Mark Braude, "The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile" (Penguin Press, 2018)
I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more abo...
17 Aug 20251h 2min
Thomas Kemple, “Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. Inte...
16 Aug 20251h 13min
Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from enslavement, seven years hiding in an attic crawl spac...
16 Aug 20251h 12min
Inna Faliks, "Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage" (Backbeat Books, 2023)
Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic artists of her generation. She has made a name for ...
15 Aug 202545min
W. Henry Sledge, "The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed" (Knox Press, 2025)
Because events like D-Day and the Battle of Okinawa took place an entire lifetime ago, it is rare to find any new accounts and memories from veterans. Thankfully, forty years after the publication of ...
14 Aug 20251h 2min
Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)
The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity. Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the auto...
13 Aug 20251h 3min
Raffale Bedarida, "Corrado Cagli: Transatlantic Bridges (1938-1947" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)
As a Jewish and openly gay artist, Cagli became the target of virulent attacks, especially after Italy promulgated its racial laws in 1938. In response to these hostile conditions, Cagli chose to leav...
13 Aug 20251h 52min
Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at hi...
12 Aug 202543min
