In Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), Kevin M. Schultz has given us a lively and colorful narrative history that captures the character of two complex men and the times in which they lived. Juxtaposing a conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and the radical Norman Mailer against a liberal establishment brings into sharp relief what the men shared and the source of their conflict. Both men agreed that there was something amiss of about American society and sought to build a movement against the entrenchment of liberal bureaucratic control and the threat of totalitarianism. With clashing visions for a new national politic, they were both surprised by the constituency that they each attracted and grew more alike as they responded to the movements they had fomented. Through their writings, public and private encounters, and an overlapping network of friends and political acquaintances we get a glimpse in the elite power dynamics that shaped the sixties. By attending to a flurry of lectures, debates, parties, letters, and the striking personalities of these two men, Schultz shows us was right and wrong with America at mid-century and the transition from a rules based to a rights based society. The relationship of Buckley and Mailer not only reflected the nation’s struggles in the sixties, but also captures the continual conflict over the future of America.

Kevin M. Shultz is an associated professor of history at University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Helen Keller, Franz Kafka and Silent Cal Coolidge appear in this week’s Almanac, a blog to celebrate the 150thanniversary of The Nation, America’s oldest magazine. Nation archivist Richard Kreitner is featuring an event from every day of the year and how The Nation covered it.In this New Books Network interview, he discusses events from May 31 to June 6 including Watergate, political assassinations and the D-Day invasion of France.As you listen, you’ll hear the voices of Richard M. Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy and an excerpt from one of Kafka’s most famous stories.

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Greg Barnhisel‘s new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia UP, 2015) examines how modernism was defanged, re-packaged, and resold during the Cold War. Barnhisel, an Associate Professor at Duquesne University, reveals that–from its incendiary beginnings–modernism was made safe for the bourgeois West thanks to the intervention of unlikely contributors like the CIA, the Department of State, and even major corporations. Barnhisel’s extensive archival research unearths the thinking that went into the repurposing of modernism to support American cold-war ideology.

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Sam Peckinpah’s career as a writer and director was also filled with controversies, but his reputation has not diminished, more than thirty years after his last film. Paul Seydor began in academics before becoming a highly regarded film editor who knew Peckinpah and has written extensively about him. His new book, The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Northwestern UP, 2015), details the genesis and troubled life if Peckinpah’s final western.

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Universities across the world have become more attuned to a global competition in higher education. International rankings and world class status are now critical focuses for these institutions. Academics have also gotten swept into this perceived competition, as their research plays a key factor for rankings and prestige. This phenomenon has pressed Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou to edit a volume chronicling these concerns and implications, entitled The SSCI Syndrome in Higher Education: A Local or Global Phenomenon (Sense Publishers, 2013), a series in Comparative and International Education: A Diversity of Voices. The authors contend that the completion and pressure of high stakes publishing has created an unhealthy environment, even lessening collaboration. For the social sciences, being published in a journal listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index has become a must for professors. However, Dr. Chou and her colleagues contend that the focus on SSCI has marginalized other journals and also academics whom come from non-English speaking countries. While the book’s roots are in Taiwan, the lessons are far reaching for higher education globally.

Dr. Chou joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd.

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Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,’ is not a new one. In Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (Columbia University Press, 2014), Marion Holmes Katz, Professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, traces the juristic debates around women’s mosque attendance. Katz outlines the various arguments, caveats, and positions of legal scholars in the major schools of law and demonstrates that despite some differing opinions there was generally a downward progression towards gendered exclusion in mosques.   were engaged in at the mosque, the time of day, the permission of their husbands or guardians, attire, and the multitude of conditions that needed to be met. Later interpreters feared women’s presence in the mosque because they argued it stirred sexual temptation. Katz pairs these legal discourses with evidence of women’s social practice in the Middle East and North Africa from the earliest historical accounts through the Ottoman period. In our conversation we discuss types of mosque actdivities, Mamluk Cairo, women’s educational participation, the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the transmission of knowledge, European travelers accounts of Muslim women, night prayers, mosque construction, debates about the mosque in Mecca, and modern developments in legal discussions during the 20th century.

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Jerzy Grotowsky and Tadeusz Kantor were influential in avant-garde theater in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, receiving high critical regard despite the fact that audiences could not understand the Polish language of the performances. In The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’ (Anthem Press, 2014), Magda Romanska bridges the disciplinary divides between theater studies and Slavic studies, between the history of Poland in the twentieth century and the history of avant-garde theatre, to place these works in a Polish and international context.

Romanska asserts that critics and audiences in West, while appreciating the theater productions of Grotowski’s Akropolis and Kantor’s Dead Class, missed the “obscure, difficult, multi-layered, funny-sounding Polish glory, with all of the complex and convoluted contextual and textual details” of these works. She traces the Polish cultural and literary roots and the Jewish history and culture on which Kantor and Grotowsky drew. She also reveals how Polish audiences would have understood words, images and actions in these productions differently than audiences in the United States, France or Germany. In doing so, The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor contributes to a deeper understanding of post-war Poland, its troubled engagement with the Holocaust and treatment of Polish Jewish citizens, and its interaction with the West.

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Kevin O’Neill‘s fascinating book Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2015) traces the efforts of multi-million dollar programs aimed at state security through gang prevention in Guatemala. O’Neill is most interested in the ways that Christianity and ideas about piety, salvation, redemption, and transformation guide and shape a variety of programs in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and, perhaps surprisingly, reality television and call centers. This is a finely hewn multi-sited ethnography as well as a moving account of the life of a single former gang member. At its core is a tension between the critique of programs that range from the absurd to the tragic, and a recognition that without those programs, former gang members in Guatemala would be relegated to the barest of bare lives.

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How are contemporary pop culture ideas about resilience used by Neoliberal capitalism? Robin James addresses this question using philosophy of music (and by doing philosophy through music) in her new book Resistance and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, and Neoliberalism (Zero Books, 2015). The book opens with a discussion of Calvin Harris (& Florence Welch’s) Sweet Nothing as a way into theargument that ‘resilience discourse is what ties contemporary pop music aesthetics to neoliberal capitalism and racism/sexism’. James combines musicological analysis of specific techniques, such as soars, stutters and stops, with an exploration of the aesthetics of pop videos and a critical theoretical framework. In particular the book connects theories of biopower and biopolitics, along a critical take on gender and ethnicity, to the work of Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Rihanna. The text also offers a consideration of alternatives, whether those that have already been incorporatedinto contemporary pop, such the techniques and sounds of Atari Teenage Riot, or new strategies and new forms that might be beyond profit, beyond capital, and represent ‘bad investments’ to suck the life fromMulti-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy. The book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars, as well as anyone keen to know more about popular music and critical theory. To learn more about Dr James work read her blog here.

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In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field.

Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for anyone interested in the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust.

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