Episodios
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From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) is powerful memoir of redemption from the son of blues legend John Lee Hooker.
Born in Detroit and exposed to the music world from an early age, John Lee Hooker Jr. began singing as a featured attraction in his father's shows as a teenager. His father was a sharecropper's son who became known for hit songs like "Boogie Chillin," "I'm in the Mood," and "Boom Boom," and in 1972, he and his father performed live and recorded an album in Soledad Prison. Junior seemed to have a golden ticket to a successful music career as a child, but trouble brewed as his father's marriage was in trouble and ripped apart the family.Drug addiction and a series of related crimes, including as a con player, landed Junior in and out of jails & prisons for several decades. An early brush with the law led to a sentence at Synanon, the infamous drug rehabilitation program turned religious cult. Later arrests resulted in time served in prisons including at Soledad, San Quentin, and Avenal.Shot, stabbed, and convicted multiple times, Junior was at his lowest point doing time at a Santa Rita jail, but it was at that moment that he found the Lord. He emerged clean and sober and began a successful career as a blues singer, earning two Grammy nominations as well as the Bobby "Blue" Bland Lifetime Achievement Award. He eventually devoted himself fully to his faith. Reverend John Lee Hooker Jr. testifies, preaches, and performs gospel music in churches and prisons in both Germany and America.
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More than any one institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.
In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation.
This eighth and final episode covers the life and times of the current chair, Jerome ("Jay") Powell - the technocratic lawyer-turned-banker who managed the global economy through two unprecedented disasters: the Covid pandemic and Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policies. As the episodes about Martin, Burns, and Volcker all attest, Powell isn't the first chairman to face political blowback. But he is the first to be publicly denounced as “Mr Too Late” and a “major loser” by a president intent on removing him from office before his term ends in mid-2026.
To discuss Powell, Tim is joined by Nick Timiraos, author of Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic and Prevented Economic Disaster (Little, Brown, 2022).
“If people think you're not going to act in the country's best interest, that's bad for the Fed,” he says. “The next time the Fed decides it needs to do something that actually is ‘exigent and unusual’, people will say: ‘Well, wait a minute, the last time you did this, we thought you were a toady for the Democrats or a toady for the Republicans. We don't think you're a straight shooter. We're not going to let you raise interest rates by 25 basis points. We're not going to give you money to backstop your purchases of corporate credit’. Those are the kind of medium and long term risks from a fight with the White House. I think, for Powell, the worst outcome is that people don't think you have an independent central bank anymore. Your monetary policy won't be credible. Why not just roll that thing into the Treasury Department if that's what you're going to do?”
Since 2017, Nick Timiraos has been the chief economics correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and has developed an unrivalled reputation as the "Fed whisperer".
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¿Faltan episodios?
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More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.
In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation.
The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke’s successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022).
“Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”.
In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He’s still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm.
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More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.
In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation.
Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan’s big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010).
“It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”.
Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed.
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More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.
In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation.
The first episode of the second series explores Alan Greenspan, the chairman who followed Paul Volcker and ran the Fed from 1987 until 2006. Once bestowed with “Maestro” status, Greenspan – who turns 100 in March 2026 – has seen his reputation deflate in the wake of the post-2008 financial crisis. To discuss the fallen Maestro, Tim is joined by Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (Bloomsbury, 2016).
“Greenspan was the man who knew,” says Mallaby. “He was the man who knew that bubbles were extremely destructive, and yet he was not the man who acted against those bubbles. So, whilst he was great on inflation and on stabilising the price of eggs, he was not good on asset-price inflation or stabilising the price of nest eggs”.
A former journalist at The Economist and the Washington Post, Mallaby is the prize-winning author of The World's Banker – a portrait of the World Bank under James Wolfensohn – and More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite. He is now the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Chris Stowers, longtime photographer, credits a fellow journalist for the title of his latest memoir, Shoot, Ask...and Run (Earnshaw, 2025). The journalist’s advice to a young Chris, just starting out, went like this.
Shoot: Take the photo when the opportunity arises. Then, if someone notices that you took a photo, “ask” for permission to use the photo. Finally, if the subject seems annoyed, “run”...particularly if he or she has a gun.
Shoot, Ask...and Run is the second memoir from Chris Stowers, who previously joined the podcast to talk about his first memoir, Bugis Nights (Earnshaw: 2023). Chris is a photojournalist based in Asia. He has traveled, lived and worked in more than seventy countries. His work has appeared in most major international newspapers and magazines, among them: Time, Newsweek, The Economist, Forbes, Businessweek and The New York Times.
Listen to Chris’s first interview, on Bugis Nights!
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign oneself to obscurity, writing only for “the desk drawer” or “without permission.”
Vasily Grossman challenged that binary choice, creating some of the most compelling and uncompromising fiction and journalism of the century, but also enduring heartbreaking censorship. Her excellent new biography, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (Yale University Press, 2019) brings the life and work of this often-overlooked writer into brilliant focus. Biography of a writer — particularly one with Grossman’s output — can be tricky to pull off, but Popoff’s extensive research is elegantly arranged into a very readable narrative, in which we follow Grossman through the harrowing experiences of witnessing first hand, famine in the 1920s, the Terror of the 1930s, the carnage of World War II, and the dull ache of censorship in the post-war Soviet Union.
Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.
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Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-brother Sir Charles Stewart has received far less attention despite his own prominent part in the politics and diplomacy of those years. In War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era: Sir Charles Stewart, Castlereagh and the Balance of Power in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Reider Payne describes the adventurous life of the third Marquess of Londonderry and the roles he played in the events of his time.
As a young man Charles Stewart initially pursued a career in the military rather than one in politics, and served in the cavalry during Great Britain’s war against revolutionary France in the 1790s. After a brief period in the War Office he resumed his military career and served with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. His record as an officer and his relationship with his half-brother led to his appointment as an ambassador – first to Prussia, then to Austria – in which roles he represented Britain at the courts of her most prominent allies during the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars. Though Charles was often better known for his social escapades, he served ably as Britain’s ambassador to Austria until his brother’s suicide in 1822, during which time he was active in both post-Napoleonic diplomacy and the efforts to collect incriminating evidence against Princess Caroline of Brunswick in aid of the Prince Regent’s effort to divorce her.
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In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022) explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics.
Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin’s personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies—the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors—but detested their ideas even more.
Geoffrey Roberts is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. A leading Soviet history expert, his many books include an award-winning biography of Zhukov, Stalin’s General, and the acclaimed Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.
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We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (U Notre Dame Press, 2025) brings together ten of Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most memorable and consequential speeches, delivered in the West and in Russia between 1972 and 1997.
Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this volume straddle this period of exile, contemplating the materialism prevalent worldwide—forcibly imposed in the socialist East, freely chosen in the capitalist West—and searching for humanity’s possible paths forward. In beautiful yet haunting and prophetic prose, Solzhenitsyn explores the mysterious purpose of art, the two-edged nature of limitless freedom, the decline of faith in favor of legalistic secularism, and—perhaps most centrally—the power of literature, art, and culture to elevate the human spirit.
These annotated speeches, including his timeless “Nobel Lecture” and “Harvard Address,” have been rendered in English by skilled translators, including Solzhenitsyn’s sons. The volume includes an introduction to the speeches, brief background information about each speech, and a timeline of the key dates in Solzhenitsyn’s life.
Ignat Solzhenitsyn is a pianist and conductor based in New York City. The middle son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he is translator and editor of several of his father’s works in English.
Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics.
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Kayla E.’s Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics, 2025), is an experimental graphic memoir drawn in a style that references the aesthetics of mid-century children’s comics and tells the story of a childhood shaped by maternal emotional dysregulation, rural poverty, and incest. The author’s childhood is portrayed as a collection of short-form comics and gag panels punctuated by interactive elements like paper dolls, satirical advertisements, games, and puzzles.
While the work is concerned with violence and a particularly Texan brand of Pentecostal fanaticism, it is presented in a playful visual language with a deadpan humor that elevates the material beyond mere graphic memoir. Precious Rubbish is a landmark work of comics storytelling and graphic medicine.
The debut graphic novel from artist Kayla E., Precious Rubbish asks the reader to do the extratextual work of filling out narrative gaps, which mirrors the challenge of trauma recollection. The reader is invited to co-labor in the meaning-making process, an exercise that facilitates an intimacy (between the author, the subject, and the reader) that is at once horrifying and hilarious.
Please note that this interview discusses issues of trauma including sexual violence, incest, and addiction.
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Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story (Barrelhouse Inc., 2025) is a genre-bending expedition into childbirth. Seamlessly blending memoir, fiction, and research into the fraught history of birth—from midwives to Victorian-era sedation through the Natural Childbirth Movement and modern L&D suites—Frontier lays bare visceral truths that are too often glossed over, and offers an incisive look at the momentous and terrifying transformations of motherhood. As she prepared to give birth to her first child, Erica Stern envisioned the idyllic experience promised by prenatal classes and diaper commercials. But when unexpected complications arose during labor, she found herself at the threshold of life and death, a liminal space that connected her to generations of mothers before her. From the chaos of the delivery room, Frontier opens into a parallel narrative: a Wild West ghost story. There, a mother who didn’t survive the ordeal of childbirth roams her old homestead, tethered to the family she left behind. In this otherworldly hybrid memoir, Stern careens between this haunted past and the present horror of the hospital as she waits for her own son to wake up in the NICU.
Erica Stern’s work has been published in The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received support for her writing from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A New Orleans native, she lives with her family in Evanston, Illinois.
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A haunting image of an unnamed Native child and a recovered story of the American West In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified.
As The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West (Princeton University Press, 2025) goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects. Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion. She follows Gardner from his birthplace in Scotland to the American frontier, as his dreams of a utopian future across the Atlantic fall to pieces. She recounts the lives of William S. Harney, a slave-owning Union general who earned the Lakota name “Woman Killer,” and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist who led the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. And she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in Gardner’s photograph, whose life swerved in unexpected directions as American settlers pushed into Indian Country and the federal government confined Native peoples to reservations. Spinning a spellbinding historical tale from a single enigmatic image, The Girl in the Middle reveals how the American nation grappled with what kind of country it would be as it expanded westward in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Martha A. Sandweiss is professor emerita of history at Princeton University, where she is founding director of the Princeton & Slavery Project.
Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.
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Raoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy (Lund UP, 2024) examines important events in the life of the Swedish diplomat, but this is not a traditional biography. Starting from Wallenberg’s time in Budapest during 1944–1945, the book analyses how Wallenberg went from being a highly sensitive topic in Swedish politics to becoming a personification of humanitarian effort during the Holocaust, as well as a ‘brand’ in Swedish foreign politics. Fictional portrayals of Wallenberg are another essential feature. Looking at the many ways in which his life has been represented in monuments, on opera stages, in a television serial, and in a feature film, it becomes apparent that scholarly historical perspectives have not set the agenda for engagement with Wallenberg. Finally, this study raises a vital issue: how can Wallenberg’s memory be kept alive as the distance to those events with which he was so powerfully connected recede into the background?
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John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result.
In John Cale’s Paris 1919 (Bloomsbury, 2025), Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale's most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York - of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol - that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale's life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved.
Mark Doyle is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (2020), Communal Violence in the British Empire (Bloomsbury 2016), and Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God (2009).
Mark Doyle on Bluesky.
Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025).
Bradley Morgan on Bluesky.
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In this captivating memoir, journalist Karen A. Frenkel unravels her parents' and sole surviving grandparent's secret, riveting stories of survival during World War II.
How do you shatter the silence that muffles family stories when those who knew what happened are gone?
In Family Treasures: Lost & Found (Post Hill Press, 2025), journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Karen A. Frenkel, investigates her parents' unspoken WWII stories. Readers accompany Frenkel on her quest and discovery of how her resourceful parents survived on the run from the Nazis. Her research leads to shocking revelations of one parent's trans-Atlantic escape to Mexico and New York, and how the other eluded capture throughout Eastern and Central Europe with false papers. Having scoured online and real-world archives and visited the relevant cities, Frenkel honors her parents, her sole surviving grandparent, and her lost relatives, who cease to be mere names and who she came to respect and love. The tale Frenkel weaves is both personal and universal, as we begin to feel that her family could be ours.
Frenkel also shares her refugee great-grandparents' rare and huge collection of stunning oil and pastel portraits, photos, and documents, which were discovered in 1968 in garbage bags. Most Holocaust families lost everything, but these cherished artifacts reveal the Jewish assimilated culture in Kraków and Berlin that the Nazis obliterated. Readers also join Frenkel on her visit to Vienna, Kraków, Tarnów, and Lviv, Ukraine, where the action took place.
Such astonishing tales of survival, resistance, luck, and loss have the power to captivate readers of all generations and backgrounds and inspire them to explore their own family histories.
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Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, in Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press, 2025) Dr. Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value.
In this original and provocative book, Dr. Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Dr. Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Eufrasia Burlamacchi (Getty Publications, 2025) by Dr. Loretta Vandi is a timely exploration of the skilful illuminated manuscripts of Sister Eufrasia Burlamacchi (1478–1548) demonstrates her artistry within this sometime neglected artistic medium. Within the convent walls of San Domenico in Lucca where she lived and worked, Burlamacchi attained high levels of artistic proficiency through her knowledge of drawing and colour technique, composition, treatment of space and proportions.
This book highlights that Sister Eufrasia was aware of the progress illumination underwent in contact with the artists we now include in the High Renaissance. She quickly established a style which she then passed on to younger sisters to establish a convent workshop where mutual exchange was the norm. Here, for the first time, Eufrasia Burlamacchi is recognized and discussed as an influential and gifted artist in her own right.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Seán Creagh was born in County Monaghan in 1977. He attended Our Lady’s Secondary School in Castleblayney and later on Dundalk Institute of Technology. After moving to the U.S and developing an intense interest in Irish-American history he attended Northeastern Illinois University where he achieved an Honors Degree in History as well as Honors in Education. Today he is a middle school Social Studies teacher in Illinois.
His first book was The Wolfhounds of Irish-American Nationalism. Listen to an interview on that here.
In this interview he discusses his second book entitled Republican Solipsist, recently published with Peter Lang
Republican Solipsist: The Life and Times of Joseph Mcgarrity, 1874-1940 (Peter Lang, 2025) discusses the life of Joseph McGarrity and his role within Irish and Irish American Republicanism including the complicated transatlantic relationship between two opposing visions of an independent Ireland. McGarrity’s militant Republicanism came into regular conflict with the reality of the political situation in Ireland. While the role of John Devoy has been well documented in the development of Irish American nationalism in the form of Clan na Gael that of Joseph McGarrity has been less well analyzed. For many historians the central focus of Irish American nationalism during the revolutionary period of 1916–1923 has centered on the Devoy-controlled branch of Clan na Gael. However, this period saw significant influence from McGarrity and the Philadelphia branch of the movement in shaping political events in Ireland which has been largely ignored. The book places McGarrity at the center of Irish Republicanism during one of the most critical periods of its history. It is hard to imagine how militant Irish Republicanism would have evolved had it not been for the role and influence of this long-neglected figure in Irish history.
Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.
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In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. I was newly arrived to New York City when I began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man barely out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. I had decided I was going to be a fiction writer and while ignorant of what that might entail, I understood writers lived in New York. From the start, Kusy’s seemed the perfect place for a budding writer looking for life experience, a singular, endlessly entertaining circus. When I interviewed Red, my old boss at Kusy’s in October of 2013, the first thing he said was, “I wish now I had a tape recorder and had just recorded every day down there. Just the fucking stories alone, the shit people came up with every day, the insanity of that place.”
It’s also the story of a young couple fresh from the Midwest making a life together. We were college sweethearts, seduced by the glamour and excitement of the East Village, its fashion model roommates, conceptual art openings, and junkies lined up outside bombed out buildings. We tried to live with an intensity that could only lead us to ruin. The Heart is Meat (Oil on Water Press, 2025) is a re-creation of a mythic time and place in New York City that can never exist again, an evocation of a vanished attitude, a pre-networked American Romanticism.
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