Eucalypts, iconic to Australia, have shaped art, science and landscapes worldwide. With around nine hundred species, from towering giants to compact mallees, these trees inspire awe and curiosity. Their hardwood has driven industries, sparked protests and even toppled governments. Their aromatic leaves hold healing properties yet fuel devastating wildfires. Eucalyptus (Reaktion, 2025) by Professor Stephen Hopper blends Aboriginal knowledge and Western science to uncover the rich natural history, biology and conservation of eucalypts. It explores their evolution, cultural significance and surprising roles in modern life, offering insights into sustainable ways to coexist with these remarkable trees. Featuring stunning photographs from fifty years of fieldwork, this is the first comprehensive review of Aboriginal eucalypt wisdom, paired with cutting-edge scientific discoveries.
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.
Faisal Devji's Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale UP, 2025) is a compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor. Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam's birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context: an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics had the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality. Ordinary Muslims, now recognized as the privileged representatives of Islam, were freed from traditional forms of Islamic authority. However, their conception of Islam as an impersonal actor in history meant that it could not be defined in either religious or political terms. Its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject also deprived figures like God and the Prophet of their theological subjectivities while robbing the Muslim community of its political agency. Devji illuminates this history and explores its ramifications for the contemporary Muslim world.
Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the historical categories of caste, religion, ecology, and sovereignties in South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific interests, his disciplinary interests revolve around public history, anthropology, literary studies, the digital humanities, and more recently, the history and politics of Artificial Intelligence.
Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Massachusetts Berkshires, traveled to the Dakota Territories to teach Native American students, undaunted by society’s admonitions. Charles, a Dakota Sioux from Minnesota, educated at Dartmouth and Boston University Medical School, was considered by his Euro-American mentors the epitome of an assimilated Indian. But when they met just ahead of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, the magnetic pull of love brought them together despite the tremendous odds stacked against them. Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Julie Dobrow offers a dual biography of Elaine Goodale and Ohíye’Sa, (Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman), exploring their individual lives as well as their highly publicized interracial marriage. Both well-known in their own time– Elaine as a poet, journalist, and advocate for Indian education and Charles as writer, public speaker, and ardent activist for Indian rights– their marriage started with a shared vision to work on behalf of Indians. In the face of extreme prejudice, financial burden, and personal tragedy however, the marriage began to unravel. Dr. Dobrow paints an intimate, emotional portrait of the Eastmans’ lives drawn from Elaine and Charles’s letters, papers, and hundreds of accounts of the Eastmans’ lives from newspapers. Along the way, she skillfully illuminates the shifting late 19th and early 20th century definitions of Indigenous identity, and reveals how the Eastmans’ legacies reflect changing American attitudes toward gender, interracial relationships and biracial children. The result is a compelling new history that weds the private and the political, and Native America and the United States of America– entwined yet separated, inextricable yet never fully joined, just like Elaine and Charles themselves.
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.
What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible?
Yanqiu Zheng’s In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974 (U Michigan Press, 2024) traces how China attempted to reshape its international image across a century marked by imperialism, political upheaval, civil war, and Cold War realignments. Beginning in the late Qing, when China’s reputation was battered by foreign domination, Yanqiu examines the painstaking emergence of cultural diplomacy as a long-term pedagogical project, one that sought to teach America about China through art, opera, exhibitions, lectures, and even reconstructed rickshaws. Drawing on archives in the United States, Taiwan, and mainland China, Zheng reconstructs how institutions such as the China Institution navigated competing agendas, the often-chaotic world of philanthropy, and geopolitical crises to present China on a global stage.
Throughout, In Search of Admiration and Respect asks questions that are still relevant today: How do countries cultivate cultural authority? What happens when narratives of refinement collide with Orientalist imaginaries? And how to institutions such as government ministries, nonprofits, and museums shape the ways nations hope to be seen?
This book will interest readers of modern Chinese history, U.S.–China relations, museum and exhibition history, and anyone curious about how culture intertwines with politics of the global stage.
Listeners of the episode might also want to check out an article that Yanqiu mentions over the course of our conversation: "Chinese Tofu in Cold War Taiwan: Gendered Cosmopolitanism and Contested Chineseness," available here.
Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Programme Chair and Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE, where she led the Black Feminism and the Polycrisis programme. Her work sits at the intersection of ideas, culture, and systems thinking, with a commitment to making complex theories accessible through books, essays, public speaking, and creative projects.
She is the author of Can Feminism Be African? (Harper Collins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020), which has been translated into multiple languages. Her writing also appears in numerous anthologies and educational publications exploring feminism, African philosophy, media, and cultural criticism.
Her work has featured in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Ideas Letter, Project Syndicate, and The Philosopher, and she has delivered talks at global institutions including TEDx, the Institute of Arts and Ideas, the European Commission, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, Yale, and Singularity University at NASA.
Salami was the creative director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, which won the Silver Award for Public Service and Activism at the 2024 Lovie Awards.
From 2019 to 2022, she co-directed Activate, an intersectional feminist movement that supported minoritised women in politics and community organising through visibility campaigns, mentoring, and fundraising. The initiative played a key role in shifting narratives and resources toward a more inclusive political landscape in the UK.
She has also worked as a Research Associate and Editor at Perspectiva, advised governments on gender equality, developed national school curricula, and curated cultural events at institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Her blog, MsAfropolitan, launched in 2010, has reached over a million readers and remains a platform for exploring feminist and African-centred approaches to contemporary life.
Salami is a Full Member of the Club of Rome, a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, and serves on the advisory boards of the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University and Public Humanities at Cambridge University Press, as well as the council of the British Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Links to References: Apart Together – essay on Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire’s radical vision for the world
Chef Pyet DeSpain joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking (HarperOne, 2025). Drawing from her Potawatomi and Mexican heritage, DeSpain shares recipes that connect past and present, including bison meatballs with Wojape BBQ sauce, raspberry mezcal quail, and poblano-corn tamales. Each dish reflects her effort to preserve tradition while creating something new.
In this conversation, Pyet talks about growing up between two cultures and how understanding their shared roots changed her approach to food and identity. She reflects on rediscovering ancestral ingredients, the meaning of her tribe’s “keeper of the fire” role, and the importance of gratitude and ceremony in her cooking.
She also speaks about the family members, chefs, friends and home cooks who inspire her to keep Native American and Mexican foodways alive, ensuring that these traditions continue to be seen, shared, and celebrated.
Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at here.
From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom--and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics
In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history--and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of "freedom now," insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people--regardless of race--were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of "extremism in defense of liberty," advocating radical individualism. In One Man's Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King's dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.
Part dual biography, part history, One Man's Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal(Princeton UP, 2025) traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater's landslide defeat in the presidential election and King's Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want--the one defined by Goldwater or by King?
Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes different forms. In democracies, while citizens enjoy the freedom of speech and the right to vote, a range of forces often conspire to limit their real power in favor of competing elites. The political and economic elite’s toolkit includes the art of bullshit—the persuasive use of language without regard for truth. Whether meritocratic or populist, elites alike have mastered this form of manipulation, amplified by modern tools of dissemination and authority.
To help us understand the challenges that bullshit poses to democratic citizens, I’m pleased to welcome Hélène Landemore.
Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University.
"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK (Bloomsbury, 2023), by Dr. Michelle McSweeney and published by Bloomsbury in 2023, explores this story
OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for “all correct” when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age.
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.
On the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist Revolt, Susanna Rabow-Edling published The First Russian Revolution: The Decembrist Revolt Of 1825(Reaktion Books, 2025), a new book about the first Russian Revolution. Though the 1825 coup attempt failed in its aspiration to change how Russia was governed, that failure has nevertheless cast a long shadow across Russian history since.
