Episodios

  • Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

    Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
    Nov 10 2025
    In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the stories of those most knowledgeable about it: veterans who were incarcerated after their military service. Combining a thorough historical narrative with the oral histories of veterans who had been imprisoned after their return to civilian society, Dr. Higgins shows how the so-called war on drugs and war on crime intersect with the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Through this history he shows how government policies built on racism, ableism, and patriarchy contributed to many young Americans being pushed into the military, punished during their service, and then being kicked out with no access to any type of support which then leads them into the carceral system. Dr. Higgins also tells the story of how incarcerated veterans helped organize amongst themselves leading to Veterans Treatment Courts which have helped reduce the number of veterans going into prison and also show a model for non-punitive responses to crime. Prisoners after War has been awarded the Oral History Association's book award for 2025. It is available open access: https://uplopen.com/books/m/35... Jason Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and Press and an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Virginia Tech University Library and the Department of History. You can find a transcript of this interview here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 2 m
  • Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

    Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
    Oct 31 2025
    When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and political news to busy business executives, and the newsletter's readership grew exponentially over the coming decades. More than just a pioneering business journalist, Kiplinger emerged as a quiet but powerful link between the worlds of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, and used his Letter to play a little-known but influential role in the New Deal. Part journalism history, part biography, and part democratic chronicle, The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) offers a well-written and deeply researched portrayal of how Kiplinger not only developed a widely read newsletter that launched a business publishing empire but also how he forged a new role for the journalist as political actor." Rob Wells is is visiting associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Kavya Sarathy is a Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Marketing Intern for the University of Massachusetts Press. She is currently a political Staff Writer at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    23 m
  • Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

    Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
    Oct 26 2025
    Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X. The book was a Kirkus Nonfiction Book of the Year for 2024, a Spectator best book of the year, and a finalist for the 2025 ASALH book prize. In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth. Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life (1925–1965). Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced. Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture. In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    26 m
  • Carlene Kucharczyk, "Strange Hymn: Poems" (U Mass Press, 2025)

    Carlene Kucharczyk, "Strange Hymn: Poems" (U Mass Press, 2025)
    Oct 25 2025
    "I'll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell," confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn: Poems (U Mass Press, 2025) by Carlene Kucharczyk, in a meticulously crafted lyrical journey exploring morality and humanity. The poems here grapple with understanding physical loss: "I wanted / to know at once and definitively our animal bodies / were not all we were. It is shameful to be this fragile." They also engage with the more abstract slipping away of memory and time: "Since I was born, I have been forgetting. Forgetting what I have wanted to remember." Kucharczyk's insightful poems blur the lines between history and myth, love and grief, song and silence.Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, "I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights." Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking "Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?"As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, "After I'm gone, don't bury my body-- / Burn it, and turn it into song." Source: Publisher Kavya Sarathy is a Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Marketing Intern for the University of Massachusetts Press. She is currently a political Staff Writer at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Kavya has always enjoyed reading, writing, and engaging with literature in any form, and is thrilled to be in conversation with these authors through the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    22 m
  • Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

    Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
    Jul 30 2025
    When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women's movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality. In Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures--Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area--to Harvard, MIT, and other universities--to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women's movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers' comments about women in science thirty years later. Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world. Christa Kuljian grew up in the Boston area, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for the past thirty years. She is a science writer and the author of Sanctuary and Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, which was short listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Currently a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University, she is also a fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Medicine and Technology (CHSMT) in Philadelphia. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 1 m
  • Cynthia Blakeley, "The Innermost House: A Memoir" (Bright Leaf, 2024)

    Cynthia Blakeley, "The Innermost House: A Memoir" (Bright Leaf, 2024)
    Jul 24 2025
    The Innermost House: A Memoir (Bright Leaf, 2024) is a stunning account of year-round life on the windswept shores of Cape Cod, threaded with meditations on memory, forgetting, and identity. About The Innermost House, Publishers Weekly writes, “Salt air and the limits of memory animate this heartrending debut. . . . Readers will be captivated.” Shelf Awareness calls the book “Enthralling” adding that “Blakeley is an evocative writer who captures the lush beauty of a ‘half feral’ childhood spent immersed in the natural world while never losing sight of the precarity and violence that permeated it.” Foreword Reviews calls the book “a distinctive memoir with a keen sense of place and renewal.” Raised in a nineteenth-century saltbox house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cynthia Blakeley was both surrounded by generations of immediate and extended family and isolated by the mysteries locked inside her affectionate yet elusive mother and short-fused father. While she and her sisters and cousins roamed the Outer Cape—drinking in the dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, and dancing in Provincetown—Blakeley also turned to the inner world of her journals as she contended with her own secrets and memories. Over-identifying with her unconventional and artistic mother, Blakeley felt certain that the key to understanding her mother’s drinking and distractions, her generosity and easy forgiveness, was the unexplained absence of two of Blakeley’s half-siblings and their connection to her mother’s unhappy first marriage. Blakeley kept her distance, however, from her disciplinarian father. Though he took his daughters sailing and clamming and beachcombing, he was the chill to their mother’s warmth, the maker, not the breaker, of rules. Slipping through these dynamics in that small house and evocative landscape, Blakeley eventually crossed the bridge and left home, only to return later in search of the family stories that would help her decode her present. Blakeley’s captivating memoir moves fluidly through time, grappling with the question of who owns a memory or secret and how our narrative choices not only describe but also shape and change us. In this insightful and poignant account of tenacious year-rounders on Cape Cod, Blakeley contends that making sense of ourselves is a collaborative affair, one that begins with understanding those we came from. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 m
  • Tom Waidzunas et al., "Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times" (UMass Press, 2025)

    Tom Waidzunas et al., "Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times" (UMass Press, 2025)
    Jul 11 2025
    Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This inclusion, however, has come at a cost. In the 1970s, these professionals sought to radically transform STEM fields by confronting the homophobia and sexism embedded within them. Instead, these fields became more corporatized and privatized, and STEM institutions and workspaces—particularly in the spheres of government and business—became dominated by a focus on individualism, self-improvement/advancement, and meritocracy, which are hallmarks of neoliberalism. For many LGBTQ STEM professionals, inclusion now required becoming more apolitical, pro-capital, and focused on professional development.In Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025), Dr. Tom Waidzunas, Dr. Ethan Czuy Levine, and Dr. Brandon Fairchild explore this transformation of LGBTQ STEM professionals from oppositional outsiders to assimilationist insiders. Drawing on historical archives, oral interviews, and participant observation of professional societies and workspaces, the authors interrogate the meanings of “inclusion” and why some LGBTQ STEM professionals have benefited from it more than others. They also advocate for a “queer STEM” that challenges and transforms the racism, classism, sexism, cisheterosexism, and imperialism of these fields, institutions, and workspaces. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Out Doing Science will appeal to readers interested in LGBTQ studies, and science and technology studies, as well as anyone who wants to create a more diverse and inclusive work environment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 6 m
  • Myra Mendible, "American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)

    Myra Mendible, "American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)
    Jun 10 2025
    Even with the availability of new forms of storytelling, the memoir remains as one of the favored ways for combat veterans to tell their stories about war for a public eager to know. In American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), Dr. Myra Mendible examines how combat veterans use the memoir to tell their stories of war and to engage in political conversations about war itself. Using memoirs by US veterans of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Dr. Mendible shows how these "true fictions" can shape knowledge about war, how veteran-writers use the "politics of credibility," the aesthetics of war and silence, and the often-ignored political function of the war memoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 m