NBN Book of the Day

Nov 02 2024 1307 ep. 58 mins 1.2k
NBN Book of the Day Podcast artwork

The "NBN Book of the Day" features the most timely and interesting author interviews from the New Books Network delivered to you every weekday.

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Jonathan A. Allan, "Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin" (U Regina Press, 2024)

Nov 02 2024 32 mins  
The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organisations argue back and forth about whether cir

Nicholas Spencer, "Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion" (Oneworld, 2024)

Nov 01 2024 55 mins  
Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today. The true history of science and religion is a human one. It's about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It's about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, cree

Dariusz Wojcik et al., "Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money" (Yale UP, 2024)

Oct 31 2024 77 mins  
From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented. Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story

Lennard J. Davis, "Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It" (Duke UP, 2024)

Oct 30 2024 32 mins  
For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It (Duke UP,

Peter Harrison, "Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Oct 29 2024 60 mins  
In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole form of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operation in a different manner, from what it does at present.' This encapsulates, observes Peter Harrison, th

Toni Alimi, "Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Oct 28 2024 66 mins  
Augustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) provides a major reassessment of this monumental figure in the Western religious and political tradition, tracing the remarkably close connections between Au

Kostas Kampourakis, "Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Oct 27 2024 41 mins  
Recent social and political psychological research indicates that increased access to ancestry testing has strengthened the notion of genetic essentialism among some groups, or the idea that our biology ties us to particular ethnic identities. This can boost a sense of cultural pride and prosocial behaviors among communities that are perceived to be similar. In the worst-case scena

Landon Palmer, "Rock Star/Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Oct 26 2024 64 mins  
During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries incr

Larry E. Holmes, "Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921–1985" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Oct 25 2024 40 mins  
In Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921-1985 (Indiana University Press, 2024), Larry E. Holmes shows us how Soviet football culture regularly disregarded official ideological and political imperatives and skirted the boundaries between socialism and capitalism. In the early 1920s, the Soviet press denounced football as a bourgeois sport that was injurious to both

Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)

Oct 24 2024 71 mins  
A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a l