New Books with Miranda Melcher

Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigates
how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a
painful illness caused by a soil fungus. The airborne disease’s
symptoms can last from two months to a patient’s lifetime and may be
fatal. Nearly a
third of the national cases are reported in California, where those
infected are disproportionately farmworkers and people incarcerated in
the region. Poverty, pollution, and prison expose these groups to
cumulative environmental and health risks that deny Valley Fever
patients adequate medical treatment.

Dr.
Sarah M. Rios examines how these populations face racial health
disparities and develop strategies of care. She connects environmental
justice activists as well as prison advocates and abolitionists who
mobilize protests and issue calls to action to the past and ongoing
efforts for medical autonomy and healthy communities. Diseases Have No Eyes emphasizes that vulnerable groups have developed an expertise
and understanding of Valley Fever out of necessity. In the process,
these community members offer an alternative public health response that
extends beyond the individual body.

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

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture
(University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how
that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for
today’s generative AI. 

With original research and clear
explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s
known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated
twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and
communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with
early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human
speech, she demonstrates
how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs
and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in
favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually
abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting
instead for work-arounds
that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution
became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals,
transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the
routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied
content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access,
circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But
this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and
ever-growing amounts of new data.

At its core, Divination Engines
illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and
images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This
connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given
rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic
culture.

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 This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy’s unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it.

Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely biodiverse landscape and wildlife. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain. 

Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, and made up of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial lakes, desert islands, caves and forests, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture. And along the way, Ed discovers that Italy once was home to pygmy elephants, giant killer hedgehogs, and vampire-toothed deer. Today we can see the relics of those ancient creatures in the flashy blue lizard of Capri, gladiator crabs under the forum in Rome, the crested porcupine, the beautiful Apennine chamois and of course the Marzipan brown bear and Italian grey wolf, not forgetting its flora, including the world’s rarest Christmas tree in Sicily.

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

Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of
Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating
the country’s still-flourishing
and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most
emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and
stone built
cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland
had by the 1820s become one of Europe’s great centres of Romanticism,
due both to the majestic Highlands, and to Edinburgh itself as city of
Romanticism. Additionally, Edinburgh developed as the main centre and
hub for travellers drawn to Romantic Scotland through the work of James
‘Ossian’ Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott: visitors including Schinkel,
Mozart, Verne, Turner, Haydn, amongst innumerable others.

Edinburgh: City of Romanticism
(Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Aonghus MacKechnie also provides a
long-overdue counterbalance to the contrastingly much-examined and
much-published topic of Enlightenment Edinburgh, showing how this and
Romantic Edinburgh have comfortably co-existed. It examines how
Edinburgh’s Romanticism was similarly driven by intellectuals, amongst
whom were Enlightenment figures and artistically talented individuals,
and it discusses the legacy of those who contributed to the Romantic
cityscape of today; an architecture that provides much of the character
of the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and of the city that
countless tourists come daily to see.

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

When world kettle-bell
lifting champion David Keohan heard the old tales of stone-lifting, he
was captivated, setting off on a quest to rediscover these famous stones
and attempt the feats of heroes past by lifting them. Guided by a 1930s archive, the dúchas,
in which schoolchildren shared their local folklore, Keohan began to
travel the country in search of the stones, as documented in The Wind Beneath the Stone: My Quest to Unearth a Piece of Ireland's Folklore (Bloomsbury and Chelsea
Green, 2026). They were often to be found hidden away in quiet villages
or cemeteries, their purpose almost forgotten. But, as he journeyed
through Ireland, he met those who recalled the stories of the stones and
the legends attached to them. Soon, others joined him as he took on the
challenge of lifting these pieces of history, the heaviest of which
weighed well over 450 pounds.

As Keohan’s efforts garnered more and more
attention, he realized that this was more than a personal challenge.
Stone-lifting had become a way for Irish people to reclaim their lost
heritage, coming together to celebrate what makes their homeland
special.

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