New Books Network

Humanity's relationship with black holes began in 1783 in a small English village, when clergyman John Michell posed a startling question: What if there are objects in space that are so large and heavy that not even light can escape them? Almost 250 years later, in April 2019, scientists presented the first picture of a black hole. Profoundly inspired by that image, physicist Jonas Enander has traveled the world to investigate how our understanding of these elusive celestial objects has evolved since the days of Michell.

With the particular goal of discovering our human connection to black holes, Enander visits telescopes and observatories, delves deeply into archives, and interviews over 20 world-leading experts, including several Nobel laureates. With Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth (The Experiment Press, 2025), he takes us on a spellbinding journey into the universe's greatest mystery, deciphers the most mind-bending science, and answers questions surrounding how black holes work, where they come from, and what role they play in the universe.

Along the way Enander discovers how our desire to understand black holes inadvertently paved the way for the invention of Wi-Fi and the calibration of our global navigation satellites, how astronomical discovery became entangled with colonial conflicts, and how our looking outward gave us critical evidence of the impact of climate change. Facing Infinity helps us appreciate and understand as never before these mysterious celestial objects and our surprising connections to them.

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While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (SUNY Press, 2019) demonstrates how tactics impact the organizational structures of social movements and expand the affinities of political communities. Carley looks at how Gramsci used innovative tactics to bridge perceptions of racial differences between factory workers and subaltern groups, the latter having been denigrated to the point of subhumanity by a complex Italian national racial economy. Newly envisioning Gramsci as a theorist of race within a broader context of social struggle, Carley connects Gramsci's insights into the political mobilizations of racialized subaltern groups to contemporary critical race theory and cultural studies of racialization and racism. Speaking across disciplines and drawing on a number of empirical examples, Carley offers a battery of original concepts to assist scholars and activists in analyzing the tactical practices of protests in which race is a central factor.

Author info - Robert F. Carley is Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station.

Host info – Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, whose work focuses on racial politics, media, and democracy. He recently published the book Democracy is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside Grassroots Political Organizing and an essay in Time on the importance of cross-racial coalitions in social movements.

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“The acme of skill,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is not “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles,” but “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (Portfolio, 2025) has devoted much of his career to exploring how economic power can advance this goal. He served on the teams at the U.S. State Department that designed and negotiated Western sanctions against Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea, and whose economic pressure campaign against Iran led to a landmark nuclear deal in 2015. Economic warfare is how America fights its most important geopolitical battles today. From thwarting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to checking Russian imperialism and China’s bid for world mastery, the United States has reached into its economic arsenal to get the job done. In the process, the world economy has become a battlefield. Its weapons take the form of sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions. Its commanders are not generals and admirals but lawyers, diplomats, and economists. Its foot soldiers are not brave men and women who volunteer for military service but business executives who seek to maximize profits yet often find they have no option other than to obey Washington’s marching orders. And America’s strength in these battles stems not from its gargantuan defense budget but from its primacy in international finance and technology. This book is about this kind of war. It blends research, analysis, and extensive interviews with more than one hundred of the key players in the events described, highlighting inflection points, interpreting their significance, and pulling back the curtain on the places where economic wars have been fought.

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In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the battlefields at Gettysburg or Antietam, nor to Mount Vernon, but to the gravesite of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George. While dedicating the new monument that marked it in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Cleveland honored “the woman who gave our Nation its greatest and best citizen.” There could be no clearer valorization of eighteenth-century republican motherhood and its centrality to the nation's origin story.
The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Kate Haulman examines the role of motherhood in the commemoration of the American Revolution by tracing the creation and evolution of the Mother of Washington figure. Dr. Haulman explores the nineteenth-century memory of an eighteenth-century woman known for and through her famous son, the nation's first president. Underpinned by a canon of stories about Mary that often involved George, the monument and the figure it memorialized overlapped, sometimes in surprising and even paradoxical ways. In print, in images, and on the landscape, memorializing Mary foregrounded maternal ideals based in traditional gender roles and ancestry in the public memory of the nation's founding. As some women framed their engagement with the state in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation's origins. Women memorialists finally took up the cause to complete the monument, finishing what elite men had begun decades earlier.
Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood, as well as using motherhood to engage with the founding past. The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America offers fresh arguments about gender, race, and the politics of Revolutionary history and memory still contested 250 years later.

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

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The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Katherine French looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.
Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Dr. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, Dr. French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and Dr. French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.

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

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews historical fiction legend Lucy E.M Black about her phenomenal new novel, A Quilting of Scars (Now or Never Publishing, 2025).  

Filled with the pleasure of recognizable yet distinctively original characters and a deftly drawn sense of time and place, A Quilting of Scars brings to life a story of forbidden love, abuse and murder. Pulsing with repressed sexuality and guilt, Larkin Beattie reveals the many secrets he has kept hidden throughout his lonely life. The character-driven narrative is a meditation on aging and remorse, offering a rich account of the strictures and rhythms of farming in the not-so-distant past, highlighting the confines of a community where strict moral codes are imposed upon its members and fear of exposure terrifies queer youth. As Larkin reflects upon key events, his recollections include his anger at the hypocrisy of the church, and the deep grief and loneliness that have marked his path. There is a timelessness to this story which transcends the period and resonates with heart-breaking relevance.

About Lucy E.M. Black:

Author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella's Carpet, The Brickworks, and Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth, Lucy E.M. Black's short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada in a variety of literary journals and magazines. She lives in Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations.

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Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) explores (mis)representations of two female claimants to the Tudor throne, Lady Jane Grey and Mary I of England. It places Jane's attempted accession and Mary I's successful accession and reign in comparative perspective, and illustrates how the two are fundamentally linked to one another, and to broader questions of female kingship, precedent, and legitimacy. Through ten original essays, this book considers the nature and meaning of mid-Tudor queenship as it took shape, functioned, and was construed in the sixteenth century as well as its memory down to the twenty-first, in literary, musical, artistic, theatrical, and other cultural forms. Offering unique comparative insights into Jane and Mary, this volume is a key resource for researchers and students interested in the Tudor period, queenship, and historical memory.

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Turkey is among a league of revisionist powers who are challenging the world order. Erdogan and his Islamist movement have aimed to create the “New Turkey”, preparing for a future that is less dependent on Western treaty allies and with an alliance structure of its own. In New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country (I. B. Tauris, 2025), Selim Koru discusses the political ideas driving Turkey's regime change and foreign policy. It de-exceptionalizes Turkish politics, arguing that the “New Turkey” is part of a global trend of far-right nationalist movements like that of Donald Trump in the United States or Narendra Modi in India. In particular, the book reveals how far-right nationalist strands in Turkey have been nurtured by an existential resentment of the West, similar to those we are seeing in Russia. In tracing this resentment and its historical roots, the book invites policymakers and experts to better understand the new relationships Turkey is building with fellow revisionists including China and Russia, as well as Turkey's involvement in the wars in Syria and Ukraine and Erdogan's grand strategy for expansion. The book is based on interviews with senior politicians and civil servants from across the country's political spectrum. It also benefits from the author's personal knowledge of Turkey's far-right and Islamist traditions. His work can be regularly found at his Substack, Kulturkampf.

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For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals, and lighting the dark. In the coalfields and beyond, in Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal (University of California Press, 2025) Bob Wyss describes how this magical elixir sparked the Industrial Revolution, powered railroads, and built urban skylines, while providing home comforts for families.

Coal's history and heritage are fundamental to understanding its legacy of threats to America's well-being. As industry developed so did clashes between powerful tycoons, coal miners, and innocent families. Exploitation and avarice led to victimization, deadly violence, and ultimately the American labor movement. More recently coal has endangered American lives and safety, brought on by two centuries of carbon combustion, and here the threat remains unresolved. This is coal's most enduring legacy, and Black Gold is pivotal in helping us understand how we got to this point.

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

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Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan.

Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journalist, the book probes how China has reached its current stage and how young people can make changes.

The Chinese version, 把自己作为方法, was named the “most impactful book of 2021” by Dou4ban4, China’s premier website for rating books, films, and music. The English version, which is entirely Open Access and downloadable for free, was translated by David Ownby. The book reached 157,000 downloads in just over a couple of months.

Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China.

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