Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

Two of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented "everything that I detest most," while Arendt met Berlin's hostility with indifference and suspicion. Written in a lively style, and filled with drama, tragedy and passion, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin tells, for the first time, the full story of the fraught relationship between these towering figures, and shows how their profoundly different views continue to offer important lessons for political thought today.

Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, Kei Hiruta's Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2021) traces the Arendt-Berlin conflict, from their first meeting in wartime New York through their widening intellectual chasm during the 1950s, the controversy over Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, their final missed opportunity to engage with each other at a 1967 conference and Berlin's continuing animosity toward Arendt after her death. Hiruta blends political philosophy and intellectual history to examine key issues that simultaneously connected and divided Arendt and Berlin, including the nature of totalitarianism, evil and the Holocaust, human agency and moral responsibility, Zionism, American democracy, British imperialism and the Hungarian Revolution. But, most of all, Arendt and Berlin disagreed over a question that goes to the heart of the human condition: what does it mean to be free?

Kei Hiruta is Assistant Professor and AIAS-COFUND Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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The Biblical Book of Esther reads like a classic fable, a drama of actors who are recognizable archetypes. There is Esther, the beautiful orphan who becomes queen, Ahasuerus, the buffoon king, Haman, the prototype of evil, and Mordecai, the wise, courageous, and loyal hero.

The Book of Esther takes us to the heart of destiny’s moments: a beautiful but unlikely queen evolves into a Jewish leader. A wise and trusted courtier expands his platform of influence, and a vulnerable minority facing death becomes a powerful people in a land not their own.

In Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile (Maggid, 2020), Dr. Erica Brown offers us a close textual and thematic reading of this familiar story of courage and heroism against a background of hate and political ineptitude.

This ancient story sheds its light on today's most pressing problems: contemporary antisemitism, sexual tyranny and the absence of leadership.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Poet and jazz band musician Sun Ra, born in 1914, is one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his band “Arkestra” appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, this keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology and that the planet Saturn was his true home. In his book, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. William Sites contextualizes this visionary musician in his home on earth—specifically in Chicago’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 Sun Ra lived and relaunched his career.

The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then still known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—all this to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.

Dr. William Sites is Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban and community studies, political economy, social movements, immigration, race, culture, social theory, and historical methods.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca

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In The Soviet Passport: The History, Nature and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR (Polity Press, 2021), Albert Baiburin provides the first in-depth study of the development and uses of the passport, or state identity card, in the former Soviet Union. This richly empirical book will be of great interest not only to students and scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union, but to to anyone interested in the shaping of identity in the modern world. The Soviet Passport was first published in Russian in 2017; this is the first English-language translation of the book.

First introduced in 1932, the Soviet passport took on an exceptional range of functions, extending not just to the regulation of movement and control of migrancy but also to the constitution of subjectivity and of social hierarchies based on place of residence, family background, and ethnic origin.  While the basic role of the Soviet passport was to certify a person’s identity, it assumed a far greater significance in Soviet life, with wide-ranging social, economic and geographical consequences. Passport ownership became the signifier of an acceptable social existence, and the passport itself became part of the life experience and self-perception of those who possessed it.

In this interview, I was joined by the book's translator, Stephen Dalziel. We discussed the role of passports in Soviet and pre-Soviet society, including the revolutionary abolition of the Tsarist passport system and the subsequent introduction of the Soviet passport system. We also discussed the process of translation, both for this book and for Stephen's previous translation projects. We hope you enjoy our conversation.

Albert Baiburin (the book's author, who could not join us) is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the European University at St Petersburg.

Stephen Dalziel (my interviewee) is the book's translator. He is a Soviet expert and former BBC correspondent. He now runs DLC Training and Consulting, and is keen to take on more translation work.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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How did Steve Bannon come to believe the strange things he believes?

The influential, former Trump aid, began as a Democrat-supporting Naval officer with an interest in Buddhism and transcendental meditation. He is now an anti-globalist, sympathizer of “Traditionalists” who look forward to a cataclysmic moment which will lead to a golden age of elitist, hierarchical, spiritual rule promoting long-lost essential truths. He uses the pseudonym "Alec Guinness." And Bannon believes in something akin to “the force” in Star Wars. How did Bannon undergo this transformation? 

In this episode, Owen Bennett-Jones sits down with Benjamin Teitelbaum, author of War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (Dey Street Books, 2020) to find out how Bannon became Bannon. 

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Building on a deep theoretical foundation and drawing on numerous examples, Volden and Shipan examine how policies spread across the American states in Why Bad Policies Spread (and Good Ones Don't) (Cambridge University Press, 2021). The authors argue that for good policies to spread while bad policies are pushed aside, states must learn from one another. The three ingredients for this positive outcome are observable experiments, time to learn, and favorable incentives and expertise among policymakers. Although these ingredients are sometimes plentiful, the authors also note causes for concern, such as when policies are complex or incompatible with current practices, when policymakers give in to underlying political biases, or when political institutions lack the capacity for cultivating expertise. Under such conditions, states may rely on competition, imitation, and coercion, rather than learning, which can allow bad policies, rather than good ones, to spread. Volden and Shipan conclude with lessons for reformers and policymakers and an assessment of the overall argument based on state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Craig Volden is a Professor of Public Policy and Politics, with appointments in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics. He is Co-Director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, and has published numerous articles in such journals as: American Political Science Review; American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Politics; Legislative Studies Quarterly; Public Administration Review; Journal of Public Policy; and Publius: The Journal of Federalism.

Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett.

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Our brains are the most complex machines known to humankind, but they have an Achilles heel: the very molecules that allow us to exist can also sabotage our minds. Here are gripping accounts of unruly molecules and the diseases that form in their wake.

A college student cannot remember if she has eaten breakfast. By dinner, she is strapped to a hospital bed, convinced she is battling zombies. A man planning to propose marriage instead becomes violently enraged, gripped by body spasms so severe that he nearly bites off his own tongue. One after another, poor farmers in South Carolina drop dead from a mysterious epidemic of dementia.

With an intoxicating blend of history and intrigue, Sara Manning Peskin invites readers to play medical detective, tracing each diagnosis from the patient to an ailing nervous system. Along the way, Peskin entertains with tales of the sometimes outlandish, often criticized, and forever devoted scientists who discovered it all.

Peskin never loses sight of the human impact of these conditions. Alzheimer's Disease is more than the gradual loss of a loved one; it can be a family's multigenerational curse. The proteins that abound in every cell of our bodies are not simply strings of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; they are the building blocks of our personalities and relationships. A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain (Norton, 2022) is an unputdownable journey into the deepest mysteries of our brains.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Today we are joined by Dr. Michella Marino, the Deputy Director of the Indiana Historical Bureau, a division of the Indiana State Library, and the author of Roller Derby: The History of an American Sport (University of Texas Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Roller Derby, its radically progressive politics in mid-century America, and its reinvention in the 21st century.

In Roller Derby, Marino charts the rise, fall, and rise again of one of America’s most unique sports. It began as an endurance competition akin to pedestrianism and weeklong cycling races and in many ways it never left those beginnings. Roller Derby always mixed sport and spectacle, eventually becoming on of the most popular entertainments in the country. Unlike any other sports at the time, Roller Derby included men and women skaters on the same team and even in some circumstances on the track at the same time. Both men and women contributed equally to the score, but changes to the game in the 1930s that made physical contact, including fighting, more common produced unease among some spectators. Roller Derby’s mixed gender composition and its violence both helped ensure its popularity with male and female fans, but also raised significant challenges to mid-century norms.

To make the sport palatable to a more conservative middle America, Leo Seltzer, Roller Derby’s founder, promoted normative gender images of the skaters. Roller Derby crowned an annual king and a queen: a popularity contest that usually rewarded the most likable man and the most beautiful woman skater. Marino shows how these performative showcases both mollified critics of the game even as they limited the participation of some of the skaters – non-white and non-traditionally feminine skaters could not perform mid-century beauty in the same way. These contests also undermined the image of Roller Derby as a sport among many journalists who refused to cover it.

Even so, Marino shows that most fans could see the athleticism of the skaters on the track and Roller Derby quickly became popular among in-person fans from across the social spectrum and later on television. Roller Derby was tough work. To keep his skaters happy, Seltzer instituted radically progressive, encouraging families to compete as families, equal pay for its skaters, maternity leave, and day care. When the league folded, it paid out the remaining skaters from a pension fund.

The final chapter details the rejuvenation of Roller Derby as an explicitly female-led and feminist sport that continues to face challenges around the sexualization of competitors, the integration of male competitors and spectators, and the challenges and opportunities provided by becoming an Olympic sport. Fun and full of life, Marino’s Roller Derby will appeal to scholars interested in American sport, gender, and spectacle, but also to the broad audience of skaters and sports fans.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter.

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For people in medieval England, the parish church was an integral part of their community. In Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021), Nicholas Orme describes how parish churches operated and details the roles they played in the lives of their parishioners. While there was a considerable variety of experience over the centuries and between the parishes throughout England, the basic practices in them largely remained the same. These were supervised by a range of people, both lay and clerical, who staged the Mass and managed the church’s everyday operations. Their activities touched on the lives of the members of the community in a variety of ways, from regular attendance at daily and weekly services to celebrations marking the seasons and the great events of life: birth, coming of age, marriage, and comfort in sickness and death. And while the English Reformation transformed the relationship between England and the Roman Catholic Church, Orme shows how some of the changes associated with it were already underway before it began, while much of what went on in parish churches remained as before.

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How is power enacted in everyday broadcast practices? National Public Radio has a “rhetoric of impartiality” but this obscures the ideological work done by the network.” In The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (U Arizona Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Chávez interrogates how NPR determines what it means to be American and what is deemed American news. NPR’s original mandate included engaging listeners in civic discourses and representing the diversity of the nation. Yet Chavez argues that NPR has created a "white public space" that pushes Latinx listeners to the periphery. As a result, NPR promotes the cultural logic that Latinx identity is separate from national identity – hindering Latinx participation in civic discourses. But Chavez maintains that the shared act of listening might facilitate the ways in which Latinx listeners negotiate and resist norms of what it means to belong, also known as sonic citizenship. He writes that through the act of listening, "... those without sustained access to political power might imagine alternative political possibilities in which they are included."

Dr. Christopher Chávez is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon where he also directs the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies. His publications include a previous book Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology, and Practice (Lexington Books, 2015).

Daniella Campos served as editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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