Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThomas Aiello, "Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)
Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta (U Nebraska Press, 2025) tells the story of Muhammad Ali’s return to the rin…
4 months, 4 weeks ago
Betty Boyd Caroli, "A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Betty Boyd Caroli's biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is the first full-length work on a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which…
5 months ago
Duy Lap Nguyen, "Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as…
5 months ago
Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick: An Odyssey" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
Episode 183
The definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of t…
5 months ago
Ben Ratliff, "Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening" (Graywolf Press, 2025)
Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Run…
5 months ago
Andrew Burstein, "Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently revil…
5 months, 1 week ago
Christopher Lynch, "Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that they…
5 months, 1 week ago
Oline Eaton, "Finding Jackie: The Second Act of America's First Lady" (Diversion Books, 2023)
Episode 145
In her new book, Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented (Diversion Books, 2023), scholar and writer Oline Eaton examines the story of an era's biggest "st…
5 months, 1 week ago
Giles Tremlett, "El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco" (Oxford UP, 2025)
From a scrawny, overlooked military graduate to the youngest general in Europe, Francisco Franco was known for his ambition, talent and calculated ri…
5 months, 1 week ago
Everything Is Fine, I'll Just Work Harder: Confessions of a Former Badass
In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the …
5 months, 1 week ago