NBN Book of the Day

• Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2025)

  From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonisation. Rao takes readers on a journey through South Africa, England, the US, Ghana, India, Australia, and Scotland, revealing how statue controversies have dramatically rearranged the canon of anticolonial political thought. By examining these debates through a personal and literary lens, Rao addresses the multifaceted issues of justice, cultural memory, and belonging. The Psychic Lives of Statues (Pluto Press, 2025) examines both the toppling of colonial statues and the raising of postcolonial ones, demonstrating that the statue form as a medium of representation and a bid for immortality is by no means obsolete. Engaging with artists, scholars, and activists, Rao provides fresh perspectives on how societies grapple with and reinterpret the past and present through iconography. About the Author:  Rahul Rao is a Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. He is the author of two books – Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010) and Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020), both published by Oxford University Press. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective. About the Host:  Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

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• Bryan Caplan, "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing" (Cato Institute, 2024)

  Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.’ Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free’ parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

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• Luca Trenta, "The President's Kill List: Assassination and Us Foreign Policy Since 1945" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

  Investigative reporter Bob Woodward once noted that assassination was the Scarlett letter of American politics because targeted killings challenge the image of the United States as a liberal democracy and the driving force behind a rules-based international order. In his new book, Luca Trenta documents how assassination and assassination attempts have been a persistent feature in US foreign policy. The US government has relied on a variety of direct methods as well as more indirectly laying the groundwork for local assassins.  Using primary documents and interviews, The President’s Kill List meticulously documents how policymakers decided on assassination and the level of Presidential control over these decisions. The book analyzes the evolution of assassination policies and reveals how successive administrations - through private justifications and public legitimations - ensured that assassination remained an available tool. The podcast includes insightful comments on assassination and the Trump administration. The paperback is coming out in May 2025. Dr. Luca Trenta is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. His previous publications include an earlier book, Risk and Presidential Decision-making: The Emergence of Foreign Policy Crises (Routledge, 2016) and he hosts Out of the Shadows, interviewing authors and experts in intelligence and covert operations. In his public-facing scholarship, Dr. Trenta has appeared in a History Channel documentary called Secret Wars Uncovered (2020) and he regularly contributes to and collaborates with media outlets such as the BBC. Mentioned: Joseph Burkholder Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (1976) John Frankenheimer, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) The Ford-Colby-Kissinger meeting is at page 35 here and Luca’s story about the meeting is here “Family Jewels” document of CIA employee responses to James Schlesinger asking to report activities outside CIA charter (1973) Rebecca Sanders, Plausible Legality: Legal Culture and Political Imperative in the Global War on Terror (2018) The Church Committee Report (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976) Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History (2024) Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2008) Tim Weiner, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century (2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

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• Kobi Kabalek, "Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

  In Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (U Wisconsin Press, 2025), Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country's population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within Germany, by contrast, rescuers are often presented in both scholarship and public commemoration as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do. Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were "forgotten" after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German politics from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of "majority" and "collective" were articulated and reformulated. Kobi Kabalek is Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Penn State University, since 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, with a dissertation on “The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany” (2013). In 2014-2017 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as part of the ERC project “Experience, Judgment, and Representation of WWII in an Age of Globalization,” and examined conflicting perspectives concerning the war in Mandatory Palestine and their impact on the postwar historiography of Israel and Zionism. Former editor of The Journal for Holocaust Research and assistant editor of History & Memory. His research focuses on historical perceptions, moral sentiments, and memory in film, literature, auto/biography, oral narratives, art, etc., in German, Israeli, and global Holocaust history. He currently explores marginalized and extreme phenomena in Holocaust testimonies, historical writing, and popular culture – with special attention to the role of fantasy, imagination, and horror – and their impact on our understanding and representation of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

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  58:12
• Mark Neocleous, "Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police" (Verso, 2025)

  Today I talked to Mark Neocleous about his new book Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso, 2025). For more than two decades, Neocleous has been a pioneer in the radical critique of policing, security, and warfare. Today we will discuss his newest work on the theory and practice of pacification, which, he argues, is “social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace.” Pacification not only aims to counter resistance to capitalist exploitation, dispossession, and displacement, but it aims to prevent such resistance from emerging in the first place by constructing social institutions and the built environment. Pacification is a totalizing process by which states deploy social policies, symbolic practices, and coercive operations in order to produce cooperative – or at least acquiescent – subjects. However, pacification never succeeds in obscuring the antagonistic nature of capitalist social relations. Consequently, pacification becomes an endless social war for peace. Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London. His previous books include A Critical Theory of Police Power (reissued by Verso in 2021), The Politics of Immunity (Verso, 2022), and War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh 2014). As a member of the Anti-Security Collective, he co-authored the Security Abolition Manifesto, which is available at anti-security.org.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

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