New Books in World Affairs
Interviews with Scholars of Global Affairs about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 55 minutes
- Episodes
- 1951
- Years Active
- 2008 - 2025
John Fox, “The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game” (HarperCollins, 2012)
There are a lot of balls in my house. Baseballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, footballs, basketballs, volleyballs. We have Wiffle balls, Nerf balls, and Super Balls. My children and I occasionally use…
00:52:01 |
Thu 07 Jun 2012
Phil Zuckerman, “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment” (New York University Press, 2010)
It is not uncommon for many Americans to believe that morality and order comes from God and religion. A society without these elements would consequently be immoral and chaotic. When Phil Zuckerman t…
00:31:41 |
Wed 23 May 2012
Marshall Poe, “A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge Univers…
01:21:59 |
Mon 26 Mar 2012
Peter Millward, “The Global Football League: Transnational Networks, Social Movements and Sport in the New Media Age” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
It’s the English Premier League’s birthday! On this day twenty years ago, all twenty-two clubs of the First Division resigned from the 104-year-old Football League and declared their plans to create…
01:05:22 |
Mon 20 Feb 2012
Niamh Reilly, “Women’s Human Rights: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalizing Age” (Polity Press, 2009)
Today, you can open your newspaper and find stories about mass rape in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, death sentences for adulterous women in Iran, or Central American women smuggled in…
01:16:06 |
Tue 20 Dec 2011
Andrei Markovits, “Gaming the World: How Sports Are Shaping Global Politics and Culture” (Princeton UP, 2010)
“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.”
Sure.Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show. For t…
01:08:22 |
Tue 22 Nov 2011
Dave Zirin, “The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed the World” (Haymarket Books, 2011)
There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, a…
01:03:43 |
Tue 04 Oct 2011
Robert Thurston, “Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective” (Ashgate, 2011)
It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in w…
01:04:55 |
Fri 05 Aug 2011
Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–p…
01:04:43 |
Mon 18 Jul 2011
Ricardo Duchesne, “The Uniqueness of Western Civilization” (Brill, 2011)
One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origi…
01:06:34 |
Fri 13 May 2011
Francis Fukuyama, “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution” (FSG, 2011)
When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continent…
00:54:14 |
Tue 03 May 2011
Dan Drezner, “Theories of International Politics and Zombies” (Princeton UP, 2011)
International theorists like to game out every possible scenario. What would happen if you applied their methodology to dealing with the fictional public policy challenge of a zombie infestation?
In…
00:44:09 |
Sun 03 Apr 2011
David Day, “Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others” (Oxford UP, 2008)
People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case…
00:59:03 |
Tue 15 Mar 2011
Joyce Appleby, “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism” (Norton, 2010)
Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting t…
00:59:01 |
Fri 04 Feb 2011
Fred Spier, “Big History and the Future of Humanity” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
My son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And so…
01:02:52 |
Fri 01 Oct 2010
Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (Oxford UP, 2006)
Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we…
00:53:13 |
Thu 15 Jul 2010
P. Bingham and J. Souza, “Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe” (BookSurge, 2009)
Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any re…
01:07:45 |
Fri 30 Apr 2010
Patrick Manning, “The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture” (Columbia UP, 2010)
Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standards)…
01:03:59 |
Fri 09 Apr 2010
Ben Kiernan, “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur” (Yale UP, 2007)
Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. Th…
01:06:47 |
Fri 12 Feb 2010
Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, “Natural Experiments of History” (Harvard UP, 2010)
I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are …
01:02:24 |
Wed 20 Jan 2010
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are the property of New Books Network. This content is not affiliated with or endorsed by eachpod.com.