New Books Network

Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods—just seven train stops apart—will shape their futures and help determine how long they live. One will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday. The other will die before sixty-five.

This is the death gap: lives lost too soon. Crossing the Gap: Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided City (U Chicago Press, 2026) asks how a city with world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of premature death—and tells the story of the people fighting to end it.

In his landmark book The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty shorten lives. He moves beyond diagnosis in Crossing the Gap to explore what happens when a major medical center joins forces with pastors, community organizers, residents, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to redefine what a hospital owes its neighbors. Part medical memoir and part urban chronicle, Crossing the Gap follows groundbreaking initiatives such as West Side United and the Sankofa Wellness Village as they confront decades of disinvestment and work to build healthier communities.

Through stories of collaboration, courage, conflict, and community leadership, Ansell shows how neighborhood voices, rigorous data, and moral imagination can transform health systems from bystanders into partners for change—not just in one city but throughout the nation.

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Mao Zedong lived one of the most epic and influential lives of the twentieth century. His impact on the People's Republic of China was vast. Half a century after his passing, he remains a divisive and controversial figure. Kerry Brown's Mao: Power and Contradiction (Reaktion Books, 2026) gives an accessible narrative of his life, from the fall of the Qing in the early part of the twentieth century to the long years in which Mao Zedong struggled not only to ensure the Communist Party of China survived, but that it then came to power after a civil war with the nationalists. Mao's tragic failures as ruler were some of the worst to ever befall a modern society, while his personal life remains a source of intense interest.
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.
Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Dr Mark Kinet (MD) discusses Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love: A Kaleidoscopic View (Routledge, 2026), published by Routledge in 2026. This book is a psychoanalytic foray into the rhetorics of struggle which shape love, desire and their production. Through readings of Freud, Lacan, Winnicott and Klein, it explores how the psyche is shaped by the complexities involved in coming to love and be loved. Later chapters examine how aspects of modern culture have introduced new modes of desire and new theatres for loving encounters. The book’s form, ‘a topography of [love’s] tensions,’ enacts the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in love, its idiosyncrasies, whilst also paying homage to the endurance of every generation’s fascination with love’s struggles. This conversation with Mark covers Lacan’s conception of desire, AI intimacy and the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry.

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The twelfth century was a pivotal time in Japan’s history. It witnessed intense factionalism at the imperial court in Kyoto, Japan’s first national civil war, and above all the rise of warriors to national prominence, culminating with the establishment of Japan’s first warrior government, the Kamakura Shogunate. This dramatic power shift has understandably dominated historical debates. However, focusing almost exclusively on military and political narratives led scholarship to overlook the extraordinary economic transformation that unfolded in parallel.

Beginning in the mid-twelfth century, Japan transformed from a rice economy to one based on cash coins imported from China. For the next three centuries, transactions, tax collections, and even fines were expressed in terms of copper coins, which in turn spurred the emergence of trade cities, new classes of merchants and artisans, and the establishment of guilds. And yet not a single coin was issued in Japan. This “minting-less” monetization seemingly stood in sharp contrast to developments in medieval Europe, where monetization went hand in hand with rulers who struck their own coins.

In The Disease of Money: Japan’s Monetization in the Early Middle Ages (U Hawai’i Press, 2026), Dr. Mikael Adolphson offers an analysis of this initial import of Chinese coins and its subsequent monetization through three lenses. First, he provides a contextual and macroeconomic explanation by looking at the context of East Asian trade, where the political and economic developments in Song China also played an especially vital role. Second, the matter of agency behind the import of and demand for coins is dealt with in depth, revealing that several groups played key roles, but above all that Chinese merchants were the most influential agents. Finally, in an effort to put Japan’s medieval monetization into a disciplinary perspective, a comparison is made with Scandinavia around the same time. It shows that while Japan took a different route to its monetization, there were also comparable situations in Europe.

By moving beyond the warrior-centric view, The Disease of Money uncovers a richer, more complex portrait of medieval Japan—one of innovation, adaptation, and global economic connectivity.
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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Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood changes are observed. But what does gentrification sound like?
In Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, (Oxford UP, 2025), author Allie Martin engages this question in Washington, DC, asking how Black people experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Drawing from music, interviews, soundscape recordings, and more, Martin argues that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others. Martin employs a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, and digital humanities to make audible the ways in which gentrification disrupts and disturbs community. Throughout, she centers Black feminist listening practices, thinking through digital modes of listening and imagining emancipatory soundscapes.
Intersectional Listening benefits from an innovative combination of sources, from interviews and soundwalks to passive acoustic recording and machine learning. Martin shares compelling stories of music and sound in the nation’s capital, and in doing so shifts conversations about how we listen to Black life. By foregrounding how processes of gentrification systematically seek to devalue, mishear, and ultimately silence Black possibility, Intersectional Listening posits how we can challenge ourselves to refute the consistent mishearing of Black people in Washington, DC and beyond.​
Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is an assistant professor in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work is attuned to questions of race, sound and power. Her first book, Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in the nation's capital. Allie is the director of the Black Sound Lab, a research environment dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice.

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