エピソード

  • Linda M. Clemmons, "Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876" (SDHS Press, 2023)

    Linda M. Clemmons, "Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876" (SDHS Press, 2023)
    2024/12/22
    For much of her life, Angelique Renville had decisions made for her. Where to live, who to live with, where to attend school, what to do with her land. That changed in 1863 when she made a plan and successfully hatched her plan to escape, living the end of her life on her own terms. This is the story Dr. Linda Clemmons tells in Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876 (South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2023). Hers is a story, yes, of defeat and loss, but also so much more than that. Of a young woman carving her own path through a world in flux, and finding space to make choices even when those choices are limited. And it's a story with afterlives, as the web of connections created by Renville during her life continued even after her untimely death in 1876. As a work of biography, Unrepentant Dakota Woman does not pretend to speak for all Dakota women, or even all 19th century Dakota women born into fur trade families, but does show how one life can both embody the historical forces that shape our stories, and how our choices can overcome even the strongest headwinds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    57 分
  • Joseph McBride, "George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Joseph McBride, "George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    2024/12/21
    The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a "woman's director"-a thinly veiled, disparaging code for "gay"-he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, "All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that's your stamp." In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph McBride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor's actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. McBride shows that Cukor's seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor's wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director (Columbia UP, 2024) gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves. Joseph McBride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and the Coen Brothers. He acted for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind and has won a Writers Guild of America award. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 57 分
  • Paul French, "Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

    Paul French, "Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
    2024/12/19
    When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced U.S.-born fiancee of King Edward VIII, they often highlighted her year spent in China—often sharing scurrilous, and poorly-sourced–if not entirely unfounded–details of her time there. China historian Paul French tries to set the record straight with Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St. Martins: 2024). Simpson managed to have a jam-packed year, with time spent in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, as different warlords fought for control of China. Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He received the Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. Both Midnight in Peking and his latest book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir are currently in development for film. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Her Lotus Year. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    48 分
  • Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)
    2024/12/15
    Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans. The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women's roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai's world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home. Bringing to life the hospital visits, food shortages, local sociability, Jewish observances, sounds and sights of nearby battles, and the very personal ramifications of emancipation and its aftermath for her household and family, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a valuable and distinct look at a unique historical figure from the waning years of the Civil War South. Dianne Ashton was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Hanukkah in America: A History and Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America. Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920; Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940; Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925; and Ballet Class: An American History. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    59 分
  • Emanuela Trevisan Semi, "Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual, Between Colonized and Colonizers" (Centro Primo Levi, 2018)

    Emanuela Trevisan Semi, "Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual, Between Colonized and Colonizers" (Centro Primo Levi, 2018)
    2024/12/14
    Emanuela Trevisan Semi’s Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual, Between Colonized and Colonizers (Centro Primo Levi, 2018) is an insightful biographical study of a key figure among Ethiopian Jews of the early 20th Century. Taamrat Emmanuel was profoundly fascinated by European Jewish culture, by Western thought, and by Italy’s language and customs. …His free spirit, his independence and critical thinking, his suspicion of power, his sarcasm, and his irony flowered and were nurtured during his years in Italy as a young man. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 38 分
  • David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician" (Penn State UP, 2024)

    David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician" (Penn State UP, 2024)
    2024/12/12
    David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, 2024). Albert the Great (1200–1280) was a prominent Dominican friar, a leading philosopher, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He also endorsed the use of magic. Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert’s reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimately to his canonization by the Catholic Church in 1931. But his thoughts about magic have been debated for centuries. Disenchanting Albert the Great takes Albert’s contested reputation as a case study for the long and complex history surrounding the concept of magic and magic’s relationship to science and religion. Over the centuries, Albert was celebrated for his magic, or it was explained away—but he was never condemned. In the fifteenth century, members of learned circles first attempted to distance Albert from magic, with the goal of exonerating him of superstition, irrationality, and immorality. Disenchanting Albert the Great discusses the philosopher’s own understanding of magic; an early, adulatory phase of his reputation as a magician; and the three primary strategies used to exonerate Albert over the centuries. In the end, Disenchanting Albert the Great tells the story of a thirteenth-century scholar who worked to disenchant the natural world with his ideas about magic but who himself would not be disenchanted until the modern era. This accessible and insightful history will appeal to those interested in Albert the Great, Catholic Church history, the history of magic, and Western understandings of the natural and the rational over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 7 分
  • Beth Kaplan, "Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin" (Syracuse UP, 2007)

    Beth Kaplan, "Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin" (Syracuse UP, 2007)
    2024/12/12
    Born of an Anglican mother and a Jewish father who disdained religion, Kaplan knew little of her Judaic roots and less about her famed great-grandfather until beginning her research, more than twenty years ago. In Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (Syracuse UP, 2007), Kaplan describes the commune he founded and led in Russia, his meteoric rise among Jewish New York's literati, the birth of such masterworks as Mirele Efros and The Jewish King Lear, and his seething feud with Abraham Cahan, powerful editor of the Daily Forward. Writing in a graceful and engaging style, she recaptures the Golden Age and colorful actors of Yiddish Theater from 1891-1910. Most significantly she discovers the emotional truth about the man himself, a tireless reformer who left a vital legacy to the theater and Jewish life worldwide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 9 分
  • Rebecca Brenner Graham, "Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany" (Citadel Press, 2025)

    Rebecca Brenner Graham, "Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany" (Citadel Press, 2025)
    2024/12/10
    She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. “Immigration problems usually have to be decided in a few days. They involve human lives. There can be no delaying,” Perkins wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .” Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act. Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025) adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story, revealing at last how one woman tried to steer the nation to a better, more righteous course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    46 分