New Books Network

A memoir of a child’s forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin’s
Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face
of extraordinary hardship. 

In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on
her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a
train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote
Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman
conditions. Looking back, Ida shares their struggles: foraging for food,
trying to reunite with her imprisoned father, spending weeks in a
desolate hospital with typhoid fever, and adapting to shifts in the
political climate to make the long journey home to Poland.

Ida published this acclaimed memoir in her native Polish in 2011.
Here, Ida’s granddaughter, Isabella Skrypczak, translates her babcia’s
words and provides additional context—including describing the
remarkable life Ida has gone on to live as a pioneering doctor.

In the vein of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile (Disruption Books, 2026) chronicles
Ida’s experiences on a lesser-known front of the Second World War.
Together, Ida and Isabella reflect on how every small act of kindness
contributed to Ida’s liberation from exile and ability to build a life
and a family. Her story celebrates the capacity of the human spirit to
not only survive trauma but thrive beyond it.Ida
Kinalska-Pietruska survived childhood exile to Siberia during the Soviet
Union’s World War II assault on Poland. When she returned to Poland as a
teen, she began studying medicine. A pioneering endocrinologist, she
founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok and led
the region’s first endocrinology clinic for twenty years. Ida has
authored more than four hundred publications, mentored countless other
doctors, and collaborated across the international medical community,
including using her research to make widely known the Chernobyl
disaster’s effects on people’s endocrinological health. She has been
honored with the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland’s second-highest
civilian state award, and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles, reflecting
her resilience, brilliance, and global impact on science and humanity.Isabella Skrypczak
is an author, intuitive healer, and former HR professional in Big Tech
whose work bridges the seen and unseen. Born to Polish immigrants and
raised in Houston, Texas, she spent every summer with her grandmother in
Poland. When her grandmother’s memoir gained national attention in
Polish media, Iza felt called to translate it into English—an act of
love, remembrance, and advocacy. As war returned to Eastern Europe, she
recognized the urgency in sharing this history with the Western world.
She lives in Austin, Texas, with her daughter, Kamila.Stephen Satkiewicz
is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational
Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military
History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian
and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.
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The relationship between the Church and the world has been a subject of debate since the Church's earliest days. In ⁠A Church for a Secular World: The Development of Klaas Schilder's Ecclesiology⁠ (Brill, 2025), Marinus De Jong explores how Stanley
Hauerwas, with his emphasis on the Church as polis, made a significant
contemporary contribution—one that has also faced strong criticism. This
study examines the distinctive insights of second-generation
neo-Calvinist theologian Klaas Schilder (1890-1952) on this issue.
Neo-Calvinism is renowned for its development of Reformed theology,
particularly in this area, and Schilder builds on this tradition with a
critical eye. Engaging with the increasing secularity of the twentieth
century, he carefully interacts with Karl Barth's writings while
refining his own perspective. In doing so, Schilder's position comes
close to the Anabaptist stance of Hauerwas, yet remains firmly rooted in
the Reformed understanding of creation.

Marinus de Jong, Ph.D., is assistant professor of the theology of
neo-Calvinism at Theologische Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands. He
co-editedThe Klaas Schilder Reader: The Essential Theological Writings (Lexham, 2022).
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Idi Amin ruled Uganda between 1971 and 1979, inflicting tremendous
violence on the people of the country. How did Amin's regime survive for
eight calamitous years? Drawing on recently uncovered archival
material, Derek Peterson reconstructs the political logic of the era,
focusing on the ordinary people—civil servants, curators and artists,
businesspeople, patriots—who invested their energy and resources in
making the government work.

In A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda (Yale University Press, 2025), Peterson reveals how Amin (1928-2003)
led ordinary people to see themselves as front-line soldiers in a
global war against imperialism and colonial oppression. They worked
tirelessly to ensure that government institutions kept functioning, even
as resources dried up and political violence became pervasive. In this
case study of how principled, talented, and patriotic people sacrificed
themselves in service to a dictator, Peterson provides lessons for our
own time.

Derek Peterson is the Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan. His books include Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent and The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI.
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One of the things that stood out in my conversation with John Longhurst about his book Can Robots Love God and Be Saved? A Journalist Reports on Faith (CMU Press, 2024) was his seriousness about journalism itself. Longhurst understands the journalist's vocation not as providing
definitive answers but as asking good questions, paying close
attention, and engaging thoughtfully with the people and events that
shape our world.

Our discussion focused on a theme that runs throughout the book: if
religion's enduring strength lies not in providing final answers but in
sustaining meaningful questions, then what sustains belief amid
suffering, doubt, and uncertainty? Longhurst's work suggests that faith
often emerges not from certainty but from ongoing engagement with life's
deepest mysteries.

Rather than offering simple conclusions, Can Robots Love God and Be Saved? invites
readers into conversations about faith, technology, culture, politics,
and everyday life. It reminds us that religious questions remain central
to how many people understand themselves and the world around them. In
an age increasingly shaped by AI and our histories, these questions may
become even more important, not less so.

My
thanks to John Longhurst for joining me on the New Books Network and
for sharing insights drawn from a lifetime of careful observation,
thoughtful reporting, and persistent questioning. 

Amisah Bakuri (PhD)
is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and
Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research examines the
intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration,
particularly within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. In The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025), rooting her investigation in two central passages in the Qur’an and hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Fārābī, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierarchies of human nature. This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates.

Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande is Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago.

Host Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa focusing on issues in Sufism, theology, renewal, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast. He can be reached by email at: christian.andrewsen@pmb.ox.ac.uk
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