John Hardman, "Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen" (Yale UP, 2019)
Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new acco...
11 Mar 20201h 15min
Al Posamentier, "Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians" (Prometheus, 2020)
Today I talked to Alfred S. Posamentier, a co-author (with Christian Spreitzer) of Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians (Prometheus, 2020). This charming book is more than just...
10 Mar 202056min
Larry Wolff, "Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe" (Stanford UP, 2020)
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's influence on the remapping of bor...
6 Mar 202058min
Rebecca E. Zietlow, "The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman ...
5 Mar 202053min
Mort Zachter, "Red Holzman: The Life and Legacy of a Hall of Fame Basketball Coach" (Sports Publishing, 2019)
Many books have been written about Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusscherre and the other great players on the New York Knicks championship teams of the 1970s, though much less atten...
4 Mar 202038min
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
In Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sarah Abrevaya Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of one...
28 Feb 202050min
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMast...
25 Feb 202042min
Sohaira Siddiqui, "Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
In her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analysis ...
21 Feb 202044min
