New Books Network

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New Books Network episodes

June 16Jesse Montgomery, "It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story" (UNC Press, 2026)
Jesse Montgomery joins Michael Stauch to discuss It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story (UNC Press, 2026). They examine how young white migrants from Appalachia and the South fought police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, and even joined forces with Fred Hampton’s Black Panther Party and the Young Lords to create the original Rainbow Coalition in the streets of Chicago in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Highlights include:
How the Young Patriots evolved from street gang to political organizers active in Chicago’s “Hillbilly Harlem,” the Uptown neighborhood;

A reminder that poor white workers made up the large majority of migrants from the South during the Great Migrations of the 20th century;

How the Young Patriots attempted to “re-signify” the Confederate flag, paralleling efforts by “race traitors” like Noel Ignatiev to reframe white workers in a context of interracial class solidarity;

How the story of the Young Patriots is also a story of urban renewal, and the fight against it, in Chicago;

A discussion of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and the role of country music in the culture wars of the 1960s.
Guest: Jesse Montgomery is a visiting assistant professor of English at Berea College who works on American literature after 1945, Appalachian outmigration, and radical culture. Jesse holds a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His writing has appeared in n+1, Popula, Full Stop, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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1 hr 16 min
June 16 Robert Suits, "The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants" (Princeton UP, 2026)
From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communities across America. The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants (Princeton UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Suits traces the journeys of these homeless men and women, showing how hobo work was an adaptation to energy transitions and a harsh and unpredictable climate, and how the hobo played a central role in the histories of industrialization and westward expansion.
Challenging common depictions of the hobo as a world-weary, bearded man in ragged clothes, Dr. Suits reveals how these wandering laborers were often fastidious and heartbreakingly young. Forever on the move due to economic hardship and climate disaster, they chased harvests and took seasonal jobs in industries like logging and mining. Too often they couldn’t find employment at all. Suits describes the difficult, dangerous, and highly unstable jobs they worked while shedding light on the hobo life and philosophy, from their techniques for stowing away on railroads to their unique blend of socialist, anarchist, and anti-work thought. He traces the emergence of the hobo to the advent of steam and the need for manual laborers in places where this new technology couldn’t reach and describes how a growing reliance on the internal combustion engine brought an end to hobo work.
Drawing on oral histories, environmental data, and cutting-edge digital methods, The Hobo paints an unforgettable portrait of an eclectic group of wandering radicals, troublemakers, poets, and writers, demonstrating how their experiences upend some of our basic assumptions about how environments and technologies shape society.
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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59 min
June 15 Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany" (Boydell Press, 2025)
Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which became established relatively late, General Average is still in widespread use.
In Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (Boydell Press, 2025), Jake Dyble explores how General Average worked. It reveals the gap between General Average in law and how it worked on the ground. It shows how General Average partitioned a wide array of business costs, thereby performing a significant role in structuring maritime commerce, managing risk and promoting shipping and trade. In addition, the book discusses how far General Average was a feature of a supposedly ancient, universal, customary maritime law, and contributes to debates about the evolution of institutions in economic development.
Dr Jake Dyble is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padova, Italy.
This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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52 min
June 15 Blue Jasmine
Woody Allen has called A Streetcar Named Desire the most well-directed film ever made and its influence on Blue Jasmine (2013) is unmistakable. Both concern a woman whose fantasy life and self-deception break down and both feature incredible performances by the lead actress: in Streetcar, it’s Vivien Leigh and here it’s Cate Blanchett. And if Streetcar is a high point of Eliza Kazan’s filmography, Blue Jasmine is surely one of Allen’s and perhaps the best of the subgenre Woody Allen Movies Without The Woody Allen Character.
Incredible bumper music by John Deley.
Blue Jasmine is Allen’s 44th film; his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, details how he became a writer and director of fifty films.
Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day.
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23 min
June 15 Colin Flahive, "The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting Gears in Rural China" (Earnshaw Books, 2026)
Colin Flahive
is an American entrepreneur and writer who has spent more than two
decades living and running social enterprises in southwestern China. He
is best known as one of the founders of Salvador's Coffee House, which
is a hub of international exchange in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan
province.
In this New Books Network episode, we talk with Colin about his latest book, The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting Gears in Rural China (Earnshaw Books, 2026).
The Galaxy's Last Ride is a rich combination of
memoir, travelogue, and oral history that explores China's sweeping
development through a deeply personal lens. The book weaves together
several strands—a 2,500-kilometer solo motorcycle journey that Colin
took across rural China during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
personal stories of Salvador’s employees, and recollections from Colin’s
past travels—to paint a part-insider-part-outsider portrait of China’s
evolutions over the last two decades.
Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a
publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and
television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera,
The Diplomat, and Eater.
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47 min
June 15 Karl Whittington, "Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2025)
Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press,
2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art
historians typically answer this question by referring to historical
evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of
imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter
is mainstream? We know little about the identities and personalities of
most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking
about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends
that we can "queer" the works of anonymous makers by thinking about
their embodied experiences creating art. Considering issues of touch,
pressure, and gesture across substances such as wood, stone, ivory, wax,
cloth, paint, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal
labor, in which the actions of hand, body, and breath interact in
intimate ways with materials. Whittington takes seriously the agency of
materials and technical processes, arguing that they necessarily placed
the bodies of artists and artisans into physical situations and
psychological states that can be read through the lens of desire.
Combining historical evidence with speculative description, this
evocative set of essays broadens our understanding of the motivations
and experiences of premodern artists. It will appeal to scholars and
students of art history, medieval studies, gender studies, queer
studies, and anthropology.
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1 hr 27 min
June 15 Marielle Risse, "Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman" (Anthem Press, 2026)
In this episode of the New Books Network, we explore Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press, 2026),
with anthropologist Dr Marielle Risse. Drawing on nearly two decades of
ethnographic fieldwork, Dr Risse offers a nuanced examination of
marriage practices among Sunni Muslim communities in southern Oman,
challenging many of the assumptions that often underpin Western
discussions of gender, family, and personal autonomy.
Rather than portraying marriage as either oppressive or emancipatory,
Dr Risse presents it as a complex social institution shaped by kinship
networks, religious values, and community expectations. Risse’s work
encourages readers to reconsider familiar ideas about family, marriage,
household, intimacy, autonomy, and social life.
Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is
an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of
religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African
diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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37 min
June 15 Darren Haber, "Addiction, Accommodation, and Vulnerability in Psychoanalysis: Circles Without a Center" (Routledge, 2022)
Addiction, Accommodation, and Vulnerability in Psychoanalysis: Circles Without a Center (Routledge, 2022) explores the compulsions and trauma that underlie addiction, using an intersubjective approach in seeking
to understand the inspirations and challenges arising from the
psychoanalytic treatment of addiction, compulsivity, and related
dissociative conditions.
Drawing on insights from his own analytic practice and personal experience, in addition to the work of Stolorow, Brandchaft
and Winnicott, among others, Haber considers the complex ways in which
addiction becomes woven into a person’s life, and analyses how it
interacts with other problems such as depression and anxiety,
self-fragmentation, and ambivalence about treatment. Haber creatively
integrates the work of Camus, Kafka, and Beckett to further contemplate
the dilemmas that can arise during the clinical process and, in
identifying his own and his patients’ vulnerabilities and
contradictions, provides an honest, humorous and sometimes painful
account of what happens in the consulting room.
With
its use of rich clinical material and an accessible and vivid writing
style, this book will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists
working with patients affected by addiction, as well as other
professionals seeking new insights into effective strategies for
treating this most challenging malady.
Darren M. Haber is a psychoanalyst practicing in west Los Angeles.
Isak de Vries is a Psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, New York.
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1 hr 12 min
June 15 David Leupold, "The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives" (Routledge, 2026)
What
does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit
cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the
question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only
to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but
to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered
radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism
itself.
These
ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking
internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city
from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists
to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s
Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a
science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to
rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical
South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026)
explores the material and immaterial legacies of
socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To
this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban
sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing
visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using
varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the
book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity,
polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the
social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political
center
in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and
linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness
within the regional dynamics of the Global South.
David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.
This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee,
PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of
postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and
environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.
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51 min
June 15 Elly Kent, "Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia" (NUS Press, 2022)
Exploring the work of established and emerging artists in Indonesia’s vibrant art world, Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (NUS Press, 2022) examines why so many artists in the world’s largest archipelagic nation choose to work directly with people and in the studio. While the social dimension of Indonesian art makes it distinctive in the globalised world of contemporary art, Elly Kent is the first to explore this engagement in Indonesian terms. What are the historical, political and social conditions that lie beneath these polyvalent practices? How do formal and informal institutions, communities and artist-run-initiatives contribute to the practices and discourses behind socially-engaged art in Indonesia? What do artists do when they locate their practice in a broader social milieu, and what tensions arise when artists integrate communities, governments, politics, history and people into their practice?
Drawing on interviews with artists, translations of archival material, visual analyses and participation in artists’ projects, this book presents a unique, interdisciplinary examination of ideologies of art in Indonesia. It portrays the ways art practice and theory are understood within Indonesia and inside Indonesian-language discourse. Indonesia's artists have continued to explore, resist and draw on the methodologies and discourses of social responsibility and artistic autonomy generated by Indonesian arts practitioners through their early 20th-century encounters with modernity and the founding of the nation state. This book brings contemporary practice into conversation with art history in Indonesia.
Dr Elly Kent is a visual artist, translator, researcher and educator with 20 years of experience working in academia and the arts in Indonesia and Australia. Elly is Deputy Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute and Sub-dean of Languages in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She convenes the Year in Asia program and is Treasurer of the Indonesia Council, Australia’s peak body for Indonesian studies.
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1 hr 8 min