Madison BookBeat: Recent Episodes
Stu Levitan, Angie Trudell Vasquez, Devin Trudell, George Dreckmann
Madison BookBeat highlights local Wisconsin authors and authors coming to Madison for book events. It airs every Monday afternoon at 1pm on WORT FM .
In her fourth collection, Driftless Area-based poet Nikki Wallschlaeger further proves herself as a singular poet of astonishing emotional depth and formal range. Hold Your Own is a steadfast search for peace, self-acceptance, and pleasure in a world that makes those basic rights an everyday challenge for Black women. It was published in May 2024 by Copper Canyon Press.
Nikki joins host Sara Batkie for a conversation about getting the right rhythm, the joys of working with books every day, and the natural beauty of her home state.
Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Waterbaby (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Houses (Horseless Press 2015), and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017), as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Richard Sweitzer about his book ODE The Scion of Nerikan. Richard is award-winning author and longtime morning radio host. He received his Master’s of Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Richard is the author and publisher of ODE The Scion of Nerikan which was published in 2023. The book is about an immortal monster who is searching for a way to die, and the little girl who gives him reason to live...for a little longer.
Richard created an ODE Bingo card which he hands out at book signings and there is a tiny independent book store near his home that he places these cards in. Some of the boxes on the Bingo card ask the reader if they threw the book, hugged the book. laughed, cried and more.
Richard always wanted to publish his books traditionally, but after three false starts working with literary agents, he decided to publish his own book. The agents he had worked with offered some great advice, but he felt the story was drifting away from the adventure which he created. When Richard is not writing, he hosts a popular morning radio show in central Wisconsin. He has been with this show for more than thirty years.
In this episode, Richard reads from his book, discusses self-publishing, marketing, artificial intelligence, going to school at age thirty, being a radio host and his love of fantasy.
Lisa thanks Richard for his message to the audience: Try something new even if it’s scary. Take that course, make that change. Be afraid and do it anyway.
Richard Scott Larson's debut The Long Hallway (University of Wisconsin Press, April 2024) is a lyrical memoir that expresses a boy’s search for identity while navigating the darkness and isolation of a deeply private inner world.
Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter’s inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael’s potential victims. In The Long Hallway, Larson scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror as a metaphor for the torments of the closet.
Richard joins host Sara Batkie for a conversation about the masks we wear, the horrors of suburbia, and finding the right home for your work.
Richard Scott Larson is a queer writer and critic. His debut memoir, The Long Hallway, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, he studied literature and film criticism at Hunter College and earned his MFA from New York University.
He has received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has been supported by residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Paragraph Workspace for Writers, La Porte Peinte, and the Willa Cather Foundation. He’s an active member of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has been recognized twice by The Best American Essays.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Rachel Werner
about her children’s book, Moving and Grooving to Fillmore’s Beat and her cookbook,
Macro Cooking Made Simple.
Rachel is a model, an author, a poet, a book reviewer, the founder of The Little Book
Project, a freelance writer and digital medical consultant, teaching artist, certified holistic
nutritionist, certified yoga instructor and mindfulness practitioner. Rachel has a daughter
named Phoebe and a dog named Butter.
Moving and Grooving to Fillmore’s Beat is a beautiful story about the historical Fillmore
District in San Francisco, CA. It teaches children about the Fillmore District’s creative
legacy and names some of the famous artists at the Fillmore such as Carlos Santana
and Maya Angelou.
Macro Cooking Made Simple has fifty plus recipes for clean eating and healthy living.
Rachel has always had a love-hate relationship with food. Rachel was diagnosed with
an eating disorder at the age of 19. Exploring the creative process of eating was a
complete game changer for Rachel in regard to her health and her career.
In this episode, Rachel shares two of her poems and reads one of her daughter’s
poems.
Lisa thanks Rachel for sharing her many talents, and for always being curious in all
things.
Madison author Beth Nguyen’s latest book Owner of a Lonely Heart (Scribner, July 2023) is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth’s relationship with her mother.
At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her family fled Saigon for America. Only Beth’s mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was nineteen. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together. It was named a Best Memoir of 2023 by Oprah Daily, and was selected by Time, NPR, and BookPage as a Best Book of 2023.
Beth joins host Sara Batkie ahead of the paperback release for a conversation about the expectations of motherhood, changing her name, and the fallibility of memory.
Beth Nguyen is the author of four books, most recently the memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart, published by Scribner in 2023. Owner of a Lonely Heart was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, Time, Oprah Daily, and BookPage. Nguyen’s three previous books, the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl, were published by Viking Penguin. Her awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center, a Bread Loaf fellowship, and best book of the year honors from the Chicago Tribune and Library Journal. Her books have been included in community and university read programs around the country. Nguyen’s work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Time Magazine, and The Best American Essays.
Nguyen was born in Saigon. When she was a baby, she and her family came to the United States as refugees and were resettled in Michigan, where Nguyen grew up. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with poet Daniel Khalastchi about hist new collection The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (2024, University of Wisconsin Press).
The Story of Your Obstinate Survival is a propulsive collection. It’s very funny, uncannily mundane and starkly surreal. The poems are a collision of juxtapositions and images, each one brimming with a vigor and vitality that demands re-reading, reading aloud, and maybe even setting to music. The lyrical wordplay will stop you in your tracks, either with laughter or with an appreciation for the delightfully weird scenes unfolding before you. The poems speak to an obstinate persistence, to enduring beyond a routinely felt sense of an ending.
Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he is the author of four books of poetry—Manoleria (Tupelo Press), Tradition (McSweeney’s), American Parables (University of Wisconsin Press, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry), and The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review, The Believer Logger, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Electric Lit, Granta, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and Best American Experimental Writing. Daniel has taught advanced writing, literature, and publishing courses at Augustana College, Marquette University, and the University of Iowa, most recently as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in Iowa City where he directs the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Writing. He is the cofounder and managing editor of Rescue Press.
Author photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Angela Trudell Vasquez, who until recently, was the City of Madison Poet Laureate.
Trudell Vasquez is a poet, writer, performer, and activist. Her most recent chapbook, My People Redux (2022, Finishing Line Press) honors her heritage, contending with generational hardships immigrant families face in making a life in America. The chapbook won first place in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Contest for 2022.
Angie began writing seriously when she was seven years old. Her grandmother purchased a diary for her, and this is where she would write her first few lines. Angie tells us that she learned the power of words make her feel whole, well-fed, and warm.
Lisa discusses Angie’s position as the former Madison Poet Laureate, poetry on the Madison Transit buses, Art Night Books, Angela’s day job as Director of Human Resources for End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, and her work on her memoir.
Additionally, Lisa jokes with Angie about some things she has learned about her, such as her love for Etta James and why she sometimes wears two different colored tights to a poetry reading.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s latest book of prose poetry, Exploding Head (Persea Books, February 2024) is described as an OCD memoir in prose poems.
It chronicles her childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. It’s been called “Magnificently propulsive and evocative” by Rebecca Morgan Frank. Megan Wildhood said, “I want someone to make a haunted house of these poems.”
She joins newest host, Sara Batkie, for a conversation about mental health, poetry as personal history, and what it’s like to be a working writer in Madison.
In addition to Exploding Head, Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Sightseer, Paper Doll Fetus, and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones. She is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Director’s Guest fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy.
Cynthia has taught creative writing and composition at George Mason University, the University of Wisconsin, and Edgewood College. She works at an electrical engineering firm in Madison, WI, where she lives with her husband and teenage child. You can find more about her at her website, cynthiamariehoffman.com and follow her on Instagram @cynthiamariehoffman.
How do you make change at organizations that resemble hard granite, and aren’t designed to bend?
Only by patiently and persistently nudging them forward day-by-day, one improvement at a time, according to the authors of Bending Granite: 30+ true stories of leading change (Acta Publications, 2022). It’s a compilation of stories from leaders, mostly in and around Madison, writing about the organizations they loved and sought to improve.
It’s a book that promises “no big bang, no instant pudding, no quick fixes.” Nonetheless, it might lend insight for managers on effectively changing the status quo.
On today’s show, host David Ahrens speaks with Tom Mosgaller and Michael Williamson, two of the volume’s co-editors.Mosgaller and Williamson join Ahrens in the studio to talk about the nature of leadership, the role of quality assurance, and the importance of paying attention to purpose, processes, and people.
Michael Williamson has led many complex public organization, including stints as chief of staff for Madison Mayor Joe Sensenbrenner, assistant to UW-Madison chancellor Donna Shalala, and policy assistant to Wisconsin Governor Lee Dreyfus.
Williamson is the former Executive Director of the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, which manages the Wisconsin Retirement System’s trust funds. Now retired, he continues to serve on a variety of nonprofit boards.
Tom Mosgaller describes himself as a “change agent by nature, and leader by nurture.” For more than a dozen years, he served as the City of Madison’s Director of Organizational Development and Training. In his tenure, the city’s quality assurance work received worldwide recognition as a pioneering effort and was recognized by the American Society for Quality (ASQ).
Mosgaller later worked as Director of Change Management for NIATx, a division of the UW Madison School of Engineering that works to improve the delivery of community-based health services.
He is past President and Chairman of the Board of the American Society for Quality and has served as a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award examiner and judge for the Wisconsin Forward Award. He now works as a consultant through his business, Gnarly Oaks.
Find more about Bending Granite – including interviews and resources – at bendinggranite.org.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with local Madison author Ann Garvin.
Ann Garvin became an author at age fifty. She has now written five books. Ann Garvin is a nurse, a professor, and USA Today Bestselling Author. She thinks everything is funny and a little bit sad. Ann writes stories about women with a good sense of humor who do too much in a world that asks too much from them. Ann is the founder of the multiple award-winning Tall Poppy Writers where she is committed to helping women writers succeed. She is a sought-after speaker on writing, leadership and health and has taught extensively in NY, San Francisco, LA, Boston, and at festivals across the country and in Europe.
Some may say that a nurse engages more with the left-brain which is analytical, calculated and orderly verses the right-brain which is supposed to be intuitive and creative. With this, there is also the thought that the nurse must step to the right of their left brains in order to be both data-minded and people focused. Lisa talks with Ann about her book journey and engages in conversation about Ann’s nurse left brain moving to the right in order to be an author.
There’s No Coming Back from This was published by Lake Union Publishing in 2023.
Ann will return to the airwaves on 10/28 for her new book, Bummer Camp.
Hallie Linden yearns to write for the New York Times. At the moment, she’s stuck at a daily newspaper in tiny Green Meadow, Indiana, a town known for its amusement park and nothing else. It’s 1989, and juicy reporting jobs are hard to find. She resolves to work hard, win a few awards, and then welcome the job offers.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host David Ahrens speaks with Cynthia Simmons. She’s author of a recent novel called Wrong Kind of Paper, the story of a young reporter in a small town who resists the corporate journalist demand to avoid “controversy.”
The novel unexpectedly turns into a two track thriller — one uncovering the deadly corruption and the other is the fight to get the story published.
Before her career as a reporter, novelist and professor of media law, Cynthia Simmons was the News Director of WORT-FM. Since then, she’s held numerous prestigious reporting positions, and is now the Associate Teaching Professor at Penn State, where she teaches mass media law.
In this interview, she also shares with Ahrens the special contribution of listener-supported radio by providing the information necessary for a democracy to function.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with journalists Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin for a conversation on their book Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy (2023, Hachette Books).
Among the Braves is a narrative history of the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong told through the eyes of four activists named Finn, Tommy, Chu, and Gwyneth. Imbedded reporters Mahtani and McLaughlin give insight into the development and ultimate dissolution of a movement more than 150 years in the making. Among the Braves Deftly blends first-person accounts with the larger social, political, and historical forces shaping a popular movement. You can follow her @ShibaniMahtani
Shibani Mahtani is an international investigative correspondent for the Washington Post. She was previously the Post's Hong Kong and Southeast Asia bureau chief and a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal based in Singapore, Yangon, and Chicago. Her Hong Kong coverage was honored with prizes including a Human Rights Press Award for an investigation into police misconduct. She is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. You can follow him @TMcLaughlin3
Timothy McLaughlin is a prize-winning contributing writer for The Atlantic. Previously he worked for Reuters news agency. His work has also appeared in publications including WIRED, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Prospect. He has won multiple awards for his Hong Kong coverage, including two Best in Business Awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing, and is a two-time finalist for The Livingston Award for International Reporting. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California. Mahtani and McLaughlin live in Singapore with their adopted Hong Kong village dog, Bean.
Image courtesy of Timothy McLaughlin
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with prolific author Jacquelyn Mitchard. Mitchard is now a frequent lecturer and professor of fiction and creative nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpellier.
She once worked as a journalist at several Wisconsin newspapers, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Capital Times, where her husband also worked before his sudden death - a tragedy that prompted her to write her first book.
Lisa interviewed Jacquelyn for her book, A Very Inconvenient Scandal, published by MIRA/Harper Collins in November 2023. It's a title Jacquelyn says she hates and was forced to change.
Lisa and Jacquelyn sit down for a conversation about the importance of titling, dreaming through your characters, and how Jacquelyn prompted Oprah to start her infamous Book Club.
Jacquelyn loves telling stories. She tells Lisa she can't imagine a life without it, saying: "They say the history of humankind is shards of pottery, but it isn't. It's stories."
You can find more about Jacquelyn Mitchard at her website, jacquelynmitchard.com, where you can also sign up for her newsletter. You can also follow her Substack accounts, Everything Explained.
For more than a decade, Greg Mickells led the Madison Public Library. He's responsible for a significant transformation of the Madison library system.
His tenure as Director took him to three continents, and to the White House in 2016, when Madison Public Library was recognized with a National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Additional awards received under Mickells' leadership include a Wisconsin Innovation Award for "The Bubbler" program, and as a Top Innovator by the Urban Libraries Council in the Race and Social Equity category.
Under his hand, the Library has transformed significantly over the last decade. Three libraries - Central, Meadowridge, and Pinney - have been expanded and renovated. The Library's taken over the Wisconsin Book Festival, launched The Bubbler program, launched the Dream Bus, and navigated safe library service during the pandemic. Dozens of community-based partnerships have been established under his leadership.
As of February 2, Mickells is retired from his post as Director of the Madison Library System, after eleven years at the helm. He was feted earlier this month with a retirement party, where foundation Executive Director Conor Moran, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Madison Public Library Board President Alyssa Kenney, staff, community partners, and friends praised Greg for his kindness, care for his staff, and vision for making Madison Public Library a national and even international leader in the library world.
WORT host David Ahrens - who got the chance to work with Mickells as a former Madison alder - sat down with Mickells shortly before his retirement for this exit interview.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Peter Coviello on his book of essays Is There God After Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things (2023, University of Chicago Press).
Exuberant, effusive, rye, and incisive, this collection of essays analyze a wide range of cultural objects in order to shore up some modicum of consolation against an intractable sense of impending doom. By focusing on beloved novels, films, and songs and the joyful connections they help foster between friends, families, and lovers, Coviello argues that these attachments are small mercies that buoy us up in light of what he terms “endstrickenness.” With verve and agility, Coviello surveys a large swath of contemporary culture in an effort to rethink what literary criticism can do and to assure us that not all of contemporary life is a wasteland of broken images. Joyful reading plain and simple.
Peter Coviello is the author of six books, including Make Yourselves Gods, a finalist for the 2020 John Whitmer Historical Association Best Book Prize; Tomorrow’s Parties, a 2013 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies; and Long Players, a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM’s Ten Best Books of 2018. His newest book, Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things, was selected as a “Most Anticipated” title by both The Millions and the Lambda Literary Review, and appeared in year-end lists for 2023 from the Chicago Tribune, the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, and elsewhere. He taught for many years at Bowdoin College and since 2014 has been at UIC, where he is Professor and Head of English.
You can follow him @pcoviell.
Image courtesy of University of Chicago Press
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with local poet Shoshauna Shy.
Shoshauna Shy has been involved in local poetry and literary events for decades. She founded the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program in 2004, a project with the mission of placing poetry in public places where it isn't expected.
She's previously worked for the Wisconsin Humanities Council, where she helped create, coordinate and facilitate poetry programs for the Wisconsin Book Festival when it was just getting started.
Shoshauna and Lisa met at Sequoya Library, during the 2024 Wisconsin Poets' Calendar Reading. They extend their conversation into the studio for this show, where Shoshauna reads some of her poems, talks about her foray into flash fiction, and shares how her 2017 book The Splash of Easy Laughter came to be.
On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews Heather Swan about her latest book Dandelion, a collection of poetry which explores our uniquely human relationship with this natural world, not only in its wondrous beauty, but also in its devastation and fragility.
About the guest:
Heather Swan is a poet, non-fiction writer, and educator in Madison. Her poetry includes the collection A Kinship with Ash, which was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and her chapbook The Edge of Damage, which was the winner of the Wisconsin Chapbook Award.
She is also the author of the non-fiction book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book to Where Honeybees Thrive is expected to be released later this year, titled Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host David Ahrens talks with with Thomas Pearson.
Thomas Pearson is a professor of anthropology at UW-Stout, where he also leads the social science department.
As a cultural anthropologist, he understands and appreciates the diversity of cultures and expressions of a common humanity. After the birth of his daughter, who has Down’s Syndrome, he documents his struggle towards broadening the concept of humanity to all people-including those who are differently able and thinking about how we can enable them to achieve their full capabilities.
That complexity and exploration of evolving ideas of disability and difference is outlined in his new book and the subject of today’s interview. It’s called Margaret Mead, the Problem of Disability, and a Child Born Different, published in fall 2023 from the University of California Press.
In addition to numerous academic articles and essays, Thomas Pearson is also the author of “When the Hills Are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community,” published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2017.
The Dane County Farmers' Market is the largest producers-only farmers market in the nation. Last year, it celebrated its 50th anniversary.
In celebration of that significant milestone, the DCFM has released a hardcover, full-color, 258-page cookbook. The Dane County Farmers' Market Cookbook (published this year by Little Creek Press) features 125 recipes that give a global spin to locally-sourced ingredients.
With a foreword written by chef Tory Miller, and photographs by Bill Lubing, the cookbook is written by Terese Allen.
She's the author of a variety of local food columns, and author of several other books, including The Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State, Fresh Market Wisconsin: Recipes, Resources and Stories Celebrating Wisconsin Farm Markets and Roadside Stands, and The Ovens of Brittany Cookbook.
She's a co-founder and longtime leader of the Culinary History Enthusiasts of Wisconsin (CHEW) and past president of REAP Food Group.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, Terese joins host David Ahrens to talk about Madison's unique food culture, what it means to be a "foodist", and what makes the Dane County Farmers' Market so special.
Stu Levitan’s guest is UW history professor Stephen Kantrowitz, whose new book should be of special interest to those of us here in Teejop. It’s Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the 19th Century United States from the good people at the University of North Carolina Press.
If you are like most Americans with an immigrant background, you probably think citizenship is a good thing, because it confers rights and privileges. But for Native Americans in the 19th century, it was something quite different – it was a way to destroy their collectivist culture and ultimately steal their land. Until some Native peoples – notably the Ho-Chunk – figured out how to use citizenship and private property rights to reclaim land and preserve their identity. The Ho-Chunk story in the Removal Era is one of both settler/colonial violence and conquest, but also one of Ho-Chunk resistance, persistence, and return.
It is a story Stephen Kantrowitz is very qualified to tell. He is the Plaenert-Bascom and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History an affiliate faculty member in American Indian Studies and Afro-American Studies, here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaching courses on race, indigeneity, politics, and citizenship. His previous books are More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin, 2012) and Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000).
And of particular interest to me, he co-chaired with Dr. Floyd Rose, president of 100 Black Men of Madison, the chancellor’s committee in 2018 that produced a very knowledgeable and nuanced report on KKK on campus.
Al Jarreau is one of the most beloved musical artists to come out of Milwaukee, and his music – from jazz to pop to R&B – defies easy classification. He performed with a bevy of jazz musicians, and blended an eclectic mix of other styles into his work.
But Jarreau is perhaps best known for his live performances and expressive vocal improvisation. When he passed away in 2017, the New York Times wrote of Jarreau’s “virtuosic ability to produce an array of vocalizations ranging from delicious nonsense to clicks and growls to quasi-instrumental sounds.”
On this edition of Madison Book Beat, host David Ahrens sits down with Kurt Dietrich, author of Never Givin’ Up: The Life and Music of Al Jarreau (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023). It’s the first biography of Jarreau’s life and career, and compiles details collected by Dietrich in interviews with Jarreau himself, alongside dozens of Jarreau’s friends, colleagues, and family.
Dietrich joins us to play examples of Jarreau’s eclectic talent, virtuosic vocalization, and early life in Wisconsin.
About the guest: Kurt Dietrich is professor emeritus of music at Ripon College, where he taught from 1980 to 2019. He received his master’s degree from Northwestern University, where he studied trombone, and later was a trombonist with jazz fusion group Matrix.
In addition to many articles, he’s the author of three other books about jazz: Wisconsin Riffs: Jazz Profiles from the Heartland (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018), Jazz ‘Bones: The World of Jazz Trombone (Advance Music, 2005), and Duke’s ‘Bones: Ellington’s Great Trombonists (Alfred Music, 1995). You can find more at his website, kurtdietrich.net.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Tacey M. Atsitty about her poetry collection (At) Wrist, (2023, The University of Wisconsin Press Press).
In a fever dream of metaphor and image, Atsitty explores themes of loss, romantic love, and faith. Drawing on the familiar poetic form of the sonnet, Atsitty demonstrates how vulnerability, nakedness, and risk are an essential part of the connections we build with others across time. Delicate and visceral, (At) Wrist is a collection which "amplifies silence, so you can hear/ every crunch or offering of self."
Tacey M. Atsitty is of the Diné tribe and her clans are as follows: she is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People). Her maternal grandfather is Tábąąhí (Water Edge People) and her paternal grandfather is Hashk’áánhadzóhí (Yucca Fruit Strung-Out-In-A-Line People) from Cove, AZ.
She is
the winner of the Wisconsin Brittingham Prize for Poetry and is a recipient of the Louis Owens Award, Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, Morning Star Creative Writing Award, and the Philip Freund Prize. She holds bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in EPOCH, POETRY Magazine, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, swamp pink, Literary Hub, New Poets of Native Nations, Leavings, and other publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her second book (At) Wrist is forthcoming (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023).
She is the director of the Navajo Film Festival, a member of the Board of Directors for Lightscatter Press, a member of the Advisory Council for Brigham Young University’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, and the founding member of the Advisory Board for the Intermountain All-Women Hoop Dance Competition.
She is a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, where she lives with her husband.
Photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press
Stu Levitan welcomes UW history professor Stephen Kantrowitz, whose new book should be of special interest to those of us here in Teejop, it’s Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the 19th Century United States from the good people at the University of North Carolina Press.
If you are like most Americans with an immigrant background, you probably think citizenship is a good thing, because it confers rights and privileges. But for Native Americans in the 19th century, it was something quite different – it was a way to destroy their collectivist culture and ultimately steal their land. Until some Native peoples – notably the Ho-Chunk – figured out how to use citizenship and private property rights to reclaim land and preserve their identity. The Ho-Chunk story in the Removal Era is one of both settler/colonial violence and conquest, but also one of Ho-Chunk resistance, persistence, and return.
It is a story Stephen Kantrowitz is very qualified to tell. He is the Plaenert-Bascom and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an affiliate faculty member in American Indian Studies and Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison, where he teaches courses on race, indigeneity, politics, and citizenship. His previous books are More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin, 2012) and Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000). And of particular interest to me, he co-chaired with Dr Floyd Rose, president of 100 Black Men of Madison, the chancellor’s committee in 2018 that produced a very knowledgeable and nuanced report on KKK on campus.
It's a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat UW Professor Stephen Kantrowitz.
On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews author Alison Townsend. Alison is an award-winning author of two poetry collections, The Blue Dress & Persephone in America, and a volume of prose, The Persistence of Rivers. She is also a professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
She joined us in the studio to discuss her latest book of memoir-in-essays titled The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022. The Green Hour can be described as a collection of sparkling lyrical prose that moves effortlessly through time like a red-winged blackbird. Inspired by five beloved settings—eastern Pennsylvania, Vermont, California, western Oregon, and the spot atop the Wisconsin hill where she now resides—Townsend considers the role that Place plays in shaping the self. Through her attentiveness to nature, she reveals the ways that a fresh perspective or new experience in any environment can incite wonder, build unexpected connections, and provide solace and salvation.
On Madison Book Beat, we aim to highlight local authors and book events. And sometimes, we hope that you just might learn about the next book on your to-read pile.
On this pledge drive edition of Madison Book Beat, we flip the table, asking YOU: what’re you reading? What book should we add to our reading list? David Ahrens hosts today’s open line.
Books mentioned by callers and by hosts in this episode include…
- Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us (Valancourt Books, 1985),
- Works by Ross Gay, including The Book of Delights (Algonquin Books, 2019), The Book of (More) Delights (Algonquin Books, 2023),
- When Crack Was King (One World, 2023) by Donovan X Ramsey
- Pathogenesis: A history of the World in Eight Plagues (Crown, 2023) by Jonathan Kennedy
- Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez
- Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (Anchor, 2023) by Patrick Radden Keefe
- Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022) by Brian Fairbanks
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Quest for North America (Liveright, 2022) by Pekka Hämäläinen
Also recommended in today’s episode is Libby, an app that lets patrons use their library card to check out and read eBooks or listen to eAudiobooks.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with musician and scholar Jérôme Camal on his monography Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics (2019, University of Chicago Press).
Jérôme Camal is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his research and teaching focus on music, dance, and postcoloniality across the French Atlantic world. Broadly speaking, he investigates how postcolonial ways of knowing and ways of being are created and transmitted through the body. In Creolized Aurality, Camal details how the practice and sounds of gwoka—Guadeloupe’s secular drumming tradition—illuminate the somewhat contradictory demands for sovereignty and citizenship that inherently accompany Guadeloupeans’ position as French citizens at the margins of the nation-state. While gwoka has been associated with anticolonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. Charting the entangled interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation in gwoka, Camal theorizes “creolized auralities”–that is, expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.
Image courtesy of Jérôme Camal
Stu Levitan welcomes to Madison BookBeat one of our greatest living writers, perhaps the preeminent American writer, Joyce Carol Oates. She holds a master’s degree and an honorary doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, but of greater immediate interest is that she’s coming back to Madison for an appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival this Thursday evening the 28th to talk about her new collection, Zero-Sum. That’s at 7 o’clock in the Madison Central Library.
To call Joyce Carol Oates prolific is something of an understatement; her statistics are staggering. By one account, 62 novels, 47 short-story collections, 16 collections of nonfiction, 9 collections of poetry, plays and books for children and young adults. And the quality of her work is just as impressive as the quantity -- she received the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970 for the novel them, Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and she’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize six times over a 45-year period. And those are just the highlights. She also maintains a very active presence on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Joyce Carol Oates
On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews author Ben Pladek about his debut novel Dry Land. It is 1917, and a young forester in the north woods of Wisconsin has just discovered he has a magical gift: his touch can grow any plant in minutes. Through this thought-provoking novel, Pladek brings us on a eloquent journey that explores the possibility that such a magical gift could actually be a curse, testing and uprooting the character’s beliefs of nature, love, and self-sacrifice.
Ben Pladek is a literature scholar and writer based in Milwaukee, as well as Associate Professor of English at Marquette University. He has published short fiction in Strange Horizons, Slate Future Tense Fiction, PodCastle, and elsewhere.
Dry Land comes out this month (September 2023) from the University of Wisconsin Press.
This week on Madison Book Beat, host David Ahrens speaks with Jonathan Melrod, a prominent radical, political activist, labor organizer, human rights lawyer and pancreatic cancer survivor, now out with a memoir: "Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War" (September 2022, PM Press).
Melrod's memoir highlights his time as a student radical on the UW-Madison campus, during the peak of anti-war upheaval in the 1960s. But unlike the vast majority of protesters, after the demonstrations ended, Melrod committed himself to organizing the industrial working class for revolution.
What follows is an account of his thirteen years organizing workers in Milwaukee, and then Kenosha, where he takes on the managers of the AMC plant -- while at the same time challenging the sclerotic UAW local to focus on the interests of its members, and fending off attacks from the FBI and local police "red squads."
Melrod describes a balancing of beliefs and interests, short-term and long-term strategies as he deals with the day-to-day problems of speed-ups on the line, discrimination and sex and race harassment, while also focusing on his long-term goals of building a working-class capable of fighting for revolution.
Madison Book Beat host David Ahrens talks with Jon Melrod about his evolution as an organizer and revolutionary, prior to several appearances in Madison:
- On Wednesday, September 27, Melrod will return to the UW-Madison campus for a talk through the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice. The talk, titled "A Radical's Journey from Campus to the Shop Floor in 1970s Wisconsin," will take place at 12:30 at the Havens Wright Center Seminar Room in the Sewell Social Science Building at 1180 Observatory Drive. Registration is required, but a virtual option is available. Register here.
- On Thursday, September 28, Melrod will speak at A Room of One's Own Bookstore at 6pm, in conversation with local labor leader Bill Franks. Find more information here.
Find more about Jonathan Melrod at his website, jonathanmelrod.com, or follow him on Twitter @JonathanMelrod.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with novelist, poet and playwright Quan Barry about her novel When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East (2022, Vintage) and her forthcoming collection of poetry Auction (2023, University of Pittsburgh Press).
“Why do we need to believe our lives must add up to some grand narrative, and what happens when we stop believing this?” asks the narrator of When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East. Set in the vast steppes of Mongolia, the novel follows two brothers on their quest to find the reincarnation of a great lama. There’s sheep stealing, telepathy, and a terrifying sand storm in the Gobi. There’s religious renunciation and epiphany. Death, birth, sacrifice, time passing, time standing still. There is the certainty of impermanence, suffering, and love’s capacity to endure beyond space and time. Barry deftly weaves these themes into delicate, meditative episodes that demand being savored over multiple re-readings.
Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s Northshore, Quan Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barry is now the author of nine books of fiction, poetry, and drama, and is currently Forward Theater’s first ever Writer-in-Residence. Her play, The Mytilenean Debate, had its world premiere in spring of 2022. Barry is a member of the Dramatists Guild, and samples of her plays can be found at NewPlayExchange.org. In addition to several awards including a 2021 Alex Award from the American Library Association, Barry is one of a select group of writers who have received NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction.
You can find out more about her at quanbarry.com.
Photo courtesy of Andrew Thomas
On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews poet Deshawn McKinney. The Milwaukee poet is out with his debut chapbook father forgive me (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2021). It’s a collection described as “an acerbic hip hop hymnal” filled with “fearless, wounding and tender” poems.
About the guest:
Deshawn McKinney is a writer and poet out of Milwaukee and currently lives in Madison. His poetry has appeared in multiple journals, including River Heron Review as a poetry prize-winner.
He’s a graduate of UW-Madison, where he earned a degree in creative writing while participating in the First Wave hip-hop arts community there.
He also holds a Masters in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master in Creative Writing – Poetry from the University of East Anglia.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Nicole Fox about her monograph, After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda (2021, The University of Wisconsin Press Press).
How does a society move forward after the mass violence of genocide? What role do public memorials play in creating healing narratives ? Whose experiences get told and re-told, and whose experiences get marginalized as years go by? 2024 marks thirty years since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and scholar Nicole Fox provides insight into these questions based on years of interviews with survivors who now dedicate their time to working at and maintaining public memorials. Fox makes a powerful argument for conceptualizing memorials "as a form of restorative justice through their ability to provide information on past atrocities, facilitate localized reconciliation and educational programs, and give survivors a sense of hope for the future."
Nicole Fox is an associate professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento where she teaches about atrocity crimes, mass incarceration, global criminology and law. Her research centers on how racial and ethnic contention impacts communities, including how remembrances of adversity shape social change, collective memory and present-day social movements. Her book we’re discussing today, After Genocide, focuses on how physical memorials to past atrocity shape healing, community development and reconciliation for survivors of genocide and genocidal rape. Her most recent project examines bystander intervention, with an emphasis on individuals who conducted acts of rescue during times of social unrest and political violence. Her scholarship has been published in Social Problems, Signs, Social Forces, Deviant Behavior, the Journal for Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Forum, and Societies Without Borders, among others. Her work has generously been supported by numerous national grants, and she also serves on the United Nations Economic and Social Council and contributes to the UN Commission for the Status of Women held annually at the UN headquarters.
You can find out more about Nicole Fox at http://nicolefoxphd.com.
Cover photo courtesy of The University of Wisconsin Press.
Part two of Stu Levitan’s conversation with his friend and former newspaper colleague Michael Dorgan, about his new book No Fight, No Blame: A Journalist’s Life in Martial Arts. It is an absorbing read about a fascinating life which both general readers and martial arts aficionados will enjoy.
And quite a life it has been in both those fields for Michael Dorgan, taking him from Richland Center Wisconsin to Beijing China as bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers and as a formal disciple to the most renowned Chinese internal martial artist of his generation, Hunyuan Taiji Grandmaster Feng Zhiqiang.
And there were some pretty interesting – and frequently dangerous – journalism stops along the way as well, in places like Islamabad, Singapore, Hong Kong. Thankfully, his only arrest as a journalist was during the strike against Madison Newspapers in late 1977, for kicking the door of a VW bug filled with scabs plowing through our picket line. That’s how I first knew Michael, as a colleague at the Capital Times and then the strike newspaper Madison Press Connection.
With the strike doomed, Michael headed to California. As a journalist, he rose to become assistant business editor and Pacific Rim correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News. As a martial artist, he turned away from the Okinawan karate he practiced at UW-Oshkosh and the Korean Tae Kwon Do he studied here with Master J. B. Chung and pursued various styles of the internal Chinese martial art Taiji, or for those who don’t speak Mandarin, Tai Chi.
Among his Taiji teachers in San Francisco in the early eighties, Master Wong Jack Man, whose secret fight in 1964 with the soon-to-be-famous Bruce Lee looms large in martial arts folklore, with lingering uncertainty as to what really happened. Reverting to his journalistic identity, Michael published a major magazine article detailing, for the first time, Man’s account of the fight, which was licensed and freely adapted for the 2016 film Birth of the Dragon.
In 1999, Michael moved to China to become the Beijing bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers, parent company of the Mercury News and at the time the world’s second-largest newspaper chain. That’s when he began studying with Grandmaster Feng – a practice that proved so important that in 2003 he took a leave of absence and remained in Beijing for a year and a half to train intensively with Grandmaster Feng and his disciple Master Chen Xiang. Which in turn caused a documentary about him to be filmed and broadcast on Chinese TV to a viewership of about 800 million. You’ll hear more about all this in a few moments.
Returning to California in late 2004, Michael returned to the Mercury News, as an editor in the business section. Until the business of newspapers got so bad that Michael left and devoted himself fulltime to his Hunyuan Martial Arts Academy of San Jose. An endeavor helped no doubt by Michael’s designation in 2007 as an honorary instructor at the Feng Zhiqiang Martial Arts Academy in Beijing.
Michael returned to journalism just this week, with a powerful opinion piece in the aforementioned Mercury News. Sadly, the headline tells a tragic tale: Cancer-drug shortage creates ‘death panels’ for patients like me. And the sub-head: I’m deemed expendable as a national scarcity of life-extending chemotherapy medications has resulted in rationing.
Because Michael has a mysterious metastatic cancer that has caused him to be cut, burned and poisoned with some progress but without a cure. So I’ve edited to tape to start with that part of our conversation, then we’ll roll it back for talk of martial arts in the Bay Area and China, then reflections on the newspaper strike, and some closing thoughts.
Here’s Michael Dorgan, author of No Fight, No Blame – A Journalist’s life in Martial Arts.
The stories included in Steve Fox’s new collection “traverse a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm.” They frequently feature Midwest settings, along with motifs centering trauma, loss, class, and politics.
The collection, titled Sometimes Creek, was published earlier this year by Cornerstone Press, and won the 2022 Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction from the Wisconsin Writers Awards.
Incoming Madison Book Beat host Cole Erickson sits down with Steve Fox for more about his collection, his process, and what’s next.
About the guest:
Steve Fox is a Wisconsin writer. His debut collection Sometimes Creek (Cornerstone Press, 2023) is the winner of the 2022 Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction from the Wisconsin Writers Awards. Steve studies creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and lives in Wisconsin with his wife, three boys, and one dog. You can follow his work at his website, stevefoxwrites.com, or follow him on Twitter or Instagram.
The Palestinian city of Jenin, in the West Bank, is in international headlines after several were killed and dozens injured in an Israel raid. The city is a significant symbol of Palestinian resistance — and it figures heavily in Christa Bruhn's new memoir, Crossing Borders: The Search for Dignity in Palestine.
The memoir, ten years in the making and published this summer by Little Creek Press, follows Bruhn's journey of curiosity to Jerusalem and Gaza, first forged while studying abroad and later as a mother of three Palestinians. It documents the challenges Palestinians face living in the shadow of the State of Israel, and the deep connection Palestinians have to their homeland that inspires them to keep on living their lives in spite of those challenges.
Christa Bruhn is an author, photographer and culinary artist with a lifelong passion for peace and justice. She has a PhD from UW-Madison in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. She now splits her time between her home in Madison and extended family abroad. She joins host David Ahrens in conversation about her debut book, and what she's learned from her travels.
The US education system has been sold as the solution for individual success and economic security. Should that still be the model?
Our guest, Jonathan Shelton, questions the idea that education should be the main way to access economic opportunity - especially when pitted against other social democratic alternatives. That's the starting point to his richly-researched new book, The Education Myth, published this spring by Cornell University Press. David Ahrens speaks with Jon Shelton about his new book.
Jon Shelton is Associate Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. A national expert on teacher unions, public education, and the history of working people, Shelton's work has been featured in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and numerous other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @prof_shelton.
Stu Levitan welcomes Mark Borthwick, here to talk about his new biography of his second cousin thrice removed, A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, from the good people at the University of Wisconsin Press.
Mamah Borthwick was a highly educated, charismatic young woman from Oak Park Illinois at the turn of the 20th century, soon to become the translator of the internationally renowned Swedish feminist Ellen Key. But as Mark Borthwick writes, she lived with a man she didn’t love in a house designed by a man she did, and despite her many talents and accomplishments, Borthwick would become one of the most reviled women of her era because she left her husband and young children in 1909 to go to Europe with the architect of that house, Frank Lloyd Wright, and then live with him at the magnificent hillside home he built in Spring Green WI, Taliesin, where she and her children were murdered in 1914.
It is quite a tale of forbidden love and devastating loss social change and artistic triumph which Mark Borthwick tells well in this important addition to the literature about the self-proclaimed world’s greatest architect.
Mark Borthwick’s resume is perhaps not quite what you would expect from the author of such a book. A graduate of Northwestern University, he served with the US Army in Vietnam, and later received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Iowa and then two postdoctoral fellowships. After a stint on the staff of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, he became the founding US Executive Director of the US National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation, and then the Director of the United States Asia Pacific Council, a project of the East-West Center. His previous book, Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Pacific Asia, was the textbook companion to the award-winning, ten-hour PBS television documentary of that name.
It's a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Mark Borthwick
How should reporters consider their ethical responsibilities to the public? That's a question studied through a historical lens in a new book by UW-Madison journalism professor Kathryn J. McGarr.
In City of Newsmen, McGarr explores how how the midcentury national press corps kept quiet about their skepticism in the first decades of the Cold War. National journalists, who were at the time almost exclusively white males, knew full well that they had reason to be cynical about the war and the US government's lack of transparency. The question, explored by McGarr from a bevy of personal correspondence from the time, is why they hid those doubts from the public.
For more, Madison Book Beat host David Ahrens sat down with McGarr to talk about her research and her new book.
About the guest:
Kathryn J. McGarr is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, where she teaches courses in literary journalism and the history of journalism and mass communications. Her research specializes in twentieth-century U.S. political history, with a focus on gender, foreign policy, and the news media. In addition to her recent book City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2022), she's also author of a 2011 book exploring Democratic power broker Robert Strauss.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Sami Schalk about her book, Black Disability Politics (2022, Duke University Press).
Across six tightly-argued chapters and two praxis-focused interludes, Black Disability Politics explores how Black cultural workers have engaged disability as a social and political issue differently than the mainstream, white-dominated disability rights movement. In doing so, Schalk argues that because Black disability politics take on different qualities, the work has been overlooked or misrecognized within disability studies and Black studies alike. Using archival work on the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project, as well as interviews with eleven contemporary Black disabled cultural works, the book offers a framework for both identifying and enacting Black disability politics for scholars and activists.
“We cannot understand Black disability politics,” Schalk writes in the Introduction, “without engaging histories of anti-Black violence, scientific and medical racism, health disparities, health activism and environmental racism. We also cannot understand Black disability politics without exploring how Black people have conceptualized not only disability, illness, and disease but also health, wellness, and healing within our own communities” (9-10).
Sami Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She has published on literature, film, and material culture in a variety of peer-reviewed humanities journals.
You can find out more about her at samischalk.com and follow her @DrSamiSchalk.
Cover photo courtesy of Duke University Press.
In Scott Mitchel May’s latest novel, a serial killer who believes he’s possessed by an Irish demi-god haunts Madison while a city detective tracks his patterns for years. A former Capitol intern becomes a separationist working to retake the American Southwest. The US is led by a President who speaks gibberish except when on the air, and a Wisconsin state senator who is past his prime casts a deciding vote to secede from the nation amid growing continental conflict.
Plots collide and timelines overlap in Breakneck: Or, It Happened Once in America (Anxiety Press, April 2023) a full-length novel from Madison author Scott Mitchel May. It could be described as cynical, neo-noir, postmodern thriller, with plenty of authentic Madison geography (Mickey’s Dairy Bar! Edgewood and UW-Madison! Eken Park! Apartments on Doty Street!).
As May tells us on Madison Book Beat, it’s “my book that I wanted to put Madison at the center of, and highlight a different kind of Midwest sensibility.” Scott Mitchel May joins us on Book Beat to tell us about his latest work, out April 28 from Anxiety Press.
Scott Mitchel May is a local writer whose work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including Maudlin House, Rejection Letters, The Bear Creek Gazette, The Maryland Literary Review, Bending Genres. He’s the winner of the 2019 Poem or Page Contest at the UW Writers’ Conference in the category of Literary Fiction and was a shortlist finalist for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. A former legislative aide in the Wisconsin State Senate, he now works an administrator for a charitable foundation, and is an avid skateboarder.
May’s debut collection of short fiction, DeKalb, Illinois is a Paradise What Eats its Own, was published by Alien Buddha in 2022. His forthcoming novelette All Burn Down is expected in October 2023 from Emerge Journal, and next novel Awful People is set to publish in winter 2024 from Death Print. You can find more about him on his website, scottmitchelmay.com, or on twitter @smitchelmay.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Jeff Sharlet about his new collection of essays, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (2023, W.W. Norton).
The Undertow is an incisive and at times foreboding collection. It is made up of ten interrelated essays that map the social, cultural and religious geographies of the contemporary United States. The collection takes the killing of Ashli Babbitt as its through line. Babbit was the pro-Trump insurrectionist shot and killed by a capital police officer on January 6 2021 who has since been turned into a far-right martyr.
Across these essays, Sharlet tracks the volatile combination of Christian evangelicalism and far-right paranoia that is fueled by conspiracy-laden social media platforms. On top of these trends Sharlet also discusses the eschatological belief in regeneration and redemption through violence. Traveling across the United States–from Sacramento, to Nevada, from Nebraska to Wisconsin, from Trump rallies to fundamentalist, warrior-Jesus megachurches and big tent revivals, to the front porches and kitchens of Confederate and Gadsden flag waving folks–Sharlet’s essays have a fever-dream-momentum.
A masterful blending of journalistic reporting, essay, and memoir, The Undertow is a book “written from the middle of something, a season of coming apart.” It is a “book of stories of difficult people doing terrible things” that registers “grief and its distortions, how loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate, or denial, or delusion.” Whiteness is the implicit and explicit specter that haunts the essays’ proceedings, and Sharlet offers provocative and productive ways of reimagining the roots and routes of White supremacy in the 21st century United States.
The opening and closing essays in the collection highlight two radical singers and performers–Harry Belafonte and folk singer Lee Hays–offering modicums of hope against the rising tide of fascism in the mid-twentieth century.
Follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffSharlet.
Image of author courtesy of W.W. Norton
Jonas Gomez Tijerino welcomes Anisa Yudawanti and Amy Wilson to discuss "What Does it Mean to Tell the Truth", written by Ms. Yudawanti’s 9th grade History students and illustrated by Ms. Wilson’s 2nd and 3rd grade Art students. This is a project which collects the musings of Madison high school students regarding the manner by which history is recounted. Whose stories are centered? Whose are left out? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that we as educators of our future leaders are telling the truth. History as it happened, not history as it pleases.
Proceeds from physical purchases of "What Does it Mean to Tell the Truth" go to Freedom Inc. It is also available online on Issuu.
Madison Book Beat host Gil Halsted sits down in the studio with Nick Vander Puy, journalist and author of the recent book “Water Protectors: The H.E.L.P Campaign to Save the Penokees” (Strong Dog Press, July 2022).
It’s a book that details the Harvest Educational Learning Project, or H.E.L.P. campaign, a coalition of tribal citizens, environmentalists and neighbors who occupied treaty-protected lands in the Penokee Hills, in Ashland and Iron Counties of Wisconsin’s Northwoods. The Penokees, elevated ridges that contain some of the oldest rocks in Wisconsin, are the headwaters of the Bad River and eventually flow into Lake Superior.
That campaign was successful at halting Gogebic Taconite – a multinational mineral corporation- from embarking on a plan for an open-pit mine. And it’s one instructive example for grassroots activists and water protectors everywhere.
Vander Puy will appear at an author event at Kismet Bookshop in Verona this Tuesday, March 21, at 5pm.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Jameka Williams about her Brittingham Prize-winning debut poetry collection, American Sex Tape™ (2022, The University of Wisconsin Press).
Brittingham Prize judge and poet Brian Teare describes American Sex Tape™ as a collection “[s]plit between a love of watching and the fear created by it.” “Williams demolishes misogynist, racist logic with weaponized line breaks and wrecking-ball wit. Looking directly “into the camera,” Williams writes “about taking back power” and “the thin line between pleasure and collusion.” “Complex and messy and necessary in all the ways sex is,” Teare concludes, “American Sex Tape™ is brilliant Black feminist truth.”
Jameka Williams holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. Her poetry has been published in Prelude Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, and Gulf Coast, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she resides in Chicago, Illinois.
You can follower her @meka_will_write on Twitter.
Stu Levitan welcomes WORT’S own Frank Emspak for a special pledge drive conversation about his new memoir Troublemaker: Saying No to Power.
You may know Frank most recently as Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin School for Workers, and the co-founder and co-producer of Madison Labor News and the Workers Independent News Services. Those of you of a certain age may recall his service in the sixties and early seventies as chair of the UW Socialist Club then chair of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, later chair of the group People Against Racism and a doctoral candidate in the history department. But between those two Madison eras of his career, he was in Massachusetts as a member of the industrial working class, union official and consultant to state government. In just one 3-year period, 1972-1975, he moved from Ph D student to senior lab technician to machinist to a laborer working in a foundry All in all, a pretty amazing life, recounted very well in Troublemaker.
Part one of the conversation aired Oct. 31, 2022.
Stu Levitan welcomes Brian J Kramp, author of a book about a world-famous band that is technically from Rockford IL, but which owes a lot of its success to Madison. That band of course is Cheap Trick, the book is This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick, from the good people at Jawbone Press.
The book’s title notwithstanding, the band does indeed have a past, and a very interesting one at that. First, there was the Byzantine way in which the bands Grim Reapers, Toastin Jam, Phrenz, Toons, Zander and Kent, Sick Man of Europe, Fuse and others morphed and mutated into CT. Then there was the relentless and ultimately effort by our friend Ken Adamany, who booked or managed several iterations, to get them a record deal. Their hard work paid off – 5000 live performances, 20 million albums sold, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It’s a double-header that Brian J. Kramp is well, maybe even uniquely qualified to tell. After all, he was across the street from Sunset Bowl in his native Waukesha Wisconsin that night in 1976 when a legendary record producer signed on with Cheap Trick. Now Brian was 2 years old at the time, so he was likely not aware of the epochal event, but it does give him some personal skin in the game.
And he’s worn out a lot of shoe leather researching the book, at least metaphorically, interviewing not just several of the principals, but tracking down musicians who were in bands with the tricksters close to sixty years ago. The result is a fascinating deep dive on a band that went from bowling alleys and beer halls to arenas and stadiums, from the Stone Hearth to the Rock and Rolll Hall of Fame.
It's a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Brian J. Kramp.
Stu Levitan welcomes back to the show the award-winning journalist, music critic and author Joel Selvin for a conversation about his classic book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, out of print for many years but just reissued by the good people at Permuted Press. It is the story of the rise and fall of one of the most important figures in modern music, from his childhood as a musical prodigy to the end of the band in 1975. It’s a tale told well by the people who were there – his parents, his bandmates, his ex-wife, his managers, his gangsters, even some members of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Some who loved him, some who came to hate him, some who did both.
It’s a story Joel Selvin was exceptionally well-qualified to uncover. Not only is he an award-winning journalist and music critic who covered pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle for more than thirty-five years, and the author of close to 20 best-selling books about the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Ricky Nelson, Haight-Ashbury and more. He is also a native of Berkeley California, and was in his early teens as Sly was making a name for himself as a hip disc jockey on San Francisco radio. And he also remembers everything about the first time he heard Sly’s seminal song Dance to the Music as a 17-yo in late 1967. And he is a great raconteur.
As to the requisite Madison connection, well, it’s through Stu. Because this is the fourth time around for Joel on his show, following conversations about his books Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day; Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues and Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise.
It’s a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat, Joel Selvin
Stu Levitan welcomes Madison native Michael Massey, the award-winning composer, songwriter, pianist and performer whose musical resume include co-founding the bands Chaser and Boys in White, writing the score to the Madison Ballet production Dracula: A Rock Ballet, being a featured performer in the Mad Cabaret, Furious Bongos and Piano Fondue, releasing several solo albums including Be Careful How you Say Pianist, the Present and Attack of the Delicious, and perhaps his greatest musical accomplishment, one in which I actually played a small part, as a ringer for the legendary garage band Johnny and the Nakomans. He lives with his wife Robin in a house they just built on the driftless prairie outside Barneveld WI, on land that’s been in his family for eleven decades.
Mike got drunk for the first time in August 1973 on a trip to Houston with the choir from Trinity Lutheran Church. He would get drunk a lot over the next 20 years before he took his last drink on October 13, 1993. He writes about those twenty years of alcoholism, and the 29 years of sobriety in a moving and powerful memoir entitled More, just out from the good people at Little Creek Press. Along with a number of Michael’s lyrics, there are some great archival photos – including two with Andy Warhol, the subject of one of Chaser’s songs. With its narrative of recovery and redemption, it is a very appropriate book to feature as we start a new year, and it is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend Michael Massey.
Stu Levitan welcomes veteran sportswriter and Madison native Dennis Punzel for a conversation about his new book about the Wisconsin Volleyball team, Point Wisconsin! The Road to a National Title for Kelly Sheffield & The Wisconsin Badgers. It’s a book he was largely able to research while at his day job, covering the Badger team for the Wisconsin State Journal since 2013, part of his 37 year career with the State Journaland the Capital Times, following seven years with papers in Green Bay, Stevens Point and Boise Idaho.
Madison BookBeat host Angie Trudell Vasquez interviews Nikki Wallschlaeger on Waterbaby, her third collection of poetry. Poems read include poems on Black motherhood, ending capitalism, the historic lunch counters of the United States, and how Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee brings poets together and shapes us.
Part two of Stu Levitan’s conversation with one of the most interesting and politically important UW graduates from the late sixties, Helen Shiller. Her career encompassed almost 30 years of civic activism and community organizing with the Black Panther Party, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Intercommunal Survival Committee, and 24 years as a member of the Chicago City Council. Studs Terkel included some oral history from Helen as a chapter in his book Hope Dies Last,and now she’s written a full memoir of her time on the streets and in the suites. It’s called Daring to Struggle Daring to Win: Five Decades of Resistance in Chicago’s Uptown Communityfrom the good people at Haymarket Books. It has been quite a life and career, and it is quite a memoir — enough for two episodes of Madison BookBeat. The first aired an Nov. 28; as we pick up part two, Helen is reflecting on why she did not join the Weatherman when the Students for a Democratic Society split in 1969.
Airdate - Dec. 12, 2022
Stu Levitan welcomes one of the most interesting and politically important UW graduates from the late sixties, Helen Shiller, whose career encompassed almost 30 years of civic activism and community organizing with the Black Panther Party, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Intercommunal Survival Committee, and 24 years as a member of the Chicago City Council. nteresting and important, enough so for the legendary Studs Terkel to include Helen’s oral history as a chapter in his book Hope Dies Last. Helen has written a memoir of her time on the streets and in the suites. It’s called Daring to Struggle Daring to Win: Five Decades of Resistance in Chicago’s Uptown Community from the good people at Haymarket Books. It has been quite a life and career, and it is quite a memoir. And it is quite a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Helen Shiller
Stu Levitan welcomes WORT’S own Frank Emspak about his new memoir Troublemaker: Saying No to Power.
WORT listeners probably know Frank as a co-founder and producer of Madison Labor Radio, right here every Friday at 5:30 since January 1998. You may know him as a co-founder and executive producer of the syndicated Workers Independent News, which broadcast every weekday from 2002 to 2017. Or maybe you know him as Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin School for Workers, where he taught from 1991 to 2008.
And those of you of a certain age, or who have read your history books, may recall his service in the sixties as chair of the UW Socialist Club then chair of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, member of the steering committee and lead organizer of Madison Citizens for a Vote on Vietnam then a successful doctoral candidate in the history department.
But in the 20 years or so between those two Madison eras of academics, activism and communications, a sojourn in Massachusetts wearing different colored collars as a hospital lab technician, skilled machinist and foundry worker.
And in each professional iteration, he has taken after his father and been a class-conscious union leader, here as President of United Faculty and Academic Staff Local 223, and in Massachusetts as Executive Board member and steward of competing unions, first at the largest shoe machine manufacturer in the country, then at a GE plant.
All in all, it has been quite a life, making Troublemaker quite a book. It's a great pleasure to welcome Dr. Frank Emspak to Madison BookBeat.
Stu Levitan welcomes Peter Fauerbach, the namesake and great-great-grandson of the founder of the brewing company that is synonymous with Madison, for a discussion of his award-winning, lavishly illustrated new book, Fauerbach Brewing Company Madison Wisconsin 1848-1967.
The elder Peter Fauerbach was born in Bavaria in 1830, emigrated to the United State in 1850, working in and running breweries in upstate NY, and the young Wisconsin towns of Portage and New Lisbon. He made it to Madison in 1868 to lease the Sprecher Brewery at Blount and Williamson streets. By 1880 it was the Fauerbach Brewing Company, a mainstay of Madison life until it closed July 1, 1966. The brewery was torn down December 13, 1967, and the site was later developed by David and Leigh Mollenhoff as the Fauerbach Condominium.
Among Peter’s descendants with an important role in the company’s history – his grandson Karl H., general manager from Prohibition until 1960, and Karl H’s son Karl P., master brewer from 1957 until the final keg nine years later. Although our Peter Fauerbach was only 14 when the brewery closed, he is uniquely qualified to tell the Fauerbach story. After all, Karl H was his grandfather, Karl P his father. And it was his great-uncle Dr. Louis who made and implemented the decision to close the brewery. No wonder that he has become the unofficial company historian.
Peter Fauerbach has degrees in physics and math from St. Olaf College in Minnesota and a master’s in industrial engineering from the university of Wisconsin. Naturally, with that academic background, he spent his career as a health care consultant, with a particular focus on hospital relocations. He lives near Spring Harbor on Madison’s west side with his wife, Maggie Zoeller.
In this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Jonas Gomez Tijerino speaks with local poet Shahayra Majumder, author of the new chapbook, The Unreliable Narrator Wakes Up. They discuss the process of publishing independently and the themes of loss of innocence and navigating adulthood.
About the guest:
Shahayra Majumder is a Madison transplant, hailing originally from West Palm Beach, Florida. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Applied Biomoleculor Sciences and a Minor in Mathematics from the University of Florida in Gainesville. In 2019, she moved to Madison for work.. Since then she has held roles as a Technical Solutions Engineer for Epic, Solution Engineer for Included Health, and, most recently, Sales Engineer for Myndshft. The Unreliable Narrator Wakes Up is Shahayra’s first published collection.
Stu Levitan welcomes Madison native Anne Winkler-Morey for a conversation about her book Allegiance to Winds and Waters: Bicycling the Political Divides of the United States, the narrative of the 12,000-mile bicycle trip she and her husband David took around the perimeter of the United States over 14 months in 2011-2012. It was quite an experience, and the book is as interesting as the endeavor.
Today, host Angie Trudell Vasquez speaks to Oscar Hokeah on his debut novel, Calling For A Blanket Dance (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2022). Angie and Oscar share stories about going to the Institute of American Indian Arts, how his book came to be, and examine the role families can play in healing.
About the Guest
Oscar Hokeah is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother’s side and has Mexican heritage through his father. He holds an MA in English with a concentration in Native American Literature from the University of Oklahoma, as well as a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), with a minor in Indigenous Liberal Studies. He is a recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship Award through IAIA and is also a winner of the Native Writer Award through the Taos Summer Writers Conference. His short stories have been published in South Dakota Review, American Short Fiction, Yellow Medicine Review, Surreal South, and Red Ink Magazine. You can find more about him on his website, oscarhokeah.com.
Stu Levitan welcomes back to the show Rob Zaleski for another conversation about conversations – the 19 interviews he had with former Madison Police Chief David Couper, just published as David Couper Beyond the Badge: Reflections of an Ex-Cop.
In a city which has had many interesting and controversial police chiefs, David Couper stands out. He took command Jan. 2 1973 and ushered in a series of policy and personnel reforms that many residents applauded but many officers resisted – all while was suffering a battery of personal trials and tribulations, which would continue for decades. Then in 1993 he did something no one expected – he retired from the police department to become an Episcopal priest.
Getting beyond the Couper headlines and into Couper’s head is the business which occupies Rob Zaleski in Beyond the Badge. It’s business he is well-equipped to pursue, having interviewed thousands of people, including David Couper, in his 40 years in journalism, including 26 years with The Capital Times.
Rob was born and raised in working-class neighborhood Bay View, on Milwaukee’s south side. He studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee but de-matriculated in his junior year to become assistant sports editor of the Waukesha Freeman. He worked at the Milwaukee Journal and several small dailies in the early 1970s before joining United Press International’s Madison bureau ion 1976, where he was a night editor and covered the Green Bay Packers and University of Wisconsin sports.
He was named sports editor of The Capital Times in 1981, later took a job with the LA Times, but couldn’t take the traffic, and in 1985 returned to the Cap Times as a columnist, racking up more than a dozen writing awards over the next 23 years.
Beyond the Badge is Rob’s second q and a book with an interesting and accomplished public man, following 2019’s Ed Garvey Unvarnished: Lessons from a Visionary Progressive. That book was the focus of his first appearance on Madison BookBeat, on May 4, 2020, and kinda had something to do with this book getting written. His first book was a novel in 2012, Searching for Sal” which featured a character clearly based on Couper.
Hello again friends and and welcome to Madison BookBeat, your listener-supported community radio home for Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers. I’m your fourth week host Stu Levitan, and I am very excited about today’s show, because our guest is not only a Madison author, he is, by the objective criteria of sales and critical acclaim, Madison’s greatest author, David Maraniss, whose brand new book is about America’s greatest athlete. It’s called Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, published last week by our good friends at Simon and Schuster, and already number2 on the NYT best seller list.
As you probably know, David is a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Washington Post, where he remains an associate editor, and the author of 12 previous books, including biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente and a history that was in part about Madison and the UW in October 1967, They Marched into Sunlight. His Madison credentials are top notch. He wasn’t born here, but did grow up here as the son of Mary Maraniss, an editor with the UW Press, and my former boss at the Capital Times, Elliot Maraniss, who was the subject of his most recent book A Good American Family. And he and his wife Linda have a house on the near west side of Madison where they summer whenever they can.
I usually spend a couple of minutes setting up the book, but you already know who Jim Thorpe was and there is so much to talk about in these 626 pages of text and notes that I’ll just say I’ve had the pleasure of talking with David about his last seven books, and it is a real delight to welcome him now to MBB to talk about Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe
In this edition of Madison Bookbeat, host Angie Trudell Vasquez speaks with poet Matthew Gutierrez. He's the author of Notes I Wrote Along the Way (Ten16 Press, 2020), a collection of original poetry in English and Spanish.
About the guest:
Matthew James Gutierrez received his master's degree in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As an undergraduate, he studied creative writing, focusing on fiction writing and poetry. Other experiences include screenplay and television writing courses at UCLA. You can follow Matthew on Instagram: @matthewjames_g and @notes2poetry.
Wisconsin author Patricia Skalka is out this summer with Death Casts a Shadow (July 2022, UW Press).
It's her seventh book in the Dave Cubiak mystery series, which pits a former Chicago cop against a roster of killers, all in beautiful Door County.
In fact, the series was sparked by the beauty of Door County itself, says Skalka. She joins host David Ahrens to talk about the importance of place as a character in storytelling in this edition of Madison Bookbeat.
About the guest:
Patricia Skalka is the author of the award-winning Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries. She turned to fiction after a career in nonfiction as a staff writer, freelancer, ghost writer, writing instructor, and book reviewer. She lives in Milwaukee and Door County. You can find more about her at patriciaskalka.com.
Stu Levitan welcomes Madison native Doug Moe for a conversation ab
out his new biography of the UW’s first director of women’s athletics, Kit Saunders-Nordeen.
On June 23rd 1972, President Richard Nixon did two things with historical significance. In a meeting with chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, he told Haldeman to call FBI director Pat Gray and tell him to stay the hell away from Watergate because it was a CIA matter, which of course it was not. This was the so-called ‘smoking gun’ tape which quickly led to Nixon’s resignation when it was released a little over two years later.
And, with a more appropriate nod to his re-election campaign, Nixon also signed the Education Amendment Act of 1972 with its 37 words and four commas now known as Title IX – “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The impact of Title IX on women’s athletics at the University of Wisconsin – and the critical role that Katherine Kit Saunders played in defining that impact -- is the business that occupies Doug Moe in his latest biography, “The Right Thing To Do – Kit Saunders-Nordeen and the rise of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics at the University of Wisconsin and Beyond.”
It is a book the native Madisonian and 1979 graduate of the UW is well-equipped to write. Doug Moe is, after all, one of Madison’s most prolific and honored journalists and authors. He’s written 12 books, including Tommy Thompson’s autobiography, biographies of legendary Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko, Madison builder Marshall Erdmann and Madison jewelers and philanthropists Irwin and Robert Goodman, a history of the fabled but now defunct UW boxing program and more. In his 18 years as a daily columnist with the Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal, he wrote more than 4,000 columns, which is about 3 million words, and continues to write a monthly column for Madison Magazine and a weekly blog for its website. He is so active, in fact, that his website isn’t doug moe dot com, it’s doug moe dot org. Speaking personally, in my work as a historian of Madison, I know I have benefitted greatly from several of his books, and am very much looking forward to one he’s working on now – the autobiography of State Senator Fred Risser. It is a great pleasure to welcome to MBB the great biographer of modern Madison, my friend Doug Moe.
This week on Madison Book Beat, host Rusty Russell speaks with poet Marilyn Taylor.
Marilyn Taylor is a former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, and of the city of Milwaukee. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals, and she’s published eight collections of poetry, the latest of which is Outside the Frame (Kelsay Books, December 2021).
Taylor taught poetry and writing at UW-Milwaukee for 15 years. She was the Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin from 2009-2010, and of the city of Milwaukee from 2004-2005. She lived in Milwaukee for forty years, but now resides in Madison.
You can find more about her on her website here.
Stu Levitan welcomes a Madison author with a remarkable life story, Dr. Patrick McBride. His book, written with his twin brother Dennis is, “The Luckiest Boy in the World.”
Dr. McBride earned a zoology degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1976, a medical degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980, and a master’s degree in public health from the University of South Carolina in 1982. Two years later he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, and with a senior colleague started the first inpatient family practice service at the UW Hospital and Clinics while also serving as the director of a new UW clinic in DeForest. He would later serve as Associate Dean of Students, Associate Dean for Faculty and as Director of Alumni Relations for the renamed School of Medicine & Public Health (UW-SMPH). In his 37-year career, he published over 200 journal articles, abstracts, and book chapters, brought in millions of dollars in grants to fund medical research, received 16 teaching awards, and upon his retirement in 2017, was named professor emeritus. Among his many other honors, enshrinement on the Wauwatosa East High School’s “Wall of Inspiration.” He has been married to Kimberly Schappe McBride for forty-two years, and they have two adult children, Sean and Gabrielle.
His twin brother and co-author Dennis has an equally impressive resume. In 2020 he was elected to a four-year term as Mayor of their hometown of Wauwatosa, following ten years on the city’s common council. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from UW-Milwaukee, a master’s degree in public administration from Princeton University, and a law degree from New York University, and spent the bulk of his professional career as Senior and Supervisory Trial Attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A former track star and champion marathoner, he was inducted into the Athletic Halls of Fame at UW-Milwaukee and Wauwatosa East.
But before all of Pat’s accomplishments and honors, a unique entry on his resume that presaged all that was to come – he was, and remains, the youngest Equipment Manager and Assistant Trainer in professional sports history.
And all because of a 25-word answer he wrote in 1969 to the question – why would you like to be a bat boy for the Milwaukee Brewers? He got the gig when he was just 15, and from that opportunity came the chance to also work for the Green Bay Packers. Then he hit the trifecta, as a ball boy for the new Milwaukee Bucks.
But it was not an idyllic life growing up in Wauwatosa for Paddy and Dinty, and their five siblings. In fact, it was a living hell, because their parents – both of them successful and popular journalists – were alcoholics who fought constantly before finally separating.
“The Luckiest Boy in the World” tells the amazing and inspirational story of how Pat McBride not only survived but thrived, first in locker rooms and arenas, then in medical clinics and the halls of academia. It is a real pleasure to welcome him to Madison BookBeat.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, David Ahrens speaks with Rebecca Donner, author of a compelling and deeply-researched biography about her great-great-aunt Mildred Fish Harnack, a Wisconsin woman who went on to lead an anti- Nazi espionage ring in Berlin.
It's titled "All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler," (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), was an instant New York Times bestseller, and has since received multitudinous honors, including being listed for a 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, a New York Times Notable Book of 2021, and a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year.
Rebecca Donner is the winner of many awards and is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She is also the author of the novel Sunset Terrace and Burnout, a graphic novel about ecoterrorism. Ms. Donner is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and has taught writing at Wesleyan University, Columbia University, and Barnard College. She is the great-great niece of Mildred Harnack.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers.
Stu Levitan welcomes back to the program the Rock and Roll Detective himself, Madison’s own Jim Berkenstadt, to talk about his latest book Mysteries in the Music: Case Closed.
Who really discovered Elvis Presley? What role did the CIA play in the gun attack on Bob Marley and his eventual death from cancer? How seriously did the FBI take its investigation into whether the lyrics to Louie, Louie were dirty? Did the Beach Boys steal a song from Charles Manson? Did Bob Dylan really record an album with members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?
These are just some of the controversies and conspiracy theories Jim Berkenstadt investigates as only he can, before providing definitive answers. It’s a book he is uniquely qualified to write.
He is, after all, the Rock and Roll Detective, LLC, specializing in uncovering the lost histories and solving the mysteries of pop music. And because musicians know and trust him, he has great access to the people who were there when the deals went down. The book is filled with revealing interviews with such legendary musicians as Elvis’s late great guitarist Scotty Moore, drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Keltner, producer Glyn Johns, and my old cab driving colleague Butch Vig, who also wrote the forward, and more. And not just musicians – this may be the only book which features interviews with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, disgraced Col. Oliver North, a sitting federal judge, and even a former CIA agent.
Jim is especially authoritative about the Beatles, serving as historical consultant for Martin Scorcese’s HBO Emmy-wining film, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, as well as to the estate of George Harrison and the Beatles’ Apple Corps. Itself. Sharp-eyed viewers will have spotted his name among those thanked in the credits to Peter Jackson’s majestic new 8-hour film about the recording of the Beatles’ Let It Be album, Get Back.
In addition to the new book tour, Jim is currently serving as co-executive producer and script consultant on the feature film adaptation of his book The Beatle Who Vanished, about the drummer Jimmie Nicol, who at the height of Beatlemania in 1964 filled in for a fortnight when Ringo Starr was felled by tonsilitis just before a world tour. That best-seller has been included in the Library and Archives of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as have his earlier books Black Market Beatles and Classic Rock Albums: Nirvana-Neverrmind,. He was also a featured expert for several seasons on the Reelz Channel TV series Celebrity Legacies and Celebrity Damage Control.
He lives north side with his wife, Holly Cremer Berkenstadt.
Jim was with us last fall to discuss The Beatle Who Vanished, and it is a pleasure to welcome him back to MBB.
Milwaukee poet Ed Werstein's latest collection is titled Communiqué: Poems From The Headlines. The book is sectioned like a newspaper, and Werstein's poems are inspired by headlines both new and old.
In this edition of Madison Book Beat, hosts Angela Trudell Vasquez and Devin Trudell speak with Ed about his newest collection and revisit some topics in the news over the last decade.
Stu Levitan welcomes William S. Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and author of, The Creeks Will Rise: People Coexisting With Floods, from the good people at Chicago Review Press.
Floods are a fact of life, and have been that way forever. Almost every culture around the world has a creation myth that features a flood. Today, they remain a necessary part of nature, renewing the soil, creating new habitats. But while floods are natural, flood damages are not – they are solely the responsibility of humankind. And it’s a massive responsibility – thanks to our decades of building in floodplains, floods are also the most frequent and most expensive type of weather disaster in the United States, accounting for 90 percent of our natural disasters.
From 1980 to 2019, the United States suffered 32 billion-dollar floods, averaging about $5 billion in flood damages a year, part of the $1.6 trillion in weather-related damages during that time. During that period, the Kickapoo River in southwest Wisconsin suffered four floods, after seven between 1907 and 1978. And even though none of them billion-$, the people of the valley had had enough after the flood of 1935, and in 1937 asked Washington for help. It finally came in 1962, authorization for a dam on the upper river, just below La Farge –designed not only to stop floods, but also to create an income-generating recreation area.
And those disasters are only going to get worse, as the climate crisis produces ever-more intense weather events and the aging infrastructure of 92,000 dams and 30,000 miles of levees fails at an ever-increasing rate. According to the University of Bristol 43 million Americans, and $ 1.2 trillion in assets are currently at risk of floods in the lower forty-eight states. And if we make it to the next century, analysts expect that 2.5 million properties worth more than $ 1 trillion will experience chronic flooding and thirty cities to be underwater.
How and why we need to change our national water policy from trying to control floods to avoiding them is the business that occupies Bill Becker in this book that is both frightening and inspiring. It is a book he is uniquely qualified to write, as an expert in alternative energy, and one of the key figures in the successful effort in the late seventies to oppose that dam across the upper Kickapoo and get the village of Soldiers Grove to move its business district out of the floodplain and onto higher ground.
After helping move SD, he moved on to become became Counselor to the Administrator, Small Business Administration, spent 12 years as Regional Director and Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary U.S. Department of Energy, founded and was co-director of The Future We Want, and since 2011 has been a Senior Fellow at Natural Capitalism Solutions, a non-profit founded by environmentalist and author Hunter Lovins. But before all that, and critical to his narrative, he was a photo-journalist, first for the US Army in Vietnam in the mid-sixties, later for the Associated Press in Madison, but most critically with the Kickapoo Scout in Soldiers Grove.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison Book Beat, Bill Becker.
Guest host George Dreckmann welcomes Stu Levitan to discuss his book Madison in the Sixties, from the very good people at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
Documenting those issues, along with stories of the public schools, highways and transportation, law and disorder, planning and economic development, and other topics, is the business that occupies Stu Levitan in this first comprehensive account of the most famous decade in our history.
Stu did not spend the sixties in Madison. He first passed through Madison on the Grateful Dead tour in early 1973, then came for good in August, 1975. But still, he is uniquely qualified to write about them. As a newspaper reporter for the Capital Times and then the Madison Press Connection in the mid-late seventies, he covered many of the issues and individuals from the sixties. As a county supervisor representing a downtown district in the early to late eighties, he dealt with the legacy of the actions and decisions from then. And as a longtime member and chair of several city commissions, including the Plan Commission and Community Development Authority, he knows what it’s like to make those kind of decisions.
After the Madison Press Connection folded in 1980, Stu went to work for the legislature’s powerful Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules. In 1983, he finally gave in to his father’s expectations and went to law school, then in 1987 quit the county board to accept a job as a mediator/arbitrator for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, implementing the collective bargaining law that Scott Walker destroyed. That’s when he retired and got serious about the book, which was published in November, 2018.
In addition to being the host/producer of Madison Book Beat for its first two years, Stu does the weekly Madison in the Sixties feature on the WORT Wednesday nights news, for which he has received 2 first place awards for writing in the past three years from the Milwaukee Press Club. He has also written extensively for local and national publications, including Isthmus, Madison Magazine and High Times. And he will insist that Bob Dylan is the greatest singer-songwriter since Homer.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat its founder, Stu Levitan.
Madison BookBeat - Your listener-supported, community radio home for Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers.Stu Levitan gets 2022 off to a wondrous start with an encore presentation of a conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil about her an enchanting and stimulating collection of illustrated nature essays called “World Of Wonders: In Praise Of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments.” Published by the good people at Milkweed Editions, it was named Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. And Aimee met two of the criteria as a former Badger who was at the Wisconsin Book Festival.If you took Aldo Leopold’s expert eye for Nature and Marcel Proust’s ability to evoke memory out of experience and filtered it all through a poet and essayist who was the daughter of a Filipina mother and South Indian father, you might come close to what Aimee Nezhukumatathil has accomplished in World of Wonders.Born in Chicago in 1974, she lived as a child in Iowa, Arizona, Kansas, New York and Ohio; received her undergraduate and master’s degrees in poetry and nonfiction from The Ohio State University; was awarded a poetry fellowship to the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing; spent 14 years teaching in western New York, and in 2016 accepted appointment as Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where her husband, the essayist Dustin Parsons, also teaches. Since 2003, she has published four collections of poetry and a chapbook of garden poems with the poet Ross Gay, and has been included in several collections and anthologies. She has been awarded a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, among other honors.A real pleasure to have Prof. Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Madison BookBeat.
Our guest today is Madison author Christina Clancy, for a conversation about her new novel, Shoulder Season. Christi gave a very interesting and engaging talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October, and I’m delighted to bring her to you today.
As you may, or more likely may not know, from 1968 to 1981 there was in southeast Wisconsin the Lake Geneva Playboy Club Hotel, a full-service facility featuring big-name entertainment, championship golf course, a restaurant, cocktail lounge, and, yes the requisite colony of bunnies – many of whom were from small towns around Wisconsin. Towns like East Troy, about 15 miles up HWY 120, where the Alpine Valley Music Center opened in 1977 – the largest amphitheater in the country until 1993. The former Playboy Club, which had become the Americana Center in 1982, has been the Grand Geneva Resort since 1993,
What life was like for the young women who became Bunnies, and how the resort and the amphitheater affected East Troy, are the main issues which concern Christi Clancy in this, her second novel for St. Martin’s Press. It is so interesting and well-written I expect it will do at least as well as her first work, The Second House, so successful it has been optioned for TV miniseries
A Ph D in English from the UW-Milwaukee, Christi worked eight years as a marketing specialist for IBM, then almost a decade as an adjunct English professor at Beloit College before becoming a full-time writer. Her work has also appeared in our best newspapers and literary journals.
She lives in Madison with her family.
It’s a real pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Christina Clancy.
Stu Levitan welcomes UW professor Paige Glotzer, whose first book is the important and eye-opening examination of the origins of systemic racism in housing, How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, just honored as the recipient of the 2021 Kenneth Jackson Award Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association.
It should come as no surprise that racial segregation has been a bedrock principle of suburban development from its very beginning, way back in the 19th century. In 1891, a British land syndicate called the Lands Trust Company purchased a large tract of land in northern Baltimore MD, formed the Roland Park Company and began developing what became one of the first planned segregated suburbs in the United States. How the leaders of the Roland Park Company formulated their exclusionary practices, and extended their influence into the very structure of federal housing policy, is the business that occupies Prof. Glotzer in her revelatory investigation of racial capitalism, published this spring by the good people at Columbia University Press. It’s a narrative that even implicates some names well known in Madison, including John Nolen, Prof. Richard T. Ely and realtor Paul Stark.
Paige Glotzer is a graduate of NYU, with a Master’s and Ph D from Johns Hopkins University in the aforementioned Baltimore. Since 2018, she has been Assistant Professor and holder of the John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy, at the fabled Department of History at the University of Wisconsin. In her young career, she has already received numerous awards for her scholarship on housing segregation, the suburbs, and related topics
Madison authors, topics, book events & publishers
It's Stu Levitan's birthday, his 68th birthday to be precise, so he's taking the day off and dialing up an encore presentation of a conversation from this past February with UW Prof. Francine Hirsch, the author of Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II. Published by Oxford University Press, it is an award-winning reappraisal of the trial that became the pivot point between World War 2 and the Cold War.
On November 20 1945, the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union opened the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, putting on trial 22 Nazi leaders and seven organizations, charged with conspiring in a crime against peace, planning and waging wars of aggression, participating in war crimes, and committing crimes against humanity.
On September 30 and October 1, 1946 judges from the four countries announced their verdicts – 12 of the accused, including Reich Marshall Herman Goering and German foreign minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, were sentenced to death by hanging, seven received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life, and three were acquitted. Four organizations -the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Secret State Police, or Gestapo, the Protective Squadron or SS, and the Security Service, or SD, were found criminal – but only for what they did after the start of the war on September 1, 1939; three organizations – the Reich Cabinet, the Storm Troopers, or SA and the German General Staff and High Command – were found not guilty.
In the collective memory of the west, these Nuremberg Trials – the only 4-power trials - were first and foremost an American exercise of finding truth and dispensing justice. Chief US prosecutor Robert H Jackson, on leave from his post as associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, was both star and director, with able prosecutors from Great Britain in friendly support. The French were only marginally relevant, and the Soviets … well, they were at best an annoyance and at worst an embarrassment whose obvious and overwhelming conflicts threatened the very legitimacy of the entire exercise.
But what if that Nuremberg Moment was just a myth, and our memory is not of the whole story? What if, notwithstanding their own dealings with Hitler and their own war crimes, the Soviets were actually essential to the Tribunal happening at all? What if it was a Soviet lawyer who came up with the fundamental breakthrough in international law underpinning the entire trial?
Those are the questions that Prof. Hirsch asks and answers brilliantly in this landmark account, for which she has already received the American Society for International Law’s 2021 Certificate of Merit for a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship.
Fran Hirsch is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison so it is no surprise that she has produced such a work of scholarship and style.
Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) received awards from the American Historical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the Council For European Studies. She also scores a very healthy 4.4 rating on Rate My Professor. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Prof. Fran Hirsch.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers.
We deviate from the usual concept just a bit this week to welcome Jackie Lees and KG Miles to discuss their book, Bob Dylan in London: Troubadour Tales, a combination illustrated guidebook for a walking tour, history lesson and critical analysis.
And there is sort of a Madison connection, because Madison was the last place Dylan stayed before he went to New York for the first time in January 1961, which is where KG’s next book, Bob Dylan in the Big Apple: Troubadour Tales of New York, begins. It was bitterly cold in NY that winter, and it would be even colder when Dylan went to London in December 1962, which is where Jackie and K.G. pick up the story.
It is a story they are eminently qualified to write, as Londoners who are longtime Dylan aficionados and co-curators of the Dylan Room at the Troubadour Club. Jackie took a break from a career writing and editing for a homelessness charity to work on the book, the room and also provide some amateur management to the Dylan Band. K.G., whom I saw speak at the inaugural conference of the Bob Dylan archives in 2019, is as I said also the author of a companion volume coming in about three weeks, Bob Dylan in the Big Apple: Troubadour Tales of New York.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jackie Lees and K.G. Miles.
Madison authors, topics, book event and publishers.
Stu Levitan deviates a bit from that concept today with his guest Lisa S. Johnson because she’s got a new book out which you might want to know about for your holiday gift-giving or gift-asking needs. The book is Immortal Axes, Guitars That Rock, an absolutely gorgeous coffee table photography book focusing on some of the most important guitars in modern music – guitars played on seminal recordings and at historic events – and even some concerts in Madison — by the likes of Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, B.B. King, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Phil Lesh, Johnny Cash and more, 157 guitarists in all, 350 pages of high-end photographs and insightful short essays, plus a Forward by Peter Frampton and an afterward by Suzi Quatro. The book is published by the good people at Princeton Architectural Press.
Lisa S Johnson followed a somewhat circuitous route to becoming one of the pre-eminent photographers in a very rarified field.
She traveled solo around Europe and South Africa for seven months as she was turning 21, went back home to Canada and got a hotel job in the icy and isolated North West Territories. Then two years at an exclusive private club in Edmonton before transferring to Florida where she put herself through college studying photography. Naturally, she ended up with a job at a private photo lab with the necessary security clearance to handle material for NASA and various defense contractors. Then a decade with the Eastman Kodak company before the corporate world started to get her down.
After injuring her neck, she took up Kundalini yoga, and took to it so well she quit her job at Kodak and opened up two yoga studios in Las Vegas, where she continues to live. All the while, though, she was continuing with her photographic pursuits, but now, thanks indirectly to her father’s interest in a 1917 Gibson mandolin, with a new focus– guitars. The lure of the modern lyre was so great she sold her studios to concentrate on a guitar project, and in 2013 published her first book, 108 Rock Star Guitars – the number itself a nod to various spiritual aspects of yoga. This new book expands the area of interest to include guitars notable for their custodian’s contributions to country, jazz and blues.
Lisa S. Johnson’s website is immortalaxes.com, her twitter handle is lsjrockphotos. It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Lisa S Johnson.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers
Today’s program hits for the cycle, as we welcome George Hesselberg. His book Deadlines: Slices of Life from the Obit Beat, a collection of obituaries he wrote for the Wisconsin State Journal from 1979 to 2017, was just published by our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, and was the subject of an event a few days ago at Mystery To Me Books, which is still available for virtual viewing.
It is an inescapable truth that every person and animal on this planet is going to die. Some will die in glory, some will die in shame, most will die in private, their passing unnoticed by all outside their circle of family and friends. Or their passing would go unnoticed, were it not for their newspaper obituary. Usually, the obituary is a straightforward account of the signposts and milestones of their lives – dates and places, marital and family status, occupation, hobbies, details of the visitation and funeral.
But in the hands of a journalist with unbounded curiosity and great style, an obituary can prompt an account that transcends the commonplace and becomes a piece of writing worthy of collecting and publishing in a book. A journalist, that is, like George Hesselberg, and a book like Deadlines: Slices of Life from the Obit Beat.
And what lives they were. The unofficial mayor of the Mazomanie nude beach. UW Police chief Ralph Hanson, and pioneering Madison policewoman Mary Ostrander. The avatar of attorney advertising, Ken Hur. Folk artist Simon Sparrow. Legendary sandal maker Cecil Burke, and fourth-generation cobbler Michael J. Falci Jr. A radio villain. A short order cook, and esteemed academic. A sword-maker, a beloved rural doctor, a circus owner, a Holocaust survivor, and scores more, 66 entries in all – and not all of them about human beings. These are not stories about their deaths – these are stories about their lives.
George followed the traditional path to a career in journalism. Cheesemaker, sign painter, stage hand, candy hawker, a series of jobs in Norway including night watchman, bartender at Peppe’s and translator, and, most relevant of all for today’s discussion, grave digger.
Then he settled down to a 45-year career with the State Journal, first as a general assignment and regional reporter then as the paper’s most popular columnist. He retired from the paper in 2017, but thankfully for us, continues to write.
His previous books include a collection of columns from 30 years ago, Paint Me Green And Call Me Fern, his coverage of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway, Olympic Moose Salami and other Lillehammer Tales, and the children’s books, Vesper Stories and Special Days, Special Tales. A native of Bangor WI, he holds a BA in journalism and Scandinavian studies from the UW and lives in Fitchburg WI.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend, George Hesselberg.
As the world eagerly awaits Peter Jackson’s documentary about the Beatles last public performance, Stu Levitan welcomes Jim Berkenstadt, author of The Beatle Who Vanished, to discuss a fascinating story about performances near the beginning of their career.
In the spring and summer of 1964, the Beatles ruled pop music like no one before or since. In April, they held the top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100, with another 7 singles also on the list. In late May, even the rerelease of their debut single from 1962, Love Me Do, had gone to number one.
They’d conquered Great Britain and America. Now they’re about to take over the world, with a month-long tour of Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The tour is set to start June 4.
But Manager Brian Epstein does not let them relax on the third, scheduling a photo shoot for the Saturday Evening Post in the morning, and recording sessions in the afternoon and evening. But they never get to the EMI studios, because drummer Ringo Starr collapses during the photo session and is whisked away to hospital with a diagnosis of tonsillitis and pharyngitis.
Soon, Beatles producer George Martin is calling a London drummer named Jimmie Nicol to invite him to an audition that afternoon. He passes the audition, and from June 4 to June 13, Jimmie Nicol is a Beatle. It was, he later said, “the best thing to happen to me. The worst thing to happen to me.”
The strange saga of Jimmie Nicol – why he was the one who got the call, what those ten days were like, and how they affected the rest of his life – is the business that occupies Jim Berkenstadt in this definitive account of one of the great and mysterious footnotes in modern pop.
No one is more qualified to investigate and recount the story of Jimmie Nicol than Jim Berkenstadt. He’s not only the Rock and Roll Detective, specializing in uncovering the lost histories and mysteries of pop music. He’s also an international authority on the Beatles, and has been a credited consultant on several projects by the Fab Four and the Estate of George Harrison. He has co-authored or edited four other books, three on the Beatles and one on the band Nirvana. His new book, Mysteries in the Music: Case Closed, is coming in March from Genius Book Publishing. He lives north side with his wife, Holly Cremer Berkenstadt.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers.
We click on two of the criteria today as Stu welcomes the award-winning journalist Terry Frei, author of Third Down and a War to Go: The All-American 1942 Wisconsin Badgers, from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
The 1942 Wisconsin football team, was coached by one of Knute Rockne’s fabled Four Horsemen, and led by three All-Americans. It went 8-1-1, finishing second in the Big Ten and placing third in the final Associated Press poll. Among the stars were several who would go on to play in the National Football League, including the legendary Elroy Crazy Legs Hirsch. And there were players who would play an important role at the UW for decades to come, like Otto Breitenbach and Bob Rennebohm.
But there were far more who would suit up in far more serious uniforms – the uniforms of a branch of the United States Armed Forces. Their country called them to war, and off they went. They didn’t all see combat, but many did – and several died. Including one of the most respected, even beloved, athletes in Badger history, two-time All-American Dave Schreiner.
Who these young men were, what their 1942 season was like, and what happened to them during and after the war, is the business that occupies Terry Frei in this gripping account of some extraordinary – but altogether typical – young men.
It is a book he is uniquely qualified to write. Not only is he an award-winning journalist – voted by his peers as the best sports journalist in Oregon three times, and four times in Colorado – he is also the son of a member of that 1942 Badger squad, WW2 pilot, and longtime assistant coach for the Denver Broncos, the late Jerry Frei, from Stoughton Wisconsin.
Among Terry Frei’s six other books, Horns, Hogs and Nixon’s Coming – Texas v Arkansas in Dixie’s Last Stand, March 1939: Before the Madness, and the novel Olympic Affair. His website is TerrytFrei.com, that’s FREI, and his twitter handle is @TFrei. He lives in Denver CO.
It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Terry Frei.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, time for the Wisconsin Book Festival, 28 events this week alone, both in-person and online, and Stu Levitan welcomes one of the featured presenters, and one of the brightest stars in the firmament that is the University of Wisconsin faculty, Professor Jordan Ellenberg, to discuss his NYTimes best-seller, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else. Prof. Ellenberg will be appearing this Saturday at 3 o’clock at the Discovery Building, 330 N Orchard St., so Stu thought it would be a good idea to dial up an encore presentation of our conversation from this past July.
As coined by the ancient Greeks, “geometry” literally means “measuring the world,” and the world which Jordan Ellenberg measures in Shape is wide and far-flung indeed. Gerrymandering, the tv show Survivor, Abraham Lincoln, pandemics and flitting mosquitoes, artificial intelligence, even an answer to the question ‘how many holes in a straw’? And it’s an accessible world – yes, there are symbols and equations, and you’re welcome to have pad and paper with you as you read, but the book is mainly a narrative built on stories and people.
Jordan Ellenberg was not a late-bloomer. The son of two biostatisticians, he taught himself to read at age two by watching Sesame Street, he was competing in high school math competitions while in the fourth grade, and four years later he was taking honors calculus at the University of Maryland. At 17, he beat out 400,000 North American high school students to win the USA Mathematical Olympiad, and over a 3-year period took two golds and a silver at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
He took his BA and Ph D at Harvard, with a masters from Johns Hopkins in creative writing in between, then started his academic career at Princeton.
He came to the University of Wisconsin in 2005, made full professor in 2011, was named a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in 2014 and since 2015 has been the John D MacArthur Professor of Mathematics.
His previous books include How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking in 2014 and the novel The Grasshopper King. He also has a credited cameo in the 2017 movie Gifted in the role of math professor, giving him a Kevin Bacon degree of separation of two and making him one of the extraordinarily small and select group of people with an Erdos/Bacon number. He maintains a blog Quomodocumque.wordpress.com and tweets at JSEllenberg. It is a great pleasure to welcome to MBB Professor Jordan Ellenberg.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, time for the Wisconsin Book Festival, and Stu Levitan welcomes one of the featured presenters, University of Wisconsin Professor Chad Alan Goldberg, editor of an important new volume Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, from our very good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press. Prof. Goldberg will be giving talk on his book live and in-person at the Madison Central Library on Saturday October 23, so Stu thought it would be a good idea to dial up an encore presentation of their conversation from this past March. And by the way, Stu’s show next week will feature another UW professor giving an in-person presentation on the 23rd, Prof. Jordan Ellenberg, talking about his best-seller, Shape.
According to Wisconsin statute 36.01(2), the mission of the university of Wisconsin system is “to develop human resources, to discover and disseminate knowledge, to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society by developing in students heightened intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”
But not everyone agrees with that mission – especially the parts of public service, improving the human condition, and searching for truth. And over the years some people in high places have sought to change that mission in fundamental ways, even destroy it outright. Leaving us with some very important questions.
What is the role of the public university in a democratic society? Specifically, what is the role of the University of Wisconsin in the democratic, pluralistic society of the 21st century? And, harking back to the words of UW President Charles Van Hise from 1905, does the beneficent influence of the university continue to reach every family in the state? If not, how do we ensure that it once again does?
These are the questions Chad Alan Goldberg asks in Education for Democracy, questions he and his 11 contributors answer by examining how and why the Wisconsin Idea was born, expanded, honored – and then threatened and diminished. And they explain why it must be renewed, and suggest how to do so.
The list of those contributors is quite a collection of scholars and analysts, including Prof. Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, environmental historian and biographer of Aldo Leopold Curt Meine, our friend, repeat guest and LGBTQ historian Dick Wagner, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Emily Auerbach, and several other distinguished professors, both from the UW and elsewhere.
Prof. Goldberg is very well-equipped to edit this volume, which is based on an outreach course on the Wisconsin Idea which he helped organize in 2016, and which he still teaches as Professor of Sociology. And It was Prof Goldberg who in May 2016 wrote the resolution — which the Faculty Senate adopted — expressing no confidence in the commitment by then-president Ray Cross and the Board of Regents to defend the Wisconsin Idea, which was under attack by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican legislature.
Prof. Goldberg’s previous books include Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought and Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare. He is also affiliated with the Center for German and European Studies, the George l. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the GAM program in History, all here at the UW Madison.
And on a personal note, Chad and Stu are both graduates of a small school now known as New College, the Honors College of Florida, where their respective graduating classes were smaller than the class roster of his Survey of Sociology course.
Thankfully, Ray Cross and Scott Walker are both gone, and Professor Chad Alan Goldberg is still here. It was a pleasure to welcome him to Madison Bookbeat.
Stu Levitan interviews Prof. Patrick W. Steele about his award-winning book, "The Home of the Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee," from the University of Wisconsin Press.
On the second and last Madison BookBeat show during the fall pledge drive, Stu Levitan welcomes a long-time friend of community radio and other alternative media, Dave Zirin. His new book The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World was just published by our friends at The New Press, and brought him to a Madison book event at the Cap Times Idea Fest earlier this month.
You probably know about Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. In 2012, he led the Niners to their first Super Bowl appearance since 1994 – a playoff run that you might recall included a record-setting performance against the Green Bay Packers. The next year, his first full season as a starter, the 49ers almost made it back to the big game, narrowly losing the NFC championship game to the Seattle Seahawks, led by former Badger Russell Wilson. 2014 and 2015 weren’t that hot for either Kap or the Niners, and after several coaching changes, by 2016 he was back to being the backup.
In the 49ers’ third preseason game in august 2016, again against the Packers, Kaepernick sat on the bench during the playing of the U.S. national anthem, rather than stand. It was a low-key, personal protest against systemin racism and police literally getting away with murder. When a reporter for the NFL Network, Sam Wyche, asked him why, Kaepernick gave a direct answer: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” he said. “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” And his comments were prophetic: “If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right.”
There was a fair amount of outrage, but nothing that would compare to what happened after Kaepernick and former Green Beret and NFL player Nate Boyer discussed the matter and concluded that taking a knee rather than sitting on the bench would be a more powerful and more respectful protest.
Of such miscalculations is history made.
Kaepernick regained his status as the starting QB, and had an excellent season – 16 touchdowns against just four interceptions, and a league-leading 6.8 yards per carry. But he also knelt before every game, and was vilified from the White House to the outhouse. He became a free agent, but no other team would sign him. He has not played professional football since.
But what of other athletes, not just fellow professionals, but athletes in high school and college, athletes who felt as he did about police brutality and systemic racism, athletes whom he inspired and gave language to, athletes who also knelt, or raised their fists, in the years 2016 to 2018. How did they come to take that action, and what reaction did they face when they did? It is their stories, not Colin Kaepernick’s, which Dave Zirin tells in this powerful and important new book.
It is a book Dave Zirin is supremely qualified to write. As sports editor for The Nation, columnist for the Progressive, host of the Edge of Sports podcast, and past winner of the NY Press Club Award for Sports Journalism, he is one of the foremost analysts of the role of sports in society. Which is why Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World.” The Kaepernick Effect is his eleventh book since 2005, when What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States was published by Haymarket Books, which has also published Things That Make White People Uncomfortable¸ written with former NFL star Michael Bennet, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports, with a forward by Chuck D; and The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, written with that great athlete and social activist, and other books.
Among his earlier books from the New Press, A People’s History of Sports In The United States, part of Howard Zinn’s People’s History Series. ; Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down, and Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love. His website is davezirin.com, his twitter handle @edgeofsports.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Dave Zirin
For his first show during the fall pledge drive, Stu Levitan welcomes Nicholas D. Hayes, author of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten House: How An Omission Transformed The Architect’s Legacy from our very good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.
If you ask someone who knows even a little bit about architecture about FLW, they’ll probably mention the breathtaking design of Fallingwater, or the glorious Guggenheim Museum or maybe Taliesin. Those in Northern California no doubt think about the Marin County Government Complex, while here in Madison it’s Monona Terrace, and maybe the Lamp House and the Jacobs House.
But before all that, before he became known as the world’s greatest architect, Wright had a vision that was truly transformative – to design beautiful houses with organic integrity which would be affordable to ordinary people. He called it the American System-Built Houses (Ready-Cut), and starting in 1912 devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the project, churning out more than 950 drawings encompassing more than a hundred unique iterations.
Unfortunately, W’s partner, Milwaukee businessman Arthur Richards, was someone with whom he already had a troubled relationship – their Lake Geneva Hotel suffered serious financial difficulties, and the 8-story hotel they planned for the corner of East Doty and Monona Avenue in Madison was never built.
And so, between the transformative idea and the resultant reality fell numerous shadows – bad planning, bad execution, and then a world war. Finally, in 1917 Wright ended the program precipitously, sued Richards, and never spoke of it again. And Wright’s assistant on the project, Russell Barr Williamson, was even more damaged by the experience – both personally and professionally.
The rise and fall of American System-Built Houses – and one small ASB house in particular, the Elizabeth Murphy House, a bastardized version of model A203 located at 2106 East Newton Avenue in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood – is the business that occupies Nick Hayes in this illuminating and engaging account that’s part architectural analysis, part business lesson, part mystery story.
It is an account he is uniquely qualified to write – because he and his wife Angela are now the owner-stewards of that house. He is also cofounder and CTO of the water stewardship company Wellntell, columnist for Sailing magazine, and author of the award-winning book Saving Sailing – The Story of Choices, Families, Time Commitments, and How We Can Create a Better Future.
It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Nick Hayes.
Stu Levitan marks the Jewish High Holy Days with an encore presentation of his conversation from April 2020 with Jonathan Z. S. Pollack, History instructor at Madison College and Honorary Scholar at the George L. Mosse / Laurence A Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which last year issued his new book Wisconsin The New Home of the Jew: 150 years of Jewish life at the UW-Madison. It’s available both in paperback of about 150 pages and a pdf download from the CJS website, cjs.wisc.edu.
Jon is the co-editor, with Jonathan Rees, of The Voice of the People: Primary Sources on the History of American Labor, Industrial Relations, and Working-Class Culture, which includes some of the scholars discussed in this new book. Jon has published several articles on the Jewish history of the Midwest, and he is a frequent guest on Wisconsin Public Radio. He had the advantage of attending two of the three best schools in the Big Ten, getting his bachelor’s at Michigan in 1990, then his masters here in 92, doctorate in 99. And of particular interest to music lovers, from 1997 to 2002, Jon played drums for Madison’s most renowned klezmer band, Yid Vicious
Stu Levitan welcomes Madison’s favorite journalistic son, and his most frequent guest, David Maraniss. As proud Madisonians know, David grew up on the west side, the son of Capital Times editor Elliott Maraniss and University of Wisconsin Press editor Mary Cummins Maraniss, graduating from West High in 1967. To the rest of the world, he is a best-selling author and an associate editor at the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1993 for his coverage of presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and was part of the Post’s team that won the Pulitzer in 2008 for its coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting.
Stu has had the pleasure of interviewing David about several of his bestselling books, most recently A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father, about the aforementioned Elliott. We’ve also aired conversations about his books Barack Obama: The Story, Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero; Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story; Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics that Changed the World, and the book that hits closest to home, They Marched Into Sunlight: Vietnam and America October 1967. Unfortunately, Stu didn’t have a show like this when he published When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.
Today, we’re going to do something different, and talk about a book that hasn’t even been published yet, because David has only just finished writing the main text, and this is the first public conversation he’s had about it. It’s another in his series of using sports to examine larger social issues – this time, the promise and plight of the American Indian in modern America, as exemplified by one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century. The book is Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, and you can look for it from Simon and Schuster late next summer.
But before we talk about Jim Thorpe, we’re going to take a few moments to preview something that’s also very near and dear to David, the Cap Times Idea Fest, a week-long series of panels and interviews on reckoning with change that kicks off a week from tonight.
As always, it is a great pleasure to welcome back to MBB, our friend, David Maraniss.
Stu welcomes Richard L. Pifer for a discussion of his book “The Great War Comes to Wisconsin: Sacrifice, Patriotism, and Free Speech in a Time of Crisis.” It’s from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, and was awarded the Silver Award for Best Regional Non-Fiction category in the Independent Publisher’s IPPY Awards.
It was 107 years ago this month that the guns of August roared and plunged Europe into the most terrible war the world had yet seen. By the time the guns fell silent at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, about ten million military men would die – 1800 of them from Wisconsin, with another six thousand or so Badger boys injured, leaving about 110,000 who made it back to Wisconsin without physical damage. Of the 118,000 troops from Wisconsin, about 3,000 came from Madison – enabling women to enter the labor force in such large numbers they even had their own machinists union.
Among the Wisconsin doughboys, the fabled 32nd Army Infantry Division, or, as they would come to be known after they pierced the German Hindenburg line of defense, the Red Arrow Division. The French called them Les Terrible, and they paid a terrible price for their combat success, suffering a casualty rate of about 15-18 percent, third highest of any American unit.
As a state, Wisconsin’s military losses were not disproportionately high. But we did bear a unique burden, due to demographics and politics. As the war began, close to 40% of Wisconsinites were either born in or had parents from Germany, Austria or Hungary, compared to only 9% with similar ties to the Allied powers. Add to that, our greatest political leader fight so fervently against going to war that he was branded a traitor by the national press, and 9 of our 11 members of congress also voted against the declaration of war. A leading politician, born in the Austria-Hungary empire, was even criminally prosecuted for his opposition to the war. Needless to say, Wisconsin was not popular with the loyalty leaguers of the day.
On the bright side, local disagreement about the war and Fighting Bob La Follette did cause the creation of one of the country’s great crusading newspapers, The Capital Times. On a more somber note, Togstad Glenn, a street in the Midvale neighborhood, memorializes Madison’s last casualty of the war, journalist Morris O Togstad, winner of the French Croix de Guerre, killed in action the day before the Armistice, and Victor S Glenn, the city’s first casualty of WW2.
What our life was like in the period 1914 to 1918 – not only for Wisconsin’s soldiers and politicians, but also for our housewives, farmers, students and others – is the business which occupies Rick Pifer in this compelling account of how we rose to shared sacrifice and sunk to intolerance and injustice.
It is an account he is supremely qualified to provide, as a scholar of the home front in Wisconsin during the First and Second World Wars. For his UW Madison master’s degree, “Total War on the Home Front: La Crosse, Wisconsin and the World Wars,” he studied life during wartime in that riverfront city in Western Wisconsin. For his doctoral dissertation, also here, he looked at the wartime labor movement in the great lakefront city in eastern Wisconsin, published by the Wisconsin historical society press in 2003 as “A City at War: Milwaukee Labor during World War II.” And it was easy for Rick to consult with his editor on that project, because until 2015, he was just down the hall as Director of Reference and Public Services for the Library-Archives Division of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Rick Pifer.
Stu Levitan welcomes UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr., for part two of their discussion of one of the most important presidents in American history – Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy is as complex and controversial as any of our Chief Magistrates.
Wilson amassed one of the most impressive records of progressive legislation of any president, yet left the worst record on race relations of any president in the 20th century, and allowed egregious violations of civil liberties. He kept us out of war in Mexico, but took us into war in Europe. A great student and thinker about good government, he was sloppy in appointing his cabinet officials and negligent in supervising them. A devout Presbyterian, he appointed the first Jew to the US Supreme Court, was the first president to visit the Roman Catholic Pope, and was buried in an Episcopal cathedral. And he’s the man after whom Woody Guthrie is named. It’s a record so rich for discussion this is our second show devoted to it, following a segment on February 15.
There’s no better guide to the life and times of our 28th President than John Milton Cooper, Jr., whom the Boston Globe called “the preeminent living historian of Wilson and his era.” We take for our primary text his 2009 volume Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, which the NY Times called “monumental,” and which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And we also note his earlier work, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
It seems Professor Cooper has spent his life in the world of Woodrow Wilson. He even graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C., and received his bachelor′s degree summa cum laude from Wilson’s alma mater, Princeton University, where Wilson later taught and served as president. Prof Cooper took his advanced degrees at Columbia University, and after a few years at Wellesley College, came to the University of Wisconsin, where he rose to hold two named chairs in History and American Institutions, and chair the famed Department of History before taking Emeritus status in 2009. And that’s even another Wilson connection – when Wilson was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, one of his favorite professors was Richard T. Ely, and one of his favorite students was Frederick Jackson Turner, both of whom would become famed members of the Wisconsin faculty. He has written half a dozen books, dozens of articles, and received numerous honors. He was the honorary president of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation, and the chief historian on the 2002 American Experience biography of Wilson produced for PBS.
I hope you were with us last week for the conversation with Jennifer Chiaverini about her historical fiction, The Women’s March, about the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913, and the suffragists effort to get Wilson to endorse a constitutional amendment enfranchising women. Because that is where we pick up our conversation, before going on to talk about race, the war, and other matters.
It is a pleasure to again present on Madison BookBeat my friend, UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers
Stu Levitan welcomes NY Times best-selling author Jennifer Chiaverini, here to discuss her latest novel of historical fiction, The Women’s March, about the historic 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession. It is just out from the good people at William Morrow, and imprint of HarperCollins. Although Jennifer technically lives in Middleton, she identifies as a Madison author, so that’s good enough for Stu.
On March 3, 1913, the National American Woman Suffrage Association held the first large political protest march in the history of Washington DC. Its purpose was to press its demand for a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. March organizer Alice Paul chose the date and location very well – down Pennsylvania Avenue, the day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson – the last president to be elected before universal suffrage.
And what a march it was to be, with floats and chariots and thousands of women in color-coded outfits, all led by a herald on a white horse, culminating in a tableau of historical allegory at the Treasury Building. Among the several thousand women there that day, the legendary Black journalist and activist Ida B Wells-Barnett and a militant suffragist librarian named Maud Malone.
Alas, things did not work out as planned, as hecklers and hooligans broke through the inadequate security to abuse, even assault the women. But the arc of the moral universe does bend towards justice, albeit slowly at times, and the constitutional amendment they demanded in 1913 was finally passed by Congress in 1919 ratified by the states in 1920. Wisconsin, by the way, has pride of place as the first state to file its ratification vote with the Secretary of State.
How Alice Paul, Ida B Wells-Barnett and Maud Malone came to be on Pennsylvania Avenue that day – the battles they fought, the choices they made – is what occupies Jennifer Chiaverini in this moving and insightful account of an event which has perhaps faded in memory but not in importance.
It is a story Jennifer Chiaverini is exceptionally well-qualified to tell, as a very successful author of historical fiction. In addition to the 20 novels in the Elm Creek Quilts series, set mainly in the Civil War era, she has written historical novels starring the martyred UW student-turned Nazi resistance fighter Mildred Fish Harnack, Lord Byron’s brilliant daughter Ada Byron King, Mary Todd Lincoln, Julia Grant and others. It is a real pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Jennifer Chiaverini.
On the 76th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, an encore presentation of Stu Levitan’s conversation from last August with Greg Mitchell, about his twelfth book The Beginning Or The End: How Hollywood – And America – Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, published by the good people at the New Press, and getting rave reviews.
“The Beginning or the End” was a B movie about the A bomb, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in February, 1947. It promised to disclose what it called “the biggest, best-kept secret in the history of the world – the men, the magic, the machines behind the world’s strongest force – the atom bomb.” The movie was, the studio declared in all caps with exclamation points FACTUAL! AUTHENTIC!”
Well, not quite. Because a movie set in motion by scientists wanting the world to know the truth was taken over by the military and the White House needing the world to believe a lie. How that happened is the business that occupies Greg Mitchell in The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It’s not just a great yarn with some surprising participants, it’s also an urgent warning about secrecy, manipulation and suppression.
Those are frequent topics in Greg Mitchell’s oeuvre. Stu had the pleasure of interviewing Greg nine years ago this week for a related book, his important expose Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and the Greatest Movie Never Made. Since then, the movie Greg made based on that book, and the previously suppressed footage, has won film festival awards from Rio to Venice. Among Greg’s earlier books, two fascinating looks at politics in California. The Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair’s radical campaign for Governor in 1934, which won the Goldsmith Book Prize, and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, about Richard Nixon’s redbaiting campaign for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950.
Greg is a former editor of Editor and Publisher magazine, Nuclear Times and has an important place in the history of rock and roll journalism, as the editor at Crawdaddy magazine who commissioner the first major profile of Bruce Springsteen before his first album was even released. Bruce returned the favor by writing the preface to the 2013 edition of Greg’s So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq. Greg is on Twitter at GregMitch, and you can subscribe to his free newsletter at gregmitchell.substack. com
Well, the Olympics are giving us some great performances and amazing story lines, so we have dialed up an encore presentation of our 2020 conversation with a true grandson of Madison, Andrew Maraniss, about his award-winning book Games of Deception, the True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team, and the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany.
You all know what basketball is, you all know what the Olympics are, you all know who Hitler was. So that part doesn’t need any more introduction.
As to Andrew Maraniss. First of all, he is, as you may have surmised, the son of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author David Maraniss and the pioneering environmentalist Linda Maraniss, born right here in Madison, now a resident of Brentwood, Tenn., with his wife Alison, and their two young children. David, of course, has also written a best-selling book about the Olympics, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. I interviewed David about that book when it came out in 2008, but no longer have access to the audio. David has also written a book about Andrew’s grandfather, the great journalist Elliott Maraniss, who I am proud to say was also my former boss at the Capital Times. That interview, about David’s book A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father was the pilot episode of MBB in 2019. You see how this all comes around?
Like his father, Andrew is really good at telling historical and sports stories with a larger social message. Games of Deception received the 2020 Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Book Honors for middle grade readers and was named one of Amazon’s Top Books of 2019. His first book, the New York Times-bestseller Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, received the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the 2015 RFK Book Awards, the first sports-related book so honored. The Young Reader edition was named one of the Top 10 Biographies and Top 10 Sports Books of 2017 by the American Library Association and was selected as a Notable Social Studies Book for 2019 by the National Council for the Social Studies. And, of course, you’ll recall that Andrew was our guest in June for his new book about sports and society, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, the first gay ballplayer in major league baseball.
Andrew is a contributor to ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com. and Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics, where he was formerly the associate director of media relations – a lesson in the value of leaving a job on good terms. He was also the first-ever media relations manager for the Tampa Bay Rays. You can follow him on Twitter @trublu24 and visit his website at andrewmaraniss.com.
Well, against much of the world’s better judgement, the Olympics are underway, so we have dialed up an encore presentation of our conversation with Madison native and former WISC TV sports reporter and anchor Jessie Garcia, about her book Going For Wisconsin Gold: Stories of Our State’s Olympians, from our good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
The spine-tingling thrill of victory. The mind-numbing agony of defeat. All on the world’s greatest athletic stage. In the 118 years after the first modern Olympics in 1896, there were more than 400 Olympic athletes with Wisconsin ties. In 2014 alone, more than 35 of the 230 athletes representing the United States were bound to the Badger state in one way or another. This year, there are 32, including 10 from the UW and 2 from your world champion Milwaukee Bucks.
Several past Wisconsin Olympians are known around the world as among the greatest – or in fact, the greatest – ever to compete in their sport. Some are remembered only in their own small town. Jesse Garcia has focused on 22 of the most captivating stories; some of them you know, many you don’t.
Jesse Garcia’s story is pretty captivating, too. She was born in Madison in 1970 to a Jewish mother from Long Island and a Catholic Mexican-American from Chicago who met while working for Volunteers in Service to America, the so-called domestic peace corps. Her mother turned her on to newspapers at a very early age; a few years later, it would be her step-father, Howard Landsman, who instilled in her a love of sports.
When we aired this show in early January, Jessie was our second straight guest who had graduated fromf East High School, following the appearance by Greg Renz, but the only Purgolder to have worked as a hostess at the old Ella’s Deli on East Washington Avenue. She went to Boston University, where she became assistant sports editor of the campus newspaper, and one summer got an internship at the sports department with the Madison CBS affiliate, WISC-TV, ch 3.
After graduating in 1992, they hired her as a part-time sports reporter – Madison’s first female sports reporter. Less than a month later, when sports director Van Stoutt fell ill, she was pressed into service to become the first female sports anchor in the state of Wisconsin. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, some sports fans let her know they were not happy hearing their sports news from a young woman.
Well, they were in a minority, because after two years at Channel 3, she stepped up to the Milwaukee market, covering sports for 23 years at WTMJ. Among her duties – hosting both the Mike Holmgren and Mike McCarthy Shows – again, becoming the first woman to host an NFL coach’s show. Those experiences provided the material for her first Historical Society Press book, My life with the Green and Gold: Tales from 20 Years of Sportscasting."
During much of that time, and for a little bit afterwards, she was also a journalism instructor at several universities, including Marquette and UW-Milwaukee, while also writing and producing corporate and video documentaries and doing audio narrations., Since January 2019, she has been back at WTMJ as Broadcast Director. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jessie Garcia.
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Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers
Stu Levitan welcomes one of the most interesting and insightful essayists on the scene today, Barrett Swanson, here to discuss his outstanding first collection, Lost in Summerland, published this spring by the good people at Counterpoint Press.
Addressing toxic masculinity at a men’s retreat in Ohio. Embedded on an organic produce farm in Waunakee run by a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Dealing with the traumatic brain injury to his older brother, and the drowning death of his best friend. Sussing out a utopian compound in the Florida swamps. Working on his football technique with his father. Role-playing a victim at FEMA’s massive disaster simulation site in Texas. Hanging out at the West Wing Weekend outside Washington. Being moved beyond comprehension at a spiritualist retreat he attended with his brother in upstate New York. Just some of journeys Barrett Swanson takes to find America – and himself – in the age of Trump.
Lost in Summerland is a tour de force of cultural anthropology and vibrant writing, 14 essays that reveal both who Barrett Swanson is and who we are. Because he believes what James Baldwin wrote in 1962 – that the artist “must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”
Barrett Swanson grew up in Brookfield, went to Catholic high school in Waukesha. After graduating with a degree in political science and English from Loyola University in Chicago, he got his MFA in creative writing from the UW-Madison – making him our third guest from the UW creative writing program, following Aimee Nezhu-ku-matathil and Steven Wright. He received a Pushcart Prize in 2015, and the next year returned to the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing as a Halls Emerging Artist Fellow.
A contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, his short fiction and essays have been featured in the New York Times magazine, the Guardian and numerous other periodicals, and collected in several anthologies, including Best American Sports Writing, Best American Travel Writing and Best American Essays.
He is now also a tenure track assistant professor in the department of languages and literatures at the university of Wisconsin whitewater, where his rate my professor rating is 4.8 out of 5, with such praise as awesome, inspirational and would smoke with him. Which, of course, Barrett would certainly not do. He lives with his wife on Madison’s east side.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Barrett Swanson.
Stu Levitan welcomes one of the brightest stars in the firmament that is the University of Wisconsin faculty, Professor Jordan Ellenberg, here to talk about his New York Times best-seller, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else.
As coined by the ancient Greeks, “geometry” literally means “measuring the world,” and the world which Jordan Ellenberg measures in Shape is wide and far-flung indeed. Gerrymandering, the tv show Survivor, Abraham Lincoln, pandemics and flitting mosquitoes, artificial intelligence, even an answer to the question ‘how many holes in a straw’? And it’s an accessible world – yes, there are symbols and equations, and you’re welcome to have pad and paper with you as you read, but the book is mainly a narrative built on stories and people.
Jordan Ellenberg was not a late-bloomer. The son of two biostatisticians, he taught himself to read at age two by watching Sesame Street, he was competing in high school math competitions while in the fourth grade, and four years later he was taking honors calculus at the University of Maryland. At 17, he beat out 400,000 North American high school students to win the USA Mathematical Olympiad, and over a 3-year period took two golds and a silver at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
He took his BA and Ph D at Harvard, with a masters from Johns Hopkins in creative writing in between, then started his academic career at Princeton. He came to the University of Wisconsin in 2005, made full professor in 2011, was named a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in 2014 and since 2015 has been the John D MacArthur Professor of Mathematics.
His previous books include How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking in 2014 and the novel The Grasshopper King. He also has a credited cameo in the 2017 movie Gifted in the role of math professor, giving him a Kevin Bacon degree of separation of two and making him one of the extraordinarily small and select group of people with an Erdos/Bacon number. He maintains a blog Quomodocumque.wordpress.com and tweets at JSEllenberg.
It is a great pleasure to welcome to MBB Professor Jordan Ellenberg
Stu Levitan welcomes the social justice activist, educator, award-winning columnist, and author Joan Steinau Lester. Her memoir Loving Before Loving: A Marriage in Black and White is just out from our very good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press. Along with her Madison publisher, Joan also could have joined us as a Madison author, with a Ph D from the fabled UW history department; but, for reasons we’ll discuss, she was unable to accept the department’s offer.
Personally, and professionally, Joan Steinau Lester has been at the forefront of most of the great social justice movements of the last seven decades. As a teenager, she refused to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath and picketed for civil rights. At 22, she married a Black man, the writer, educator and activist Julius Lester, in 1962, when mixed-race marriages were illegal in 27 states. At 64, she married a White woman when that wasn’t legal anywhere. In the late sixties, she was part of an early Women’s Liberation group with such prominent feminists as Robin Morgan, Kate Millet, Flo Kennedy, Ti-Grace Atkinson and others. And long before diversity, equity and inclusion were common buzzwords, she used her doctorate in multicultural education from the University of Massachusetts to give anti-racism workshops, then co-found and direct the nonprofit Equity Institute in 1981.
Her previous books include the novel Mama’s Child, with a foreword by Alice Walker; the young adult novel Black, White, Other; a biography of her friend from Antioch College, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Fire in My Soul; Taking Charge: Every Woman’s Action Guide, and The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas.
Her columns have been published in USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan and New York Times.
She received the National Lesbian and Gay Siegenthaler Award for Commentary on National Public Radio and was a Finalist from the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and for the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction award for narrative nonfiction. She lives in Berkeley California with her wife Carole, to whom Loving Before Loving is dedicated. It is a pleasure to welcome to MBB, Dr. Joan Steinau Lester.
WORT 89.9 FM airdate - July 5, 2021
Stu Levitan welcomes R. Richard (Dick) Wagner for a special Pride Month encore presentation of our conversation about his award-wining We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History, from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. The book covers the period from territorial days to the 1960s; Dick’s companion volume, Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History brings the story up to the present day.
In 1982, under Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to adopt a gay rights law, making discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation illegal. In 1983, under Democratic Governor Tony Earl, Wisconsin became the first state to have a Governor’s Commission on Lesbian and Gay Issues. Wisconsin is the only state to have elected three openly gay members of Congress – 2 Democrats, 1 Republican.
But the dairy state has not always been so friendly to non-normative sexuality. In fact, laws against gay sex predate the state. When the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836, territorial legislators took the law against sodomy from the Michigan Territory and increased the penalty from three years to five.
In 1905, the Wisconsin Attorney General called oral sex “this unspeakable offense,” ‘the infamous crime,’ degrading and disgusting.” In 1928, the Supreme Court called sodomy “repulsive and detestable,” but “too prevalent to be ignored.”
In the 1940s, Wisconsin criminalized even thinking gay, passing the Sexual Psychopath Law to prosecute people whose impulsiveness of behavior rendered them sexually irresponsible – whether or not they ever acted on those supposed impulses.
Even that citadel of sifting and winnowing, the University of Wisconsin, got into the gay-bashing business, investigating hundreds of gay students in the fifties and early sixties, and sending many of them for therapeutic discipline. UW business manager A.W. Peterson even took the doors off the toilet stalls in the Bascom Hall men’s rooms, to stop gay assignations.
It’s part of our state’s history that most people, straight or gay, don’t know, but should. Because a community cannot fully know itself, or be fully known by others, without knowing its history. As they say, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.
There is no one more qualified or appropriate to write this groundbreaking history of early gay life in Wisconsin than Dick Wagner, who is himself historic, as the first openly gay member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. He even lives in a landmarked building on Jenifer Street which long before he came to town was a center of Madison gay life.
Dick came to Madison as a graduate student in history in 1965, getting his doctorate in 1971. In 1972, Gov. Pat Lucey named him executive director of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. After Lucey resigned in the summer of 1977 to become Ambassador to Mexico, Dick ran the executive residence for Gov. Martin Schreiber until January 1979, when he joined the Department of Administration as a budget analyst. Dick retired from state service in 2005.
In addition to serving on the Dane County Board from 1980-1994 – including four years as the first openly gay county board chair in Wisconsin – Dick’s record of state and local public service is extensive. In 1983, Gov. Tony Early appointed him co-chair of the aforementioned Governor’s Council on Lesbian and Gay Issues. That same year, he co-founded the New Harvest Foundation, a funding source for south central Wisconsin’s LGBT communities. Dick stepped down last year as chair of the Madison Urban Design Commission, following service on the Plan Commission, Landmarks Commission, Wisconsin Arts Board, Wisconsin Humanities Council, and numerous other organizations. In recognition not just of his service but the way he served, Dick was named the first recipient of the city of Madison’s Jeffrey Clay Erlanger Civility in Public Discourse Award, in 2007.
And on a personal note – I had the pleasure of serving with Dick on the Dane County Board and the Plan Commission, and there is no one whose intelligence, integrity and decency I respect more. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend, Dick Wagner.
Stu Levitan welcomes award-winning and bestselling author Andrew Maraniss for a special Pride month conversation about Glenn Burke, who was a rising young star in Major League Baseball in the late seventies until he was effectively run out of the game because he was gay. The book is Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, from the good people at Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Andrew is that rarest of authors – not just a true son of Madison, but a grandson of Madison, born right here in 1970 to Linda and David Maraniss, Linda an environmentalist and David of course also being an award-winning and bestselling author and the son of Mary Maraniss, a book editor at the UW Press, and her husband Elliott, the subject of David’s most recent book and during the very period that Andrew writes about, my editor at the Capital Times.
This is Andrew’s third book examining the intersection of sports and society, and our third conversation, following Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the collision of race and sports in the south in 2015 and Games of Deception: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany in 2019. He received the Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the RFK Book Awards for Strong Inside and the Sydney Taylor Honor Award for Games of Deception. He is also a Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics and a contributor to ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com.
It is a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat, Andrew Maraniss.
Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning journalist, music critic and author Joel Selvin for a conversation about his new book Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise, from the good people at House of Anansi Press. It’s the inside story of how one of the first great pop styles was born in a high school locker room and then went on to conquer the world.
It’s a story Joel Selvin is exceptionally well-qualified to tell. No only is he an award-winning journalist and music critic who covered pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle for more than thirty-five years, and the author of best-selling books about the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Ricky Nelson, Haight-Ashbury and more. He is also a native Californian, albeit one from the Bay Area, who first visited Los Angeles as a 10-year-old, just at the time the events in this book were transpiring.
As to the requisite Madison connection, well, it’s through me. Because this is the third time Joel has appeared with me, following conversations about his books Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day; and Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues. At least we’ve finally got a book that is mainly about sun and fun, although there are some dark, even tragic moments as well. And btw – with three appearances, Joel is now tied with Madison’s own Ben Sidran for the number two spot on my all-time roster, behind only our former neighbor, David Maraniss.
It's a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat, Joel Selvin
Airdate on WORT 89.9 FM - June 14, 2021
Stu Levitan welcomes the renowned broadcast journalist, educator and author Patty Loew, formerly of Madison, for a conversation about the second edition of her award-winning book Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
Wisconsin has about 87,000 American Indians living on about 647,000 acres of reservation and in various urban and rural settings, about 1.5% of the state’s population on about 1.5 percent of the state’s land mass. But despite those small percentages, the 11 federally recognized nations and tribal communities – Menominee, Oneida, Ho-Chunk, Forest County Potawatomi, Stockbridge-Munsee, and the six bands of the Lake Superior Ojibwe, plus the unrecognized Brothertown Indian Nation – have played a huge role in our history, economy and culture.
Telling that history is the business that occupies Patty Loew in Indian Nations of Wisconsin, a comprehensive and accessible account, heavily illustrated, with maps and tables showing the changes over time in the location and population of the Nations. It’s a book she is extremely, perhaps uniquely qualified to tell. Because, as an enrolled Member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe with a Ph D, she has both studied this history, and lived it.
Now, while you were watching Patty Loew the award-winning reporter/anchor on WKOW-TV from the mid-70s to the late-90s and producer/host on Wisconsin Public Television from 1991-2011, you probably didn’t realize that Patty Loew the student was also working towards a masters and doctorate in mass communications from the UW-Madison, with a dissertation on “The Chippewa and Their Newspapers in the ‘UnProgressive Era.’”
Upon getting that doctorate in 1998, she continued on TV for a few years, but also became Patty Loew the Professor, in the UW’s Department of Life Sciences Communication, where she remained until 2017. That’s when she became Professor Emerita and moved to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she also directs the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.
As broadcast journalist and author, she has won numerous state, national and even international awards, and has received numerous honors, including the Outstanding Service Award, Great Lakes Inter-tribal Council. Her book Seventh Generation Earth Ethics: Native Voices of Wisconsin, also from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, won the Midwest Book Award in 2014, while the first edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin received the 2001 Outstanding Book Award, Wisconsin Library Association, so we know how good a third edition would be. She has also written an award-winning textbook for fourth-graders, Native People of Wisconsin, along with a teacher’s guide co-written by our own Back to the Country co-host Bobbi Malone.
It is a real pleasure to welcome to MBB, a friend to us all, Patty Loew.
Stu Levitan welcomes someone who’s had an exceptionally interesting and varied career in music, movies, finance and technology - Jonathan Taplin, author of The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock and Roll Life. And what a life it’s been, with scenes filled with figures from the pantheon of pop culture – Bob Dylan, George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, the Band, Judy Collins, Martin Scorcese, Wim Wenders, even the Walt Disney Studios.
And as the founder of the first streaming Video On Demand Platform in 1996, called Intertainer, and holder of two patents for that technology, Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, and former Professor at the USC Annenberg School, Jon is also among our foremost thinkers and doers concerning the intersection of technology and culture, a topic he addressed in his very prescient book in 2017, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.
As for the requisite Madison connection, I was at two of the seminal concerts he tour managed, saw three of the movies he produced, and still listen to the music he helped bring into the world.
It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jonathan Taplin
Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning comic novelist and just-retired columnist for the Miami Herald Carl Hiaasen, coming to the Wisconsin Book Festival for a virtual appearance at the Madison Public Library Foundation’s Lunch for Libraries next Tuesday May 25. Carl will be discussing his uproarious new bestseller Squeeze Me, now out in paperback with a brand-new epilogue, which will be sent to all who attend that annual fundraising event.
Squeeze Me is a sharp, even savage satire set in Palm Beach FL involving a giant Burmese python, a missing society matron, a gutsy wildlife wrangler, a mystery man with one eye and a great library, hapless crooks, a wrongly accused immigrant, a crude and stupid president of the united states in residence at Casa Bellicosa, and much more. It is classic Carl Hiaasen, which means it is a fiercely funny social commentary about life, death and the environment in the Sunshine State.
It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Carl Hiaasen.
Stu Levitan welcomes Jeff Kannel, author of Make Way For Liberty: Wisconsin African Americans in the Civil War from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
When the civil war began in April 1861, neither the US Army or the Wisconsin state militia allowed Black men to serve. But on April 9, 1865, Black men – some of them from Wisconsin — held the rifles that fired the last shots preventing Robert E Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia from escaping at the Battle of Appomattox Court House. By that time, more than 450 Black men, residents of Wisconsin or credited to the state, had served in the US Colored Troops. In addition, several hundred, maybe thousands, had served in support roles for Wisconsin officers and regiments.
Who those men were, and what their lives were like before, during and after the war, are the questions Jeff Kannel answers in this comprehensive survey of an overlooked aspect of our shared history. They’re answers he started researching ten years ago, after attending a presentation at Kenosha’s Civil War Museum, where he was a volunteer. And after retiring as an instructor at Gateway Technical College, he had time to continue that research, and turn it into this book, for which we are all indebted.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jeff Kannel
Stu Levitan welcomes the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, whose long-awaited graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength comes out tomorrow and is already receiving rave reviews. It also features the extremely extensive coloring collaboration of her, wife, the artist Holly Rae Taylor. And on Thursday at 4 o’clock, Alison will be appearing at the Wisconsin Book Festival, in conversation with another best-selling memoirist, Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild.
“The unexamined life,” Socrates reportedly said during his trial for impiety, “is not worth living.” By that standard, as well as many others, Alison Bechdel has had a very worthwhile life. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, a decade-by-decade examination of her exuberant, sometimes excessive, pursuit of bodily and metaphysical fitness, is her third graphic memoir examining her life and that of her family. It follows Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, from 2006, about the strained relationship she had with her closeted gay father, and 2012’s Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, about the strained relationship she had with her emotionally distant mother. Two years later, she was rewarded for those works by being awarded a McArthur Fellowship, the so-called “Genius Grant.” Fun Home: The Musical came to Broadway in 2015, winning 5 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
She began her literary career with the syndicated comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008. It was in a 1985 strip that she popularized, but did not devise, the so-called Bechdel Test as a metric to measure the representation of women in fiction. She and Holly Rae Taylor live in Vermont, where she has also served as the state’s cartoonist laureate.
It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Alison Bechdel.
Stu Levitan celebrates National Poetry Month by welcoming Professor Richard Jones of DePaul University, editor of its award-winning illustrated literary journal Poetry East, now celebrating its 100th edition and 40th anniversary. Part two of our conversation with Howard Sherman about his book Another Day’s Begun” Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st century, originally scheduled for today, will be heard later this spring.
Richard Jones is the author of sixteen books of poems, most recently his quasi-memoir of a peripatetic life, Stranger on Earth. He has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems and Billy Collins’s Poetry 180, and his poems have been featured on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and The Writer’s Almanac. His selected poems, The Blessing, won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry in 2000.
It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Prof. Richard Jones.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers
Stu Levitan welcomes Edward Ball, his latest book is the most extraordinary family memoir I have ever read, Life Of A Klansman: A Family History In White Supremacy, from the good people at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Demographers tell us that about 137 million white Americans – more than half the current white population of the country – are direct descendants of members of the Ku Klux Klan, mostly from the second wave, from 1915 to 1925. Edward Ball’s link to the Klan goes back even further. His grandmother’s grandfather was Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, a downwardly mobile carpenter of French Creole descent born in New Orleans in 1832. He served – none-too-honorably — as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War and then in its immediate aftermath joined the first generation of the Ku-Klux and other white terrorist groups in their murderous and successful effort to “redeem” their heritage, end Reconstruction and reestablish white supremacy.
The story of Constant Lecorgne is a profoundly important microhistory, showing how the life of this very ordinary, even mediocre person reflects an entire culture that helped change history. Because the tragic reality is that, through men like Constant Lecorgne, the South snatched victory from the jaws of defeat; the Klan was not put down; the Klan faded because it won, preserving white supremacy for another hundred years.
It is a story Edward Ball is exceptionally, even uniquely, qualified to tell. His first book, for which he won the 1998 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was Slaves in the Family, an account both of his father’s family, major slaveholders in South Carolina for 170 years, and the histories of ten Black families once enslaved on their rice plantations. His other books include The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South; The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures; The Genetic Strand: Exploring A Family History Through DNA, and Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. The recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and several fellowships, he has also taught at Yale University and the State University of NY, and joins us today from his home in New Haven.
It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Edward Ball.
Stu Levitan welcomes Sarah Chayes, her latest book is On Corruption in America and What is At Stake, from the good people at Penguin Random House.
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. One of the ways that evil manifests itself is through corruption – individuals, or more likely networks, abusing public office for private gain. How to identify and fight that corruption is the business that occupies Sarah Chayes in her new book, as it has occupied much of her professional life, especially as special assistant on corruption to then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, and as advisor to military leaders David McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal.
After the Pentagon, she spent five years as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her previous books include Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, for which she won the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. A former award-winning reporter for National Public Radio based in Paris, France she now lives in Paw Paw, West Virginia.
Sarah comes by her interest in public service and integrity organically, as the daughter of the late law professor Abram Chayes, a State Department official under President Kennedy, and Prof. Antonia Handler Chayes, attorney and undersecretary of the Air Force under President Carter.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Sarah Chayes
Stu Levitan welcomes Brian Alexander, his new book is The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town, just out from the good people at St. Martin’s Press. Brian will be presenting at the Wisconsin Book Festival tomorrow evening, Tuesday March 30, at 7pm in a conversation with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Angela Fitzgerald. Brian’s appearance is part of a series on health care issues faced by underserved communities, made possible through a partnership with our very good friends at the Madison Public Library and a research program of the National Institutes of Health called All of Us, conducted locally at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bryan Ohio is a small town of about eighty-five hundred people, the county seat of Williams County in the most northwestern corner of Ohio. Its largest employer, and most important community asset, is the non-profit Bryan Hospital, an 85-bed facility which opened exactly 85 years ago and is now the flagship campus of the three entities comprising Community Hospitals and Wellness Centers – CHWC.
For its size and resources, CHWC provides very good medical care, including to patients who can’t – or sometimes, won’t – always take good care of themselves. Last year, the National Rural Health Association named it one of the Top 20 rural community hospitals, along with two facilities in Wisconsin – the Monroe Clinic to our southwest, and SSM Health St. Clare Hospital just up the road in Baraboo.
How CHWC provides that very good medical care – and whether it can continue to do so, given its size and resources, as powerful forces far beyond its control continue to batter its business model – is what occupies Brian Alexander in this comprehensive and compassionate account, which lays bare in very human terms just how fraught and fragile is the American health care system.
Brian Alexander didn’t base his reporting just on interviews and documents, although there are plenty of those. No, he actually embedded himself in the Bryan hospital for 15 months, experiencing life – and sometimes death – everywhere from the emergency room to the board room.
Brian Alexander is very well-equipped to write this story. He is from Ohio, the small city of Lancaster, the economic decline of which he chronicled in his award-wining book from 2017, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. A former contributing editor at Glamour and Wired magazines, his earlier books touched on more, ah, intimate matters, including America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction and Rapture: A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism and the New Era of Immortality.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat the master of the subtitle, Brian Alexander.
Stu Levitan welcomes Miles Harvey for a conversation about his new book, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. Miles gave a very successful talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival last fall. Alas, Stu was not able to schedule him before that appearance, and he’s very happy to be able to bring him and his wildly entertaining book to you now.
James Jesse Strang was born in rural western New York in 1813. As a man, he was short and balding and entirely unprepossessing except for his eyes. He became a jack-of-many useful trades – most importantly attorney, postmaster, and newspaper editor. He called himself “a perfect atheist, an inveterate unbeliever and opposer of the Mormon faith.” Yet in early 1844, on a happenstance visit to the large Mormon enclave at Nauvoo Illinois, he was baptized by the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith himself. A week later, he was ordained an elder of the church by Smith’s older brother, Hyrum.
And when Joseph Smith was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob five months later, Strang declared that the prophet had chosen him as his successor. And he pressed his case so successfully that he attracted hundreds of followers to the Walworth County community of Voree, then thousands of devotees to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, where he proclaimed himself King of Earth and Heaven – and also got elected to the Michigan House of Representatives.
How James Strang pulled it off – and how he, too, met a violent end – is the business that occupies Miles Harvey in The King of Confidence, which also serves as a portrait of the weird and wild world that was antebellum America, and features cameos by P.T. Barnum, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, John Brown, and even the President of the United States, Millard Fillmore.
The King of Confidence is Miles Harvey’s third book, following the national and international bestseller The Island of Lost Maps and Painter in a Savage Land, which was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Booklist Editors’ Choice. He also teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.
It is a pleasure to finally welcome to Madison BookBeat Miles Harvey.
Stu Levitan welcomes Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century as we add a new category – books about plays by Madison playwrights. That’s right, Thornton Wilder – the only person to receive Pulitzer Prizes for both Drama and the Novel – was born right here in Madison in 1897, when his father Amos was the progressive editor/publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal for 12 years before moving to Hong Kong as US Consul General in 1906.
Our Town is an odd play, with neither conventional plot nor even linear narrative, just snapshots of some of the 2,642 residents of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, especially Emily Webb, George Gibbs, and their families. Their growing up, their marrying, their living, their dying.
By Wilder’s stage direction, the play is to be performed with no curtain, no scenery, and no props, save for a table, some chairs, and two ladders. The lead character doesn’t even have a name, but is just called the Stage Manager, speaking directly to the audience and rarely interacting with the rest of the cast. It was a piece of meta-theatre 25 years before that term even existed.
Despite what he had the Stage Manager say, it was not, Wilder later wrote, meant to be understood as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as an updated interpretation of Dante’s Purgatory. Rather, he explained, it was “an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.”
This seemingly small play has found great and lasting value ever since it opened on Broadway on February 4, 1938 and won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama – the first of two such awards Wilder would win, along with an earlier Pulitzer for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Decade after decade, it has been the most-produced play in America, from high schools to major professional productions on both stage and screen, featuring some of the biggest stars of their day. It’s been translated into 80 languages, and produced around the world; just this month, it became the first production when the Queensland Theatre of Australia reopened after the pandemic.
But what is it like to live in Grover’s Corners eight times a week? What happens when you think about the Mind of God every night, and bid farewell to the living at Wednesday and weekend matinees? How do you step back in time while keeping the play relevant to the audiences of today?
These are the questions which occupy Howard Sherman in Another Day’s Begun, questions he sought to answer by talking to more than 100 actors and directors responsible for 13 of the most interesting and innovative productions of the past 21 years. Some are award-winning household names, like Helen Hunt and Jane Kaczmarek; others are maximum-security inmates of Sing Sing prison. And he has done the seemingly impossible – written a book about Our Town that is almost as emotionally powerful and multi-faceted as the play itself.
Howard Sherman comes well-equipped to this assignment. He grew up in New Haven not far from Wilder’s long-time home in Hamden, CT and has held a series of executive, managerial and public relations positions with several theatres, including the Eugene O’Neill Theater, Hartford Stage, and Westport Playhouse. From 2003 to 2011 he was Executive Director of the American Theatre Wing, the folks who bring us the Tony Awards. A frequent presenter at national conferences, he also writes a weekly column for the British magazine The Stage and is contributing editor of Stage Directions magazine. In 2014, he was cited as one of the Top 40 Free Speech Defenders by the National Coalition Against Censorship the following year received the Defender Award from Dramatists Legal Defense Fund. And this month he celebrates his sixth anniversary as director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School for Drama.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Howard Sherman.
Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers
Stu Levitan welcomes University of Wisconsin Professor Chad Alan Goldberg, editor of an important new volume Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, from our very good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.
But before we hear from the good professor, you should know that you have dialed us up on a very special day. It is Madison Bookbeat's last show of the winter pledge drive, giving you one more chance to call 256-2001 or go online to wortfm.org and show your support for what we’ve been doing every Monday afternoon for the past 14 months. And there are three folks who did just that last week whom we’d like to thank. Pete likes WORT because he learns something every time he listens; he says being in a town with an independent radio station is almost like being in college. That’s right, friends, you can regard your donations as voluntary, tax-deductible tuition. Terese says she enjoyed the book we featured last week, Madeline Uraneck’s “How to Make A Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted,” and can’t wait to read it. That’s why I do this, Terese, to share with listeners the books I’ve found interesting and important, which I think you will, too. And our old friend Anonymous pledged with the comment, “book lovers love Madison BookBeat.” Well, MBB loves book lovers back. So be like Pete, Terese and Anonymous and give us a call at 256-2001 or go on line at wortfm.org. The book lovers in your life will thank you – as will I.
Now then, to the program at hand.
According to Wisconsin statute 36.01(2), the mission of the university of Wisconsin system is “to develop human resources, to discover and disseminate knowledge, to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society by developing in students heightened intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”
But not everyone agrees with that mission – especially the parts of public service, improving the human condition, and searching for truth. And over the years some people in high places have sought to change that mission in fundamental ways, even destroy it outright. Leaving us with some very important questions.
What is the role of the public university in a democratic society? Specifically, what is the role of the University of Wisconsin in the democratic, pluralistic society of the 21st century? And, harking back to the words of UW President Charles Van Hise from 1905, does the beneficent influence of the university continue to reach every family in the state? If not, how do we ensure that it once again does?
These are the questions Chad Alan Goldberg asks in Education for Democracy, questions he and his 11 contributors answer by examining how and why the Wisconsin Idea was born, expanded, honored – and then threatened and diminished. And they explain why it must be renewed, and suggest how to do so.
The list of those contributors is quite a collection of scholars and analysts, including Prof. Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, environmental historian and biographer of Aldo Leopold Curt Meine, our friend, repeat guest and LGBT historian Dick Wagner, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Emily Auerbach, and several other distinguished professors, both from the UW and elsewhere.
Prof. Goldberg is very well-equipped to edit this volume, which is based on an outreach course on the Wisconsin Idea which he helped organize in 2016, and which he still teaches as Professor of Sociology. And It was Prof Goldberg who in May 2016 wrote the resolution -- which the Faculty Senate adopted -- expressing no confidence in the commitment by then-president Ray Cross and the Board of Regents to defend the Wisconsin Idea, which was under attack by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican legislature.
Prof. Goldberg’s previous books include Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought and Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare. He is also affiliated with the Center for German and European Studies, the George l. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the GAM program in History, all here at the UW Madison.
And on a personal note, Chad and I are both graduates of a small school now known as New College, the Honors College of Florida, where I believe our respective graduating classes were smaller than the class roster of his Survey of Sociology course. I know mine was.
Thankfully, Ray Cross and Scott Walker are both gone, and Professor Chad Alan Goldberg is still here. It is a pleasure to welcome him to Madison Bookbeat.
Stu Levitan interviews Madeline Uraneck, author of How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted (Wisconsin Historical Society Press) on Madison BookBeat, WORT 89.9 FM Madison
Madeline Uraneck is part traveler, part global citizen, having worked, studied or had adventures in 64 of the planet’s 195 sovereign states – a fitting characteristic for the first international education consultant in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She’s taught English in Japan and researched globalization in Morocco, studied dance in Sweden and Poland, worked for the Peace Corps in Central Asia, and have been a Peace Corps volunteer in southern Africa. But perhaps her most important journey began and flourished right here in Madison. And it all started in 1994 with the simple act of befriending the cleaning woman in her state office building, a Tibetan refugee named Tenzin Kalsang.
That friendship would blossom into a deep relationship spanning three generations, taking Madeline Uraneck around the world and deep into her own heart.
Airdate - March 1, 2021
An encore presentation of a program which originally aired November 23, 2020.
Stu Levitan welcomes one of the brightest new stars in the literary firmament, Danielle Evans, coming back to Madison on Wednesday, virtually at least, to present her new collection The Office of Historical Corrections at the Wisconsin Book Festival.
Grief and loss, apologies and corrections, anxiety and forgiveness. Women demanding to live full and complex lives. History. Performance. Race. These are the things which occupy Danielle Evans in the six stories and one novella which comprise The Office of Historical Corrections, just out from the good people at Riverhead Books, and already getting rave reviews.
Danielle Evans burst onto the scene at age 26 with Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, a collection of eight short stories which she finished while on a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. That collection received several awards and made her a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. In the decade since, she has taught creative writing at the aforementioned UW Institute for Creative Writing, American University and now the Johns Hopkins University. In recognition of her artistic excellence and merit, she is also the recipient of a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
It is a real pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Danielle Evans.
On this third Monday of February, a day commonly, but mistakenly, called President’s Day, Stu Levitan welcomes UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr., for a discussion of one of the most important presidents in American history – Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy is as complex and controversial, as any of our Chief Magistrates. It’s a record so rich for discussion we’re taking two hours to cover it, with out second segment set for early April.
He amassed one of the most impressive records of progressive legislation of any president, yet left the worst record on race relations of any president in the 20th century, and allowed egregious violations of civil liberties. He kept us out of war in Mexico, but took us into war in Europe. A great student and thinker about good government, he was sloppy in appointing his cabinet officials and negligent in supervising them. A devout Presbyterian, he appointed the first Jew to the US Supreme Court, was the first president to visit the Roman Catholic Pope, and was buried in an Episcopal cathedral. And he’s the man after whom Woody Guthrie is named.
There’s no better guide to the life and times of our 28th President than JMC Jr, whom the Boston Globe called “the preeminent living historian of Wilson and his era.” We take for our primary text his 2009 volume Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, which the NYTimes called “monumental,” and which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And we also note his earlier work, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
It seems Professor Cooper has spent his life in the world of Woodrow Wilson. He even graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C., and received his bachelor′s degree summa cum laude from Wilson’s alma mater, Princeton University, where Wilson later taught and served as president. Prof Cooper took his advanced degrees at Columbia University, and after a few years at Wellesley College, came to the University of Wisconsin, where he rose to hold two named chairs in History and American Institutions, and chair the famed Department of History before taking Emeritus status in 2009. And that’s even another Wilson connection – when Wilson was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, one of his favorite professors was Richard T. Ely, and one of his favorite students was Frederick Jackson Turner, both of whom would become famed members of the Wisconsin faculty. He has written half a dozen books, dozens of articles, and received numerous honors. He was the honorary president of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation, and the chief historian on the 2002 American Experience biography of Wilson produced for PBS.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend, UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr.
As part of WORT's continuing celebration of Black culture and history, a special rebroadcast of a candid conversation that first aired live on February 10, 2020.
Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning Black, Queer and Poz poet and performer Danez Smith, who will be at the Central Library tonight at 7 pm, in support of their brand new collection Homie, poems about friendship and loss and violence and love, it’s a presentation by our friends at the Wisconsin Book Festival.
Now as long-time listeners know, it is Madison BookBeat policy to regard students at the UW as Madisonians, so Danez hits two of the three criteria.
Because before Nezzy was a finalist for the National Book Award and the youngest person ever to win the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Don’t Call Us Dead, before the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for [insert]boy, before the video of “Dear White America” got 387,000 views, thank you very much, before the fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, before the individual and team slam championships, before the Poetry Foundation podcast VS with Franny Choi, before they were on WORT’s A Public Affair with Ali Muldrow last January, it’s in the archives, check it out, before all that -- Danez Smith was in the first cohort of the ground-breaking First Wave program in the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and a member of the University of Wisconsin Class of 2012, On Wisconsin.
Their third collection of poems, Homie, is now out from Graywolf press, and receiving rapturous reviews, NYT calling it a work of ‘startling originality and ambition.” which as I said is what brings them back to town for a Wisconsin Book Festival event at the Central Library, 201 West Mifflin St. tonight at 7, it is a special reading and conversation with Sofia Snow, the director of the aforementioned Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and the First Wave Scholarship Program. It is a real pleasure to welcome Danez Smith to Madison BookBeat.
Airdate on WORT 89.9 FM: Feb. 10, 2020; rebroadcast, Feb. 8, 2021
Stu Levitan welcomes R. Richard (Dick) Wagner, author of We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History, covering the period from territorial days to the 1960s. It’s from our friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, which in September will publish his companion volume, Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History. Some breaking news about volume one – it was just awarded the gold medal in the LGBT category by the Independent Publishers association.
In 1982, under Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to adopt a gay rights law, making discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation illegal. In 1983, under Democratic Governor Tony Earl, Wisconsin became the first state to have a Governor’s Commission on Lesbian and Gay Issues. Wisconsin is the only state to have elected three openly gay members of Congress – 2 Democrats, 1 Republican.
But the dairy state has not always been so friendly to non-normative sexuality. In fact, laws against gay sex predate the state. When the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836, territorial legislators took the law against sodomy from the Michigan Territory and increased the penalty from three years to five.
In 1905, the Wisconsin Attorney General called oral sex “this unspeakable offense,” ‘the infamous crime,’ degrading and disgusting.” In 1928, the Supreme Court called sodomy “repulsive and detestable,” but “too prevalent to be ignored.”
In the 1940s, Wisconsin criminalized even thinking gay, passing the Sexual Psychopath Law to prosecute people whose impulsiveness of behavior rendered them sexually irresponsible – whether or not they ever acted on those supposed impulses.
Even that citadel of sifting and winnowing, the University of Wisconsin, got into the gay-bashing business, investigating hundreds of gay students in the fifties and early sixties, and sending many of them for therapeutic discipline. UW business manager A.W. Peterson even took the doors off the toilet stalls in the Bascom Hall men’s rooms, to stop gay assignations.
It’s part of our state’s history that most people, straight or gay, don’t know, but should. Because a community cannot fully know itself, or be fully known by others, without knowing its history. As they say, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.
There is no one more qualified or appropriate to write this groundbreaking history of early gay life in Wisconsin than Dick Wagner, who is himself historic, as the first openly gay member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. He even lives in a landmarked building on Jenifer Street which long before he came to town was a center of Madison gay life.
Dick came to Madison as a graduate student in history in 1965, getting his doctorate in 1971. In 1972, Gov. Pat Lucey named him executive director of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. After Lucey resigned in the summer of 1977 to become Ambassador to Mexico, Dick ran the executive residence for Gov. Martin Schreiber until January 1979, when he joined the Department of Administration as a budget analyst. Dick retired from state service in 2005.
In addition to serving on the Dane County Board from 1980-1994 – including four years as the first openly gay county board chair in Wisconsin – Dick’s record of state and local public service is extensive. In 1983, Gov. Tony Early appointed him co-chair of the aforementioned Governor’s Council on Lesbian and Gay Issues. That same year, he co-founded the New Harvest Foundation, a funding source for south central Wisconsin’s LGBT communities. Dick stepped down last year as chair of the Madison Urban Design Commission, following service on the Plan Commission, Landmarks Commission, Wisconsin Arts Board, Wisconsin Humanities Council, and numerous other organizations. In recognition not just of his service but the way he served, Dick was named the first recipient of the city of Madison’s Jeffrey Clay Erlanger Civility in Public Discourse Award, in 2007.
And on a personal note – I had the pleasure of serving with Dick on the Dane County Board from 1982-1987, and there is no one whose intelligence, integrity and decency I respect more. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend, Dick Wagner
Stu Levitan welcomes journalist and author Rob Zaleski, for a conversation about his new book Ed Garvey Unvarnished: Lessons from a Visionary Progressive. Published by our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.
As the subtitle indicates, Ed Garvey was indeed a visionary progressive. With a long and very varied resume of public service. Sixty years ago this week, he became President of the Wisconsin Student Association. In August 1961, President of the National Student Association. UW Law School, a job with a Minneapolis labor law firm. Then from 1971-1983, the job that, for many, would define him, the first executive director of the National Football League Player’s Association. Deputy Attorney General under Bronson La Follette, Democratic nominee for Senate against Bob Kasten in 1986, Democratic nominee for Governor against Tommy Thompson in 1998. Environmental lawyer waging – and winning – lawsuits or political fights against Exxon, Perrier, and an out-of-state factory farm corporation. And finally, the founder and driving force behind Fighting Bob Fest, the unabashedly progressive Chautauqua that brought Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, Jim Hightower and others first to Baraboo then to Madison. Ed Garvey died of Parkinson’s Disease in 2017 at age 76.
Like the Burlington-born Ed Garvey, Rob Zaleski is a Wisconsin native, from the Bay View neighborhood on Milwaukee’s southside. And he probably knew Ed Garvey as long as anybody in Madison today, and longer than most. Because when Ed was the young, brash executive director of the NFLPA in the early seventies, Rob was the young, brash sports editor for the Green Bay Daily News, and the recipient of a number of scoops from Ed. And although we did not know it at the time, Rob and I were actually colleagues then, because I was doing some writing for the paper from Washington. Rob came down to Madison after that as night editor for United Press International, became sports editor of The Capital Times in 1981, had a brief sojourn with the Los Angeles Times before returning the Madison for another 23 years as news columnist and special projects reporter for the Cap Times, in which capacity he amassed more than a dozen writing awards. In addition to freelancing, Rob has also written a novel, Searching for Sal. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend and former colleague, Rob Zaleski.
Stu Levitan welcomes Matthew Levin, who scores a trifecta -- he’s a Ph D from the UW, and the author of “Cold War University – Madison and the New Left in the Sixties” from our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.
As to the topic - in the 1960s, the university of Wisconsin Madison was one of the four or five most important campuses for both antiwar and civil rights activism.
As portrayed on the cover of Cold War University, it was at the UW in May 1966 that hundreds, at times thousands, of students peacefully occupied the administration building for a week, in a popular protest against university compliance with the military draft. It was at the UW Stock Pavilion just five months later that a handful from the Committee to End the War in Vietnam heckled Sen. Edward M. Kennedy so relentlessly that he left that stage. It was at the UW in February 1967 that hundreds of students occupied the offices of the president and chancellor – while they were there. It was at the UW on October 18, 1967, the Battle of Dow, that American police for the first time used tear gas to quell an on-campus antiwar disturbance. And it was at the UW at 3:42 on the morning of August 24, 1970 that the first fatal antiwar bombing took place – the New Year Gang’s attempted destruction of the Army Mathematics Research Center in Sterling Hall, which killed physics graduate student Robert Fassnacht.
In fact, Madison’s importance even predates the sixties. For a time in the early 1950s, the UW was the only campus in the country where the Communist Party’s Youth Labor League was still allowed. It was at the UW in 1959 that a group of graduate students started the journal Studies on the Left, almost three years before the Students for a Democratic Society adopted the Port Huron Statement. And it was Studies on the Left, not the Port Huron Statement, that would successfully define the New Left’s relationship with liberals.
Studies on the Left even had a major impact on race relations, publishing a 1962 essay that inspired Huey P. Newton and others to form the organization that was a forerunner to the Black Panther Party. One of many examples of UW-Madison’s significance in civil rights.
UW students were among the nation’s first in February 1960 to picket local chain stores in support of the lunch counter sit-ins at the southern franchises. In the Summer of 61, UW students joined the Freedom Riders, and some were jailed at Parchman Farm. In early 1964, UW students were part of the sit-in at Sears department store conducted by the Congress of Racial Equality. A few months later, other students participated in Freedom Summer, registering voters in Mississippi and Tennessee – and starting an extraordinary collection of documents now held by the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. In March, 1965, UW students joined the march from Selma to Montgomery. And in February 1969, black students coordinated the university’s most successful political protest of the decade, the strike that led to a full degree-granting Department of Afro-American Studies.
It is quite a history, historic at times, and Matthew Levin lays it out with precision and perspective in Cold War University – Madison and the New Left in the Sixties. The editor of the first book about Madison and the New Left agrees. Paul Buhle, editor of History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin 1950-1970 and the journal Radical America, says Levin has done “a masterful job,” and that he has. I know that when I was researching my book Madison in the Sixties, I relied very heavily on Cold War University for insight, accuracy and really good endnotes.
As to Matthew Levin, he was born and raised in Seattle, came to Madison in 1998 for graduate work in the UW’s nationally renowned History Department. Which obviously worked out well because his doctoral dissertation -- "The Sixties and the Cold War University: Madison, Wisconsin and the Development of the New Left” -- essentially become the first draft of the book. His main gig is teaching history at McFarland High School, where he is also the faculty advisor to the Sign Language Club. He also volunteers at local food pantries and GSAFE, the gay straight alliance for safe schools.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Dr. Matthew Levin.
Stu Levitan welcomes former Madison journalist Bill Christofferson, author of The Man From Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson, himself a former Madisonian, from our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press, still located right here in Madison.
As to Gaylord Nelson – Tom Brokaw calls him “one of the great public servants” of the post-war era. His Senate colleague George McGovern calls him “a magnificent man.” Former VP Al Gore says his story is “an inspiration.” Even Ralph Nader calls him “one of the great can-do senators of his time.” And those are just the folks who wrote endorsement blurbs for this book. Pretty much everybody who worked with him or for him, or covered him, agrees. Conservation, the environment, peace, social justice, consumer protection – pick just about any important issue, and Gaylord Nelson made things better. And he did so with honor and humility and humor
And as to Bill Christofferson – well, he’s a pretty fine fellow, too. He’s a Marine Corps veteran, served 17 months in Vietnam as a combat correspondent … which is why he’s a long-time active member of the Milwaukee chapter of Veterans for Peace.
After Vietnam, he was a reporter and editor at daily newspapers in Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois before coming to Madison in 1973 to cover the legislature and politics for the Wisconsin State Journal. He also became president of the State Journal Union so when the strike came in 1977, he became a reporter and editor of the strike newspaper, the Madison Press Connection. Which is when we went from being competitors to being colleagues, which I much preferred.
After the strike, he spent four years as the director of Nukewatch, educating the public on nuclear weapons and nuclear power and helping to pass a statewide nuclear freeze referendum. He is also a past chair of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, a statewide coalition of 165 organizations working for social justice.
As a political consultant and aide, his clients have included Ed Garvey, Tom Loftus, Senator Herb Kohl, Governor Jim Doyle, Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, and Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist.
It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, my friend and former colleague, Bill Christofferson.
Stu Levitan welcomes a true grandson of Madison, Andrew Maraniss, coming back this Thursday, at least virtually, for a presentation of his new award-winning book GAMES OF DECEPTION, the true story of the first U.S. Olympic basketball team, and the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany. That event is Thursday at 7 through our friends at Mystery to Me. More details at M2Mbooksdot com.
You all know what basketball is, you all know what the Olympics are, you all know who Hitler was. So that part doesn’t need any more introduction.
As to Andrew Maraniss. First of all, he is, as you may have surmised, the son of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author David Maraniss and the pioneering environmentalist Linda Maraniss, born right here in Madison, now a resident of Brentwood, Tenn., with his wife Alison, and their two young children. Follow Andrew on Twitter @trublu24 and visit his website at andrewmaraniss.com.
Second, he’s really good at telling historical and sports stories with a larger social message. GAMES OF DECEPTION has already received the 2020 Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Book Honors for middle grade readers and was named one of Amazon’s Top Books of 2019. His first book, the New York Times-bestseller STRONG INSIDE: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, received the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the 2015 RFK Book Awards, the first sports-related book so honored. The Young Reader edition was named one of the Top 10 Biographies and Top 10 Sports Books of 2017 by the American Library Association and was selected as a Notable Social Studies Book for 2019 by the National Council for the Social Studies.
Andrew is a contributor to ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com. and Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics, where he was formerly the associate director of media relations – a lesson in the value of leaving a job on good terms. He was also the first-ever media relations manager for the Tampa Bay Rays.
It is a pleasure to welcome to MBB my friend Andrew Maraniss.