New Books in Politics and Polemics

If we want girls to succeed, we need to teach them the audacity to transgress. Through the lives of students at three very different schools, Sally Nuamah, an award-winning scholar-activist, makes the case for “feminist schools” that orient girls toward a lifetime of achievement in How Girls Achieve (Harvard University Press). This bold and necessary book points out a simple and overlooked truth:...

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, 2019) argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward...

No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (Routledge, 2020) is the first to outline the history of the tactic of ‘no platforming’ at British universities since the 1970s, looking at more than four decades of student protest against racist and fascist figures on campus. The tactic of ‘no platforming’ has been used at British universities and colleges since t...

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. ...

For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all...

One of the most enduring ideas in economics is that unemployment is both unavoidable and necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy. This assumption has provided cover for the devastating social and economic costs of job insecurity. It is also false. In this The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity, 2020), Pavlina R. Tcherneva challenges us to imagine a world where the phantom of unemployment...

After working on two presidential campaigns (for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), MSNBC political analyst and SiriusXM host Zerlina Maxwell gained first-hand knowledge of everything liberals have been doing right over the past few elections–and everything they are still doing wrong. Ultimately, these errors worked in President Donald Trump’s favor in 2016; he effectively ran a campaign on white...

The far-right has been coming after democracy for decades and we may be just one election away from a total takeover. Join NBN host and rhetorical scholar Lee Pierce (she/they) for a robust discussion of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking, 2017) with award-winning historian Nancy MacLean and attorney Mary Whiteside. Get ready for an explos...

Should we understand the conservative elites of #Never Trump as homogeneous and united? Failed renegades? Moral guardians of republicanism and values? In their new book Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites (Oxford University Press, 2020), Robert P. Saldin (Professor of Political Science at the University of Montana) and Steven M. Teles (Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins...

In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true—Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide,” Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection, and, four years earlier, the Democratic ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket by a ma...

The Making of the Presidential Candidates 2020 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) is the most recent entrant within a long-established, well-respected series that surveys the nomination process in the United States every four years. Political Scientists Jonathan Bernstein and Casey Dominguez have pulled together a diverse assemblage of authors and perspectives to help readers think about how the nomin...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee M Pierce (s/t) interviews Luke Winslow of Baylor University on the book Luke Winslow, American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which offers a fresh, provocative, and insightful contribution to our most pressing social challenges by taking an orientation to...

In today’s ultra-polarized and highly partisan political environment, Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets―And What You Can Do About It (Post Hill Press, 2020) is one of the rare books written to appeal to engaged and open-minded citizens from across the political spectrum. Welfare for the Rich is the first book to describe and analyze the many ways that feder...

No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Social Movements (City Lights Publishing, 2020) by Hilary Moore and James Tracy recounts the stories of fearless organizers and activists who created an anti-racist social movement that fought against the normalization of white supremacy during the 1970s and 1980s. As white allies to contemporaneous Black-led movements aga...

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, h...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t interviews Shiu-Yin Sharon Yam of University of Kentucky on the new book, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, 2019), which explores how intersecting networks of power—particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class—marginalize transnational subjects who find...

Burn It Down: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (Verso, 2020), Breanne Fahs has curated a comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos from the nineteenth century to today. Fahs collected over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, calling on feminists to act, be defiant and show their rage. This thought-provoking and timely collection includes not only popular manifestos often tau...

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-s...

You mean big business is good, contributes to our general welfare, and is not generally guilty--with notable exceptions--of all of the charges made against it? That's the argument libertarian economist Tyler Cowen makes in his book Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (St. Martins, 2019) Most NBN listeners will raise an eyebrow to that claim, but most of those same NBN listeners ar...

Polarization, a disaffected and frustrated electorate, and widespread distrust of government, media, and traditional politicians set the stage in 2016 for an unprecedented presidential contest. For many, Donald Trump’s campaign speeches and other rhetoric seemed on the surface to be simplistic, repetitive, and disorganized. In Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Texas A...

What is truly at stake in politics? Nothing less than how we should live, as individuals and as communities. This book goes beyond the surface headlines, the fake news and the hysteria to explore the timeless questions posed and answers offered by a diverse group of the 30 greatest political thinkers who have ever lived. Notably, they blur boundaries of ancient and modern, Western, Chinese and Isl...

In his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy. Democracy, as you may dimly recal...

How can we make sense of the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump? What forces moved American politics from the first African-American president and an all-Democratic Congress (2008) to ethno-nationalist rhetoric and GOP control of Congress (2016)? What do the reactions to these political events – the rise of the Tea Party and the Anti-Trump resistance – tell us about these, and future, pres...

Today’s right wing media has a long history that is largely unknown to its current listeners. In The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul Matzko details its emergence in the 1950s and the response to its rise by some of the leading political and religious institutions of the era. As M...

Americans are living through a social crisis, contends Yuval Levin in his 2020 book A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020) In Levin’s view, acrimony reigns in the media, both social and traditional. Public discussion of crucial policy matters has degenerated into finger-pointing....