Archives de catégorie : History

MILENA AND MARGARETE de Gwen Strauss

A profoundly moving and expertly researched WWII history from the author of The Nine. A celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances, Strauss sheds light on both an untold WWII love story and an untold chapter in queer history.

MILENA AND MARGARETE:
A Love Story in Ravensbrück
by Gwen Strauss
St. Martin’s Press, August 2025

From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.

Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margarete wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”

Gwen Strauss is the author of The Nine and a collection of poetry, Trail of Stones. Her poems, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals including The New Republic, London Sunday Times, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. She was born and spent her early years in Haiti. Strauss lives in Southern France, where she is the Executive Director of the Dora Maar Cultural Center.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM de Julian Sancton

Julian Sancton’s follow-up to his thrilling, acclaimed debut, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, is the riveting story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Columbia in 1708 with over a billion dollars in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find and excavate it.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM
by Julian Sancton
Crown, January 2026

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.

Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. With academic training cobbled together across various disciplines, Dooley was no one’s idea of a credentialed academic, and yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Like The Orchid Thief, NEPTUNE’S RANSOM plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. In this tale of temerity and treasure, Julian Sancton blends the adventure of Indiana Jones with the international intrigue of XXX into a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.

Julian Sancton is a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching this book.

MOTHER MEDIA de Hannah Zeavin

An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

MOTHER MEDIA:
Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century
by Hannah Zeavin
MIT Press, April 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, MOTHER MEDIA tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.

Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at UC Berkeley. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and beyond. Zeavin was a recipient of a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for an essay about the children of psychoanalysis, “Composite Case.” She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021).

SUPER NINTENDO de Keza MacDonald

The first major cultural history of the biggest form of entertainment on the planet– video games – by the world’s pre-eminent video games journalist, with unique never-before-granted access to Nintendo HQ.

SUPER NINTENDO:
How One Innovative Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun
by Keza MacDonald
Faber, summer 2025
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Whether it’s Mario or Animal Crossing; Tetris on the Game Boy or The Legend of Zelda on the Switch; almost everybody who’s ever held a controller has been touched by a Nintendo game.

For most of its 130-year history, Nintendo, the Kyoto-based entertainment giant, made playing cards. But in 1981, after a few years experimenting in the burgeoning world of electronic toys, it created an arcade game called Donkey Kong. Since then, Nintendo has delighted hundreds of millions of people all over the world with their fizzily creative, brilliantly weird, and enormously fun video games, that issue forth from its secretive Japanese headquarters.

Nintendo is now as ubiquitous and culturally relevant as Marvel, Apple or Disney. Like Disney, it has become a cross-generational treasure, as the kids who were captivated by Super Mario Bros on the SNES now play Nintendo classics with their own children, and proud parents who once doodled pictures of Pikachu on their class notebooks chaperone their offspring to the Pokémon World Championships.

A lot has changed since 1981, but kids still know who Mario is.

Using Nintendo’s most iconic and recognisable games (alongside a smattering of fascinating but less-well-known ones) as a way in, SUPER NINTENDO will tell both a cultural history of video games and posit a narrative about how fun is our primary desire when we consume media.

Taking readers through Nintendo’s history – as so through the history of the medium itself – it will tell the stories of some of the millions of people whose lives have been touched not only by Nintendo games, but gaming more generally: from real-life Pokémon masters to video game developers, parents of autistic children to ordinary players on the sofa, the bus, or the school playground.

Using the story of Nintendo, and its games, to examine how and why the world has moved toward video games as its pre-eminent form of fun, SUPER NINTENDO is the first book to truly examine the dominant cultural medium of the 21st century.

Keza MacDonald played her first Nintendo game at the age of 6; when she was 11, her dream was to go to the Pokémon World Championships. (She finally achieved this aged 25. It was magical.) She is the Video Games Editor at The Guardian, and was previously UK Editor of IGN and Kotaku, two of the biggest specialist games websites in the world, read by over 100 million unique users. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with her husband and two sons.

Le Prix allemand de la non-fiction 2024 décerné à Christina Morina

L’historienne Christina Morina a reçu le 11 juin le Prix allemand de la non-fiction 2024 (Deutscher Sachbuchpreis 2024) pour son ouvrage TAUSEND AUFBRÜCHE (« Mille nouveaux départs. Les Allemands et la démocratie depuis les années 1980 »). Le livre avait déjà été sélectionné pour le Prix de la foire du livre de Leipzig de cette année.

Voici le commentaire du jury :

« Tout le monde s’accorde à dire que les démocraties sont en crise dans le monde entier. Mais la question de savoir ce que signifie réellement vivre la démocratie est souvent reléguée au second plan. Christina Morina utilise des sources peu considérées jusqu’à présent pour montrer à quel point la conception de la démocratie a évolué différemment en Allemagne de l’Est et de l’Ouest depuis les années 1980. Son analyse de l’histoire contemporaine, très instructive et raffinée sur le plan méthodologique, se base sur des lettres, des pétitions et des tracts et donne une voix aux citoyens et citoyennes de la RDA et de la RFA. Avec ce livre, Christina Morina donne des impulsions surprenantes et nécessaires aux discussions sociales actuelles. Son livre prend beaucoup de risques sans polariser ; la démocratie est un processus, pas un état. »

Le Prix allemand de la non-fiction est décerné chaque année à un ouvrage exceptionnel de non-fiction publié en langue allemande qui stimule le débat social. Il est doté d’une récompense de 25 000 euros. Depuis le début du concours, les sept membres du jury ont examiné 225 titres publiés depuis avril 2023.

Christina Morina est professeure d’histoire contemporaine à l’Université de Bielefeld en Allemagne. Ses recherches portent sur l’histoire sociale et mémorielle du nazisme, sur l’histoire politique et culturelle de l’Allemagne divisée et réunifiée ainsi que sur la relation entre l’histoire et la mémoire. Elle a étudié l’histoire, les sciences politiques et le journalisme aux universités de Leipzig, de l’Ohio et du Maryland et a obtenu son doctorat en 2007.

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