New Books in Politics and Polemics

Interviews with Authors of Politics and Polemics about their New Books

News
1501
Doreen Lee, “Activist Archives: Youth Culture a...
Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2016) is a book about Indonesian youth activism both before 1998 and after. But it is no ordinary chronological study,
55 min
1502
John Bew, “Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Mod...
As Labour Party leader, member of Winston Churchill’s governing coalition during the Second World War, and prime minister of the epochal postwar government that established the welfare state, Clement Attlee played a decisive role in the history of mode...
74 min
1503
Ethan Michaeli, “The Defender: How The Legendar...
In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s longest running and most significant black period...
64 min
1504
Charlotte Mathieson, ed. “Sea Narratives: Cultu...
What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey,
46 min
1505
Andrew Cole, “The Birth of Theory” (U. of Chica...
Was Hegel a medieval thinker? In The Birth of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Andrew Cole puts forward a reexamination of Hegelian dialectics that embeds Hegel in a long tradition of medieval dialectical thinking and suggests that it is pre...
62 min
1506
Jessamyn R. Abel, “The International Minimum: C...
Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to...
59 min
1507
Matthew Dallek, “Defenseless Under the Night: T...
Matthew Dallek is the author of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dallek is associate professor of political management at The George Washington University.
25 min
1508
Matthew MacWilliams, “The Rise of Trump: Americ...
NB: Because Amherst College Press is open-access, this book is available free for download here. Just when I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ways and means of American politics, Donald Trump “happened.
48 min
1509
Jill Gentile, “Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech...
In Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac Books, 2016), Psychoanalyst Jill Gentile explores the intersection between Freuds fundamental rule of free association and freedom of speech in a democracy,
58 min
1510
Lucas Graves, “Deciding What’s True: The Rise o...
In a fragmented media world where anyone can speak, professional journalists are no longer the “gatekeepers” who decide what the public will see and hear. Instead, citizens are barraged with claims, assertions and innuendo that have not been subjected ...
53 min
1511
Frances Lee, “Insecure Majorities: Congress and...
Frances Lee is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Lee is professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. For much of the 20th century,
19 min
1512
Kristin Stapleton, “Fact in Fiction: 1920s Chin...
Kristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family in Chengdu during this period.
64 min
1513
Stevphen Shukaitis, “The Composition of Movemen...
How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other,
37 min
1514
David Ensminger, “The Politics of Punk: Protest...
Punk has long been viewed as a subculture of anger, disruption, and alternative political and lifestyle choices. In The Politics of Punk: Protest and Revolt from the Streets (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) David Ensminger examines the various ways in wh...
56 min
1515
Richard Bourke, “Empire and Revolution: The Pol...
Richard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Bur...
46 min
1516
Monika McDermott, “Masculinity, Femininity, and...
With the 2016 presidential election in full swing and rhetoric surrounding each candidate becoming more polarized, how does gender impact the way that people behave politically? Monika McDermott in her new book Masculinity, Femininity,
62 min
1517
Megan C. Thomas, “Orientalists, Propagandists, ...
In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely attentive account of how anthropological sciences cont...
57 min
1518
Terri Diane Halperin, “The Alien and Sedition A...
In The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political history of the 1790s and explained the origins of one of the most contentious free speech events in A...
56 min
1519
James E. Campbell, “Polarized: Making Sense of ...
James E. Campbell has written Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2016). Campbell is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York.
21 min
1520
Stuart Elden “Foucault’s Last Decade” (Polity P...
Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press, 2016) Stuart Elden,
48 min
1521
Megan Tompkins Stange, “Policy Patrons: Philant...
Megan Tompkins-Stange is the author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence (Harvard Education Press, 2016). She is assistant professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
18 min
1522
Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker, “The Cotton Kings...
With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market,
54 min
1523
Mary Hawkesworth, “Embodied Power: Demystifying...
How can we explain the “occlusion of embodied power” and “lack of attention to race, gender, and sexuality” in the discipline of political science, a field “that claims power as a central analytical concept” (17)? In her new book,
61 min
1524
Donald Kettl, “Escaping Jurassic Government: Ho...
Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at t...
18 min
1525
Isabelle Hesse, “The Politics of Jewishness in ...
In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to I...
22 min