Book tour part 2, reviews, writing, and podcasts
Hallo, readers!
If you’re a new subscriber, welcome - you might like to check out my new book, HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, available as hardback and ebook. The audiobook read, by Christina Delaine, comes out on May 13. Some book excerpts and interviews are here.
Today’s newsletter includes:
book event info
tidbits from the road
A new essay around HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY
reviews of HUMANS (which I promised and then forgot to add to the last issue!)
podcast episodes
Book event info
Newsflash: I’m speaking at NYU tomorrow, Tuesday April 8. Do tell any friends who may be interested - you might forward this newsletter to them.
Event 1: “Writing for Broader Audiences” - a free session aimed at grad students and now open to all.
2:00-3:15pm, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, NYU, 24 W 12 St, New York 1001 Sign up here.
Event 2: “Humans: A Monstrous History” - a lecture about the book.
6:30-8pm, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, NYU, 24 W 12 St, New York 1001. Sign up here.
More events in Philly (April 17), London (April 27-8), and online (April 17, 24, 27) to follow. Follow this link for more info and to register!
And check out this fabulous book trailer for HUMANS, made by historian of medicine and novelist Brandy Schillace for my upcoming live YouTube appearance on The Peculiar Book Club!
On the road
It’s been another action-packed ten days on tour. After California I headed to Boston. There I attended the Renaissance Society of America annual conference, a three-day affair at which I presented on monster-related things in a couple of sessions, and chaired a session on the early modernist as public intellectual. As a member of the Board of Directors of the RSA, for which I serve as Fellowships Chair, the conference was preceded by an all-day Board meeting.
I also did a fancy version of a podcast recording: the hosts sent a field producer to my hotel room, equipped with a real microphone and portable recording equipment, and proceeded to hold the mic for me while the interview happened over Zoom. At the other end of the Zoomiverse was my interviewer, with a similar setup. My field producer listened to us through headphones and could tell when the recording was picking up Boston background noise - from sirens to hotel corridor chatting - so we knew when to repeat a segment.
I look forward to checking out the sound quality of this podcast. It will surely be a thousand times better than an episode of a different show I heard years ago, in which a leaf-blower sounds through half the episode, and yet the podcast host just ploughed on. Public Service Announcement: don’t let that happen to your podcast recording!
After Boston I headed to Wesleyan University, Amherst Books, and Tulane University. After that I enjoyed a few calm days with a friend in Philadelphia (with the obligatory podcast recording and endless museum-visiting).
Essay: The Page 99 test
Have you heard of the Page 99 test? According to the early twentieth-century novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford, “open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.“
The proposition that page 99 reveals the quality of a book is as intriguing as it is terrifying. By page 99, we’re often about a third of the way through a nonfiction book. Long past the introduction and background chapters, this is a point by which more “stuff” is packed into each page, since the reader has already munched their way through dozens of pages that they’ll bring to the table.
I wrote an essay about page 99 of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY for The Page 99 Test blog.
Have you been reading HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY? Feel free to share your favourite quotes on social media and to tag me (handles at the bottom of this newsletter).
When you’ve finished the book, I’d love it if you considered rating / reviewing it on Amazon, Goodreads, or Storygraph. Reviews are short and informal - they can be a word or two, or a paragraph or two - whatever is easiest for you. They aren’t meant to be perfect or complete or fancy or even positive; they just really help drive the algorithms if they are there.
Reviews have started appearing!
Colin Dickey in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Davies’s book is a radical and timely plea to renew our focus on the humanities. At a time when biology and other sciences are making great strides in understanding how we are put together, chemically and physically, Humans makes clear how vital it is that we invest in understanding how we are put together culturally.”
Pippa Bailey in The New Statesman: “Humans documents the curious ways we have thought about who counts as human throughout history, from Pliny’s belief that extreme environments created monstrous people to the 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s four subtypes of humans. Most significant for our time, however, are Davies’ thoughts on nation states – the way ideas about race and birthrights are used for dark political ends – and on how AI might end up monstering us.”
Ed Finn in Science Magazine: ”Davies invites readers to imagine the lives of historical monsters and to empathize with their often-wretched treatment."
Podcast episodes
Talk Nerdy, with Cara Santa Maria.
Turn the Page, Syosset Public Library, with Jenn Jordan.
The full list is here.
If you missed the first tour newsletter, which includes purchasing option updates and discounts, follow this link to read it.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).