New Books in Intellectual History Podcast
1) Great Books: Nicholas Johnson on Samuel Beckett
“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand, with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her … but langu...Show More
AUDIO REMOVED: The podcast creator has removed the audio for this episode.2) Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this e...Show More
3) Lin Hongxuan, "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic" (Oxford UP, 2023)
In contemporary Indonesia the idea that Islam and Marxism are inherently incompatible has become deeply entrenched. However, as Lin Hongxuan's work Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Makin...Show More
4) Marcus Willaschek, "Kant: A Revolution in Thinking" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively i...Show More
5) Johannes Zachhuber, "Gregory of Nyssa: on the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Johannes Zachhuber and Anna Marmodoro, eds., Gregory of Nyssa: On the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays (Oxford UP, 2025) This book presents Gregory of Nyssa's On the Six Days of Creation (In...Show More
6) Zubeda Jalalzai, "Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Zubeda Jalalzai about her book Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023). Literary License and the West’s Romance...Show More
7) Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal rol...Show More
8) Shiben Banerji, "Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy" (U Texas Press, 2025)
War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one an...Show More
9) Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)
A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramat...Show More
10) Mike Bird, "The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset" (Penguin, 2025)
In The Land Trap (Portfolio / Penguin), Mike Bird—Wall Street editor at The Economist—reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world. From the speculative land gra...Show More