Book Beat: Recent Episodes
The City University of New York
Distinguished authors and emerging writers from the ranks of University faculty, students and friends discuss and read their published works.
CSI and Graduate Center professor Ava Chin uncovers her family's remarkable history and reveals the deeper history of exclusion that defined the Chinese American experience for a century in "Mott Street."
Crystal Hana Kim says the Korean War is so deeply ingrained in her family's history--but so remote for Americans today--that it became the driving force for her to become a writer.
National Book Award finalist Grace Cho talks about "Tastes Like War," a memoir of her quest to understand her mother's journey from Korean War bride in the Pacific Northwest to her struggle with schizophrenia.
In "Sparring with Smokin' Joe," CUNY journalism professor Glenn Lewis recalls the epic rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali -- one that transcended sports, became a cultural and racial touchstone and ultimately defined Frazier's life inside and outside the ring.
Jimmy Carter is often thought of as a failed one-term president, but in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY's Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he's given credit for.
Ralph Blumenthal's "The Believer" tells the beguiling story of John Mack, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner whose career came to be defined by his study of people who said they'd had encounters with aliens. Mack believed them, and his life was never the same.
Brooklyn College alumnus Robert Jones Jr.'s debut novel, "The Prophets," is a different kind of love story: It reaches across centuries, continents and cultures to tell a soulful story of love between two young men enslaved on a plantation in the antebellum American South.
In his novel Missionaries, Phil Klay--Hunter College MFA alum, Iraq War veteran and National Book Award winner--explores the globalization of war through the stories of four people caught up in the nearly 60-year conflict in Colombia.
CUNY legal scholar Julie Suk discusses "We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment," her book about the women behind the long battle to enshrine full equal rights for women as a Constitutional amendment.
A conversation from Mexico City with Carmen Boullosa, one of the world's most celebrated Spanish-language writers and a CUNY literary treasure whose 18th novel, "The Book of Anna," has just been translated into English.
The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality. Richard Haw of John Jay College talks about his fascinating new biography, "Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling."
In February 1861, Abraham Lincoln journeyed 13 days and 1,900 miles by rail from his Illinois home to his inauguration in Washington. It was a long, tumultuous and dangerous trip through hundreds of towns where millions saw and heard Lincoln as the country hurtled toward the Civil War. Macaulay Honors College's Ted Widmer tells the dramatic story in "Lincoln on the Verge."