Grant Olwage, "Paul Robeson's Voices" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023) is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and ...
13 Sep 20241h 36min
Peter Rose, "The Good War of Consul Reeves" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)
Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in Ch...
12 Sep 202448min
Matthew C. Ehrlich, "The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice president and a famed physiologist dubbed “the cons...
11 Sep 202442min
Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)
In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected th...
8 Sep 202452min
Sara E. Johnson, "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023)
If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, a...
7 Sep 202442min
Tom Boniface-Webb, "Modern Music Masters: Oasis" (MMM, 2020)
In the first book in the Modern Music Masters series, Tom Boniface-Webb examines the Manchester band Modern Music Masters-Oasis (MMM, 2020). Founded in 1994 and playing together until their spectacula...
7 Sep 20241h 11min
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France" (Duke UP, 2018)
The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in...
6 Sep 202458min
Mark Blake, "Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
An illuminating deep-dive into everything Fleetwood Mac--the songs, the rivalries, the successes, and the failures—Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac (Pegasus Books, 2024) evokes the band's entir...
6 Sep 202452min
