Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of which tie into early modern Spanish debates.

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There has been a dramatic leap in education across the world over the past 150 years–from the importance and longevity to Western-style universities to truth and knowledge production created through schooling, permeating to almost every culture throughout the globe. Dr. David Baker, professor at Penn State University, calls this phenomenon the “education revolution” in his most recent book, entitled The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture (Stanford University Press 2014).

What is the “Schooled Society” and how was it created? Drawing on neo-institutional theories and real world examples, Dr. Baker provides an interesting and compelling take on society and its interactions with education. He joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd.

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Conventional psychoanalytic views of narcissism focus on familiar character traits: grandiosity, devaluation, entitlement and a lack of empathy. In his new book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Routledge, 2013), Daniel Shaw explores narcissism from a relational perspective, concentrating on the effect that the traumatizing narcissist can have on others. Shaw defines the traumatizing narcissist as the parent of a child, a leader of a cult, a partner in a couple or others who abuse their power, use their charisma and knowledge of human nature to subjugate. This power dynamic can lead to maladaptive patterns such as compliance, dissociation and the taking on of the abusive behaviors of the narcissist by thepatient.

To elucidate his conceptualization, Shaw writes chapters on clinical theory, his practice with patients effected by narcissism and his own past history as a cult member. Shaw illustrates how the therapeutic relationship can be healing by helping the patient reclaim a sense of subjectivity that has been lost. Our interview concludes with an exploration of traumatizing narcissism in the psychoanalytic profession, both in the consulting room and the institute setting.

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In Understanding Qur’anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), Isra Yazicioglu draws connections between an array of scholars, from different time periods and cultures, in order to make sense of miracles and miracle stories in the Qur’an. What are miracles? Why do they occur in stories? And how does the Qur’an define this complicated concept in particular ways? To address these questions and others Professor Yazicioglu gives particular attention to Ghazali (d. 1111), Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), David Hume (d. 1776), Charles Peirce (d. 1914), and Said Nursi (d. 1960), which makes for a rich and multilayered investigation into the limits and possibilities of science, epistemology, and scriptural hermeneutics. In our interview we also discuss Professor Yazicioglu’s intellectual background as a biologist in secular Turkey, turned scholar of religion and how her own social context has influenced and challenged her scholarly pursuits. Yazicioglu’s compelling and well-researched monograph will likely interest not only scholars of Islam and the Qur’an, but also philosophers as well as natural scientists.

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Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century are assumed to have been conservatives. In Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Cornell University Press, 2014), Carol E. Harrison goes beyond this familiar dichotomy to unveil a tradition of lay Catholicism that refused to go to either side, remaining in the political middle and marrying traditional Catholicism with a progressive social consciousness. Many of these people were the companions and heirs of the all-too-ill-known Félicité de Lamennais, whose condemnation by the pope in the 1830s did not prevent his social and religious vision from continuing to flourish throughout the century.

I spoke with Harrison to hear her perspective on her Catholics, who range from the celebrated daughter of Victor Hugo Léopoldine, to a totally forgotten best-selling novelist, Pauline Craven, to the Empress Eugenia de Montijo herself. Nor were male Catholics missing from the story: we talked about the well-known historian Frédéric Ozanam, the melancholy poet Maurice de Guérin, and the Dominican star Henri Lacordaire. I heard all about their ‘romantic impulse toward a renewal of faith’.”

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In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyō and ko-jōruri.

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The Writings of Pamela Price: State, Politics, and Cultures in Modern South India: Honour, Authority, and Morality (Orient BlackSwan, 2013) is a wonderful collection of ten essays by historian Pamela Price, that originally appeared between 1979 and 2010. The essays, as well as touching on the concepts of honour, authority and morality in different south Indian regions also broadly address questions of continuity and change. Drawing on debates from anthropology and political science, the book offers insights into how these above mentioned concepts shift across historical periods and how they appear in different linguistic and cultural regions.

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Margaret Mitchell’s blockbuster novel was released in 1936 to great acclaim. It immediately drew interest from Hollywood hoping to turn it into an epic film. After its sale, Mitchell began a large series of letters related to the making of the film. GWTW expert John Wiley, Jr. reviewed the large collection of Mitchell’s correspondence and compiled a fascinating book of letters and telegrams from Mitchell to Hollywood moguls, reporters, fans, and friends related to the making of the film. The Scarlett Letters: The Making of the Film Gone With the Wind (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2014) presents a new way to look at the making of Gone With the Wind, as well as a different view of the importance of the book author to a movie.

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Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great powers and small states that is necessary to create and enforce norms across the globe. The 1856 Declaration of Paris marks the precise moment when international law became universal, and is the template for creating new norms until today. Moreover, the treaty was an aggressive and successful British move to end privateering forever – then the United States’ main weapon in case of war with Britain. Based on previously untapped archival sources, Jan Lemnitzer shows why Britain granted generous neutral rights in the Crimean War, how the Europeans forced the United States to respect international law during the American Civil War, and why Bismarck threatened violent redemption during the Franco-German War of 1870/71. The powerful conclusion exposes the 19th century roots of our present international system, and why it is as fragile as before the First World War. A sample chapter of the book can be found on the publishers website here.

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Elizabeth Schmidt‘sForeign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013)depicts the foreign political and military interventions in Africa during the periods of decolonization (1956-75) and the Cold War (1945-91), as well as the periods of state collapse (1991-2001) and the “global war on terror” (2001-10). In the first two periods, the most significant intervention was intercontinental. The United States, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and the former colonial powers entangled themselves in numerous African conflicts. During the period of state collapse, the most consequential interventions were intracontinental. African governments, sometimes assisted by powers outside the continent, supported warlords, dictators, and dissident movements in neighboring countries and fought for control of their neighbors’ resources. The global war on terror, like the Cold War, increased the foreign military presence on the African continent and generated external support for repressive governments. In each of these cases, external interests altered the dynamics of internal struggles, escalating local conflicts into larger conflagrations, with devastating effects on African populations. Schmidt’s book is an excellent synthesis of the past 70 years of African history and politics. Her book is provocative, thoughtful and passionate. It is a superb book for students, general readers as well as scholars.

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