NBN Book of the Day

The balance of global power changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, above all with the economic and political rise of Asia. Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century (Harvard UP, 2024) is a bold new interpretation of the period, focusing on the conflicting and overlapping ways in which Asians have conceived their bonds and their roles in the world. Tracking the circulation of ideas and people across colonial and national borders, Sugata Bose explores developments in Asian thought, art, and politics that defied Euro-American models and defined Asianness as a locus of solidarity for all humanity.Impressive in scale, yet driven by the stories of fascinating and influential individuals, Asia after Europe examines early intimations of Asian solidarity and universalism preceding Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905; the revolutionary collaborations of the First World War and its aftermath, when Asian universalism took shape alongside Wilsonian internationalism and Bolshevism; the impact of the Great Depression and Second World War on the idea of Asia; and the persistence of forms of Asian universalism in the postwar period, despite the consolidation of postcolonial nation-states on a European model.Diverse Asian universalisms were forged and fractured through phases of poverty and prosperity, among elites and common people, throughout the span of the twentieth century. Noting the endurance of nationalist rivalries, often tied to religious exclusion and violence, Bose concludes with reflections on the continuing potential of political thought beyond European definitions of reason, nation, and identity.

Sugata Bose is Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.
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In Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg presents a lively exploration of the medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance, as the perception of dancers changed from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil.

The devil’s cows, impudent camels, or damsels animated by the devil: late medieval and early modern authors used these descriptors and more to talk about dancers, particularly women. Yet, dance was not always considered entirely sinful or connected primarily to women: in some early medieval texts, dancers were exhorted to dance to God, arm-in-arm with their neighbors, and parishes were filled with danced expressions of faith. What led to the transformation of dancers from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil?

Drawing on the evidence from medieval and early modern sermons, and in particular the narratives of the cursed carolers and the dance of Salome, this book explores these changing understandings of dance as they relate to religion, gender, sin, and community within the English parish. In parishes both before and during the English Reformations, dance played an integral role in creating, maintaining, uniting, or fracturing community. But as theological understandings of sacrilege, sin, and proper worship changed, the meanings of dance and gender shifted as well. Redefining dance had tangible ramifications for the men and women of the parish, as new definitions of what it meant to perform one’s gender collided with discourses about holiness and transgression, leading to closer scrutiny and monitoring of the bodies of the faithful.

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.
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A sobering investigation of the rush for lithium for electric vehicles, the problematic history of lithium mining, and the consequences for sustainability.

Consumers today are buying electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries motivated by the belief that they are doing good and decarbonizing society. But is sustainable lithium extraction possible? In Living Minerals, Javiera Barandiarán examines the history of lithium mining and uses during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the two oldest brine-lithium mines: Silver Peak, Nevada, and Salar de Atacama, Chile, where lithium is found as one more element in a liquid mix of salts, minerals, and organisms.

For six decades, mining experts have failed to ask about water usage, about waste or brine leakage, and about the ecosystem impacts in delicate deserts. Instead, they have relied on various fictions about the size of reserves, the fate of leaked brine, or the value of waste in facilitating mine development. These fictions, rooted in brine-lithium’s material qualities, could be sustained thanks to powerful mining memories that celebrated resource nationalism. Unique in its historical and multidimensional approach to minerals and mining, based on the novel Rights of Nature paradigm, and using new archival materials from both Chile and the US, the book argues that decarbonizing society requires that we reckon with these realities—or risk deepening our dependency on an unsustainable mining industry.

Javiera Barandiarán is Associate Professor in the Global Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

Sandra Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. Her research relates to water- control projects implemented in a low- lying, deltaic region in South- West Indian state of Kerala called Kuttanad– which is dubbed as the state’s rice granary. She can be reached out on X
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Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Administration (and some contributed, as well, to the first Trump Administration.) While Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton UP, 2025) is about quite a few scholars and academics, it is written like a propulsive page-turner of a book. And Field takes us through all the of the ins and outs of the individuals who have pursued a path to power and policy development, often from positions in the Ivory Tower. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is truly fascinating, since it is not simply about egg-headed academics writing up white papers or books, or simply about presidential advisors and the way they have worked to influence the president or put particular policies into place. Instead, Field interrogates the construction of the ideas that have come to dominate this New Right, seeking their genesis and how these ideas, which are divided into three distinct but overlapping intellectual camps, have made their way to the Trump Administration, through Trump himself, Vice President J.D. Vance, and so many of the advisors and cabinet members who surround Trump.

Field’s training in political theory, especially Straussian political theory, contributes to her understanding and analysis of the individuals at the heart of the story in Furious Minds—and how these particular academics think, but in particular how they think about politics and political projects. The substance of Furious Minds is focused on the past decade or so of engagement between these various schools of thought and the Trump Administration—both while in elected office as well as during the out of office interregnum. At the same time, Field traces the deep origins of some of these schools of thought through the longer conservative tradition in the United States. In our discussion, we explore the Claremonters, the Postliberals, and the National Conservatives. Each group is populated by well-educated (PhDs, published authors, etc.) individuals (mostly men) who are urging a concept of the common good, as they define it, on to the American people, through the Trump Administration’s rhetoric, policies, institutional dispositions, cultural approaches, and general demeanor. Field takes all of these thinkers and ideas seriously, making the case for understanding both the ideas themselves and their origins, while also critiquing much of this by exposing the more extremist bases behind these paths of thinking as well as the people who are purveying them.

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a tour de force of the intellectual and political landscape that has brought us to the midst of the second Trump Administration and provides the reader with deep insight into the radical origins of the myths and concepts that are the backbone of the current Trump Administration and the current Republican Party.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She studied political theory at Kenyon College and Boston College. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China (Cambridge UP, 2025) challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the authors track governance of social media and commercial social credit ratings during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras. Their findings reveal how Chinese tech companies such as Tencent, Sina, Baidu, and Alibaba, have become consultants and insiders to the state, thus forming a state-company partnership. Meanwhile, citizens voluntarily produce data, incentivizing platform firms to cater to their needs and motivating resistance by platforms. Authors Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo unveil the intricate mechanisms linking the state, platform firms, and citizens in the digital governance of authoritarian states.

Daniela Stockmann is Director of the Centre for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School.

Ting Luo is an Associate Professor in Government and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master's program in International and Development Economics.
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