New Books Network

The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (Harvard UP, 2025), provides a detailed, research-driven survey of the gaokao, China's high-stakes college entrance exam. Authors Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li--past test-takers themselves--show how the exam system shapes schooling, serves state interests, inspires individualistic attitudes, and has lately become a touchstone in US education debates.  

Ruixue Jia is a professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. She also serves as co-director of the China Data Lab, executive secretary of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies (ACES) and co-chair of the China Economic Summer Institute (CESI).

Hongbin Li is the James Liang Chair, Faculty Co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford University. 

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master's program in International and Development Economics.
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

Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible (Bloomsbury, 2025) is an eye-opening book highlights the role of elites in constructing systems of persecution and extermination during the Holocaust. Being highly educated or living within a certain social class doesn't prevent us from being lured into destructive systems, especially when they operate to our benefit. The perception that the Holocaust was largely a crime carried out by ill-educated thugs acting on nationalistic hysteria and xenophobic prejudice is a myth. Leaders from many sectors of society, including industry, science, and religion came to support and enable the Nazi government, often due to the ways in which they were able to profit and benefit from the policies of persecution and genocide. With both a social science and historical approach, Lethal Elites highlights and assesses the ways in which the influence, training, and expertise of the most powerful and best educated were used in service to the genocidal agenda of the National Socialist Regime.
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 episode of Democracy Dialogues, co-host Maya Tudor speaks with Yogendra Yadav – political thinker, activist, and one of India’s most prominent voices on democratic reform. A former academic and party leader, Yadav has led influential research initiatives, built new political movements, and worked at the intersection of grassroots activism and national politics.

Their conversation explores the forces shaping India’s current democratic crossroads. Yadav reflects on global perceptions of India’s democratic decline, the meaning of its 2024 election results, and the interplay between national and state-level politics. He addresses the erosion of institutional independence – from the electoral commission to the media – and the growing impact of religious polarization on governance.

Drawing on decades of experience in social movements, Yadav considers what drives political mobilization, the role nationalism plays in supporting or undermining democracy, and the strategies citizens can use to protect democratic values in turbulent times.

From the “thousand small cuts” undermining India’s democracy to the enduring potential of grassroots activism, this episode offers both a candid diagnosis of India’s political challenges and a call to action for anyone committed to safeguarding democratic principles.
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

Higher education continually mediates long standing traditions while seeking new ways of thinking, creating a quiet tension as institutions respond to shifting and multiple socio-cultural values. Dance programs, not immune to these currents, must consider intersecting obligations to build a more equitable curriculum, meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population, and prepare students for a wider array of dance-based careers. In view of their critical role in stewarding the next generation of dance artists-educators-scholars-leaders and fostering change in higher education, faculty must give more attention to the experiences of those committed to dance in higher education.Stories We Dance / Stories We Tell: Essays on Dance in Higher Education (McFarland, 2025) articulates and considers these lived experiences, revealing the inner workings of dance in higher education. Autoethnographic essays varying in style and scope illuminate the pressures encountered across one’s career trajectory. By unearthing and contextualizing hidden challenges, expectations, and opportunities, the authors speak to possibilities for how proactive change in dance education can occur.
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

Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic (U Illinois Press, 2026) is the new book from Dr. Cassandra Shepard, Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. Published with University of Illinois Press, this encompassing and engrossing book focuses on the crises that have engulfed New Orleans, including the disasters of colonialism, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and COVID-19, taking the reader through their causes and impacts on not only a broad level but through the everyday and often traumatic experiences of the residents of New Orleans. The analysis moves from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, to state-level post-disaster reconstruction contracts, to international forms of colonialism, and even encompasses Beyonce. This book, which is also includes poetry and a recommended playlist, is also very relevant to the current global moment.

Shepard analyses the overlapping and intersecting disasters that have affected New Orleans through ideas of disaster capitalism and settler colonialism, demonstrating how Black and Indigenous peoples have been deprived of critical resources. The reconstruction processes following, and during, these crises have often sought to exploit the authentic New Orleans culture and vibrancy to further the consolidation of power, profit, and privilege of white elites, to the detriment of Black and Indigenous peoples. Shepard’s book, Settler Colonialism is the Disaster, takes a multi-scalar view of settler colonialism and investigates how it has not only operated historically in New Orleans, but clearly demonstrates that it is a continual process that still determines reconstruction, relief, and other projects today. Shepard connects the ongoing violence and dispossession inherent in settler colonialism within New Orleans, expressed through structural responses to Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, to other settler colonial projects around the world, such as in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia.

Cassandra Shepard’s new book is an exceptional, theoretically and empirically rich book that offers a new critique into ‘best practice’ reconstruction, which demands attention. Settler Colonialism is the Disaster offers an urgent, critical view of the political economy of reconstruction, aid, and government responses; a view which is crucial to take seriously in our world today, plagued as it is by crisis, war, and settler colonialism.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.
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