year old teaching English in Qingdao in 1992, the human element of this monograph, the real people and their lives are foregrounded. Rogers takes the reader through a nexus of the CCP's tyranny; from China's crackdown on its own citizens; through the repression and violence perpetuated in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, to the way that the CCP props up and is complicit in crimes against humanity in Myanmar and North Korea. This book is essential to understanding both the domestic and global ramifications of the threat that the CCP poses to the free world. Rogers has been at the heart of advocacy for human rights in and around China during this period. His on-ground insights, countless meetings, interviews and direct encounters with those who live through the harrowing realities manifested by current CCP ideology, should operate as a wake-up to those who value democracy everywhere. 

Benedict Rogers is a human rights activist and writer specialising in Asia. He is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong Watch, Senior Analyst for East Asia at CSW, an advisor to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, the Stop Uyghur Genocide Campaign and several other charities, and Deputy Chair of the UK Conservative Party Human Rights Commission. 

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Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 (Oxford UP, 2023) traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried ‘Hasheesh Candy’, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use nor addiction was linked to crime, due to the dearth of restrictive laws. After the Civil War, American presses published extensively about domestic addiction. Later in the nineteenth century, many people used cocaine and heroin as medicine.

As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK.

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What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. What if human exceptionalism is more of a curse than a blessing?

As Dr. Justin Gregg puts it in his book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity (Little, Brown (US), 2022, Hodder (UK), 2023), there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process.

In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Dr. Gregg highlights features seemingly unique to humans – our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness – and compares them to our animal brethren. What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In the midst of the Second World War, Central and East European governments-in-exile struggled to make their voices heard as they reported back to the Allies and sought to reach mass Allied publics with eyewitness testimony of German atrocities committed in their respective homelands. The most striking case is that of Poland, whose wartime exile government served as the principal conduit for first-hand testimony (much of which was initially ignored, questioned, or suppressed by the major Allies) of both the Holocaust and the German occupiers’ mass repression and killing of non-Jewish Poles. Historian Michael Fleming offers a rich and unprecedented take on the story of Poles’ contributions to the emergence of a global legal regime for prosecuting war crimes, by reconstructing the central contribution of the Polish War Crimes Office in London to the emergence, successful work, and postwar legacy of the UN War Crimes Commission. 

In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a ground-breaking intervention in global legal history, in Polish history, and in the history of the transition from World War II to the Cold War.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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In her new book, Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented (Diversion Books, 2023), scholar and writer Oline Eaton examines the story of an era's biggest "star of life," Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, as she coped with trauma and built a new existence in an unstable world during the time between JFK's murder in 1963 and the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, in 1975. Jackie Kennedy was universally loved and to this day is still remembered as dignified, classy, a superior wife, mother, decorator, and hostess. But what story lies beneath that of the former First Lady? What is the true tale of the woman who later wore leather miniskirts, grew her hair long, and married infamous Greek shipping tycoon Ari Onassis?

Eaton charts the taboo and often dismissed story of Jackie, the life of a woman reinventing herself time and time again. In Finding Jackie, she follows the "star of life" through her tragedies and triumphs with all the urgency and uncertainty she faced. Revealed is the Jackie the world has never seen, the Jackie who climbed pyramids, held fascinating jobs, lived abroad, married a scandalous man, saw a sex movie with him in a theater, and then judo-flipped a photographer on her way out. She frolicked braless and barefoot in Capri. She saved Grand Central. She stepped outside the rarefied world she'd been born into and exemplified the cultural changes of the 1960s and 70s. With newly released archival evidence, Finding Jackie illuminates the disconnect between the public story and what is now known of Jackie Kennedy Onassis' actual private life. Jackie has long been celebrated for her style rather than her substance but, when set in its full historical context, her story resonates today.

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Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities (Oxford UP, 2014) offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography, but this volume gathers these, and many other humanities disciplines, into a single coherent account.

Its central theme is the way in which scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about the past is trustworthy? By what criteria are we to distinguish consonant from dissonant musical intervals? What rules jointly describe all possible grammatical sentences in a language? How can modern digital methods enhance pattern-seeking in the humanities? Rens Bod contends that the hallowed opposition between the sciences (mathematical, experimental, dominated by universal laws) and the humanities (allegedly concerned with unique events and hermeneutic methods) is a mistake born of a myopic failure to appreciate the pattern-seeking that lies at the heart of this inquiry.

A New History of the Humanities amounts to a persuasive plea to give Panini, Valla, Bopp, and countless other often overlooked intellectual giants their rightful place next to the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.

Rens Bod is a professor of humanities at the University of Amsterdam.

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.

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New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves.

And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City’s Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan.

Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman’s new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan’s early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan’s New York years in a rich context.

Bob Dylan’s New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan’s early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan’s apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan’s New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s.

The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan’s New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer.

Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu.

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In Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (U California Press, 2022), historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.

Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens.

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Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.The Naked and the Dead was acclaimed not so much for its intrinsic qualities but rather because it launched a brutally realistic sub-genre of military fiction - Catch 22 and MASH would not exist without it. 

In Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury, 2023), Richard Bradford combs through Mailer's personal letters - to lovers and editors - which appear to be a rehearsal for his career as a shifty literary narcissist, and which shape the characters of one of the most widely celebrated World War II novels.

Bradford strikes again with a merciless biography in which diary entries, journal extracts and newspaper columns set the tone of this study of a controversial figure. From friendships with contemporaries such as James Baldwin, failed correspondences with Hemingway and the Kennedys, to terrible - but justified - criticism of his work by William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book gives a unique, snappy and convincing perspective of Mailer's ferocious personality and writings.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm).

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