Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick: An Odyssey" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
The definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of the groundbreaking filmmaker. The enigmatic and elus...
6 Feb 202457min
Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer, "Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War on Slavery" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023)
A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814-71) waged a far more personal and radical wa...
5 Feb 20241h 14min
Elizabeth Varon, "Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
An authoritative biography of the controversial Confederate general, who later embraced Reconstruction and became an outcast in the South. It was the most remarkable political about-face in American h...
4 Feb 202428min
Michael O'Malley, "The Beat Cop: Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish Music" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chica...
3 Feb 202459min
John J. Michalczyk et al.. "Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Holocaust: A Prelude to Genocide" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler’...
27 Jan 20241h 55min
Gregor Gall, "Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero " (Manchester UP, 2024)
In the summer of 2022, the little-known leader of a small union became a ‘working-class hero’. Facing down media pundits who thought they could walk all over him, he offered a robust critique of the g...
27 Jan 20241h 6min
Paul D. Barclay, "Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising" (Eastbridge Books, 2023)
Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising (Eastbridge Books, 2023) is a gripping and revealing account of the colonial Japanese era in Taiwan, focusing on t...
22 Jan 202459min
Catherine Powell-Warren, "Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Jana Byars speaks with Catherine Powell-Warren about Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century (Amsterdam Universit...
22 Jan 202449min
