Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchYaroslav Hrytsak, "Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation" (PublicAffairs, 2024)
Episode 920
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contempo…
1 year, 2 months ago
Danielle Leavitt, "By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)
Episode 921
An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukra…
1 year, 2 months ago
Stephan Kieninger, "The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz" (Routledge, 2018)
Episode 919
The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (Routledge, 2020) investigates the underlying reasons fo…
1 year, 3 months ago
John Man, "Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict" (Oneworld Publications, 2025)
Episode 917
China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from…
1 year, 3 months ago
James D. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025)
Episode 918
Richard Sorge is one of history’s most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanising, motorcycle-crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embassy…
1 year, 3 months ago
Paul W. Werth, "How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Episode 916
Paul W. Werth, How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History (Bloomsbury, 2025)
“Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big.” Thus Paul…
1 year, 3 months ago
Marlene Laruelle, "Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Episode 915
Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the…
1 year, 3 months ago
Kevin B. Anderson, "The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism" (Verso, 2025)
Episode 914
Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the int…
1 year, 3 months ago
Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth, "A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 912
In 2016 the United States was stunned by evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. But it shouldn’t have been. Subversion—domes…
1 year, 3 months ago
Tamar R. Shirinian, "Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia" (Duke UP, 2024)
Episode 913
Tamar Shirinian is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her new book, Survival of a Perverse Natio…
1 year, 3 months ago