Read Beat (...and repeat): Recent Episodes
Steve Tarter
New books, new looks. Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 15 minutes on the average) chats with folks that have taken the time to research a topic and now written a book about it. I try to come up with subjects I think listeners will enjoy. Mostly non-fiction. Interviewer is Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and contributor to WCBU-FM, Peoria Public Radio.
Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com.
His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the years with most of the great songwriters of our time: John Lee Hooker, Neil Sedaka, Gerry Goffin, Phil Ochs, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Frank Zappa, Jimmy Webb, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Randy Newman, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. You get the idea.
You learn things in this book. The songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant wrote 24 songs for the Everly Brothers, among other things. Pollock ‘s interview with them sheds light on how a successful songwriting team broke into the business. They wrote letters to everybody they could think of.
“My heart would crack with every rejection,” said Felice. “I thought, well maybe we’re not that good, because I was counting on the fact that the powers that be really knew, cause if they didn’t know they wouldn’t be there. I didn’t realize it’s all guesswork in their department, too.”
Boudleaux added: “Some of the (songs) that we ourselves have liked personally the least have been songs that other people have flipped out on, and some of them have been pretty good hits. And some songs that we absolutely just were crazy about and loved and thought were just the best we’d ever written didn’t do a thing, and we still have them sitting around.”
Pollock’s interviews span an era from the 1970s into the 21st century. So were there surprises? On Neal Peart of Rush: “Would you expect the drummer of a world-renowned arena-resounding rock band to be conversant with the subtleties of black humor?”
“He was an intellectual,” said Pollock, who, in a 1986 interview, recalled what Peart had to say about his favorite writer: “To me, Tom Robbins is the quintessential modern writer because he’s funny, he’s profound, he’s sexy, he’s irreverent, he’s dirty, he’s hip. He’s everything I would like modern writing to be.”
Frank Zappa, often the contrarian, proved quite polite, said Pollock. John Sebastian talked about “magic moments” in the studio that were responsible for the string of hits he composed for the Lovin' Spoonful in the 1960s.
Sometimes it’s Pollock’s endnotes following the article that stay with you: “The erratic, sporadic, and quintessentially chaotic career of Andy Partridge, in and out of XTC, with various spinoff groups and album reconfigurations, continued into the twenty-first century and as yet shows no signs of relenting.”
Pollock’s concise collection takes you across the board when it comes to insight regarding the music business.
Oh yes, Pollock is also the author of the Rock Song Index, 7,500 of the most important songs from 1944 to 2000. No, it’s not a countdown, although I’d love a radio station to take a shot at it sometime. What would it take? Maybe a month or more. Waiting for number-one would take a true fan.
The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda.
The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. The sequel introduces a new cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a four-month-old Bengal who unleashes his boundless energy by demolishing bed linens and curtains, to tenacious and curious Shasha, who doesn’t let her small size stop her from anything, and the most lovable yet lazy cat Ms. Michiko.
Shimoda said translating the book presented a challenge due to the magic present in Ishida's work. "I find the story uplifting. I'm personally a fan of cats," she said.
The story fits into the fast-growing category of healing fiction, a subset of the cozy mystery, a genre that Shimoda said provides readers the opportunity to explore a little magic in everyday life.
Shimoda is at work on the translation of Ishida's third book in the series, due out in this country next year.
Based in New York, Shimoda is also considering translating select Japanese novels from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as preparing a manuscript of her own for publication.
Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system.
It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements all focused on the red planet. On Broadway, you had the comedy, A Message from Mars.
David Baron, a former science correspondent for NPR whose previous book, American Eclipse, chronicled America’s fascination with the solar eclipse of 1878, takes up the subject of this fascination with Mars in his latest effort, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.
Baron came by his interest in Mars through America’s space program. “I was raised on spacemen and Martians. It was on TV that I saw Martians, too,” said Baron, referring to My Favorite Martian, the sitcom that starred Ray Walston and Bill Bixby, and Marvin the Martian on the Looney Tunes that aired on Saturday morning.
The central figure in Baron’s study is Percival Lowell, a Bostonian blueblood who graduated from Harvard in 1876. Lowell sets up an observatory in Flagstaff, Az. and becomes the nation’s leading proponent of life on Mars.
In 1895, Lowell presented a program of “observations on Mars” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Downtown Boston. Lowell suggested that life on Mars may have had a head start. “Perhaps intelligence, indeed civilization, had emerged there eons ago, in ample time to adapt to the looming water crisis…Irrigation, and upon as vast a scale as possible, must be the all-engrossing Martian pursuit,” noted Lowell.
The question of canals on Mars, shadowy lines on the planet’s surface that appeared to some astronomers, was not a question to Lowell. “The canals are constructed for the express purpose of fertilizing the oases,” he said.
Nikola Tesla is also drawn into the Mars controversy as the inventor sought to communicate with Mars through the wireless (radio) beams he was experimenting with.
Baron noted that H.G. Wells wrote a story for Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1908 called “The Things That Live on Mars,” the apparent result of a meeting between Wells and Lowell in 1906. In the magazine story, Wells rejected his earlier conception of Martians as gelatinous, blood-thirsty monsters on stilts, said Baron. “They will probably have heads and eyes and backboned bodies, and …big shapely skulls,” noted Wells.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Martian craze was the publication of a newspaper cartoon in 1907 of a Martian called Mr. Skygack who comes to Earth to make ironic observations about day-to-day life.
While the scientific community, which always had reservations about Lowell’s observations, provided evidence that Mars was not only uninhabited but as desolate as our Moon, Lowell was a believer of Martians to the end. He died in 1916 when “the animating force of his imaginative mind departed his body forever,” wrote Baron.
Obituaries of the day largely lauded Lowell, noted Baron, adding that the excitement over Mars also inspired future generations. Robert Goddard who developed the concept of rockets said that he first got excited about the concept of blasting off from Earth from War of the Worlds.
Carl Sagan, the astronomer who opened up the universe for millions on PBS television, and Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction,” also credited the Martian craze for stimulating their interest in space.
Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been.
A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor.
As the first Jewish American artist to win international acclaim, Ezekiel (1844-1917) was a proud American yet lived in Rome for 40 years, said Baskind. Ezekiel never gave up his U.S. citizenship, making frequent trips back to the States to visit friends and family.
Ezekiel was a celebrity artist in his day, honored by U.S. presidents and European royalty, she said.
“Ezekiel felt he should be in Europe to get the proper art education he needed,” said Baskind. The artist spent time in Germany before falling in love with Rome, where his studio became famous in its own right, she said.
Some of Ezekiel’s works have lately become the source of controversy. Several of Ezekiel’s monuments depicting Confederate soldiers were taken down in the early 2020s after the murder of George Floyd, she said. An Ezekiel statue of Christopher Columbus was removed in Chicago, noted Baskind.
But Ezekiel’s Confederate work represented only a small part of the art he produced, she said, pointing to works like the majestic 1876 monument “Religious Liberty’’ in downtown Philadelphia and the large Thomas Jefferson monument on the University of Virginia campus that showcase his skill as an artist.
The UVA campus also displays Ezekiel’s “Blind Homer with His Student Guide,’’ a tribute to the ancient Greek poet. Ezekiel’s works can also be found in several American cities, such as Cincinnati and Louisville.
Among the sources Baskind used in researching her book were Ezekiel’s 638-page memoir, along with private correspondence, and records at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where Ezekiel was a cadet during the Civil War.
Despite a general lack of awareness about the artist, Baskind said she hopes that more people will come to appreciate Ezekiel's diverse body of work. “Ezekiel is an artist whose work is hidden in plain sight,” she said.
David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car.
Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing how these companies have pursued profit at the expense of the common good.
He details how the industry has covered up the dangers of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund opposition to climate change. Obst considers the future of mobility, surveying how cities—from Taipei to Tempe, Copenhagen to Chicago—are experimenting with forms of transportation that offer alternatives to the dominance of cars.
Do what you can in your own community to secure an area where people can enjoy life without the necessity of an automobile, urged Obst, who’s involved in doing that very thing in his own hometown of Santa Barbara.
When he’s not working on setting up car-free zones in California, Obst is getting college newspapers to work together on sharing stories. “Universities Speak (universitiesspeak.com) is an effort to develop a free college news service. Let’s say the Bradley Scout at Bradley University runs a story. People read it on the campus, and that’s as far as it goes. You send it to us, and we’ll send it across the country. We plan to launch the service in November,” he said.
“I’m 80 now, and my wife asks me if I’m ready to retire. I say no because we’re about to lose our democracy. If we don’t fight now, it will be too late,” said Obst.
When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war.
In Launching Liberty, Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas.
The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ships built to the same exact specifications. Over 2,700 were built between 1941 and 1945. When packed full of cargo, one ship could hold the equivalent of 300 railroad boxcars. That might be 2,800 jeeps or 430,000 K-rations.
Most chronicles how American shipyards — and their workers — rose to the wartime challenge. There were 228,000 workers in U.S. shipyards in December 1940. Less than two years later, 2.2 million worked on constructing ships.
There was a reason for that build-up. The United States was engaged in a two-front war that included both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Forgotten, perhaps, is that in the spring of 1942, just a few months after entering the war, the Allies lost 397 ships. Eighty-two of those ships were sunk off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia.
The heat was on. Along with the increase in manpower--and woman power--came new ideas on setting up shipyards and on building cargo ships fast.
Henry Kaiser, described by Most as "a dynamic builder of highways, dams, and bridges," turned his attention to shipbuilding, having never built a ship in his life before the war. Kaiser and others brought about "the greatest emergency shipbuilding program the world has ever seen," noted Most.
The shipyard brought "poor housewives, farmers, plumbers and Phds, inventors and patriotic handymen, brilliant engineers, hard-driving politicians, and billionaire businessmen" together to build giant steel cargo ships faster than the Germans could sink them," stated Most.
The author humanizes the Liberty Ship story with accounts of individuals like Wilmer Patrick Shea, the Marine corporal who lost an arm in battle but returned to the states to become a one-armed welder in the shipyard along with becoming an advocate of the healthcare program that Kaiser offered workers.
But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Most talks about a blended workforce required for the construction of so many ships. "But it didn't blend easily," he said.
Women and African Americans had to deal with resistance when they joined the shipyard workforce. "Unions were initially dismissive but the barriers did eventually come down," said Most.
Most doesn't gloss over the fact that there were problems in the construction of some of the ships. "The Liberty Ships were a critical component of the war program, but they weren't perfect. They had to be done quickly. They had flaws," he said.
Yet the fact that the S.S. Robert E. Peary, the Liberty Ship constructed in a record four days, carried supplies as the Allied troops were landing on the beaches of Normandy served as inspiration to all Americans, said Most.
If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik.
The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star, have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands.
Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse University Press) focuses on the Montezuma Wetlands Complex in central New York.
"Wetlands are much more than swamps, bogs, fens, marshes, and moors," noted Howard in the book's introduction. "Wetlands help us change the way we think."
The benefits of wetlands have become more pronounced in recent years. Wetlands filter impurities and pollutants from water, protect against wildfires and flooding, and provide a habitat for wildlife.
The National Park Service reports that by the mid-1980s, the United States had lost more than half of its original wetlands to development and agriculture. Additionally, a 2023 Supreme Court ruling has removed environmental protections from nearly half of the country's wetlands, according to Howard.
The New York complex that's the focus of Wisdom of the Marsh supports more than 368 species of fish and wildlife, as well as 242 species of migrating birds, half of which are endangered or threatened. It was in the Montezuma Wetlands area where the bald eagle was successfully reintroduced in the United States after almost being wiped out.
Once home to the Cayuga Nation, where People of the Great Swamp lived in harmony with plants and wildlife, the area changed once settlers moved in. The native people were forced out, and the great swamp was reduced by diking, farming, and the construction of canals, said Howard.
But Howard and Zalaznik's focus on the Montezuma complex shows how wetlands are now being embraced and expanded. Cornell University professor Eric Cheyfitz and the late William Mitsch of Ohio State University are among the many interviewed for the book who cite the challenges--and benefits--in advocating for wetlands.
Zalaznik's picture of the Northern Harrier Hawk, otherwise known as the gray ghost, flying through the Montezuma complex, is a vivid example of the importance of wetlands.
"Combating climate change is not all about Spartan sacrifice, scarcity, discomfort, and duplicative layers of government oversight," said Howard.
It also involves listening--and understanding--the wisdom of the marsh.
Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country.
The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry.
Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally.
No pre-war congressional investigation ever called film executives on the carpet for failing to identify the threat to this country in the 1930s, an era when “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at a time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” noted the New York Times.
In his book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, Thomas Doherty, a film historian and Brandeis University professor, explains that there were several reasons for U.S. moviemakers to avoid the issue before Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939.
Americans were suffering through the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Jobs were hard to find. People went to the movies to forget their troubles, watching fare like The Wizard of Oz or Fred and Ginger dancing in art-deco apartments, said Doherty.
MGM boss Sam Goldwyn said if you want to send a message, use Western Union, emphasizing Hollywood’s overriding mission was to provide entertainment, Doherty noted.
Other factors impeding a flow of message movies included the film industry’s production code that restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. The Third Reich wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, with German consul Georg Gyssling lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.
Studios also did business overseas, and Germany represented a big European market for U.S. films, said Doherty.
But Doherty said there some outliers, films that did address the dangers that Nazi aggression presented before the mainstream studios finally got around to the subject.
The first film to do so was Hitler’s Reign of Terror, “an oddball quasi-documentary” made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. that was released in 1934, said Doherty, noting that the film contains some striking footage of Vanderbilt on the streets of Vienna and Berlin amid Nazi brownshirts.
A member of one of America’s wealthiest families, Vanderbilt was a globetrotting raconteur who included “a truly bizarre sequence” with the reenactment of an interview between Vanderbilt and someone posing as Hitler. Vanderbilt asks “the money question,” said Doherty: “What about the Jews, your Excellency?”
“The film gets a limited release in 1934. It’s controversial. The German embassy wants to censor it. It doesn’t have much impact. But whatever you say about Vanderbilt, the film is very prophetic,” said Doherty, noting that Vanderbilt points to the militaristic path that Germany was on, predicting war in Europe “in five or six years.”
Hitler’s Reign of Terror gets an exclusive screening at the Peoria Women’s Club, 301 NE Madison Ave., on Oct. 16 in conjunction with the Peoria Area World Affairs Council. The film will be part of a program commemorating Vanderbilt’s speech at the club in 1939.
Doherty cited another independent film, I Am a Captive of Nazi Germany, released in 1936. Isobel Steele, an American journalist and “party girl,” was imprisoned by the Nazis for espionage in 1934. Steele was released, returning to the United States to star in a film of her experience, the first anti-Nazi motion picture to get a production code seal of approval, he said.
The film studios finally weighed in when Confessions of a Nazi Spy was released by Warner Brothers in the spring of 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe.
Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the public’s right “to control how their thoughts, sentiments, and emotions were published.”
When Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer, offered up his own view of privacy in 2009 by saying, “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he was simply channeling an old belief that the devil might call on you when you were on your own.
But Jenkins doesn’t single out the internet as the lone reason privacy may be under attack in the 21st century.
Reality television has a lot to answer for, she said. Starting back in the 1970s when TV’s Loud family aired their dirty laundry on the air, viewers have seen plenty of petty squabbles and bad behavior over a 50-year period, said Jenkins.
Writing from her home in England, a country with a love of security cameras, as any fan of modern British TV crime shows will attest, Jenkins said privacy concerns over having so many cameras to capture public activity have diminished over the years in the interests of public safety.
Strangers and Intimates is sweetly reasonable and pleasantly readable, noted reviewer Rupert Christiansen in the British paper, The Telegraph. “Jenkins respects all sides of an argument or situation without tub-thumping or special pleading. Her conclusion that 'the private realm must be validated and respected as equal to the public' may seem tame and question-begging, but the evidence she offers should set alarm bells ringing, “ he wrote.
T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes.
Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station wagon in 2017. Not just a day trip, mind you, but the length of the route--and back.
In a few weeks, he’ll leave Chicago to be part of a nine-car convoy of classic cars to cover the route—to L.A. and back—at an average of 35 miles per hour, the typical speed attained on pre-WWII highways, he noted.
The history that Baker provides isn’t just a nostalgic account of a bygone era. Starting in Chicago, the book outlines places of interest, explains how they came to be, as well as how they came to an end. But all is not lost. Some 30 percent of the places Baker describes in the book are still serving food, he said.
Some of the traditions created for travelers on Route 66 carry on. Baker loves the horseshoe sandwich made famous by Joe Schweska in 1928 at the Leland Hotel in Springfield, Illinois. The secret was the sauce, said Baker. “While one cook is engaged in making the sauce, it is helpful for a second person to prepare ham steak, French fries, and toast,” he wrote.
Schweska has long left the scene, but the horseshoe sandwich is very much alive in Springfield today. Yes, the Cozy Dog Drive-in is also included among Baker's Springfield highlights.
Of the 20 recipes that Baker includes, his favorite is the old-fashioned navy bean soup originally prepared at the Bowl and Bottle Restaurant in Chicago, an eating place originally operated by the Fred Harvey Co., the firm that ran restaurants and hotels usually associated with railway travel in the West.
Baker’s listings tend to whet your appetite. Whether it’s the glazed strawberry pie served at Miss Hulling’s Cafeteria in St. Louis or the onion-fried hamburger at Johnnie’s Grill in El Reno, Okla., you want to settle into a booth and wave down a waitress. It’s not always fancy. Baker includes a recipe from the Old Riverton Store in Riverton, Kansas, for a baloney and cheese sandwich, for example.
You learn things in this book, such as the fact that the Black Cat Café in Commerce, Okla., was where New York Yankee star Mickey Mantle hung out as a teen. “It was the only joint in town that had a neon sign,” Mantle recalled.
While California summoned up images of sand and surf, the first encounter inbound Route 66 travelers had with the state was having to traverse a stretch of the Mojave Desert, no simple trek in the days when radiators often overheated and tires were susceptible to the sharp lava rock found in some places, noted Baker, adding that when Glen Campbell drove a 1957 Chevy across the desert in 1960, he tied water bottles to the car’s grill to refill the radiator.
If you’re looking for evidence of Route 66’s legacy when it comes to dining, consider the fact that two of our best-known fast-food operations—McDonald’s and Taco Bell—sprang up on the Mother Road in San Bernardino. Baker provides the details of the early days of both establishments.
Baker doesn’t shy away from identifying the double standard that existed along the road. “You can’t talk about cross-country travel without talking about racism,” he said. Baker points out that African Americans were often denied service at many of the businesses along Route 66 for decades. He mentions places that didn’t discriminate, as well as citing outlets like Alberta’s Hotel & Snack Bar in Springfield, Mo. where Margie Alberta Northcutt Ellis was “always looking for avenues to meet the needs of her African American customers.”
If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting.
For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II.
The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows the first conceptualization by European physicists to the destruction that occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of the unique powers of oral history is the way that it puts you back in the footsteps and experiences of the people who lived these events firsthand before they knew the outcome, said Graff.
Narrative history often makes events seem neater and simpler than they felt to anyone who was living them at the time, stated Graff.
Reading through quotes delivered by major players of the time allows readers to feel the uncertainty that existed while the world was at war.
Once it became clear—to the scientists, anyway—of the potential destructive power of atomic energy, the race was on. Physicists from across Europe, many of them Jewish and fleeing for their lives as Nazi power expanded, came to the United States with the hope that their work wouldn’t be too late—that Hitler wouldn’t get the bomb first.
Graff noted that sometimes the story of the Manhattan Project tends to center only on the Los Alamos outpost. The war was won by the vast industrial effort that went into the bomb’s creation, said the author. Just as important as the New Mexico lab where the first bomb was detonated were “secret cities” developed in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., sites where thousands worked on developing the materials needed to create an atomic reaction, he said.
As a native Vermonter, Graff compared the process of converting 4,000 pages of quotes and notes down to 500 to making maple syrup. “You just boil and boil,” he said of the editing process involved. When all the boiling was done, you’re still left with some 500 voices to relate the process, both scientifically and militarily, that brought about the bomb.
The oral history approach empowers the reader with the ability to skim at record speeds, choosing to skip passages at will to get to later developments. However you tackle the work, there’s a lot of history to consider. Graff said the atomic bombs represented the final part of a fierce U.S. bombing campaign that included that single night in March 1945 when 100,000 people died in the firebombing of Tokyo, the most destructive single day of a war that killed so many. A total of 66 Japanese cities were firebombed in U.S. B-29 raids before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There’s a section of the book devoted to the transport of the bomb. The U.S.S. Indianapolis, a cruiser back in the States for repair after a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, carried off the mission but was sunk by a Japanese submarine four days later. Of the nearly 1,200 on board, only 316 survived. The survivors spent four days and five nights in the water. Graff includes two quotes to close the chapter: “The Indianapolis was the last major ship to be lost during the war and the greatest single disaster in the history of the Navy,” said Col. Kenneth Nichols.
“If the Indianapolis had been sunk with Little Boy (the bomb) aboard, the war could have been seriously prolonged,” said Luis Alvarez, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist.
As for his next project, Graff said it wouldn’t be an oral history or cover an aspect of WWII. Right now, he’s leaning towards writing about the preservation of history in this country. “As America approaches its 250th anniversary, its history is under attack right now,” he said.
When you get through reading America America by Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, you have to wonder what might have been when it comes to U.S. policies regarding Latin America over the years.
Grandin figures that Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes in Latin American countries between 1961 and 1969. He goes into great detail outlining U.S. involvement in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Brazil.
While U.S. officials are interfering with Latin American governments, many of the rest of us in this country are ignoring the countries and people south of the border.
All too often, it’s portrayed as a region plagued by economic instability, drug cartels, and death squads. The Trump Administration, after all, is going to great pains and expense to stress the region’s problems.
Grandin received the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth, his previous book about the U.S. frontier, and the relentless drive that pushed people west. But an all-out surge to take over territory isn’t the way it worked in South America.
Grandin details centuries of turmoil, bloodshed, and diplomacy in Latin America that have shaped the laws that govern the modern world. Despite the struggles and slaughter of millions over the years, Latin America clings to a social democratic tradition, principles worthy of the United Nations.
Grandin writes that Latin America has helped develop the notion that nations have common interests and that cooperation is preferable to competition.
The United States hasn’t always been the imperialist meddler. Grandin recalls Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” in the 1930s and 1940s, a period that involved mutual respect and admiration.
FDR’s VP Henry Wallace (replaced by Truman for the 1944 election) talked about raising the wages of the common man on his triumphant swing through Latin America in 1943. “(Latin Americans) didn’t think Roosevelt would run in 1944. They thought Wallace was going to be president,” said Grandin.
Instead, the postwar period brought the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Latin America got left out when it came to the billions the U.S. was spending around the world. If South American countries wanted private capital, they needed to assure investors that it was safe to do so, said Marshall.
As a result, Latin American regimes turned oppressive. Dissent was stifled. By 1950, nearly the entire region of Latin America was ruled by brutal men,” noted Grandin, citing dictators such as Batista (Cuba), Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Duvalier (Haiti), Odria (Peru), and Somoza (Nicaragua). “All were faithful to the U.S.,” added Grandin.
Mexico. With its strong commitment to sovereignty, it plays a central role in the history that Grandin relates. “Mexico’s Constitution was the world's first social democratic constitution, the first constitution to recognize not just individual rights, but social and economic rights. The right to dignity, to a pension, health care, and education,” stated the author.
Grandin also had praise for Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman president of Mexico. “She has the support of 60 percent of the population. The people love her,” he said.
Liza Tully’s previous literary effort was a grim thriller set in Siberia. “It was a suspense novel, but I realized it was very dark,” she said.
The author, who wrote Finding Katarina M under the pseudonym Elisabeth Elo, decided to follow that with something a little lighter. The result? The feel-good mystery, The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant.
Her latest effort teams Aubrey Merritt, “a brilliant Boomer detective," with Olivia Blount, “an ambitious Gen Z assistant.” Together, the pair repair to the lavish Wild Goose Resort in Vermont to solve a murder—or is it suicide? The clues are there for the reader to come to his or her own conclusion, said Tully, who worked as an editor at a children’s magazine before turning to fiction writing. She’s also worked as a project manager at a tech company and as a counselor at a halfway house.
A lover of mysteries, particularly those of Agatha Christie, Tully said she followed the approach used by Christie, saving the concluding chapter in her book for “the big reveal,” where the detective lays out her case, lists the clues, and names the suspect.
Tully noted that in the world of mysteries today, she plays it pretty straight in the publishing world that now offers a wide variety of mystery categories—such as historical, psychological, hard-boiled, and others. The “cozy mystery” category usually involves “amateur detectives and cats,” she said.
The fact that so many books get published in this country each year—as many as one million titles by one estimate—might give one pause to someone trying to corral readers. But Tully said the fact that so many books are published “is a sign of a free and healthy society.”
Tully, who lives outside Boston with her family, taught classes at Harvard and Tufts before attending night classes at Boston College, a schedule that allowed her to write during the day. As far as her present writing routine goes, “I’ll start at noon and go until four or five,” she said.
As for her intake of books, Tully loves mysteries but said she often reads those with a critical eye, judging style and substance as she shapes her own future efforts. “For my own pleasure, I tend to read non-fiction. It allows me to learn things that I didn’t know before,” said Tully, citing All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley, a 2023 memoir of a museum guard, as an example.
Michael Doyle's Nightmare in the Pacific is a book about an aspect of World War II you probably haven’t heard before: the saga of Artie Shaw, the big-band leader who took his group on a whirlwind tour of the Pacific in 1942-1943.
What makes this story so interesting are the characters involved: Artie Shaw, himself, the motley group of band members that Shaw recruited himself, as well as figures from the worlds of the military and show business.
Even before the United States joined the war, Shaw exhibited erratic behavior. At the top of his game in 1939, riding the success of big-band swing and a hit recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” Shaw abruptly walked away from the bandstand, disappearing from sight to spend six weeks in Mexico without telling anyone of his whereabouts.
That was a characteristic of Shaw’s, said Doyle. He would walk away from difficult situations throughout his life. Married eight times (among his brides: movie queens Lana Turner and Ava Gardner), Shaw often turned off the people who were closest to him.
“He was probably a musical genius, but he was also prickly, short-tempered, and driven, Doyle noted.
Shaw’s epic Pacific roadshow had him playing in Hawaii for several months before heading out to sea where Navy Band 501 played aboard ships, aircraft carriers, as well as indoor and outdoor venues in Guadalcanal, Australia, New Zealand, and islands in between. By all accounts, the band delivered regularly, sharing the hits of the day including his trademark tune "Nightmare," providing entertainment appreciated by military personnel who faced danger far from home.
“Artie had traveled, by some accounting, 68,000 miles throughout the Pacific,” related Doyle in his book. “He had ducked into foxholes and hidden from bombs. He had felt his stomach lurch at sea and in the turbulent air. He had been bedside with the dying, and he had entertained admirals, generals, and foreign dignitaries. He had been cheered by thousands, and he had charmed the president’s wife,” he noted.
And Shaw also had a nervous breakdown that ended his tenure as wartime bandleader. By 1944, Shaw was back in the States, trying to clear his head.
The band, incidentally, kept playing under the guidance of Sam Donahue, a sax player with the band. The group was sent to play before military crowds in England. They soon became popular favorites, even beating the esteemed Glenn Miller Band in a battle-of-the-bands competition (before Miller lost his life when his airplane went down in the English Channel).
As for Shaw, the post-war music scene brought change. It no longer made economic sense to take 20 musicians on the road. Following the trend that dictated smaller musical groups, Shaw formed the Gramercy Five. But in 1954 he decided to put away his clarinet and walk away from performing completely (save for a brief late-in-life resurrection). He took up sharpshooting as a hobby and appeared occasionally on the What’s My Line TV show.
“As much of a jerk he could be, he had integrity,” said Doyle of Shaw, a musician who didn’t want to spend the last 50 years of his life playing “Begin the Beguine.”
In his own 370-page autobiography, Shaw only devoted three pages to his wartime experiences. Doyle corrects that oversight.
A new book looks at the short history of the freedom of choice.
Some of us have more choices than we’ve ever had—from what to buy and where to live and whom to love, even what to believe--but how did that come about? That’s the basis of the book Sophia Rosenfeld has written, called The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.
Rosenfeld said she wanted to find those times when the early forms of choice were taking shape—when you could marry whomever you wanted, shop for what you might need, and vote as you saw fit. “I tried to find the moments when the practice was new,” she said.
We haven’t always had so many choices, said Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. The dance card is one example, as viewed by the author, of a measure of freedom that emerged in the 18th century, developed in the 19th century, and largely disappeared by the early 20th century.
"Once, though, dance cards had a real function," Rosenfeld noted. Designed mostly by men and used mostly by women, the cards facilitated decision-making in the ballroom. A lady could show that her dance card was already full, but "the expectation for the woman was a yes," she said.
The process was formal and may seem restrictive by today's standards, but it marked a step forward in the age of choice.
“Rosenfeld demonstrates how modern societies have made the ability to choose the hallmark of freedom, whether in the marketplace, in ideas and belief systems, in courtship, in voting, in feminist and other rights-oriented politics, or in the social and behavioral sciences. But as we learn from Rosenfeld, this equation of choice with freedom can often exclude rather than empower,” said Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
Moving from the seventeenth century to today, Rosenfeld pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change.
China is sometimes described as the forgotten theater of war during World War II. But it’s unlikely that the Chinese people have forgotten their eight-year war with Japan, a ferocious engagement that began four years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's estimated that as many as 20 million Chinese died in the war.
In Fallen Tigers, Daniel Jackson recounts U.S. involvement in China, where the country provided supplies and air support to a nation that desperately needed it. U.S. airmen who served in China had to contend with a Japanese invasion that, by 1940, controlled China’s skies, 95 percent of its industry, and one-quarter of the Chinese mainland and half its population, noted Jackson.
Supporting China, a country embroiled in a prolonged civil war at the time, was important to U.S. interests, stated the author, adding that keeping Japan “busy” in China reduced Japanese resources that would otherwise be used against U.S. forces in the Pacific.
Jackson provides accounts of singular heroism on the part of numerous U.S. airmen who served in relative anonymity during their time in China. But there are familiar names, as well.
Claire Lee Chennault is the maverick Army Air Force commander who formed the Flying Tigers, the U.S. group of flyers who struck a blow against Japanese air dominance.
There’s also Merian Cooper, the WWI veteran who escaped from a Soviet gulag after the war, who went on to co-write and direct King Kong (Cooper, himself, is at the controls of the bi-plane that toppled Kong from the top of the Empire State Building). At the age of 48, Cooper returned to the battlefield during WWII and helped Chennault plan a successful raid on Japanese-controlled Hong Kong.
Before becoming the venerable leader of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh was a friend of American forces in WWII. In return for his assistance, he asked for an autographed picture of Chennault and six pistols, explained Jackson. These were items the wily Ho used to forge political alliances.
The Chinese people, themselves, were more than receptive to American assistance during the war, said Jackson. “They knew the risk they were taking by helping Americans,” he said, referring to the Chinese civilians who delivered U.S. airmen who bailed out or survived crash landings to safety.
U.S. servicemen who landed in the jungle or mountainous terrain were brought back safely 90 percent of the time, Jackson said. Compare that with U.S. airmen downed in Europe during the war--they only had a one in five chance of returning safely, he said.
Despite Japan's policy of deadly reciprocity when it came to dealing with civilian assistance to Americans, the Chinese persevered, the author said.
Today, the U.S. and China are competing world powers, but it’s important to recall the two countries were once allies who overcame their differences to win a war, said Jackson.
Play This Book Loud is the literary equivalent of a trip to the record store, that enchanting experience of searching for something new from something old.
Joe Bonomo (pronounced Bo-know-mo, not the Turkish Taffy), an English professor at Northern Illinois University, starts his book that way, recalling the days of the coronavirus when he was offered hand sanitizer and plastic gloves at Green Tangerine, his local record shop.
From there, we depart on essays on Van Halen’s “Panama,” the Cramps, Green Day, Lester Bangs, Pickwick Records, Dick Clark’s Twenty Years of Rock and Roll double album, to name but a few of the subjects covered. There are also asides on Cragmont Cola (once sold at Safeway supermarkets), radio jingles, and “great archeological artifacts found on YouTube.”
While Bonomo does a lot of looking back, he brings us right to the present, where he feels we’re enjoying a golden age of musical writing. No, it’s no longer confined to the pages of Rolling Stone or The New Yorker but across the internet, where people like Josh Terry, Steve Pick, Tony Fletcher, Dan Epstein, Heather Ferris, and Aaron Gilbreath, to name a few, are busy posting stories.
Bonomo is busy building his own internet file with the Substack site, No Such Thing as Was. A quick glance at the site reveals that, in addition to posts on Amyl and the Sniffers, the Linda Lindas, Bad Nerves, and the Strokes, there’s a review of George Harrison’s Electronic Sound from 1969, a record that most of us have never heard (the back story on how the record was made may be even more fascinating than the review).
In talking about Lester Bangs, who died at the age of 33 in 1982, Bonomo cites the music journalist as his greatest influence. “He was more than a rock critic. The 45s and album cuts were simply the moving parts that got his words to the page. He was writing about what it means to be alive,” he said.
If you’ve ever come across a Pickwick Records release, you’ll be interested in Bonomo’s take on the subject. The company, which specialized in producing cheap knock-offs of hits of the day, was started in 1950 by Cy Leslie, “a Harvard-educated World War II vet who understood the dynamics of the wallet,” he noted. Recalling a Pickwick release of Beatle favorites, Bonomo is still amazed that the label attempted to duplicate "Mother," John Lennon's primal effort from an early solo album: "Who'd want to tackle a performance so raw and private, not to mention infamous and epochal?"
As for the 1973 Dick Clark release, “a wide-ranging potted history of rock and roll,” Bonomo pointed to the different genres of music represented on the album as well as the historic significance of the era that produced it. At the time of the album’s release, American Graffiti was also hitting theaters with a musical salute to nostalgia.
The author of Play This Book Loud always has something interesting to offer when it comes to the music front. Bonomo makes the point that Green Day, a band that still sells out arenas, has a career that parallels Bruce Springsteen in many ways.
Where else do you get an essay on the 7-Eleven convenience store chain’s 1966 release, “Do the Slurp?” The promo novelty 45 knocked Bonomo out as a kid, a memory he still can’t shake but happily shares with you.
McKeesport, Pa. has been through a lot in recent decades. Andrew Conte tells the story in his book, Death of the Daily News. The town, located 20 miles from Pittsburgh, once manufactured about 70 percent of all steel tubing used in the United States, earning the moniker of “Tube City.” Like other towns in southwestern Pennsylvania, McKeesport fell on hard times in the 1970s and 1980s as foreign steel imports undercut American manufacturers. The city’s population, that once topped 50,000 in the mid-20th century, is now down to 17,500.
The McKeesport business district, with its movie theaters, furniture stores, jewelry shops, and three department stores, withered away. But on Jan. 1, 2016, McKeesport faced another blow--life without the Daily News, the newspaper that had covered the area since 1884.
Like so many other papers in small towns across the country, the failure was due to a migration of advertisers to the internet, along with the inevitable decline in readership. No longer were papers owned by a single family or group in the town being served, but rather by media companies whose first responsibility was to stockholders and hedge fund owners.
Along with the loss of an outlet that provided a rundown of local news, the paper meant something else, Conte said. “The newspaper represented a shared sense of identity,” he said. People realized that the local paper was more than headlines and town council coverage. Some recalled that their first job was delivering the paper. Others counted the times family and friends had been pictured in its pages over the years.
Politicians who first breathed a sigh of relief, figuring that they no longer faced tough questions during a campaign or over a council issue, realized they’d also lost their megaphone to communicate accomplishments to the community.
The paper's iconic downtown office, with a black-and-white exterior, checkboard-tiled office, with its large map on the wall, no longer allowed free access to the public. “We lost that connection,” said Conte, founder and manager of the Center for Media Innovation in Pittsburgh.
But Conte still believes local news has a future. The subtitle of his book is How Citizen Gatekeepers Can Save Local Journalism. The work has only just begun to find the right formula that would use modern technology to provide meaningful information to communities like McKeesport, he said.
Digital news outlets are succeeding in places like Santa Cruz, Calif., and in Pennsylvania, where the Center for Media Innovation is operating, said Conte. “We’re also learning what doesn’t work. The Houston Landing was started with a $20 million investment, but the public didn’t take to it. It closed,” he said.
“I’m more encouraged by operations that start small and grow,” said Conte, who calls on the need for “citizen gatekeepers” to bring journalism into the 21st century. “We’re all gatekeepers now. The news now belongs to all of us, and we need to make sense of that,” he said.
Robert Ingersoll lived in Peoria from 1857 to 1877. He was hailed as the greatest orator of his time, the latter half of the 19th century.
While Ingersoll attracted huge crowds, he had plenty of critics who called him “the Great Infidel” because of his criticism of organized religion. “Religion can make a good man somewhat better,” Ingersoll mused, “but usually it only makes bad men worse.”
While decrying the Bible and organized religion, Ingersoll supported women’s rights while opposing racism and the death penalty. “In an age before microphones and mass media, he was a household name in America—a thunderous voice for liberty, reason, and human dignity,” noted Tom Malone in his new book, The Portable Ingersoll.
Ingersoll had many names—the Great Agnostic, Royal Bob, the most noted of American infidels, and the daring blasphemer.
A successful lawyer, Ingersoll and brother Ebon established a law office in Peoria. After he and his family left central Illinois, Ingersoll lived in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Ingersoll was appointed Attorney General of Illinois before the Civil War where he served as a colonel in the 11th Illinois Cavalry. He was taken prisoner in the war by Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who went on to found the Ku Klux Klan.
A lifelong Republican, Ingersoll gave the nominating speech for James Blaine at the 1876 Republican Convention. Although Blaine did not receive the nomination that year, Ingersoll’s speech was considered to be one of the great convention speeches of the 19th Century.
Ingersoll delivered another memorable speech that year in Peoria where he focused on the Declaration of Independence in a July Fourth celebration, noted Malone.
“Seven long years of war — fighting for what? For the principle that all men are created equal — a truth that nobody ever disputed except a scoundrel; nobody, nobody in the entire history of this world,” noted Ingersoll in the Peoria speech.
It’s believed that Ingersoll delivered around 1,500 lectures in 30 years, traveling the country while earning huge fees for his speeches, said Malone. “There’s a lot made of his focus on religion. That’s understandable but he was so much more than that. His speeches dealt with art and history, subjects like Shakespeare, Burns, and Thomas Paine. These were people he viewed as heroes,” he said.
Among Ingersoll’s admirers were some of the leading minds of the day, people like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walt Whitman, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Thomas Edison.
If a producer is seeking a subject for a historical documentary, Robert Ingersoll might be just the ticket, said Malone. Such a program would not only shed light on an overlooked American but might salve our battered senses in these divisive times by promoting the importance of being happy.
An oft-repeated quote from Ingersoll: "Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so."
Anti-Communist feelings reached a fever pitch in the United States following World War II. The big war was won, but the Cold War was on.
Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter, addresses this point in his fourth book, Red Scare, where he takes you back to that postwar period, where, as author Stacy Schiff put it in one of the blurbs on the book’s back cover, “a group of hardened conservatives lost their heads and a country lost its way.”
“Everywhere it seemed the Communists were on the offensive and winning,” Risen writes of the late-40s period that gave birth to the Scare. “In February 1948, Czechoslovakian Communists took control of the country in a Soviet-backed coup,” he noted, adding that later that same year, Russia closed off West Berlin, setting up a massive airlift by Allies to supply the city. Meanwhile, U.S.-backed forces in China were losing ground to Mao Zedong.
With Communism on the march, tensions in Washington ran high, setting the stage for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Hollywood 10, and Joe McCarthy. But the Red Scare involved more than much-publicized stories of blacklists and McCarthy’s list of Communists in high office, more than the high-profile trials of accused spies Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.
McCarthy, who dominated the media for four years, was a symptom of the era, not the cause, said Risen.
At a time when finger-pointing was encouraged, when U.S. citizens, be they teachers, reporters, or everyday workers, lost their jobs as a result of past associations or rash accusations, it was a time when fear ran wild in this country, noted the author.
Among those profiled, Risen tells the story of Harry Bridges, who organized West Coast dockworkers. Bridges was a successful labor leader who worked well with the shipping companies he negotiated with, but had to fight off government attempts to have him deported to his native Australia for years, said Risen. Bridges was even the subject of a record, “The Ballad of Harry Bridges,” sung by Pete Seeger with Woody Guthrie among the backup singers.
The book’s subhead is Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America so it’s not surprising to find similarities between that toxic 50s period and the divisive politics of today.
While McCarthy was in the national spotlight, Republicans routinely lashed out at Democrats and the left as anti-American.
Compare that with the recent characterization of left-wing critics as “scum” in President Trump’s Memorial Day address. Earlier this year, a congressional subcommittee hearing, a Republican-backed effort to investigate public broadcasting, was titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”
World War II is a never-ending source of history. Decades after the conflict’s conclusion, research and examination continue as we seek to understand how we got to where we are today.
In Building Bridges, Douglas Bristol examines how the military treated Black Americans before, during, and after the national emergency that WWII represented.
Initially, Black Americans weren’t accepted into the service like their white counterparts. When the first peacetime draft was instituted in 1940, many Blacks were passed over by local draft boards, especially in the South. Spurred on by the federal government, more Blacks entered the military, but largely in menial roles rather than serving as combat troops, said Bristol. “Eighty percent of African Americans were used in a service capacity over the course of the war,” he said.
But in the spring of 1943, the American military faced manpower shortages that threatened to delay the D-Day invasion, said Bristol. “What followed was a conservative revolution in the Army that changed the way they trained Black GIs,” he said.
Since two-thirds of the Black GIs, many coming from a sharecropper background, had only a third-grade education, the Army devised new ways to evaluate recruits, developing non-verbal IQ tests and forming special training units, said Bristol.
The training allowed Black GIs who had been sharecroppers before the war to gain skills, allowing them to work in complex organizations, he said.
Riley King, later to become known as musician B.B. King, was a tractor driver in the service who was permitted to return to work in the field, said Bristol, pointing it out as an example of how labor needs of Southern planters were taken into account by the military.
King was also witness to a scene that exemplified the added burden African American soldiers faced in WWII, said the author.
“He was on a bus with other GIs when they passed people on the road. One of the Black GIs innocently called out to some of the women. When the bus came to a lunch stop, an enraged white man got on the bus with a rifle, demanding to know who had the temerity to address a white woman. No one said a word despite being threatened at point-blank range. Eventually, the man left. The incident showed the need for solidarity among Black soldiers when facing hardship,” he said.
African American newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender also played a part in helping Black citizens overcome problems in the military. “The constant complaint of African Americans was that the mainstream press said nothing at all about the racial incidents that occurred in camps across the country. The Black press allowed people to read about the problems," said Bristol.
As a fellow in the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi, Bristol previously co-edited Integrating the U.S. Military: Race, Gender, and Sexuality Since World War II.
Shannon Monaghan is a military historian whose last book, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men, offered an account of select British special operations unit members who were so important during World War II.
This time around, Monaghan covers a more recent conflict, one that’s still going on: the war between Ukraine and Russia. In To Die With Such Men (Hurst & Co.), the reader is taken behind the lines as Monaghan recreates some of the missions fought in the early stages of a war that started in 2022 when Russia invaded the country. Through extensive interviews with members of Ukraine’s International Legion, the author follows a core group of Western volunteers in Ukraine, fighting together from the early battle for Kyiv through to battles at Severodonetsk and Bakhmut, through May 2023.
While not in Ukraine herself, Monaghan recreates battle scenes that portray urban combat in riveting detail. Dialogue from soldiers like Dan, Ginger, and Greg, along with a description of frontline action, complete with a rundown on the weaponry involved, has one ducking for cover.
“There’s so much body-cam video and audio of this war that it’s possible to detail battles,” she said. “The war has changed a lot since it started. There was a lot of urban warfare at first that’s evolved into a 21st century version of WWI with drones taking the place of the barbed wire,” said Monaghan.
The relentless tension of war is broken by Monaghan’s ability to incorporate the banter of the barracks into the account, where black humor and poignant reflections take hold.
While the International Brigade may have contained as many as 20,000 soldiers from Western countries at the start of the war, that number has declined substantially once the realization of what the conflict requires settled in, she said, adding that many of those she interviewed for the book about their service through the summer of 2023 are still there.
Ukraine remains steadfast in its opposition to Russian rule, said Monaghan. “The Ukrainian determination to win is there,” she said.
The Trump Administration’s efforts to end the fighting in Ukraine may have brought confusion, but “if there’s a silver lining, it’s that the U.S. position has forced European nations to double down on their support for Ukraine,” she said.
Among the heroes in this book is Oleksii Chubashev, a TV reporter in Ukraine whose military reality show allowed him to step into the Ukrainian special forces. Having some knowledge of English placed him as an officer in the International Legion. The men who served under Chubashev “genuinely liked working with him: he was smart, charismatic, and a true believer in the cause,” noted Monaghan.
Understanding why some people go out of their way to face danger is at the heart of Monaghan’s book. The soldiers she interviewed knew they might be criticized for fighting someone else’s war. But they also knew it was the right thing to do, she said.
World War II may have ended 80 years ago, but it’s still happening for Jenny Chan, a 2012 University of Illinois graduate.
Chan is president and founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a non-profit based in San Francisco that churns out history regarding World War II’s Pacific front.
In addition to publishing 29 books by a wide variety of authors that document human rights abuses, military battles, resistance efforts, and relate other untold efforts from the war, Chan’s group has produced over 500 short historical videos for Pacific Front Untold on YouTube. The group’s website, pacificatrocities.org, has been visited by over half a million visitors in the past 12 months, said Chan, a Chinese-American who first heard horror stories about the war in Asia from her grandmother, who was living in Hong Kong at the time.
The stated mission of Pacific Atrocities Education is to increase awareness about atrocities committed in the Asia-Pacific Theater of World War II through public history projects, said Chan who believes that future generations need to understand, and share this history, she said. Chan said that an estimated 25 million to 35 million people died in Asia during WWII.
Through publishing books, creating educational resources, and heading archival projects on topics such as Korean comfort women, the Bataan Death March, Unit 731 (a biochemical weapons program), and the Nanjing Massacre, the group seeks to help survivors find closure while increasing the dialogue about complex contemporary issues that surround human rights worldwide, said Chan.
While WWII ended in 1945, information related to what happened during the conflict continues to come to light as files are declassified, said Chan, who soon plans another visit to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to do further research.
Chan isn’t the first U of I grad to get involved in the war in Asia. “After graduating 100 years before me, in 1912, Minnie Vautrin became a missionary in China and famously saved the lives of at least 10,000 Chinese refugees during the Japanese army’s 1937 invasion of Nanjing. Sixty years later, University of Illinois Iris Chang (class of 1989) unearthed Vautrin’s diary for her award-winning book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” she said.
Pacific Atrocities Education plans a Sept. 18 conference in San Francisco, said Chan “to build bridges and advocate for a more peaceful future.”
Craig Pittman is one writer who doesn’t have to spend a lot of time digging up story ideas. As a 30-year veteran of the Tampa Bay Times and now a reporter for the Florida Phoenix, Pittman gets tips online or by phone as well as having dozens of reliable sources who will alert him to the latest goings-on in his home state of Florida.
Florida has been Pittman’s beat for decades. “Nine hundred people move to this state every day. I look at it as my job to tell them what they’re in for. A lot of people think Florida’s history started with Disney World, but there’s a lot more going on,” said Pittman, named a Florida Literary Legend by the Florida Heritage Book Festival in 2020. “That’s a living legend,” said Pittman. “That’s the important part.”
Florida has gone through plenty of changes over the years, he said. “In the 1940s, we were the getaway state. In the 1950s, we found that cities like Tampa and others were Mafia-dominated. In the 1960s, you had the Kennedy Space Center. In the 1970s, of course, you had Disney World. By 2000, we became known for the (presidential) election we botched,” said Pittman.
His newest book, Welcome to Florida—True Tales from America’s Most Interesting State (University Press of Florida), is a collection of Pittman's recent columns and articles, all about Florida, that most interesting of states.
Whether writing about developers and a place once known as Jackass Junction or Jimmy Buffett who founded the Save the Manatee Club in 1981 and supported the effort right up until he died in 2023, Pittman captures your interest with his stories.
“To me, the manatee represents what we all like about Florida—kind of cruising in warm, clear water and not bothering anybody,” said Buffett in Pittman’s book.
Pittman wrote about manatees just last week in the Florida Phoenix in a story citing the 2,000 manatees that starved to death because the seagrass they depend on for food was wiped out by the consequences of human pollution.
“When you only have about 6,000 manatees to start with, that’s a problem,” said Pittman, who acknowledges that Florida faces severe environmental challenges in the era of climate change.
“Florida is the flattest state in the union, and we’re surrounded on three sides by water. So that water comes surging in. We’re also the hottest state, with temperatures even rising at night. They call it the Sunshine State but most of Florida’s cities get more rain than Seattle. That leads to more mosquitoes and mosquito-related disease,” he said.
More intense hurricanes are doing more damage than ever, but the mantra remains “we will rebuild” instead of “retreat from the beach,” said Pittman. While the governor and a developer-friendly legislature don’t offer much in the way of leadership on climate-change issues, Pittman sees another group weighing in. “The property insurance companies see the pace of disaster,” he said, noting that higher rates or an exodus of insurance firms from the state will likely set the agenda for action.
While he never tires of writing about his home state (Welcome to Florida is his seventh book), Pittman said he may try his hand at fiction next. “I wrote about Tim Dorsey (the Florida novelist who died in 2023) in the book. Usually, Tim would slip in some scenes that directly reference real ‘Florida Man’ headlines. There was the one about the guy who tossed an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-through window. Maybe there’s room for another wacky Florida crime novel. We’ll see,” he said.
Rob Christensen’s new book, Southern News, Southern Politics (University of North Carolina Press), is more than the history of the newspaper, the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., described at one point by a politician as “pretty damn fearless.” It’s a profile of the Daniels family, starting with Josephus Daniels in 1895, whose family’s ownership of the paper spanned most of the 20th century.
The book chronicles the involvement of members of the Daniels family with U.S. presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, all of whom found support from the paper and its owners.
Josephus Daniels was a white supremacist who used the paper in its early days to spread hate. “Blacks were routinely portrayed as sexual predators, feeding white paranoia,” noted Christensen.
“Even in situations where a white woman was merely in the presence of a black man, the News & Observer found cause for alarm,” wrote journalist David Zucchino. But Daniels found other subjects to write about. He also went after the almighty railroads and opposed the American Tobacco Co’s cornering the market on cigarette production.
All the while, Daniels became increasingly involved in Democratic Party politics—not just in Raleigh but across the state and around the country. His first political hero was William Jennings Bryan. Daniels was at Bryan’s side during three presidential elections (all of which Bryan lost).
While Josephus Daniels never changed his mind on matters of race, the ardent segregationist was a progressive and a liberal on a broad range of issues from education to women’s rights, said Christensen. “In his time, he fought against the Klu Klux Klan and McCarthyism,” the author said.
Daniels helped Woodrow Wilson’s organize a national presidential campaign in 1912. As a result Daniels, 51, was named Secretary of the Navy during the Wilson Administration, where his chief deputy was FDR, then 31. They made the proverbial odd couple, noted Christensen.
“The handsome, aristocratic FDR frequented the exclusive clubs clad in English-tailored suits…(while) Daniels, short, dumpy, and allergic to exercise—called the pre-polio FDR, who was six feet two, athletic, and well spoken, “as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I have ever seen,” wrote Christensen, adding that Daniels probably saved Roosevelt’s political career by covering up an affair he had while serving in the office of the Navy.
When Daniels was named ambassador to Mexico after FDR was elected president in 1932, Jonathan Daniels, his son, took over as the paper’s editor. “He had different ideas on race than his father did,” said Christensen. “(Jonathan) gave more voice for racial issues at a time when Blacks had little voice,” he said.
Jonathan Daniels also played a role in Harry Truman’s surprising 1948 presidential election. Considered the underdog as Truman was getting his from both the left (Henry Wallace) and the right (Strom Thurmond) in his own party and up against a polished GOP candidate, Thomas Dewey, Truman pulled off the upset. Jonathan Daniels was one of his speechwriters.
The News & Observer, meanwhile, continued to develop as a watchdog publication—not just in Raleigh but across North Carolina. During the 1990s, the paper hired its first Black executives and invited the first African American to join its board of directors.
Christensen also documents the decline of the newspaper industry, something he bore witness to as a longtime News & Observer staffer who retired in 2018.
As the paper’s former book editor J. Peder Zane noted about Southern News, Southern Politics: ”Ambition and politics, family dynamics, and the grand sweep of history collide and align in Rob Christensen’s epic tale of the North Carolina Newspaper dynasty.”
When Christy Mathewson burst upon the scene with the New York Giants in 1900, baseball had a less-than-perfect image. It was a rowdy game played by roughnecks known for their consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco, said Alan Gaff, author of Baseball’s First Superstar.
Mathewson’s good looks and his quiet, easy-going manner made him a hit with the ladies, Gaff said. “Women came to baseball games,” he noted, adding that “opposing clubs would schedule Ladies Days for games in which Christy would pitch and women would come in throngs.”
On the field, Mathewson racked up big numbers. In his first 14 seasons with the Giants, he won at least 20 games every season. In 1905, he led the Giants to a championship, winning three games in the World Series that year without surrendering a run.
Gaff also provides a history of baseball’s growth in the early 20th century. The sport was heavily supported by the big newspapers of the day, especially those in New York. Sports sections carried accounts of big-league games that reached millions. As the game gained popularity, larger ballparks were required to accommodate the growing crowds that attended. In New York, the Giants started games just an hour after the closing of the stock market, encouraging the Wall Street crowd to frequent the ballpark.
Mathewson was smart, said Gaff. He could recall situations with opposing batters years later in vivid detail. John McGraw, his longtime manager on the Giants, said that “Mathewson’s real greatness in the game was the example he set for young fellows and the impression he left on the minds of the public. He gave our profession a dignity that it needed and was slow to acquire.”
Before achieving fame as a baseball player, Mathewson was a member of the Bucknell University football team, where he starred as both fullback and drop kicker. He spent three years at Bucknell before becoming a professional baseball player. The school’s football stadium is named after him.
True crime accounts are all the rage these days. But Tom Chorneau didn’t want to just add another cold case to the national docket.
Instead, the unsolved murder of Myrtle Cook in 1925 is related to political forces flowing through the state of Iowa at the time, with Chorneau, a former reporter, explaining the state’s near-constant battle over temperance.
During the first half-century of statehood, Iowa lurched from wet to dry eight times before Prohibition was ratified in 1919. Cook was president of the local temperance union when she was shot through the heart.
Chorneau speculates that it might have been something she saw that cost the woman her life. In any event, the shooting made the front page of the New York Times. The next day her funeral made national news when a small army from the Klu Klux Klan gathered in town on her behalf.
Cook wasn’t just the head of a temperance union but an informant for the law. “Myrtle spent hours at her parlor window, which had a clear view of the Rock Island Railroad station and the dive café next door,” noted Chorneau, adding that “Myrtle kept good notes on the comings and goings of the bootleggers and their customers, who regularly conducted their business at the depot.”
Cook may have even realized that her life was in jeopardy. In a conversation with a friend shortly before her death, “Myrtle didn’t tell Marie what or whom she had seen but ended the conversation with a chilling remark: ‘I believe this work will be the end of me.’” related Chorneau.
Prohibition wasn’t the only force creating change in Iowa. You also had the women’s suffrage movement, the issue of slavery, and the railroad industry all moving across the state. In 1925, Al Capone took over as gang boss in Chicago, creating a ripple effect across the Midwest, especially when it came to bootlegging operations. Chorneau even raises the possibility that Capone himself may have had a hand in the Cook murder.
How did you learn about the American West? Books came first. Reading material included notorious dime novels that made legends of Buffalo Bill and Jesse James. Newspapers and magazines, meanwhile, focused on the American West in the 19th century as railways turned the frontier into an attraction for tourists who watched herds of buffalo disappearing while Native Americans were being herded onto reservations.
Western history was recorded in so many movies—from silent films like On the War Path (1911) and The Indian Massacre (1912) to John Ford epics like Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946) along with High Noon (1952), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Blazing Saddles (1974) and hundreds more. Between 1947 and 1950 Westerns made up 30 percent of major Hollywood releases.
Maybe you got your first taste from television on shows like Bonanza, Maverick, Cheyenne, or Gunsmoke? On radio, you might have followed the exploits of the Lone Ranger or the Six Shooter with Jimmy Stewart.
William Grady’s Rebranding the Western (University of Texas Press) surveys another medium that explored Western history: the comic. From the start of the 20th century, newspaper comic strips exploded in popularity.
Western strips like Red Ryder and Lone Ranger blossomed in the 1930s along with Little Joe, a strip that ran from 1933 to 1972, following Joe Oak, a child who lives with his widowed mother on the family ranch managed by a former gunslinger.
Grady notes that Westerns were part of the comic book craze that evolved in the 1940s and 1950s. That was a period when comic books were sold everywhere: in grocery stores, on newsstands, and at the corner drugstore. “Calculations on the monthly sale of comic books averaged anywhere from 60 million to 100 million across the postwar decade (1945-1954),” he said.
More than 3,400 different Western comic book titles had been printed by 1959, said Grady. “Every comic book publisher, from Ace Magazines to Ziff-Davis Publications, offered a slew of Western titles that featured thrilling adventure tales about cowboys, gunfighters, outlaws, and historical frontier figures,” he said.
Along with Kit Carson, Indian Scout, and Two-Gun Kid, you had Western romance titles like Western Love Trails and Cowgirl Romances. But the comic-book trail wasn’t limited to 19th-century frontier days. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, for example, worked on the Cold War frontier of the 50s, searching out missing atomic scientists or combatting Russian saboteurs, noted Grady.
Western comics reflected the times, said the author. Lobo, an African American hero, arrived in the 1960s while Jonah Hex, a disfigured antihero burst onto the scene in the 1970s. Also in the 70s, Marvel Comics launched Red Wolf, a series where Johnny Wakely, a Cheyenne Indian sought justice for all people on the frontier.
The Western continues to evolve, Grady stated, citing The Walking Dead ( a TV show based on a graphic novel) and Yellowstone (a neo-Western) as contemporary examples of Western-type storytelling. “On one hand, the image of the Western has remained unchanged for over a century. On the other, the genre has regularly experienced transformations that permit it to maintain its compelling hold on audiences,” he said.
Chrysler released a special edition of the Dodge Royal Lancer that Chrysler in 1955 called LaFemme. Marketed as “a car for the modern woman,” the model offered a pink-and-white color scheme along with matching accessories. There was only one problem: women didn’t buy it. Chrysler soon dropped the concept due to low sales.
That’s just one of the examples that Jessica Brockmole details in her book, Pink Cars and Pocketbooks, a study of U.S. auto industry efforts to win over female customers through the 20th century.
Brockmole points out that women were a factor in the acceptance of the automobile in America—almost from the start of the 20th century. Pictured in the book is a 1903 advertisement for Oldsmobile with a headline, “Good Bye, Horse.” A lady driver is shown waving goodbye to a faithful steed standing behind a fence. “Any lady who understands a sewing machine can drive this graceful Runabout,” notes the ad copy.
While automotive history traditionally followed a male orientation with an emphasis on speed and power, women were on the scene, noted Brockmole. “The percentage of driver’s licenses issued to women tripled between 1922 and 1931. Among the consumer homes surveyed, women were driving in over half and, in many of those households, more than one woman drove the family car,” she stated.
In a 1935 study, women made up one-third of U.S. drivers on the road but their “sphere of influence” impacted two-thirds of all car sales, said Brockmole.
Women, used to the vagaries of the fashion industry, weren’t taken aback when Alfred Sloan of General Motors transformed the automotive industry with the concept of planned obsolescence, the launching of “new” car models annually, she said. The idea of making minor design adjustments while offering color and ornamental changes brought car companies into the realm of fashion, the author noted.
Style became substance as industrial designers like Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes were hired by automakers. Brockmole said Dorothy Dignam, an ad executive with the Philadelphia ad agency, N.W. Ayer & Son, helped Ford Motor Co. understand that lines were everything in the 1930s. Dignam outlined ways Ford could promote new models to women concerned with line, style, and appearance, said Brockmole.
In the 1950s, Charlotte Montgomery wrote a column in Good Housekeeping called “Woman and Her Car,” expressing the viewpoint that women were interested in automotive fundamentals, not just a car to match a spring outfit, the author noted.
Brockmole cited Ms. Magazine as an example of promoting a new spirit for women in the 1970s. A woman’s place was no longer solely in the home as working women grew in number and stature, she said. Other periodicals followed providing specific information to women about cars.
A study of the relationship between women and the auto industry is a story with a happy ending, noted Brockmole, adding: “Despite women’s messy history with the automobile, they have claimed the knowledge, the voice, and the confidence to define that relationship for themselves.”
Much is made of the temples and striking artwork of the ancient Maya. Justifiably. Ever since U.S. travel writer John Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood explored the ruins of Copan in Honduras, publishing Incidents of Travel in Central America in 1841, the world has been aware of the “lost world” of the Maya.
Stephens’ dramatic accounts and keen insight at what he found along with Catherwood’s meticulous engravings at numerous Maya sites proved to be a revelation. The public learned about structures like the Temple of the Sun and the Monument at Quirigia, of pyramids and plazas, of carvings and hieroglyphics, of the grandeur of a culture that didn't just exist in a harsh environment for more than 4,000 years but flourished.
Much has been learned since Stephens and Catherwood wielded machetes to cut their way through the area of the world now known as Mesoamerica. We now know the Maya were not only builders, farmers, artists, and warriors--but masters when it came to a sustainable lifestyle.
Lisa Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, has investigated Mayan life in Belize for over 35 years. Her book, Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet, suggests Mayan accomplishments weren’t limited to architecture and art.
“Maya reservoirs at the hundreds of cities supplied millions of people for over 1,000 years,” she said, referring to a period that encompasses the Classic Maya period (250 to 900 A.D.) How did they keep water clean enough for drinking? Lucero talks about the aquatic plants the Maya cultivated to maintain water quality in the same manner as constructed wetlands cleanse soils. “I love talking about water lilies,” she said, referring to sensitive plants that can only grow in clean water.
Maya kings (one ancient pot pictured in the book shows a king with a water lily headdress) had to be water managers before anything else. In times of drought, maintaining an adequate water supply for a growing population became increasingly difficult, said Lucero. Sustained droughts finally proved calamitous, forcing families to pack up and move, she said.
While many Mayan cities were already abandoned a thousand years before Stephens and Catherwood arrived, Lucero doesn’t view the exodus as a huge mystery. “People focus on the collapse of the Mayan kings (by 900 A.D.). They did disappear. But the people just moved on. They voted with their feet,” she said.
The very fact that the Maya were able to maintain cities in a jungle environment for so long without the technology we now hold in such high esteem is testimony to their understanding of environment and an ability to use the plants, animals, and earth to create what we call a sustainable existence today.
The fact is the Maya didn’t disappear, she said. “More than 7 million Maya live today—some in Illinois,” said Lucero. “The Maya have adapted to many changes over the millennia—demands from Maya kings, Spanish and English colonial rule, and massive droughts. They continue to adapt today in Central America and elsewhere, and many of their ancestral practices are alive and well,” she said.
The problem of climate change requires learning from the Maya, said Lucero. “We are all connected. We are part of one huge family and we need to take care of one another,” she said.
Before Alison Kosik wrote What's Up With Women and Money?: How To Do All the Financial Stuff You’ve Been Avoiding she’d been a business correspondent for CNN, often filing stories from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Kosik interviewed heads of business and corporate experts regularly but relegated financial decisions to her husband. Although dealing with business on a daily basis on the job, when it came to her own personal finances, she decided not to get involved.
Although in what she called “a bad marriage,” she confessed to being terrified to leave for fear of running aground financially. All of which led to her learning about things like buying a car, a house, and saving for retirement, issues she put off getting involved in for years.
What’s Up gives a step-by-step action plan on various money topics as well as providing interviews with women who share their tales of why not learning about money decisions can lead to problems.
Kosik saw the irony in her position. “How could I, of all people, CNN’s business correspondent on Wall Street, be in this position – feeling trapped in a failing marriage because I didn’t have the self-assurance to make important financial decisions that would also impact my young children,” she said.
"I was afraid of making mistakes whether it was our investments, the car buying, or insurance. I didn’t think I had the knowledge and good judgment that comes from experience of 'doing the financial stuff.' I was embarrassed and ashamed,” said Kosik.
Kosik also realized other women were in the same position.
"Compared to previous generations, women are more educated, they’re carving out careers and running companies. But what I learned through dozens of interviews and research is that even many of these high-achieving women aren’t fully involved with managing their financial lives. They’re pawning it off to their spouses or just plain avoiding it. And they’re not readily admitting it because they don’t want to seem unintelligent by their peers,” said Kosik.
"I hope you discover, as I did, that these financial things aren’t as complicated as you first thought. In fact, once I began tackling these transactions, each little victory made me gain a little more confidence. And over time, I wondered what I had been afraid of in the first place. And why I didn’t start sooner,” she said.
Abbi Waxman, a British-born Californian, is the author of eight books including I Was Told It Would Get Easier, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, and The Garden of Small Beginnings.
Her latest, One Death at a Time, is promoted as a “feel-good mystery,” a categorization that Waxman seems relatively happy with. But then Waxman confesses to be a relatively happy person. “One Death at a Time is funny. All my books are lighthearted,” she said.
Born in England in 1970, Waxman came to the United States at 21, setting up a lifelong battle between her Britishness and her Americaness, she said. A career in advertising, where she worked as a copywriter and then creative director at various advertising agencies in London and New York, proved to be a great training ground for book writing, she said.
“(Advertising) work is technical but at the same time creative. You have to express an idea in limited space and create an emotional connection.” All that rewriting and editing that goes into ad work helps one prepare a novel, said Waxman.
Growing up in England with an American mother (from Detroit) who was a murder-mystery writer, Waxman’s childhood reading list included books by classic mystery writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. “Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe, is my favorite,” she said.
But along with reading plenty of non-fiction these days, Waxman said she will suddenly read a string of books by various authors from Jane Austen to Stephen King. “King’s a master of description,” she noted.
Absorbing the work of accomplished writers helps restore her faith in the wonder of reading, she said. “It helps me create a world that will transport a reader,” said Waxman.
Frances Perkins is one of those figures in history that you need to know more about. Helping in that regard is the latest book from Stephanie Dray, a historical novel called Becoming Madam President.
Published in March 2024, Becoming is the 10th work of historical fiction for Dray who likes to write about revolutionary women, both those involved in the American Revolution and, as in Perkins' case, women whose work was revolutionary.
Perhaps best known as the Secretary of Labor in Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, a position she held for 12 years, Perkins is credited with helping FDR create Social Security. As the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, Perkins drafted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, a bill that banned child labor, established a minimum wage and brought about the 40-hour week.
Dray, who started her research for the book in 2020, said that Perkins credited her grandmother, Cynthia Otis Perkins, with setting her on a course to help others. “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life," said Frances Perkins, often seen as the driving force in the New Deal.
Dray refers to Perkins as the most consequential cabinet member since Alexander Hamilton. Ironically, Dray related that when Perkins and FDR first worked together in New York, the pair didn't see eye to eye.
“They loathed each other when they first met. She thought he was just a spoiled rotten arrogant jerk. He thought she was a stuffy insufferable blue stocking," Dray said in an interview with Spectrum News.
Perkins, who played such a big role in pushing for worker safety, was at the scene of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, a horrific fire in New York City that took 146 lives, most of them young women employed as garment workers. Doors had been locked at the factory as a precaution against the threat of theft, said Dray.
Perkins was at a meeting nearby when the fire broke out. "She knew the source because she knew of problems (for workers) that existed there," said Dray. Perkins was witness to the scene of many workers who leapt from the building to their death trying to escape the fire, she said.
Perkins handled her government job with distinction, but what many don't know is that her husband, Paul Wilson, a fellow reformer, suffered from serious mental illness, said Dray.
"There's a picture of the signing of the Social Security Act in 1935 with Perkins looking over Roosevelt's shoulder right into the camera. The day that photo was taken, she had to leave to look for her husband who had just escaped from an asylum," Dray said.
While acknowledging many marvelous biographies of Frances Perkins, Dray said that the historical novel allowed her to share more of Perkins as a person--not just a government official. Novelists can go where historians rightfully fear to tread, she said.
Jesse Sutanto is a successful writer educated at Oxford and California, lives in Jakarta, and has found her niche: the cozy mystery.
I didn’t know what a cozy mystery was until Jesse explained it. “Nothing truly bad happens to the primary characters. For example, I couldn’t kill off Vera Wong,” she said.
“Cozy mysteries have a lot of standard features,” said Richelle Braswell, a writer who explains some of the many varieties out there in her online essay, “Cozy Mystery Plots.” The stories usually involve an amateur sleuth, no explicit gore and a cute or funny sidekick, Braswell explained.
Whereupon, Braswell proceeds to tick off 17 categories from academic (where the action takes place at a college or boarding school) to travel (allowing the mystery to unfold in multiple locations around the globe). In between, you have cozy categories such as culinary (exemplified by Cheese Shop mysteries by Avery Adams), historical (such as Lady Caroline Murder Mysteries by Isabella Bassett), medical (Travel Nurse Mysteries by Molly Evans), and seniors (African Violet Club Mysteries by Elise Stone that take place in an Arizona Retirement community).
Sutanto’s latest entry in the cozy field is Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man), a follow up to Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, published in 2023. Sutanto said the character of Vera Wong, the 60-something amateur detective, is based on her own mother known to sometimes offer outrageous comments.
Sutanto, whose grandparents came from China, was born in Jakarta but grew up in Singapore. "My mother was a big influence on me. I didn’t see much of my father who worked in Jakarta at the time,” she said.
Sutanto previously wrote young-adult fiction but said she switched to the mystery genre when she felt “too old” to write for teens.
The author’s writing routine is to “treat it as a day job,” she said. “I allow three days to write an outline, a time when I walk about the house talking to myself about what characters would say and do,” said Sutanto.
“I try to write my books in five weeks. I write 2,000 words a day—usually writing every weekday before lunch time,” said Sutanto, whose family includes husband and two small children. After completing 40,000 words, she checks into a luxury hotel alone for three nights to write 12,000 words a day. “I’ve followed this routine six or seven times,” she said.
The system that produces three books a year appears to be working for Sutanto—and her cozy-mystery readers.
The ancient Maya civilization is known for many things: pyramids, stone sculptures, complex astronomical calculations, a writing system, a rubber-ball game and the subject of anthropologist Dean Arnold's latest book, Maya Blue (University Press of Colorado).
Arnold, an adjunct curator of anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and professor emeritus of anthropology at Wheaton College, has published more than 60 articles about potters, pottery and pottery production.
He has pursued the mystery of what he describes as a beautiful blue pigment that's proved impervious to fading "even after exposure for many hundreds of years in one of the world's harshest climates--the tropical forests of southern Mexico and Guatemala."
"It is one of the world's most unusual pigments," said Arnold, who has been researching the subject since 1965. The color appears on Maya pottery, sculpture, murals, as well as having been used on human sacrifices, he said.
"It is ironic that although the ancient Maya used Maya Blue widely for more than seventeen centuries, modern scientists still have much to learn about it," he said. "Chemists have been trying to figure out why the pigment binds the way it does," said Arnold.
Mayans combined the organic dye indigo with an inorganic clay mineral called palygorskite to create the hybrid material that stands up to attacks by acids, alkalines, and time, itself, he said.
The Mayans may have created the color but its use is evident across a wide area in Mesoamerica, noted Arnold. "If you go to Mexico City to view the remains of Aztec pyramids, you can still see Maya Blue," he said.
Seeking to unearth the Mayan secret of the pigment has permitted Arnold to visit Mayan sites firsthand. In addition to his research on the Mayan use of color, he's also made a career of studying contemporary people. "I like going back to the Yucatan. I really enjoy the Mayan people. I've made some wonderful friends there," he said.
"I love the food. It's very different from what you find from the Highland Maya area. My favorite dish is frijol con puerco, black beans with pork and spices," said Arnold.
While the book Maya Blue stands as the most thorough analysis of research that's been done on the color to date, Arnold is still on the case, collaborating with associates at the Field Museum. "We want to learn how the Mayans made the pigment," he said.
Add Maya Blue to the mysteries that surround the ancient Mayans. "Even after more than ninety years since the discovery of the unique characteristics of Maya Blue, unraveling the mysteries about the pigment and its constituents requires much more research," said Arnold.
W.E. B. DuBois went on record in 1896 saying that white supremacy significantly warps whites' perceptions and behaviors. Even earlier--in 1890--as a 22-year-old Harvard College student--he called out Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
He outlined the Davis career in a 10-minute speech as one who "advanced civilization by murdering Indians" and participated in the "national disgrace called the Mexican War" before attaining "the crowning absurdity" of his career, heading up the Confederacy, "the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free."
Unveiling the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois on the Problem of Whiteness by Lisa McLeod, a lecturer at Northeastern University in Boston, explores DuBois's views of whiteness as a political and moral issue.
There's a lot to cover with DuBois, an African American who lived to be 95 years old and whose writings about the need for equality for close to a century.
It was Martin Luther King Jr. who credited DuBois as the man who "demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history."
"Slaveholders were convinced that Black people would not work without force, that slavery was their natural condition. DuBois argued that this belief was as certain to southerners as the rising and setting of the sun, and the United States never implemented a widespread reeducation program to correct this or any other misconception regarding African-descended people," wrote McLeod.
"Instead, when southerners rebuilt after the war, they attempted to make Negores slaves in everything but name. This is a shameful and shamefully underreported truth of American history," McLeod noted.
DuBois said the South understood the capabilities of Blacks. "It is nonsense to say that the South knew nothing about the capabilities of the Negro race. Southerners knew Negroes far better than Northerners. There was not a single slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder," DuBois noted in 1935.
McLeod presses DuBois's point that it was the duty of white Americans to work against racism for the benefit of all.
Ida Lupino's "problem" was that she constantly found herself the smartest person in the room, noted biographer Alexandra Seros, a Hollywood screenwriter and the author of Ida Lupino: Forgotten Auteur (University of Texas Press).
Lupino was more than a great actress but also a successful director. The Hitch-Hiker, a film made in 1953, is now considered a film noir classic. The fact that a woman directed the movie places when few women directors worked on major film releases places her in exclusive company, said Seros.
"Actually The Hitch-Hiker was not straight noir, it was a crime thriller with (Nicholas) Musuraca’s noir lighting. Lupino was actually known for her noir film portrayals, but her directing was full of hybrids," Seros said.
Lupino was also a television pioneer, stepping into the new medium in the 1950s, stated the author. "(In TV), she went for modernity, like satire, the grotesque, and westerns - she loved experimenting with genre. However, "No. 5 Checked out”, her first big foray into TV, though not her debut, was for Screen Directors Playhouse, a prestigious way to enter a new medium. That show was like a Whitman’s Sampler of all her work, including noir," said Seros.
"I believe after her film acting work early on, she became exhausted by noir, which was antithetical to social realism, the thematic she really wanted to expose post war," she said.
"(Lupino) was so multifaceted and complex, it’s difficult to talk about her without bringing in many elements from her work and influences from her life. She really was as paradox. I wanted to understand who she was, and one can begin to glimpse it in Ralph Edwards' “This Is Your Life, Ida Lupino”, on YouTube.
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Maia Lee-Chin, whose book, Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases (Andrews McMeel), was published last year, got more out of Latin class than I did.
But she admits it didn't just happen. "I was forced to enroll in Latin. I considered dropping the course several times, especially while translating Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico. I couldn't understand his long-winded explanations of wartime strategies, and I had no love for Roman history," wrote Lee-Chin.
"Something changed when I first translated the Aeneid from Latin to English. I was struck by the kinship I felt for Aeneas," she said.
Lee-Chin, a 2021 graduate of Holy Cross College, outside Boston, was the first Black woman to be named a Fenwick Scholar, the school's highest academic honor.
I wish I had known a girl like Maia when I was taking Latin classes all those years ago. But then I was introduced to the subject at Boston Latin School (where I spent the seventh grade), at a time when only male students attended.
Lee-Chin's book, beautifully illustrated by Italian artist Marta Bertello, takes 50 Latin phrases, translates them, and then provides a brief backstory (usually just a few paragraphs) to give a taste of Roman history and a glimpse at the life that flourished behind those turgid phrases.
Take omnia vincit amor, for example. "Love conquers all" isn't a line from a 60s song but from one of Vergil's poems "that paints an idyllic portrait of rural life in the Roman countryside," noted Lee-Chin.
"It is not the rallying cry modern readers imagine, she stated. It's a warning from a poet (Gallus) on his deathbed: "We cannot defeat love, and so nos cedamus--let us yield to it."
"Pining over the mistress while she pursues another, (Gallus) embodies the servitium amoris--'the enslavement of love' and his dying words admit his defeat," Lee-Chin said.
We never got stories like that when I was in Latin class.
Another thing, Vergil is supposed to have written just one line of poetry a day. He compiled 10 poems but that output was dwarfed by the 24 books that Homer produced, said Lee-Chin, stating her love for Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Washington Post calls Mark Greaney the Tom Cruise of thriller writers. Like the Mission Impossible star, Greaney is on a roll, following in the footsteps of Tom Clancy, the thriller writer whose books have sold over 100 million copies.
Greaney, who said he became obsessed with Clancy’s work as a teenager, co-wrote several books with Clancy before the author died in 2013. While carrying on the exploits of Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan, in several books, Greaney started a successful series of his own in 2009 with Court Gentry, the Gray Man, “a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away.”
“The Gray Man author tests weapons, flies in fighter jets, and is home for family dinner,” noted the Post’s Travis Andrews. Netflix may have brought the Gray Man to the screen with Ryan Gosling in 2022 and has plans for a follow-up but Greaney, 57, just keeps cranking out the books. Midnight Black is the 14th Gray Man novel and he’s already at work on number 15.
Greaney is down to earth about his success, pointing to the life he enjoys at home with his family and dogs in Memphis. It's the town where he was raised and where his father, Ed Greaney, taught son Mark the importance of keeping track of what’s happening in the world. The senior Greaney was a fixture at the Memphis NBC-TV affiliate for 50 years, including a lengthy stint as news director,
Mark visits Ireland this year along with plans to go scuba diving and take a firearms course but otherwise, Greaney’s at home rolling out the garbage cans at home, he said.
Current events are a part of the geopolitical thrillers that Greaney specializes in. The War in Ukraine is a factor in Midnight Black as Court Gentry seeks to sneak into Russia to rescue his lover who’s imprisoned there. “I listen to a one-hour podcast every day detailing troop movements in the battle between Russia and Ukraine,” he said.
Greaney opens his latest novel at a bar in the Ferentari district of Bucharest where Gentry nurses a Carpathian single malt whiskey, contemplating how to get the jump on five would-be assassins who look to do him harm. Such is the life for a Gray Man novel. “I haven’t been to Bucharest but I’ve been to the Balkans and I needed a place to start the book,” he said.
Greaney’s prolific pace—he figures he’s averaged a book-and-a-half a year over the last 15 years—isn’t slowing down this year but Greaney figures he’ll eventually fall back to "just" producing a Gray Man novel every other year. That will allow him to do other things such as adding to one of the other literary streams he started, the Armoured series with Josh Duffy as the main character.
His writing routine usually has him heading out to his backyard office each morning. Greaney said he also sometimes likes to work at the coffeeshop near Memphis University where he’s surrounded “by young people who don’t know or care who I am.”
As much as the 150,000-word books, themselves, Greaney is proud of the fact that he’s come up with the biting titles of most of the books he’s written. With the author’s name in bold headlines at the top, book covers tend to only have room for a two- or three-word title. “The title’s not an add-on. It helps me write the book when I know the title,” he said.
Having a successful series hasn’t made writing easier, said Greaney. “The books are getting harder to write. You have to be sure you’re not trotting over ground you’ve covered before,” he said.
Note to Mark: come up with another drink in Gray Man 15 now that you’ve used Carpathian single malt whiskey.
Kimberly Kay Hoang, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, traveled over 300,000 miles, conducting hundreds of interviews to trace the flow of capital from offshore funds in the Cayman Islands, Samoa or Panama to holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Her book, Spiderweb Capitalism, reveals how some of this money finds its way into risky markets in Vietnam and Myanmar.
"Not only was getting access to wealthy individuals around the world highly challenging, but then trying to connect the dots of their relationships with one another in tangled and layered webs felt like being caught inside a 3D maze with no clear way in or out," Hoang noted.
Those relationships are explored closely as Hoang details her field trips with financial professionals to look at proposed developments in as-yet-undeveloped parts of Vietnam or Myanmar.
To succeed in making money in Asia you need to master the art of "playing in the gray," she was told. The gray being the territory between the legal and illegal.
Making risky investments requires careful planning, repeated visits to the scene and a clear understanding of taxes and payments that might be involved to get the deal done, she said.
Hoang illustrates the global nature of spiderweb capitalism with her interview with a developer who shares his own background: "I am Korean, educated in America, living in Hong Kong. My company is domiciled in Samoa and my investments are in Vietnam."
The developer told Hoang that everything he was doing was legal. "The Pritzker family set up these structures, one of University of Chicago's biggest donors," he added.
The information provided about Vietnam is particularly interesting. The country has come a long way from the war-torn nation of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, it's a country of 95 million people with a growing middle class, noted Hoang, whose parents were among that country's "boat people" who escaped capture in the 70s.
“It’s a new world when it comes to journalism. That prompted Patrick Ferrucci, the head of the journalism department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to go out and see how that world has changed.
The Organization of Journalism offers a profile of six different business models that now bring folks the news or sports, as the case may be. There’s the St. Louis Beacon, a digital nonprofit, and the Defector, an employee-owned cooperative focusing on sports and culture. The Colorado Sun, a startup led by former Denver Post employees, and the Athletic, a sports site purchased by the New York Times in 2022, are also reviewed along with two “legacy” newspapers, the Boston Globe and Denver Post.
Each model has pros and cons, noted Ferrucci, who has no misconceptions about the daunting task ahead regarding news-gathering in the digital era. “We are living in scary times for journalism,” he notes. That can also be translated into scary times for readers or want-to-be readers, many of whom are deprived of the variety of the daily paper they once knew.
The subtitle of Ferrucci's book is "Market Models and Practice in a Fraying Profession. The choice of "fraying" to describe the present state of journalism reflects his awareness of the changes that have been wrought in the digital age.
Where you live probably dictates how much local news is put on your plate these days. Ferrucci said that Boulder, Colo. has more news available to the public than when he moved there 10 years ago. The resources of a well-to-do community and the presence of a large university make that possible. Other parts of the country aren’t so lucky.
Ferrucci’s research—he interviewed employees at every stop—illustrates how the journalism scene has changed. In comparing the Globe and Post, both papers with pedigrees, Ferrucci said the Boston model, owned by billionaire John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, was now positively regarded as a “writer’s paper” by many in the Globe newsroom.
That’s not the sentiment Ferrucci perceived from those interviewed at the Post, a paper bought in 2011 by Alden Global Capital, the so-called “hedge fund vampire,” a company that reduced the Post newsroom of 300 down to 70 and moved the paper from a historic downtown building to a site outside the city in 2018. While the Post still does good work, many of its employees feel they’re shortchanging readers because they don’t—can’t—cover the state like they once did, said Ferrucci.
The Globe has also changed its focus: Instead of covering suburban Boston as it once did, Ferrucci said the paper goes after Boston stories but also recognes the changing news scene. With the Providence Journal in decline, the Globe has beefed up staffing to cover Rhode Island more closely and, as a result, is building a subscription base there, said Ferrucci.
One of the points the author makes in speaking with Steve Tarter is that universities may be more important than ever in the development of journalism. “We’ve always had journalism schools,” he said but the present situation where many different business models now vye for acceptance requires the understanding once found in the nation’s newsrooms now diminished in size.
Speaking of newsrooms, that’s Ferrucci’s next project: a look at the places that have spawned so much journalism in the past.
You already know about the local news crisis. The proof is probably not in your hands with the demise of so many newspapers. The terms “ghost paper” (a publication with an old masthead and little else) and “news deserts” (areas without local news coverage of any kind) are part of the vernacular these days.
Communities have had to be inventive to replace the local news they once took for granted, says Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston and co-author of What Works in Community News with Ellen Clegg, a former editor on the Boston Globe.
Kennedy may be optimistic about some efforts made to restore local news but the problem remains a growing national crisis, he said. Some 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005 in this country, most of them weeklies, said Kennedy, suggesting that even with hundreds of start-ups launched in that time, what’s come online has not replaced news provided in the past.
The real solution must come from folks at the community level, he said, citing examples such as The Colorado Sun, a digital startup founded by 10 former journalists from the Denver Post, a paper decimated by hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital. “The Sun has now grown to a staff of two dozen people that makes it one of the largest news organizations in the state. They’re now looking at going beyond Denver to provide coverage in rural areas outside the city,” he said.
"There’s also MLK50: Justice Through Journalism in Memphis, Tenn., a non-profit investigative project formed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But they decided to keep going. They’ve since won awards and secured grants,” said Kennedy. The Daily Memphian has also been formed, providing news in that town missing from the Gannett-owned Commercial Appeal.
"We love non-profit news but there's only so much philanthropy out there," he said. What Works in Community News examines about a dozen projects in nine parts of the country. While approaches differ, the one thing they have in common is dedicated leadership at the local level – entrepreneurial journalists initiating new business models on the fly, said Kennedy, who mourns the loss of so many weeklies.
Weekly publications have traditionally served as the beating heart of community journalism, covering local government, schools and neighborhood issues – plus weddings, births, deaths and youth activities that draw neighbors together, he said.
But Kennedy points to positive action taken in Bedford, Mass., a small town (population 14,000) outside Boston (not to be confused with New Bedford, the state’s old whaling port). Bedford was once home to a newspaper called the Bedford Minuteman, a once-robust weekly downsized by its corporate owner, GateHouse Media, which later merged into Gannett, the U.S.’s largest newspaper chain.
Three members of the League of Women Voters who had been monitoring local government and reporting back to the membership asked themselves: Why not write this up for the benefit of the public? That was the beginning of The Bedford Citizen, a news project featured in our book, said Kennedy. "Over the years, the nonprofit website has grown from an all-volunteer operation into a professional news organization, funded through initiatives ranging from voluntary membership fees to an annual glossy guide filled with advertising and mailed to every household in town, he said.
Today, the Citizen has a full-time editor, a part-time reporter and paid freelancers alongside a contingent of unpaid contributors, said Kenndy, noting that The Minuteman faded away and was
It’s been 80 years since the bloodiest battle of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, a five-week struggle that started during the Christmas season of 1944 that took 19,000 American lives in fighting in the densely wooded Ardennes region of Germany.
It was Germany’s last stand, said O’Connor, who drew on considerable research of that battle in Jeep Show, a novel that focuses on the U.S. Army’s troupe of performers who put onsmall variety acts for combat infantry just behind the front lines.
While the USO entertained troops throughout the war in larger productions with stars such as Bob Hope, the Andrews Sisters and Dinah Shore, the Jeep shows, so named because performers often arrived in a Jeep, were smaller affairs designed to reach the fighting men on the front line or at air bases.
It was entertainment in a hurry and sometimes risky. Jeep shows performed in forward areas too dangerous for USO shows or the Red Cross. The war also demanded a lot from the entertainers. Sometimes Jeep show teams would put on as many as 11 shows in a day, said O’Connor.
Mickey Rooney, one of the central figures in O’Connor’s story, was a real-life Jeep show squad leader during the war, earning a Bronze Star for his service. Other Jeep show performers, not all well-known at the time, who went on to stardom included Mel Brooks, Red Buttons, Burt Lancaster, Dick Van Dyke, and Sammy Davis Jr., said O’Connor.
“Sammy Davis Jr. may have been the first black man to integrate the U.S. Army since the service was still segregated at the time,” O’Connor noted.
“(Jeep show) performances served as more than just entertainment. They were beacons of hope bringing moments of song, dance and laughter to weary troops, letting them know they weren’t forgotten,” said the author.
O’Connor said he originally planned a non-fiction account on Jim Hetzer, a West Virginia dance instructor assigned to the Army's Morale Corps as an Entertainment Specialist. Attached to a Jeep show squad in Europe, Hetzer often worked with Private Mickey Rooney.
With access to dozens of letters Hetzer wrote during the war that described the Jeep show experience, O'Connor said he opted for the historical novel approach in order to engage younger readers.
“It seems odd to call a World War II novel 'delightful,' but that's exactly what you get with O'Connor's mix of history and fiction as battles rage on and enlisted men entertain the troops,” cited Kirkus Reviews.
Dr. Jordan Grumet is a hospice doctor as well as a podcaster at The Earn & Invest Podcast. He’s also an author whose new book is The Purpose Code, a follow-up Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life, published in 2022.
Grumet describes his own battle to find purpose in life, relinquishing a job as a full-time medical doctor in 2014. While he didn’t want to give up being a hospice physician, he got rid of everything else to hold onto those things he enjoyed: encouraging people to find financial independence, podcasting, and writing.
You don’t find purpose, you create it, he said, using the example of Julia Child in his book. “(Child) didn’t want to be famous. That was never her goal. She was out with her husband at a French restaurant one day and something burst in her brain. She said this is what I want to do,” said Grumet, noting that Child loved the process of learning about French cooking, a fact that sustained her in the 10 years it took for her first book to be published.
“Purpose consists of those activities we engage in that light us up and fulfill us,” said Grumet. There’s even a health benefit: Having a sense of purpose in life leads to health, longevity, and happiness, he said.
Grumet makes a distinction between “small p” purpose and “big P” purpose. The “small p” purpose is simpler, smaller, and more understandable—things you can do on an everyday basis. “But when we set goals that we can't meet, it’s frustrating,” he said.
Purpose, as consequential as it may be, also can be toxic. Purpose becomes toxic when it goes from ‘little p’ purpose to ‘big P’ purpose,” said Grumet, giving the example of his own love for podcasting. “I love podcasting. When I sit in front of a microphone those are the greatest hours of my life. Even if I lose the audio and never post it. Even if I post it and no one downloads it. This is ‘little p’ purpose for me. It connects me to other people. Those people become my collaborators and friends. This feels like living a good life that makes me happy,” he said.
But setting what might be an unrealistic goal even doing something one loves can lead to anxiety, he said. “Let’s say I had success with my podcast. I’m going to put out this goal, this big, huge goal of a million downloads a month,” said Grumet. To try to achieve that, he stated he’d have to go on social media, make TikTok videos, and spend time more marketing the podcast—things Grumet said he doesn’t like doing.
As a hospice doctor who’s spoken with many people in their final days, Grumet says he’s never heard anyone say they should have spent more time working or making money. In The Purpose Code, the author cites a long-term study that noted when it came to happiness, it was not money, achievement, career choice, exercise, or a healthy diet that made respondents happy. It was positive social relationships. Those who felt more connected to others lived longer and happier.
Books that seek to help you understand the world of finance probably aren’t viewed as the most engaging of literary categories. Consumers, after all, hold that book in their hands for a specific reason: to understand policy rates better or inflation-linked bonds not for a ripsnorting reading adventure.
Paul Podolsky, a former equity partner at Bridgewater Associates and the founder and CIO of Kate Capital, an investment management firm, however, has tried to make his advice on the subject accessible. The Uncomfortable Truth About Money carries a subtitle: How to live with uncertainty and think for yourself.
Uncertainty may be the order of the day, after all. “As I write this, it is less than 100 years since a hyper-developed country, Germany, lined up behind a maniac. He created hell on earth, obliterating lives and wealth. Millions of people enthusiastically followed him, both in Germany and elsewhere. In the years since, People haven’t changed. If it can happen in Germany, it can happen anywhere and it has—Chile (1970s), Rwanda (1990s), Italy (1930s) and Russia (1930s and 2020s),” wrote Podolsky in his first chapter.
On that cheery note, we’re off and running. “If you don’t want to get wiped out, study how things work,” Podolsky suggests. But the author isn’t coming at his subject from on high. A former newspaper reporter, he’s also served as a bartender, carpenter, teacher, and even a mountain guide in addition to serving as a banker and investor.
“I got my money education in real time, out of necessity, piece by piece,” stated Podolsky who lived in Moscow in his twenties working as a journalist. The Soviet Union (as it was known then) taught him a lesson about pricing. “The Soviet Union sought to pay a doctor roughly the same as a coal miner,” he said. Supply and demand—you knew that you’d be hearing the importance of that sooner or later.
Podolsky doesn’t try to steer readers in a specific direction other than to get a better understanding of terms and options that are out there. “If you decide to learn how to invest, recognize that there are sharply different approaches about how to do so, almost like different religions,” he stated.
Podolsky concludes his 200-page book with two slogans: Health is wealth; Be wary of sages--there aren’t any (including me).
You’re a Japanese American living in Nebraska in 1941. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, sending the United States into war. What do you do?
At 24 when war broke out, Nebraskan Ben Kuroki enlisted to fight for his country. Ben joined the Army Air Force along with his brother.
In Most Honorable Son by Gregg Jones, Kuroki’s unique wartime experience is related.
Ben Kuroki not only flew a staggering 58 combat missions as a gunner on Army Air Force bombers but battled racism and resentment on the home front.
Despite anti-Japanese sentiment running rampant in America, Kuroki not only persevered in his desire to serve but also challenged the U.S. policy of forcing some 100,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during the war.
After his 30th mission—a raid on Munich, Germany that was nearly his last when shrapnel from an enemy shell barely missed his head—Kuroki was dispatched to three of the internment camps to encourage enlistment in the service. By 1944, Jones said, the U.S. military was seeking Japanese Americans to serve in the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy.
In a series of speeches at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming, Kuroki urged Nisei men to enlist but his message fell flat with the camp's growing draft resistance movement. Camp supporters demanded the restoration of constitutional and civil rights for all camp residents before submitting to military service.
Ben also spoke at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Delta, Utah, and the Minidoka Relocation Center near Hunt, Idaho. Before these speaking engagements, Kuroki had only a vague notion about the fate that had befallen West Coast residents of Japanese descent.
He came away shaken by the sight of men, women, and children who looked like him packed into flimsy wooden barracks in wilderness areas guarded by rifle-toting Army soldiers. Kuroki became aware of the deep divisions within the camp when Heart Mountain hecklers interrupted him during his speeches.
But even after flying 30 missions in Europe, Ben wasn’t through with the war. His next stop was the Pacific where he joined the 505th Bomb Group. The mission? To bomb Japan.
Like others whose job it was to drop bombs on targets during the war, Jones said individuals often “compartmentalized” their actions, not thinking of the damage being done down below. But the author said Kuroki had reservations after seeing the orange glow of Tokyo receding in the background after an intense incendiary raid on the Japanese capital.
Kuroki suffered his most serious injury of the war—not on a plane—but at the hands of a fellow soldier in August of 1945. When good-natured banter turned ugly, Ben’s head was slashed open with a knife.
U.S. medics saved his life as Kuroki recuperated on Tinian, the tiny Pacific isle that U.S. forces had used as a launching pad for bombing runs over Japan—including the mission flown by the Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Kuroki was still recovering from his injuries when Japan’s surrender was announced.
After the war, Kuroki returned to making speeches—opposing discrimination in all forms. He later turned to journalism. The shy Nebraska farm boy became a progressive crusader who came to terms with the fact that the same country he defended had rounded up and imprisoned Japanese Americans during WWII.
“Kuroki once said he looked Japanese but had the heart of an American,” said Kevin Maurer, author of No Easy Day, the inside story of the Bin Laden raid, co-written with former Navy SEAL Mark Owen. Kuroki’s story “reminds us that America is everyone,” noted Maurer.
So many images represent Walt Disney. There’s that mouse, of course, and all those movies. There’s so much music, countless cartoons, and aisles of toys Once there were even comic books. Characters like Donald Duck operated across many different media. We know about the cartoons starring an exasperated duck with a funny voice. But there was also an adventure series with Donald, his nephews, and a miserly Uncle Scrooge in comic books created by cartoonist Carl Barks.
Barks, who worked for Disney from 1942 to 1966, is now singled out for his comic-book creations. Other people have depicted Disney’s duck but they don’t have their stories being reprinted in full-color hardbound books from Fantagraphics (the complete Barks series is slated to be completed by 2026).
What sets Barks apart are his stories, said Peter Schilling, Jr., whose book, Carl Barks’ Duck, was published in 2014. “It’s the writing as well as the art,” he said.
Schilling discovered Barks as a kid when he and his brother were avid comic-book readers. What Schilling discovered was that the comics that Barks created—anonymously under the Walt Disney umbrella—were different from those drawn by other artists. “We read other Donald Duck comics but they weren’t the same. They weren’t from that guy,” he said.
That guy—Barks—toiled in anonymity until late in his career but the secret’s out now. “I look at his comics like little movies with Donald Duck as Cary Grant, whose career ran from comedy to serious drama,” said Schilling.
Along with his wide-ranging stories and explosive artwork, Barks was a creator of characters. He came up with Uncle Scrooge, Gyro Gearloose, the Woodchuck Manual, and the Beagle Boys, said Schilling.
As for a favorite story, Schilling cited several in his book but called “Vacation Time” “a forgotten masterpiece.”
“The End of Baseball: A Novel” by Peter Schilling Jr.
Another Schilling book, The End of Baseball—A Novel (2008), is a baseball novel of what might have been. Schilling writes a story featuring Bill Veeck, the real-life maverick promoter, who reportedly had a plan in 1944: buy the struggling Philadelphia Athletics franchise and replace the existing squad, a woeful bunch made up of players either too young or too old (World War II had depleted rosters for all teams) and replace them with star players from the Negro leagues.
Veeck was a baseball man, through and through. His father, William Sr., was a Chicago sportswriter who became president of the Chicago Cubs. After his father died in 1933, Veeck became treasurer of the Cubs. In 1941, he bought the Milwaukee Brewers, then a Cub minor league property. Veeck raised attendance with promotions by giving away live animals or scheduling morning games with free breakfast for overnight workers.
When it came to baseball promotions, no one could hold a candle to Veeck who, in 1951, sent Eddie Gaedel—all 3-foot-7 of him, up to the plate for one of the most famous one-day careers in baseball (he walked). Veeckis is also given credit for growing the ivy that still grows in Wrigley Field and introducing scoreboards that could dispense fireworks.
That was reality. In his book, Schilling related that Veeck, back from WWII service where he was injured while serving in the Marines, shared his revolutionary plan to integrate baseball with then-commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The baseball establishment then then thwarted the deal by having another buyer take over the Philadelphia franchise.
Did Veeck actually plan such a move three years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier? Schilling thinks so and his book imagines the season that might have followed, raising awareness of some of the great players in the Negro leagues as well as anticipating some of the problems such a team would have faced.
In real life, Veeck headed a syndicate that bought the Cleveland India
Pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in America. Ilana Long, author of Pickleballers, a debut romantic comedy set in Seattle, noted that as many as 50 million individuals are expected to play the sport in 2024.
The game, which Long calls multigenerational, serves as the backdrop for a story about a young woman who, on the rebound of a breakup, finds solace and redemption on the pickleball court.
Long, who said the sport gave her life during the pandemic, says she's met folks on the pickleball court she'd never have run into otherwise.
The pickleballer in Long's book is a newbie to the sport looking to recover from life’s swings and misses. Meg Bloomberg is in a pickle: What to do now that boyfriend Vance has left?
She finds hope on the ferry between Seattle and Bainbridge Island. That's where she meets Ethan Fine. The relationship gets off to an inauspicious start when his seatbelt locks up in her car. But Meg rises to the occasion to cut him loose.
"Maybe this was the new Meg Bloomberg. Bouncing on a strange man's lap, wielding a knife, and talking like a crustacean in a Disney movie," noted Long.
Fine, described as "a charismatic environmental consultant," is a resident of Bainbridge Island. Things look promising until Meg discovers that Ethan is sabotaging her home court. She decides the match is over. Or is it?
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About Ilana Long
Ilana Long first heard about pickleball when her sporty friend confessed that she was addicted to a game that was “like ping-pong but standing on the table.” Shortly after, Long joined the pickleball craze despite her utter lack of hand-eye… More about Ilana Long
Whenever the Jurassic Park/World franchise launches another movie entry, the national media runs to quote “a dinosaur guy” for a professional analysis. One of the guys they call is David Hone, a zoologist at Queen Mary University in London and the author of How Fast Did T.rex Run? and the Tyrannosaur Chronicles.
Hone’s latest book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior (Princeton University Press), seeks to provide answers as to how dinosaurs may have moved, fed, grew, and reproduced.
Deducing dinosaur behavior isn’t easy when all you’ve got to go on are a few bones but Hone believes it’s possible. His book uses comparisons to living species as well as referencing the latest studies on prehistoric behavior. Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior uses diagrams, photographs, and the artwork of Florida artist Gabriel Ugueto to flesh out the dinosaur behavior picture.
Hone said discoveries from two centuries of research have expanded our view of life on the planet 70 million years ago. “We’ve been in a golden age of dinosaur discovery for the past 30 or 40 years and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. Dinosaurs are no longer considered the cold-blooded, tail-dragging, stupid, lizard-like monsters of the Victorian age, but are instead recognized as animals that were upright, active, fast-growing, and if not especially intelligent, certainly not stupid,” he said.
Hone's a critic when it comes to the latest Jurassic Park movies. “The first ones (starting in 1993) were fine but the last few have been really woeful—both as movies and as a dinosaur spectacle,” he said. Dinosaurs depicted in recent films are less accurate than the Jurassic Park movies of 30 years ago, noted Hone.
As a scientist and writer whose first two books focused on the Tyrannosaurus rex, Hone is in a good position to comment on the creature he classifies as one of a kind. “Take an orca (killer whale) and put it on legs and you’ve got an extraordinary predator. Probably more scientific papers have been written about T.rex than any other dinosaur,” he said.
As for how fast a T.rex run can run, Hone said a beast that could reach a weight of seven tons could make 15 mph--not enough to challenge a Jeep as depicted in the first Jurassic Park movie but it could definitely outrun a man, he said.
The T.rex may have lost a battle with a Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park 3 but the author, whose next book will focus on Spinosaurus research, says that outcome would have been unlikely. T.rex had a decided size advantage, said Hone, comparing the confrontation as combat between a lion and a cheetah.
Figuring out how creatures behaved millions of years ago remains an ongoing challenge for scientists but Hone said it’s worth remembering that “the sum total of the behaviors of dinosaurs across 1,500 species and 170 million years were much more complex and interesting than we can ever know.”
A plaque standing in downtown Bloomington, Ill. pays tribute to that city’s circus heritage:
“In the era before movies, television, and the internet, it was the circus that entertained us…For more than 80 years, spanning the 1870s until the 1950s, countless numbers of brave Bloomington men and women risked their lives to entertain massive crowds by performing aerial tricks high up on the flying trapeze.”
After two local brothers, Howard and Fred Green installed a trapeze rigging in a Bloomington building in 1875, the town became known as a center for trapeze artists. When the Green brothers went on to international fame, others were inspired to perform.
Bloomington became the center of activity for aerialist training and trapeze act recruitment in the United States. More than 200 people from the Bloomington area became circus performers, according to the McLean County Historical Society.
Charting that history today is Maureen Brunsdale, a Special Collections Librarian at Illinois State University’s Milner Library since 2008.
Brunsdale has published dozens of articles and, in 2013, wrote her first circus book, The Bloomington-Normal Circus Legacy with co-author Mark Schmitt. In the Shadow of the Big Top: The Life of Ringling's Unlikely Circus Savior (2023) is Brunsdale’s second book on the circus.
In the Shadow tells the story of Art Concello, a trapeze artist who trained at the Bloomington YMCA and in a fabled barn on Bloomington’s Emerson Street. Concello became known for performing the triple somersault, “the killer trick,” as it was called because so many trapeze artists had died trying to perform it, said Brunsdale.
With wife Antoinette, they became known as the Flying Concellos, charting circus history with their circus. Antoinette, a trapeze pioneer in her own right, Brunsdale noted, later became the first woman to perform the triple somersault.
But Art went on to perform amazing feats on the ground, she said. He demonstrated the same skill as an executive as he did on the flying trapeze “after hanging up his tights as a performer,” noted Brunsdale. Concello handled the crushing task of transporting circus acts (that usually only stayed in the same place for two days) with hundreds of people plus animals and equipment from town to town with remarkable efficiency, she said.
Concello is credited with later working out the logistics of transitioning circus acts from tents to indoor arenas, enabling circus acts to reach the public in the 20th century.
Concello also played a major role in the making of The Greatest Show on Earth, the Cecil B. DeMille film made in 1952. Concello trained Betty Hutton on the trapeze for the movie while Charlton Heston’s role as circus manager is a character reportedly based on Concello, himself.
“Once the biggest moneymaker in the world of entertainment, the circus may not have the elevated status it once did but it’s still with us,” said Brunsdale, citing circus acts still performed on television, the success of the Cirque du Soleil, and a revived Ringling Brothers touring show.
Bloomington-Normal’s circus heritage is celebrated every April when the Gamma Phi Circus performs on the Illinois State University campus, a tradition since 1929, Brunsdale noted.
Decades before the Civil War, Illinois meant freedom for those seeking to escape slavery. Larry McClellan’s Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois is his third book exploring the phenomenon known as the Underground Railroad.
McClellan, a resident of Crete, Illinois, some 35 miles south of Chicago, served as a professor of sociology at Governors State University, the Chicago school he helped found 54 years ago.
“It was neither underground nor a railroad,” said McClellan. The Underground Railroad was a freedom movement that depended on a fundamental human situation, he said. “When people on the run showed up at the door, the folks who lived on a farm had to make a human decision: are we going to help these folks?”
“The thing most striking to me is how ordinarily human this all becomes. There were people running for their freedom and other people saying, my gosh, we have to help,” said McClellan.
“Perhaps the stories of secret hiding places, tunnels, and other collaborations kept deeply hidden were experienced in other parts of Illinois and other states,” noted McClellan. “However in Chicago and northern Illinois, in large part because of broad-based abolitionist sentiments by the 1850s, activists needed to be discrete but not totally secretive.”
That doesn’t mean there weren’t dangers for those who sought to help people find freedom. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 strengthened penalties on those who assisted freedom seekers. “Its passage terrorized Black people across the northern states, creating fear for settled families as well as for freedom seekers traveling toward Canada. The new law meant that places such as Chicago and other places in northeastern Illinois were no longer outside the reach of slave catchers and kidnappers,” he said.
Illinois was classified as a free state but that label could be misleading, he said. “In southern Illinois, the population was overwhelmingly pro-slavery. When we get to central Illinois—places like Springfield and Peoria where folks followed the Illinois River—sentiment is mixed with a substantially larger number of people who are anti-slavery (compared to southern Illinois),” said McClellan.
The Underground Railroad operated through Peoria and neighboring communities, he said. “On both sides of the Illinois River, you literally had hundreds of people who were walking on their way to freedom. They were coming through,” said McClellan.
The number of people who actually “ran” the Underground Railroad was very small, he said. Within the general population, there may have been a majority that considered themselves opposed to slavery but only a minority of those were abolitionists, individuals calling for the repeal of slavery. Smaller still within the abolitionist group were those people willing to break the law and help people escape, said McClellan.
McClellan, whose research on the Underground Railroad spans three decades, estimates that 3,000 to 4,500- freedom seekers came through northeastern Illinois. The total number of people who sought freedom across the country through the Underground Railroad is estimated to be between 30,000 to 50,000, he said.
“We have great journey stories and, in addition, we have a great set of location stories, places where freedom seekers found help and places that began to be identified as places of refuge. Here in Illinois, we can document at least 200 places where freedom seekers found help. In my research some 60 sites in northeastern Illinois alone have been identified,” said McClellan.
McClellan said information on the operation of the Underground Railroad throughout the state will soon be submitted to the Illinois Legislature. He also announced that work is underway on documenting the Chicago to Detroit Freedom Trail, a route taken by many freedom seekers who sought refuge in Canada.
The comics page has long been a place for cars and energy. Comic strips like Otto Auto, Toonerville Folks, and Gasoline Alley related a nation that happily motored about in a car-centric world.
Daniel Worden, an art professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, relates that history in Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics.
“This book analyzes how comics represented this transition to fossil fuels from the late nineteenth century to the present, a transition that shaped the comics medium itself,” wrote Worden, who teaches a course on comics at RIT.
“I write this book during an ongoing climate crisis, and comics are relevant to this crisis because the medium both shaped fossil fuel culture and offers ways of making, reading, seeing, and belonging that pull away from the time and space of fossil fuel culture,” he noted.
Comic artists in magazines and newspapers chronicled America’s oil industry, comparing the growth of Standard Oil to an octopus reaching out across the country. One of Worden’s favorite examples is Oil John, the Detective, a strip by Gus Mager that caricatured the oil trust. Oily John is a lanky John D. Rockefeller who captures small dealers, “a ridiculous miser out to get the little guy,” noted Worden.
Along with being the focus of comic art, oil companies were also comic enablers, distributing their own four-page funnies in the 1930s before traditional stapled comic books were produced, said Worden.
“The media landscape has changed. Comics are everywhere now,” he said, adding that the traditional printed comics in newspapers and magazines have migrated to the internet and graphic novels.
Worden’s Rochester class focuses more on “serious” comics such as the work of Joe Sacco whose comics have focused on subjects such as the Bosnian War and the conflict between Israel and Palestine than superhero exploits, he said.
“There have been a number of good non-fiction comics about climate change,” said Worden, citing examples such Science comics that detail the origin and impact of climate change in its “Wild Weather” series.
Worden sees comics as becoming a regional asset. He organizes the Rochester Indie Comics Festival every spring that brings 60 to 80 comic book artists to the town where they can sell their comics to the public.
Having just attended a similar festival in Columbus, Ohio, Worden said he sees comics not only becoming more of a regional issue but serving as a tool to help educate the public.
Doug Villhard knew that Red Grange might have been the greatest running back in the history of college football. He was also singularly responsible for helping make the National Football League an established professional league. But Villhard said what drew him to write the historical novel, The Golden Age of Red, was Grange’s alliance with C.C. Pyle, the man who became America’s first sports agent.
The University of Illinois is the setting as the book takes off with Pyle running the Virginia Theater in Champaign, Illinois. The year is 1924 and it's the year that Red Grange, already America’s darling, turns in a performance for the ages against a vaunted Michigan team.
Villhard paints a picture of Pyle as a Hollywood has-been who still has connections (Charlie Chaplin visits him in Champaign). Pyle is a 42-year-old former actor forced to live in the past. Yet he notices when the newsreel lights up the screen in the 1,500-seat theater (that still stands, by the way), customers go wild when Grange’s exploits are shown. “This guy’s a national hero right here on campus and he doesn’t even know it,” figures Pyle who lets Grange sneak in the backdoor to watch the movies to avoid the crowd’s adulation.
The story takes off from there as Villhard takes us on a thrill ride with the man sportswriter Grantland Rice called the Galloping Ghost. Grange charges through a spectacular career with Illinois and carries on to boost the fortunes of the Chicago Bears in the rough-and-tumble NFL, a league that Villhard said was closer to professional wrestling than what we know today as pro football.
The U of I will rededicate the 100-year-old Memorial Stadium on Oct. 19 with ceremonies to include a Red Grange symposium.
College football was a very big deal in the 1920s, especially at big state schools like Illinois and Michigan. That’s why they built a stadium to hold 67,000 in 1924 (today Memorial Stadium has been enlarged to hold more than 80,000). Of course there just weren’t enough seats in any stadium to accommodate all the people who wanted to watch Red Grange play football in 1924.
If you were lucky enough to get one of those seats back on Oct. 18, 1924, you had to be worried at the prospect of facing a fabled Michigan team that came into Champaign riding a 20-game winning streak.
Following the Michigan coach’s old-school strategy that valued field position over all else, they kicked the ball to Grange who takes it at the five-yard-line.
Big mistake. Grange runs it back for a touchdown and the rout is on. Grange proceeds to score four times before halftime. In the second half, Grange scores another touchdown, throws a TD pass, and intercepts two passes while playing defense. Final score: Illini 39 Michigan 14.
In 1991, Sports Illustrated cited Grange’s performance in that game as “the most unforgettable moment in sports.”
Another major character in Villhard’s novel is Coach Bob Zuppke, the Illini coach. Villhard believes the only reason Zuppke isn’t regarded as one of the great football coaches of all time--like Knute Rockne and Amos Alonzo Stagg--was his refusal to sign out-of-state students that later cost him wins in the highly competitive Big Ten. He believed that if you were a true footballer and grew up in Illinois, you should play for the Illini, said Villhard.
The field at Memorial Stadium is named for Zuppke, the "razzle dazzle" coach credited with inventing the huddle, the screen pass, the spiral snap, and the flea flicker (The QB hands the ball off to a running back who laterals the ball to a receiver. The receiver then laterals the ball back to the quarterback for a pass). Zuppke and Grange shared a special relationship but the coach opposed Red going pro and didn’t talk to Grange for years after his greatest star joined the Bears.
It’s a story of World War II but it’s also a story of politics, power, seduction, and intrigue. Did I leave anything out?
Pamela Churchill Harriman didn’t as Sonia Purnell’s book, Kingmaker, makes clear. The British biographer and journalist spent five years gathering information on Harriman’s life, including gaining access to a wealth of fresh research, interviews, and newly discovered sources.
Harriman, who died in 1997, is well-known as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, the 20-year-old who played cards with Winston in the middle of the night when bombs were falling on London but she was also a power broker whose influence extends to the present. It was Harriman who bolstered Joe Biden’s career back in 1988 early in the Delaware senator’s career.
Pamela Harriman got around, to put it mildly. She successfully wooed W. Averill Harriman, the wealthy businessman who came to London as Franklin Roosevelt’s “Lend Lease” representative in 1940—before America was in the war. Lend Lease was the result of Churchill’s efforts in urging FDR to provide a beleaguered Britain with much-needed war supplies—much to the annoyance of the U.S. separatist movement.
This was a time when England was just hanging on, rapidly running out of manpower, munitions, and supplies as Nazi forces loomed across the channel. But she did even more to advance “Operation Seduction USA,” as Purnell put it: she bedded generals, high-ranking officials, and representatives of the media (most notably Ed Murrow whose “This is London” broadcasts helped Americans experience England’s plight during the Blitz)—all for the sake of jolly old England.
She married Randolph Churchill and had his child, Winston II, but the prime minister’s son, awash in gambling problems, was a disaster as a husband, said Purnell. The pair were divorced following the war and Pamela found herself out of a job along with father-in-law Winston, as Clement Attlee and the Labour Party swept to power in 1945.
After moving to France, she spent time with playboy Prince Aly Khan before falling in love with Gianni Agnelli, the head of auto giant Fiat. After four years the couple broke up but Agnelli, whose own career is one for the books, stayed in touch-- calling Pamela every morning at seven for the rest of her life, said Purnell.
In 1960 Pamela moved to America and married Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer with shows like South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Mister Roberts and Gypsy to his credit. Harriman enjoyed their 11-year marriage until his death. At age 51, she married Harriman, her lover from the war, and now 79 and a widower.
Being married to the elder statesman of the Democratic Party kicked off a new chapter in Pamela’s illustrious life—that of a person of influence. “Adversity galvanized her,” noted Purnell, pointing to how she countered the Reagan landslide of 1980 by pumping up Democratic hopes. Harriman reminded them that Churchill came back (getting re-elected prime minister in 1951) and that Democrats could, too.
At her funeral, Clinton acknowledged that without Harriman’s support, he might never have been president. Purnell noted that it was through Harriman’s connections in Washington, her hobnobbing with the high and mighty, that allowed a young politician from the state of Arkansas to gain visibility and ascend to the national stage. A grateful Clinton named her U.S. ambassador to France, a position she held until her death.
There was virtually nobody of substance in the 20th century that Harriman didn’t know or work with, Purnell said, offering a list that included such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Nelson Mandela.
Earlier biographies have painted Harriman as a sex-obsessed gold digger, a courtesan who craved power, as “the other woman” in her relationships with married men. There w
The 20th century American department store: a palace of consumption where shopping meant something more than simply getting what one needed. Every major city had at least one department store with a name that lives on even in this age of discounters and online buying.
New York, of course, was the nation’s business capital, main market and fashion center.
Julie Satow tells the story of how women helped develop the department store and fashion in this country even though men owned the buildings. Inside the store, however, women ruled.
When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion is a story of the 20th-century. Satow relates how Hortense Odlum turned Bonwit Teller into a multi-million-dollar success even though she had no training in the retail field.
Dorothy Shaver helped make it possible for American designers to leave their mark, escaping the shadow of the always-popular Parisian originals at Lord & Taylor while Geraldine Stutz reinvented the look of the modern department store at Henri Bendel in the 1960s.
These women succeeded at a time when the world of work was run by men, noted Satow. “There were very few women bosses around when Hortense Odlum called for change in the 1930s,” she said.
Odlum objected to dresses that “shrieked cheap or whispered chic,” Satow stated. Initially, the entrenched garment industry (dominated by males) was dismissive. But Odlum pushed ahead for quality in women’s clothing. She also had ideas to draw men into the store such as the 721 Club within Bonwit Teller which allowed males to smoke cigars or drink whiskey while watching models exhibit the latest fashions.
Shaver not only promoted American designers but brought Art Deco to America in the late 1920s, said Satow.
Among the many stories that Satow tells in When Women Ran Fifth Avenue involves Salvador Dali, the irreverent surrealist, in 1939. Hired to do a window display at Bonwit Teller, Dali labored all night on his creation that involved a wax dummy stepping into a bathtub. Only the dummy’s blonde wig was crawling with beetles with tears of blood running down her face. Reaching out of the tub were some 100 wax arms holding mirrors. The whole theme was based on Narcissus, the Greek myth detailing the affliction of excessive vanity, said Satow.
Dali finished his window display in the early morning hours and went back to his New York hotel to sleep. Meanwhile, Bonwit Teller opened. Complaints poured in regarding Dali’s window. Customers and passers-by found it objectionable, even obscene. As a result, the store replaced Dali’s scantily clad figure with a traditional mannequin in a tailored suit.
When Dali came by at two in the afternoon to view his handiwork, he was enraged to see the changes made. After registering a protest with Bonwit officials, Dali returned to the window display and pushed the bathtub right through the store window, sending it and himself crashing to the sidewalk outside the store. Unhurt, Dali was then arrested and held for several hours before paying a fine of $500, the exact price of his commission.
The Dali incident reflects the importance of window displays in the 20th century department store. “By the 1940s, there was a retail rule of thumb that one-third of all sales could be credited to impulse purchases resulting from window displays,” noted Satow.
Among the pioneers of displaying product in store windows was L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In 1897, Baum launched The Show Window, a monthly journal that advised merchants on how to attract a customer’s attention. With the success of his Oz books in 1900, Baum left the retail world behind, said Satow.
But a department store needs more than striking window displays. Satow points to Dorothy Shaver’s work in overhauling Lord & Taylor’s advertising. Shaver hired artist D
The overriding message you get after reading the essays collected by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor, and Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School, is that all the voting issues of today (charges of voting fraud, voter suppression, and foreign interference with the vote) have been with us a long time.
Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue outlines this country's less-than-illustrious past in pursuing democracy.
"The most significant challenges to free and fair elections in the United States have not, and do not, come from abroad, they have come from domestic actors," writes Nicole Hemmer in her essay on election deception.
Regarding foreign interference, Jeremy Subi noted that "the U.S. was, after World War II, the most aggressive and pervasive foreign election meddler. The Cold War national security state enabled Washington's reach into the election of other societies, but the country's own elections remained largely insulated, until the 21st century."
Greenberg pointed to past presidential elections that were contested in this country. "If the 2000 election was a wake-up call and the 2020 election a full-scale alarm, other elections had also stumbled to the finish line--most famously in 1800, 1824, and 1876," she noted.
Too often, election problems have been left unresolved and "kicked down the road," said Greenberg in an interview with Steve Tarter.
"As we approach the 2024 presidential election, the dangers to democracy of a contested election are now indisputably clear...let's keep our fingers crossed," she stated.
By now most of us have heard of some of the daring deeds executed by the special operations teams that worked undercover during WWII. Shannon Monaghan has added to that body of work through her latest release, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men.
Monaghan follows the exploits of four Britishers, David Smiley, Peter Kemp, Billy McLean, and Julian Amery. These four show remarkable courage and resilience as they wend their way through WWII from Albania (where the primary goal was to keep German troops tied up in the Balkans rather than heading off to fight Russia) to Cairo to Romania to Thailand and other points in between.
Along the way in Monaghan's book, Peter Fleming pops up. That's Ian Fleming's older brother, a star in his own write and a purported model for the character we know as James Bond.
You learn in Quiet Company that undercover work is anything but easy. You're not only fighting an enemy as dangerous as Nazi Germany but dealing with local political divisions and regional rivalries. Then there's the matter of bureaucracy which dictates movement and supplies.
Monaghan follows her four fighters through the war into other wars and other fronts: the Mideast, Hungary, and Vietnam being a few of them. "They saw the Cold War coming," said Monaghan.
While reading Monaghan's work, clandestine maneuvering becomes routine. In 1949, seeking the help of an Italian military group in overthrowing the Hoxha regime in Albania, our heroes flew in to make their pitch. "If it's no, I'll leave one bottle of brandy in your hotel room. If it's yes, I'll leave six," they were told.
They got six.
When Ellie Laks found herself communicating with animals early on, she said she didn't think anything of it. But as Laks, continuing with her communications, got older, "people looked at me as though I was crazy," she said.
But Laks also rescued and rehabilitated animals. As co-founder of The Gentle Barn, a rescue mission for animals with no other place to go, she celebrated the organization's 25th anniversary this year with the publication of her second book, Cow Hug Therapy. Laks published Her Gentle Barn in 2014.
She credits a cow named Buddha, a rescue cow that spent 13 1/2 years at the Gentle Barn, for making cow hug therapy possible.
The Gentle Barn has three facilities the public can visit: Los Angeles, Nashville and St. Louis.
The organization cares for 200 animals with 60 people on staff and hundreds of volunteers, Laks said.
Those interested in visiting are encouraged to book online, she said, noting that private tours and field trips are also available.
Anyone around youngsters knows that among the many benefits is reading children’s books—to your child or to yourself.
Children’s literature offers stories and pictures that we all need to enjoy—not just kids. One of the best examples of that is some of the work done by Chris Sickles of the Red Nose Studio in Greenfield, Ind., just a stone’s throw from where Wilbur Wright was born.
Sickles, 50, is a freelance illustrator whose credits include the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as producing The Look Book and Build along with illustrating Elvis is King and Here Comes the Garbage Barge by Jonah Winter, The Beginner’s Guide to Running Away from Home by Jennifer Huget, and The Secret Subway by Shana Covey.
Described as the mastermind of Red Nose Studio, Sickels creates three-dimensional characters and scenes that serve as illustrations for children's books and other projects. You have to see his work to really appreciate it. In his 2022 effort Build, he created “wonky versions” of toy bulldozers, dump trucks, and cranes
Sickles may say wonky but another way to describe his work is wondrous. There’s imagination at work here that makes you understand why he’s identified as “insanely talented” in one of the accounts of his work online.
His creations come from old pieces of wood, typewriter keys, whatever the artist can glom onto to fire his sculptural artistry. He grew up on a small family farm where things always had to be fixed with what was around. That continues to serve as his approach to art, Sickles said.
“As an illustrator, my job is to create an image that hopefully makes a viewer or reader stop and pursue content further, whether that’s a book cover or an image in a magazine,” Sickels explained when his work was exhibited at the University of Indianapolis in 2018.
When Sickles did the art for Secret Subway, a story about Eli Beach’s effort to build a pneumatic subway in New York City in 1870, he produced some 20 characters including Beach, himself, Boss Tweed (the mayor who ran New York who opposed Beach’s effort) as well as construction workers, passengers, and New York residents, all in 1870 attire. “I probably got into it more than I should have,” he laughed.
Incidentally, Beach’s block-long subway was demonstrated successfully with much fanfare but unfortunately never went anywhere. With Tweed and the established railway in opposition, once Beach’s effort was discovered, the secret subway was entombed and forgotten. It wasn’t until 1904 that New York finally got its subway.
Sickles said one of the things that appealed to him about the story was that Beach had to deceive city officials to build what he initially described as a way to deliver mail. Pneumatic tubes still serve that function in some places. They’re also still very much in use at drive-in banks. That’s a lesson for kids, the artist said—not to be mischievous—but not to get too hung up with all the rules so often laid down by adults.
On June 24, 1946, a bus carrying 16 members of the Spokane Indians baseball team careened off a mountain pass in Washington’s Cascade mountains, killing nine players. It remains the deadliest accident in the history of American professional sports.
Eric Vickrey’s Season of Shattered Dreams takes us back to that fateful season, providing an account of events leading up to the accident and how individuals coped after such a catastrophic crash.
This was the era of postwar baseball. Like other national institutions, the sport had to recover after four years of fighting. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized that keeping baseball going through the war could boost the country’s morale but, with 90 percent of the 5,000 professional ballplayers in the country part of the war effort in some capacity, things certainly weren’t the same. Of the 44 minor leagues in the nation, only nine operated during the war, Vickrey noted.
The 1946 season started with promise, however. “Major league training camps overflowed with players attempting to shake off the rust and rediscover baseball skills put on the back burner during the war,” stated Vickrey.
Vic Picetti (rhymes with machete) was the hottest 18-year-old prospect on the Spokane squad. The San Francisco speedster could hit and was considered a sure bet for the major leagues. Vickrey said that one major league team had reportedly offered $50,000 for his services (the equivalent of over $800,000 today).
There’s a picture in Season of Picetti taking instruction from Casey Stengel, then managing in the minors. Vickrey said the Picetti family offered up a scrapbook of the young man’s baseball accomplishments still treasured after almost 80 years since the 18-year-old Picetti died in the bus crash.
The accident took place on Snoqualmie Pass some 50 miles east of Seattle. Vickrey describes how a black sedan, trying to pass a truck on the narrow mountain road, suddenly appeared in the wrong lane in front of the bus as it was headed downhill over the pass. The sedan clipped the front end of the bus. The driver tried valiantly to keep the vehicle on the road but the bus broke through the protective guard cables, plunging over the side of the ravine.
Ben Geraghty, who had earlier switched seats with another player, was thrown out a window. After regaining consciousness, he viewed a gruesome scene: the bus had burst into flames and come finally to rest on the embankment some 300 feet from the road. He took off his jacket to smother the flames from a teammate.
Geraghty recovered and, while he never played baseball again, went on to a 20-year career as a minor-league manager, achieving success with several teams while being highly regarded for his baseball knowledge and handling of players. Hank Aaron, who played for Geraghty with the Jacksonville Braves in 1953, called him the finest human being he ever met.
Jacksonville was a club in the Sally League, made up of teams from Southern states that had never allowed players of color in its 49-year history. That changed in 1953 when Aaron, Felix Mantilla, and Horace Garner joined the team. When black players were prohibited from eating in some of the restaurants with their white teammates, Geraghty would order burgers and bring them back to the bus, noted Vickery.
Sadly, Geraghty never achieved his goal of managing in the big leagues, remaining in the minor leagues to teach players the fundamentals of the game he loved so much. In the minors, players usually traveled by bus which meant Geraghty spent years riding about with the memories of that fateful day Snoqualmie Pass. “Ben would sit behind the driver and consume a case of beer each trip in an attempt to drown away the nightmarish images…of that horrible crash,” stated Pete Wevurski, a sportswriter with the Jersey Journal.
Vickrey also includes the story of Jack “Lucky” Lohrke, a member of the Spokane
Among the digital giants that we've probably come to take for granted is the all-knowing Wikipedia site.
Stephen Harrison has taken notice. In fact, for the past five years, he's been following Wikipedia in a column called "Source Notes" in Slate magazine.
Recent articles of his carry titles such as "Wikipedia is covering the war in Israel and Gaza better than X" and "Wikipedia will survive A.I."
Harrison has carried his interest in Wikipedia over to The Editors, a suspense novel that the Washington Post labels "strikingly relevant."
Harrison said he became fascinated with Wikipedia after moving to New York several years ago. Wanting to know more about the city's extensive transit system, he consulted Wikipedia and was impressed with the information he found there. After looking up the sources of several specific articles, Harrison found that they were written by a couple of teenagers from Queens. That got him hooked on learning more about the many volunteers who provide input to the site and edit its contents.
Harrison noted that, as in his fictional work, attempts have been made to compete with Wikipedia over the years but, for various reasons, haven't gained traction.
Harrison says that Wikipedia does a good job of providing "neutral" information but he doesn't recommend it as a single stop for students. "I think it's a good place to start one's research but not to finish there," he said.
As one of the Four Horsemen of the Noir Apocalypse (the others being Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, and Cornell Woolrich), Raymond Chandler has a unique place in our literary history.
Chandler invented Philip Marlowe, after all. He wrote about the mean streets of Los Angeles years before Dragnet. His novels have been developed into quintessential noir movies such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely.
The list of actors who’ve played Marlowe, the definitive private eye, includes Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, and, most recently, Liam Neeson.
Born in Chicago but raised in England before moving back to the United States in his 20s, Chandler developed a perspective that came through in his writing, said Tom Williams, author of A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler.
Chandler was the proverbial outsider from the start when his mother placed him in a fancy British prep school. He remained somewhat out of step even after his return to the States, said Williams, noting that “Chandler’s reasonably easy to see but hard to grasp.”
If you listen to Chandler’s voice on some of the interviews that exist, you find his accent is neither British nor American but just different, Williams said.
Chandler found his footing in Los Angeles, however, when, while in his 40s, he turned to writing detective fiction. Fascinated and encouraged by pulp magazines like Black Mask, Chandler wrote lines like “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”
Marlowe’s dialogue had a purity and straightforwardness that explains the character’s popularity with readers but Chandler (often photographed with a pipe clenched tightly between his teeth) could be difficult, noted Williams.
When James Cain, the author of Double Indemnity, wasn't available to write the movie screenplay (he was under contract to another studio), the call went out for Chandler. So began a rocky 10-week collaboration between Chandler and the film’s director, Billy Wilder.
The two men were unable to get along from the first, said Williams, suggesting that collaboration wasn’t Chandler's strong suit. At one point, Chandler left the studio in a huff, citing a slew of complaints about Wilder, blaming him for everything from arriving late to meetings to opening the blinds without permission.
Despite their differences, the film that was produced stands as a classic, Williams said. In casting Fred MacMurray, better known for comedic roles, as the wayward insurance salesman, the audience found a likable murderer, he said.
Chandler also had problems with another famous director. While Chandler’s name appears on a screen credit on Strangers on a Train, he didn’t have much to do with the film, often cited as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best. It seems that Chandler reportedly referred to Hitchcock as “that fat bastard,” a comment that Hitch apparently overheard after making a special trip to Chandler’s home in La Jolla to discuss the screenplay.Chandler wrote a script for the film but Hitchcock not only didn’t use it but made a ceremonious gesture of dropping Chandler’s effort in the trash during a production meeting for the film.
Lest you think that Chandler and Philip Marlowe exist only in noir’s colorful past, the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this year that the Chandler estate has been licensing new literary treatments of the private eye with different authors since 1989. In The Goodbye Coast, published in 2022, Marlowe drives a 2008 Mustang GT and knows how to use GPS.
Matthew Algeo got the idea for writing The President is a Sick Man after visiting Philadelphia's Mutter Museum where the tumor removed from the mouth of Grover Cleveland in 1893 is among the exhibits.
Fascinated by such an oddity, Algeo found out that Cleveland was going into his second term as president when the operation took place--in secret.
Cleveland was incapacitated for six weeks until a rubber implant allowed him to speak again. But the American people never knew that at the time.
Algeo said that the president was able to keep the procedure secret due to the summer schedule followed in that era. "Congress took two months off in the summer so the president went to his summer home in Cape Cod where the operation took place," he said.
Cleveland's routine was to go fishing every day. While he recovered and unable to speak, he waved off reporters who asked questions. One Philadelphia reporter filed a story in August 1893 about the president being a very sick man but the White House discredited the report. Formal details about the president's oral surgery weren't revealed until years later, noted Algeo.
Public awareness about a president's condition has been limited at other times, noted Algeo, citing the 1944 Democratic Convention when Henry Wallace was dumped from the ticket in favor of Harry Truman.
An ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a fourth term as president. While the public was generally unaware of his condition, Democratic insiders knew that Roosevelt's vice president would likely advance to the presidency. FDR died just three months after taking office in 1945.
Among Algeo's other works is Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure, an account of the road trip Truman took with his wife after leaving the presidency in 1953.
"In those days, the president didn't get a pension. There was no Secret Service, no traveling entourage," said Algeo.
"Truman was the last U.S. president who didn't go to college but he knew how to campaign," the author said. In 1948, Truman was the standing president but trailed Thomas Dewey in all the polls.
"He made no bones about it when he was on the campaign trail. You need to read his speeches that year. He told labor groups: Don't blame me. Get out there and vote."
Radio drama was declared dead in September 1962 after CBS axed its last two network shows, Suspense, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
Hold on, said Eleanor Patterson, media studies professor at Auburn University. Scripted radio programs may have stopped from being the dominant form of entertainment which they were through most of the 30s, 40s and 50s but radio drama has always been around, she said.
Shows like ABC’s Theater5 (1964), CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974-82), and Sears Radio Theater (1979) were just some examples, she said. You also had The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a BBC effort that aired over many U.S. public radio outlets in 1981 and NPR’s Earplay (https://current.org/2018/06/wisconsin-public-radios-earplay-before-the-podcast-era-a-story-focused-series-with-experimental-edge/).
Now old radio shows proliferate online while other audio entertainment options—audiobooks and podcasts—abound. Depending on how you define radio, the golden age may still be with us.
Audiobooks now often include music and sound effects, emulating dramatic radio shows of the past, said Patterson. Meanwhile, podcasts not only offer original material but also critique shows of the past, she said. “Podcasting represents where creative radio is right now,” said Patterson.
In the TV writing class she teaches at Auburn, Patterson said she spends the first six weeks covering radio. Students create their own scripts using old radio shows like Pat Novak for Hire and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet as examples, she said.
“It’s important that we know our history. I tell students that radio is where the different genres we know today came from,” said Patterson.
Along with Novak, Patterson said some of her personal favorites are Richard Diamond and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. “I love radio noir. It’s so visual,” she said.
Radio programs like the Lone Ranger and the Jack Benny Show remain entertaining, said Patterson. “Jack Benny was the first show using the concept of a show within a show,” she said.
In the segmented world of the present, it’s important to remember that a show like NPR’s Prairie Home Companion racked up 4 to 5 million listeners every Saturday night during the 1980s and 90s, said Patterson, noting that the performance of the show’s host, Garrison Keillor, was “an ode to classic radio.”
“Network television would kill for those numbers today,” she said.
Patterson said radio is still telling stories. “This American Life (on NPR) makes use of ambient noise to create a story and sense of place,” she said.
Patterson, whose last book was Bootlegging the Airwaves, is presently at work on broadcast television which she sees surviving despite the rise of streaming. “I like to look at dead things,” she laughed.
In the world of film noir, the leading lights are usually listed as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Cornell Woolrich.
Hammett proved to be an inspiration for Mark Dawidziak, a writer whose published works include biographies of Mark Twain (the white-suited author who Dawidziak has impersonated for more than 30 years), Edgar Allan Poe (see previous podcast on The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe) and Teddy Roosevelt along with books on Twilight Zone, Columbo and Kolchak the Night Stalker.
Dawidziak said he was moved to write his own book on Hammett after several biographies appeared on the author (along with a PBS documentary) in the late 70s and early 80s.
Hammett in Hollywood would have explored Hammett’s working life in Hollywood—as a detective in the Fatty Arbuckle case, a union organizer and screenwriter, said Dawidziak. Hammett’s involvement in the movie capital also extended to the stories he wrote that became movies (including two excellent versions of The Glass Key but, most notably, The Maltese Falcon).
Finally, Dawidziak said, came the depiction of the mustachioed Hammett, himself, in a number of movies such as Julia (1977) and Hammett (1982).
But Hammett in Hollywood never got published, said Dawidziak, because Mysterious Press, which had accepted the piece, made the decision to publish only works of fiction.
A chapter from the book—on the radio show, The Adventures of Sam Spade that ran from 1946 to 1951 with Howard Duff as Spade for four of those years—turns up in The Big Book of Noir, a collection of noirish essays edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server and Martin Greenberg.
Dawidziak interviewed Duff shortly before the actor’s death in 1990 to learn more about a radio series he characterized as unlike any other detective program of the period.
If you were looking for Humphrey Bogart’s depiction of Spade, you didn’t find it with Duff, said Dawidziak. “Duff had his own distinctive voice,” he said.
Good writing tainted with a sly—sometimes outrageous—sense of humor made the show stand out, Dawidziak said. The distinctive villains on Sam Spade came right out of Dick Tracy, he noted. A strong stock company of radio players included Lurene Tuttle as Effie, Spade’s secretary, whose scenes with Sam are among radio’s best.
Dashiell Hammett was among those ensnared in the Red Scare of the early 50s, a time when any association with Communism was considered criminal.
His association with Hammett—simply playing the author’s best-known character—was enough to get Duff blacklisted. Cited in Red Channels, the maligning missive of the day, Duff was relieved of his duties as the wisecracking detective by Steven Dunne in the show’s final year.
Hammett has rebounded nicely from the government’s character assassination attempts of the 50s, said Dawidziak. His five novels along with short stories and screenplays have made him almost as important as Twain when it comes to cultural impact, he said.
Sam Spade, the Thin Man, the Fat Man, and the Continental Op are all Hammett characters that have flourished in the ever growing world of film noir.
Bicycle racing was a legitimate spectator sport in the 1890s. Big crowds gathered in cities across America and Europe to watch men and women compete in a sport that exploded over the last decade of the 19th century.
Perhaps the biggest star of that period was Major Taylor, an African American cyclist who first achieved success as a teenager in 1894, noted Robert Turpin, a history professor at Lees-McRae College in North Carolina and the author of Black Cyclists: The Race for Inclusion.
A bicyclist who previously competed as an amateur in races across the United States, Turpin said he was first moved to learn more about black cyclists after learning about Taylor’s success. “He was world champion in 1899 and continued to compete on the bike racing circuit until retiring in 1910,” said Turpin.
After retiring, Taylor became known as the wealthiest man in Worcester, Mass., a town 40 miles west of Boston, said Turpin. “He purchased the first car in town and owned property there,” he said.
But other black cyclists weren’t as fortunate. While Taylor competed as a professional, able to secure large purses, other African Americans were forced to compete as amateurs, not eligible for the cash prizes offered, said Turpin.
Participation was specifically limited to white participants in the 1890s by the sanctioning body, the League of American Wheelmen (and later the NCAA), he said. Taylor and a number of other black racers who were already members were allowed to remain but others of color were excluded from competing.
Taylor also complained of sometimes being “pocketed” during races. Racers would conspire to work together to box the black cyclist out, restricting his ability to sprint to the finish. Those involved would then divide the prize money amongst themselves, said Turpin.
While racers of color would compete in Europe where they would be less likely to face racial restrictions, sometimes U.S. racism would follow. Turpin said sometimes racers would be denied access to a European hotel because of complaints from American guests.
Despite the impediments placed before them, black cyclists continue to break through, said Turpin, noting that Nelson Vails won a silver medal in the 1984 Olympic games held in Los Angeles while Biniam Girmay from Eritrea, one of the poorest countries in Africa, recently won a stage of this year’s Tour de France, becoming the first black African to take a first in the month-long competition.
He belongs in the upper echelons of special-ops thriller authors. That’s one of the comments on the back of the book jacket of Mark Greaney’s new book, Sentinel (Berkley).
You haven’t experienced a special-ops thriller? It’s a whirlwind tour of international intrigue, high-powered weapons, death, deception, and destruction as grizzled soldiers of fortune collide on unmarked battlefields.
Greaney is an old hand, having knocked off a dozen Gray Man books with a new one to be released next February.
Sentinel is part of another Greaney series, this one labeled Armoured. Here we follow the exploits of Josh Duffy and his wife Nikki, who tackle State Department duties in Ghana.
As we learn from the book’s opening pages, we’re plunged into China’s “debt-trap diplomacy” in Africa. “Loan a poor nation enough money to get itself into trouble, then control it with the compromise of debt,” Greaney writes.
One of the many bad guys in Sentinel is the Chinese agent Kang Shikun who’s plotting unrest in Ghana, considered one of the more stable governments in West Africa (while coups abound on its borders).
Kang Shikun is one of the many great names that Greaney comes up with for his characters. Others you’ll find in Sentinel include Lev Belov, Kwame Boatang, and Hajj Zahedi. I asked him how he came up with them.
“It is complete construction work to come with all those names. This is my 20th published novel with 30 to 40 characters in each book. I do all these different things to find out names. A lot of times I look at the volleyball teams of different countries. Nobody knows famous volleyball guys. I’ve pretty much exhausted all of that by now. Every Russian volleyball player has been used in the book,” said Greaney.
One of the heroes in Sentinel is Isaac Opoku, a policeman in Ghana. Greaney said that name was inspired by a taxi cab driver he encountered while touring Ghana last year.
Greaney makes it a point to research his literary locales in person, noting that, while in Ghana, he visited the U.S. embassy where he talked with several dignitaries, and traveled to the Akosombo Dam, a vital power generator in the country where much of the book’s action takes place.
Keeping up with the news is another Greaney characteristic. In Sentinel, there are references to Russia’s Wagner Group, the mercenary unit that opposed Russian leader Vladimir Putin last year. Greaney said he was first captivated by the blend of fiction with fact that bestselling author Tom Clancy developed. Greaney coauthored three books with Clancy before the author died in 2013.
Greaney first came by a respect for daily events from his father, Ed Greaney, who served as managing editor of a major Memphis TV station, serving at the same station for 50 years, working until he was almost 80.
You can’t have a special-ops thriller without spilling a little blood but if the body count in Sentinel seems to spiral out of control, Greaney said it’s an unfortunate reflection of real-world violence that’s become all too familiar. “You’ve got 1,100 Russians dying every day in Ukraine,” he said.
Now 53, Greaney, who’s been churning out 450-page thrillers with the dedication of a Russian career soldier, vows not to spiral out of control, himself, suggesting he has plans to reduce his work schedule down to one book a year…soon.
He belongs in the upper echelons of special-ops thriller authors. That’s one of the comments on the back of the book jacket of Mark Greaney’s new book, Sentinel (Berkley).
You haven’t experienced a special-ops thriller? It’s a whirlwind tour of international intrigue, high-powered weapons, death, deception, and destruction as grizzled soldiers of fortune collide on unmarked battlefields.
Greaney is an old hand, having knocked off a dozen Gray Man books with a new one to be completed later this year.
Sentinel is part of another Greaney series, this one labeled Armoured. Here we follow the exploits of Josh Duffy and his wife Nikki, who tackle State Department duties in Ghana.
As we learn from the book’s opening pages, Greaney notes that China is involved in “debt-trap diplomacy” in Africa. “Loan a poor nation enough money to get itself into trouble, then control it with the compromise of debt,” he writes.
One of the many bad guys in Sentinel is the Chinese agent Kang Shikun who’s plotting unrest in Ghana, considered one of the more stable governments in West Africa (while coups abound on its borders).
Kang Shikun is one of the many great names in Greaney’s book. Others include Lev Belov, Kwame Boatang, and Hajj Zahedi. I asked him where he came up with them.
“It is complete construction work to come with all those names. This is my 20th published novel with 30 to 40 characters in each book. I do all these different things to find out names. A lot of times I look at the volleyball teams of different countries. Nobody knows famous volleyball guys. I’ve pretty much exhausted all of that by now. Every Russian volleyball player has been used in the book,” said Greaney.
One of the heroes in Sentinel is Isaac Opoku, a policeman in Ghana. Greaney said that name was inspired by a taxi cab driver he encountered while touring Ghana last year.
Greaney makes it a point to research his literary locales in person, noting that, while in Ghana, he visited the U.S. embassy, talking to several dignitaries, and the Akosombo Dam, where much of the book’s action takes place.
Keeping up with the news is another Greaney characteristic. In Sentinel, there are references to Russia’s Wagner Group, the mercenary unit that opposed Russian leader Vladimir Putin last year. Greaney said he was captivated by the blend of fiction with fact that bestselling author Tom Clancy developed. Greaney coauthored three books with Clancy before the author died in 2013.
Greaney first came by a respect for daily events from his father, Ed Greaney, who served as managing editor of a major Memphis TV station, working until he was 80
You can’t have a special-ops thriller without spilling a little blood but if the body count in Sentinel seems to spiral out of control, Greaney said it’s an unfortunate reflection of real-world violence that’s become all too familiar. “You’ve got 1,100 Russians dying every day in Ukraine,” he said.
Now 53, Greaney, who’s been churning out 450-page thrillers with annual regularity, vows to slow down…soon.
He belongs in the upper echelons of special-ops thriller authors. That’s one of the comments on the back of the book jacket of Mark Greaney’s new book, Sentinel (Berkley).
You haven’t experienced a special-ops thriller? It’s a whirlwind tour of international intrigue, high-powered weapons, death, deception, and destruction as grizzled soldiers of fortune collide on unmarked battlefields.
Greaney is an old hand, having knocked off a dozen Gray Man books with a new one to be completed later this year.
Sentinel is part of another Greaney series, this one labeled Armoured. Here we follow the exploits of Josh Duffy and his wife Nikki, who tackle State Department duties in Ghana.
As we learn from the book’s opening pages, Greaney notes that China is involved in “debt-trap diplomacy” in Africa. “Loan a poor nation enough money to get itself into trouble, then control it with the compromise of debt,” he writes.
One of the many bad guys in Sentinel is the Chinese agent Kang Shikun who’s plotting unrest in Ghana, considered one of the more stable governments in West Africa (while coups abound on its borders).
Kang Shikun is one of the many great names in Greaney’s book. Others include Lev Belov, Kwame Boatang, and Hajj Zahedi. I asked him where he came up with them.
“It is complete construction work to come with all those names. This is my 20th published novel with 30 to 40 characters in each book. I do all these different things to find out names. A lot of times I look at the volleyball teams of different countries. Nobody knows famous volleyball guys. I’ve pretty much exhausted all of that by now. Every Russian volleyball player has been used in the book,” said Greaney.
One of the heroes in Sentinel is Isaac Opoku, a policeman in Ghana. Greaney said that name was inspired by a taxi cab driver he encountered while touring Ghana last year.
Greaney makes it a point to research his literary locales in person, noting that, while in Ghana, he visited the U.S. embassy, talking to several dignitaries, and the Akosombo Dam, where much of the book’s action takes place.
Keeping up with the news is another Greaney characteristic. In Sentinel, there are references to Russia’s Wagner Group, the mercenary unit that opposed Russian leader Vladimir Putin last year. Greaney said he was captivated by the blend of fiction with fact that bestselling author Tom Clancy developed. Greaney coauthored three books with Clancy before the author died in 2013.
Greaney first came by a respect for daily events from his father, Ed Greaney, who served as managing editor of a major Memphis TV station, working until he was 80
You can’t have a special-ops thriller without spilling a little blood but if the body count in Sentinel seems to spiral out of control, Greaney said it’s an unfortunate reflection of real-world violence that’s become all too familiar. “You’ve got 1,100 Russians dying every day in Ukraine,” he said.
Now 53, Greaney, who’s been churning out 450-page thrillers with annual regularity, vows to slow down…soon.
Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations leaves you shaking your head.
A history professor at the University of North Carolina, DuVal provides a view of this country’s colonial history we never got in school.
This history comes from those already present when the French, British, and Spanish landed on North American shores. Her detailed account (the footnotes alone are an informational storehouse) raises the curtain on the American stage, letting us see—perhaps for the first time—the power and diversity of the American Indian.
Native Americans held the upper hand in most engagements with European colonists between 1600 and 1800, noted DuVal. Not only did they have numbers on their side in those years but Native Americans possessed knowledge of the land and its resources that outsiders hungered for.
Few of those colonists arrived in time to view urban America in its first form, developments exemplified by sites like Cahokia, near St. Louis, which reached a peak around 1100, she said.
Instead, native states developed across North America with their own customs and language, noted DuVal.
“As Spanish, Dutch, French, and British colonists struggled to put down roots, local tribes mostly avoided them, preoccupied with their own blood feuds and fitful alliances. But they were also budding entrepreneurs. They sought advantage among outposts such as Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Quebec, enriching themselves through barter and luring Europeans into their conflicts,” noted Hamilton Cain in his review of Native Nations.
We’ve all heard about Manhattan being sold for $24 worth of beads but think again if you assume Native Americans were gullible traders, said DuVal, pointing out that the lucrative fur trade that so excited Europeans allowed Native Americans to acquire items in return such as guns, metal cooking utensils, and linen.
The Mohawks “came to Fort Orange (now Albany, N.Y.) for the guns but they stayed for the cake,” wrote DuVal. After sampling cakes and cookies that Dutch bakers produced, Mohawks drove the prices of baked goods beyond the range of many Dutch colonists in the area, she said.
The story of the American Revolution is related through Indian eyes this time, a view that exposes the many moving parts of a conflict that DuVal plans to explore in her next book.
After the revolution, Native Americans convened in 1784 in St. Louis, on the site of one of Cahokia’s vacated satellite cities. The subject in question centered on the threat posed by this new country, whose people were more ambitious and more numerous than the British they deposed. The threat of U.S. expansion to Native American communities was perceived as “a plague of locusts.”
As the United States grew, native people were driven further west. The resulting collision between a determined U.S. government and Native Americans is one history most of us are already familiar with.
Some Native Americans called for a united front to resist the threat. One of those was Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who, with his brother Tenskwatawa, traveled widely to unite tribes in opposition to the government.
DuVal notes that Tecumseh, lauded as a brilliant speaker, visited Potawatomi towns and the towns of the Peorias on the Illinois River in 1805. He likely was one of the first of many great orators to speak in Peoria.
Despite government policy often seeming hellbent on extermination, Native Americans have survived, wrote DuVal, who cites an American Indian renaissance in the late 20th and 21st centuries.
“Even as Native communities continue to struggle with poverty, healthcare crises, and the weight of historical loss, they are reinvigorating language and traditions and exercising new political and cultural power,” she noted.
DuVal credited recent wide-ranging research that made her book possible. “Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have written this book,” she said.
While growing up in Los Angeles and while attending school in Madison, Wisc., Eleanor Patterson was fascinated by old radio: shows like Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and the Jack Benny Show.
Curious about the source of programming that long since left the air, she asked the host of the Madison public radio program how he came by the old radio programs he shared on the air. People just gave them to him, he said.
That led to the book, Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution, where Patterson explores how radio and TV shows have been copied, collected, and shared over the years--outside of network constraints.
What Patterson discovered was that after shows--both radio and TV-- went off the air they were often not only saved and shared by an active body of enthusiasts who allowed people to be entertained all over again.
Radio collectors developed fanzines in the 60s, 70s, and 80s to help circulate programs and information, said Patterson, who talked to individuals who published these newsletters that offered or sought recordings.
While the digital era now provides a wide variety of radio programs from the past, shows aren't aired as they were originally presented, she said. Internet channels often group radio shows by genre--mysteries or science fiction, for example. When radio networks were pumping out home entertainment before television took over, you had a variety of programs presented across the course of a day and night, said Patterson.
Sometimes circulating programs of the past enlisted controversy, she noted. Amos & Andy, for example, was an extremely popular radio show in its day but has been cited as promoting racial stereotypes.
Just as radio has survived television, Patterson said that old forms of media delivery have their place even in a digital world. "I see us going back to DVDs and CDs in some ways because you can control the media," she said.
Patterson said her next project will be a review of network television in the early 2000s.
Dealing with someone who faces a life-or-death situation just once is enough for most of us. But what of someone involved in transplant surgery who goes through it time after time?
How do you deal with having so much power and responsibility? Those are some of the factors that led Dr. David Weill to write his first novel, All That Really Matters.
The former director of the Advanced Lung Disease and Lung and Heart Transplant Program at Stanford University Medical School, Weill, a former transplant surgeon, had plenty of experience to draw on.
"The characters in the book are derived from people I've come in contact with over the years," said Weill.
The subject, transplant surgery, touches on one of the most dramatic outcomes modern medicine can produce. "It's the biggest reset button you could possibly have," he said.
With 100,000 people waiting for transplants in this world, just getting on a waiting list is difficult, said Weill. "You don't know when the time (for surgery) is going to come. You have to be ready all the time. If it does come, (for family and immediate friends) you don't know if this will be the last time you'll see the very person you care the most about," he added.
Fiction presents an opportunity to make a point about the present health system that needs to be made, said Weill. "As much non-fiction has been written about our broken health system, I haven't seen a lot of progress. If anything, it's been going in the opposite direction. That makes me sad because I love this field," he said.
As head of the Weill Consulting Group, work that takes him all over the globe, Weill is already hard at work on another book.
So how does this little insect navigate between distant flower patches and the nest? That’s just one of the questions that bee researcher Lars Chittka seeks to answer.
Chittka’s book, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press) not only covers bee navigation but explores research by himself and others that demonstrate that bees have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers, solve problems, and learn through observation. In short, bees are smart.
The “simple” act of navigation alone is not a trivial challenge, said Chittka, outlining the hurdles faced as bees solve “the traveling salesman problem.” That’s referring to visiting multiple locations that may be well apart from one another in the most efficient manner possible. The bee’s complex array of senses including being able to see ultraviolet light (something humans can’t do), are part of what sets it apart, said the author.
Research also indicates that bees may be able to use the Earth’s magnetic field to aid them in navigation or the location of a nest.
There’s nothing new about this interest in bees. The ancient Egyptians studied bees while evidence of Mayan honey production in Mesoamerica is over 1,000 years old.
Chittka details his own work as well as that done by other researchers, indicating that individuals are often stories in themselves.
Martin Lindauer was injured while serving in the German army during World War II. As a result, he was sent home from the Russian front, a fact that probably saved his life since his entire company was virtually wiped out, stated Chittka. After attending a lecture by Karl von Frisch, the German scientist and Nobel Prize winner (for his work on bee communication through dance behavior), Lindauer caught the bee bug and went into research himself, carrying on even as Allied bombs fell.
After the war, Lindauer conducted his own breakthrough experiments while starting a succession of bee researchers. Among those studying under him was Randolf Menzel, a scientist who became established in his own right. Among the graduate students that Menzel attracted was Lars Chittka, now having researched the subject for more than 40 years.
Another bee researcher highlighted in The Mind of a Bee is Charles Turner, an African American born two years after the Civil War. By the age of 25, Turner had published articles in some of the most prestigious scientific journals of his day, said Chittka, noting that because of his ethnicity, Turner was never able to land a position at a college or university. Instead, Turner conducted his experiments as a science teacher at Sumner High School in St. Louis.
“His research was remarkable in identifying individual differences among insects,” said Chittka. “Contrary to the beliefs of the day, Turner believed that animals could think. He was a century ahead of his time with his research.”
The honeybees, the roving pollen gatherers, live only a few weeks while a queen bee may live up to seven years, Chittka said. He added that the managed honeybees, those maintained by beekeepers and used in agriculture are not endangered. Wild bees, however, face many obstacles. Like many other animals, bees are endangered through pesticide use and modern farming practices, said Chittka. Monoculture farming, the practice of growing the same crop in the same field year after year, reduces opportunities for bees who seek plant variety, he said.
But people can help the situation by planting a bee-friendly garden or flower box, said Chittka. Goldenrod, Bee Balm, Black Eyed Susan, Foxglove, Hosta, Coneflower, Zinnia, Marigold, and Sunflower are just some of the flowers that draw bees.
While bee research is hundreds of years old, Chittka feels that bee research is like a magic well. “After coming up with a conclusion, some new riddle always emerges,” he said, adding that the question of whether bees are conscious beings is likely to consume fu
Having been raised on TV westerns (my favorites were Cheyenne, Maverick, and the Rifleman), I never looked at rustlers as anything more than bad guys out to steal cattle.
It took Victoria Lamont, an English professor at Waterloo College in Ontario, Canada, to open my eyes.
Her book, Westerns: A Women’s History, spotlights accomplishments made by women who wrote about the Old West in an era when the Western frontier was recognized as officially closed (1880 to 1900). Yes, women wrote about cowboys, ranchers, romance, and rustlers.
In doing so, Lamont must deal with the mythology that surrounds the Old West. We know a lot about that mythology since it’s been transferred to screens both large and small for 100 years. We know who wears the white hat and who doesn’t.
“Mythology likes to be simple but these stories are complicated,” said Lamont.
Comparing two books published in April 1902, Lamont notes that both covered the same subject, action based on a real-life rustling dispute in Johnson County, Wyo. in the late 19th century--with completely different results. Owen Wister’s The Virginian became a bestseller that’s generated six films and a long-running TV series. The Rustler by Frances McElrath, a woman whose lone novel was largely unknown until reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 2002.
Wistler’s version supports cattle owners who resort to vigilante violence to deal with two men who were opposed to the cattle companies and identified as rustlers.
McElrath tells a different story, a story of a class struggle in the Old West, said Lamont, pointing to a collision between rich and poor. The rich were the big cattle operations financed by wealthy individuals in the Eastern U.S. or Europe. Cowboys who wanted to get a piece of the action, themselves, by getting into the cattle business were discouraged by the large cattle companies from owning cattle.
Unbranded cattle—mavericks—became a big issue. Cowboys who didn’t turn over these cattle to the large cattle companies would be accused of rustling, she said. If courts didn’t find those accused of rustling guilty, cattle owners felt justified in resorting to vigilante action, said Lamont.
“In my opinion, Frances McElrath’s version of history is more accurate,” she said.
Lamont’s next book focuses on another woman whose writing accomplishments have been overlooked, Bertha Bower, whose publisher decreed in 1920 that her books on the Old West were second in sales only to Zane Grey.
Sarah Rose's D-Day Girls not only lets you understand what life was like in occupied France for four long years during World War II but also lets us understand the contributions that women made to overthrow the Nazi menace.
It's a true story, drawn from recently declassified files, diaries, and oral histories, that follows the challenges women faced as French saboteurs. Trained in England, the one European country left to counter Hitler's plans for conquest, the women learned how to shoot and handle explosives while keeping a low profile to avoid capture--and probable torture.
Rose explained that, while writing the book, she realized that the real end to her story arrived not with the end of the war in Europe but with D-Day, the successful Allied invasion that came 11 months earlier.
French resistance workers, suffering under German rule for years, came alive with the invasion, actively blowing up train and power lines to thwart Nazi forces bent on repelling the invaders.
But laying the groundwork for that resistance effort required a heroic effort by men--and women--whose every move was being scrutinized by a regime that Rose described as "a citadel of hate."
Fourteen of the 39 women trained by Britain's Special Operations Executive, the secret agency that became known simply as the firm, died in the war. Others sustained horrific injuries but, despite so many problems, they succeeded.
In her interview with Steve Tarter, Rose also talks about the role of the BBC during the war, not just providing information but conveying code words to spy operatives in Europe.
An experienced auctioneer is in a good position to shed light on the human condition. After all, they're up there in front of a crowd, dealing with both buyers and sellers, as well as spending a lot of time evaluating the bric a brac we all love to collect.
So it is with Bob Brunk who spent 35 years as an auctioneer in Asheville, N.C. Brunk's collection of essays, A Question of Value, shares some of his experiences auctioning off everything from glass eyeballs to telescopes.
Some of the characters in the collection include the 90-year-old woman who was divesting herself of her earthly possessions, some going to family members, other things going to auction. "I just want to come out even," she tells Brunk.
There's Robert Young, the fiery little auctioneer who negotiated only one way--his way. Brunk recalls being in Young's shop when a woman offered Young $1,800 for an item that was priced at $2,200. He informed her that the price was as marked but if she asked again, the cost would be $3,500. "Naturally, she hurried out of the store," said Brunk, whose own auctioneering approach was less confrontational.
"I went to auction school where they teach you the chant but I found that what worked best for me was to be clear about what the bid was and what I was asking," he said.
Like everything else, the auction business and the selling of antiques has seen plenty of change over the years, said Brunk.
"When I started here in Asheville in the 1980s there were 14 or 15 antique stores. Now there's just one," he said. The number of auctioneers has also dwindled, noted Brunk, pointing out that some of the things that people collected in the past--such as pewter dinnerware, Hummels, and pressed glass--don't have the same value today.
Just because something gets older doesn't always make it more valuable, he added.
The internet has also brought change to the business of buying and selling items, said Brunk, recalling a regular buyer who told him he was no longer going to come to auctions because the internet opened the field to "the whole world." When that same individual had a collection to sell, however, he asked Brunk if he was still involved with "that internet thing."
Deciding on “the best player you've never heard of” is a baseball pastime sure to involve arguments just as fruitless as those demanding a particular batter or pitcher be included in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
But Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz, baseball historians whose previous publications have delved deeply into baseball’s early days, the so-called Dead Ball Era, make a convincing case for Mike Donlin, “a rough and rowdy” baseball player who became an idol in New York before Babe Ruth arrived on the scene.
Their book, Mike Donlin, covers the career of the man Damon Runyon said was the most colorful player he ever saw as well as Donlin’s second career, on the stage and in the movies.
Born in Peoria, Donlin is now all but forgotten but played with some of the greats, players like Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, Tris Speaker, and John McGraw. In 12 seasons, Donlin batted over .330, earning a reputation both as a dynamic hitter and one of baseball’s bad boys, tormenting umpires and managers alike.
A heavy drinker, Donlin got into scrapes more serious than the occasional bar fight or on-field skirmish. He did prison time and was suspended from pro ball for a year after being found guilty of assaulting a woman in 1902. But he was back playing baseball for the Cincinnati Reds in 1903, a year when he batted .351, second only to Honus Wagner’s .355.
Steinberg said that Donlin’s celebrity status blossomed as a member of the New York Giants, one of several teams he played for. Managed by McGraw, the Giants won the World Series in 1905.
But the Donlin book also has a romantic side, offering a portion of the article James Hopper wrote for Collier’s magazine in 1908: “Two years ago Big Mike Donlin was a reckless, violent, husky-voiced, swaggering brawler. Then he met Mabel Hite, who, discerning a chance for that redemption which woman so dearly loves, gently led him to the altar. Mike Donlin now is a …lithe, clean-hewed, supple athlete; his features made firm through physical and moral health, have regained lines almost classical.”
As the most prominent vaudeville actress in the country at the time, Mabel Hite was just what the doctor needed when it came to taming the wild Donlin. The team of Hite and Donlin was a vaudeville hit with crowds and critics alike, said Steinberg. “If you miss him (Donlin), you do yourself an injustice,” said a reviewer at Variety magazine.
But the marriage and her theatrical career were cut short when Hite died of cancer in 1912 at the age of 29. Trained by his wife, Donlin gravitated to the stage. His last baseball season ended in an unsuccessful comeback attempt in 1914 but he married actress Rita Ross and moved to Hollywood where he became a drinking buddy of actors John Barrymore and Buster Keaton. Among the 100 movies he appeared in, mostly in small parts, was the role of a Union general in Keaton’s The General, considered one of the comedian’s greatest films.
Donlin died in 1933, remembered more as a likable actor than the brawling ballplayer “He was something of a headache but more often a joy to me, and player…a fighter, the kind that used to make for winning teams in the days I played the game,” said former manager McGraw who also recalled humorist Will Rogers telling him of his fondness for Donlin.
World War II may have ended nearly 80 years ago but it lives on as a subject endlessly reviewed with fresh insight and information supplied on an ongoing basis.
Movies and books haven’t stopped rehashing the great war since its conclusion, witness last year’s Oppenheimer and, now playing in your local metroplex, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Meanwhile, WWII offers an ongoing avalanche of literary material, exemplified by recent titles like Churchill’s Shadow Raiders: The Race to Develop Radar, WWII’s Invisible Secret Weapon, Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, and Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence.
WWII was so vast and so involving, that it may be another 80 years before we stop writing books about it. There are always aspects to explore, examining the men and women who put their bodies on the line, sometimes in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Who isn’t interested in tales of that kind of heroism?
Caroline Alexander’s Skies of Thunder (Viking Press) examines the WWII heroes who flew transport planes in the China-Burma-India theater. During these times of rising tensions between China and the U.S., it’s worth noting that the two countries were allies in WWII.
Japan had attacked China years before Pearl Harbor and, by 1942, had all but sealed China off from the world. Alexander notes that the official line at the time was that America wanted to keep China in the war. The U.S. military didn’t want Japanese troops engaged in China to be diverted elsewhere in the Pacific.
Alexander said that Franklin D. Roosevelt was also thinking about global politics after the war. Assisting the most populous country in the world—that wouldn’t declare an allegiance to Communism until 1949--could only bolster U.S. prospects.
Once Japan closed Chinese ports and gained control of the Burma Road, the only way to get supplies into China was by air. There was only one little problem: the air route required flying over the foothills of the Himalayas. As if navigating through the tallest mountain range in the world wasn’t daunting enough, pilots had to deal with frequent, intense storms over those mountains, the result of warm air from the Bay of Bengal colliding with cold winds from Siberia, said Alexander.
Storms proved to pose an even greater danger than enemy planes at a time when the existence of a weather phenomenon known as the jet stream wasn’t even known, said Alexander. “Pilots sometimes reported being shot up thousands of feet in a minute as they endeavored to fly by instruments,” she said. Flights were scheduled around the clock regardless of the weather.
The stormy weather proved to be a major obstacle, claiming 600 planes and 1,700 lives. Little wonder that flying the Hump also became known as traversing the Aluminum Trail.
Alexander said she first became aware of the airlift while undertaking an assignment for National Geographic on the large tiger refuge in Myanmar (Burma’s present name). After noticing that strange, jagged pieces of metal fencing of villagers’ gardens were made from pieces of fuselage from old WWII planes, she learned that the lush jungle was hiding a graveyard of crashed cargo planes.
Alexander also includes information on how Americans supported China on the ground, carving out the Ledo Road, a route between India and China that required “a Herculean engineering project in challenging terrain and climate,” noted Matthew Delmont in Half American, a book about the contributions African Americans made during WWII.
The Ledo Road stood as a remarkable achievement, involving 15,000 American troops, almost two-thirds of them African American, along with 35,000 local Indian, Burmese, and Chinese civilian workers. It took a lot of heavy equipment to
"If you keep up with the headlines, you know computers are taking our jobs. Spying on us. Controlling what we buy and who we vote for. Even discriminating against us. When they're done beating us at our own pastimes, maybe they'll rise up and kill us. Our relationship with these machines has become, not to put a fine point on it, dysfunctional."
That's how Michael Littman starts Code to Joy, his book that suggests everybody should learn a little about programming.
People don't need to learn how to be coders but we'd benefit if we found out a few things in order to let the computer work for us, he said.
Littman said artificial intelligence can aid in the simplification of computer programming. It's a good match, regardless, he said. "We come prewired to teach. Computers come prewired to learn."
Littman, a computer science professor at Brown University, would like to see us go from a world where only professionals program to one where nearly everyone programs.
Littman sees positive results already. "Customizable questionnaires, web pages, and video games are out there now that allow people to write small amounts of code and get large benefits in terms of tailoring the computer's behavior to their goals," he noted.
"Word processors and spreadsheets provide scripting languages and macros that let you streamline your workflow. Entities like Google and Amazon are privately talking about giving people more control over how recommendations are made on their behalf, making it less about the machine reading our passive intentions and more about you asserting your will," stated Littman.
Climate change needs no introduction for most of us. Or does it? How do we confront it without being overwhelmed by the prospects of a planet in disarray?
In his book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage, Rob Verchick seeks to tamp down the fear and loathing that goes with the subject and build up a plan of action, a call for climate resilience.
"The world we inhabit is getting hotter, drier, wetter, and weirder," notes Verchick. "Our coastlands are sinking. Forests are bursting into flame. Droughts and heat waves are getting worse," he adds.
"On top of this comes another dose of hard reality: As a matter of physics, global warming cannot be reversed very quickly," Verchick stated.
So what's to be done? "Today climate action takes two distinct priorities: curbing greenhouse gases to fend off worst-case consequences and boosting community resilience to cope with the impacts already mounting," he said.
Getting real is what's being called for. "I believe that climate resilience is the gateway discussion toward broader climate action, including eliminating fossil fuels," noted Verchick, who hosts his own podcast, Connect the Dots, talked to Steve Tarter about a woman he interviewed in Octopus who seeks to improve worker safety in Nevada where presently there are few protections for those working outside, often in 100-degree heat.
While that may not seem like working on climate change, it's a start, he said.
In his Read Beat interview, Verchick discusses an approach for the average citizen in this overheated world while exploring the problems of Joshua Trees, coral reefs and those discarded refrigerators that were left behind after Hurricane Katrina.
Nick Medina’s Indian Burial Ground is a horror novel that combines stirring storytelling with an exploration of historical racial injustices in America – in this case, the epidemic of alcoholism, suicide, and mental health disorders on Indigenous reservations.
Medina’s sophomore novel again sheds light on issues affecting Native communities, while also delivering a genuinely terrifying and engaging read.
Already at work on a third book in the same horror/Native American vein, Medina told Steve Tarter that his hope is to enlighten readers who might not comprehend some of the problems modern Native Americans face.
Medina, an admitted true-crime TV fan, made his debut in 2023 with Sisters of the Lost Nation, a book which addressed the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
Burial Ground is centered around a woman and her uncle as they are haunted by a string of deaths—decades apart—in their Louisiana reservation.
William McKinley was assassinated before completing his first term of office as U.S. president in 1901 "after leading the nation to victory in the Spanish-American War," noted the White House Historical Association.
That's the war perhaps best known for the slogan, "Remember the Maine," the U.S. war cry over the battleship sunk in Cuba, an incident that reportedly set off the conflict. But Taina Caragol wants you to know that there's a lot more to the story.
In 1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Caragol and co-editor Kate Clarke Lemay outline changes that took place that year as the U.S. claimed sovereignity over Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam and temporarily occupied Cuba. That was also the year that the United States annexed Hawaii as a territory.
The 1898 book also serves as a catalog for an exhibition-- held at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. for 10 months through February 2024.
That exhibition added pictures and text to what happened in those countries beyond what the gallery already had in place: the lauding of Theodore Roosevelt and George Dewey as war heroes.
Caragol told Steve Tarter that noted historians Kristin Hoganson, Healoha Johnston, Jorge Duany, Theodore Gonzalves, Neil Weare and Paul Kramer all contributed to 1898.
What you get in 1898, along with graphics you might expect from a display at the National Portrait Gallery, is a picture of U.S. empire-building, taking over Spanish colonies and asserting their own needs ahead of the people living in Cuba and the Philippines, countries that had been fighting their own wars of independence for years.
In the case of Hawaii, five years before formally annexing the island nation, the United States helped overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy that ruled the country.
Such U.S. involvement in the affairs of other countries drew criticism from Americans like W.E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams and Mark Twain, the book noted.
"This isn't who we are (as a nation)," Twain complained at the time, said Caragol.
In a presidential election year, eyes turn toward the many distinct groups that make up the electorate. So what's up with the rural voter? It's a group that voted Republican by a margin of 70 to 80 percent over their Democratic rivals in many rural communities, noted Nick Jacobs and Dan Shea, the authors of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.While the GOP advantage among rural voters may have been 60 percent several decades ago, a steep divide between city and country voters began as far back as 1980, said Shea.
Along with studying voting patterns over the years, the two professors at Colby College in Maine conducted what they consider the largest single study of the rural voter, surveying 10,000 rural voters across the country, said Jacobs.
Rural voters tend to think that place is important, he said. What pushes so many away from the Democrats is the feeling that rural values have been neglected by that party.
Another point that Jacobs and Shea make in their book is the problem that rural residents now face in getting information, particularly about local politics. The demise of so many small-town newspapers in recent years means less local rural news. That means more get their news from television where the focus is on national issues.
Jacobs and Shea don't think major media outlets have done a very good job in portraying rural America, often succumbing to "rural rabble-rousers," focusing on outgoing individuals who want to be interviewed, thereby diverting attention from more mainstream rural attitudes.
That leads to a widening in the gulf between urban and rural, said Shea. When the media focus is on the rabble-rouser, the urban viewer/reader is likely to think "They're all lunatics out there" (in rural America), he said.
Survey results also pointed to a misconception that rural residents are stuck where they are, that they've struggled to leave but failed. "These are not the wastelands of alienation that people want to leave. They don't want to move. They want to stay where they are," said Shea.
Buffalo Bill Cody is one of the iconic figures of the Old West but did you know his Wild West show often involved a cast of 1,500 people who had to be fed and transported from town to town? Or that Cody dined with presidents and royalty?
Those are just some of the things you learn in Steve Friesen's book, Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill.
Yes, Cody was an accomplished scout and hunter who lived in the era when the West was still relatively wild. Friesen describes Cody's Civil War experience as generally undistinguished but during the conflict, he did meet up with Wild Bill Hickok then serving as a Union spy.
After the war, Cody served as a scout and earned his name as a buffalo hunter at a time when herds were still abundant, Friesen points out.
The 1870s was the era of the dime novel and Western characters like Cody found fame with their rifles and buckskin. When Cody went east he was urged to to take the Buffalo Bill persona to the stage. One thing led to another, Friesen told Steve Tarter, and Cody got the show biz bug.
Those shows got bigger and bigger with Cody insisting on authenticity. "Even as the West he knew disappeared, he would live it on a daily basis," noted Friesen.
One of the main features of the book is exploring the fact that Cody liked to eat and eat well. While the author notes how much Buffalo Bill enjoyed New York's Delmonico's, Nashville's Maxwell House (before they started serving coffee there) or the DeWitt Hotel in Lewiston, Me., he didn't dine alone.
Cody and a team that included ace promoter Arizona John Burke made sure that the cast of Native Americans (primarily members of the Lakota nation), cowboys, and stagehands ate well when they were on the road.
It didn't matter if it was a one-night stand or a six-month stint such as the fabulously successful run in 1893 at Chicago's Columbian Exposition where Cody and his troops entertained 20,000 people twice a day every day for six months while crowds flooded to see White City.
"When people got off the train in Chicago, they could go left to the exposition or right to the Wild West show," said Friesen.
The Chicago engagement made a millionaire out of Cody who ran his Wild West shows all over the world for 30 years, said Friesen. Buffalo Bill not only had an impact on how we view the West in this country but in Europe where the Wild West show toured for years, he said.
Annabel Abbs-Streets discovered she didn't have to suffer at night when insomnia struck. She discovered something else: her night self.
"The night self is a version of ourselves you experience when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're all alone. Most of us start to ruminate or be worried," she said.
Abbs-Streets said she learned that if you can dial down that voice, there's another version, an alter ego that can provide solace.
She was so impressed with her discovery that she wrote a book about it: Sleepless, a work that also details the lives of accomplished artists who allowed their creativity to shine at night.
New research notes that the brain can rewire itself at night, she said. "Things happen in the brain at night that make us think differently than we do during the day, said Abbs-Streets.
Instead of rushing out to get sleeping pills, those who find themselves waking up at night should try to unleash the power of the night brain, suggests the London-based writer.
Abbs-Streets has produced both works of fiction and non-fiction including 52 Ways to Walk (a previous Read Beat interview). When she wakes up now in the middle of the night, she tells Steve Tarter "I light my candle and get my notebook out and start scribbling away. I find that after that I go back to sleep."
If you don't understand math, you can still enjoy Paul Nahin.
Don't get blinded by the 24 books the professor of electric engineering has written or that he's busily at work on book 25.
The longtime University of New Hampshire faculty member has just published The Mathematical Radio, a book complete with equations and diagrams.
One needs only the familiarity of advanced high-school-level math to follow along. But don't be deterred. Nahin isn't just involved with electromagnetic fields and frequencies. He loves radio.
"Radio is perhaps the single most important electronic invention of all, surpassing even the computer in its societal impact (the telephone doesn't depend on electronics for its operation, and television is the natural extension of radio)," he writes.
"Radio changed everything," said Nahin, quoting Reginald Victor Jones, the British intelligence operative credited by Winston Churchill for breaking "the bloody (radio) beam" used by the Germans during WWII's Battle of Britain.
"There has never been anything comparable in any other period of history to the impact of radio on the ordinary individual in the 1920s," wrote Jones in Most Secret War, his memoir published in 1978.
"It was the product of some of the most imaginative developments that have ever occurred in physics, and it was as near magic as anyone could conceive, in that with a few mainly home-made components simply connected together one could conjure speech and music out of the air," noted Jones.
Nahin isn't just a math whiz, however. He's also written about time travel and, in Holy Sci-Fi, writes about the connection between religion and science fiction.
It shouldn't surprise you but the 83-year-old Nahin also expresses a love for video games.
You know you've made it in the book world when the author's name is bigger than the title. That's where Mark Greaney finds himself with the publication of The Chaos Agent, the 13th in the Gray Man spy thriller series.
This time around Court Gentry is battling a diabolical plot to wipe out the world's leading experts on robotics. Greaney said he deliberately focused on AI's dark side in researching the new book.
"Lethal autonomous weapons, otherwise known as killer robots, make up a field that's really advancing," said Greaney, concerned that once wars are fought at "machine speed," the world will face enormous problems. He likened the development of new weapons to the invention of the Gatling gun, the forerunner of the machine gun developed in the 1860s.
The Chaos Agent, like Greaney's other Gray Man novels does a lot of globe-hopping with most of the action taking place in Mexico and Guatemala, countries that Greaney visited to soak up local color.
Greaney figures he's now visited some 36 countries in pursuit of exotic locales for his books.
After collaborating with Tom Clancy on several books, Greaney carried on with several Jack Ryan stories following Clancy's death before establishing his own spy characters.
A native of Memphis, Greaney told Steve Tarter that interest in world events comes easily having learned about the news of the day as a kid at the dinner table each night. His father, Ed Greaney, served as managing editor of WMC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Memphis.
Put aside your fears about a robotic uprising, says Ruth Aylett, a computer science professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a robotics researcher for 30 years.
Talking with Steve Tarter, she emphasized that robots, whatever you may have heard to the contrary, are machines, made and controlled by man.
"Forget the hype and the unrealistic speculations about so-called new species or superhuman abilities, and let's work together as roboticists and as citizens to apply this fascinating and challenging technology where it will do some good," she notes.
The book jacket suggests we look at robots as human-made artifacts rather than placeholders for our anxieties, something that Aylett said comes easily to the general public.
"Human beings are wired to react to things that look as if they have some degree of autonomy as if they were social beings. If something with movement looks even vaguely humanoid, people will assume it has human capabilities," she said.
Aylett puts robots alongside cars, planes and washing machines as tools that people merely use in daily life.
The fact is that the task of fashioning a robot to walk upright is difficult, she said. Designing a robotic arm to do just a few of the things a human arm can do is a huge challenge, said Aylett.
Youngsters engaged in making robots for competitions get a clear understanding of the difficulty involved in getting robots to do what you want, she said.
As for the science fiction side of the equation, Aylett said she enjoys reading sci-fi. But when it comes to movies, she points to the fact that, through three generations of filmmaking, "no film has ever used a real robot."
First, actors wore costumes to play robots like R2D2, said Aylett. A second generation of films like Short Circuit relied on puppeteers while the third generation, which we're in now, involves post-production wizardry, she said.
Beavers have a long and illustrious history. There were beavers as big as bears for millions of years until some 10,000 years ago. Since then the beaver has dutifully carried out the work of an environmental engineer, creating dams and managing water flow, helping both wildlife and plants prosper.
"Beavers are the only animals apart from man that radically transform their environment," states Leila Philip in Beaverland.
European fur traders nearly wiped out the North American beaver when the demand for beaver pelts reached a fever pitch after the French and English set up shop on the American continent. .
Tycoon John Jacob Astor created a trade empire on the backs of beavers, she noted. The fur of the beaver and other animals lined hats, coats and blankets around the world.
Estimates are that 60 to 400 million beaver were living in North America prior to 1600. Three hundred years of trapping later, the number of surviving beavers was so low, said Philip, that it took a major effort in the 20th century to restore the animal to a fraction of its former presence (less than 1 percent of the pre-1600 population).
But Philip maintains that the beaver's story is a positive one. There's hope now as efforts are taken to insure that the beaver's role as a wetlands creator and water diverter is protected.
"We're bringing beavers back. California is leading the country in free-thinking beaver policy, moving beavers where they can help in watershed restoration," she said.
"People are waking up to the economic value of beavers," said Philip, a professor at Holy Cross College near Boston.
"It's really important to be hopeful and take action. We need to take a look in our own backyard. I discovered beavers by accident (near her home in Connecticut). They're extraordinary and it left me thinking what else is out there," she said.
Race into space? Not so fast, say Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the husband-and-wife team whose book, A City on Mars, lays out some of the challenges that face space settlements on the Moon, Mars or wherever man (and woman) might be heading in the future.
Space may look more promising with all the problems on Earth but while there may not be pollution on Mars, there are plenty of issues to face before relocating to space. Kelly’s a biologist while Zach’s an artist who provided the many cartoons and illustrations in the book. The two admitted to spending four years researching the subject of space settlements.
They went into the project excited about the possibilities but came away skeptical, said Kelly Weinersmith. “The more research we did, the more problems we came across,” she said. “We’re definitely not anti-space settlement but we are pro-a thoughtful, slow approach.”
Among the issues raised in the book are the problems of living in space, the effects of low gravity or space radiation on the human body, the transport of materials into space, and the laws that would define what resources one could use on the Moon or Mars and the altercations that could break out if there’s a difference of opinion between countries on the use of those resources.
“Space is beautiful but it’s also deeply political,” said Kelly Weinersmith. Countries tend to look at space exploration as a way of saying, “Look how advanced we are,” she said.
Robotics will play a big role in space exploration, Kelly Weinersmith conceded but only if robots can perform all the tasks needed to allow humans to live in space. That involves technology yet to be developed, she said.
“We don’t know how to do it yet, but we still believe that someday, with enough knowledge, we can have Mars…But we must earn it, both by gaining in knowledge and be becoming a more responsible, more peaceful species. Going to the stars will not make us wise. We have to become wise if we want to go to the stars,” she said.
Godzilla is one of the great movie franchises of our time. But how many people know about the 1955 novella written by Shigeru Kayama, the Japanese science fiction writer who produced the original Godzilla screenplay?
Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again are works translated by Jeffrey Angles, a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University, that were published in 2023 by the University of Minnesota Press.
The stories include an extensive afterword written by Angles who details how the Godzilla story came to be.
Angles noted that Tomoyuki Tanaka, the producer at Toho Studios in Japan, learned that Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the 1953 film about a dinosaur revived by an atomic test, was a hit in the United States.
"Tanaka realized that if he were to create a film about an ancient monster awakened by a nuclear blast, he might capitalize on the tremendous fears and concerns surrounding nuclear weapons and radioactivity in Japan--the same country that had suffered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade before," stated Angles.
Kayama's original screenplay made several pointed references to nuclear bombs and nuclear testing that the U.S. military was carrying out in the Pacific in the 1950s but Tanaka toned down the anti-nuke sentiment.
Kayama's strident message about the danger of nuclear weapons was included in an 11-part radio series on Godzilla that aired in Japan before the film's release in 1954.
Godzilla opened in November 1954 and was a huge hit in Japan.
The following year, an American studio bought the rights and inserted Raymond Burr (who completed his part for the film in one day of shooting) into a U.S. version of the film. The rest is history.
Dozens of Godzilla movies have followed over the years including Godzilla Minus One, a 2023 Japanese production (also from Toho Studios).
Angles applauds the new production, comparing it favorably with the somber original.
In 2024, the 70th anniversary year for Godzilla, another Godzilla vs. King Kong film is slated to be released.
If you're one of those people who has shuddered at the thought of spiders, snakes, or other creepy crawlies invading your space, you might get new insight from Bethany Brookshire, whose book about pests makes the point that animals are just being animals.
"We believe we're in charge, entitled to space only for us," said Brookshire. "What we really hate about the pests is their success. They're where we don't want them," she said.
Brookshire divides her book into chapters devoted to different pests such as the pigeon (once favored but no longer wanted), mice, wolves, and elephants, to choose just a few.
"Pigeons are one of the oldest domesticated birds and may have been domesticated more than 5,000 years ago," the author noted. "They were used to carry messages, ...and they were considered delicious. Every pigeon on the streets today is the descendant of a domesticated bird," she said.
Brookshire sheds light on wolves and coyotes, animals that, as she told Steve Tarter, receive mixed reviews. Urban residents tend to honor the wolf while rural residents, particularly ranchers, call them pests.
Of the 41,000 cattle that died due to predation in 2015 in the United States, less than 5 percent were killed by wolves, said Brookshire.
As for the adventurous coyote, the animal has been sighted in New York's Central Park and Downtown Chicago, she said.
Pests is not a natural history of the animals we hate but a book about us. It’s about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It’s a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst.
Brookshire's research brought her in contact with indigenous people from around the world. While different cultures had different approaches, live and let live seemed to be the commonality, she said.
Brookshire told the story of a town in Canada besieged by bears (there was a salmon cannery there) that found the government approach to their problem (they shot the bears) unacceptable. So adjustments were made (the cannery was moved and garbage contained) and the town learned to live with the wildlife.
Elmwood is a small town in Illinois that had a population of 1,500 when Nelson Dean Jay was growing up. But the small-town boy went on to make a name for himself in Paris, France.
“In my opinion, you simply can’t name anyone from central Illinois who had this much influence on America and the world, and (yet) no one knows about him,” said William Engelbrecht, the co-author of "The American Banker in Paris" along with Karl K. Taylor..
“This isn’t a book about a bank or finance but about an interesting human being who came out of central Illinois,” said Engelbrecht, noting that after Jay graduated in 1905 from Knox College (located in nearby Galesburg). “After that, he got into finance. Then came World War I,” he said.
Jay entered the U.S. Army and served Gen. Charles G. Dawes as general purchasing agent for the American Expeditionary Force where he later received a Distinguished Service Medal. No fewer than four countries decorated Jay for service during the war, said Engelbrecht.
Following the war, Jay headed the Paris affiliate of the J.P. Morgan & Co. bank in Paris from 1920 to 1941 and then again after WWII.
During the Roaring Twenties in Paris, Jay was a friend of Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, and Gertrude Stein. During that era, Jay was described in the New York Times as “one of the most civilized and authentic Americans in Paris," said Engelbrecht.
Jay was a member of the welcoming party for Charles Lindbergh when he made the first transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. “The J.P. Morgan Co. was one of the sponsors of the Lindbergh flight. The name on the business card that Lindbergh carried in his pocket during the flight was Nelson Dean Jay,” said Engelbrecht. Jay later criticized Lindbergh to his face, suggesting he reconsider some of his pro-German views, the author noted.
Jay's personal life is also part of the story, said Engelbrecht. Jay met his wife, Anne, on a blind date. He told her of his plan to marry her that night. And he did. The marriage lasted 60 years.
Along with helping Andre Citroen get the start he needed to become the largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, Jay also helped finance the work of his friend, (two-time) Nobel Prize winner Madame Marie Curie, the woman who laid the foundation for modern oncology, said Engelbrecht.
The past 20 years have not been kind to the newspaper industry. Margot Susca, a communications professor at American University in Washington, D.C. and former reporter, provides details on some of the financial dealings involving newspapers during that time.
Susca outlines the furious activity taken by private investment funds and hedge funds in the past 20 years, outlining practices such as profit overharvesting and debt-based takeovers by companies that have become known as notorious vulture capitalists--Alden Global Capital and the Blackstone Group, to name just a couple.
What these capitalists did was shrink the country's newspaper industry, she said, forcing the closure of papers in many parts of the country while establishing a new category in many other communities--ghost newspapers, papers that look and cost the same as before but have vastly reduced local content due to decimated newsrooms.
"I hope this work further helps shift part of the blame for our local newspaper crisis away from the internet to where it belongs: onto the private investment funds that for years have gutted local newspapers and grown wealthier off the backs of what is left of them," Susca noted.
Susca told Steve Tarter that while the actions taken by companies like Alden and Blackstone were legal, the fact that no efforts were made by the federal government to establish guidelines to aid an industry in distress allowed the problem to get worse.
The end result? "We can and should demand a media system that benefits democracy," she said, pointing to the 400 non-profit news outlets now active in the United States, urging citizens to visit https://www.pressforward.news/ for more information.
We had another busy year on Read Beat in 2023--more than 50 interviews, almost one per week. Your host is Steve Tarter, a retired newspaper reporter living in Peoria, Illinois.
I try to find issues that might prove interesting to a general audience. A lot of books get published each year and you hear about the most popular ones on a lot of fronts.
Here we try to find the ones you may not hear so much about but are no less important.
I want to thank all the folks I've had the pleasure to interview over the past three years as well as all the listeners who've tuned in.
We'll try to keep things interesting in 2024.
Media folks have been taking questions about the magazine industry to "Mr. Magazine" for decades. Samir Husni, 70, now retired after more than 30 years as a professor at the University of Mississippi, is still the oracle when it comes to magazines with his Mr. Magazine blog (https://mrmagazine.me/).
"It's the world of bookazine these days," said Husni, referring to the single-issue publications that turn up at checkout counters across America on subjects from Amazon to Zorro.
In 2023 at least 1,000 bookazine titles hit the marketplace, he said. In addition to filling ballparks, Taylor Swift led in the number of bookazines published this year. "Jesus ran second," he told Steve Tarter.
The bookazine concept succeeds with consumers despite a high cover price (that now ranges between $14 and $15), said Husni. "It's just one issue so there's no long commitment. If you're interested in going on a cruise, you'll pay $15 for a copy of 'Cruises on the Cheap,'" he said.
"The age of the mass magazines is gone," said Husni, who recently donated his vast collection of magazines (five storage units worth) to his alma mater, the University of Missouri.
While Samir remains a supporter of the great magazines of the 20th century, citing Life, Reader's Digest, TV Guide, and National Geographic, he's not ready to shovel dirt on the printed page. "As long as we have human beings, we'll have print," he said.
J.P. Telotte has been writing about film since 1985. As the man who introduced film studies to Georgia Tech University, Telotte, now professor emeritus at the Georgia school, has produced Selling Science Fiction Cinema, a study of the effort to market sci-fi films in the 1950s and 1960s.
His book focuses on a period when science fiction first exploded on the screen.
In this postwar period both the film industry and its traditional audience were undergoing sea changes.
Telotte notes the presence of television was at first a concern of Hollywood then later used as a marketing tool to help promote films like Godzilla (1954) and The Blob (1958).
While television could help spread the word about a film, it could also be restrictive in some ways, said Telotte. Advertising for a film like The War of the Worlds (1953) was refused by several television stations because, it was claimed, the film’s images of an atomic bomb explosion and a Martian heat ray incinerating people might alarm children in the TV audience.
The problem boiled down to figuring out how best to define science fiction, Telotte told Steve Tarter. Hollywood producers, in efforts to draw people into the theater, were wary of sending out the wrong signals to the general public.
The Thing from Another World (1951), for example, the film that featured an alien that ran amuck on a North Pole military base, was not advertised specifically as a science fiction film. Its initial marketing avoided the term “science fiction” with early reports describing it as a “mystery,” an “exploitation” film, or even a “pseudo-scientific melodrama.”
Most of us are familiar with Nancy, the comic strip penned for decades by Ernie Bushmiller, but what about the new Nancy now produced by Olivia Jaimes?
That's the focus of Jeff Karnicky's new book, "The New Nancy."
Bushmiller died in 1985 but Nancy has been sustained by the syndicate that owns the rights to the character and she just keeps going.
Despite fears--with newspapers in decline--that the daily comic has become an endangered species, a new digital reordering is underway, says Karnicky.
Those of us accustomed to perusing the funny pages to find Beetle Bailey, Blondie or Peanuts lament some of the changes that have come about but Karnicky, an English professor at Drake University, sheds light on the new age of the funnies, sharing some of the pros and cons of web comics.
It's a new ballgame for comic artists, said Karnicky. While a fortunate few (Bushmiller, Charles Schulz, Mort Walker and others) made a good living producing daily comics, the internet is a different master, he said.
"Comic creation has become part of the gig economy and can rarely be seen as the lucrative career it sometimes was in the 20th century," said Karnicky.
But there's still a world of comics about, he said. Sites like Gocomics.com are alive with comic strips, old and new. There are always new features and fresh characters that may not be in your daily paper--if you have a daily paper at all, that is.
Karnecky dissects some of these changes, providing background on how Jaimes approaches the challenge of keeping a cartoon character (originated in the 1930s) alive and relevant.
Route 66 still stands as a symbol of the road west, the open highway representing independence and mobility, two values that Americans consider part of their heritage. Yet Nat King Cole’s 1946 hit song, “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” stands more than a celebration of the open road. It’s a reminder that the road wasn’t open to everyone
Nat King Cole, himself, wouldn’t have been able to stay at most of the motels on Route 66 when that song was released.
African Americans taking vacations along Route 66 not only couldn’t stay at many of the motor inns the route helped popularize but weren’t always welcome at restaurants along the way. In many cases, bathrooms were off limits. There was also the problem of “sundown towns,” — communities that excluded blacks after the sun went down.
The Green Book was devised in 1936 by Victor Hugo Green, a New York postman, to provide a list of places that African Americans could visit without fear of retribution.
The guides were published annually until 1966.
Alvin Hall talked about Route 66 in an interview on Read Beat regarding his book, Driving the Green Book.
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guide book for African Americans published between 1936 and 1967. The publication served as a guide to finding businesses that were welcoming to black Americans, including hotels and restaurants, during an era when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against nonwhites was widespread.
That description comes from New York’s Museum of Arts & Design in its presentation of Sanctuary, an exhibit based on the Green Book the museum featured in 2018 by artist Derrick Adams. Adams was the first person to be interviewed by Alvin Hall on the road trip that served as the basis for his book, Driving the Green Book.
Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem postal worker, conceived the guide to avoid what he called “aggravations” for black Americans who traveled, noted Hall. Along with Janee Woods Weber, Hall visited 12 U.S. cities from Detroit to New Orleans in a whirlwind 12-day tour, interviewing individuals with stories to tell about travels made with family and friends who traveled when the Green Book provided vital information. The podcasts from that trip help underscore the guide's importance and the dangers faced en route. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/driving-the-green-book/id1519839250
Hall, who produced a documentary on the Green Book for BBC in 2016, said the initial reaction for many when first hearing about the guide is surprise. “Many people have expressed the fact that they just didn’t know about it,” said Hall, who told Steve Tarter that he found it interesting that the BBC program that played to a global audience—all over the world--except in the United States.
More became aware of the guide after a film called The Green Book made the rounds in 2018, but that movie, highlighting the 1962 tour of African American pianist Don Shirley, “had virtually nothing to do with the actual Green Book,” said Hall.
Among those interviewed by Hall was Noelle Trent, now the CEO and president of the Museum of African American History in Boston, who recounted that even recent family trips started at 5 a.m. in the morning, a holdover from the past.
Five in the morning was that magical hour for many black families when they set out to travel, said Hall, noting that food for the trip was often laid out the night before. Along with facing the problem of obtaining food and services on the trip, “You wanted to get on the road early to reach your destination before dark. The last thing you wanted was to land in a sundown town late at night,” he said.
Sundown towns—communities that prohibited African Americans after the sun went down, Hall explained, were actually more common in the northern United States than in the South.
The Green Book stands as an example of black ingenuity, he said. Finding ways to seek safe harbor in a country where doors were often closed with real danger present was an act of resistance but it was also an act of resilience, said Hall. “It's a story of people who did not become embittered or seek vengeance. We knew we had to make a way through this.”
Of all the general-interest magazines that held sway for decades before bowing out in the mid-20th century, Look is the one that’s often forgotten, said Peter Yarrow, whose book on the magazine points out that the publication had 35 million readers at its peak.
Unlike Life, Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, the other major magazines of the day, Look tends to be overlooked, he told Steve Tarter.
“Look—which has slipped from national memory—had an extraordinary influence on mid-20th century America,” said Yarrow, noting that the magazine was published from 1935 to 1971 before closing. While a bit on "the schlocky side" at first, by the late 1940s, Look had grown into a powerful force with pictures and stories that both informed and entertained Americans, he said.
While Life continues to resurface at the supermarket counter with special editions on topics from the Beatles to the sinking of the Titanic, Look remains lost in the past. Unlike Life, Look has also never been digitized, said Yarrow, at work on a documentary of the magazine at present.
The loss of national magazines that were often optimistic about solving some of the social problems of the day has proved to be a major loss for the country, he said. “Instead of Look’s thoughtful, public-spirited journalism, we now live in a maelstrom of countless, small-audience, online, broadcast and print media,” said Yarrow, who points to an underappreciated past.
“The mid-20th century was a golden age (featuring) an increasingly prosperous middle class, a government that actually got things done and a reasonably well-informed citizenry,” he said.
Look took strong stands on civil rights and was one of the first national publications to profile gay Americans, said Yarrow. While Norman Rockwell is famous for the many covers he produced for the Post, it’s often forgotten that he also did some 30 paintings for Look, including the famous 1964 work that depicted Ruby Bridges, an African American grade schooler being escorted by federal marshals to a New Orleans school ordered to integrate, he said.
Film director Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look for six years, starting when he was just 16, said Yarrow.
Magazines like Life (which ended regular publication a year after Look) had millions of subscribers up until the day they folded but weren't able to hold advertisers who moved to television in the 1960s, said Yarrow, pointing to an increase in postal rates and competition from special-interest magazines as helping bring the curtain down on the country's general-interest magazine era.
Additional information on Yarrow’s documentary project is available at https://andrewlyarrow.com/the-life-of-look-the-film.
Peoria native Anthony Suau won awards for his photography while taking pictures for big-city dailies like the Chicago Sun-Times and Denver Post. His photographs have appeared in Life, National Geographic and Paris Match.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for his images of the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 while in 1996 he received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for coverage of the war in Chechnya.
Now the 67-year-old Suau has his first full-length movie out, a film called Organic Rising. Suau said that what started out as a 10 to 15-minute short turned into a 10-year project.
“After living in Europe for 20 years, I moved back to the states in 2007 and got interested in organic agriculture,” he said.
That interest quickly turned to passion.
“I’m very inspired by the amazing farmers who farm organically,” said Suau who crossed the country gathering information and shooting pictures for the film including doing interviews here in central Illinois.
Suau hopes his film can revive the fight against business interests that have sought to suppress the organic movement, he said. Suau cited the impact of lawsuits filed against “60 Minutes” and “Oprah” when those programs raised concerns over chemicals like glyphosate and atrazine in the nation’s food and water.
“Seed companies basically shut down the press,” said Suau, who credited Clare Howard, a former journalist with the Peoria Journal Star, with inspiring him to focus on problems caused by the use of atrazine as a weed killer.
Suau cited Howard’s work in exposing an aggressive multi-million dollar campaign conducted by the Syngenta Co. to protect profits made from the sale of atrazine, a chemical which research indicates can run off fields and contaminate water supplies.
“Organic Rising” also includes footage shot on a non-organic farm near Galesburg. “In order to learn about all elements of the organic sector, you have to learn about conventional agriculture at the same time,” said Suau.
Along with interviews with farmers, Suau includes comments from scientists like Charles Benbrook and Tyrone Hayes. “A day of reckoning is coming for the United States,” said Benbrook regarding the use of pesticides.
The good news is that organic agriculture has been embraced by the public, said Suau. “Organic agriculture today represents a $35 billion business. It’s moving,” he said.“ The film can be viewed at www.organicrisingfilm.com/the-film.
Advertising has been part of the American scene since the beginning. Jennifer Black, in her new book, "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America," points to ads at the time of the American Revolution by "a growing contingent of Americans who expressed their classed identities through the goods they purchased."
But things really got going in the 1800s as the American commercial marketplace began as a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knockoffs and outright frauds thrived.
As early as the 1830s, printers and manufacturers started working on ways to advertise goods.
By 1870, visual elements, design and entertainment efforts had ushered in the advertising age that we still live in today.
As Black explained to Steve Tarter, the development of lithography, the printing of images, spurred an interest in art and nature in the public but it also presented a whole new world for advertisers.
Black details the rise and fall of trade cards that carried an advertiser's brand along with a pretty picture.
Advertising continued to develop into the 20th century. Black pointed to brand images that have stood the test of time such as the Quaker man for Quaker oats, initially established in the 1870s. But there were also ad mascots that didn't last such as the bug-eyed Josh Slinger, who served as the "spokesman" for Hires root beer from 1914 to 1918.
Being labeled “the Czar of Noir” isn’t anything new for Eddie Muller. The San Francisco-based author and TCM film host has been writing and talking about film noir for more than 25 years.
His 1998 release, “Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir,” was just selected as one of the top 100 movie books by the Hollywood Reporter (the book will soon be rereleased from TCM). Muller has produced an entire noir library including “Dark City Dames” (look for a revised edition next year), a book on noir posters and several original novels but this year he’s pushed noir limits even further, publishing the “Noir Bar,” a book of mixed drink recipes and the films that inspired them (Eddie’s first professional job was as a bartender) and, most recently a children’s book, “Kid Noir: Kitty Feral and the Case of the Marshmallow Monkey” (with Jessica Schmidt and Forrest Burdett).
Film noir, that genre made up of those gritty black-and-white crime films mostly from the 40s and 50s, has no better proponent than Muller who not only introduces viewers to films on TCM’s “Noir Alley” ( Saturdays at midnight) but organizes and hosts film festivals all over the country—both for TCM and his own film-restoring foundation —to keep classic noir films in front of the public. Next summer, Muller hosts a film noir fest in Paris, au fait.
What was Muller’s first noir? What old movie led him to a life of crime (movies)? “It was probably ‘Big Heat’ but ‘Thieves’ Highway’ makes a better story,” he told Steve Tarter. “(‘Highway’) could be called agri-noir because it’s about a man who goes to the open San Francisco farmers’ market to avenge his father who he believes was done in by a conniving fruit peddler (played by Lee J. Cobb). There are also a lot of scenes of San Francisco with buildings that are no longer there,” he said.
While he hosts film noir fests from Seattle to Detroit throughout the year—including the granddaddy of them all, the 21st annual Film Noir Foundation festival set for Oakland in January—Muller says he never tires of all the hoopla or the genre, itself. “I’m an enthusiast before anything else,” he said.
So are there still any old chestnuts to pull out of the film noir fire we haven’t seen? Muller said studio releases have been largely tapped but he’s still on the lookout for those independent films released (but not owned) by Hollywood studios back in the day that may have disappeared. There are also films overseas that need to be added to a film noir fancier’s collection, he said. Muller said he's been turned on to some great ones from Argentina.
“Crime shows are a great unifier. I think Americans broaden their horizons with crime fiction such as the present interest in Scandinavian mysteries,” said Muller.
Expressing concern over dangers presented by Artificial Intelligence, Muller said the issue comes down to basic plagiarism. “There’s no way to stop it. Everything today gets on the internet and that’s where AI finds its material."
Muller recognized AI as a problem that looms larger in the future. "By its very nature, it keeps improving. It’s very much an existential crisis,” he said.
The hope is that AI won’t progress to the point that a revamped version of “Big Sleep” might be released that actually makes sense of that film’s convoluted plot.
Meanwhile Muller prepares for the annual TCM Classic Cruise this November. If they wind up shorthanded, the czar can always help out at the bar. Here is Eddie’s recipe for the Last Word, a popular Prohibition-era cocktail revived by Murray Stenson at the Zig Zag Café in Seattle:
(Coupe glass chilled/ Shaker, strained): ¾ ounce gin; ¾ ounce green Chartreuse; ¾ ounce Luxardo Maraschino liqueur; ¾ lime juice, freshly squeezed; Garnish: Luxardo Maraschino cherry.
While Rosie the Riveter is a vivid symbol of World War II, emphasizing the vital role women played in the workplace during the war, an "Airplane Annie" tag was never developed that might have fit Ann Baumgartner, the American aviator who became the first woman to fly a jet aircraft as a test pilot during WWII.
As a member of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) program, Baumgartner was one of 1,000 women who contributed to the war effort by ferrying planes into position for deployment overseas.
She's just one of the female soldiers Lena Andrews writes about in her book, "Valiant Women," chronicling some of the many contributions made by women in the 1940s war effort.
"The military women of WWII brought the woman's movement into the modern era," noted Andrews who outlined some of the challenges women confronted to serve their country in wartime.
The WASP program was discontinued in 1944 when the women who served were accused of being job-stealers and "unqualified seductresses," stated Andrews. It took more than 30 years before the U.S. Air Force finally recognized the women's contributions, granting them full veterans' benefits, she said.
Another forgotten female who served her country during the war will soon be the subject of a Netflix film production from Tyler Perry, said Andrews, referring to Charity Adams who led the 6888th Central Postal Battalion (known as the Six Triple Eight), the Army’s only all-women unit that served overseas in WWII.
Adams headed the battalion, made up largely of African American women, that cleared a backlog of more than 2 million letters and packages intended for the soldiers who were serving on European front lines.
"Everyone knows how important the mail was for the morale of soldiers during the war where letters were often read out loud," Andrews told Steve Tarter.
Women served in all phases in WWII, she said, from dealing with all the paperwork created with millions in world-wide service to planning functions such as analyzing ocean tides and currents to establish the best landing areas for troops deployed to Pacific islands controlled by the Japanese.
The publishing industry has undergone change since 1960, notes Dan Sinykin, the Emory University English professor whose new book is "Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature."
If you're familiar with names like Ballantine, Bantam, Berkley, Dell, Doubleday, Knopf, Putnam and Viking, these once-independent publishing houses are among the companies in the stable of Penguin Random House, now the largest book publisher in the world.
Sinykin told Steve Tarter that the consolidation that's occurred in the publishing world has meant that editors now pore over profit-and-loss statements where they once courted writers. That's left to literary agents these days.
Sinykin said changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, its literary form, and what it means to be an author.
Thankfully, the rise of the conglomerates has also spurred on nonprofits such as Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press that seek to protect literature from market pressures. Sinykin also singled out employee-owned W. W. Norton, the lone big house of the six large publishers that remains independent and provides a market for "misfit fiction.".
It's a subject that's largely escaped scrutiny, said Sinykin, quoting Marc McGurl, author of "The Program Era," who noted that the publishing industry "has grown so large and internally complex that few scholars attempt anytime to gather its splinters."
But Sinykin has gathered a number of those splinters, adding that there's the traditional publishing industry led by the mighty conglomerates along with the growing world of internet publishing where Tik Tok now creates some of the biggest best sellers on the market. said Sinykin.
The ubiquitous AI looms as a change agent in the future for the publishing world, he said, suggesting that the impact will become clearer once law suits are settled.
Fifty years after his death, Pablo Picasso remains a central figure in the art world. Along with his famous periods--blue, rose and African, for example--there were the many women that shared his life.
Picasso's love life was almost as colorful as his art, critics have noted.
That triggered Jeanne Mackin into writing "Picasso's Lovers," a work of historical fiction. "I wanted to tell the story from a woman's point of view," she said.
Sometimes criticized for his treatment of both wives and lovers (such as the Paris Review article entitled "How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art"), Picasso isn't viewed as a villain by Mackin.
"No one forced these women into Picasso's life," she told Steve Tarter.
Mackin spins her story from 1920s Europe to 1950s New York. The period when Picasso visited the French Riviera in 1923 is also part of the story, she said, crediting Gerald and Sara Murphy as the wealthy American ex-patriots who helped make it fashionable for celebrities like Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway to enjoy the south of France.
When Betty Friedan returned to her home town of Peoria in 1978 for a high school reunion (Peoria High School, class of 1938), she'd already covered a lot of territory.
Rachel Shteir (pronounced sh-tire) outlines much of that activity in the book, "Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter."
Friedan, of course, wrote "The Feminine Mystique," a book that one can say with some confidence helped change the world. Published in February 1963, "Mystique" helped further women's rights like nothing else had before (save the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote in 1920).
When "Mystique" came out in paperback in 1964 the first edition sold 1.4 million copies. Friedan automatically became a star, a crusader and a symbol of the need for change.
"Friedan was no saint," wrote Shteir. "Butshe was an oracle and an iconoclast, ahead of her time, the American activist with a Russian soul, the artist of moral and intellectual fervor, driven by a desire to change herself and others. She said things (about women, about Jews) that many people did not want to hear."
But Friedan said those things. Yet Friedan was not immune to changing her own views on things.
"It used to embarrass me, even to admit that I came from Peoria.," she wrote in the New York Times in 1978. "It was a vaudeville joke, the epitome of the hick town...the town where I was born and grew up, and knew I had to get out of. I never wanted to go home again, or so I always used to tell myself. I remembered only the pain of growing up in Peoria. I never would admit the pleasure, the delight, the sweet sure certainty of belonging in Peoria--that small, satisfied, deceptively simple, mysterious, complex heartland of America, which undeniably provided my roots, and therefore the roots of whatever vision of equality, passion for justice, or sense of possibility drove me to the women's movement in the world."
Born on a farm in Oklahoma's Cherokee Nation in 1879, Will Rogers went on to become one of the most celebrated people of the 20th century, hobnobbing with the rich and famous while entertaining millions in movies, on radio and through his newspaper column.
Gary Clayton Anderson, an accomplished author (previous books focus on Sitting Bull and the Indian Southwest), offers a portrait of Rogers and his rise to fame and fortune.
"Over 100,000 people attended his funeral in Hollywood, an event that was broadcast live on radio," noted Clayton after Rogers died in a plane crash along with friend and pilot Wiley Post in 1935.
Starting with rope tricks, Rogers perfected a stage act that involved a monologue citing news events of the day and gently chiding leading politicians and celebrities with a folksy drawl.
He also wrote a weekly newspaper column. "He dominated the press. Everyone got the Friday paper to read his column, often on the front page," Clayton told Steve Tarter.
Established journalists of the day were somedays irritated by Rogers' "down home" success. H.L. Mencken, one of the leading columnists of that time, was particularly irritated at the fact that, while Mencken's column ran in 200 papers across the country, the Rogers column was carried by 400, said Clayton.
Dawidziak, a former TV critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal, has written books about three prominent TV shows: Columbo, Twilight Zone and Kolchak the Night Stalker.
Columbo ran for 10 seasons while Twilight Zone ran for five and been repeated endlessly over the years. Kolchak, on the other hand, lasted for only the 1974-75 season and 20 episodes.
Dawidziak told Steve Tarter that the Kolchak series was preceded by two TV movies that aired in 1972 and 1973. When the first Night Stalker movie aired on ABC in January 1972, it picked up a 54 percent share of the TV audience, said Dawidziak.
Even though his class of movie enthusiasts had never heard of that first TV movie, Dawidziak said that, after watching the film, "students loved it."
"The magic that worked in 1972 still works today," he said.
That magic is largely due to the performance delivered by Darren McGavin who plays reporter Carl Kolchak for a Chicago newspaper where he tangles weekly with his editor played deftly by Simon Oakland, said Dawidziak.
"Kolchak is such a creature of life. He's constantly getting knocked down but he just gets back up and keeps going. He's constantly seeking the truth. I look at him as a knight errant in a seersucker suit and porkpie hat," he said.
Dawidziak said he expects to have a revised version of the Kolchak book ready by next year.
In turning their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places, the authors of "The Injustice of Place" discovered that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice but rural areas that are often ignored.
Kathryn Edin and Tim Nelson, both of Princeton University, noted that, along with Luke Shaefer, who co-authored a previous book on poverty with Edin, set off on a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas to better understand the poverty that exists in those places.
What they found, the pair told Steve Tarter is that these poverty-stricken areas were rung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials. Areas home to desperate poverty were also places that bore witness to considerable wealth.
Edin recalled that a Mississippi politician told them that he wished that instead of setting up segregation academies, whites in the area would have gone to school with black neighbors. If they had, things would have been different, he suggested.
In regards to education in America: "We've got to face the fact that we're as segregated as we were prior to the (Supreme Court's) Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954."
Edin added that people returning to some of the poor communities are now seeking changes in order to make things more equitable.
The Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain remains with us today but when Piggly Wiggly first appeared on the scene in 1916 it was part of a whole new concept in retailing: the self-service store.
Lisa Tolbert, a professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, explores the Piggly Wiggly phenomenon through 1940 at which time the self-service approach had become commonly accepted, she noted.
Tolbert describes how the self-service store was "a starkly different experience" than shopping in a counter-service store. She also tells the story of Piggly Wiggly founder Clarence Saunders, a white supremacist who courted African-American customers, was the consummate salesman.
The Piggly Wiggly story is also a franchising story with most stores operated by independent franchisees with five stores or less. Advertising is also part of Tolbert's story: Piggly Wiggly took out a two-page spread in the national magazine Collier's in the 1920s, an unheard of effort by a grocery chain that usually focused on the local newspaper, Tolbert told Steve Tarter.
For the first half of the 20th century, Piggly Wiggly went head to head with another national chain, supermarket giant A & P, to sell America its groceries, she said.
Bill Hammack follows in the illustrious footsteps of Don Herbert ("Mr. Wizard"), Carl Sagan and Bill Nye the Science Guy (and, to some extent, Alton Brown of the Food Network) as one of the explainers of the universe.
While the aforementioned individuals developed a following on television, Hammack, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, has reached millions via public radio and YouTube by being able to explain complicated things in a way we can all understand.
His new book, "The Things We Make," continues Hammack's efforts to explain the engineering method. As he told Steve Tarter, the book is accompanied by four 12-minute companion videos on YouTube. You can find all kinds of videos on engineeringguy.com that offer views on everything from an aluminum beverage can to the steam turbine.
When asked about artificial intelligence, Hammack responded, "I can only give you an attitude but I think it's been incredibly overhyped."
As an example, he cited the development of self-driving cars as one that would take "a very long time" to fully replace human-driven models but that we might experience an incremental use of autonomous activity sooner with self-driving vehicles that could operate between O'Hare Airport and the 18 largest hotels in the area, for example.
Hammack delves into plenty of history while reviewing engineering principles. He points to the power of "the rule of thumb" in explaining why cathedrals built in the Middle Ages remain intact.
Among the numerous awards that Hammack has received over the years is the 2021 National Science Board Public Service Award.
As co-founder of the Rails to Trails Confederacy, Peter Harnik has visited 207 rail trails across the United States as part of his work on a fascinating chronology of rail corridors that have become trails for bikers, joggers as well as folks just out for a walk.
But Harnik also supplies the background on how these trails came to be, a rail history that salutes the train era. "The rail-trail is laid onto the detritus of a surpassed technology. Today's bicyclists, walkers, runners, skaters, skiers, equestrians and even snowmobilers are merely Johnny-come-lately beneficiaries of a surface network created by radically different people for a totally different purpose," he noted.
"Since they were built to carry some of the heaviest rolling loads ever devised, the roadbed engineering had to be astoundingly precise," stated Harnik.
But train lines that grew like Topsy ran into technological challenges from cars and planes. While freight rail remains a thriving business, passenger rail fell on hard times in this country. As a result, entire corridors went unused, providing an opportunity for trail buffs.
"I love trains and bikes," he told Steve Tarter. Bicyclists powered the rail-trail movement, said Harnik, adding that bicyclists feel they needed a place of their own, having been forced off the road by the automobile.
Harnik saluted the many trail advocates across the country--people like East Peoria attorney George Burrier Jr.--who helped establish rail-trails across central Illinois and May Theilgaard Watts, a naturalist at the Morton Arboretum, whose letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune in 1963 led to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path, the first rail-trail project undertaken in a densely populated area.
As for what lies ahead Harnik said that there are more than 100,000 miles of abandoned rail corridors waiting for either a revival of rail or conversion to a trail.
There are a lot of baseball books out there but few delve into the kind of detail that Steve Gietschier (rhymes with "itchier") delivers in "Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years."
His book covers the sport from the depths of the Great Depression to the uncertainties of World War II right through the 1950s. Gietschier draws his title from the quote, "I prefer turbulent progress rather than quiet stagnation," uttered by Brooklyn Dodger executive Branch Rickey, the man who integrated the major leagues by inserting Jackie Robinson into the Dodger lineup in 1946.
While Robinson broke the color barrier, another individual highlighted by Gietschier brought color to the game. Bill Veeck, the man responsible for planting ivy in Wrigley Field was both a promoter and a forward thinker, the author told Steve Tarter.
Veeck served in the Marines during WWII, suffering an injury that later resulted in the amputation of his right leg. But losing a leg didn't slow Veeck, the owner of the Cleveland Indians when they won the World Series in 1948. After taking over the St. Louis Browns, Veeck was responsible for sending 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate in 1951, the smallest batter to ever appear in a major league game (Gaedel walked on four pitches as you might have figured).
Veeck later took ownership of the Chicago White Sox. "He was renown for trying to attract fans," noted Gietschier, who shed light on the exploits of another executive, Harry Frazee, the former Peorian who was the Boston Red Sox owner remembered for selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920.
Ruth was sold for $100,000 (in today's money, that would be $1.5 million).
While the story goes that Frazee sold off Ruth to finance his Broadway productions, that version isn't quite right, said Gietschier.
"You have to remember that Ruth, while a rising talent in 1920, wasn't doing what Shohei Ohtani is doing for the Los Angeles Angels this year, starring as both pitcher and slugger," he said, adding that Ruth was also a troublemaker and a free spirit at that time.
The fact that Ruth slammed 54 home runs in his first year with the Yankees, 39 more than the National League home-run leader, forever tainted the transaction that Red Sox fans have agonized over for 100 years.
America was a nation of farmers in the 19th century. As R. Douglas Hurt notes in his book, "Agriculture in the Midwest 1815-1900," someone in 1900 born after the War of 1812 would have seen dramatic changes in farming practices.
"They would be able to recount harvesting wheat with a sickle. They could discuss threshing a crop with a machine. They would have observed the power of a steam engine and, by the end of the century, perhaps heard about a gas-powered engine that suggested great promise for a new form of agricultural power," he said.
Early in the 19th century, 80 percent of Americans lived on a farm. It was also a nation of immigrants. Families arrived from Europe, moving to the Midwest in search of a place to farm in places like the Grand Prairie of Indiana and Illinois or fields in Michigan or Ohio.
"Irish, German, Polish and Scandinavian immigrants, like their earlier counterparts from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the Upper South sought opportunity in the Midwest that only the land could provide," he noted.
By 1850, one-third of Wisconsin's population was born abroad, Hurt told Steve Tarter.
Hurt documents the evolution of the American farm in the Midwest, starting with the acquisition of land, the development of market towns like Chicago and Cincinnati and the ever-changing drive for efficiency in the field, whether growing crops or raising livestock.
The book begins by following Aristarchus Cone, a young man of 22, who arrives in Peoria by steamboat in 1837 to find a place in the sun. Cone takes off on foot and treks the 90 miles to Rock Island before crossing into what would later become Muscatine County in Iowa.
Cone sets up a farm in Iowa and stayed right there until 1905 when he died at the age of 90, noted Hurt, who focuses on individual accomplishment rather than statistics to tell his story.
Come with us now to a stretch of lonely desert in New Mexico during the latter days of World War II. Under extreme secrecy, there’s activity here that involves the country’s top military officials and some of the best minds in the world, scientists steeped in cutting-edge physics at work harnessing a nuclear chain reaction that will result in the first atomic bomb.
That’s the story that Janet Farrell Brodie tells in her book, “The First Atomic Bomb—The Trinity Site in New Mexico.” The action takes place 220 miles south of Los Alamos, the government’s secret laboratory where the Manhattan Project sought to develop a new weapon on untold power.
Before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war with Japan, the atomic weapon was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.
As we soon learned when the bombs leveled two Japanese cities, the test was successful if you consider it a success coming up with the deadliest weapon ever conceived.
But just as the new movie, "Oppenheimer," reveals, the testing that took place in New Mexico faced plenty of obstacles. "It was a case of extreme secrecy. Everything had to be routed to avoid the possibility of a potential spy or noisy neighbor finding out what was going on. They used fake addresses and fake names," said Brodie.
The secrecy that cloaked the test site remains to this day, she said. While open to the public, it's only for a few hours on just one or two days a year. "There's nothing really to see but quite beautiful desert," said Brodie who told Steve Tarter that she and her husband paid a visit to the site on the designated day several years ago.
There were actually two tests made in the desert, she said. The first, called "the 100-ton test," using only "a little bit of plutonium" "shocked some scientists" with the amount of radioactive particles that were released, she said.
After the Trinity test proved successful two months later, atomic components were immediately on their way to Japan, said Brodie. "Everything was rushed." she said.
Brodie describes the atmosphere at the time of the test and the work that surrounded the project, building roads, dealing with neighboring residents (who lived miles away) and the interaction among the scientists, themselves.
The author also touches on Operation Paperclip in her book, the code name for the project that brought some 1,600 German scientists, technicians and their families to the United States following the war, helping develop U.S. weaponry as well as assisting the American space program at NASA.
As the co-founder of American Prairie, Curtis Freese is an ecologist working to help restore the wildlife in the grasslands of the Great Plains. His book, "Back From the Collapse," is a study in what's happened over the years in the Great Plains and what's being done to establish a large refuge that will let bison, wolves, beaver, prairie dogs and grassland birds thrive once again.
In explaining his title, Freese said that the collapse refers to animal populations that have seen losses of 90 percent or more. "The beaver was the first to go in the early 1800s due to the fur trade," he told Steve Tarter.
The loss of beaver meant a keystone species was affected. "Beavers are the ultimate ecosystem engineers, surpassed only by humans in their ability to alter the landscape and what grows on it," stated Freese.
Beavers have even more impact on the semiarid systems found on the western Great Plains. "Beavers can ecologically transform small upland streams from narrow channels of water bordered by grass to ponds and marshes bordered by forest with far-reaching consequences for biodiversity," he said.
Freese pointed out that Native Americans recognized the beaver's role in the ecosystem.
Following the decimation of beaver populations, the bison and big predators were all but eliminated in the Plains before the 19th century was over, he said.
"In the 1880s and 1890s, four to six thousand wolves were killed every year just in eastern Montana," said Freese, noting that tactics included loading up a dead buffalo with strychnine. "Pretty soon there'd be a dozen dead wolves around the carcass," he said.
Freese touts present efforts to add on to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, an area that spans 5,000 square miles. "American Prairie (americanprairie.org) wants to run it just like a national park," he said, adding that camp sites and huts are available to the public.
The Great Plains was once the American version of the Serengeti, said Freese, referring to the African refuge with its lions, wildebeest and Cape buffalo.
"People have forgotten what that looks like," he said, touting the range of North American animals that once roamed the Great Plains.
“It attacks old and young alike,” declared the Pike County Democrat in 1866. The Illinois newspaper wasn’t talking about a cholera epidemic but baseball fever.
Robert Sampson details the game’s early popularity in Illinois in his new book, “Ballists, Dead Beats and Muffins: Inside Early Baseball in Illinois.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, papers up and down the state were singing the praises of this new phenomenon called base ball (two words back then).
“(Baseball) is spreading like an epidemic,” the Chicago Tribune observed. “Everybody is batting balls and running bases—young, middle-aged and old,” stated the Cairo Democrat.
“At Peoria, ballclubs sprouted everywhere,” wrote Sampson, editor of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, who identified Captain M.A. Stearns, an Army recruiter in Peoria as one of those who encouraged adoption of the game by organizing the Olympic Base Ball Club in town.
Before he was shipped off to a new post in Fort Reno in the Montana Territory, Stearns did his best—as club president and as a pitcher—to help establish baseball in Peoria. Never mind that his team lost to the Celestial Club of Pekin by a 53 to 35 score.
As for the title, ballists were what they called ball players back them while the Dead Beats was just one of the many figurative names that teams took in those early days (such as the Lively Turtles of Rock Island). Muffins were players that weren't all that accomplished, said Sampson, adding that games between teams made entirely of muffins often drew large crowds.
Access to a train line was important for baseball teams that wanted to travel, Sampson told Steve Tarter. “With few exceptions, teams were in cities, towns and villages served by the growing railroad network in Illinois, soon to become the largest system of all the states in the union,” he said.
Peoria teams had the benefit of traveling by rail or river. “The Fort Clark Base Ball Club and supporters boarded a special car attached to a train for a match with Chillicothe while, a year earlier, Peoria’s club took the Peoria City Steamboat up the Illinois River to Lacon, promising passengers multiple recreation activities on board and on land,” Sampson noted.
You had your early heroes in this new game. Pana attorney J.C. McQuigg would later be recognized as the Babe Ruth of his era, the author said, “striking the ball so hard it was termed a ‘hummingbird,’ posing a danger to fielders who got in the way."
By 1870, the baseball craze had cooled. It had become established with more organized leagues taking over but the novelty was gone, said Sampson. So were the long accounts that newspapers had been running (that provided the basis for his book).
The battle for civil rights in the United States has always involved people willing to stand up and be passionate about what they believe. Two of those people were Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt. The alliance between the two women forms the basis for “The First Ladies” by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, a work of historical fiction that allows the reader to better understand what racial conditions were like in the 1930s and 1940s.
Mary McLeod Bethune was born in Mayesville, S. C. in 1875, the 15th child of former slaves Patsy and Sam McLeod, the first child in the family to be born free. Young Mary got to attend school even though her father had initially wanted her to join her brothers and sisters in the fields. After learning to read, Mary received the opportunity to attend the Scotia Seminary in Concord, N.C. and then the Moody Bible College in Chicago. She made the most of it, pledging to encourage education.
After marrying Albertus Bethune in 1898, she heard that there was no school for black children in Daytona Beach, Fla. She decided to start one. She opened the school in 1904 with five students. A year later the school had 100 students and three teachers. Later that school turned into Bethune-Cookman College.
Before FDR became president, Eleanor Roosevelt was impressed with Bethune the activist and educator. Roosevelt was drawn into a friendship with someone who shared the same beliefs in women’s rights and the power of education. The two women become fast friends, Benedict and Murray told Steve Tarter, confiding their secrets, hopes and dreams with each other.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president, the two women began to collaborate more closely, particularly as Eleanor moved toward her own agenda separate from FDR, a consequence of the discovery of her husband’s love affair with a member of his staff. Eleanor became a controversial First Lady for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights.
While Eleanor Roosevelt blazed a trail for equality at the highest levels of government, Bethune worked on the job front. Franklin Roosevelt appointed her to the National Youth Administration to help promote promote employment during the Depression. As a result she became the first African-American woman to hold such a lofty position in Washington.
“I think about the things that Mary went through,” said Murray. “Here she was one of the most powerful black Americans in the country but when she went to visit Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR in the White House she had to ride in the colored car on the train from Florida to Washington, D.C. She lived in both worlds.”
Benedict and Murray, both accomplished writers, collaborated last year on “The Personal Librarian” and have a third book of historical fiction planned together for release next year.
“It attacks old and young alike,” declared the Pike County Democrat in 1866. The Illinois newspaper wasn’t talking about a cholera epidemic but baseball fever.
Robert Sampson details the game’s early popularity in Illinois in his new book, “Ballists, Dead Beats and Muffins: Inside Early Baseball in Illinois.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, papers up and down the state were singing the praises of this new phenomenon called base ball (two words back then).
“(Baseball) is spreading like an epidemic,” the Chicago Tribune observed. “Everybody is batting balls and running bases—young, middle-aged and old,” stated the Cairo Democrat.
“At Peoria, ballclubs sprouted everywhere,” wrote Sampson, editor of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, who identified Captain M.A. Stearns, an Army recruiter in Peoria as one of those who encouraged adoption of the game by organizing the Olympic Base Ball Club in town.
Before he was shipped off to a new post in Fort Reno in the Montana Territory, Stearns did his best—as club president and as a pitcher—to help establish baseball in Peoria. Never mind that his team lost to the Celestial Club of Pekin by a 53 to 35 score.
As for the title, ballists were what they called ball players back them while the Dead Beats was just one of the many figurative names that teams took in those early days (such as the Lively Turtles of Rock Island). Muffins were players that weren't all that accomplished, said Sampson, adding that games between teams made entirely of muffins often drew large crowds.
Access to a train line was important for baseball teams that wanted to travel, Sampson told Steve Tarter. “With few exceptions, teams were in cities, towns and villages served by the growing railroad network in Illinois, soon to become the largest system of all the states in the union,” he said.
Peoria teams had the benefit of traveling by rail or river. “The Fort Clark Base Ball Club and supporters boarded a special car attached to a train for a match with Chillicothe while, a year earlier, Peoria’s club took the Peoria City Steamboat up the Illinois River to Lacon, promising passengers multiple recreation activities on board and on land,” Sampson noted.
You had your early heroes in this new game. Pana attorney J.C. McQuigg would later be recognized as the Babe Ruth of his era, the author said, “striking the ball so hard it was termed a ‘hummingbird,’ posing a danger to fielders who got in the way."
By 1870, the baseball craze had cooled. It had become established with more organized leagues taking over but the novelty was gone, said Sampson. So were the long accounts that newspapers had been running (that provided the basis for his book).
Public broadcasting wasn’t some grand plan that just happened. Josh Shepperd traces the setbacks, minor victories and hard work that had to take place before the experiment that is public broadcasting took shape.
His book, “Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting,” identifies the universities that built the first educational program networks in the 1930s.
You learn, for example, that Carl Menzer served as engineer, announcer and station manager at the University of Iowa radio station in Iowa City in those early days. He was also a one-man show on the air, willing to go to great lengths to meet federal criteria for a full broadcast day, said Shepperd. “To meet requirements for on-air programming, Menzer took to playing his violin for hours on end over the air,” said Shepperd.
Later Menzer got the idea of having other Big 10 schools supply programming that the stations could trade with one another, later to be known as the “bicycle network” as programs were "pedaled" between stations. Between the 1930s and late 1940s, Menzer was responsible for exploring different ways to relay and exchange information between radio stations. He also helped found the University of Iowa’s TV station.
While NPR has soared in recent years as the driving news force on radio, radio was only penciled in at the last second when Washington passed legislation that led to establishing public broadcasting networks in this country. Shepperd noted that originally the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 only mentioned television. The word “television” was crossed out and replaced by ”broadcasting” on the original bill, said Shepperd.
Mark Dawidziak has a new book out, this one on Edgar Allan Poe. It takes its place on the bookshelf alongside other volumes Dawidziak has written. It’s a varied lot with subjects such as Mark Twain (who he has portrayed on stage for 44 years), Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Matheson and classic TV shows like “Twilight Zone,” “Columbo,” and “Kolchak: the Night Stalker.”
In the new book, Dawidziak makes the point that Poe is completely misunderstood. “Our vision of Poe remains a blurry one, at best,” he writes. “The Poe we know—or think we know—is a grotesque caricature. He’s the sickly pasty guy with the sunken eyes, huddled over a manuscript in an attic, a raven perched on his shoulder. A red-eyed black cat sits among the cobwebs at one hand, a bottle of cognac at the other. We’ve reduced him to this cartoonish image, letting a small part of his literary output completely frame that distorted perception,” noted Dawidziak.
But Poe, famous for writing “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” was so much more than a creator of horror tales, Dawidziak told Steve Tarter. In his short life—Poe died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 40 in 1849—Poe’s largest output came as a literary critic and a tough one (nicknamed the tomahawk). He was also an accomplished poet.
“Poe had to find sources of income. He sought to support himself as a professional writer. That was not the norm. Most writers at that time had a day job such as being a teacher,” said Dawidziak.
As a result, Poe wrote a lot—enough to fill 17 volumes when his collected works were published in the early 20th century. “Poe was also funny. He wrote as much comedy as he did horror. We just don’t read the funny stuff,” he said.
Along the way, Poe also created the modern detective story, said Dawidziak, noting that the author "was a dedicated artist who was constantly revising manuscripts."
While Mark Twain’s image has expanded beyond “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” with the release of writings that showed “he had a lot to say about religion, and the damn human race,” the view of Poe has not similarly been enlarged, said Dawidziak.
“One of the reasons I wrote the book was while the publisher was interested in the mystery of his death, I was more interested in how he lived,” Dawidziak said.
Doug Howard and David Bianculli produced an entire book about endings, specifically television finales. The book, “Television Finales—from ‘Howdy Doody’ to ‘Girls’” (2018), is a collection of essays edited by Howard and Bianculli that catalog the last show in a series where an effort is made to provide closure, answer lingering questions or send characters off to different spin-offs.
The most famous TV finale came when “The Fugitive” added a late-summer two-part conclusion in 1967 allowing Richard Kimble to stop running, a watershed moment for television, said Howard.
But it wasn’t by grand design. “ABC wasn’t at all interested in ending ‘The Fugitive,’” said Bianculli, who also serves as a TV critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air. “But after they ran the finale in the dead of summer and outrated an appearance by the Beatles on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ three years earlier that had been the biggest TV event up to that point, the finale became common and almost mandatory,” he said.
The first finale of note came on “Howdy Doody,” a kids show that finished a 13-year run in 1960. That’s when the camera closes in on Clarabell the Clown, a character played by three different actors, none of whom had uttered a word in 13 years.
When Clarabelle says very quietly, “Goodbye, kids,” Howard suggests the effect might have proved alarming for some people. “If you had any kind of clown phobia, this is your worst nightmare come true,” he said, adding the scene is available on YouTube.
But finales are known to stir fans that have followed a particular program for years, said Howard, an English professor at Suffolk County Community College in New York. “Sometimes people don’t want to say goodbye,” he said.
Bianculli told Steve Tarter that the finale of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was “very Seinfeld-ian” That’s when creator Carl Reiner (who played Alan Brady on the show) announced plans to play Rob Petrie, the chief writer, in the final episode.
Sometimes finales don’t go over or come too late, noted Bianculli, the professor of TV studies at Rowan University. “The finale to ‘The Walking Dead’ was like the dog that caught a car that stopped. At one time it was the most-watched cable show and it was excellent over the first several years. But the show refused to die. It went on too long. I’m just not interested in any spinoffs at this point,” he said.
When it comes to TV finales, however, the hardest thing may just be keeping up. Both Howard and Bianculli admitted to looking forward to two finales this Memorial Day weekend—when “Barry” and “Succession” come to an end.
In writing "The Influencer Industry," Emily Hund, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, had a challenge: to explore the "increasingly-commercialized, social media-focused and sprawling internet environment" to find the influencers, the people that we go to to find truth or at least what we believe to be the truth.
"Amid the immense noise of social media content, who should be singled out as worth listening to?" That's the question that Hund posed.
What she found out is that the game has changed. In the internet's early years, there were bloggers who gained audiences, individuals who did an end run around traditional media to reach the public.
But as more money came into play, as advertising campaigns became involved, as marketers took action branding deals followed and the influencer industry grew at a startling rate, said Hund.
Today with "a massive pool of influencers" on the scene, Tik Tok plays a major role when it comes to the influencer industry.
"We've reached an existential turning point," Hund told Steve Tarter. The public is rightfully frustrated now but needs to aware of what has happened: "The mass media era of the 20th century became atomized in the 21st, personal stories and interactions became vehicles for commercial messages," she noted.
"Digital self-expression, and the degree to which it is considered 'real,' became tied to the shifting needs of profit-motivated companies," writes Hund.
If you believe western civilization is the result of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times, historian Naoise (pronounced Knee-sha) Mac Sweeney suggests you think again.
That concept is a powerful figment of our collective imagination, she says, delivering some of her evidence in the form of a new book, "The West: A New History in 14 lives."
How did she arrive at the 14 individuals she wrote about? "I just wanted to capture a range of personalities--not just kings and queens or great generals--but I wanted to get more of everyday people," Sweeney told Steve Tarter.
That's if people like Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq as-Sabbah al-Kindi, a Muslim philosopher, mathematician, physician and music theorist who lived in 9th-century Baghdad, could be called an everyday person.
Al-Kindi stirred Sweeney's interest, she said, the more she researched his work--hundreds of treatises from astrology to zoology. He touched on subjects as varied as the astronomy, jewelry and the tides, even writing about how to remove stains from clothing, said Sweeney.
Other figures in "The West" include Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century B.C., Phillis Wheatley, an 18th century African American poet, and Carrie Lam, "until very recently the chief executive of Hong Kong," she said.
The 14 characters cited by Sweeney span the millennia and the continents, representing different religions, varying levels of wealth and education, diverse traditions and nationalities. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed—and why we’ve misunderstood it for too long.
The bicycle has had anything but a smooth ride in the United States. As Robert Turpin tells it in “The First Taste of Freedom,” a history of how the bicycle has been marketed over the years in this country, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s. Bicycling was a phenomenon with adults riding both individually and in clubs. Women found cycling brought new freedom. Production boomed with some 300 manufacturers across the country producing bikes.
Production peaked in 1898 and 1899 with a million bikes produced annually, said Turpin. But just a few years later, the biking craze cooled. U.S. production of bicycles dipped to 200,000 a year by 1905, he said.
The arrival of the automobile at this time obviously played a big part in displacing the bicycle as a transportation wonder, said Turpin.
The U.S. military purchased a lot of bicycles in World War I but couldn’t really find an application for them other than to equip messengers with fresh wheels.
Bicycles enjoyed something of a upturn in the 1930s, Turpin told Steve Tarter, but the emphasis was more on nostalgia—a desire to recreate the golden days of the 1890s--rather than charting an exciting future.
After World War II, manufacturers finally gave up on convincing adults to ride bicycles, said Turpin. Instead the focus was on the youth market. “The bicycle became more of a toy. Replicas were popular,” he said, noting that one of the popular models in the 1950s was a Hopalong Cassidy bike complete with six-shooters mounted right behind the handlebars.
Turpin said a second bike boom came in the 60s and early 70s generated by the popularity of Schwinn’s Sting-Ray, the first bike with a “banana” seat and high-rise handlebars. With the arrival of the oil crisis in 1973, adults finally outpaced children as bike riders, he said.
Interest in exercise helped get bikes moving again in the later years of the 20th century with mountain bikes taking off after their early adoption in California, said Turpin. More recently, biking spiked during the pandemic when bikes became as hard to find as toilet paper.
Only now have biking stocks resumed to a normal level, said Turpin, a longtime bike rider, himself.
Today’s trends? The number of kids who once drove the bicycle market are in decline while electric bikes are on the upswing, he said.
"A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed."
That's the way David Sax's "The Revenge of Analog" starts off but that was 2016--light years ago since the intervening pandemic seemed to stretch time, itself. Sax's most recent effort, "The Future is Analog" was published in 2022.
"This book came out of the experience with the pandemic when everything in our lives --work, school or family reunion--went online," Sax told Steve Tarter.
"This was the future, the new normal" was the feeling at the time, he suggested, adding that folks later found out they wanted to do real things again--like going out to movies, concerts or restaurants.
Sax, who lives in Toronto, said business in the city still hadn't returned to what it was before the pandemic. "I was in a big office last week and it seemed pretty bustling but they said that at one time only 50 to 60 percent of the workforce was in the building," he said.
"I don't think any place is back to 100 percent. Everybody's experimenting now (with hybrid models balancing remote and in-office work). Unfortunately, you physically can't be in both places," said Sax.
"How do we strike the right balance between analog and digital?" That's the real message that Sax brings.
Samir Husni has the distinction of being known as "Mr. Magazine," a title bestowed on him by a grateful student in 1986. Having made magazines his focus as a professor at the University of Mississippi for 37 years before retiring last year, Husni is now the founder and director of the Magazine Media Center.
Husni told Steve Tarter that he picked up his love for magazines in his native Lebanon as a child, developing a love for publications involving ink and paper that has never wavered.
Husni recently donated his extensive collection of magazines--two truckloads worth--to his alma mater, the University of Missouri where they will be stored and maintained to serve students and those with an interest in media, he said.
Magazines, like newspapers, have gone through numerous changes in the digital age, said Husni. Consolidation of the companies that publish magazines has resulted in fewer titles coming to press, he noted.
While 535 new magazines hit the market in 1996, only 74 new titles appeared in 2022, noted Husni, pointing out that newsstands are also disappearing from the American scene.
Husni wrote the obit for the old-fashioned newsstand in 2014. That was the place that usually sold tobacco products along with magazines and newspapers. At that time he pointed to the new newsstands springing up in groceries and bookstores.
Now those outlets are shrinking while the average price of an individual magazine (now at $11) continues to climb, he said.
While the pandemic wiped out reading material in waiting rooms and airline magazines, subscription sales for a number of periodicals went up during that time, he said.
One of the trends in magazine publishing today is the bookazine, said Husni. "This is a book made to look like a magazine," he said. Subjects are chosen to grab public interest. It might be the Titanic or a rock group like Journey, anything that people might be willing to spend $14.99 on, Husni added.
When Bonnie Siegler found the movie film that her grandfather Jules Schulback, a successful Manhattan furrier and amateur filmmaker, had taken of Marilyn Monroe while in New York doing the famous blown skirt scene from "The Seven Year Itch," she knew she had something.
It turned out to be more than just a fascinating piece of cinema history (the only surviving footage of that legendary night in 1954) but a book, "The American Way," that Siegler co-authored with Helene Stapinski.
Her pursuit of details about her grandfather led to a remarkable piece of forgotten history bridging old Hollywood, the birth of the comic book, and the Holocaust.
Schulback escaped from Nazi Germany but as Stapinski and Siegler state, getting out of Germany was difficult and dangerous enough but getting his family into America posed another challenge.
Jewish people needed a financial sponsor to be admitted to the United States at that time. Stepping up to assist Jules and his family was a character by the name of Harry Donenfeld, a publisher of “girlie” magazines who really struck gold when he started publishing comics.
That led to yet another icon in "The American Way": Superman. While Donenfeld cashed in as publisher, the creators of the cartoon, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who signed over all rights to the "Man of Steel," were left frustrated in their efforts to take advantage of the comic's incredible success.
Other luminaries that are also part of "The American Way" include Billy Wilder, the director who made "The Seven Year Itch" along with classics like "Double Indemnity," "Sunset Boulevard" and "Some Like It Hot." Like Schulback, Wilder, who came to the U.S. with fellow countryman and actor Peter Lorre, also left a family in Nazi Germany.
While Siegler's grandfather was able to get his family out of Germany, Wilder never knew what happened to his mother until Siegler's own research pinpointed where she had been murdered by the Nazis.
The book, while focusing on a number of celebrities, has a serious side, following how Jewish citizens in Germany lost their freedom, then their businesses and finally their lives through the 1930s. Siegler points to parallels with rights that have been steadily eroded in the United States in recent years.
Sometimes it's hard knowing just how wild the Wild West was in this country. Cutting through the mythology that surround western heroes like Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill Cody is something that Steve Wiegand endeavors to do with "1876: Year of the Gun."
A longtime journalist for three California papers, Wiegand has devoted himself to writing books since 2010. With "1876," he's sifted through western history to provide an account for readers to better understand the situation.
"Sometimes the legends and the fact are inextricably intertwined. Sometimes what squeezes out is the truth," he said.
Wiegand debunks some of the stories surrounding Bat Masterson, George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James along with Earp and Cody but makes the point that the figures we know so well weren't phonies. "They did live dangerous lives. Hickok was shot and killed while playing poker at the age of 39. In the case of Bat Masterson, he had a dual life. On one hand he was a buffalo hunter, involved in shootouts and served for a time as sheriff of Ford County (where Dodge City is located). For the last 20 years of his life he moved to New York where he served as a newspaper editor and sports columnist and an expert on boxing," Wiegand told Steve Tarter.
Wiegand's research turned up the legends that might have been along with the celebrated characters that have become household words thanks to television and movie stardom.
"Bill Tilghman was a U.S. marshall and revenue agent who racked up 50 years in law enforcement, getting involved in more shootouts that Hickok, Earp and Cody combined, but you don't hear about him," he said.
Journalist Gloria Dickie, based in London where she serves as an environmental correspondent for Reuters, offers a superb study of the eight surviving species of bears with "Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future."
Recounting her travels in search of spectacled bears in Ecuador and Peru, sloth bears in rural India, pandas in China, sun and moon bears in South Vietnam, black and grizzly bears in the western U.S., and polar bears in the Canadian arctic, Dickie details the threats faced by each and profiles the conservationists who protect them.
Along with describes the horrific conditions under which caged sun and moon bears have their bile harvested for use in traditional Vietnamese medicine, she notes how sloth bears, the most dangerous of all bears, are facing habitat challenges in heavily populated India.
While the eight species live in different environments there's one thing they have in common: they're all in trouble. The panda is protected in captivity but is increasingly rare in the wild, she pointed out. The polar bear, meanwhile, is literally on thin ice when it comes to its future.
Dickie relates how bears have been mistreated over history despite occupying a special place in the culture. It's hard to come up with a bad bear literary figure with heroes such as Rupert, Paddington and Winnie the Pooh on the scene.
Baloo in Kipling's "Jungle Book" is described as a brown bear but rightfully should have been a sloth bear, states Dickie. "No other bear species inhabits the forests of Madhya Pradesh. He would likely have eaten termites and mahua (flowers), not nuts and roots. And Baloo would have been more inclined to disembowel Mowgli than to teach him the ways of the jungle."
Steve Tarter recalled a statement from Dickie's book that sums up the predicament bears face with a habitat that continues to shrink: "Without wilderness the grizzly would cease to exist. And without the grizzly, wilderness is tamed, deprived of its monarch."
Alexis McCrossen is a professor of history at Sothern Methodist University who cannot only tell you what time it is but tell you something about time, itself.
Her book, "Marking Modern Time" is a history of clocks, watches and other timekeepers in American life.
She notes that the public clock era flourished in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s. That was a period, she told Steve Tarter where, after the Civil War, cities across the country sought to build the biggest and best public clocks possible.
"The public clocks were a symbol of order, of legitimacy. Showing the wrong time might have suggested there were other problems about the enterprise displaying that clock," she said.
Clocks entered American homes as decorative pieces that had the ability to tell time.
"Connecticut clockmakers that used brass and other materials became very wealthy. Clocks became wildly popular after the Civil War," said McCrossen.
Watches came on during World War I but didn't really sweep the market until after World War II, she said.
Edith Wilson may have wielded more power than any first lady in U.S. history for a period during the second term of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency but, if she did, she never admitted it.
That’s part of the story that Rebecca Roberts tells in her new book called “Untold Power.”
Edith Wilson first met the president during Wilson’s first term. “She inherited a jewelry store when her first husband died in 1908. She was a wealthy woman of status. She was the first woman in Washington to get a driver’s license. She’d tool around D.C. in her little electric car.
While Woodrow, himself a widower, was taken with Edith right away, she took a little longer to accept his proposal. “She initially told him that she’d marry him if he lost (the 1916 election) but came around and said she’d marry him regardless of the vote,” Roberts told Steve Tarter.
While she never gave any interviews, Edith Wilson blazed trails in a lot of ways, said Roberts, who described the first lady as fascinated by politics.
When Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in October 1919, the president became bedridden. That’s when Edith stepped up as acting president although no formal acknowledgement was ever made. The physical problems that Woodrow Wilson suffered were kept from the public, the press and the president, himself, said Roberts. During this period of his incapacity, if you needed to see the president, you dealt with Edith, she said.
After Wilson left the White House in 1921, Edith covered her tracks and downplayed her role, emphasizing she was only the dutiful wife, said Roberts.
After his presidency, the Wilsons remained in Washington. Woodrow Wilson died in 1924 but Edith outlived him by 37 years, dying in 1961. Following her husband’s death, she returned to her role as wealthy widow, said Roberts, noting that her one focus throughout her life was to burnish her husband’s legacy whenever she could.
It’s easy to take the phenomenon of the Sunday paper for granted. Until just recently, the idea of a metro Sunday newspaper complete with color comics, special supplements and inserts landing on your porch with a resounding thud was the way of the world.
While the devastating decline in the nation’s newspaper industry has suddenly made us conscious that the world may not always have newspapers to sort through on a Sunday (or on any other day for that matter), Paul Moore and Sandra Gabriele have written “The Sunday Paper: A Media History” to provide a vivid account on how one of the most successful media stories—from both an artistic and business viewpoint—came to be.
Transcending the constraints of newsprint while facing competition from other media, Sunday editions borrowed forms from and eventually partnered with magazines, film and radio, inviting people to not only read but watch and listen.
“When we started in 2007, we would never have guessed how newspapers would be a thing of the past by the time we finished (“The Sunday Paper” was published last year by the University of Illinois Press), including the great American Sunday paper. But we already knew the art, fiction and fun of Sunday papers had always been precarious and ephemeral,” Moore and Gabriele wrote.
In their interview with Steve Tarter, the authors relate how syndication efforts that started late in the 19th century played a part in making the Sunday paper special. It wasn’t just about news, the very lifeblood of the newspaper, that made the Sunday effort outstanding, “the Sunday paper structured a different relationship between its world and public,” Moore and Gabriele noted.
“From the society and fashion pages to sporting and business reports, theater reviews, and listings, and feature stories about contemporary culture, Sunday supplements took advantage of a day of leisure to reflect upon pastimes and amusements,” the authors stated.
The death of newsprint is also part of the story here as newspapers, displaced first by “breaking news” broadcasts on radio and TV and then by Twitter and other social media, no longer own the public stage. Can a Sunday paper succeed in a digital world? Moore suggests that it would be an effort in nostalgia to try and reinstate a printed journal since our whole concept of a day of leisure has changed along with our media choices.
When you talk about great Chicago cuisine, you're talking about Italian beef sandwiches, deep dish pizza and the Chicago hot dog. Those are just some of what's covered in "Made in Chicago," a guide book to 30 different Windy City delicacies gathered by two Chicago journalists, Monica Eng and David Hammond.
While Eng is a reporter for Axios Chicago and cohost of the podcast Chewing, Hammond is the dining editor for Newcity/Chicago magazine.
The pair know their stuff. Hammond runs down several possible origin stories for the legendary Italian beef while Eng traces influences on the "culinary 10-car pile-up known as the Jim Shoe" to Greek, Italian, Jewish, African American, Pakistani, Palestinian/Jordanian, Mexican and stoner culture.
For the uninitiated, the jim shoe has corned beef, roast beef and gyros meat on a sub roll topped with giardiniera, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, mayonnaise, cheese and "a liquidy approximation of tzatziki."
The guide also identifies the places that sell the Chicago goodies that Eng and Hammond write about--like Fat Johnnie's Famous Red Hots in Marquette Park on Chicago's South Side, "a landmark of Chicago food greatness," noted Hammond.
Fat Johnnie's is believed to have originated the Mother-in-Law, a Chicago corn roll tamale in a hot dog bun, covered in chili, dressed like a dragged-through-the-garden Chicago hot dog, he stated.
Eng goes back to WWII and the transfer of some Japanese American citizens to Chicago to lay out the origin of Akutagawa--hamburger meat with chopped onions and green pepper, bean sprouts and scrambled egg served with a side of race and gravy.
The two writers also helped Steve Tarter understand the no-catsup provision on a Chicago hot dog although Hammond did say that some Chicagoans may have gone too far in their objection to the red stuff.
When you talk about the state of rural America, the story usually involves boarded-up storefronts and shrinking downtowns. Declines in jobs and population in small towns in Illinois and across America stretch back decades.
But Norm Walzer and Chris Merrett have just produced “Rural Areas in Transition,” a book that sees new hope for rural America, hope spurred on by technology.
The book shows that rural areas are in a major long-term transition and that local leaders who take advantage of these opportunities in their community and economic development strategies can create a very positive future for residents.
“We now have opportunities for people who live in places where they’d like to live and couldn’t in the past because they had to go to work every day,” said Norm Walzerwho founded theIllinois Rural Affairs Instituteat Western Illinois Universityin 1989.
“It’s debatable as to what’s going to happen in the next few years—whether companies will call people back to work in the office—but without question I think there’s going to be a segment of the population who will continue to work not in the office every day. They’re going to work from home, wherever,” Walzer said.
“That opens the opportunity for them to live elsewhere,” he said. In addition, Walzer said advances in telecommunications also allow telemedicine to serve rural citizens who may not live close to a medical facility.
Institute directorChris Merrettsaid Mattoon offers affordable, dependable broadband and also benefits from being located near an interstate highway and is a town with passenger rail service. Small towns need to examine what assets they have, he said. “Then the challenge is can you bundle them and market them to attract people?” said Merrett.
“I’m optimistic that if you can convince local places to proactively think about their future, come together to think about their future, great things can happen whether it’s setting up a cooperative grocery store, increasing broadband service or filling up empty storefronts in the downtown,” he said.
“We underestimate the ability of rural communities to make a positive change,” said Merrett, adding, “When a community makes a plan, it strengthens relationships within that community.”
Walzer and Merrett wrote two of the book’s 13 chapters. Other contributors include some of the nation’s top rural economic development specialists.
Rachel Koller Croft is on her first book tour …and loving it. A screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles, Croft has added novelist to her job description with the recent publication of “Stone Cold Fox,” athriller about an ambitious woman who wants to leave a dark past behind to marry an heir to one of the country’s wealthiest families but first must go toe-to-toe with a female adversary.
Croft shared “breaking news” with Steve Tarter that “Stone Cold Fox” had just been picked up as a possible TV series to feature her both as writer and executive producer.
But Croft didn’t settle into success immediately. After college (a 2008 graduate from the University of Minnesota), she headed west to California to make her mark, she said. “The first job I got there was a very popular celebrity gossip blog. I remember thinking then that I had made it but it really was not my calling,” said Kroft who moved back to Chicago “a little deflated about my writing dreams.”
“I needed a real job and ended up working in sales (in Chicago) which was pretty fortuitous for me. What people don’t tell aspiring screenwriters is that you have to go into a room and pitch yourself and your story so I’m actually very glad I got that work experience,” she said.
Her return trip to the Golden State turned out to be more productive. Using her own experience taking road trips to Nashville from Chicago with her girlfriend (both love country music), she fashioned “Torn Hearts,” a screenplay about two women musicians who travel to the Music City in a story blending country music and horror.
As she tours the country, Croft blends an extrovert’s delight with meeting new people with stories about her “Stone Cold Fox” characters which she described as “little monsters.”
“Burner” is the new action adventure novel, the 12th in the “Gray Man” series by Mark Greaney, but it could also describe the author’s career who’s definitely been on a hot streak in recent years.
“The Gray Man” was the most-watched movie of 2022, according to Netflix, and there’s now a second film in the works. Meanwhile Greaney keeps pouring out the novels. This year he’s due to turn out his 13th Gray Man story and the second in the Joshua Duffy series, a new character who debuted last year in “Armoured.”
Greaney got the idea for the Gray Man (Court Gentry) while traveling in Central America, he said. He saw an American at a bar and made up an entire back story that the man was a former CIA agent, living off the grid and taking jobs as they came.
As a collaborator with Tom Clancy in the last three novels Clancy wrote before he died, Greaney was steeped in the intricacies of writing the adventure novel, even continuing to pen Jack Ryan stories after Clancy's death (though Clancy's name still was prominent).
In “Burner,” Greaney ties in the Russian invasion of Ukraine into the action—not with any involvement in the Ukraine but in terms of Russian money laundering. A story right out of the headlines, as the movie trailers used to say. Greaney told Steve Tarter that it was a calculated gamble to write about a war that broke out last spring without knowing what was going to happen a year later.
As it turns out, the war goes on and Russian actions (and finances) have never been more newsworthy. Greaney scores again.
Writing books about international intrigue involves plenty of travel and Greaney noted he’s now visited 38 countries in the course of writing his novels. The most recent effort took him to Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, Milan and Zurich, he said.
In the course of the interview, Greaney revealed that his favorite action movie was "The Man From Nowhere," a gritty Korean film about a former assassin who befriends a little girl.
Jeff Karzen is a sportswriter who’s now telling the world what Peoria sports fans already know: that basketball plays a major role in the community.
A hotbed of talent since the 1980s, Peoria has produced a number of standout players, such as Shaun Livingston, A.J. Guyton, Marcus Griffin, and Sergio McClain – just to name a few. The city captured six high school state championships – including Manual High’s run of four straight championship titles from 1994-97 – and boasted four Illinois Mr. Basketball winners.
But Karzen’s book, “Playgrounds to the Pros: Legends of Peoria Basketball,” along with coverage of the game, also includes a view of Peoria’s South Side, the poor side of town where the income is low and the crime rate high. But the neighborhood has strong people--and talented players. He notes the positive effect basketball has had not only on this area but the entire region.
“It just kind of popped in my head that there might be some great stories to tell here that haven't been told before,” said Karzen, who pulls the curtain back on the great players and coaches that made Peoria a basketball hotspot.
The history of air travel in this country has been marked by a number of celebrated moments in history—the Wright Brothers’ first ascent, Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and the crash of the Hindenburg crash of 1937 (that effectively ended the airship era) are among the best known. But the air race of 1919 that drew 63 flyers in a competition that pitted them against each other in an effort to cross the country not once but twice might have escaped your attention.
John Lancaster’s “The Great Air Race” documents the effort of these air pioneers who competed at a time with planes that lacked the many tools that help navigate the skies today and before airfields were fully established in many parts of the country.
It was a time—just after WWI—when airplanes were being looked at for transporting mail. Billy Mitchell, a military man who saw airplanes as a future necessity, is profiled as the catalyst for a race that would promote the potential of flight—even at a risk.
As Lancaster told Steve Tarter, nine people died (two on their way to start of the race) out of 63 entries, a pretty grim percentage. While the race drew attention and crowds who welcomed the brave, young men who flew and worked on the planes (a mechanic was a valuable addition at a time when gas-engines had a tendency to misfire in flight), it also drew the ire of editorialists who condemned the whole thing as a publicity stunt, noted Lancaster.
Planes that had been used to engage in wartime encounters were not built to cover long distances. They also lacked instruments to help pilots when they faced blinding rain, fog or snow, all conditions faced in the 1919 race.
Lancaster also tells the story of Belvin Maynard who won the race, an expert flyer and navigator who was fortunate enough to avoid the storms that slowed other participants. While meticulous in his approach to the great race, Maynard may have gotten complacent. He was killed at the age of 29 when his plane crashed at an air show just three years later.
A pilot himself, Lancaster also included a chapter on his own flight in 2019, recreating the course the flyers took 100 years earlier. Despite the many improvements and safety precautions, danger still lurked.
“More than the wind or any other aspect of the weather, fatigue was my biggest challenge,” he wrote. “Landing at a satellite airport near Salt Lake City after a memorable flight over the steep forested canyons of the Wasatch Range, I skidded my turn to final approach and let my airspeed sink dangerously low. It was the same sort of low-altitude carelessness that had killed Dana Crissy and Virgil Thomas just a few miles away and a hundred years earlier, on the first day of the race.”
Joe Sawchak is a collection assistant for the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pa. We called him to talk about the hell pig, the prehistoric creature that was completely in charge of the planet for more than 10 million years.
You always have to wade through a lot of names when it comes to paleontology but don’t let that stop you from marveling at this specimen. A strange warthog-like creature (only a lot bigger) with four sets of teeth falls into the category of entelodonts.
It’s referred to as Dinohyus at the Carnegie Museum. That means “terrible pig” (now you can see where the hell-pig label came from). Oh yes, it’s also referred to by another name, Daedon, but don’t let that throw you; that’s just one of those apatosaurus/brontosaurus things where a creature of the past gets tagged with two names.
Whatever you call it, the hell pig must have done a lot of damage in its day.
We called Joe because his museum is home to what is probably the most complete, best-preserved fossil skeleton of this terrible pig that’s ever been discovered. In 1905, Carnegie Museum field collector T. F. Olcott unearthed this skeleton from the Agate Springs Fossil Quarry in Nebraska. But the museum has something else, something that’s no longer on display but is stored away in the museum’s Big Bone Room.
To snake a peek, check out the Carnegie Museum website with Joe's description athttps://carnegiemnh.org/dinohyus-terrible-pig-in-more-ways-than-one/
It’s a replica of the hell pig, made shortly after the museum put their entelodont skeleton display early in the 20th century. “To several members of the (vertebrate paleontology) staff, including myself, the model—lovingly known as the Hyus—is perhaps even more horrifying than the actual creature itself,” noted Sawchak in a blog on the museum site.
It’s the model’s eyes, said Joe. “They seem so ‘emotive’ or ‘human’ that it’s disturbing. It almost seems as though they’re staring right into your soul,” noted Sawchak.
If anyone ever had run into a real-life hell pig, it's disturbing to think about is what it might have done to a mere human. As big as a buffalo with a three-foot head full of teeth and an appetite for just about anything living or dead, this pig meant business. Thankfully, they exited the planet over 15 million years ago.
It was fun talking with Joe, a dinosaur fanatic who clearly loves his job, and the man who took us inside the Big Bone Room for a glimpse of the past.
Alice Boyes believes you can be more productive. You just need to learn what helps you innovate, produce, and flourish... without the burnout. Her book, “Stress-Free Productivity,” gives you the ability to formulate your own personalized system.
Now with more people than ever working outside the office, there’s a greater need than ever to be personally productive, the former clinical psychologist said. “People do need a strategy to cope with uncertain times,” she told Steve Tarter.
You can boost your own creativity just by trying, she said. “Creativity is easier to ignite than people think,” said Boyes.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all productivity plan, she said. The tricks that work for your colleague may not work as well for you. Or perhaps they don't work at all. The fact is that everyone has their own productivity quirks to make them work efficiently and effectively. They just don't know how to crack them, said Boyes..
So the Midwest is fly-over country, is it? Everything that’s worth anything is found on the U.S. coasts, is that what you think? Then you need to hear from Jon Lauck. His book, “The Good Country,” helps offset what some scholars’ have put out there. Lauck, who edits the Middle West Review and teaches history and political science at the University of South Dakota, serves up a more detailed picture of the American Midwest.
The American Midwest, by Lauck’s account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the 19th century. The region developed a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date.
The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity, the author noted.
The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest’s openness to women in higher education.
Lauck told Steve Tarter that the decline that's hit the newspaper industry across the country has hit the Midwest hard. "The Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch used to be major forces in American life but they've been cut back so much that they don't have the presence they used to have. We need to reverse that and give our region a stronger voice," he said.
If you can keep up with all the names, this is a prehistoric creature that may interest you. The entelodont, otherwise known as dinohyus or daedon, was a strange looking animal that spent almost 20 million years on the planet, finally going extinct about 17 million years ago.
There's a catchier name for this beast: hell pig. As paleontologist Scott Foss put it, this was a pig-like animal as big as a bison with huge teeth. "There was no other animal like it," said Foss, who did his dissertation on the hell pig at Northern Illinois University.
You can find an excellent entelodont skull at the Field Museum in Chicago, said Foss, who did most of his museum work there while working on his doctorate at NIU.
Foss compares the hell pig with a bear in that the animal ate a little bit of everything.
"A bear is an opportunist. It can take down a deer but it will also eat salmon, berries or insects," he said.
Likewise, the hell pig, with four different kinds of teeth in its huge mouth, could munch on flesh or vegetation. Foss believes the entelodont was a top predator/scavenger. Just as hyenas will steal a carcass from the lion, the entelodont had the tools to take any carcass it wanted, he said.
The fact that the creature roamed across America for millions of years is proof of its dominance but Foss, the division chief of education, cultural and paleontological resources with the Bureau of Land Management in Santa Fe, N.M., thinks the animal has been generally overlooked by the public when it comes to prehistoric predators.
"I don't understand why entelodonts aren't on the cover of every fossil book. Look at the face of that thing," he said.
After suffering a panic attack in a speaking engagement in front of some 100 people, Chris Bailey decided to investigate the cause of the anxiety he suffered. The result is his book, "How to Calm Your Mind."
For years leading up to the attack, Bailey, who's first book was "The Productivity Project," had been obsessed with the subject of productivity, the topic he was on stage to speak about.
Yet striving for accomplishment can make us less productive, said Bailey. "Researching and writing "How To Calm Your Mind" showed me that we become more productive when we leave the frenetic pace behind and instead work deliberately and calmly on what's truly important. Studies show that a standard eight hours of work can take around nine and a half hours when we're working anxiously--and that's a conservative estimate," he said.
Spend more time in the analog world versus digital, Bailey told Steve Tarter.
Be aware that the internet is loaded with distractions and our brains gravitate to what releases the most dopamine--superstimuli included. One of the things he advises is that people take a month-long "stimulation fast" to settle the mind.
"I follow a simple rule: if I want an experience to be meaningful or have depth, I do it in the physical, analog world. If I want something done efficiently, I do it digitally," he said.
"Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants." If that sounds like a science fiction story then you haven't talked to Caleb Scharf, author of "The Ascent of Information: How Data Rules the World."
One of the most unique features of the human race is the vast amount of information we carry around. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data.
Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us.
Come 2040, Scharf notes, unless we find new ways to store all our tweets and videos (or come up with a new energy supply) we're going to be in trouble.
In the meantime, Scharf, whose previous books include The Zoomable Universe, The Copernicus Complex, and Gravity’s Engines, suggests that everyone recognize that we have a problem and that the problem is us.
"Information wants to grow," Scharf told Steve Tarter. "That's kind of terrifying but if we can understand that maybe we can do a better job of maintaining our civilization and not ruining the planet," he said.
People need to think about the world in a different way. For example: Do you really need to post a picture of your sandwich?
Illinois is a state that brings a lot of variety and history to the table. "Illinois Trails & Traces" is proof of that.
Author Gary Marx and Dan Overturf team up to provide unique portraits of people and places across the state.
Marx is a journalist who worked for numerous newspapers including the Southern Illinoisian in Carbondale, Ill. and the Kansas City Star in Kansas City, Mo. Sadly, Marx passed away at the age of 70 in December 2022.
Overturf is the professor emeritus of photography at Southern Illinois University where he taught for 30 years.
The pair combined on a previous book, "A River Through Illinois," published in 2007.
This time around Marx and Overturf are on the trail for interesting characters and they find them, beautifully photographed by Overturf, with fascinating passages from Marx who knows how to get his point across in a succinct manner that allows one to sail through the book.
Overturf told Steve Tarter that he set up photographs of the individuals in the book the old-fashioned way, using lights and staging them in an environment that showcases their interest or work.
You'll think you know these people after you read about them and view the pictures.
Backroads and byways come back to life in a book that sheds new light on sites from Cahokia Mounds to Galena,
Todd Kashdan isn't preaching insubordination just to be a disruption. His approach is that insubordination, rather than be viewed merely as a negative exercise, is actually something than help societies to progress.
Kashdan, a professor of psychology at George Mason University, is talking about principled insubordination, challenging conventional wisdom and improving on it.
Most would-be rebels lack the skills to overcome hostile audiences who cling desperately to the way things are so Kashdan has supplied a guidebook.
His book is filled with history and stories to make his point. One of his examples is about basketball great Wilt Chamberlain foregoing success at the free throw line when he decided to try an underhanded approach for a season. But Wilt the Stilt thought people were making fun of his "granny style" and went back to the traditional overhand approach and, similarly, went back to missing free throws again.
Kashdan's point? It's not easy to go against the status quo--even if you're an NBA star.
Some of the author's suggestions include:
--Resist the allure of complacency.
--Produce messages that influence the majority– when in the minority.
--Manage the discomfort when trying to rebel
--Champion ideas that run counter to traditional thinking
Kashdan told Steve Tarter that his favorite band Fugazi was not only musically advanced but "lived their values." They never charged high prices for a concert or used the traditional record company approach, said Kashdan.
The authors want to point out how powerfully we are influenced by our perspectives and prejudices—our frames, noted Forbes magazine.
Humanity faces unprecedented challenges that threaten our very existence but don't give up on the human spirit--and intelligence, said De Vericourt in an interview with Steve Tarter.
To frame is to make a mental model that enables us to make sense of new situations. Frames guide the decisions we make and the results we attain. People have long focused on traits like memory and reasoning, leaving framing all but ignored. But with computers becoming better at some of those cognitive tasks, framing stands out as a critical function—and only humans can do it, said De Vericourt.
In an age where machines continue to advance, de Vericourt points out that "machines as we know them today can only work with data that's provided."
Remember that the Wright brothers, the fathers of modern aviation, ran a bike shop in Ohio, he said. They were normal people who used a design frame to come up with the first flight.
Around the world, there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a fraction erupt into violence, a fact too many accounts overlook. When hostilities do break out such as the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine, it's that rare case where factors have forced that most costly of actions, war.
"Unchecked leaders ignore the cost of war," said Christopher Blattman, referring to Vladimir Putin. Blattman's book, "Why We Fight," reminds us that enemies usually are almost always willing to split the pie than spoil it for everyone or struggle over thin slices.
A professor at the University of Chicago, Blattman doesn't just study warring states but street gangs that operate in places like Chicago and Medellín, Columbia.
"We need to understand why gangs are fighting," he told Steve Tarter. Some of the reasons that Blattman has run across include angry vendettas and the need to maintain a reputation.
Regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Blattman ventures that it might turn into another Kashmir, contested territory between India and Pakistan where the parties remain unable to agree on terms but have at least stopped fighting. "That allows kids to go to school again and farmers to plant crops," he said.
Instead of supressing a young person's curiosity about an individual who might be different, a parent should accept it, said Amber O'Neill Johnston, author of "A Place to Belong."
Turn the idea of being color blind on its head, she said. In "A Place to Belong," she helps families to honor their cultural heritage and champion diversity in the context of daily family life by:
• Fostering open dialogue around discrimination, race, gender, disability, and class
• Teaching “hard history” in an age-appropriate way
• Curating a diverse selection of books and media choices in which children see themselves and people who are different
• Celebrating cultural heritage through art, music, and poetry
• Modeling activism and engaging in community service projects as a family
Johnston, a homeschooling mother of four, told Steve Tarter that schools that lack diversity in their student makeup might consider a relationship with a sister school in order to help kids better understand and appreciate people who are racially and culturally different.
As enjoyable as the book, itself, is the lilting Scottish accent of author/artist Johanna Basford as she chats with Steve Tarter about "30 Days of Creativity."
Basford, an accomplished player in the adult coloring book world, has numerous titles to her credit but "30 Days" is an effort to let someone who may never have picked up a crayon to join in.
She suggests spending just 10 minutes a day--for 30 days--to follow along with her book to see what you can do.
"Once you start and get going, you'll be amazed at how much skill you have," she said.
Basford is a cheerleader for the inner artist in all of us. "Comparison is the thief of job. Don't doubt yourself," she urges.
"If you're worried about showing your work to people, you're showing it to the wrong people," said Basford.
"Forget about perfection. Just aim for progress," she said.
You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Zoe Chance, author of "Influence is Your Superpower," seeks to explain how you can rediscover the power that brings great ideas to life.
It's about giving that power to everybody, not just left in the hands of the power-hungry people in this world, Chance told Steve Tarter.
The author explained that the brain has two systems, one that makes an immediate, intuitive response and the other works on a more thoughtful response.
Chance calls that first system the gator, using the analogy on alligators she observed at Gatorland in Florida. "What you notice is how lazy they are," she said. Alligators won't bite on a chunk of meat thrown by them being creatures that can go a long time without eating, said Chance.
"Their dominant response is to ignore the situation," she said. The judge, on the other hand, represents a reasoned, thoughtful approach to a problem. But the problem is that, typically, people use the gator response 95 percent of the time, said Chance, whose class at Yale University is one of the most popular on campus.
After all, who doesn't want to be influential.2
Before you order that favorite pair of jeans, you may want to hear what Maxine Bedat has to say on what she found out about the clothing industry.
Did you know how many thousands of miles were involved or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold the item to get it to you?
Did you know that in the 1960s, about 95 percent of what Americans wore was produced in this country and now about 2 percent is?
Bedat makes the point that today's fashion industry operates with radical opacity, and it's only getting worse to disguise countless environmental and labor abuses.
In "Unraveled," Bedat sets off to follow the production of a pair of blue jeans from cotton field to landfill, the life of the garment.
In doing so, she explores factories in China where chemicals banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms.
Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines.
Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pushed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them.
Bedat reminds us that the Levis brand, so very American in its heritage, and one that once employed thousands in Texas and California, has now moved all production offshore.
The author told Steve Tarter that it wouldn't take much to allow for workers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to earn a living wage for their labors while some of the wealthiest people in the world derive some of their income from the fashion industry.
CATEGORIESBusiness & Economics - Industries - Fashion & Textile Industry
Business & Economics - Green Business
Technology & Engineering - Environmental - Waste Management
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR* MBMaxine Bedat
MORE ABOUT THE NARRATOR* MBMaxine Bedat
A noted British historian whose previous books includes volumes on Churchill and Napoleon now turns to the "The Last King of America," his book, published in 2021, about George III.
Often dismissed as a buffoon--a heartless and terrible monarch with few, if any, redeeming qualities--George deserves better, notes Roberts.
The best-known modern interpretation of him is Jonathan Groff's preening, spitting, and pompous take in "Hamilton," Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway hit. But this deeply unflattering characterization is rooted in the prejudiced and brilliantly persuasive opinions of eighteenth-century revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, says Roberts.
The rebels needed to make the king appear evil to achieve their own political aims, Roberts told Steve Tarter.
George III was in fact a wise, humane, and even enlightened monarch who was beset by talented enemies, debilitating mental illness, incompetent ministers, and disastrous luck, stated the historian.
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Any given day brings a never-ending list of things to do. And if you're Madeleine Dore, you're putting that list of tasks on paper.
Looking to get organized? There’s the work thing, the catch-up thing, the laundry thing, the creative thing, the exercise thing, the family thing, the thing we don’t want to do, and the thing we’ve been putting off, despite it being the most important thing.
Even on days when we get a lot done, the thing left undone can leave us feeling guilty, anxious, or disappointed. Is that you? Then it might help to listen to Dore, author of "I Didn't Do the Thing Today."
After five years of searching for some secret to productivity, Dore finally discovered there isn’t one. Instead, she came to the conclusion that we’re being set up to fail. She talks to Steve Tarter about taking productivity off its pedestal.
Want to catch a break from your self? Stop beating yourself up for what you haven't accomplished and embrace the joyful messiness and unpredictability of life. That's Madeleine's message.
China is one of the world’s most powerful nations but just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few. In "Kingdom of Characters," Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.
Her book follows the innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao’s phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell.
Without their efforts, China might never have become the dominating force we know today, noted Jing Tsu.
One has to consider history when looking at the Chinese language since the country's written characters date back 5,000 years, she told Steve Tarter.
Paulina Porizkova found fame as a supermodel, gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1984.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Porizkova married Ric Ocasek, leader of the Cars rock group.
Her book, "No Filter," reveals what she went through growing up, achieving success (she was the face of Estee Lauder in 1989) as well as her long marriage to Ocasek that ended in divorce--and, after Ocasek's death, betrayal.
She told Steve Tarter that being famous was like being in a soap bubble. "You see out but you can't join in," she said.
"What people don't realize is that fame makes you unbelievably isolated. If you're someone who doesn't mind being isolated, that's fine but if you're a person like me that likes to be with people, it can be terribly confining," said Porizkova.
Ken Zurski’s new book, “Unremembered 2,” continues the author’s fascination with once-famous individuals who no longer find themselves in the limelight.
This collection focuses on “artists, actors, actresses and influencers,” he said.
It's the fourth book for Zurski, who's been offering up traffic reports on Peoria radio since 2003. When he's not checking the activity on central Illinois highways and bridges, Zurski's doing research and writing.
His previous books include “The Wreck of the Columbia” (2012), “Peoria Stories” (2014) and “Unremembered,” the first volume of once-famous people now all but forgotten by time that was published in 2018.
In "Unremembered 2," Zurski offers portraits of a wide variety of people who performed in the late 19th and early 20th century. Among the characters encountered: Felix Nadar, the Frenchman who took flight in a balloon to pursue aerial photography; Isadora Duncan, the dancer who was described by a New York newspaper as "some will call her blessed, others will call her names," and Sada Yacco whose Japanese troupe performed 369 performances in 123 days at the 1900 Paris Exhibition.
Zurski said he’s already at work on “Unremembered 3,” another volume of stories he hopes will blow the dust off past accomplishment, allowing a new generation to take note.
Bob McChesney, professor emeritus of communication at the University of Illinois, and Wisconsin journalist John Nichols collaborated to write "People Get Ready" in 2016, a book that talked about the consequences of the technological revolution.
To follow that up, McChesney and Nichols wrote a piece last year for the Columbia Journalism Review on a dramatic proposal, the Local Journalism Initiative.
McChesney spoke with Steve Tarter about the latest proposal, an idea he feels is so important that the very future of democracy in the United States hangs in the balance.
"The tsunami of misinformation, and the extent to which it now permeates our politics, results from a much larger problem," said McChesney. "It's the collapse of local journalism as a viable institution in cities, villages and towns across the nation."
"Unless the collapse of local journalism is addressed directly and successfully, it is impossible to see how the threat of a more authoritarian, even fascistic, future can be subdued--or put another way, how functional self-government and the rule of law can survive," he stated.
McChesney proposes an initiative that will establish well-funded, competitive, independent, locally based and uncensored nonprofit news media in every town, city and county in the United States.
He expands on that idea in this interview. For more information on the initiative:
https://www.freepress.net/sites/default/files/2022-03/to_protect_democracy_recreate_local_news_media_final.pdf
Most of us have heard about Bob Welch, the charismatic CEO of General Electric, the American company that embodied innovation and industrial power throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.
What most of us didn’t know until William Cohan wrote Power Failure,” is that Welch who, for 20 years, masterminded the firm that once claimed to “bring good things to life,” enjoyed many successes but he may have made his biggest mistake in the selection of his successor.
“CEOs make a difference,” Cohan told Steve Tarter. In his book, Cohan not only covers Welch's rise to power at the company and follows the many deals he pulled off but involves the reader in the selection process of the person to fill his shoes, profiling the three major candidates in exacting detail.
Jeff Immelt, Welch’s handpicked successor, ran into difficulties immediately because no sooner was he in the CEO chair than 9-11 happened, an event that cost General Electric dearly.
Along with having two GE employees killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Immelt canceled all scheduled commercials on GE-owned NBC for three days, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars. GE had also insured 7 World Trade Center and all four airplanes used in the attacks.
That was just the beginning of a downturn for GE.
Immelt lasted 17 years before he was fired. General Electric, after a 129-year run, was broken up into three separately traded public companies in November 2021. What happened to an institution often viewed as the corporate superstar of American business?
Cohan spent three years researching the book, talking to executives and individuals close to the company to tell that story.
Astrologer Nadine Jane said the 750-page guide she recently published combines astrology with the tarot and numerology.
"It was the hardest thing I've ever done," she told Steve Tarter, noting that the book took a year-and-a-half to complete.
Weaving together astrology, tarot and numerology into a one-page summary for each day of the year was difficult enough, let alone making the information "accessible to the novice or skeptic," she said.
Nadine Jane, who often provides custom astrological readings for celebrities, said she wanted to provide a guide for the average person with "Magic Days."
It's not just a book for the astrology fan but for the novice looking for a first introduction to spiritual practices or lost soul seeking some direction in life, she said.
He didn't write a professional word until he was 40. Jerry Saltz turned to driving a truck after a failed career as an artist (his CB handle was the Jewish Cowboy). When he turned to writing, Saltz did it with a vengeance. In 2018, he received the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Saltz's new book, "Art is Life," is a showcase of why he received that prize, a compilation of columns written over the past 22 years, a perfect (and accidental) reflection of the 21st century.
It's a collection where Saltz calls Robert Rauschenberg the American Picasso, that Philip Guston reinvented the sublime and recalls Beauford Delaney, a great black artist in his day who's now all but forgotten.
As one of fewer than a dozen paid art critics (Saltz's own calculation) left in the U.S. in the era that's seen the dramatic decline of print, Saltz is senior art critic for New York magazine. He covers the ever-changing New York art scene with flair and abandon.
But, as he told Steve Tarter, he's a creature of the Midwest, growing up in suburban Chicago. In his book, Saltz relates being a teen drawn to the protests during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago. When folks saw Chicago police clubbing white kids rather than people of color that's when "my right-wing stepmother and all her friends turned against the war," he wrote.
Art is like a movie, Saltz told Tarter. "There's no right way to look at a movie or art. There's no way to prove that Leonardo Da Vinci is better than the calendar art you have in your house," he said.
"The story that art is telling you (is something ) you already know," said Saltz.
Undeterred by changes in print media, Saltz encouraged people to view his Instagram account where he regularly posts pictures, "weird politics and naughty things, as much as I can."
Minda Harts has addressed the matter of racial equality before. Her previous books include ”The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table” as well as “Right Within: How to Heal from Racial Trauma in the Workplace.”
Her new book, “You Are More Than Magic,” is addressed specifically to teenage women of color. Harts relates her own experience growing up to make the point that women of color need to be advocates for themselves.
Harts, an assistant professor of public service of NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, is the founder of The Memo LLC, a career development company for women of color. She also has a weekly podcast for women of color, “Secure the Seat.”
“We can’t control anything but ourselves,” Harts told Steve Tarter in an interview where she emphasized that she wants to bolster the confidence of young people as they get out in the world. “Say what you mean without saying it mean,” Harts suggested.
She takes on the imposter syndrome, that nagging feeling we sometimes have that we don’t belong. One needs to see oneself as an asset in order to push back negativity, said Harts.
She found her voice on prom night years ago, describing an incident where she and her date waited for an hour for a meal at the restaurant only to have the meal served cold. When presented the bill, she came to a conclusion: “I thought I work too hard for my money at Dairy Queen,” she said and complained about the situation to the manager. As a result, they didn’t have to pay. “I think we both were surprised but that’s when we realized one has power in certain situations,” she said.
Harts said make sure that what you’re advocating is something that really matters to you and not just a passing interest. She also makes a point of mentioning the need for courage. “That’s fear that’s said its prayers,” she noted.
“It’s Not TV” by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Despite the title, “It’s Not TV” by Felix Gillette and John Koblin chronicles one of television’s great success stories.
It’s been 50 years since what started as a small cable channel blossomed into what has become a quality showcase for a medium that’s not always been about quality.
In this interview with Steve Tarter, Gillette talks about the “HBO Shrug,” an expression for how the network put distinctive programming before the bottom line, allowing creative folks to do their thing without interference such as allowing David Chase to make his mafia series in New Jersey with all the costs that come with location shooting instead of on a Hollywood soundstage.
Everyone has their favorites but HBO put its mark on the TV landscape with shows like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” “The Wire,” "Game of Thrones" and many others.
Gillette talks about how, early in the 21st century, HBO considered buying a little DVD service called Netflix and why HBO’s east coast executives nixed the deal.
He also talks about an original movie that HBO was developing in the early 2000s that was going to focus on the battle between Donald Trump and Steve Wynn over an undeveloped property in Atlantic City. Missed that, you say? That’s because the movie never got made. Trump got wind of the plan, said Gillette, and had dinner with director Danny DeVito, convincing him to back out.
Now in the age of streaming, HBO faces competition on all fronts from companies with big budgets for projects. Gillette talks about how the network is at yet another crossroads and what might lie ahead.
Joel Richard Paul’s latest book explores the impact of Daniel Webster, a man often considered one of the greatest orators of the 19th century, but also sheds light on American history along the way.
For example, 45 years before the South seceded from the union, the New England states contemplated such a move. Outraged over the loss of critical trade with England due to President James Madison's initiation of the War of 1812, New England representatives met in Hartford in 1815 to debate the measure. As it turned out, cooler heads prevailed, trade finally returned and order in the union was restored.
That’s just one of the insights Paul shares in “Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism,” a book about the New Hampshire lawyer who turned politician when he moved to Boston.
“Daniel Webster was willing ultimately to sacrifice his own political ambitions (he was a four-time candidate for president) in order to save the union,” Paul told Steve Tarter.
Webster’s support of the Compromise of 1850—where the west was declared slave-free in return for the northern states agreeing to enforce fugitive slave laws—cost him the backing of members of his own party in Massachusetts, a state that vehemently opposed slavery, said Paul.
Even though Webster opposed slavery, himself, he made the point that the only way to eliminate it was as a union, a stance that Abraham Lincoln also took. “Lincoln and Webster were political allies. Webster shaped Lincoln’s thinking,” the author said.
Webster saw his speeches and writings published widely. For years after his death in 1852, schoolchildren were taught to recite excerpts from his speeches, said Paul, pointing out that Webster's stirring rhetoric convinced Americans to see themselves as a nation bound together by a government of laws, not parochial interests.
World War II is often recalled as that one great war, an engagement between the forces of good and evil that called upon this country to unleash the arsenal of democracy to thwart fascism and annihilate the concept of Nazism.
But what we don’t often recall is that while every able-bodied individual was called on to serve his country in this time of need, some of the most able-bodied Americans stepped up to help the cause and were turned down—because of the color of their skin.
That’s just one of the stories that Matthew Delmont relates in “Half American,” a book that documents the battles that black Americans fought before they could be sent overseas—to enlist, to survive basic training and then to accept secondary roles when the military, bowing to pressure, finally put black soldiers into service.
Delmont said it took seven years of research to construct “Half American.” He reported that black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender were great resources on black America’s involvement in WWII.
“The black press has always understood itself to be a fighting press,” he told Steve Tarter. “They’ve always said they’re fighting on behalf of black Americans. During WWII they were fighting against racial discrimination in the military and defense industries,” he said.
“They were front and center calling on FDR, the military and politicians to be accountable, to recognize that black soldiers were catching hell in these Army bases in the South,” said Delmont, who spelled out the large—and largely ignored—role that black Americans wound up playing in the war.
“Black Americans, by and large, were not in combat but placed in supply and logistical roles,” he said. Delmont points out that supply lines like the Red Ball Express that served Allied troops in Europe made the difference when it came to keeping troops engaged. “WWII wasn’t just a battle of strategy but a battle of supply,” he said.
While the black press promoted a Double Victory campaign, calling for wins over America’s enemies and racism at home, it was all but ignored by the white press, said Delmont. “When it was reported on, it was critically as some viewed black Americans fully behind the war effort, that blacks were asking too much by asking for equality.”
Delmont also cited the role black Americans played in two of the biggest road projects during the war, the Alaskan Highway and the Ledo Road in Asia. Under some of the most difficult conditions on Earth, black Americans made up an estimated 60 percent of the work force in both projects.
Talk of democracy being endangered is fashionable these days. It’s easy to be alarmed but Yascha Mounk says there are reasons to be optimistic. In “The Great Experiment,” Mounk spells out his reasons: “Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly,” he said.
Achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world and is the greatest experiment of our time, said Mounk.
Mounk said societies have long suffered from domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are pessimistic of a harmonious outcome but Mounk said the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better in the future. There is real reason for hope.
“It could go wrong in all kinds of ways but in the United States, we’ve made some real progress,” he told Steve Tarter.
It is up to us and the institutions we build whether different groups will come to see each other as enemies or friends, as strangers or compatriots. To make diverse democracies endure, and even thrive, we need to create a world in which our identities come to matter less—not because we ignore the injustices that still exist but because we have succeeded in addressing them said Mounk..
Scanning the globe, Mounk said there are no perfect democracies to emulate and that nobody is doing any better at it than the United States.
We need to reject politicians who are unwilling to compromise and try to pit groups against one another, he said.
You know about Sears, America’s favorite store until it wasn’t. So how is Sears an example of quitting as cited in Annie Duke’s book, “Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away”?
People know about Sears, the pioneering catalog store that rose to become the nation’s powerhouse retail establishment, accounting for 1 percent of the country’s Gross National Product in 1950, said Duke.
They also know what happened in later years when the store faced competition from the likes of Walmart, Target and others. What folks don’t always recognize is that Sears also spawned Allstate Insurance, the Dean Witter stockbrokerage (later bought up by Morgan Stanley), the Discover card and the Coldwell Banker real estate firm, she said.
Where does quitting come in? Sears quit the wrong thing, said Duke. They chose to tough it out with retail in the 90s when they should have stayed with the financial services side of the business.
Quitting has a negative connotation, Duke told Steve Tarter. “If I call you a quitter, it’s like calling you a loser,” she said.
But quitting at the right time is not only appropriate, it gets you to your goals, said Duke. “They say, ‘Winners never quit and quitters never win,’ but winners quit a lot. They quit all the stuff that’s not working so they can stick to the things that are,” she said.
Duke, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, also serves as co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit that seeks to held kids K-12 make better decisions in life, she said.
Looking back now, the story of what took place in Donald Trump’s White House during 2020 seems like a dream--or nightmare. The events passed by us on television while we were all hunkered down during the pandemic. Two Washington Post reporters looked into that year a little further with interviews of 140 people.
Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker wrote “I Alone Can Fix It,” a book published in 2021. Old news? With hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection still going on, the book serves as a reminder of the amazing and upsetting events that took place that year.
What was really going on around the president as a government failed to contain the coronavirus and over half a million Americans perished? The authors also focus on who was influencing Trump after he refused to concede an election he had clearly lost and spread lies about election fraud.
Leonnig told Steve Tarter in the 2021 interview that she never covered anything like the Trump presidency in 20 years of reporting at the Post. “There’s nothing that came across my plate like this. It was like a firehose times ten,” she said.
Along with relating the many difficulties that occurred in the 2020 White House, Leonnig made a point of recognizing what made Trump a winner in the first place when he upset Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
While acknowledging that no one was more surprised than Trump, himself, to have attained the presidency, Leonnig outlined what she felt carried the Republican standard bearer to victory: convincing rural America and those who felt they were being ignored in Washington that he would be their defender, she said.
Marshall Allen has a message for you: get ready to fight.
His book, "Never Pay the First Bill," urges consumers to know their rights and understand what you’re up against—namely the nation’s healthcare system.
“Our healthcare system is exploiting our sickness for profit,” Allen told Steve Tarter in this 2021 interview.
“It’s okay to make a profit and we want to reward excellence but what we have too often in the American healthcare system is profiteering,” he said.
“You have businesses creating schemes to take more of our money than they should and a lot of schemes are very deceptive,” said Allen, who’s been covering the healthcare scene for 16 years as a reporter.
“I’m trying to help people understand how these schemes have been working against them,” he said.
Allen said the consumer must be constantly vigilant. “No one else is coming to our rescue,” he noted.
Allen’s guerrilla guide includes the following:
--Analyze and contest your medical bills, so you don't pay more than you should;
--Obtain the billing codes for a procedure in advance;
--Write in an appropriate treatment clause before signing financial documents.
If you want to know more about crime fiction, Martin Edwards is your man. His latest book, “The Life of Crime” is an extensive (over 700 pages) history of the subject, sectioned off by books, radio, stage, movies and TV.
When he’s not recording history, he’s madly writing—mystery novels, short stories and articles. He’s also president and archivist for the prestigious Detection Club, a British group of writers founded in 1930 by folks like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
Speaking from his native England, Edwards took time away from his writing to talk about, what else, crime novels with Steve Tarter.
How did he get started with a life of crime, Tarter asked? Edwards, now 67, said when he was eight he saw a movie, not a terribly good one, but one that was based on an Agatha Christie story. From that point on he was hooked.
“From that moment on, the two things I wanted to do were to read lots and lots of crime fiction and also to write it. I had a very specific ambition to be a crime novelist. I’m very lucky that I’ve been able to achieve that,” said Edwards.
You might be interested to know that one of the founding members of the Detection Club was A.A. Milne, the author of “Winnie-the-Pooh.” Milne joined the illustrious group even though he only wrote one crime story, “The Red House Mystery,” a book that sold well in England, Edwards said.
Whether the writers are new or old, Edwards believes there’s crime novel to fit all tastes.
One of his next projects is a Liverpool mystery set in the 60s that may involve a certain musical group, Edwards suggested. He can’t say any more. It is a mystery, after all.
Linda Flanagan paints a vivid picture of the “Little League parent” in her book, “Take Back the Game.” It was herself. She writes about being so proud of her son’s basketball skills before realizing that she’d gotten too caught up in being a super-fan.
Parents need to back off from their kids’ games, said Flanagan, a former track coach, herself. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with sports, she said. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life.
But youth sports have changed over the last 25 years, said Flanagan. They no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Instead, unbeknownst to most parents, kids who play competitive organized sports are more likely to burn out or suffer from overuse injuries than develop their characters or build healthy habits.
In “Take Back the Game,” Flanagan writes about the youth sports industry that’s grown up, capitalizing on parents’ worry about their kids’ futures while selling the idea that more competitive play is essential in the feeding frenzy over access to colleges and universities. Flanagan delves into a national obsession that has compelled kids to specialize year-round in one sport, increased the risk of both physical injury and mental health problems, encouraged egregious behavior by coaches and parents while reducing access to sports for low-income families.
If you want a good example of how to handle sports, check out Norway, Flanagan told Steve Tarter. It's a country with "a culture geared toward children, their development and enjoyment of sports versus our system which is based around adults, adult supervision, seriousness, and competition," she said.
Starting about 15 years ago, television had to adjust to a new world. No longer did the medium have the audience to itself.
Cory Barker, a communications professor at Bradley University, explores what happened when TV collided with social media and the internet in his book, "Social Media: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture."
Barker outlines how campaigns were set up for people to chat online while watching specific programs, where exchanges among viewers took place on Twitter as a show unfolded.
There's less of that now, Barker noted, now that so many streaming networks have developed. The internet came and conquered.
But the streamers can't afford to celebrate, said Barker. "This has been a bad year for every streaming network," he told Steve Tarter, referring to reduced subscriber lists at almost every level.
Barker also weighs in on the future of newspapers, noting that the college students he interacts with on a daily basis generally treat news as a commodity they're able to get free online.
He also points to the stratification occurring across the nation where big operations like the New York Times continue to expand offerings and influence while local media outlets have to make do with less and less.
William Stixrud, the co-author with Ned Johnson, of “What Do You Say?”, talks about communicating with teenagers.
If you’re a parent, you’ve had a moment–maybe many of them–when you’ve thought, “How did that conversation go so badly?”
At some point after the sixth grade, the same kid who asked “why” non-stop at age four suddenly stops talking to you. The good news is that effective communication can be cultivated, learned, and taught, said Stixrud. As you get better at this, so will your kids, he adds.
Stixrud , who with Johnson have 60 years combined experience talking to kids one-on-one, based the title of their book on the most common question they get when out speaking to parents and educators: “What do you say?”
While many adults understand the importance and power of philosophies behind the books that dominate the parenting bestseller list, parents are often left wondering how to put those concepts into action. Stixrud talks about how to engage in respectful and effective dialogue, beginning with defining and demonstrating the basic principles of listening and speaking. Forty percent of children admit to being estranged from a parent at some point in their lives, said Stixrud, citing research. That often comes from misunderstandings based on a failure to communicate between parent and child. Stixrud also cautions about technology overload—for both parent and child.
A friendship famine? Along with everything else we’ve had to put up with for the past two years? We’re a lonely society--in need of friendship, says Marisa Franco, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland and the author of “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends as an Adult.”
How do we make and keep friends in an era of distraction, burnout, and chaos, especially in a society that often prizes romantic love at the expense of other relationships? Franco says it’s important to understand how we bond these days. If your friends aren’t texting you back it’s not because they hate you.
To make and keep friends you must understand your attachment style—secure, anxious, or avoidant. That’s the key to unlocking what’s working (and what’s failing) in your friendships.
Making new friends, and deepening longstanding relationships, is possible at any age—in fact she says, it’s essential. The good news: there are specific, research-based ways to improve the number and quality of your connections using the insights of attachment theory and the latest scientific research on friendship.
Guys, she tells Steve Tarter, sometimes have a harder time bonding with another man due to fears that it will be taken as a sign of being gay.
But friendship is important enough to find forms of connection, said Franco.
Need Einstein’s theory explained? How about an evaluation of Sir Isaac Newton’s contributions to physics?
Sean Carroll’s your man. His new book, “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe,” offers up equations, history and some basic math principles but seeks to do it in an easy-to-understand manner.
But then you may already know about Carroll. He’s written a number of books such as “From Eternity to Here” and “The Particle at the End of the Universe” as well as accumulating over 4 million views on his YouTube series where he routinely explains mind-boggling concepts.
Carroll decided on a career in physics at the tender age of 10, reading books at his local library on black holes and the Big Bang Theory. “I thought that was the most interesting stuff in the universe,” he told Steve Tarter.
Now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Carroll has some counsel for those of us who have stressed about the concept of eternity or the miracle of life. “I understand it can be disturbing to contemplate some of these ideas but nature doesn’t care,” he said.
As a frequent consultant to Hollywood, Carroll said he understands the primary purpose of a film is entertainment “but when things obey the laws of physics, the reality can get people more immersed in the movie,” he said.
Dr. Dale Bredesenis internationally recognized as an expert in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, and the author of “The First Survivors of Alzheimer’s” (2021).
In “First Survivors,” Bredesen outlined the revolutionary treatments that are changing what had previously seemed like the inevitable outcome of cognitive decline and dementia, presenting the stories of the first survivors of Alzheimer’s themselves.
These first person accounts detail the fear, struggle, and ultimate victory of each patient's journey. They vividly describe what it is like to have Alzheimer's. They also drill down on how each of these patients made the program work for them.
Bredesen suggests people get checked in advance to offset an onset of Alzheimer’s. "Just as when you’re over 50 you should get a colonoscopy, when you’re over 45 you should get a cognoscopy which, by the way, is far more pleasant than a colonoscopy,” he told Steve Tarter. .
“With early detection and prevention, we can get make this a rare disease,” said Bredesen.
Inspired by none other than naval historian and literary agent Jim Hornfischer, Greg Wahl applied a flash fiction approach to what World War Two was about at some of the Pacific Islands that became famous as theaters of war.
Wahl, a former dentist who makes his home in Peoria, said a professor friend of his encouraged him to take on the project that involved two years of research on eight islands where fighting took place in WWII.
Hornfischer, who died in 2021, had originally suggested that Wahl take on some 40 battles, a feat that Wahl said could have taken decades. Hornfischer, the author of books like “The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-45” and “Neptune’s Inferno: the U.S. Navy at Guadacanal,” was a military expert whose accounts merited awards from the Naval Historical Foundation.
Wahl, on the other hand, offers up wartime stories without all the historical details that most relate to the subject. “I focus on the people, the people who fought the battles,” he told Steve Tarter.
By focusing on those who fought, "A Time of Islands—Stories of the Pacific War Isles" communicates personal moments at a time when life wasn’t assured, when the world was up for grabs.
The title of “Build,” a children’s book by Chris Sickels might also describe the Indiana native’s career. From puppetry to stop-motion animation, Sickels is always building in order to express himself.
“I started in illustration and now I focus on 3D and animation,” said Sickels, who credited Terry Martin, his art teacher, with setting his career in motion. “In rural Indiana, you didn’t just go off and become an artist,” he said.
Sickels now works out of his own studio based in Greenfield, Ind., called Red Nose Studio, working on a variety of projects as a freelance illustrator and fulltime builder. A taste of the Sickels style is available on YouTube.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Sickels talks about the toy bulldozers, dump trucks, and cranes he constructed in the making of “Build.”Those models were made from “chunks of scrap wood, bent nails and springs,” he said to make “wonky versions of those machines.”
Encouraged to create recipes without dairy and meat when her husband’s research pointed to the impact of diet on reversing disease, Ann Esselstyn began feeding her family creative, plant-based meals more than thirty years ago. Now Ann and her daughter, Jane Esselstyn have written “Be a Plant-Based Woman Warrior,” a collection of 125 recipes, many of which are desserts, that involve no meat, no dairy and no oil.
In her interview with Steve Tarter, Jane Esselstyn, at 56, the younger of the two authors (mother Ann is 86), she says that a plant-based lifestyle is not only a healthy choice but adopting it can reverse existing problems.
The book not only contains recipes but testimonials from women that have adopted the plant-based diet. The cookbook is a call to action and a message of hope for plant-based women warriors who are in control of their own health, said Esselstyn.
When Tarter suggests that some listeners might hear “no meat, no dairy, no oil” and say what’s left, Jane replies “Everything in the world that grows.” Recipes range from Apple Flax Flapjacks and Black Ramen Bowls, to Portobello Sliders with Green Goddess Sauce, to Mint Chip Outta Sight Brownies.
The history of roller derby dates back to 1935 when Leo Seltzer, a Chicago promoter, drew 20,000 people to the Chicago Coliseum to view roller skaters in action.
That’s just some of the action that Michella Marino relates in “Roller Derby,” a book that covers the sport through its ups and downs right to the present.
The deputy director of the Indiana Historical Bureau in Indianapolis, Marino, who described herself as “very competitive,” actually played with a professional roller derby team in western Massachusetts for almost three years.
The sport attracted her because it was a chance for a woman in her late 20s to compete, she said.
Roller derby challenges the traditional sports framework because it remains a rough, full-contact co-ed professional sport not modified for women, noted Marino.
Many have viewed roller derby as a product of television, something that Jerry Seltzer, Leo’s son, can take credit for, she said. Since taking over for his dad in the late 1950s, “the Jerry Seltzer era of roller derby was marked by innovation, savvy and theatrics,” stated Marino.
Where roller derby goes from here is anyone’s guess but this isn’t the only country where roller derby is played. The game is big in France, Marino told Steve Tarter.
As for Michella strapping on those skates again and getting back on the track, she’s thinking about it. We told you this girl was competitive.
Raymond Loewy left his imprint on this world in a lot of ways. Born in Paris in 1893 and trained as an engineer, Loewy revolutionized 20th-century American industrial design.
John Wall explores the Loewy legend in “Streamliner,” tracing the evolution of an industry and the path that Loewy took to becoming a national brand.
He created bright, smooth, and colorful logos for major corporations that included Greyhound, Exxon, and Nabisco. His designs for Studebaker automobiles, Sears Coldspot refrigerators, Lucky Strike cigarette packs, and Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives are iconic, noted Wall.
Wall told Steve Tarter that Loewy employed a full-time press agent who was almost as skilled as Loewy in the courting of journalists and tastemakers to become the face of a consumer-driven vision of the American dream.
In “Streamliner,” Wall makes a point of spotlighting the job that Loewy did for Studebaker, pointing to models in 1947 and 1953 as well as the Avanti in 1964 that initially allowed the automaker to compete with the Big Three.
Other examples of Loewy’s legacy include the familiar eagle silhouette logotype of the United States Postal Service and the distinctive look of the President's white Air Force One jet.
Horrific wildfires in California have dominated the news in recent years. We think of the heroic efforts of those who fight these fires, the torment of those who have lost family and homes and to the dangers of drought and climate change.
Katherine Blunt, an energy reporter for the Wall Street Journal who has covered the story of California wildfires in recent years, adds another element to the story: years of neglect by the Pacific Gas & Electric utility.
As PG&E prioritized profits, power lines—running through the woodlands of Northern California—were left to deteriorate. As Blunt reports in “California Burning,”, it was a rusted hook, purchased for 56 cents in 1921, that split in two that sparked the deadliest wildfire in California history.
Blunt relates the story of how PG&E, even when warned, some years before, by its own engineers of the dangers inherent in neglecting needed maintenance, failed to follow through.
Now PG&E is undertaking an alternative once considered prohibitive to stringing electrical wires through mountain forests. The utility has undertaken a program to start burying those lines—at a cost expected to top $20 billion.
As Blunt tells Steve Tarter, PG&E isn’t the only utility in the nation with aging infrastructure. The price of providing a critical service in a changing climate is likely to have to be paid by others.
Most of us assume the motion picture camera was brought to us by Thomas Edison or the Lumiere Brothers out of France. But Paul Fischer makes a case for Louis LePrince, "a self-taught generalist" who lived in France, England and the United States.
In fact, Fischer notes in his book, "The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures" that LePrince was on his way to join his family in New York to announce his invention when he mysteriously disappeared.
The year was 1890 and LePrince had boarded a train headed for Paris. From there he was going to the United States where he'd already spent a number of years. But LePrince was never heard from again.
His family initially assumed he was simply delayed before realizing, weeks later, that no one had any idea where he was.
Shortly after LePrince's disappearance, Edison made his announcement of a movie camera that bore a striking likeness to the contraption that LePrince had spent years developing.
Fischer provides plenty of history in his work, noting that LePrince not only had patents and a working model of his camera (that still exists) but photographic proof of motion film years before the Lumiere's.
Other central characters in this real-life mystery include Lizzie, Louis' wife, and other members of the family. You also learn about other inventors' efforts in the late 1800s, a time of epic discovery and change.
History may have forgotten LePrince but Fischer certainly hasn't and delivers a fascinating story that readers aren't likely to forget.
Another book on the Titanic? Daniel Stone, the author of "Sinkable," admits there's a fixation with that ship that collided with an iceberg in 1912 and, regrettably, sank. But that's the focus of the book: it's about shipwrecks and the most famous of them all remains the Titanic.
Stone, a former staff writer for the National Geographic, wonders aloud what is it about the Titanic that makes it the poster child for disasters at sea.
He tells Steve Tarter that he's finally come up with the reason the Titanic has been enshrined in history. "There were 1,500 people who died on board but there were 712 survivors--many of them children who would go on to tell their story for decades," said Stone.
Stone's book details other major shipwrecks, accidents that haven't caught the public's eye like the Titanic. There's the Waratah, for example, sometimes referred to as "Australia's Titanic", a 500-foot steamer with 211 passengers on board that was on its way to Africa before disappearing without a trace in 1909.
Stone also relays the story of the USS Maine, the ship sent to Havana Harbor that exploded and sank in 1898, setting off the Spanish-American War. The Maine was later patched up, raised and sunk in deeper waters in 1911, he said.
The sea can be a dangerous place. More people have died on boats and ships than ever will be killed in automobile accidents, related Stone, pointing out that passage by sea, once the most common way to travel long distances, was often steeped in peril.
There's still danger today, he noted. The giant container ships that ply the oceans bringing goods to anxious consumers will occasionally disappear but we don't hear about it, said Stone. More often, individual containers, often stacked high on these ships, are lost at sea, he said.
Shipwrecks stay in the news. Earlier this year Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance, a long-lost treasure, was found near the South Pole, said Stone.
When John Ikerd talks about industrial agriculture in the United States, the professor emeritus at the University of Missouri is referring to a farm system supported by big business, the government and most schools of agriculture across the nation.
“We are told that industrialization is the inevitable consequence of human enlightenment and technological progress,” said Ikerd. “But the industrialization of agriculture is neither enlightened nor progressive.”
Ikerd is a believer in the small farm and in sustainability. His book, “Small Farms Are Real Farms,” is a battle cry, a call for a revolution in agriculture.
But Ikerd, who spent 30 years in various professional positions at North Carolina State University, Oklahoma State University and the University of Georgia along with Mizzou, knows what he’s up against.
“The sustainability revolution is not one that will be fought on the battlefield, in the streets, or even necessarily in the halls of Congress. Instead it’s a battle for the hearts and minds of the American people,” said Ikerd, who believes the stage is set for change.
The present industrial model is propped up by government subsidies, he said. People are still hungry in this country while many others are suffering from health problems due to the food being raised. Our rural communities have been devastated by industrial agriculture while environmental issues abound, said Ikerd.
The idea is not to simply get bigger and bigger, the ways farms have been developing in this country but to adopt a sustainable model that allows for smaller farms to prosper, he said.
“The industrialization of farming—with its mechanization, hired labor, genetic selection, irrigation, agrochemicals, antibiotics and hormones, and more recently, genetic engineering—is the result of farmers’ historic struggle to establish control over the chaos of nature,” said Ikerd.
“The failure of industrialization is seen in the ever-growing ecological and social costs, which are not reflected in food prices but borne by society in general,” he said.
"There is an alternative," said Ikerd, referring to a system that involves small farms, a system which can be financially successful. "Small farmers focus on creating value, as well as reducing costs--they are niche marketers. They give individual consumers what they want, rather than produce bulk commodities for mass markets," he said.
Those Vietnamese refugees able to escape from their war-torn homeland in the 1970s found a refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast where they engaged in shrimping, something they knew from experience.
Their story is described by Kirk Johnson in "The Fishermen and the Dragon" as these shrimpers run up against the opposition of the white fishermen who resent the arrival of the Asian newcomers.
In an effort to expel the Vietnamese fishermen, the Klu Klux Klan is brought in to run a two-year campaign of threats and violence.
This all plays out against a backdrop of pollution in the bays that have sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers. Petrochemical plants, oil spills and the continued dumping of chemicals goes on unabated as one lone woman fights to stop the environmental degradation.
Johnson told Steve Tarter that his book is a study in who America is for, who gets the benefit of the democratic ideals that are held so highly.
The NRA is characterized by NPR investigative reporter Tim Mak as "the most powerful political advocacy group in the country" but he adds it's also an organization that's stumbled badly in recent years.
In "Misfire," Mak relates some of the problems--lavish spending by NRA executives including CEO Wayne LaPierre--while rank-and-file employees of the NRA, a non-profit, are underpaid.
Having performed hundreds of interviews from inside the NRA, Mak told Steve Tarter that after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2011, the organization went from taking a gun-rights stand that would seek to involve Democrats on occasion to a "culture war" organization that relied strictly on conservative support.
The NRA spent $30 million on the Donald Trump candidacy in 2016, said Mak, but, ironically, was less successful during the Trump administration than in previous years.
Mak also points out how the NRA was "played" by Russian intelligence as NRA executives made a 2015 trip to Moscow, a by-invitation affair that was packed with meetings with Russian government officials, diplomats, and oligarchs--all seeking influence in American politics.
Despite all this, even a crippled NRA remains a political powerhouse, warns Mak.
Most of us assume the motion picture camera was brought to us by Thomas Edison or the Lumiere Brothers out of France. But Paul Fischer makes a case for Louis LePrince, "a self-taught generalist" who lived in France, England and the United States.
In fact, Fischer notes in his book, "The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures" that LePrince was on his way to join his family in New York to announce his invention when he mysteriously disappeared.
The year was 1890 and LePrince had boarded a train headed for Paris. From there he was going to the United States where he'd already spent a number of years. But LePrince was never heard from again.
His family initially assumed he was simply delayed before realizing, weeks later, that no one had any idea where he was.
Shortly after LePrince's disappearance, Edison made his announcement of a movie camera that bore a striking likeness to the contraption that LePrince had spent years developing.
Fischer provides plenty of history in his work, noting that LePrince not only had patents and a working model of his camera (that still exists) but photographic proof of motion film years before the Lumiere's.
Other central characters in this real-life mystery include Lizzie, Louis' wife, and other members of the family. You also learn about other inventors' efforts in the late 1800s, a time of epic discovery and change.
History may have forgotten LePrince but Fischer certainly hasn't and delivers a fascinating story that readers aren't likely to forget.
An enrolled member of the Ottawa Tribe and a former U.S. Air Force officer, D.J. Eagle Bear Vanas talks about the concept of the Native American warrior spirit.
“A true warrior is not the toughest or bravest person in the room,” Vanas told Steve Tarter. ”A true warrior is committed to self-mastery, transforms setbacks into opportunities for achievement, refuses to quit, and most importantly, always fights for something bigger than the self,” he said.
In his book, “The Warrior Within,” Vanas details the way of the warrior for everyday use. Having spoken at Fortune 500 companies, tribal nations, and even at the White House, Vanas offers the same encouragement he provides to organizations on how to apply the warrior spirit principles at work.
“Courage is not about an absence of fear but conquering it,” he said.
Vanas also warns his audience to stay positive. “The information and ideas we consume can fuel the spirit of a warrior or a worrier,” he said, advocating music and laughter as “medicine” that can help the body, mind and spirit.
Also, warriors don’t retire, said Vanas, pointing to the importance of elders to help the young with daily challenges.
In an effort to boost literacy, Maya Payne Smart has written a book to help parents get children started on the reading road.
"Reading For Our Lives" is a guide book for parents, particularly helpful since the brain architecture for reading develops rapidly during infancy. Early language experiences are critical to building it, she told Steve Tarter.
"Many people believe that at some point everyone learns to read but the reality is that for many people it requires additional instruction to get there," said Smart.
"When people struggle, schools aren't equipped to help them catch up. There aren't people in a high school building whose job it is to help kids read before they graduate," she said.
Reading aloud to our kids is good but it's not enough to ensure school readiness, said Smart, who offers personal stories, historical accounts, scholarly research, and practical tips to help parents develop young readers.
Smart noted that Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became the great advocate of civil rights, made a special effort to learn to read and, as a result, became one of the 19th century's greatest orators.
Douglass said the ability to read translated to a need for freedom, she said.
It occurred to historian David Stewart, who has written extensively on the founding of America (books on James Madison, Aaron Burr and the U.S. Constitution) that, when asked by readers who the most important person was in the forming of America, his answer was George Washington.
"After giving that answer a couple of dozen times, I realized I might be missing the point," Stewart told Steve Tarter.
Now Stewart has delivered a book on the single most important figure in the formation of the country.
While giving Washington his due: winning elections unanimously when "a unanimous election was no more common in the late eighteenth century than it is today," he also details the fact that Washington managed almost 700 slaves from 1760 on at his Mount Vernon plantation. Of that number, 46 tried to escape, noted Stewart.
Yet Washington opposed the importation of slaves as early as 1774 and freed his slaves at his death. But Stewart also notes that Washington's statements and actions about slavery "would always be inconsistent."
Stewart's efforts to liberate the man from "the mists of myth" make for a fascinating interview.
Douglas Wolk has read all 27,000 Marvel comics. He says it's all one big story but who among us would dare to complete such a story with all its mutants, monsters and mysteries?
"All of the Marvels" is Wolk's book celebrating the feat. It's also a tidy comic history that dates back to 1961 when Marvel burst upon the scene with eight issues a month (now they produce 50 a month).
"All of the Marvels" strolls through the years, highlighting special social and comic issues along the way. Wolk's not hearing the line that comic books are dying, by the way. Indeed, he says the industry is thriving with digital comics "a new frontier."
Those Marvel movies, the blockbusters that Hollywood depends on these days, hasn't pre-empted the comics but augmented them, he says.
Wolk marvels at Marvel's success. "Marvel has moved to the center of our popular culture. Everyone knows who Spider-Man is," he told Steve Tarter.
"It's Marvel, Star Wars and Harry Potter and not much else," he said of that popular culture.
Marvel, meanwhile, continues to fascinate Wolk, noting that he's a fan of a more recent creation, Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American Muslim teen superhero.
You just can’t pass up a guidebook to smell. After all, they say smell is the sense that comes closest to pure perception. Smell can collapse space and time, unlocking memories and transporting us to worlds both new and as familiar as a whiff of the old gym.
We can recognize different smells--the bright tang of citrus, freshly sharpened pencils, the fish counter but do we understand how and why we smell?
In “Revelations in Air,” Jude Stewart takes us on a journey into the weird and wonderful world of smell. Beginning with lessons on the incredible biology and history of how our noses work, Stewart teaches us how to use our noses so that we can smell better.
While humans lack the ability of the average dog, people aren't bad, said Stewart, noting that a person can differentiate from 80 million to a trillion different odors.
When people lost their sense of smell as a result of covid, Stewart told Steve Tarter that it often led to other problems such as overeating junk foods in an effort to experience familiar smells and tastes.
Tarter recalled a childhood visit to Lake George in New York where the idyllic lake was overshadowed by the fumes emanating from a paper mill on the lake.
Stewart noted that smell-induced memories tend to be earlier than other memories.
In her book, she breaks down smells into categories such as funky or pungent, challenging readers--and smellers-- to add their own items to the list.
With engaging exercises for listeners to refine their own skills, "Revelations in Air" offers a doorway into the surprising, pleasurable, and unfamiliar landscape of smell.
Dwyer Murphy believes he has the dream job: "I get to read crime fiction all day long."
As the editor of the CrimeReads website, a site that , as the title might imply, brokers a wide variety of criminal literature, book and movie reviews, profiles and feature articles on such subjects as the role of cheese in murder mysteries or a look at the works of TV producer Quinn Martin ("Fugitive," "Streets of San Francisco" and "The FBI") who had a primetime show on television for 21 straight years.
Now Murphy has a book out, the novel, "An Honest Living," which calls on his lawyer background (before he took on the crime website five years ago), the city of New York (his home), book collectors and elements of film noir.
He told Steve Tarter that it was important to include Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows," the classic 1969 film noir about the French Revolution, in his book because "everyone I ran into for a two week period in New York back in 2006 was either coming from or going to see 'Army,' a film just released in the United States that year.
"I know that not everybody was concerned with French noir but it seemed like it at the time. My father came down from Boston to see that movie with me," he said.
Murphy tosses out the possibility of running an all-inclusive noir list on CrimeReads that would blend books, movies, TV shows and other forms of media.
Meanwhile, he plans on more books, including a sequel to "Honest Living" set in Miami.
When Ken Auletta wrote a lengthy profile on movie producer Harvey Weinstein for New Yorker magazine in 2002, Weinstein didn't like it.
That was because Auletta pictured Weinstein as a brilliant moviemaker with a dark side, a bully who blew up frequently.
But Auletta said while he'd heard reports that Weinstein had gone too far in his dealings with a number of women, he hadn't been able to get the women involved to talk.
In 2017, journalist Ronan Farrow got women on the record, stating that Weinstein had molested them. Things snowballed from there for Harvey as many as 80 women charged him with everything from groping to rape.
Auletta provides the full rise and fall story now 20 years after his first profile on Harvey Weinstein. He also documents how the man was able to get away with bad behavior for so long. Included is an account on how Harvey's brother Bob has fared. The pair worked together for years, making a number of critically-acclaimed and financially successful hits, films like "Shakespeare in Love," "Cider House Rules," "Chicago" and "Pulp Fiction."
Today, Weinstein faces lengthy jail time. His health is deteriorating and other charges may be brought against him, said Auletta. The man who declared himself the king of Hollywood has been deposed.
"Aurora" is the painful recollection of one of the nation's mass shootings, this one at the Aurora, Colo. theater outside Denver in 2012 when a troubled grad student opened fire on a packed movie house, killing 12 people and injuring 70.
Dr. Lynne Fenton is the psychiatrist who had six sessions with gunman James Holmes before the shooting took place. Fenton relates the bizarre behavior that Holmes exhibited, noting that from their first meeting, Holmes struck her as deeply troubled and someone she sought to help.
As a psychiatrist on the University of Colorado's School of Medicine and director of the Student Mental Health Center, Fenton provided counseling to Holmes, one of the academically-gifted students in the college's prestigious neuroscience program.
When he talked of killing people, Fenton noted that such destructive and violent thoughts were not abnormal for a depressed patient.
As she sought to help Holmes in subsequent sessions, Holmes was gathering guns and making plans--unbeknownst to Fenton.
After the horrific shooting in which Holmes survived to stand trial, Fenton's name was accidentally released to the public. Death threats followed. You should have known, anonymous callers demanded.
Fenton quit her job as a result and went into seclusion. Today she continues to work at the medical school and has raised her voice in the raging debate about mass shootings in this country.
She told Steve Tarter that more mental health screening is necessary but that alone won't solve the problem. Fenton said society would be better off if the age when someone can purchase a gun was raised from 18 to 21 because of the mental state of young males who are often the perpetrators of the mass shootings.
Mark Greaney's on a roll. His new book, "Armoured," is out and so is the first Gray Man movie.
As the author of more than 20 books, three of them collaborations with Tom Clancy before the author's death in 2013, Greaney is enjoying unqualified success.
But his Gray Man character took his time before making a movie debut. "The movie rights were actually secured when I wrote the first Gray Man novel (he's working on his 11th now) in 2009," he told Steve Tarter.
Brad Pitt was initially set to play the part and a script was written but that didn't happen. Things looked up when the Russo brothers, producers of "Avengers" and "Captain America" blockbusters, came on board to tackle the project.
Netflix will stream the Gray Man movie starting July 22.
Greaney used to write at the Starbucks in his native Memphis but had to give that up, he said, because too many folks were asking him to consider writing proposals of their own.
For "Armoured," a story about high-powered mercenaries in Mexico, Greaney said he spent time living and training with real-life members of private armed forces to gain insight for the book.
The Trump years--neatly cataloged in history now? Not so fast says one of the best chroniclers of the Washington scene, Mark Leibovich, whose new book, "Thank You For Your Servitude," whisks us through the tumultuous Donald Trump presidency with an emphasis on the followers, "the accomplices who make Trump possible," he said.
Leibovich, who spent 10 years as the chief national correspondent for the New York Times magazine before joining Atlantic magazine, logged more than 250 interviews over six years with folks like Senator Lindsey Graham, Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. John McCain, whose funeral is described in some detail in the book.
While it's great to be able to look back and laugh at all the foibles, the impeachments, the engagement with the Russians (you remember that), the control that Trump holds over the Republican Party makes it a distinct possibility that there may have to be a sequel, Leibovich told Steve Tarter, looking ahead at the 2024 election.
Joe Biden will be 82 at that time and with no heir apparent in sight yet in either party, Leibovich is fully prepared to record another presidential run for the Disrupter in Chief.
Paul Hawken has written books like “The Next Economy,” “Growing a Business” and “The Ecology of Commerce”. “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution,” co-authored with Amory Lovins, was referred to by President Bill Clinton as one of the most important books in the world.
He has served on the board of many environmental organizations including Center for Plant Conservation, Shelburne Farms, Trust for Public Land, Conservation International, and National Audubon Society.
So the man has credibility when it comes to the environment. All of which gives us reason to hope. Hawken’s new book, “Regeneration” offers a new approach to climate change, one that could mean ending the crisis in one generation.
"Regeneration means bringing the Earth back to life," says Hawken simply. "Regeneration" describes how an inclusive movement can save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions.
Describing the climate crisis as the greatest civilization may ever face, Hawken ponders why so many of the world's citizens are disengaged--an estimated 98 percent. The problem, he says, has been in the communication area. "Guilt, fear and obligation are not inspiring motivators," he told Steve Tarter.
Instead we need to look at solutions to global warming not as a curse but as an opening, a chance to reconnect with nature. The website, regeneration.org, offers more on the subject.
Carpenter has been tending to his family's three kids as a stay-at-home dad since 2008 so he had plenty of experience to draw from for a manual for full-time fathers.
"The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad" is a collection of tips, words of wisdom, warnings and ideas for the guys who stay home. There are even recipes (Carpenter planned on enchiladas the day he interviewed with Steve Tarter).
He wants to encourages others to follow in his footsteps. "Don't freak out over 14 years (the amount of time he's been at home). Try it for six months or a year and see how it goes," he said.
It comes down to self-worth, said Carpenter. "I'm not babysitting. I'm not helping out Mom. I'm parenting," he said.
With the pandemic creating more homebound parents than ever before, Carpenter's guidebook may be just the ticket to facilitate family time in a lot of households.
Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. For a decade she’s been a columnist at the Washington Post.and written about food for two decades, she told Steve Tarter in the interview.
When Haspel and her husband move from Manhattan to the quaint community of Barnstable on Cape Cod, they decide to take a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. There’s fishing, too.
They find a couple of perennials to start with: Turkish Rocket and Good King Henry. Both are "promises that don't deliver," said Haspel. But with “first-hand food” as her guiding principle, Haspel gamely embarks on a grand experiment to start using her own ingenuity and creativity when it comes to what you put on the table. All the while, there’s humor and common sense to dispense.
Some of her experiments are a rousing success (refining her own sea salt). Others are a spectacular failure (the turkey plucker engineered from an old washing machine). Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her while discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about food--and ourselves.
Haspel also delivers a tip of the cap to Euell Gibbons whose "Stalking the Wild Asparagus," a book written in the 60s, serves as her "primer on foraging." "He was so adventurous so you don't have to be," she said.
After spending some 40 years at Eastern Illinois University, Charles Titus, a retired history professor, decided to share some of that history in his home state with readers.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Titus shares some of the highlights that he spotlights in his book, “Exploring the Land of Lincoln.”
Titus shares views on 20 places across the state of Illinois including Cahokia, Lincoln sites in and around Springfield, Bishop Hill, Nauvoo, and Chicago's South Side Community Art Center.
The pandemic has brought a lot to light, perhaps most notably a new attitude towards work and one's behavior at work.
A social psychologist at New York University, Tessa West has delivered a handbook on some of the bad behavior to watch for--whether you're back at the office or working remotely.
She even provides a watch list of problem personalities you need to be aware of: the bulldozer, the free rider and the kiss-up and kick downer, to name a few.
Bad bosses and obnoxious colleagues are nothing new, of course. But West doesn't believe you need to just grin and bear it. "(Bad behavior) is part of human nature. But to just suck it up and deal with it can lead to low-level stress and, over time, that builds up," she told Steve Tarter.
There are things you can do, she offers, pointing to strategies outlined in "Jerks At Work."
West said the wave of resignations that have followed the pandemic are the result of the number-one reason people leave a job: a toxic workplace.
In a world beset by supervillains, now we have a guidebook: “How To Take Over the World” by Ryan North.
It’s familiar territory for North, a comic (as in book not hah-hah funny) writer who’s been working on the graphic front for more than 20 years.
The premise of this book is: what if the supervillain didn’t have to lose? So we have it—practical schemes and scientific solutions for the aspiring supervillain, all niftily illustrated by Carly Monardo.
“Who among us hasn’t thought about the best way to construct a secret, technologically advanced lair from which we might conquer all humanity? North assumes we all have, and in doing so he zaps the fun back into one of pop culture’s most enduring archetypes.” That was an NPR report.
Other glowing reviews refer to “North’s trademark sarcasm and humor” or “I never knew reading about becoming a supervillain could feel so wholesome.”
There’s a lot of science injected into this effort so be prepared to take the whole thing, if not seriously, at least with an open mind.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, North reveals a quick wit and a businesslike manner which is what most of us are looking for in our supervillains.
“No regrets.” You hear people say that as a positive philosophy of life. But that’s nonsense, even dangerous, notes Daniel Pink in his latest book, “The Power of Regret.”.
Everybody has regrets, says the author. He has survey results to prove it. Pink and his team asked 15,000 people in 105 countries if they ever looked back on their lives and wished they’d done things differently.
Eighty-two percent said regret was at least an occasional part of their lives. Regrets are a fundamental part of our lives, Pink states.
But here’s the good news: if we reckon with them in fresh and imaginative ways, we can use our regrets to make smarter decisions and perform better at work and school, he says.
In his book, Pink provides some steps to help people deal with their regrets. Rather than be haunted by regret, make a list of your regrets, he suggests. “You will find that a list is a lot less frightening than a ghost," suggested Pink.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Pink relates that his survey uncovered four basic kinds of regrets that people have—not worrying about whether they should have bought this car or that or ordered something else from the menu.
The four included connection regrets over things like a failed romance or neglecting a bond with a parent or moral regrets where you failed to live up to a personal commitment. Foundation regrets might involve wishing you’d stayed in school or worked harder in school while boldness regrets involve inaction: I should have gone ahead and…
A book about index funds? Passive investing? Snooze time, right? Not with Robin Wigglesworth, the man with the "Harry Potteresque" last name.
As the global financial correspondent for the Financial Times, Wigglesworth covers financial history with a reporter's skill and the flair of a good storyteller. His cast of characters are individuals who came up with financial wisdom that's changed all our lives.
Of course, there's Warren Buffett, the oracle of Omaha, but you also have Nate Most, the former submariner was instrumental in the invention of the ETF (exchange-traded funds); Eugene Fama, the University of Chicago economist (still teaching in his 80s) who helped inspire passive investing; Jack Bogle who founded Vanguard; Larry Fink who built BlackRock into the world's biggest investment empire; and many more.
In this interview with Steve Tarter, Wigglesworth helps the common man understand some of the mysteries of Wall Street by making a subject easier to understand and entertaining as well.
Take a cartoonist who holds a PhD in robotics from Stanford University and team him with a professor of physics and astronomy and you’ve got the successful podcast team of Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson whose new book is “Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe.”
If that sounds familiar, it should. Their podcast is “Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe” so tackling big questions, big, out-of-this-world questions, is nothing new for them.
The banter regarding serious issues may be light-hearted, peppered with puns, but they don’t let the comedy get in the way of the science.
What’s with dark matter? Is it related to the dark web? And the biggest misconception about space?
In addition to books and podcasts, Jorge and Daniel are also the co-creators of the animated PBS series, “Elinor Wonders Why.”
Get ready for a fast-moving interview as Steve Tarter tries to keep up with these two high-flying explainers of the universe.
Michelle Huneven is the author of “Search,” a novel about a restaurant critic and a longtime member of the Unitarian Universalist church in Southern California who’s asked to join the church’s search committee for a new minister. That memoir follows the travails of the committee and their candidates—and becomes its own media sensation.
The central figure in the novel had good material to work with: the committee is a wide-ranging mix of people, and their candidates range from a baker and microbrew master/pastor to a reverend who identifies as both a witch and an environmental warrior. Ultimately, the committee faces a choice between two very different paths. Although she may have been ambivalent about joining the committee, she finds that she cares deeply about the fate of this institution and she will fight the entire committee, if necessary, to win the day for her side.
Huneven, a former restaurant critic for the L.A. Times, said “Search,” her fifth novel, became her hardest writing challenge to date. She rewards readers with more than her prose, however. At book’s end, she includes some of the recipes the search committee enjoyed.
Talk about your famous families or is it infamous? John Wilkes Booth, after all, goes down as one of the most loathsome villains in history but Fowler maintains this isn't a book about the assassin but rather about the theatrical Booth family.
You have Junius Booth, the father and a Shakespearean actor; Edwin Booth, the son (and John Wilkes' younger brother) who successfully followed in his father's footsteps. Telling the story, Fowler has the two Booth girls, Rosalie and Asia.
The scene is America, a country boiling with dissension that explodes into civil war. "Booth" is the portrait of a country in the throes of change and a family faced with conflict.
In her interview with Steve Tarter, Fowler revealed the conundrum she faced in the book. "I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes Booth. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn't think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn't be writing about his family, if he weren't who he was, if he hadn't done what he did."
Don't let the title throw you. Cassandra Quave is an ethnobotanist but her quest is easy to understand. She wants to develop new ways to fight illness and disease. And she wants to do it through the healing powers of plants.
Plants are the basis for an array of lifesaving and health-improving medicines we all now take for granted. Ever taken an aspirin? Thank a willow tree for that. What about life-saving medicines for malaria? Some of those are derived from cinchona and wormwood.
Quave, who teaches at Emory University, suggests that in today’s world of synthetic pharmaceuticals, people have lost their connection to the natural world. By ignoring the potential of medicinal plants, however, we are losing out on the opportunity to discover new life-saving medicines, she says.
Antibiotic-resistant microbes are already a problem. Each year, 700,000 people die due to untreatable infections but by 2050, 10 million annual deaths are expected unless we take action.
In her interview with Steve Tarter, Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell the extraordinary story of her own journey. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida and isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo—all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers.
She's also the co-creator and host of "Foodie Pharmacology," a podcast dedicated to exploring links between food and medicine.
Named by The Washington Post as one of the best feel-good books of 2021, "The Comfort Book" is the ideal read for your next plane trip, especially in the travel explosion of 2022 when you may be forced to settle down and wait in some airline terminal.
“It is a strange paradox, that many of the clearest, most comforting life lessons are learnt while we are at our lowest," notes Haig, who said the pandemic was a factor in his collection of notes, lists and stories that make up "The Comfort Book."
Haig compiled the material over a period of several years, Haig uses sources from across the world, history, science, and his own experiences.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Haig demonstrates both humor and concern. The author of "Reasons to Stay Alive"and "Notes on a Nervous Planet," along with six novels and several award-winning children's books, the critically-acclaimed Britisher is likely to become better known as some of his works come to the big screen.
Among the blurbs on the back of Kelefa Sanneh's "Major Labels," a book about popular music, is this from David Letterman: "Kelefa Sanneh has achieved the impossible. 'Major Labels' somehow manages to unspool everything you need to know about 50 years of music, but more impressively, he makes you care about all of it. Even the stuff you don't care about."
The pop music critic of the New York Times for six years before joining the staff of the New Yorker in 2008, Sanneh provides musical history in a variety of genres. It's a book that, as Letterman says, crams a lot in.
Here are just a few of the things I learned from 'Major Labels':
--Waylon Jennings was a pinball fanatic.
--George Strait had 85 top 10 country singles.
--An early form of smooth jazz, known as the "quiet storm" format, was inspired by Smokey Robinson's "Quiet Storm" album of 1975.
--The album version of the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" ran 12 minutes long.
--Eric Church had a country hit called "Springsteen."
--Alanis Morissette, the Canadian pop star, sold 15 million copies of her album, "Jagged Little Pill."
Sanneh, whose first rock concert came in 1988 when, as a seventh-grader, he attended a birthday party that involved the Poison/David Lee Roth concert in Worcester, Mass., wasn't around for all the breakthrough rock of the 1960s but covers it, nevertheless, often with the judicious use of passages from Rolling Stone critics of the day.
But Sanneh has a critic's touch of his own: "'Soft rock' described, more or less, the duo Steely Dan, whose slick compositions were buoyed by astonishing musicianship, and enhanced by arch lyrics that hinted, softly, at perversion."
As far as rock goes, "the genre has faded in cultural importance, even as the music remains ubiquitous," states Sanneh. But he covers more than rock in "Major Labels." There's grunge, punk, soul music and hip hop as well as views on the breakup album and what alternative music really means.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Sanneh reveals respect for the music he covers. I only wish he'd found a better title for what has to be one of the best musical histories of our time.
Erich Schwartzel details the rise of the Chinese film industry and how the Asian nation has been able to dictate to Hollywood.
"Red Carpet" shows that American interests, hungry to take advantage of the huge market, have been forced to yield to Chinese demands when it comes to anything that might put that country in a bad light.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Schwartzel points out how criticism of the Chinese has been muted on the big screen due to the riches Hollywood sees in gaining access to Asian movie screens.
Want to make sense of our volatile economy? Feel powerless in a world where billionaires and mighty corporations seem to make all the rules?
You need to meet Joe Saul-Sehy and Emily Guy Birken who are here to tell you that personal finance can be a lot more fun than you think.
Their book is “Stacked—Your Super Serious Guide to Modern Money Management” only it’s not so serious. Saul-Sehy was a financial advisor who got into the media side, creating “Stacking Benjamins,” one of the most popular podcasts in the personal finance sphere. Kiplinger has called the show the “best personal finance podcast” and Fast Company has described it as striking a “great balance between fun and functional.”
Then there’s Guy Birken whose ’work has appeared in Business Insider, Kiplinger, MSN Money, and the Washington Post. The author of four books: “The 5 Years Before You Retire,” “Choose Your Retirement,” “Making Social Security Work for You,” and “End Financial Stress Now,” she seeks to alleviate the fears of those who think money decisions are beyond them.
In their lively interview with Steve Tarter, the authors demonstrate an awareness of the public’s financial insecurity along with a sense of humor.
In the early ’90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she’d been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream.
But it didn't take long for financial realities to upset that dream. As housing costs rose, Tiffanie and her family were uprooted, moving from Texas to Florida then back to New Jersey. Drayton's experience in a variety of American neighborhoods leads her to ask listeners (in her exchange with Steve Tarter) as to why black neighborhoods that bear names like Martin L. King Avenue are often crime-ridden while others are safe? Where schools often lack the resources of schools that serve predominantly white children.
Ultimately, exhausted by the pursuit of a “better life” in America, 20-year-old Tiffanie returned to Tobago where she has found that she's able to enjoy the simple freedom of being black without fear. It's also a place where she imagines a different future for her children.
"Black American Refugee" examines some of the historical ramifications of American racism while relating the impact of white supremacy--even if it's unintentional--has on people of color.
Drayton may have left the United States to live but she hasn't stopped working to further racial justice in America. Her interview seeks to galvanize listeners into action, she said by sharing the irony of someone who had to search beyond the “land of the free” to realize their own freedom.
Grant Golliher qualifies as the modern-day cowboy who tries to help others adopt the cowboy spirit.
"I'm the lucky cowboy that showed up and married the rancher's daughter. This beautiful piece of land, and the safe harbor I found in my marriage, would become the setting for me to find my true calling in life," he notes.
Golliher is referring to Jane, his wife, and the Diamond Cross Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyo. where visitors come from all over the world to learn about leadership, trust, teamwork and many of those other mission statement mainstays.
Companies send executives to the ranch so they might think like a horse--at least for a little while.
As Golliher describes it in his book, it's a matter of getting down to basics. Horses respond to how you act--just like people do. "If you deal with an attitude, you won't have to deal with an action," he notes.
The book relates episodes from the ranch such as Braveheart, the proud horse that didn't get a chance despite Golliher's efforts to convince the owner otherwise and Neal, the homeless alcoholic who became a trusted employee at the ranch.
Golliher's interview with Steve Tarter reveals a cowboy who's as comfortable helping others as he is in the saddle.
“Star Trek” isn’t just an old TV show—it’s an industry. Or as Ryan Britt, the author of “Phasers on Stun!” might say, a universe.
Britt’s new book beams us down to the show’s origins back in the 1960s, its acceptance after initial resistance and relates the offspring of the series—both film and TV shows.
“Mr. Spock and Data weren’t just cool space superheroes to me as a kid, they were beacons of resilience,” wrote Britt. “Living long and prospering doesn’t jusat mean getting older and not dying. It means embracing change.”
And change is something that Trekkies can understand. After all, following the original 79 episodes of “Star Trek” that concluded in 1969, we’ve had “Star Trek: the Animated Series” (1973-74), “Star Trek: the Next Generation” (1987-94), “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” (1993-99), “Star Trek: Voyager” (1995-2001), “Star Trek: Enterprise” (2001-2005), “Star Trek: Discovery” (2017-present), “Star Trek: Picard” (2020-present), “Star Trek: Lower Decks” (2020-present), “Star Trek: Prodigy” (2021-present), and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (2022-present).
That’s just the TV side. There have also been 13 feature films, the first six featuring the original TV cast. It adds up to 800 hours of programming and Britt has consumed it all.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Britt underscores the role Leonard Nimoy played, both as Spock and as the director of two of the films. He also points out what a contribution Nichelle Nichols (who played Uhura) made in the U.S. space program, calling for women and minority hiring at NASA.
Bill Shatner may have flown into space but as a passenger. Nichols, who trained as an astronaut, could have actually (wo-)manned the controls, noted Britt.
Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber serves up a treatise on the great American comic that takes you through over 150 years of history. He goes all the way back to Thomas Nast, who fashioned images of Uncle Sam and Santa we still abide by, and runs through the comics of the 21st century.
There’s Superman, of course, and all the super folks that followed along with the moral panic of the Eisenhower era that changed comics as we knew them, underground comix that brought more changes and then there are the developments that followed in the latter years of the 20th century (such as the graphic novel).
While recognizing that the erosion of the American newspaper has cost us editorial cartoons and comic strips, including favorites that ran for 60 years or longer, Dauber remains optimistic about the medium in general.
You get the back story along with the cover storyfrom a researcher who’s unapologetic about his love for the medium. “Some of my earliest reading memories are of lying on the floor, sprawled out with the Sunday comics pages,” related Dauber, who said his next book will focus on horror.
Cynthia Clampitt wants you to explore the Midwest. Her new book, “Destination Heartland,” serves as a guide to places of interest and foods of interest in a 12-state region.
“The region sometimes called ‘flyover country’ offers a multitude of great places to land,” she said. Now you might find an entire volume of Midwestern attractions that Clampitt didn’t include. She makes no claims to this being either all-inclusive or to serve as a definitive listing.
But what Clampitt covers is a number of historic attractions from Illinois and 11 Midwestern states, chronicling places she has personally visited.
Ah the Midwest: “It was ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and the Pony Express. It was the birthplace of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and Antonin Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony (both in 1890s Iowa). It gave us revolutionary farm equipment, but also gave us the first airplanes (the Wright Brothers lived in Ohio) and cheap cars (thank you Mr. Ford). It was and is a place where wide-open spaces led to big ideas,” notes Clampitt, a big fan of living history venues.
One she cites is Conner Prairie, just outside Indianapolis, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Museum. Another is Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa while Cahokia Mounds, near St. Louis, offers up a museum Clampitt calls amazing.
“Destination Heartland” also includes a nice little history where I learned about the Prairie Traveler, the bestselling manual published in 1859, that served as the pioneer’s guide to the west, how to fix your wagon and all that.
Clampitt adds another touch to her history survey: food. She makes a point of visiting the oldest restaurant, hotel or tavern in many of the places she visits and it's a move that seems to pay off. If the Village Tavern of Long Grove (35 miles NW of Chicago) is still in business since it opened in 1847, chances are they know what they're doing.
Eugene Linden can say I told you so but he'd rather see progress towards heading off a catastrophe that he suggests is coming unless citizens of the world take climate change seriously. Indeed, it may be too late for seriously. What we face now is urgency, he says in his 11th book, subtitled "A People's History of Climate Change, From 1979 to the Present."
Linden revisits some of the most destructive examples of what a warming planet is capable of: Hurricane Andrew in 1992 (a storm that wrecked 125,000 homes in Dade County alone and led to the insolvency of 11 insurance companies), Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (bringing a 19-foot storm surge that damaged 70 percent of the homes in New Orleans), Hurricane Sandy in 2012 (sending torrents of water into New York's subways).
But Linden isn't just reciting bad storm statistics. He brings a message: recalling a book he wrote in 1998, "The Future in Plain Sight," he suggests that 24 years after publication a scenario for 2050 seems to be unfolding--that California's remaining redwoods, mighty trees that have dominated for eight million years could be wiped out within three decades.
"More than 90 percent of the excess heat created by our overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases has ended up in the oceans," noted Linden. Unbeknown to those of us on land, that's leading to a whole lot of change and a whole lot of trouble. When sea levels rise, coastal cities will feel it first but that isn't the only issue.
The wildfires that have torched western states will only get worse, said Linden. At some point, the cost to fight those fires will bankrupt the state of California.
But Linden isn't walking the plank--he's offering hope and looks for action to counter the impending crisis. His book may be depressing but it's important to understand what's going on.
Armstrong, who has written previous books on "Seinfeld" and "Mary Tyler Moore Show," goes back to the early days of television in this one.
She focuses on four women who had a big impact on the TV medium. Irma Phillips defined the soap opera, establishing a format that would run for decades across all networks.
Gertrude Berg turned a hit radio show into one of TV's first hit comedies and later took the concept to Broadway.
Hazel Scott, an established jazz pianist, became the first African American (before Nat King Cole) to host an evening variety program.
Betty White started on daytime TV before television even knew what to do with programming during the daytime hours.
This interview with Armstrong was conducted shortly before White's death earlier this year.
For many of us, the sentiment has been that the only good insect is a dead insect. After all, if they're not swiping plants in a farm field, they're buzzing around, destroying the ambience of a picnic or outing.
But insects have a big role to play in the wide world of life, says Oliver Milman, whose book,
"Insect Crisis," spells out the dangers this world will be in if we let insect numbers continue to fall.
And they are falling precipitously. That's bad news for birds and a whole chain of life that depends on little bugs to play a major role. That's bad news for us at the end of the chain.
Insects, after all, are the ultimate survivors, notes Milman,
Around before the dinosaurs, insects have lived through five--or is it six--major catastrophes to impact our planet.
The problem is that now, while we have pulled back on DDT, one of the alternative chemicals in use is hundreds of times stronger than what Rachel Carson warned us about, said Milman. Regulation and moderation is required. Also a new mindset: we need bugs to survive.
The title is the answer Washington Post writer Travis Andrews received when he wondered to his newspaper associates why Goldblum had developed such a following even though he hadn't appeared in any recent "A" movies.
That led to this book, an interesting cruise through the spectacle of the Goldblum Factor, that intangible something that defines some celebrities, making them eminently likable.
Andrews tells Steve Tarter that he first came upon Goldblum through the jazz album he released a few years ago. That led to an exploration of the eclectic record that is Goldblum's.
You can't help but smile at the guy no matter what he does. It's the same with the book.
Louisa Lim grew up in Hong Kong and later covered China and Hong Kong for a decade as a correspondent for BBC and NPR. Her previous book, "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited," recalled China's brutal suppression of protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Now a teacher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, she found herself immersed in familiar territory when protests broke out in her native Hong Kong in 2019. The protests were a reaction to a crackdown by Chinese authorities who want to bring the city under its control.
Lim said she found herself caught up in the protests that swept through Hong Kong before the covid shutdown, forcing her to question her objectivity as a journalist in covering the scene.
"Indelible City" covers Hong Kong's past, from the British takeover in 1842 to its "return" to China in 1997 to the present situation as Beijing lays down ever-stricter rules for citizens.
Lim talks to Steve Tarter about an exodus from Hong Kong by citizens who seek to avoid Chinese domination and start little Hong Kongs across the globe.
Building a future for coral reefs may not seem to be a priority in a world threatened with climate change, an ocean festooned with plastic and alarming extinction rates being registered even in insects, always thought of as the planet's ultimate survivors.
As Juli Berwald notes in her interview with Steve Tarter, coral reefs aren't just pretty places to view while on vacation. Coral reefs take up less than 1 percent of the ocean's area but help a fourth of all marine species survive at one time or another. "A billion people rely on those ecosystems for sustenance or work," she writes.
"The combined revenue from food, recreation and protection from storms attributed to coral reefs has been calculated at between 2.7 and 10 trillion dollars a year. The death of the reefs means food insecurity for tens of millions," noted Berwald.
Some predictions indicate that the world's great coral reefs could be lost by 2050.
But Berwald injects hope in her account. Coral farming is a real thing and, with more support, could show some great results.
One of the unsung heroes, among many individuals that Berwald consults in her research, is Frank Mars of the Mars candy firm, one billionaire who's not flying into space but diving into the problem of saving the coral reefs.
Berwald isn't just seeking answers to environmental problems but also provides a touching account of her daughter's battle with mental illness in "Life on the Rocks."
"This is Where You Belong--Finding Home Wherever You Are" covers Melody Warnick's own experience of moving about in the United States, never staying anywhere longer than a couple of years, traveling from California to Utah to Iowa to Texas--until she got to Blacksburg, Va.
There, Warnick has found peace and stability--not because Blacksburg is a model city or one of those places that always turns up among the top 10 small towns to live in or any of the lists that litter the internet--but because Warnick decided to make an effort to enjoy the place she was at.
That effort is accompanied by interviews, facts and formulas to urge others to understand what she's learned--that the place isn't as important as the person.
Chapters such as "Buy Local," "Say Hi to your Neighbors" and "Volunteer" steer one on ways to get out and commit to the place they live.
Yet another book on President Kennedy? It's true but Mark Updegrove, the author of four previous books dealing with U.S. presidents, tries to cut through the myth and the conspiracy theories with this effort.
Updegrove, who served as the director of the LBJ Presidential Library for eight years and now heads the LBJ Foundation, doesn't shy away from acknowledging that Kennedy was badly outplayed by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev at their first meeting.
The Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba is also outlined but, as Updegrove noted, JFK didn't suffer a loss in popularity as a result. For a man who barely outdistanced Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, JFK gained appreciably in the office.
It's worth noting that Kennedy was supposedly more worried about his own military when it came to the Cuban missile crisis than the Russian response.
Coming out of that showdown, Kennedy clearly established himself as a leader but other trials showed him to be more worried about politics than civil rights. Updegrove credits Bobby Kennedy who attended a meeting of leading African Americans for counseling the president to take action when the south was aflame in the 60s.
On Vietnam, Updegrove says there's nothing in the record to indicate that Kennedy would have pulled out any sooner than his predecessors. Overall, it's hard to believe that the Kennedy tenure was only three years when you stack up all the issues faced in that time.
"Generation Sleepless--Why Tweens and Teens Aren't Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them" is a mouthful of a title but Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright have a lot to say when it comes to the sleeping habits of our youth.
In an interview with Steve Tarter, Julie Wright explains that sleep is just as important to teens as it is to babies.
One of the points made in "Generation Sleepless" is that, whether due to extracurricular activities or routine school schedules, almost half of U.S. public high schools start at 7 a.m.
The problem is that they may not allow students who stay up late enough sleep. That could affect performance, note the authors.
The Minnesota state medical association states that there's an "erroneous societal concept that sleep is negotiable, rather than a biologic imperative."
And sleeping in on Saturday won't necessarily prove productive. It can come back to steal sleep from a young person later on, said Wright.
"Sleep stealers" are cited in the book as well as ways to wind down at night in order to assure a good night's sleep.
Francie Hinrichsen has made a career out of helping small businesses get their brands and websites in order but she found another passion: helping women entrepreneurs.
She started Founding Females "where I get to root for women," she said.
And she wrote this book, a step-by-step guide on how women can get that business started.
"Everything's in the mind. That's where it all starts. Knowing what you want is the first step towards getting it." That's a quote from Mae West that begins the section on outlining your business idea.
"It's better to see the vision than to keep it locked away in your heart. Lay it all out! Give those ambitions hope! Delight in the chance to pour your heart out!" That's Francie's advice on stating your business idea.
Other steps follow: financial, marketing and digital points that are explained clearly so that the would-be entrepreneur knows what to do and why she's doing.
By the way, guys: While it's a female guide, Francie says the mechanics work, regardless of gender.
Lisa Scottoline fits into the category of celebrity writer very nicely. Having sold over 30 million copies, her books are published in over 35 countries.
So you might think that launching a new book, “What Happened to the Bennetts,” a mystery about a family that's moved into a witness protection program after a deadly carjacking incident, would be, well, routine.
Instead, Scottoline opened a new box of the books recently live on Facebook to mark the occasion. Let her tell it: “This isn’t the first time I’ve opened a box of my own books. I’ve done that forty-three times."
"You might be wondering, does it ever get old?"
"The answer is, have you had spaghetti?"
"I have."
"I’ve had spaghetti about a million times."
"I could have it a million more times.”
She goes on: “By any reasonable measure, an unboxing video should be a stupid thing to watch. I used to think they were weird, until I watched one, then two, and then a million."
"This is why I stay off of YouTube."
"And why I’m not on TikTok."
"Because tick-tock is the sound of my time wasting, and I can waste time like it’s a job.”
And finally: “If you throw a pandemic at me, then a war, sooner or later I’m going to watch some lady get a new pair of sneakers.”
These are comments taken from a weekly column she writes with her daughter Francesca Serritella for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Chick Wit.”
Elizabeth Williamson has excelled at three of the top newspapers in the country: Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Her reporting skills are in evidence in "Sandy Hook," a book that not only covers the tragic shooting that occurred on Dec. 14, 2012 when 20 first graders and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. but the strange aftermath as some people insisted the event never occurred at all. Described as one of the most shocking cultural ruptures of the internet era, "Santy Hook" documents a belligerence that has become all too common in our interconnected world.
Williamson takes us through the torment that parents, already suffering the loss of a small child, had to contend with as families were accosted online, on the street, even shot at at one point--tormented by people who accused the parents of faking their children's deaths.
The pattern of denial and attack didn't stop at Sandy Hook, of course. They reach right to the present as the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol continues. That incident, fueled by a former president's claims of a rigged election drove a mob to violence in the nation's capital
Arthur Brooks always wanted to be a French horn player. And became one, winding up playing professionally in the United States and Europe. In his early twenties, however, he realized he wasn’t getting better at his instrument. He was getting worse.
“I visited famous teachers and practiced more, but I couldn’t get back to where I had been. Pieces that had been easy to play became hard; pieces that had been hard became impossible,” he noted.
Brooks, the author of “From Strength to Strength,” suggests that what he went through was traumatic but not all that unusual. While there’s a drop-off in abilities that people experience in their forties and fifties, the good news is that there’s a second wave to ride to success that favors people who are older, says Brooks.
A decline in fluid intelligence doesn’t mean you’re washed up, the author states. “It means it’s time to jump off the fluid intelligence curve and onto the crystallized intelligence curve. Crystallized intelligence relies on a stock of knowledge and tends to increase with age, Brooks said.
A lot of what people think is being recycled, isn't. That's Jennie Romer talking. A San Francisco attorney who first looked into the problem of plastic bags and plastic pollution 15 years ago, Romer's book is a guide to better recycling. While nine states now have laws that ban plastic bags, "we still have quite a few places where that's not happening," she said.
Evison's seventh novel chronicles 170 years of American history but it's not chronological. We skip back and forth between the California gold rush, the building of the transcontinental railroad and modern life. "Evison pulls off a wonderful high-wire act of storytelling that few would attempt," noted Jason Mott, author of "Hell of a Book."
Adam Tooze, a history professor at Columbia University, is the author of "Shutdown--How Covid Shook the World's Economy." Never before did the global economy contract by 20 percent in a matter of weeks as it did in 2020. While the number of people contracting covid as well as the heated debate over mask use and opening of facilities is finally easing, it's important to understand the impact of the worldwide pandemic. Tooze's article in the New York Times article referenced in the discussion was published in the Sept. 1, 2021 edition.
Interview with Nathaniel Philbrick, author of "Travels with George," an account of the tour of the colonies made by George Washington as he prepared to take office as the first president of the United States. Philbrick, along with wife Melissa and dog Dora, follow the same route that Washington made some 230 years earlier, providing both history and present updates at the various locations.