New Books Network

The Rediscovery of George "Nash" Walker: : The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America (SUNY Press, 2025) is the first biography dedicated to the life and cultural contributions of this actor, writer, and producer who revolutionized Black American theatre during the early twentieth century. In 1892, Walker left his hometown with a medicine show and quickly formed a partnership with comedian Bert Williams that would last nearly eighteen years. Under the moniker of “The Two Real Coons,” Williams and Walker used their comedy to erode the stereotyped White image of minstrel-style “cooning.” Their theatrical company produced many popular plays, including Clorindy/A Lucky Coon (1899–1900), Policy Players (1900–1901), Sons of Ham (1901–1902), In Dahomey (1902–1905), Abyssinia (1905–1906), Bandanna Land (1907–1909), and Mr. Lode of Koal (1909–1910), even performing on Broadway and abroad. An activist at heart, Walker insisted that audiences receive carefully curated Black entertainment, told from a uniquely Afro-American perspective. Unfortunately, Walker contracted syphilis and was forced to retire in 1909, marking the end of the first golden age of Black theatre. Despite his landmark contributions, Walker’s story has been largely forgotten. Drawing on archival resources, newspaper accounts, memoirs, oral histories, and manifestos written by Walker, this book celebrates the accomplishments of the vanguard generation of Black artists who were active between the close of the Civil War and the start of World War I.
Daniel Atkinson’s research and commitment to the legacy of George Walker and his generation is deep and authentic. Listen in on this fantastic conversation and check out also previous episodes with Dr. Cheryl Thompson and Es-pranza Humphry, both scholars of this era. And when you’re finished, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack where we continued our conversation.
Daniel E. Atkinson is an independent scholar who earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington where he specialized in Afro-American music and culture. You can find Daniel on Instagram and LinkedIn.
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What is magic, and why does it keep returning in new disguises? For a special Halloween episode, host Ryan Shinkel is joined by essayist and novelist Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature, Here in Avalon, Strange Rites, and Self-Made, to trace the Western esoteric tradition from the Renaissance to the present. Burton describes learned magic as the search for hidden correspondences between things, a humanist project that promised not union with God but the chance to become godlike through secret knowledge.
The conversation follows that promise through Ficino’s Hermetic translations at the Medici court, the 19th-century occult revival and its turn from proto-science toward art, reaction, and the unstable self, and the American arrival of New Thought, which gave us manifesting. Along the way: why the technocratic class keeps finding itself at the center of the magical worldview, what the tradition’s two-tier esotericism has in common with the noble lie, and how occult imagery shaped modern propaganda. Burton also discusses how her own search for beauty led her to Anglo-Catholicism, whether demons can possess a chatbot, the nature of charisma, and what a human writer can offer that a large language model cannot.

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El Salvador Reborn: Abortion, Environment, and the Politics of Survival in a Postwar Nation ( examines the nation’s efforts to reshape its identity after the Peace Accords amid declining Cold War tensions. The book explores activism in postwar El Salvador by focusing on two key organizations, Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto and Foro del Agua, highlighting their political strategies during a critical moment in El Salvador’s formation.
Linton-Villafranco makes the case for a holistic conception of life that integrates land, body, and community sovereignty, weaving reproductive justice with environmental activism to promote a broader, interconnected understanding of life and rights in El Salvador.
Mellissa Linton-Villafranco is an assistant professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation, where she also coordinates the LGBT Studies Certificate.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself stripped of status, freedom, and certainty. As president of Carolco Pictures, Hoffman helped steer an era-defining slate that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Rambo, navigating a world of massive egos, creative brilliance, and financial brinkmanship. But ambition has its cost. After the industry turns, legal battles mount, and a federal conviction leads to imprisonment, Hoffman is forced into a confrontation far more exacting than any boardroom negotiation: a reckoning with his own choices, illusions, and moral blind spots. Set partly within the quiet, disorienting confines of Terminal Island federal prison, Karmic Winds traces a journey through humiliation and loss toward clarity and acceptance. Drawing on philosophy, Buddhism, and a lifelong search for meaning, Hoffman examines the nature of justice, the seductions of power, and the invisible forces—personal and systemic—that shape our lives. Neither a tell-all nor a plea for absolution, Karmic Winds is a deeply reflective account of success and failure, told with intellectual rigor and emotional restraint. It is a story of what remains when the titles disappear, the noise falls away, and one is left alone with the self...and the winds that carried them there.

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The history of the environmental movement-from environmentalism of the nineteenth century to the environmental justice struggles of the late twentieth century-has often been portrayed as a series of efforts led by white environmentalists. In Stewards of the Land, Stevie Ruiz reassesses the movement and reveals that it has always been a multiracial endeavor. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism.
Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West (UNC Press, 2026) argues that environmental justice was never just a reaction to pollution in the 1970s but has a much longer history tied to land theft, labor exploitation, and the everyday struggles of frontline communities to live and work with dignity. Drawing from comparative ethnic studies and archival research and with a commitment to decolonial praxis, Ruiz recovers the stories of those who labored-often invisibly-to build, maintain, and reimagine environmental spaces in the American West.
Stevie Ruiz is a Professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge and a historian, author, and environmental justice scholar. 
His research focuses on the intersection of labor, immigration, and the American environmental movement — the work of building, maintaining, and stewarding the land that is so
often left out of the story. For more information about his work, see his website.
Kalani Foster is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester whose research focuses on the intersection between biodiversity conservation, data and technology, and coloniality. For more information, and ways to contact him, see his research profile.

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