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 m…

How can cultural organisations better support diversity? In Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector antonio c. cuyler, Professor of Music in Entrepreneurship & Leadership and Faculty Associate in Voice & Opera in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD), and Faculty Associate in the African Studies Center at the University of Mich…

Japan at War, 1914-1952 is a synthetic and interpretive history that highlights the centrality of war to the modern Japanese experience. The author argues that war was central to Japanese life in this period--the era when Japan rose and fell as a world power. The volume examines how World War I set off profound changes that led to the rise of a pol…

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kingston, Ontario poet Callista Markotich about her poetry collection, Wrap in a Big White Towel. Callista’s powerful first collection is an imperative: Wrap in a Big White Towel. When the spirit trembles, when imagination shrinks from a torched world, when empathy drowns you, protect yourself, seek solace. Then …

Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope (Summit Books, 2025) Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction, criticism, and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer prize, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus amo…

Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma Second Edition 2nd Edition by Charles A. O’Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman The second edition of this classic analyzes why mature organizations find it so difficult to innovate. This question has become ever more important as organizations face continuous disruptive changes. O’Reilly and Tush…

When Professor Asha Rangappa began posting online about the lessons she was teaching in the Yale University course on Russian intelligence and information warfare, the public took notice. Many reached out for a copy of the syllabus, and began lamenting that they couldn’t take her course. This led to the creation of a series of free lessons and pres…

Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Elise Franklin whose first book, Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France, was published by the University of Nebraska Press (2024). Distintegrating Empire examines the processes of decolonization through the intersecting histories of the French welfare…

It seems beyond doubt, since 9/11, that the main responsibility of intelligence and security services is to prevent ticking bombs from going off. The thing is, though, that the West has been confronted with international terrorism and domestic political violence throughout the 1970s as well. And although intelligence organizations countered terrori…

Psychiatry’s quest for credibility as a scientific discipline led it to adopt a disorder-label orientation in which mental conditions are categorized in terms of measurable behavioral criteria. In Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering personal narrative for a humanist science (Routledge, 2025) Şerife Tekin offers an alternative framework tha…

NBN host Hollay Ghadery talks with the wonderful poet Elizabeth Green about her most recent collection from Ekstasis Editions, No Ordinary Days is a book of shifting perspectives. It begins with a sense of limited beautiful days and a series of elegies for friends alive in memory but vanished into the stream of time. It opens into a consideration o…

In Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons (Beacon Press, 2025), urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept thei…

Intelligence is all around us. We read about it in the news, wonder who is spying on us through our phones or computers, and want to know what is happening in the shadows. The US Intelligence Community or IC, as insiders call it, is more powerful than ever, but also more vulnerable than it has been in decades. It is facing the threat of rival intel…

One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game (Princ…

An interview with Jean Ryoo and Jane Margolis about Power On! A diverse group of teenage friends learn how computing can be personally and politically empowering and why all students need access to computer science education. This lively graphic novel follows a diverse group of teenage friends as they discover that computing can be fun, creative, a…

Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries: Encountering Persecutors and Questioning Humanity (Routledge, 2024) uses an empathic reading of Yiddish diarists’ feelings, evaluations, and assessments about persecutors in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos to present an emotional history of persecution in the Nazi ghettos. It re-centers the daily experiences …

Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the next-door neighbors began a crusade to push them out. The two brothers followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her insi…

The present book contains a facsimile edition of a unique modern Kashmiri translation of five chapters from Cervantes’s famous Don Quijote. In this book the Kashmiri translation and the corresponding parts of Jarvis’s English version are presented on facing pages. The Kashmiri text is reproduced as a facsimile of the autograph prepared by Pandit Ja…

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Jack Wang about his novel, The Riveter (HarperVia, 2025). In the vein of All the Light We Cannot See, a cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII. Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to make a new life for himself. …

Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites. Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) demonstrates the significant impact of popular Rom…

The debate over the inclusion of gender diverse people in sport has become the latest battleground in the fight for basic human rights and equality. Trans and nonbinary people around the world are facing physical harm and violence—including death—at unprecedented rates. In Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes (Beacon Press, 2…

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Toronto author Teri Vlassopoulos, author of Living Expenses—a timely tale of reproductive health in an age of both technological and geographical distance. The novel has roots in Teri’s own struggle with infertility. More about Living Expenses: As the children of a single mother who immigrated fr…

The Spanish Civil War: A Military History takes a new, military approach to the conflict that tore Spain apart from 1936 to 1939. In many histories, the war has been treated as a primarily political event with the military narrative subsumed into a much broader picture of the Spain of 1936–9 in which the chief themes are revolution and counter-revo…

In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and …

Why has Libya fallen apart since 2011? The world has largely given up trying to understand how the revolution that toppled Muammar Gaddafi has left the country a failed state and a major security headache for Europe. Gaddafi's police state has been replaced by yet another dictatorship, amidst a complex conflict of myriad armed groups, Islamists, tr…

William L. Dawson (University of Illinois Press, 2024) by Gwynne Kuhner Brown is a biography of the Black American composer, conductor and pedagogue. She gives equal weight to the different aspects of Dawson’s career from his early training at Tuskegee Institute (now University) to his twenty-five years as director of choirs and composer at the sam…

Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Socie…