New Books with Miranda Melcher

Deserts,
the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as
inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through
the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US
military had navigated during World War II, the United States defense
establishment took a keen interest in these places, dispatching troops
to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To
preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, to pave
runways and build bridges, engineers had to understand and then conquer
dunes, permafrost, and even the surface of the moon.

Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments
(University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Gretchen Heefner explores
how the US military generated a new understanding of these environments
and attempted
to master them, intending to cement America’s planetary power.
Operating in these regions depended as much on scientific and cultural
knowledge as on military expertise
and technology. From General George S. Patton learning the hard way
that the desert is not always hot, to the challenges of constructing a
scientific research base under the Arctic ice, to the sheer
implausibility of modeling
Martian environments on Earth, Dr. Heefner takes us on a wry expedition
into the extremes and introduces us to the people who have shaped our
insight into these extraordinary environments. Even decades after the
first manned space flight,
plans for human space exploration and extraplanetary colonization are
still based on what we know about stark habitats on Earth.

An entertaining survey of the relationship between environmental history and military might, Sand, Snow, and Stardust
also serves as a warning about the further transformation of the
planet—whether through desertification, melting ice caps, or attempts to
escape it entirely.

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

In 1644 four norcini
or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their
fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it
with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their
shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this
supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome
themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a
blind eye to
such horrendous acts. This fabricated story points to an underlying
reality—that in the early seventeenth century, a series of popes
dramatically increased the amount of food and wine consumed by Romans,
culminating in a per capita consumption of over a pound of meat per day
during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (d. 1644).

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) traces the efforts and
activities of a range of actors who strove to bring meat to the Roman
table. Dr. Bradford A. Bouley shows how Rome’s preoccupation with food
was the result of papal policy in the aftermath of the Reformation;
food, and especially meat, served as religious and political propaganda,
symbolizing the correctness of the Catholic faith and demonstrating the
extent of papal power. Dr. Bouley details the dramatic reorganization
of Roman foodways needed to satisfy this demand for meat, as large herds
of animals had to be funneled from the countryside to the city. This
consumption was ultimately not sustainable, triggering a crisis that
fueled sensational rumors
of murder and cannibalism and eventually, Dr. Bouley contends, sparked
the outbreak of civil war, as vassals rebelled against papal oversight. The Barberini Butchers
recovers this significant episode in food, environmental, and cultural
history, one that brings early modern politics and history into
conversation with concerns over human use of natural resources and
consumption of animal products that continue to resonate clearly today.

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

This book is available open access.

For
more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will
revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers
(MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of
politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how
programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace
activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build
simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.

Drawing
on novel archival and historical research, Dr. McKelvey recounts the
history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections,
voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United
States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international
affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the
two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of
exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while
presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes.

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

For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of
nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments
that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later.
Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated
health benefits could follow recipes for nearly fifty types of marine
life from state waters, such as salmon, flounder, and oysters. Others
are no longer available, out-of-vogue, or simply forgotten. Further,
overfishing and environmental damage decimated many local seafood
stocks, providing a cautionary tale with global significance.

In San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table (Bloomsbury,
2026), Dr. Paul Stangl traces the development of San Francisco's
fisheries, seafood markets, cookery, and dining culture from the Gold
Rush to the 1920s. Migrants from around the world imported fishing
techniques and cuisines, then slowly adapted as they came to understand
local resources and each other. Newcomers found the tastiest fish
through trial and error and assimilated the “best” into a new cuisine.
Different ethnic and occupational groups collaborated, fought, and
learned from one another as they irreversibly altered the natural world
around them. By the end of the First World War, San Francisco's seafood
cuisine scarcely resembled that of the 1850s, due to cultural
adaptation, technological advancements, and changes to the natural
environment. It was no longer derivative of New England and France, but
included influences from the Southern states, Asia, and South America.San Francisco Seafood
chronicles the city's transformation from a fish-barren town-where
restaurants served canned, pickled, and dried fish from the East
Coast-to a seafood-rich metropolis that harvested seafood from Mexico to
Alaska. He emphasizes how the impacts on nature and local labor serve
as a necessary cautionary tale for today's global seafood trade. This is
a thorough and insightful history of a once emerging, and now
essential, cuisine for food and history buffs alike.

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

Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have
invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the
answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the
way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us.

Everyone has encounters with glasses, passively or actively, from
reading glasses to sunglasses. At times they are the main identifiers in
a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and
brainy to cool and sleazy. They are alternately the most mundane of
things on our bodies and potentially the most glamorous.

In this edition of the Object Lessons series, Glasses (Bloomsbury,
2026) by Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible
accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between
ourselves and the world outside.

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