New Books Network

Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?

In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite’s fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.

In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell’s examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.

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.
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Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner are enterprise strategists at Amazon Web Services, based in London. Phil was previously a corporate VP and international CIO at McDonalds. Jana was formerly at DHL and studied uncertainty dynamics in academia. They are authors of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Octopus’s are nimble and amazing, as anybody who has watched the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher will verify. In contrast, the Tin Man model we know from The Wizard of Oz needs constant oil and is too rusty and rigid to function well on its own for long. This episode’s guests lean into the Octopus model, which is about earning trust and evading, in this case, the enemy within ourselves when it comes to not admitting mistakes and quickly learning from them. The value of a strong feedback loop, creating an technology infrastructure that is “thin” and allows for freedom, and not chasing metrics that prevent you from learning from anecdotal evidence of where change is necessary: those are among the topics that lively conversation pursues. A final key point the authors make is that at a time when investment in executive learning has tripled while other personnel developments remain flat is a mistake; now more than ever, human capabilities need to be built upon in an era of rapid innovation.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.
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Can Europe afford to stand back as China rewrites the global electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem? In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen at the University of Helsinki talks to United Nations Senior Adviser Matthew Gray for Europe and Central Asia Markets, who discusses the rapid international expansion of Chinese EVs. The conversation highlights how Chinese brands have moved beyond public buses to growing passenger car markets in the Nordic region and Central Asia through superior technology, lower price points, and patient policy.

While European markets face limited model availability due to protectionism and strategic caution, Central Asian nations have seen an immediate and total transformation of their transport infrastructure with far higher and lower end Chinese EVs than in Europe - and dramatic new challenges in electrification capacity. Based in Copenhagen, with 20+ experience in the regions, Gray is speaking freshly with us after two recent months in Tajikistan and China. He compares EV and soft power growth in Scandinavia vs Central Asia, and explains that modern EVs act as geopolitical infrastructure, shifting the focus from simple manufacturing to long-term digital service ecosystems, data control, and entry into more vertical industries. As the West maintains protective barriers, China’s control over the battery supply chain and hybrid innovations will likely force a global shift in both consumer and freight industries. Listeners can find Gray’s fact-finding recap of Chinese EVs in Tajikistan here.

Julie Yu‑Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Master’s Programme in Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Her new book, Global Knowledge Production about China, explores how the practice of “China‑watching” has evolved over the decades. The book is freely accessible online.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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Picture book author, Jilanne Huffmann's first middle-grades novel, Heartland (Little Brown Books, 2026). Out of the Dust meets Me and Marvin Gardens in this coming-of-age novel about a young misfit searching for the truth of her family's past, set against the backdrop of an environmental cover-up. Twelve-year-old Xyla is sick of two things: working on her family's sixth-generation Iowa farm and her mother's nagging words, "Pay attention!" But Xyla can't help getting lost in the thoughts that fill her head, sometimes leaving a wake of costly mistakes. If only her mother would tell her something, anything, about her father, who left when she was little. When Xyla finds her mother's hidden childhood diary, she's soon sucked into the story of a hardscrabble life on the family farm in the 1980s. Can she find the key to her past and her father in the pages? Xyla's life grows even more complicated as a new family begins renting a vacant house on the farm, and the daughter Alegría is focused and motivated--the kind of kid Xyla is sure her mother prefers. But when the girls stumble upon an environmental disaster right next door, Xyla must trust her new friend and her complicated mother to figure out how to stop it. Alternating timelines in prose and verse connect the quiet desperation of Iowa farmers in the late 1980s to the modern farming landscape in this layered and voice-driven middle grade debut.
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Punishment makes nobody safer, imprisonment only impoverishes us as a society. And yet, we lock up our own, more and more for worse and worse reasons. What might finally inspire us to run the equation another way, and come up with a different solution?

Anna Terwiel joined John to discuss her remarkable new book, Prison Abolition for Realists, which charts a path away from paranoid (as documented by Eve Sedgwick) and purity politics in favor of an abolitionism that fuses "abstract normative theorizing" with attainable worldly goals. One name for this is agonistic abolitionism; it offers, as Anna sees it a positive vision alongside its criticism of the status quo.

Anna is a professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, where she co-directs their Prison Education Project. She beings by tracing the impact of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) and his activism with the Prisons Information Group, and credits the influence, during her schooling, of the Prison and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project in Illinois at Statesville Prison.

John (apropos of his earlier work) mentions the failed pursuit of purity among late 19th century Chartists, while Anna makes the case not for perfect solutions but for remainders, a form of politics of the possible. They explore possibilities of "non-reformist reform"; Anna stresses the enduring importance of Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete and her contribution to revolutionary black Marxist thought; and she praises local gender-based-violence organizations like CARA in Seattle. They discuss Sharon Dolovich's recent work on conditions for correctional officers, and Anna explores the notion of a new "right to comfort" that might take into account the current inhumanity of treatment inside prisons as regards profound but basic factors like ventilation and heat. As well as the right to a loved one's hugs.

Listen to and read the episode here.

Also mentioned in the episode

Abolitionist work by Mariame Kaba,


Ruth Wilson Gilmore , e.g. Golden Gulag

Recallable Books

Nils Christie, "Conflicts as Property."

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.

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