Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.
On March 26, JP published “Arendt on Oases” the last of three short pieces about Hannah Arendt in Public Books (following “Against Anticipatory Despair” and “Arendt’s Refugee Politics”).
Listen here to the article read aloud, an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.
John is joined by the brilliant and affable Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt (The Blood of Government) to discuss Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. With Christine A. Desan (Recall This Book adores her) he is the co-director of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. This builds on his marvelous previous work about the global cotton trade.
John wants to know about the importance of the state as money-maker and underpinner of markets. Paul asks about the key historical ruptures; the conversation goes back a millennium to traders in Aden and in China. Together Paul and Sven speculate on the role violence plays inside the “free” market that capitalist exchange established and now somewhat remarkably sustains. The singular turning-point of the late 19th century (which Sven decided to present in three interwoven chapters) comes in for sustained attention.
Mentioned in the Episode
Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (2014)
Ursula Le Guin “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” (National Book Foundation Medal speech 2014)
Ferdinand Braudel Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (1979)
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)
In Recall This Book’s second episode (January 2019) John and Elizabeth spoke with their brilliant Brandeis colleague, the MacArthur-winning neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano, about a number of different facets of addiction. The conversation seems as timely as ever.
What makes an addiction to a morning constitutional different from–or similar to–an addiction to Fentanyl? What are the biological and social factors to consider? Should the addict be thought of in binary terms, or addiction as a state that people move into and out of? They contemplate these questions through biological, anthropological, and literary lenses, drawing on Marc Lewis, Angela Garcia, and Thomas de Quincey. Late in the episode, there’s also a Sprockets joke. Then, in Recallable Books, Gina recommends David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure, Elizabeth recommends When I Wear My Alligator Boots by Shaylih Muehlmann, and John recommends Sam Quinones’s Dreamland.
Discussed in this episode:
Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease
Angela Garcia, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar
Shaylih Muehlmann, When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands
Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic
The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose-built institutions? To others, we already have a template. Didn’t Michel Foucault long ago show us that prisons as they exist now–in all their horror, in all their commitment not just to jail people before trial but also to imprison them afterwards–come about only in the modern episteme, concomitant with capitalism and all sorts of attendant evils?
Actually, nope. Prisons are as old as the Romans and very likely much older than that. In Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (California, 2025). Mark Letteney (a U Washington historian who wrote The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity)directs excavations in a legionary amphitheater) and Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen, author of Gospels before the Book) document an ancient and durable prison system system with five key features: Centrality, surveillance, separation depth, and punitive variability.
Their RTB conversation explores key aspects of that system and its present-day legacy or parallels. Yet it ends on a note of cautious optimism from Letteney: just because we don’t find a prison-free world in ancient Rome is no reason to give up the struggle. Whatever better solution to societal safety and rehabilitation awaits us in the future, it must be something we ourselves set out to build anew.
Mentioned
Michel Foucault’s foundational Discipline and Punish (1975)
Adam Gopknik reviews Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration in The New Yorker
The Rules of Ulpian (3rd century jurist)
Wengrow and Graeber’s foundational and heavily debated The Dawn of Everything (2021).
G Geltner Medieval Prison
Spencer Weinreich’s work on solitary confinement)
Erving Goffman Stigma (1963) and Asylums (1961)
Livy (eg in his History of Rome on prisons and prisoners
Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson.
Libanius (on the abuse of Prisoners)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead
Samuel Delany Tales of Neveryon.
In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”
Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”
Mentioned in the Episode
When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generlaly and France especially, the infamous fin de siecle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus–like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past.
Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.
The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930’s–but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.
From Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating “Franco-French War” about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.
Mentioned in the episode
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1844)
George Eliot’s (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)
Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?
The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation–and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.
The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.
Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.
America’s racial “one drop” rule.
Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.
Listen and Read Transcript here.
As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John’s 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about The Drama of Celebrity, her tour-de-force account of how stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly scrapbooked by adoring fans.
They tackle a question at least as old as Sarah Bernhardt: who or what makes a star? Rather than crediting star making to the culture industry, to fans, or to star themselves, Sharon makes the case that all three forces together constitute a celebrity creation machine.
Continue reading “163* The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)”For our Pandemic-era Books in Dark Times series, RTB spoke in 2020 with Carlo Rotella of Boston College. Rotella is the author of such gems as Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt and most recently has come out with What Can I Get out of This? along with some sparkling related pieces about AI in the classroom.
Carlo is always worth listening to, in dark days… and darker ones, too. He starts by praising sagas, makes a case for stories of disagreeableness and plugs a remarkable book about preaching, deception, and the urge to belong.
Continue reading “162* Carlo Rotella’s Books in Dark Times (JP)”One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a “Behind the Screen” premiere at the storied West Newton cinema.
John’s “Arendt’s Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an opponent both of identity politics and also of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called “We Refugees“, he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins.
Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.
Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off!
In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham (Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016).
Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places–and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering “the one word that gets you killed”?
Continue reading “159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)”Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie.
When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedyhas provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them “collective repertoires”) for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.
RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon).
Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart will have you thinking again.
Continue reading “156* Recall This B-Side: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart””An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing.
Lesley and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough.
Continue reading “155 Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt’s Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)”With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.
All of that, though, only prepared the ground for The Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.
Continue reading “154* Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson (Elizabeth Miller, JP)”John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair” in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt.
Half a century ago, in “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent–not just in how America’s campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance.
Continue reading “153. What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)”In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists’ prior expectations.
The three discuss what it means to have an emergent and residual shticks; differences between how you prepare to talk to undergraduates and your peers matter, and the three agree that going in without any expectations of your audience makes for a weaker presentation. Imaginary interlocution makes for better pre-gaming.
Continue reading “152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)”Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up–we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why?
To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the Spring 2025 Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference. Their discussion began with the idea that agreeing to give papers is an act of “externalized self-promising” and ranged across the reasons that floating ideas before our peers is terrifying, exhilarating and ultimately necessary.
Kristin Mahoney‘s books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti ‘s first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don’t need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession.
Mentioned in the episode
Theosophical Society in Chennai
Jiddu Krishnamurthi in his early life was a not-quite-orphan child guru for Besant.
Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies on grand theorizations of race by folks like Acton
Adorno’s Minima Moralia provides Nasser with an important reminder oF the importance of “hating tradition properly.”
H G Wells, The Time Machine and its modernist aftermath eg in the opening pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and in Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors and The Good Soldier, which is in its own peculiar way a time-travel novel.
The three discuss Foucault’s notion of capillarity a form of productive constraint, which Nasser uses to characterize both early 20th century Orientalism, and the paradigms of postcolonialism that replaced it,
Paul Saint Amour’s chapter on Ford Madox Ford is in Tense Future.
John Guillory on the distinctions between criticism and scholarship in Professing Criticism; the rhizomatic appeal of B-Side Books.
The “hedgehog and the fox” as a distinction comes from a poem by Archilochus—and sparked Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay of the same name.
Pamela Fletcher the Victorian Painting of Modern Life .
Back in 2019, John spoke with the celebrated comic novelist Stephen McCauley. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve–his latest is You Only Call When You’re in Trouble, but John still holds a candle for his 1987 debut, Object of My Affection, made into a charming Jennifer Aniston Paul Rudd movie. And there is no comic novelist Steve loves better than Barbara Pym, a mid-century British comic genius who found herself forgotten and unpublishable in middle age, only to roar back into print in her sixties with A Quartet in Autumn. Steve and John’s friendship over the years has been sealed by the favorite Pym lines they text back and forth to one another, so they are particularly keen to investigate why her career went in this way.
In the episode, they talk about some of these favorite sentences from Pym, and then turn to the comic novel as a genre. They talk about the difference between humorous and comic writing, the earthiness of comedy, whether comic novels should have happy or sad endings, and whether the comic novel is a precursor to, or an amoral relief from, the sitcom. They also discuss some of Steve’s fiction, including his Rain Mitchell yoga novels. In Recallable Books John recommends Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell and Steve recommends After Claude by Iris Owens.
Discussed in this episode:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
“The Beast in the Jungle,” Henry James
The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber
The Group, Mary McCarthy
After Claude, Iris Owens
Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell
An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym
Less than Angels, Barbara Pym
The Sweet Dove Died, Barbara Pym
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
The Sellout, Paul Beatty
My Ex-Life, Stephen McCauley
You can listen here or read here.
Recall This Book 