Booktalk with Diana Korte: Recent Episodes
Diana Korte
Top authors are interviewed on this 10-minute program that captures their own words about their books and often the story behind the story. Listeners stream from around the world on six continents, remote islands in the Pacific, and on many public radio stations across the U.S. This is also a regular feature on KGNU in Boulder/Denver Colorado. The show, hosted by Diana Korte and engineered by Gene Korte, has been in production for more than 25 years.
Host Diana Korte speaks with James Lee Burke who is the author of about 40 books written over more than 50 years.
He’s best known for two series. One is about the Holland family that’s featured in this program about “The House of the Rising Sun.” We chatted about this book several years ago.
The other series that he is best known for features former New Orleans police officer Dave Robicheaux. His continuing story has been told in two dozen books. #24 is “Clete,” published this year.
Another 2024 title is “Harbor Lights,” a book of 8 short stories that move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with Daniel Handler--perhaps better known for 25 years as his alter ego Lemony Snicket--who has authored his 30th book, “And Then? And Then? What Else?"
It’s a fully engaging memoir from who’s that guy in the coffee shop wearing big headphones while scribbling on index cards to details of his love of books always, along with advice for aspiring writers.
Woven through is his path toward one of the most spectacularly successful writing careers of the 21st century.
My personal favs in this interview are how he feels about selling 70,000,000 books and the tale of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, a Swan of Harlem herself who is one of the dancers featured in "The Swans of Harlem. Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years Of Sisterhood, And Their Reclamation Of A Groundbreaking History” written by Karen Valby.
It’s the forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas, the first principals in the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who traveled the world as highly celebrated stars in their field and whose legacy was erased from history until now.
Karlya Shelton-Benjamin began dancing at age 4 with the Colorado Concert Ballet (currently Colorado Ballet). At 17, she became the first person of color to represent the United States in the prestigious Prix de Lausanne ballet competition in Switzerland.
Her ballet sisters also featured in this book are Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan and Marcia Sells. Together they describe their triumphs and challenges of being Black ballerinas back in the day when many people didn't know they existed.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with David Coggins, author of his fourth book, "THE BELIEVER".
He brings readers along for an enchanting year of fly fishing in Patagonia, Cuba, Belize, Spain, Scotland, Norway, and the U.S. And of course, it’s about more than just the fishing.
He deftly mixes travel, local cultures, further fishing challenges (some knee-buckling in their disappointment) and details his own experience as life and love crowd his time to fish.
And, since this is fly fishing, after all—there’s always the possibility of abject failure and leaping, glorious reward.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with US Senator Tim Kaine from VA and former Democratic vice-presidential candidate. He is the author of a new memoir-- Walk, Ride, Paddle that describes a bit of history along with adventures and misadventures on the road including too many bear encounters. In 2019, he commemorated both his sixtieth birthday and his twenty-fifth year in public office by exploring Virginia's trails, bike tracks, and waterways. During weekends and in Senate recess weeks, Kaine—over a period of several years—hiked the 559 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Biked 321 miles along the Virginia Blue Ridge and canoed 348 miles on the James River.
He’s been a Virginia mayor, governor, and US senator and now a bonafide outdoorsy politician.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with Don Winslow, bestselling author of CITY IN RUINS, the last book in a trilogy featuring crime boss Danny Ryan.
The lesson for him is as hard as it is true: sometimes you must become what you hate to protect what you love.
Now a billionaire gambling mogul, he builds an empire of glittering mega-hotels and casinos along the Las Vegas Strip. Battles of money, influence, and bribery soon follow.
After 26 books this is Winslow’s last book as he’s taking his talents to a new patriotic pursuit.
But his books and numerous movies made from them live on. Austin Butler, in his first starring role since his Oscar nominated turn as Elvis Presley, will star as crime boss Danny Ryan in “City On Fire,” an earlier book in this trilogy.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with Manal al-Sharif, author of DARING TO DRIVE, who grew up in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.
In her teens she was a religious radical, by her twenties she was a college-educated computer security engineer. Then she lived for a while in Boston, learned to drive and became a women’s rights advocate.
Back home she was the first Saudi woman who defied the ban on driving and immediately put the video on YouTube. And, yes, she was arrested.
This interview originally aired June 23, 2017. One year later the Saudi government made it legal for women to drive. Yet several years later, the number of women who have licenses to drive is only a few percent.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Never one to shy away from controversial topics, Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Sacrifice” is based on the story of Tawana Brawley of upstate New York who made headlines in the late 1980s with allegations of kidnapping and rape that were later proven false.
When we spoke about this book in 2015, JCO was already the author of more than 100 books—novels, short story collections, a memoir, children’s books, poetry, plays, even a libretto for an opera.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with New Mexico-based Michael Benanav, a photo-journalist known for searching out and living with nomadic tribes and bringing their compelling stories and images back from distant places.
In “Himalaya Bound: One Family’s Quest to Save Their Animals–And an Ancient Way of Life” he travels to northern India to journey with the Van Gujjars, a tribe of forest-dwelling nomadic water buffalo herders during their annual spring migration into the Himalayas.
In a book laced with stories of tribal cultures from India to Yellowstone, from Jordan to Kenya, Benanav deftly wends through the controversial terrain where Western ways of protecting the environment clash with indigenous understandings of nature.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Tracy Clark is an award-winning author of 6 crime novels including the Cass Raines Chicago Mystery series. FALL is her newest book and second in the Detective Harriett Foster thriller series.
In this page-turner of a book, the Chicago PD is on high alert when two city aldermen are found dead: one by apparent suicide, one brutally stabbed in his office, and both with thirty dimes left on their bodies—a betrayer’s payment. With no other clues, the question is, Who else has a debt to pay?
Detective Harriet Foster is on the case before the killer can strike again. But even with the help of her partner, Detective Vera Li, and the rest of their team, Harriet has little to go on and a lot at risk. There’s no telling who the killer’s next target is or how many will come next.
TUNE IN for why Tracy Clark writes crime novels, what she likes best about Harriett Foster. and her advice for new writers.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with R. David Edmunds, author of 12 books about Native Americans. His newest title is “VOICES IN THE DRUM that features 9 stories about these people spanning hundreds of years of history.
Times and places range from Mound City, AL as it existed a century or so before Columbus to what it was like for a job-hunting family in the 1950s to move from a reservation in the Dakotas to Denver CO.
TUNE IN for misconceptions non-Natives have about Indians, what it takes to be counted as a member of a tribe, and who are the unsung heroes in Native American history.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with Douglas Preston, author of "THE LOST TOMB." Some of the stories in this book have taken him from the haunted country of Italy and the largest tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings to the booby-trapped Money Pit on Oak Island in Nova Scotia and a cannibal site in the American Southwest.
Listeners might be familiar with some of his other 40 books including "Lost City of the Monkey God" and his co-authored fiction series featuring FBI special agent Pendergast.
TUNE IN for, what he found when he was the first to enter an Egyptian burial chamber that had been sealed for millennia, why many of his books include archeologists, and his one piece of advice for would be writers that might be quite difficult to accomplish.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Cary Elwes, who was then age 23, played the dashing character known as Westley in this cult movie classic. He talked about the behind-the-scenes making of the moviein his book, “As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride” when we spoke in 2014.
The continued unexpected popularity of this happy movie made 36 years ago didn’t begin until ten years after it was released, thanks to the new VHS and cable tv then and the streaming internet today.
Tune in for the name of Cary Elwes’s favorite fan, his biggest challenge—the inconceivable one—in making the movie, and what it took to create that great sword fight.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Today I spoke with the James Beard Award-winning Fuchsia Dunlop about her 7th book, “Invitation To A Banquet. The Story of Chinese Food.”
Based in London, she speaks, reads, and writes Chinese and has traveled, often writing down recipes, for 30 years all around China.
Rather than another cookbook, “Invitation to a Banquet” is an exploration of the history, techniques, and philosophies of Chinese cuisine. She presents this through a "menu" of thirty dishes from different parts of the country including Mapo tofu, drunken crabs and stir-fried greens.
TUNE IN for what many non-Chinese people most misunderstand about Chinese food along with a glimpse into Fuchsia Dunlop’s adventures as the first westerner to train at the influential Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in mainland China.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Author of more than a dozen books, historian Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War” details the perilous ocean crossing the European pilgrims made. Imagine the struggle of moving 2 mph for 3,000 miles over two months.
Yes, the Native American Wampanoags shared bounty with the Pilgrims at that first tense Thanksgiving, but unlike what many of us learned in grade school, it was an overwhelmingly Native affair. As for the menu, probably yes to turkeys, ducks and venison but no to cranberry sauce and pumpkin pies. The author describes these and many other new facts about this epic time in American history.
This Booktalk program dates back to 2007.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Host Diana Korte speaks with Alexander McCall Smith, the author of more than 100 books sold around the world in 40 languages. This includes the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, plus other series and stand-alone books.
His newest title in this cozy series, the 24th, is From a Far and Lovely Country featuring Mma Precious Ramotswe and her world of familiar characters.
In this latest installment two cases compete for Mma Ramotswe's attention—and she may need to call in back up. But no worries, there’s always time for red bush tea and fruitcake.
Tune in for just how many hours a day Scotsman McCall Smith spends writing his 5 books a year, why the series takes place in Botswana, and what happens when Assistant Detective Charlie gets his first case.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
At age 84 Madeleine Albright passed away last year. She was the first woman US Secretary of State, US Ambassador to the United Nations, and author of numerous books including PRAGUE WINTER.
She came to the US with her family as a political refugee, a daughter of a diplomat, and spent her teen years in Colorado. She spoke of the indispensable role of international diplomacy as the world often faces multiple crises. Like now.
In our last conversation in 2012 about her book, “Prague Winter,” she reminisces about her early days in Czechoslovakia. She goes on to describe a family secret that she didn’t discover until she was age 59 and with characteristic candor, details some of the political predicaments that were occurring a decade ago and somehow still seem familiar today.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Taras Grescoe, author of “THE LOST SUPPER”, his eighth book, explores an understanding that is quickly spreading among chefs, food producers, and scientists: that the key to sustainable eating lies not in looking forward, but in looking back to the foods—many of them forgotten or on the verge of extinction—that have sustained us through our half-million year existence as a species.
Grescoe is a widely read commentator on the interplay of food, travel, and the environment. His journalism has been published in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and National Geographic.
Tune in for details about the insects that fueled the diet of the Aztecs, the value of farmhouse cheese, and how to start your own journey to the food varieties of the past.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Craig Johnson, author of a Wyoming mystery series featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire is back with his 19th in the series, THE LONGMIRE DEFENSE. This long running string of books is not only a bestseller in the book world, but continues as a popular TV show, Longmire, on Netflix despite being cancelled some years ago.
This new novel takes readers deep into the heart of the Wyoming countryside where Sheriff Longmire is called to a crime scene like few others that he has seen. This crime and the old rifle that is found at the site bring up issues that go back to his grandfather Lloyd Longmire’s time in Wyoming. And the revelations he learns about Lloyd offer clues and motives for Walt’s investigation.
Tune in for what's up with the tv show, where Johnson gets his book ideas, and what's coming next.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
In 2018 former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, author of BLOWBACK: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump wrote an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Timesfrom inside the Trump administration. He revealed publicly what Trump’s cabinet was saying privately: the president was dangerously unfit for office.
He unmasked himself 2 years later to urge Americans to vote against Trump in 2020 and launched the largest alliance of ex-officials in United States history to take down the president who appointed them.
In the world of national security — the world Taylor comes from — there’s a term to describe the unintended consequences of our actions, of failing to see what’s around the corner if we make the wrong choice: BLOWBACK.
Tune in for why Trump’s supporters are so loyal, what is the worst part of being a political target, and what only citizens can do to keep the US a strong democracy.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
James McBride’s newest book is THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them.
As the story begins, it’s 1972. Workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania are digging the foundations for a new development, and the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
When the truth is finally revealed about what happened and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community— heaven and earth— that sustain us.
James McBride is an award-winning writer, musician, and screenwriter, the author of eight books, and brother to 11 siblings. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the US.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“I Have Something to Tell You” by Chasten Buttigieg is the young adult adaptation of his candid bestselling memoir about growing up gay in his small Midwestern town.
This version is completely rewritten with new stories, including resources for readers, parents, and teachers. It focuses on the author’s young years and his coming of age story. He also explores the support systems he’s built and describes ways readers can build their own.
He is on a 30+ stop nationwide in-person tour, including places where anti-LGBTQ legislation and book bans are on the rise.
Listen in as he describes the most common comments he hears on the road and explains the differences between questions he’s asked at events depending on whether he’s in a red, purple or blue state.
Chasten Buttigieg is the husband of Pete, a former Democratic presidential candidate, and dad to Penelope and Gus.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Jake Tapper regularly interviews world leaders and other newsmakers, but he also brings his knowledge of politics and the past to his political thrillers that are historically accurate.
“All The Demons Are Here” is set in 1977. The story revolves around a brother and sister, Ike and Lucy Marder, son and daughter of U.S. Senator Charlie Marder and Margaret Marder, a well-known zoologist. Ike is a U.S. Marine war hero, but AWOL when we meet him, while Lucy is an up and coming journalist at a Washington, DC tabloid.
Jake Tapper is the chief DC anchor and chief Washington correspondent for CNN; he hosts the weekday show The Lead with Jake Tapper and cohosts the Sunday public-affairs show State of the Union.
Tune in to discover Jake’s earliest memories of politics, his opinion of tv news coverage after decades in the business, and how many issues of the 1970s repeat themselves today.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
The latest historical novel, LADY TAN'S CIRCLE OF WOMEN, from writer Lisa See who is the author of 12 books, is inspired by the true story of a woman physician from 15th-century China whose remedies are still used today some 500 years later.
According to Confucius who was influential at the time, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family in the late 1400s in China was raised by her grandparents to be a doctor.
Tune in to hear how Lisa discovered Tan Yunxian, details about the thousand-year tradition of foot binding in China, and why red-haired-and-freckled Lisa See writes books about Chinese women and their friendships.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road, had an itinerant childhood. Based in New York City, she is now 89 and has never stopped traveling.
When she was a young girl, her father would pack the family in the car every fall and drive across country searching for adventure and trying to make a living. The seeds were planted: Gloria realized that growing up didn’t have to mean settling down.
And so began a lifetime of travel, of activism and leadership, of listening to people whose voices and ideas would inspire change and revolution.
“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was.” This interview originally aired October 21, 2016.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Silvia Pettem’s “In Search of the Blonde Tigress," dips into the world of sensationalized Chicago newspaper headlines in the 1930s that claimed Eleanor was not only “the blonde tigress,” but also “the most dangerous woman alive.”
But a closer look at her life shows that she was an otherwise ordinary woman who got caught up in a Chicago crime spree, then was convicted as an accomplice to murder, and sent to prison for 199 years. She escaped seven years later and managed to live out her life as America’s longest-running female fugitive.
Pettem’s research led to police and prison records, court transcripts, and her theory of where the grave of the “blonde tigress” is today.
Listeners might be familiar with some of her other 20 plus books including the recently revised "Someone’s Daughter—In Search Of Justice For Jane Doe," which is also now part of a documentary series available on Hulu.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Award-winning African ecologist Paula Kahumbu, author of SECRETS OF THE ELEPHANTS, is one of the world’s preeminent advocates for elephant conservation and the fight against illegal poaching of elephants for the ivory trade.
Her gorgeous co-authored National Geographic coffee table book is a companion to the TV series of the same name.
As big as a bus and weighing up to 11 tons, elephants have fascinated us for centuries. But only recently have scientists been able to observe their innermost workings as individuals, families, and herds.
Kahumbu describes how she became committed to elephants, how they communicate with each other in ways unknown until recently, and which one of the four types of these animals is in grave peril.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
The always fun Lisa Scottoline is back with her 37th novel, LOYALTY, a historical novel about the beginnings of the Mafia on the island of Sicily in the 1800’s.
Readers will be transported to the dramatic and ruggedly beautiful island of Sicily, the jewel of the Mediterranean, where lush lemon groves and mouth-watering cuisine contrast with a turbulent history of colonization and corruption.
Tune in for Italian American former lawyer/law professor Scottoline explaining what’s missing from the movie The Godfather, why law and justice are often not the same thing, and why in some families loyalty is everything.
She has an amazing 30 million books in print and has been published in 35 countries.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Steven Simon, author of seven books, is currently a fellow at MIT (Mass. Inst. Tech) after spending nearly 40 years specializing in the Middle East in a variety of high-level jobs both in and out of government.
In his newest book, “GRAND DELUSION: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East,” he is both candid and clear about the gap between US policymakers’ fantasy and reality in this part of the world. He calls out the enormous and terrible consequences, particularly for the people in the region caught in the crossfire as a result of this gap.
In our conversation he explains the origins of US interest in the Middle East, which president offered “The Deal of the Century” (chapters are organized by president), and what 2 countries in the region actually benefitted from the American presence.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Inspired by a 25-year-old New York Times article about World War II evacuated English children revisiting their U.S. foster homes as adults, Laura Spence-Ash tells her own well researched story, BEYOND THAT, THE SEA.
The book follows the lives of two families over three decades. Their lives become intertwined when Beatrix, the eleven-year-old daughter of the English family, is sent to live with an American family during the height of the London Blitz.
Bea’s story begins as German bombs fall over London in 1940, and her working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make an impossible choice: they decide to send her to the United States for safety. When she arrives in Boston, she meets her new family, Nancy and Ethan Gregory and their two sons with whom she'll live for five years.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Former Associated Press Mexico City Bureau Chief Katherine Corcoran's IN THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF. A Murder, A Cover-up, and The True Cost of Silencing the Press reports some of the facts why 85 Mexican journalists have been killed in the past decade with no consequences for the killers.
Except for war zones, Mexico--a democracy--is the world's most dangerous country for journalists.
Corcoran focuses on the murder of legendary journalist Regina Martínez who was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico's state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. In 2012 she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe.
At the AP, she led an award-winning team that broke major stories about cartel and state violence and abuse of authority in Mexico and Central America. Her columns about Mexican politics and press freedom have appeared in numerous newspapers and publications.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
In Marc Schultz's THE GOOD LIFE, what makes for a happy life, a fulfilling life? A good life?
The simple but surprising answer is: relationships. The stronger our relationships, the more likely we are to live happy, satisfying, and overall healthier lives. In fact, the Harvard Study of Adult Development reveals that the strength of our connections with others can predict the health of both our bodies and our brains as we go through life.
For over eight decades, this study has tracked the same individuals and their families, asking thousands of questions and taking hundreds of measurements—from brain scans to blood work—with the goal of discovering what really makes for happiness and a good life.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Elaine Weiss's THE WOMAN’S HOUR: The Great Fight to Win the Vote tells the true story of the suffragettes—women in the face of enormous opposition who fought for and won American women's right to vote in 1920, a long 131 years after American men cast their first ballots.
As the book opens up, it's that fateful summer. After 70 years of a long fought campaign for equal citizenship for 27 million women, one of the pivotal political battles in United States history is unfolding in Nashville, Tennessee. The women's suffrage movement needed just one more state to ratify the 19th Amendment, and it all came down to this state. In the state legislature that summer, Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment by one vote in August, 1920.
Weiss reveals what it took for activists to win this crucial battle and how close they came to losing. Woman’s Hour is more than just a vivid work of history, it is an inspiration for everyone who continues the fight for justice and equal rights today.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Jennifer Herrera’s debut thriller and first in a series is THE HUNTER.
After reckless behavior costs NYPD detective Leigh O’Donnell her job and her marriage, she returns with her four-year-old daughter to her beautiful hometown of Copper Falls, Ohio in this richly atmospheric novel.
Three men in town have drowned in what Leigh suspects to be a triple homicide. She hopes that by finding out who killed them, she just might get her life back on course.
Tune in for her explanation of why fictional murder victims are usually women, yet statistics say 80% of homicide victims are men.
Jennifer Herrera is a former philosophy grad student turned literary agent (her day job), whose first task in the publishing world was ghost writing.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Artist and singer Melissa Newman, one of the 5 daughters of actor Paul Newman who died in 2008, spoke with me about her dad’s posthumous memoir, “PAUL NEWMAN, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man.”
It was compiled from interviews he gave to a close friend, and it sheds light on the self-doubt of the seemingly cool and calm Hollywood legend who was a deeply private man living an intensely public life.
His major film roles (out of 65 movies) include 3 of my favorites Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting. He was also a race car driver starting at age 47. He won several national championships and took home the prize at his last race behind the wheel of a 700-horsepower Corvette when he was in his 80s.
A leading philanthropist of the 20th century, Newman raised and donated nearly $1 billion to many charities. He had six children and was married to Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward for fifty years.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
LONGPATH by futurist Ari Wallach is about a mindset that looks at a future where new ways aren’t quite here yet and the old ways don’t work anymore.
Drawing on history, theology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and social technologies, Wallach teaches readers to strengthen their ability to look ahead, relieve reactions to stressful events, increase capacity for cooperation, and even boost creativity.
Founder of a company that’s worked with CNN, Volkswagen Global, and The UN Refugee Agency among many others, in our conversation Wallach also describes the future trend he didn’t see coming.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“I feel lucky to do what I do. I write about real people, often by living their lives for a while—visiting their lives, you might say. Trying them on for size. Though there are easier ways to make a living, I suppose, none strike me as a fraction so interesting.” T.C.
In Ted Conover’s 7th book, CHEAP LAND COLORADO, he introduces us to the off-gridders and their families who live in an isolated part of southern Colorado’s enormous San Luis Valley.
In our conversation today Ted talks about why these folks seek out this difficult life, how they manage the bitter high-altitude winters, and the skills homeowners learn when there are no city services or utilities.
Ted has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, and butchered beef in a meat-packing plant in Nebraska. His day job is teaching at New York University. He's also the author of six other books and numerous articles published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic, among many others. Perhaps his best-known book is “Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing,” an account of his ten months spent working as a corrections officer at New York’s Sing Sing Prison.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Christopher McDougall's Running with Shermanintroduces us to the McDougall family and their menagerie--donkeys, rams, chickens, fainting goats--who all live on a small farm in rural Pennsylvania.
This book is part scientific exploration of the lost art of connecting with animals, part vivid telling of what life’s like in the southern part of Amish country, part radical rehabilitation story, part deep dive into the crazy sport that is burro racing (and the insane training required to run 15 miles with a donkey in tow in Colorado’s high altitude), and part road trip that cuts through the best of Americana.
Along the way impossibly, improbably, Sherman who starts out as a rescue donkey in this story learns to run.
This conversation with Chris McDougall took place several years ago. His newest book, Born to Run 2: The Ultimate Training Guide, will be released in December 2022.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Delia Owens, the co-author of three nonfiction books on African research and wildlife, published her debut novel, “Where the Crawdads Sing,” in 2018, the year when this interview took place. Since then this book has sold in the millions, attracted literary prizes, and has been made into a movie.
Where the Crawdads Sing is a mystery, a love story, and a courtroom drama, but it is primarily about self-reliance and survival. This nature-infused story features Kya, a young woman who was abandoned as a child in the remote coastal marshes of North Carolina and who learns to live by herself. In our conversation Delia also talks about her research life in Africa studying wildlife and how that experience affects her today.
"I learned from a book that crawdads don't really sing, but the important thing is that I learned from my mother that if you go deep enough into the wilderness, you'll hear them anyway." Delia Owens
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Private investigator Elvis Cole and his enigmatic partner Joe Pike are back on the case in RACING THE LIGHT by Robert Crais whose thrillers have been translated into 42 languages.
In Bob's 23rd novel, Adele Schumacher isn't a typical worried mom. When she hires Elvis to find her missing son, a controversial podcaster named Josh Shoe, she brings a bag filled with cash, bizarre tales of government conspiracies, and a squad of professional bodyguards.
Finding Josh should be simple, but Elvis quickly learns he isn't alone in the hunt. Then mix in super-secret security tech, corrupt politicians, vicious business cartels, and of course, humor and suspense.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
RIVER OF THE GODS by historian Candice Millard is her fourth book. Known for her meticulously researched work, her newest book is an adventure tale full of danger that takes place in unchartered territory in Africa in the mid-1800s.
For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In 1854 Richard Burton and John Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England.
Finding the source of the Nile took years and would not have been possible for these Englishmen without the guidance, expertise and local knowledge of Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a former slave.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Richard Osman is an author, a well-known television personality and comedian in the UK. His newest book is The Bullet That Missed in the popular “Thursday Murder Club” series that has already sold in the millions.
Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim are adventurous 70somethings who live at the Coopers Chase Retirement Village in rural England and are the crime solvers in these light-hearted, clever mysteries. In the latest installment they solve murders, take on an ex-KGB colonel, and a murderous money launderer. Tv hosts and the local cops show up, too.
Trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Patricia Schultz of “1000 Places to See Before You Die” fame has authored a different kind of book this time.
“WHY WE TRAVEL: 100 Reasons to Get Up and Go” pairs beautiful color photos with pearls of wisdom, lists, and essential travel tips and focuses not on where or when to travel, but on how travel enriches us and why we choose to travel.
She told me why packing tips are a whole lot more than what you put in your suitcase, what the first thing is she does when visiting a new city, and why an assignment to cover “The Game of Thrones” in Northern Ireland was so challenging.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Kimberly Garza’s debut novel, “The Last Karankawas” explores modern, diverse south Texas. She takes readers to the salty aired streets of Galveston where a tight-knit community of Mexican and Filipino American families live on the Texas coast.
When word spreads of an approaching storm named Hurricane Ike in 2008, each Galveston resident is forced to decide: abandon their hard-won home and flee inland, or board up the windows and hunker down.
Born in Galveston and raised in Uvalde, Kimberly is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
An American retired judge of the Superior Court of California, LaDoris Hazzard Cordell was also the first black female judge in the northern part of the state.
Her memoir, "HER HONOR, My Life on the Bench...What Works, What’s Broken, and How to Change It," is a robust and colorful collection of stories from 20 years as a judge.
In her courthouse she rotated through various specialties—family and probate courts, criminal jury trials and traffic court, to name just a few.
She uses real cases to highlight how judges make difficult decisions, all the while facing outside pressures from the media, law enforcement, and the friends and families of the people involved.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
With INVISIBLE STORM Jason Kander has written the book he himself needed in his darkest moments of PTSD. After Afghanistan, his day job was politics as a rising star in the Democratic party, first in his native Missouri and then running for national office. But that stopped when symptoms became too great.
It’s the best book I’ve read about PTSD—what it is, what it feels like, what to do about it, how it affects families (through the words of his wife Diana), and how it interplays with a life of politics.
Today, Jason Kander works with national veterans groups.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Ryan Busse, author of “GUNFIGHT. My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America” is a proud gun owner, sportsman, environmentalist, and conservationist and a former firearms executive who’s written an insider’s view of the radicalization of the US gun industry.
Busse explains how and when the US gun culture changed, that culture’s alliance with political factions in the US and abroad, and the most essential thing that we can do to change it.
Today, Busse is a policy advisor for gun control advocate and former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords who was shot and severely wounded during an assassination attempt.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Colorado-based Mark Lee Gardner’s ninth book, THE EARTH IS ALL THAT LASTS, is a dual biography of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders. The author's research features new primary sources, including diaries.
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and their warriors crushed Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana and led Sioux resistance in the fierce final chapter of the “Indian Wars.”
This 1876 epic battle was the Sioux's greatest victory, but it was also the beginning of the end for their treasured sacred way of life.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
David Gergen knows a thing or two about how leaders are made. He's been a White House adviser to four presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan & Clinton) of different parties, CNN senior political analyst, and founder of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
In Hearts Touched with Fire. How Great Leaders Are Made he presents his ideas about leadership using numerous examples from the past and present.
He traces the journeys of historic icons like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as contemporary game changers like Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s time, he says, to pass the torch to younger leaders.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”
Bill McKibben is an educator, environmental activist and author of more than a dozen books. His newest title is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What The Hell Happened.”
He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country except North Korea. His new project, organizing people over age sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
OVERBOARD by crime writer Sara Paretsky is her 21st book in her series about her legendary detective, V.I. Warshawski.
As this book begins V.I. is on her way home from an all-night surveillance job in Chicago and is led by her dogs on a mad chase that ends when they discover a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan.
Credited with transforming the mystery category of books with the creation of her female private eye 40 years ago, Paretsky's books featuring V.I. Warshawski are international best sellers in 30 countries. She’s also the founder of Sisters in Crime and recipient of numerous awards around the world.
She’s advocated for women and the underserved for decades and works closely with literacy and reproductive rights groups.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Colorado-based Paul Holes, author of UNMASKED, specializes in cold case and serial predator crimes. He began his career in the Contra Costa County (CA) Sheriff's and District Attorney's Offices in California's Bay Area.
He led the team that found the Golden State Killer, the most notorious and cunning serial predator in U.S. history who hid in plain sight for more than 40 years.
His memoir of investigating America’s toughest cold cases and the rewards and toll of a life solving crime also includes details of Laci Peterson’s murder and the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.
He continues his work today applying innovative technology, including genetic genealogy, which was the key to identifying the Golden State Killer.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
After dozens of travel guidebooks under his belt, Brandon Presser’s newest title is THE FAR LAND: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, And Mutiny In The South Pacific.
The mutiny on the British navy vessel HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific in 1789 when Fletcher Christian and his followers seized the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh.
In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the area and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era. They found the whereabouts of the Bounty’s band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions.
Seven or so generations later, the island’s past still looms over its 48 residents-- descendants of the original mutineers, marooned like modern castaways. Today only a rusty cargo ship connects Pitcairn with the rest of the world a few times a year.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
In WAYS & MEANS. Lincoln and his Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, author Roger Lowenstein not only spells out how each side in very different ways paid for the war, but reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation.
Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
In our conversation he also describes the several ways that Mr. Putin in his invasion of Ukraine today are similar to what the Confederacy did more than 150 years ago.
Lowenstein is the author of 7 books, Including "America's Bank" and "Origins of the Crash." He reported for The Wall Street Journal for more than a decade, and his work appears in numerous other financial publications.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Ted Conover'sIMMERSION: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO GOING DEEP shares the how-to’s of his trade that he had to learn the hard way. How to get in, how to be ethical, and how to avoid being Googled are just a few of his topics he discusses.
Ted has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, and butchered beef in a meat-packing plant in Nebraska. His day job is teaching at New York University. He is also the author of five other books and numerous articles published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic, among many others. Perhaps his best-known book is “Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing,” an account of his ten months spent working as a corrections officer at New York’s Sing Sing Prison.
This conversation with Ted Conover took place several years ago. His newest book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge, will be released later this year.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
ANGELS OF THE PACIFICbyElise Hooper (her fourth novel) tells the powerful story of American army and navy nurses kept as prisoners for nearly three years during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II.
Many of them had fled the hardships of the Great Depression at home before the war for the glamour and adventure of Manila, one of the most desirable postings in the world.
But everything changed when the Japanese army invaded with lightning speed and devastating results only hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
These angels of the Pacific served on the front lines until captured as prisoners of war on Corregidor, a US post on a fortified island near Manila, and subsequently held behind the high stone walls of Manila's Santo Tomas Internment Camp.
This book is dedicated to the author’s grandfather who served in the US Navy in the Pacific during the war.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Early in Brit Bennett’s “THE VANISHING HALF” light-skinned Desiree and Stella, now age 16, run off to New Orleans, two hours away. But "after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find."
It’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities.
One sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past.
Yet the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Bob Shea has written and illustrated over a dozen children's picture books. His newest is the award-winning “CHEZ BOB,” a story about a lazy yellow alligator named Bob who is intent on gobbling birds.
To that end, he opens Chez Bob, a bird restaurant, on his nose. It becomes so popular that Bob finds himself a pillar of the bird community. Bob even coaches a local bird basketball team and joins a bird book club.
What happens next to Bob in this story, is he going to learn to love, too?
Tune in to find out why he and the alligator have the same name and his answer when the first-graders at school visits predictably ask him if he's rich.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
"THE STEAL. The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It," co-authoredby Mark Bowden, concentrates in week-by-week, state-by-state fashion on the 64 days between Election Day, November 3 and January 5th, 2021.
All the judges in the 61 election lawsuits during this period made their unanimous decisions against Trump’s claims based on the law. So did the election workers at many levels in the six swing states, regardless of their party affiliations, who refused to change the votes.
The only elected officials who objected to certifying the 2020 Electoral College results were in Washington DC. They are all Republicans and include 8 Senators and 139 members of the House of Representatives. Their names appear in the back of the book.
The book is co-authored by journalists Mark Bowden (his 15th) and Matthew Teague (his first).
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Can a lawyer in their first courtroom case win against the mighty power of the US federal government? Yes, she did. The Farmer’s Lawyerby North Dakota attorney and advocate Sarah Vogel is a memoir about her successful landmark class action lawsuit against the federal government.
She did it on behalf of 240,000 family farmers facing illegal foreclosures during the 1980s farm crisis in the President Reagan years.
Sarah Vogel is also the first woman elected Commissioner of Agriculture in the US. She served in that position in North Dakota for two terms and has become one of the foremost agriculture lawyers in the United States.
You might want to tune in to hear Sarah’s answer to “Who is the best friend of the small farmer today?” Maybe you will be as surprised as I was.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Prolific (36 books) storyteller Ken Follett, author of the contemporary thriller NEVER, says, “When I was doing the research for “Fall of Giants” I was shocked to realize that the First World War was a war that nobody wanted…I came to believe that it was all a tragic accident. And I wondered: Could that happen again?”
His compelling book speaks to our political times while it travels the world. It brims with heroines and villains, false prophets and elite warriors, jaded politicians and opportunistic revolutionaries.
Two elite western intelligence agents in the Sahara Desert track drug-smuggling terrorists. Nearby, a beautiful young widow in Chad fights against human traffickers. A senior Chinese spy battles against older Communist hawks who support North Korea and hate the west. Meanwhile, US President Pauline Green navigates terrorist attacks, illegal arms trading, and the smear campaigns of her political opponent with careful and deft diplomacy. But what’s next for her?
More than a thriller, NEVER is about the impossible decisions and unforeseen consequences that could lead to the next world war. It is a cautionary tale for our times.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Prompted by the onset of Covid, Doughty has created a book that is a charming collection of lists, musings, prompts, and illustrations—from the extraordinary to the everyday, from the big to the little. Here are examples. Best advice. Handwritten thank-you notes. A stroll through the park at dusk, just as the crickets start to hum.
One of my favorites is that YouTube video of “Uptown Funk” set to dance clips from old movies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Another is the “Little Pieces of Hope” Playlist of 19 songs from the book.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Doerr takes readers on a 600-year epic journey.
There are three storylines: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city wall during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and gentle octogenarian Zeno, in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for a distant exoplanet, decades from now.
A single copy of an ancient text—the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land—provides solace, mystery, and the most profound human connection to this group of characters.
An author of six books, Doerr’s last book, “All the Light We Cannot See,” about people and events during World War II won a Pulitzer Prize and is being produced as a series for Netflix.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Bestselling, award-winning historian Nathaniel Philbrick's "Travels with George" is a blended account of two road trips separated by about 230 years.
In the fall of 1789, Washington, only six months into his presidency, set out on his first of four road trips as he attempted to unite what were in essence thirteen independent states into a single nation.
In the fall of 2018, Philbrick, his wife Melissa, and their dog Dora set out on their own series of road trips as they retraced Washington’s route across the country.
As for the style of travel, the Philbricks journeyed in a comfortable car with GPS. George traveled in a carriage pulled by four horses. But ever the soldier, when he neared a town, he’d slip out of the carriage dressed in his general’s uniform, mount his big white horse, and ride down the main thoroughfare to thunderous acclaim.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Dylan Thuras is co-author of "Gastro Obscura A Food Adventurer’s Guide," a book with 500 entries that span all seven continents and fifty states. Complete with photographs and illustrations, it’s all about food that ranges from the Antarctica Base Stations’ often elegant cuisine for scientists to the largest Asian night market in North America at Richmond in British Columbia.
But then there's also Elvis’ favorite sandwich, the Fool’s Gold (peanut butter + blueberry jam + bacon on white bread), created in a now defunct restaurant in Denver CO. Story goes that Elvis once flew from Graceland to Denver with friends on his Boeing 727 private jet back in the 1970s just so they could share his cross-country indulgence. Fool’s Gold is still on the menu today at Nick’s Café in Golden, Colorado.
"The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid," also co-authored by Dylan Thuras, is an illustrated guide to 100 mysterious wonders, both natural and manmade, and is popular with kids, parents and teachers alike.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
"The Devil in the Gallery” is a lavishly illustrated book, the latest of more than a dozen books by Noah Charney. It’s a guided tour of the history of art through its scandals, rivalries, and shocking acts, each of which resulted in a positive step forward for art in general and, in most cases, for the careers of the artists in question.
Charney is an American expat who lives with his family and teaches in Slovenia and who is also a professor in Rome. He is the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art and considered by many the Sherlock Holmes of art crime.
Among his other books is the recently released co-authored “Making It: The Artist's Survival Guide.”
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
This book, “How Magicians Think. Misdirection, Deception, and Why Magic Matters,” is my love letter to magic,” says Jay, ”and it answers the questions people ask me every night after the show.” This book is divided into 52 essays, same number as a deck of cards, and is filled with Jay's insights from working as a magician since he was a kid. Jay answers common questions like "How do you know who to call up from the audience to help you with your show?" “What do magicians do in secret?,” and “What does it feel like when you perform?"
An international prize winner for his magic tricks, Jay averages 300 days each year putting on shows and watching other masters at work. He’s performed magic in more than 100 countries and can tell you with precision who is his toughest audience.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Ever wonder why some parents don’t get their kids vaccinated? How reliable are childhood and Covid-19 vaccines anyway? Tune in…
It’s not often that a book published five years ago is more pertinent today. But University of Colorado Denver Professor Jennifer Reich’s “Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines” is that book because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“For over a decade, Jennifer Reich has been studying the phenomenon of vaccine refusal from the perspectives of parents who distrust vaccines and the corporations that make them, as well as the health care providers and policy makers who see them as essential to ensuring community health. Reich reveals how parents who opt out of vaccinations see their decision: what they fear, what they hope to control, and what they believe is in their child’s best interest. Based on interviews with parents who fully reject vaccines as well as those who believe in “slow vax,” or altering the number of and time between vaccinations, the author provides a fascinating account of these parents’ points of view.” New York University Press
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
Scott Small’s debut book is “Forgetting. The Benefits of Not Remembering.” He's an expert on the memory losses of old age and Alzheimer’s who now introduces us to a third kind of forgetting. The normal one, the one that’s good for us and enhances our lives.
"Small, director of Columbia University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, puts forgetting in a new light in his eye-opening and reassuring debut. While the standard view in science has been that forgetting is a malfunction of memory, Small makes a case that it ‘is not just normal but beneficial to our cognitive and creative abilities, to our emotional well-being, and even to societal health’...Small keeps things accessible with an easygoing prose and helpful diagrams, and his passion is undeniable. This smart survey will satisfy those curious about memory, or anxious about forgetting.” Publisher’s Weekly
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer--now ninety-one years old and at the top of her game--has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers, who “raises ordinary people and everyday occurrences to a new height.” (Washington Post) These collected short stories--most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new story that brings her early characters into the present--are evocative of an era that still resonates deeply today."
This is the author's 15th book. At age 91 she’s already working on her next novel. Along with publishing fiction, she’s written a book for writers called “The Company of Writers.” She’s taught in many creative writing programs and received honors and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
"Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek Tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike—particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana’s niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge. Mariana, who was once herself a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the ancient traditions, lies something sinister."
Alex Michaelides’s second novel is “The Maidens.” His first novel, “The Silent Patient,” was written after a self-described disappointing career as a Hollywood screenwriter. An instant bestseller, his first book has been sold in 50 countries. Alex was born and raised in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean, where he first learned about the Greek mythology that is woven throughout his books.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“Cold Case Chronicles” tells the stories of victims – some missing, some murdered and some with changed identities. All are true, and each are mysterious in their own ways. The cases in this nonfiction narrative date from 1910 through the 1950s and include an evolution in forensics, as well as historical context in order to view the men, women and children through the lens of time.”
One of these new forensic tools is genetic genealogy, the use of DNA testing (often using commercial home kits) to determine relationships between individuals, find genetic matches and discover one’s ancestry.
In addition to writing her true crime books, Silvia is a longtime newspaper columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and author of more than 20 books. Though she is not a member of law enforcement, she works with them, has written a book for them and is credited with doing the lion’s share of the research on a famous Boulder Jane Doe case (“Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe”).
For more information, see www.silviapettem.com.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.
Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.
It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.”
Zakiya Dalila Harris’s debut novel, The Other Black Girl, takes readers into the corporate world of publishing. Somewhat like the character Nella in her book, Harris spent nearly three years in editorial at Knopf/Doubleday, a premier publishing house. She’s currently working on the pilot of a Hulu streaming service tv series about this book. Follow Harris on @zakiya_harris.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“The change was immediate. The country opened up west of Harrisburg and suddenly we could drink from streams and build fires without getting caught and sleep pretty much anywhere we wanted. We’d walked the railroad track from Washington to Baltimore to Philly and then turned west at the Main Line and made Amish country by winter. The Pennsylvania fields lay bare and hard in the cold but there were seams and folds in that country—strips of woods along stream bottoms, windbreaks between the cornfields, ridges left wild for hunting—where a man could easily pass the night unnoticed.”
Multiple best-selling author Sebastian Junger’s sixth book, Freedom, recounts in part a 400-mile trek of a few men with 70-pound backpacks each walking along railroad lines on the East Coast.
Junger is the author of “The Perfect Storm,” “War,” and “Tribe” as well as Co-Director of the Oscar-nominated @Restrepo movie. Follow Junger on @sebastianjunger
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
As a child, Jory Fleming was wracked by uncontrollable tantrums, had no tolerance for people, and couldn’t manage the outside world. Slightly more than a decade later, he was bound for England, selected to attend one of the world’s premier universities, Oxford University, on a Rhodes Scholarship.
Jory Fleming’s unconventional memoir is “How to Be Human. An Autistic Man’s Guide to Life.” This book was written through a series of conversations with writer Lyric Winik.
Jory and Lyric exchange comments and collaborate as they examine what it means to be human from topics ranging from rethinking emotion to autism and faith.
Jory now works at his undergrad college, the University of South Carolina, analyzing climate data. In his spare time, he is an avid bird watcher, board game enthusiast, and Scottish country dancer.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“Tessa, born and raised in Belfast, is a news producer for the BBC. She is also the single mother of a six-month-old son, who she is raising in the shadow of escalating threats to peace by a reemerging IRA. While she’s at work one day, news breaks of an IRA raid at a gas station a few hours to the north. Tessa freezes as security camera footage reveals a familiar face: her sister, Marian, who is at the scene, putting on a black ski mask. From that moment, Tessa’s life is upended, as she struggles to confront the seemingly impossible truth that her sister has become involved with the IRA.”
Flynn Berry’s third thriller, a Reese’s Book Club Pick, is “Northern Spy.” Berry, a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers in Texas, writes her books in longhand and doesn’t key them into a computer until she’s written at least 1,000 pages.
Known for writing novels with a strong sense of place, her first book, “Under the Harrow,” won an Edgar Award for best first novel. Her books, so far, have taken place in England or Ireland with a different part of the world coming up next.
Follow Flynn on @flynnberry_
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“A floundering second-generation teen growing up in Atlanta’s suburbs, Neil Narayan doesn’t have the same drive as everyone around him. His parents’ expectations for him are high, but he just wants his neighbor Anita Dayal. But Anita has a secret: she and her mother, Anjali, have been brewing an ancient alchemical potion from stolen gold that transfers the ambition of the jewelry’s original owner to the drinker. Anita needs just a little boost to get into Harvard, but when Neil – who needs much more – joins in the plot, events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart.”
Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel, Gold Diggers, introduces readers to an Indian American community in a suburb of Atlanta.
Like the author herself, many of the book’s characters were born in the US into immigrant families. As the story unfolds, high achievement is the expected norm and the families’ version of the American Dream often proves unrealistic.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“I grew up in a family of foodies, chefs, butchers, and hunters (yes, it’s true). My household had a flock of chickens (both for eggs and for eating), the freezers were stocked full of meat, steaks were cooked rare, and there were even real animal heads decorating the walls (not that I ever liked the heads). … So, as I’m sure you can imagine, switching to veganism was a BIG change for me.”
Sam Turnbull’s second cookbook, Fast Easy Cheap Vegan, makes the case that an animal-free vegan diet doesn’t have to be time-consuming, too much work or even expensive.
This cookbook is all about smart tips and easy techniques that simplify cooking. Many recipes are one-pot, freezer-friendly, and make-ahead meals. And Sam says you can make any one of 101 recipes in fewer than 30 minutes.
Follow Turnbull on twitter: Sam@bonappetegan
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
“In the decade I’ve worked for the New York Times, I’ve reported from terrorist hot spots in West Africa, to wildfire ravaged California, and the globe. And as soon as I file each story, I do one thing before I head home. I search for the horses.”
Sarah Maslin Nir‘s first book, Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal describes why so many people are passionate, even obsessed, with horses.
Lifelong Manhattanite Nir began riding horses when she was just two years old and hasn’t stopped since.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message
New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto is the author of five books and numerous science-linked articles. This is the Voice begins with a story about how he blew out his own voice singing in a band.
Along the way, he shows us why the voice is the most efficient, effective means of communication ever devised. Even babies hear their mother’s voices in the womb. Our voices can be calibrated to reach one other person or thousands. One of his many research stops is up the Amazon to meet the Piraha, a reclusive tribe whose speaking sounds like singing.
In our conversation, he compares the political voices of Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/booktalk-diana-korte/message