David Dayen, "Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story" (Strong Arm Press, 2018)
How did a Wall Street executive and “foreclosure king” like Steve Mnuchin become the Treasury Secretary for a populist like Donald Trump, and what is he doing to the country now that he’s there? David...
14 Jan 201935min
Andrew R. Murphy, "William Penn: A Life" (Oxford UP, 2018)
While William Penn’s name is one familiar to many Americans thanks to his founding of the Pennsylvania colony, this accomplishment can overshadow both his role as a leading 17th-century English Quaker...
14 Jan 20191h 2min
Joe Jackson, "Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary" (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016)
Black Elk witnessed some of the most monumental moments in the history of the Lakota and the Northern Great Plains: Red Cloud’s War, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the murder of Crazy Horse, Wounde...
11 Jan 20191h 8min
Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017)
While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geography o...
11 Jan 20191h 2min
Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine" (Scientific American, 2017)
Joseph Lister changed the world of medicine. In her book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Scientific American, 2017), Dr. Lindsey Fitzharr...
7 Jan 201945min
Andrew S. Curran, "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely" (Other Press, 2019)
Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains in h...
2 Jan 20191h 5min
R. David Cox, "The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee" (Eerdmans, 2017)
One of the most recent additions to the well-known and highly regarded Eerdmans series, the Library of Religious Biography, is The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Eerdmans, 2017), by R. David Cox, a ...
14 Dec 201840min
James R. Rush, "Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2016)
From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate. One of the central figures ...
13 Dec 201844min
