NBN Book of the Day

By one of the world's leading chemists, an entertaining and revealing tour of the chemical bonds that shape our everyday lives and provide the infrastructure for our chaotic world. 

We all have a relationship with chemistry. Bonds between molecules, forged and broken in the blink of an eye, underpin everything from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the ways we treat illnesses and construct our homes. It’s a relationship we nurture, whether we know it or not, and for leading chemist Ijeoma Uchegbu, it was serious from the beginning.

In Chain Reaction: How Chemistry Shapes Us and Our World (HarperCollins, 2026) Uchegbu shows us the world through a chemist’s eyes, revealing the intricate science we take for granted: how our body’s most fundamental chemical structure, our DNA, is estimated to be two meters long, resting tightly within each of our cells; how egg yolks are held together by weak chemical bonds that make them primed for emulsifying our salad dressings; and how the chemical makeup of PFAs, or “forever chemicals,” makes them so good at sticking around.

Along the way, we travel from Uchegbu’s home in London to Nigeria, where cooking experiments go awry in her family kitchen, and to Italy, where the chemically inert compounds that make up stained glass keep medieval windows shining. The careful interplay of bonds and molecules brings a sense of order and wonder to the chaos of our lives, she shows, and we don’t have to wear a lab coat or study solutions in beakers to appreciate it.

For readers of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and anyone who wanted to be like Elizabeth Zott in Lessons in Chemistry, Chain Reaction is a lively and intimate portrait of the wondrous and under-explored field that shapes our everyday lives.
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During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In his new book, Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing (Cambridge UP, 2026), Fabio Lanza examines the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. This first full-length history in English of China's urban communes shows how universalization of production, the collectivization of life, including communal canteens and nurseries, and women's liberation, were intended to transform modern urban life along socialist lines. Urban Revolution writes a new history of the socialist everyday by showing how urban residents, and women in particular, struggled to enact a radical change in their lives. Lanza argues that this transformation of everyday life must be taken seriously, but that ultimately the failure of urban collectivization reveals the most crucial contradictions of the socialist revolution.
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In her latest book, Sanctuary People: Faith Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Gina Perez explores sanctuary practices in Ohio, locating them in broader local and national efforts to provide refuge and care in the face of the challenges facing Latina/o communities in a moment of increased surveillance, migrant detention, displacement, and economic and social marginalization. Pérez argues for a conceptualization of sanctuary that is capacious, placing support of Puerto Ricans displaced in the wake of Hurricane Maria within the broader practices of sanctuary and expanding our understandings of the movement that addresses the precarious conditions of Latinas/os beyond migration status.Based on four years of ethnographic research and interviews at the local, state, and national levels, Sanctuary People offers a compelling exploration of the ways in which faith communities are creating new activist strategies and enacting new forms of solidarity, working within the sometimes conflicting ideological space between religion and activism to answer the call of justice and live their faith.

Dr. Gina Perez is a cultural anthropologist and chair of the Department of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of two award-winning books—The Near Northwest Side Story: Gender, Migration and Puerto Rican Families (2004, University of California Press) and Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC and the American Dream (2015, New York University Press). Pérez's research interests include Latinas/os, youth, militarism, gender, migration, urban ethnography, and faith-based organizing. Her new project focuses on sanctuary movements and multiethnic faith-based organizing among Latina/o communities in Ohio.
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Tunisia’s Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority (Edinburgh UP, 2025) tells the captivating story of those Andalusians, descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, who sought refuge in Tunisia. Rather than simply replicating Iberian traditions, Andalusian culture in Tunisia stands as a vibrant and evolving phenomenon, shaped by complex dynamics of interaction and adaptation over four centuries. The book dismantles the romanticised view of Andalusian culture as a mere transplantation of al-Andalus, analysing distinctive cultural features that distinguish Andalusians as an ethnic group within Tunisia’s diverse social fabric. Drawing on historical records and contemporary ethnographic data, including personal accounts and family archives, the book sheds light on how Andalusians navigate their unique cultural position amidst a Tunisian national narrative often focused on Arabo-Muslim homogeneity. By examining the complexities of cultural preservation and assimilation, the book offers a nuanced perspective on Andalusian identity, revealing its dynamism and resilience in the face of changing social, political, and economic circumstances.
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Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future world power, gas became an avenue for the country's developmentalist ambitions. The ability to build technologically sophisticated infrastructures served as a powerful tool of state legitimation, both before and after the 1979 Revolution, and tied top-down politics of modernization to bottom-up feelings of national belonging. Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran (Stanford UP, 2026) analyzes the interwoven histories of energy, development, and the environment inIran. Following the movement of natural gas from underground deposits, through infrastructures of refining and distribution, and into everyday life, Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani explores the roles of development planners, oil firms, industrialists, engineers, and consumers—as well as the mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself—to show how natural gas emerged as a crucial enabler of industrialization and a strong impetus for resource nationalism. Tracing the transformation of gas from a waste product into a vital resource, this book offers a history of anticolonial developmentalism in Iran—revealing a key driver toward intensified energy use that suggests why and how societies in the Global South became voracious consumers of fossil fuel energy.

Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani is the Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector.
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