New Books Network

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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In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ everyday lives. Supposedly, local politicians are the elected representatives closest to the people they serve, but are they actually accountable to their constituents? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that they are not: local elections routinely fail to punish bad politicians or reward strong performers. The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable argues that this is because urban politics is defined by minimally effective competition, complex institutions that confuse voters, and a lack of effective media coverage. These institutional features combine to stymie even well-intentioned voters and make accountability difficult. Fixing these problems is challenging, but, as de Benedictis-Kessner shows, change is possible if we can enable citizens to reclaim and assert their political power.
Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances.
Host Ursula Hackett is the Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is published with Cambridge University Press.

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Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026) by Professor Susan L. Burns explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the Meiji period.
Tracing the development of institutions and policies designed to improve medical care and public health in a dense urban environment, Professor Burns examines tensions between the involved parties—including doctors and policymakers, police and civil officials, residents and those who governed them—and provides case studies focused on three of the city’s major challenges in public health: syphilis, cholera, and mental illness. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials and contemporary accounts, Dr. Burns also employs geographic information system analysis in mapping the complicated relationships interlinking aspects of the urban environment, social life, public policy, and commercialized medical culture to demonstrate visually how policy decisions and medical capitalism gradually reshaped existing spatial arrangements in the city as well as the social relations that unfolded within them.
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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Few things delight a historical novelist more than true stories of forgotten individuals remembered, if they are remembered at all, for one dramatic moment or act. Flora Cordier—a Belgian glove maker who apparently married the last effective Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), before his accession to the throne—is just such a person. Flora left almost no impression in the historical record, not much more than a newspaper account and a few references to her outside the empire in later life, yet the question of how a European craftswoman might not only have set up shop in nineteenth-century Istanbul but have also crossed the path of a prince from the House of Osman begs to be told.
Christina Ståhle tackles this problem with aplomb in Before He Was Red (Pebble Press, 2025), her debut novel. The title refers to Abdulhamid’s later nickname, Red (in the sense of bloody), reflecting his use of terror and violence to suppress his enemies. Here he goes by the name Hamid, a choice made in part out of necessity (heirs to the Ottoman throne in the 1870s are not supposed to leave the palace) and in part to conceal his true identity from Flora and from the numerous rebels, mostly students, massing in the streets of Istanbul to protest the actions, or lack thereof, of the government.
It’s a tense time, with the Russian Empire stirring up rebellion among the Christian populations of the Balkan states, still officially under Ottoman rule, and the British Empire doing its best to control the Turks both financially and politically. Ståhle does a wonderful job of juggling the historical, political, and romantic plot lines, maneuvering a large cast of characters, some of whom have multiple identities, without ever losing sight of the drama inherent in the romance between Flora and Hamid.
Born in London to Swedish parents, Christina Ståhle grew up in various countries—including the UK, Italy, and Saudi Arabia—and speaks four languages. A political scientist, she has lived in Belgium for the last thirty years. Before He Was Red is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her latest book, Song of the Silk Weaver, appeared in September 2026.

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