New Books Network

About Mark Klobas

NBN Episodes hosted by Mark:

Biography December 1, 2020

The Life of William Faulkner

This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962

Carl Rollyson

Hosted by Mark Klobas
By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood. As Carl Rollyson details in The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), this led to an itinerant life divided between Mississippi and Hollywood. Rollyson shows how his encounters with the politicized writers and European refugees …
History December 1, 2020

Isolationism

A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World

Charles A. Kupchan

Hosted by Mark Klobas
In the past few years isolationism, which had long been derided in the national discourse, has been making a comeback as a political force. In Isolationism: A History of America’s …
Biography November 16, 2020

Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez

The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star

Kat D. Williams

Hosted by Mark Klobas
For many of its participants, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) offered them an opportunity to change their lives, yet few were as transformed as that of Isabel “Lefty” …
British Studies November 9, 2020

The Bloody Flag

Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution

Niklas Frykman

Hosted by Mark Klobas
The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In …
World Affairs October 21, 2020

The New Twenty Years' Crisis

A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019

Philip Cunliffe

Hosted by Mark Klobas
At the end of the 20th century, the liberal international order appeared unassailable after its triumph over the authoritarian challenges of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Twenty years later, however …
European Studies October 16, 2020

All the Horrors of War

A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen

Bernice Lerner

Hosted by Mark Klobas
One was a teenage Jewish girl, forcibly transported from her home in Hungary to a Nazi concentration camp. The other was a British doctor, whose experiences serving in two world …
British Studies October 5, 2020

The First Serious Optimist

A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics

Ian Kumekawa

Hosted by Mark Klobas
The work of Alfred Cecil Pigou may not be as well known to people today as that of his contemporary John Maynard Keynes, but as Ian Kumekawa details in his …
British Studies September 29, 2020

Churchill's Hellraisers

The Secret Mission to Storm a Forbidden Nazi Fortress

Damien Lewis

Hosted by Mark Klobas
On the night of March 27, 1945, a small group of partisans and British soldiers from the elite Special Air Service (SAS) stormed two villas in northern Italy that were …
Music September 18, 2020

A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany

Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69

Julia Sneeringer

Hosted by Mark Klobas
The Beatles’ sojourn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg during the early 1960s is part of music legend. As Julia Sneeringer reveals in A Social History of Early Rock …
British Studies September 11, 2020

Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening

Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939

Simon J. Potter

Hosted by Mark Klobas
In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote …
Biography September 11, 2020

Political Godmother

Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party

Meg Heckman

Hosted by Mark Klobas
Despite her nearly two decades as the publisher of the largest newspaper in a politically pivotal state, the role of Nackey Scripps Loeb in American political and media history has …
British Studies September 1, 2020

An Introduction to John Owen

A Christian Vision for Every Stage of Life

Crawford Gribben

Hosted by Mark Klobas
Though theology is often regarded as dealing primarily with abstract issues of belief, the prolific 17th-century English Puritan John Owen focused much of his attention on the role of Christian …