Recall This Book

Jan 23 2025 150 ep. 39 mins 25

Recall This Book Podcast artwork

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.

Arts History Society & Culture

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142* Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)

Jan 23 2025 34 mins

What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP

141 The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life

Jan 03 2025 70 mins

Avi Shlaim, is a celebrated "New Historian” whose earlier work established him as an influential historian of Middle Eastern politics and especially of Israel's relations with the Arab world. Most recently he has turned to his own Iraqi/Israeli/British past in Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew–which he refers to as an "impersonal autobiography." He speaks today to John and h

140* Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)

Dec 19 2024 50 mins

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré

139 Recall This Story: Ivan Kreilkamp on Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle" (JP)

Dec 05 2024 65 mins

Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle.” It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin. Before div

138c Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie (with David Cunningham)

Nov 23 2024 24 mins

Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FB

138b Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock (with Vincent Brown)

Nov 22 2024 21 mins

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well-known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture.

138a An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

Nov 21 2024 33 mins

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transfo

137 David Peña-Guzmán: Animals Dream and That Makes Them Morally Considerable (JP)

Oct 31 2024 51 mins

In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than

136* Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)

Oct 17 2024 29 mins

Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “n

135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)

Oct 04 2024 54 mins

You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here. Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely. This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted