New Books Network

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island (Bloomsbury, 2025), archeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

Mike Pitts is a writer and broadcaster, archaeologist and former museum curator. His books include A Fairweather Eden: Excavations at Boxgrove, Hengeworld, Digging for Richard III, Digging up Britain, and How to Build Stonehenge. He has also written for almost all of the important British newspapers - the Guardian, Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, New Scientist, BBC History Magazine, Spectator and other papers and magazines - and conduct original research and publish in peer-reviewed journals. He also edited British Archaeology magazine for 20 years and is a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this second episode of Season 5, I interview Dr. Reece Edmends, a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, and a junior faculty member in the Classics Department at Princeton University.

Drawing on his recent PhD dissertation, “‘Liberation’ in Augustan Propaganda” (2025), we discuss the fall of the Roman Republic, the empire that Caesar Augustus forged, as well as the other fascinating figures in this story, from Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony to Brutus and Cicero.

The transcript for this interview will be available on our new Substack page. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play (MIT Press, 2026) follows an array of bouncing balls through the histories of nonelectronic and electronic games, across the spectrum of play, game, and sport, and into the domains of physics, material science, animation, and computing. The book’s focus on bounce sidesteps the focus on play found in much of the game studies literature and broadens the scope of game history by spotlighting an interaction that is central to thousands of physical and digital games and sports. The book is divided into three sections that introduce different kinds of bounce to address the matter of the ball, the virtuality of bounce, and bounded spectacle: Ricochet in ancient tennis is set against modern tennis’s true bounce; squash and stretch in animation serves as a mirror of the pings and pongs of computer bounce; and the bounce feel in Electronic Art’s FIFA video game series and pok ta pok of the Mesoamerican game ulama elaborate the contrasting positions of these two mythological games.

Carlin Wing is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Scripps College.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?

In The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (FSG Press, 2025), the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.

Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

Guest: Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and other publications. She was born and grew up in Detroit.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connected to major developments in the “new science” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, precious and semiprecious stones were at the center of dramatic shifts in natural knowledge in early modern Europe. They were used to investigate luminescence, electricity, combustion, chemical composition, and more. They were collected by naturalists; measured by mathematicians; and rubbed, burned, and dissolved by experimental philosophers. This led to the demise of the traditional way of classifying gems—which grouped them by transparency, color, and locality—and the turn to density, refraction, chemistry, and crystallography as more reliable guides for sorting these substances.

The science of gems shows that material evaluation was as important as material production in the history of science. It also shows the value of seeing science as the product of the interaction between different material worlds. The book begins by bringing these insights to bear on five themes of the Scientific Revolution. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with a major episode in early modern science, from the expansion of natural history in the sixteenth century to the emergence of applied science early in the nineteenth century. This important work is not only the first book-length history of the science of gems but also a fresh interpretation of the Scientific Revolution and an argument for using a new form of materialism to understand the evolution of science.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network