David Hayton, "Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier" (Manchester UP, 2019)
Acclaimed after the Second World War as England's greatest historian, Sir Lewis Namier was an eastern European immigrant who came to idealise the English gentleman and enjoyed close friendship with le...
14 Nov 20191h 17min
Wendy Wickwire, "At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging" (UBC Press, 2019)
The history of anthropology remembers James Teit as a field assistant and man-on-the spot for Franz Boas. But in At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (University of British Colum...
13 Nov 20191h 3min
Robert Mann, "Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon" (Potomac Book, 2019)
Throughout much of his career as an actor in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan identified as a passionate New Deal Democrat, yet by the time he turned to a career in politics in the 1960s he was a conservative...
12 Nov 201952min
Douglas R. Egerton, "Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America" (Basic Books, 2019)
John and Abigail Adams founded a famous political family, but they would not witness its calamitous fall from grace. When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow decline of the family’s poli...
12 Nov 20191h 42min
John Launer, "Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein" (Henry N. Abrams, 2017)
John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you ma...
11 Nov 201959min
Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" (Yale UP, 2019)
In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, p...
11 Nov 201947min
Noelle Giuffrida, "Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America" (U California Press, 2018)
Noelle Giuffrida’s book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018), tells the history of collecting and exhibitin...
9 Nov 20191h 21min
John Shelton Reed, "Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s" (LSU Press, 2012)
John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology (emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, has been observing the South for decades. This week he and Al Zambone talk about New Or...
7 Nov 201950min
