Shai Held, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence” (Indiana UP, 2013)
In Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Indiana University Press, 2013), Shai Held, Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, offers a sympathetic, yet critical, exam...
16 Feb 201630min
Julie Des Jardins, “Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man” (Oxford University Press, 2015)
In anticipation of Super Bowl 50, Sports Illustrated and WIRED magazines teamed up to speculate about the state of football fifty years from now, at the time of Super Bowl 100. Of course, the big ques...
6 Feb 201656min
Sarah Maza, “Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris” (U. of California Press, 2012)
On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that uns...
18 Des 201549min
John Allen Paulos, “A Numerate Life” (Prometheus Books, 2015)
John Allen Paulos, who has accomplished the unheard-of double of writing best-sellers about mathematics and inserting a word (‘innumeracy’) into the language, has attempted another ambitious feat – br...
12 Nov 201553min
Megan Marshall, “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life” (Mariner Books, 2013)
Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor in writing, literature and publishing. Her book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Mariner Books, 2013) won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in...
8 Nov 20151h 5min
James E. Strick, “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” (Harvard UP, 2015)
“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in w...
6 Okt 20151h 9min
Minghui Hu, “China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen” (U of Washington Press, 2015)
Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This st...
15 Sep 20151h 4min
Kecia Ali, “The Lives of Muhammad” (Harvard UP, 2014)
Muhammad is remembered in a multitude of ways, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. And through each retelling we learn a great deal not only about Muhammad but about the social milieu of the authors. In ...
25 Aug 201551min
