W. K. Stratton, "The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
On June 18, 1969, "The Wild Bunch" premiered to critical success. Over the past 50 years it has been rightly recognized as one of the landmark films from the end of the Hollywood studio system. Yet it...
3 Jan 202458min
James O'Toole, "The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good" (HarperBusiness, 2019)
Is the University of Chicago-blessed, "greed is good" near-term profits approach to business wearing out its welcome? James O'Toole's The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers...
1 Jan 202452min
Khurram Hussain, "Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
Delighting in Khurram Hussain’s consistently sparkling prose is reason enough to read his new book Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). But ...
1 Jan 202458min
Craig Keener, "Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels" (Eerdmans, 2019)
Are the canonical Gospels historically reliable? The four canonical Gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these Gospels were intentional in how they handled histo...
31 Dec 202341min
Michael Braddick, "The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2018)
As historical topics, political revolutions come in and out of fashion. At the moment the American Revolution as an ideological struggle engages the public, but historians are less sure. Books that us...
30 Dec 202328min
Erika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)
Today I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (McG...
30 Dec 202356min
Ralph H. Craig, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner" (Eerdmans, 2023)
When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is ...
29 Dec 20231h 3min
Joseph Vogel, "James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era" (U Illinois Press, 2018)
By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pushe...
28 Dec 202337min
