Ben Rothenberg, "Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice" (Dutton, 2024)
In July 2021, Naomi Osaka—world number 1 women’s tennis player—lit the Olympic Cauldron at the Tokyo Olympic Games. The half-Japanese, half-American, Black athlete was a symbol of a more complicated, ...
7 Mar 202443min
Edda Fields-Black, "Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom t...
7 Mar 20241h 35min
The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You
Today’s book is: The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You (Catapult, 2020), by Dina Nayeri, a book which asks “what is it like to be a refugee?” There are more than 25 million refugees i...
7 Mar 202457min
Jessica Hooten Wilson, "Flannery O'Connor's 'Why Do the Heathen Rage?' A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress" (Brazos Press, 2024)
When celebrated American novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor died at the age of thirty-nine in 1964, she left behind an unfinished third novel titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? Scholarly e...
5 Mar 202435min
Jean-Manuel Roubineau, "The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The ancient philosopher Diogenes--nicknamed "The Dog" and decried by Plato as a "Socrates gone mad"--was widely praised and idealized as much as he was mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculp...
4 Mar 202430min
Yaniv Feller, "The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought (Cambridge UP, 2024) discusses the life and work of Leo Baeck (1873–1956) the rabbi, public intellectual, and the official leader o...
3 Mar 20241h 3min
Peter Harmsen, "Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing" (Casemate, 2024)
In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks, hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners...
28 Feb 20241h 14min
Judith Pearson, "Crusade to Heal America: The Remarkable Life of Mary Lasker" (Mayo Clinic Press, 2023)
Mary Woodard Lasker had a singular goal: saving lives by increasing medical research. Together with her husband, advertising genius Albert, they created the Lasker Foundation, bestowing the Lasker Awa...
27 Feb 202458min
