Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds. Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

8 Jan 42min

Surveillance is everywhere today, generating data about our purchasing, political, and personal preferences. Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024) shows how surveillance makes people visible and affects their lives, considers the technologies involved and how it grew to its present size and prevalence, and explores the pressing ethical questions surrounding it. David Lyon is former Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Law, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

8 Jan 59min

This empowering book blends history, storytelling, and culturally grounded techniques to equip readers with the tools needed to promote self-reflection, personal growth, and diasporic healing. Asian Americans represent the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, yet few books capture how historical events, immigration experiences, cultural values, and unhelpful generational patterns contribute to this group's thoughts, attitudes, and actions in ways that impact relationships, well-being, and psychological health. In Patterns That Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. Stacey Diane Arañez Litam empowers readers to heal from diasporic wounds and become people, partners, and parents who embody abundance mentalities grounded in joy, balance, and gratitude. This unique book combines complex and nuanced facets of Asian American history, research, and therapeutic modalities in ways that validate Asian American worldviews and promote a deep sense of universality and community. Each chapter addresses culturally relevant topics among Asian Americans and children of Asian immigrants and is informed by academic research in addition to author-conducted interviews with diverse Asian American community members and thought leaders. The book effortlessly blends history, storytelling, and culturally grounded perspectives to provide an inspirational, validating, and practical framework toward healing. Informed by Litam's lived experiences as a Filipina and Chinese immigrant as well as by her professional identities as a professor, researcher, and mental health clinician, Patterns That Remain provides the foundation for timely conversations and centers the importance of healing, personal growth, and unlocking the power behind our stories. Dr. Stacey Diane Leetam is an Associate Professor of Counselor Education, a licensed professional clinical counselor and supervisor, as well as a diplomate and clinical sexologist with the American Board of Sexology. Dr. Litam is a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board, an Advisory Council Chair for the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) Minority Fellowship Program, and was named one of Crain’s Cleveland 40 Under 40 in 2023. Dr. Litam has published over 50 academic peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and facilitated hundreds of workshops and trainings. Her work has resulted in a total of 15 national and 12 regional/state awards. She is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on the impact of COVID-19 related discrimination on the mental health and wellbeing of disaggregated AAPI communities and communities of color with 17 publications archived in the World Health Organization’s Global Database on COVID-19 literature. Dr. Litam is a keynote speaker, racial equity strategist, and content expert on topics related to mental health, sexual wellbeing, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), as well as Asian American and Pacific Islander concerns. She regularly serves as a content expert on platforms such as Forbes Health, National Public Radio (NPR), and media outlets. Additionally, she has been featured in the White House, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Forbes Health, National Public Radio (NPR), Discovery Magazine, Dutch BBC, Psychology Today, National Institutes of Health, Mental Health Academy, The Daily Mail, The Filipino Channel, as well as in podcasts, documentaries, and news outlets. Her past partners include Fortune 500 Companies, professional sports teams, and federal level politicians. Dr. Litam is an immigrant and identifies as a Chinese and Filipina American woman. Visit Dr. Litam's website here and find information on her upcoming book tour here Follow her on Instagram @drstaceyalitam Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is Assistant Editor at the New Books Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

8 Jan 26min

As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Adam Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal - arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence. Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. But this is a book about resistance, considering black liberation movements in the 20th century while utilising a decade of activist research covering spontaneous rebellion, campaigns and protest in the 21st century. Drawing connections between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, it is argued, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalisation. Black Resistance to British Policing is a must read for all those who are interested in the history of the British Empire, its enduring legacies, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. Adam Elliot-Cooper is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence. Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

7 Jan 59min

How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, charts the history of schools, colleges, and universities. The book charts the tension between demands for democracy and the defence of meritocracy within both elite and public discourses, showing how this tension plays out in Britain’s complex and fragmented education system. Offering an alternative vision to the popular memory and perception of education, a note of caution about the power of education to cure social inequalities, and a celebration of public demand for high quality education for all, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in understanding education in contemporary society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

6 Jan 39min

Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that people make. As Devin Fergus, Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History, Black Studies, and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, shows in Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class (Oxford University Press, 2018), these perfectly legal fees are buried deep within the verbose agreements between vendors and consumers – agreements that few people fully read or comprehend. The end effect, Fergus argues, is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few: large banking corporations, airlines, corporate hotel chains, and other entities of vast wealth. Fergus traces the fee system from its origins in the deregulatory wave of the late 1970s to the present, placing the development within the larger context of escalating income inequality. He organizes the book around four of the basics of existence: housing, work, transportation, and schooling. In each category, industry lobbyists successfully influenced legislatures into transforming the law until surreptitious fees became the norm. The average consumer is now subject to a dizzying array of charges in areas like mortgage contracts, banking transactions, auto insurance rates, college payments, and payday loans. The fees that accompany these transactions are not subject to usury laws and have effectively redistributed wealth from the lower and middle classes to ultra-wealthy corporations and the individuals at their pinnacles. By exposing this predatory and nearly invisible system of fees, Land of the Fee will reshape our understanding of wealth inequality in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

5 Jan 43min

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biological fact but as a socially-constructed role that has evolved over time. Historically, given assumed paternal uncertainty, fathers were defined in terms of their behavior (acting like a father) or their relationship to a child’s mother (being married to a woman made a man the father of her offspring). In the twentieth century, paternity testing developed as a way to scientifically determine male progenitors, although these new methods never replaced older ways of reckoning paternity. Milanich describes blood tests and other early techniques proffered by doctors and scrutinized by courts as a way to know the “true” father. Paternity testing, she points out, has been used to different ends in different societies: it could identify an errant progenitor or reveal a mother’s liaison. A certain paternity test result could mean economic security for a child or put a person’s life in jeopardy. Moreover, Milanich reveals the uneven application of paternity testing that has tended to protect the most privileged groups in different societies. Paternity is a transatlantic study that moves from South America to Europe and the United States, and its chapters touch upon the histories of science and medicine, gender and the family, and immigration. The podcast features fascinating case studies set in Brazil and Argentina. This book’s reflections on the making of modern paternity speak to our own time, when, for example, the U.S. government is using DNA testing at the border to separate “real” kin from “fictitious” families, as Milanich explains to podcast listeners. The stakes of knowing the father go far beyond determining biological progenitors, and this book vividly reconstructs the political uses and cultural implications of the paternity test. Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

4 Jan 1h 6min

Cuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of strategies not just for survival but for the invention of expressive practices and community-building spaces. Enduring years of Special Period economics and a transition away from Fidel Castro’s leadership as well as shifting political contexts in Latin America, the United States and Europe, Cubans continue to struggle but also find ways to flourish.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

4 Jan 43min