New Books Network

In this episode of New Books Network, Laura Goldberg speaks with Thomas David DuBois, Professor at Beijing Normal University, about his book China in Seven Banquets, which traces Chinese history through seven extraordinary meals.

Gastronomy and dining rituals offer a revealing historical framework: they make visible social order, ethical values, and political power, expressed through ingredients, preparation, display, and etiquette. DuBois shares stories of early ritual feasts shaped by Confucian thought and of vast imperial banquets with hundreds of dishes – diving into fermented meat sauces, courtly excess, and the arrival of new foods via the Silk Road.

Conversation also turns to the modern period, considering the globalization of Chinese cuisine and the circulation of foreign foods within China. A feast from film – in the opening sequence of cult classic Eat, Drink, Man, Woman – is explored, as is the potential of food security impacting China’s culinary future.

In addition, DuBois shares how he recreated dozens of traditional recipes using modern kitchen techniques – all of which he includes in the book for the intrepid home cook.

Thoughtful and engaging, the discussion invites listeners to see meals not simply as nourishment, but as moments where culture, power, and history come together.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. highlights the crucial impact of high school activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Mid-twentieth-century student activism is a pivotal chapter in American history. While college activism has been well documented, the equally vital contributions of high school students have often been overlooked. Only recently have scholars begun to recognize the transformative role teenagers played in reshaping American education.

Inspired by civil rights and antiwar movements, students across the nation demanded a voice in their education by organizing sit-ins, walkouts, and strikes. From cities such as San Francisco and Chicago to smaller towns such as Jonesboro, Georgia, these young leaders fought for curricula that reflected their evolving worldviews. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Aaron G. Fountain Jr. reveals how teenagers became powerful agents of change, advocating for constitutional rights and influencing school reform. Ironically, the modernization of school security, including police presence, was partly a response to these student-led movements. Through oral histories and FBI records, this fascinating history offers a fresh perspective on high school activism and its lasting impact on American education.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sean Minogue about this play, Prodigals (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025).

When a big-city dreamer from a small northern Ontario city returns to his hometown to testify in a murder trial, he faces old uncovered wounds in his circle of friends and discovers that his missed opportunities are more than just regrets.

Sean Minogue has written for film, television and theatre. His poems, stories and essays have been published in ARC Poetry Magazine, Maudlin House, Shift, THIS Magazine, Full Stop, Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others’ homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency.
An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools.

Allie Morris ([email protected]) is a joint Ph.D. student in Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She broadly studies gender, age, and education in the late 20th-century United States. Her current research focuses on the political history of girlhood from the 1960s to the 1990s, examining girls’ culture and activism in the American high school.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025), edited by Professor David Newheiser, is a new collection asks if it’s possible to consider art-making as a spiritual practice independent of explicit religious belief or content. Where earlier research has focused on the religious significance of secular artworks, this innovative volume turns its attention to the role of the artist, and to specific examples of art practices, putting them into conversation with ritual practices. By creating a web of connections that emerge across multiple disciplines and practices, a team of scholars and artists shed new light on the way art-making and ritual embody non-discursive forms of understanding. Drawing on the work of scholars who argue that ritual practice is central to religious identities, they use close analysis of specific examples to address philosophical issues about the nature of knowledge and spirituality and the relationship between them. Art-Making as Spiritual Practice is a rich and in-depth examination of the possibility that art has spiritual meanings that are endemic to the practice of art-making itself, establishing a new paradigm that changes the conversation surrounding the spiritual, if not religious, significance of art.

Professor David Newheiser is a returning champion on New Books in Secularism—he joined us in 2020 to talk about his book Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and in 2023 he told us about his edited collection, The Varieties of Atheism (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University, with research that explores the role of religious traditions in debates over ethics, politics, and culture. He received a PhD in Religion from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in early Christian thought from Oxford. He is also co-editor of the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion.

Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding is an open source publication, available free from Bloomsbury Academic Press, here.

…

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. [email protected] @carrielynnland.bsky.social

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (Liverpool UP, 2025) offers a new interpretation of Franz Rosenzweig's magnum opus The Star of Redemption, commonly treated as one of the high points of modern Jewish thought, and demonstrates its profound immersion in the Protestant conceptuality of its time. It argues that appreciating the decisive mark of Protestant thought on The Star solves many of its puzzles, challenges some entrenched hagiographic orthodoxies about Rosenzweig, and provides a unique perspective onto one of the most influential cases of the 'Protestantisation of Judaism'. The book shows that Rosenzweig's inventiveness resides in his weaving of Jewish and Christian motifs that result in an original scheme that is remarkably inclusive toward Judaism from a Christian perspective and remarkably inclusive toward Christianity from a Jewish perspective. The Star thus emerges anew, not simply as a work of Jewish thought that is 'influenced' by Christian theology but as a work that is more accurately characterised as 'Judeo-Christian'."

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today, I speak with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of the new artist’s biography Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025). The book was recently named one of NPR’s Books We Loved for 2025. Pollack-Pelzner is a cultural historian, theater critic, and teacher at Portland State University, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

Pollack-Pelzner’s biography offers a captivating exploration of Miranda’s artistic journey—from a sensitive child in Manhattan’s Washington Heights to the visionary creator of Hamilton whose voice has reshaped musical theater and popular culture. This book captures a living artist in motion, weaving together countless threads of collaboration, cultural synthesis, and personal revelation that define Miranda’s work.

In our conversation, we focus on the challenge of writing biography itself. How does a scholar and critic approach the story of someone whose art feels both deeply personal and expansively historical? How does one trace the education of an artist who learned not in isolation, but through community, heritage, and creative exchange? Pollack-Pelzner guides us through these questions with the grace of a storyteller and the precision of a historian, drawing on unparalleled access to Miranda’s inner circle and his own interviews with the artist.

This is a book about how an artist finds his voice, and a conversation about how a biographer finds the shape of a life. Join me for this engaging discussion with the delightful Daniel Pollack-Pelzner.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.

 Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.

Host: Michael L. Rosino, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Molloy University

Recent Books:

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics.
.
Alastair McClure is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. 
.
Saumya Dadoo is a Ph.D Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

For hard-core baseball folks, for anyone who cares for the future of the game, veteran baseball writer Jane Leavy compels attention with her provocative book, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball And How To Fix It (Grand Central, 2025). Our conversation focuses on her proposed solutions to the core problem of a sport in the destructive grip of a data-driven analytics mindset. For example, because the numbers crowd dictates that hitters should swing for the fences, they too often strike out, and home runs themselves, she says, have become boring. Her fix: wrap plexiglass around the outfield wall at every major-league ballpark, so that each wall is a uniform eighteen feet high. That way, teams will be forced to invest in speedy players able to hit lots of exciting doubles and triples. Leavy may not become commissioner, but out of her deep love for the game, and with edgy good humor, she is forcing an overdue scrutiny of what was once known as America’s National Pastime.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network