Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions.

In Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2015), Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. Kudelia challenges the conventional accounts of the armed conflict in Donbas, which portray it either as an interstate conflict entirely manufactured by Moscow or as a civil war that broke out without any external influence. Instead, he argues that local actors prepared ideological and organizational basis for the uprising, but the successful spread of separatist control resulted from the covert intervention of Russian agents and widespread collaboration with them of town administrators and community activists. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated.

A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements.

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In Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell (Dey Street Books, 2025), Gabe Henry presents a  brief and humorous 500-year history of the Simplified Spelling Movement from advocates like Ben Franklin, C. S. Lewis, and Mark Twain to texts and Twitter. Why does the G in George sound different from the G in gorge? Why does C begin both case and cease? And why is it funny when a philologist faints, but not polight to laf about it? Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to write in English has, at one time or another, struggled with its spelling. So why do we continue to use it? If our system of writing words is so tragically inconsistent, why haven't we standardized it, phoneticized it, brought it into line? How many brave linguists have ever had the courage to state, in a declaration of phonetic revolt: "Enough is enuf"? 

The answer: many. In the comic annals of linguistic history, legions of rebel wordsmiths have died on the hill of spelling reform, risking their reputations to bring English into the realm of the rational. This book is about them: Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Eliza Burnz, C. S. Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Darwin, and the innumerable others on both sides of the Atlantic who, for a time in their life, became fanatically occupied with writing thru instead of through, tho for though, laf for laugh, beleev for believe, and dawter for daughter (and tried futilely to get everyone around them to do it too). Henry takes his humorous and informative chronicle right up to today as the language seems to naturally be simplifying to fit the needs of our changing world thanks to technology--from texting to Twitter and emojis, the Simplified Spelling Movement may finally be having its day.

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Wage stagnation, growing inequality, and even poverty itself have resulted from decades of neoliberal decision making, not the education system, writes Neil Kraus in his urgent call to action, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (Temple UP, 2023).

Kraus claims the idea that both the education system and labor force are chronically deficient was aggressively and incorrectly promoted starting in the Reagan era, when corporate interests and education reformers emphasized education as the exclusive mechanism providing the citizenry with economic opportunity. However, as this critical book reveals, that is a misleading articulation of the economy and education system rooted in the economic self-interests of corporations and the wealthy.

The Fantasy Economy challenges the basic assumptions of the education reform movement of the last few decades. Kraus insists that education cannot control the labor market and unreliable corporate narratives fuel this misinformation. Moreover, misguided public policies, such as accountability and school choice, along with an emphasis on workforce development and STEM over broad-based liberal arts education, have only produced greater inequality.

Ultimately, The Fantasy Economy argues that education should be understood as a social necessity, not an engine of the neoliberal agenda. Kraus' book advocates for a change in conventional thinking about economic opportunity and the purpose of education in a democracy.

Neil Kraus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. He is the author of Majoritarian Cities: Policy Making and Inequality in Urban Politics and Race, Neighborhoods, and Community Power: Buffalo Politics, 1934-1997.

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How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digital and creative methods, the book punctures many myths around young people’s digital lives, showing both the potential as well as the problems of contemporary online spaces. Framed through the idea of the paradoxes of social media for young people, the book’s analysis is insightful and engaging, as well as deeply theoretically informed. The book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary digital life.

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Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I’m grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book.

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Have you ever noticed that in areas of everyday life, rather than being addressed like a mature adult, you're increasingly treated like an irresponsible child in constant need of instruction and protection?

Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy.

But importantly Infantilised is no one-dimensional, unsympathetic critique. Brimming with anecdotes and examples that span everything from the normalisation of infantilism on reality TV to the rise of a new class of political 'infantocrat', Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (Constable & Robinson, 2025) also offers an insightful and at times humorous account of infantilism's seductive appeal, and details some suggestions for avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with our increasingly infantilised world.

Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at Copenhagen University

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Between the study of specific languages and the philosophy of language lies what Ryan Nefdt calls a “Goldilocks zone” of theoretical issues related to language. In The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Nefdt introduces and explores the elements in this zone, including different theories of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and differing views of how language evolved, which languages are possible, and what defines language. Nefdt, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, shows where dominant linguistic theories, such as Chomskian syntactic theory and truth-conditional semantics, fit in a generalized framework where a key theoretical dimension is the role of social context.

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Those who fought in the Civil War were expected to overcome their fear of injury or death as they charged into a hail of bullets. Soldiers could expect erupting artillery shells or Minié balls to maim or tear their bodies apart. The 11th New York Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas Infantry were no different. They charged into battle with high, perhaps even inflated, expectations of glory on the field of battle. After all, they had already shown their bravery at home especially in the case of the Fire Zoaves. Yet when they marched into battle at the fields of Bull Run or Shiloh, falter as a unit they did. Afterwards, members of both units faced charges of cowardice casting a lingering shadow on their regiments and personal reputations. Over time charges of cowardice would fade to be replaced with the rhetoric of martial heroism leading some historians to insist that all Civil War soldiers were heroes. In her latest work

, Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the America Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr. Lesley Gordon seeks to offer a fuller understanding of the experiences of Civil War soldiers and sufferings of war.

Dr. Gordon is the Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at West Point and the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at the University of Alabama. Dr. Gordon received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and specializes in civil war history. 

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, in Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press, 2025) Dr. Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value.

In this original and provocative book, Dr. Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Dr. Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Amid the fanfare around AI and autonomous weapons, decision-makers - both military and political - are imagining an augmented future for warfare that minimises human influence and connection. But in their rush for speed and lethality, leaders have failed to understand the behavioural and technical challenges that accompany these new weapon types, as well as the detail of their operation and the practicalities involved in deploying these assets on tomorrow's battlefields. Indeed, as autonomy starts to flood fighting practices, the classical concepts of combat, tactics and strategy may no longer be fit for task. We are not ready and, as Paddy Walker makes clear in War Without Oversight: Why We Need Humans on the Battlefield (Howgate Publishing Limited, 2025), human oversight over lethal engagement is critical if we are to do more than suffer defeats faster.

Formerly commissioned into the Fifth Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, Dr Paddy Walker is Managing Director of the Leon Group. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Buckingham, an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and an Associate at the Institute for the Public Understanding of War and Conflict at the Imperial War Museum. Previously London chair of NGO Human Rights Watch, Paddy is a Board Member of NGO Article 36 and co-authored War's Changed Landscape, also published by Howgate, with Professor Peter Roberts in 2023. Check out the New Books Network episode on that book here.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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