Harvey Sachs

Also, in an archived interview, Mark Lamster tells us about MASTER OF DECEPTION. It’s about Peter Paul Rubens and his secret diplomatic career. We first aired it in March of 2010.

Can you write a whole book for the general public about one piece of music? Yes, if you are writing about Beethoven’s stirring Ninth symphony, which was always about more than the music. As Anthony Tommassini wrote in his New York Times review of Harvey Sachs’ book about the Ninth, “for generations, the symphony, with its choral finale espousing universal brotherhood, has been the work of choice to solemnize a peace treaty, open a new concert hall or foster communal bonding.”

But Beethoven never pegged the piece to any particular political philosophy. Instead, through the music he called upon the listener to attain a higher, more heroic state of being, one free of the prisons of the mind that society and its enforcers tried to impose.

Harvey Sachs first became inspired by the Ninth Symphony when he was a child, growing up in Cleveland, with its great symphony orchestra. When Sachs was twelve years old, he asked for a recording of the Ninth as a birthday present. He was attracted to the power and excitement of the music, but more than that, Beethoven was for the young Sachs, an example of someone who lived as he wanted to. Being true to oneself as an individual was an idea birthed by Romanticism, and Beethoven was present at that birth.

Harvey Sachs is the author of eight previous books, including biographies of Arturo Toscanini and Arthur Rubinstein. He teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

COMING UP SOON:

We talk with Business Week editor Eric Pooley about why the Senate failed to pass climate legislation and thereby failed America’s future.  His terrific, true-crime political thriller is THE CLIMATE WAR.

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Ted Nace

Diane Gilliam Fisher

Poet Diane Gilliam Fisher talks about her book, KETTLE BOTTOM. It’s about the Mine Wars of the 1920’s and the people who fought them. And we talk with Ted Nace about the movement to stop new coal plants from being built. His book is CLIMATE HOPE: On the Front Lines of the Fight Against Coal.

The Massey Energy Company mine disaster in West Virginia is but the latest in a long and bitter history of the exploitation of the people and the land of Appalachia’s coal country. The other side of that story is how the miners fought back to win better wages and working conditions by organizing the UMWU.

Looking at the Upper Big Branch mine, one fact stands out for those who know enough about how important that union history is. The mine was non-union. Far more coal mine fatalities happen in non-union mines than those where the workers are unionized.

Poet Diane Gilliam Fisher’s 2004 book KETTLE BOTTOM uses verse to tell the story of the West Virginia Mine Wars of 1920–21. That’s when the United Mine Workers union went up against the coal operators and their hired thugs. Many people died — mostly miners — and President Harding sent in troops to quell the rebellion. The southern coal fields didn’t win union recognition until 1933.

KETTLE BOTTOM won the 2004 Perigia Press Award, and was listed in the 2005 top ten list for poetry by the American Booksellers Association. In addition to KETTLE BOTTOM, Fisher is also the author of ONE OF EVERYTHING and RECIPE FOR BLACKBERRY CAKE. Writers Voice spoke to her in 2004.

Read Diane Gilliam Fisher’s poem Explosion at Winco No. 9.

Coal is most carbon intense fuel, according to climate scientist James Hansen. With climate chaos happening at a faster pace than even the most pessimistic scientists predicted, many are saying we should just leave the coal in the hole.

Ted Nace is one of them. His new book, CLIMATE HOPE: On the Front Lines of the Fight Against Coal, tells the remarkable story of the movement to stop the building of any new coal power plants in the US. In just 2 years, between 2007 and 2009, it managed to stop plans nearly a hundred coal plants from being built, out of 151 proposed. The loosely organized grass roots movement brought a burgeoning coal boom largely to a halt.

Ted Nace is the founder of CoalSwarm, a web based wiki that currently has over 2,000 articles and has become an online hub for the anti coal movement.

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Howard Zinn

The great “people’s historian” Howard Zinn died January 27, 2010 at the age of 87. His book, A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, presented an alternative view to the one most are taught in school: instead of focusing on presidents and tycoons, it told the story of people’s movements, including those of workers, civil rights and antiwar activists, women and gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

Zinn spoke to Writers Voice host Francesca Rheannon in 2005 about his companion volume to A PEOPLE’S HISTORY, . It’s a collection of writings from the great protagonists of social justice: Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Sacco and Vanzetti, and Malcolm X, among many others. Zinn talks about hi perspective on history, war and peace, and the two sides of the American story — idealism and exploitation.

Go to Howard Zinn page on Amazon.com.

In this video Zinn discusses his experiences fighting during World War II and his being asked to bomb a small town in France.

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Thad Carhart

We hear excerpts from a dramatic reading of Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Enchanted Circle Theater actors. It’s about a young black man in Jim Crow Louisiana who is condemned to death. And we interview Thad Carhart about his new historical novel, ACROSS THE ENDLESS RIVER. It’s about Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea who was a guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition and who lived both in the United States and Europe.

A Dramatic Reading

One in seven people sentenced to die are later proven innocent, according to studies cited by the ACLU. This terrible injustice is one of the themes of Ernest J. Gaines powerful novel, . Another is the dignity of all human beings, no matter what their situation is. Gaines, who is probably best known as the author of DRIVING MISS DAISY, explores these themes through the story of Jefferson, a young black man who is sentenced to death for his role in a botched robbery, even though he is not the killer. The action takes place in rural Louisiana during the 1950’s, when Jim Crow was still alive and well.

Published in 1997–and an Oprah favorite–”A Lesson Before Dying” was chosen as this year’s selection for One Book Holyoke, a community project based on the idea of the Big Read, a program by the National Endowment for the Arts to encourage reading. When I interviewed the founder of the Big Read, Dana Gioia, back in 2005, he asked me why there were no Big Read programs in Massachusetts. There are some now, and One Book Holyoke has gotten support from the Big Read. The idea is simple, Holyoke residents read a selected book during a set period of time. They then get together for a variety of activities planned around the book.

[sniplet amazon bookstore widget]

One activity was a dramatic reading by the Holyoke based company, Enchanted Circle Theater. They compressed the action of the book into a dramatic script of about an hour and a half. Writers Voice went to a reading at Holyoke City Hall for an audience of local high school students.

You can listen to the entire reading on the Web Extra, but we air excerpts on the show.

The actors are Gilbert McCauley as Jefferson, James Lightfoot as Grant Wiggins, L’Kuicha Parks as Jefferson’s godmother Miss Emma, and James Emery in the roles of the book’s white characters, the defense lawyer and Mr. Henri Pichot.

You can get the Oprah Book Club edition of the audio book on Audible.com

The son of Sacagawea

Thad Carhart’s first book was the memoir, , in which he chronicled finding a piano shop tucked away on a little street that helped him rediscover his love of playing the piano. An American citizen with an Irish passport who lives in Paris, Carhart is an expatriate like the protagonist of his new book, . It’s an historical novel about the fascinating life of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.

“you had this extraordinary story of survival and determination and…by anybody’s lights and in anybody’s culture that’s a remarkable life’s beginning.”

Charbonneau was the son of the Indian Sacagawea and a French Canadian voyageur. He was born while his parents were accompanying the explorers Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition of 1804 to 1806, was adopted by William Clark after his mother died, and lived for years in Europe as the assistant of Duke Friedrich Paul Wilhelm von Württemberg before returning to his native land.

Read an Excerpt from ACROSS THE ENDLESS RIVER

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Max Page

Patrick Radden Keefe

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with architectural historian Max Page about . And journalist Patrick Radden Keefe tells us the story of China’s outmigration to New York in the 1980′s and the “snakeheads” who facilitated and exploited it. His book is .

This week marks the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But before Al Qaeda’s jets crashed into the twin towers in the real world, millions of players of the software game Flight Simulator had crashed their fantasy jets into the same towers for years. Before that, King Kong threatened the Empire State Building. New York has been destroyed by flood, a sudden ice age, aliens from other planets, anarchists and immigrants and nuclear war — all in the imagination of American writers, filmmakers, and artists. What is it about the New York that excites such fantasies of destruction? That’s what Max Page explores in his gorgeously illustrated book THE CITY’S END: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.

Page says, “each era has found it useful to destroy New York in its own particular way.” He links fantasies of “the City’s end” to fears about immigration, modernity, and technology, as well as love for and homage to New York.

Max Page teaches history and architecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

LINKS

• NYT review
• Alexis Rockman, Manifest Destiny
• Download Caesar’s Column at Project Gutenberg
• The Day After Tomorrow trailer

The US is a country of immigrants, yet ever since the 9/11 attacks, life has become increasingly precarious for them, especially if they came here illegally: thrown into jail, summarily deported, sometimes denied due process of law. But such harsh policies didn’t begin with 9/11. They began under the Clinton Administration, with the shipwreck on the shores of New York of the Golden Venture. The ship was carrying Chinese migrants from Fujian Province. Ten of the migrants died during their six month journey to America.

The wave of immigration from Fujian was facilitated by the so-called “snakeheads” of Chinatown. They smuggled people into New York in return for a hefty fee of thousands. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe uncovers their story in his book, THE SNAKEHEAD: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.

In addition to THE SNAKEHEAD, he’s also author of .

LINKS

• Article on Golden Venture
• Governor Gary Locke’s Inaugural Address January 15, 1997

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Marshall Jon Fisher

Gwyneth Lewis

Guest host Christian McEwen talks with Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis and Francesca Rheannon talks with Marshall Jon Fisher about one of the greatest tennis matches ever played: the 1937 Davis Cup final at Wimbledon. His book is A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played. The movement to preserve Welsh culture and language in Britain has been a bitterly contested one by the British government. (The week this show was produced, Welsh folksinger Arfon Gwilym was denied a visa to enter the USA to represent Wales at the Smithsonian Institute’s Folk Life festival in Washington, D.C. because he has a “criminal record”: he was jailed three times years ago by the British government for his campaigns on behalf of the Welsh Language, including demanding bilingual road signs and the creation of a Welsh television channel.)

Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis has been part of that movement. Appointed Wales’s first National Poet from 2005, Lewis writes in both English and Welsh. She’s published six books of poetry in Welsh and English, three libretti for Welsh National Opera, as well as a memoir about her battle with depression, .

WV guest host Christian McEwen spoke with Lewis in February 2009, when she came to read at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. This interview is part of an ongoing series she’s producing with the Poetry Center at Smith and Writers Voice. It’s called Sparks from the Anvil.

This week, the Wimbledon tennis championships are happening. As of today, the news is that Rafael Nadal has withdrawn from the games. That means no  rematch of last year’s epic Wimbledon final with Roger Federer, which some have called the greatest tennis match ever played. My guest, Marshall Jon Fisher, disagrees. His book, tells the fascinating story of an earlier match, which he thinks deserves the title of the greatest–one that took place as the world was tilting toward the cliff edge of World War II. It was the 1937 Davis Cup match between Don Budge, playing for the Americans, and Baron Gottfried von Cramm on the German team. Fisher takes the reader on a gripping play by play of the match. But he also places it within the context of the geopolitics and sexual mores of that time.

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David S. Reynolds

We talk with cultural historian David S. Reynolds about his new book, WAKING GIANT: America in the Age of Jackson. And poet Wally Swist reads from his forthcoming collection, MOUNT TOBY POEMS.

When Andrew Jackson became president of the United States, the country was in upheaval. He presided over an America transitioning from a more egalitarian society based on the small (albeit white) yeoman farmer to one dominated by the capitalist market with its booms and busts and increasing concentrations of wealth. The country had just experienced its first bank panic, evangelical fervor was sweeping the land, and the frontier was exploding, as new canals opened the market for goods both domestic and foreign.

Jackson ran on a populist, pro-democracy platform. But once in office, he redefined the presidency–making the executive branch more powerful than ever before. (His opponents went so far as to call him King Andrew.) But he expanded the powers of the presidency in order to trim back the power of Wall Street and the banks.

Historian David S. Reynolds has written several previous books about America in the nineteenth century, including and John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. He tells us about his latest book, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and draws parallels to today. He says President Obama, with his populist platform, is a “neo-Jacksonian”.

Wally Swist

Mount Toby, Sunderland, MA

Poet Wally Swist makes the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts his home. Well known for his fine poems about nature, Swist finds much material for his work in the hills and fields of the region.  He is one of America’s finest practitioners of the Japanese poetry form, haiku, receiving the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award and two Museum of Haiku Literature awards.  But in recent years, Swist has moved to longer form verse. It allows him to explore his unique sensibility about place–and our place as human beings in nature.

His forthcoming poetry collection, “Mount Toby Poems,” is inspired by one of the Valley’s most distinctive landmarks. It will be published in February 2009 by Timberline Press.

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Richard Michelson

Beverly Swerling

We talk to novelist Beverly Swerling about the latest in her historical series about Old New York, City of God: A Novel of Passion and Wonder in Old New York. Also, children’s book author Richard Michelson, tells us about his latest, AS GOOD AS ANYBODY: Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom.

Beverly Swerling

New York was pro-slavery, but it also was seething with abolitionist fervor, promoted by the growing evangelical movement. But while the evangelicals condemned slavery, they promoted religious bigotry against Catholics and Jews. Swerling throws the reader into this cauldron of social change while telling a gripping story of love and betrayal, following two families, the Turners and the Devreys.

Read an excerpt from CITY OF GOD. And watch a great trailer.

Richard Michelson

Monday Jan 19 is Matin Luther King, Jr. day—and the day after, January 20, will see the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the US. I wish King could have seen this day. But I also know that King would have wanted us to keep Obama’s feet to the fire on his promise to get out of Iraq—and I doubt he would have approved the war in Afghanistan that Obama has pledged to expand. King was opposed to violence and injustice on religious principle, as well as humanitarian grounds.

He was joined in this by his friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel—an opponent of the Vietnam War, along with King.  As children, the two men both were victims of hate –one here, the other in Europe. As grown ups they came together at the March on Selma to defeat hate and promote love between all people.

Richard Michelson has written many children’s books—and several have been on the theme of friendship between Jews and African Americans. Earlier on WV, we talked to him about Across the Alley, his book about the friendship between two boys in Brooklyn, one Jewish, the other black. His latest on that theme is .

Read an article from Peaceworks Magazine about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Heschel.

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Fisher is also the author of Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in    High Culture, 1865-1920. He teaches American literature at Wellesley College.

And Francesca talks with some young people from Holyoke’s inner city about their new found love of Shakespeare. They took part in a summer collaboration between the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, the Enchanted Circle Theater and the Holyoke public schools* that put on a production of Romeo and Juliet with the young actors from Holyoke. We also hear from instructors Aaron Brandes of the Enchanted Circle Theater and Tim Zajac of the Center for Renaissance Studies.

The program was funded by the University of Massachusetts College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts.

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Brian Wansink

Peter Filkins

Award-winning translator Peter Filkins talks about THE JOURNEY, a lost masterpiece of Holocaust literature by acclaimed author and survivor H. G. Adler which Filkins translated. Food psychologist Brian Wansink gives us tips on how to keep the pounds off during the Holiday season; and Native American storyteller Marge Bruchac tells us what really happened during the first Thanksgiving.

We talk with translator Peter Filkins about . A survivor of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, Adler moved to London after World War II and began writing fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history–most of it centered around his experience of the Holocaust. His book about day-to-day life in Theresienstadt was one of the first such survivor accounts to emerge from the war.

But his fiction remained largely unknown, especially outside the German speaking world. Now, Peter Filkins has brought one of his greatest novels, the journey, to English readers. It’s the first-ever English translation of what is being called a lost masterpiece of Holocaust literature.

In addition to translating THE JOURNEY, Peter Filkins has translated the writings of Ingeborg Bachmann, for which he won an award. He’s also a poet. His work has appeared in, among others, the New Republic, the American Poetry Review, the Massachusetts Review, and the New York Times.

Also, food psychologist Brian Wansink gives us tips on how to keep the pounds off during the Holiday season in this excerpt from a 2009 WV interview. His book is . You can find Wansink’s YouTube channel here.

And finally, Native American storyteller Marge Bruchac tells us what really happened during the first Thanksgiving. She also recounts an Indian tale of how humans were given the gift of corn. She’s the co-author of and author of .

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Jennet Conant

Joan Wickersham

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with writer Joan Wickersham about her powerful new memoir, . Also, we talk with Jennet Conant about .

Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham’s father got up one morning from the bed he shared with his wife, walked into his study, and shot himself. He left no note. Why did he do it? How could he, a loving father and husband, subject his family to the anguish of dealing with losing him in such a violent manner? These unanswerable questions fueled Wickersham’s search to reconcile her the father she knew with the man who killed himself. As she writes in her powerful new memoir, THE SUICIDE INDEX, “When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You’re saying “I’m gone and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.”

Wickersham puts her father’s death in order through an ingenious narrative construction. Under headings about suicide like “anger about”, “other people’s stories about”, “possible ways to talk to a child about”, Wickersham explores all the facets of coming to terms with her father’s suicide.THE SUICIDE INDEX is  a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. You can read an excerpt here. And scroll down for the extended interview with Joan Wickersham.

Roald Dahl is best known as a wildly successful writer of children’s books, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. But before he wrote books for kids, he was a British spy in Washington DC during the Second World War. Dashing and handsome, he used his charm to invade the upper reaches of the U.S. government and Georgetown society. There he won friends and influenced politicians to back the British war effort–and sabotaged those who were less enthusiastic about the war. And Dahl cut his budding literary teeth on writing colorful propaganda pieces– published in leading American popular magazines — that helped to gain public support for the war.

Jennet Conant is the author of the 2002 New York Times bestseller Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. Now she continues her fascination with the lesser known corners of America’s involvement in that war with her new book, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington.

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Studs Terkel

It’s Halloween, time to take a break, if you can, from obsessively checking the latest presidential poll results, and have some fun. Today, we train our literary focus on hocus-pocus by exploring the magic of the Harry Potter series with magician Allan Kronzek.  He wrote . The most popular lexicon of the lore that underlies the Harry Potter series, THE SORCERER’S COMPANION will tell you where to find a basilisk today, how to get rid of a goblin, or who wore the first invisibility cloak, among much other useful and arcane information.

A best-seller, it came out first in 2001 and was updated and re-issued in 2004.  Alan Kronzek co-authored the book with his daughter, historian Elizabeth Kronzek.

Kronzek is also the author of . Stay tuned to this site to hear Kronzek talk about poker with Francesca.

Also, we remember the great Studs Terkel, who died October 31, 2008 at the age of 96. We air an excerpt from an interview we did with him in 2006 about his last book, .

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Elizabeth Winthrop

Ron Suskind

Francesca talks with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind about . Also, Elizabeth Winthrop on , the story of an 11-year old girl working in the textile mills of Vermont at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ron Suskind‘s THE WAY OF THE WORLD is chock-full of shocking revelations about US policy on war and terrorism under the Bush Administration.

Read an excerpt from WAY OF THE WORLD about Usman Khosa.

But the book is about much more than revelations. It’s about finding “the human solution” to the grave crises we face in this world.

Elizabeth Winthrop paints a vivid portrait of the plight of child laborers in the New England textile mills in the early 1900′s. She bases her main character, Grace, on the photograph by Lewis Hine of a young girl posed in front of her machine. While writing the book, Winthrop went in search of the real person behind the photo and found out the remarkable story of Addie Card.

To hear about Winthrop’s discovery of Addie Card, listen to the Web exclusive extended interview.

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Paul Auster says that “writing is no longer a matter of free will for him–it’s a matter of survival”. His new novel MAN IN THE DARK deals with issues of survival in a post 9/11 America — the survival of hope, of connection with others, of choice in the face of evil And, finally, of the stories that knit families together. Auster is the author of numerous novels, screenplays, and works of non-fiction, including Travels in the Scriptorium, The Invention of Solitude, and The Brooklyn Follies. He’s also a poet, translator and film director.

Jennifer Haigh likes to write about families. In her new novel, THE CONDITION, she turns her attention to a family from the Boston area. The parents, Paulette and Frank, are divorced. Although their marriage had multiple strains, it came apart over the diagnosis of their daughter Gwen with a rare genetic condition called Turner’s Syndrome when she was 12 years old. Now their three children are grown and all five members of the family live in isolation from each other. But they are connected by the powerful undercurrents of the emotional bonds they carry. Haigh’s previous novels are Mrs. Kimble and Baker Towers.

Last year, we spoke with energy security expert Michael Klare about his book RISING POWERS, SHRINKING PLANET, THE NEW GEOPOLITICS OF ENERGY. When he told WV at that time that the next resource war could be between US-backed Georgia and Russia, it sent a chill down my spine. We hear and excerpt from that May 2007 interview.

Tune in to Writer’s Voice with Francesca Rheannon on Fridays at 5:00 PM on WMUA 91.1 FM
on NPR Talk Radio 640 AM WNNZ on Sundays at 3:00 PM
and on Valley Free Radio 103.3 FM Thursdays at 8:00 AM.
Can’t listen then? Subscribe to our podcast or listen online at our website.

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Read excerpts from THE GREAT WARMING.

Some recent polls suggest that in a time of high oil prices, people are losing interest in climate change. They want the price at the pump to come down. Rather than investing in clean energy like solar or wind, they want more drilling for more oil. And the assumption that we can’t afford to make the transition to renewable fuels is rife.
Rheannon’s second guest, George Monbiot, says that’s a false assumption. Earlier this month, he wrote on his blog Monbiot.com there is no cheap alternative to a green economy. And the famous 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change said that while going green will cost an estimated 1% of the world’s GDP, not doing so would cost as much as 20% of GDP.
Monbiot’s book HEAT, HOW TO STOP THE PLANET FROM BURNING is an essential guide to clear thinking about the climate crisis and solutions. In this abridged version of our interview last year, Monbiot talks about the kind of economic sticks and carrots that could end up not only saving us all a lot of money, but the planet, as well. I was joined on the interview by Bill Baue. He’s my colleague on Corporate Watchdog Radio, a weekly radio show and podcast about corporations, sustainability and human rights.

Read the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change

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Also, urban geographer Rutherford Platt tells us about how to make cities that are sustainable and a pleasure to live in. Editor of the THE HUMANE METROPOLIS, he’s the founder of the Ecological Cities
Project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Donald Kroodsma

Eric Weitz

We talk with historian Eric Weitz about . On the one side, there was Bauhaus, Expressionism, Magnus Hirschfeld and new freedom for gays and women, a vital and experimental theater–in short, an explosion of intellectual and artistic creativity. On the other: hyperinflation, economic depression, and bullies of the left and right rampaging in the streets, setting the stage for the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

We explore both sides of Weimar Germany and what lessons it may hold for us today.

Also, a preview of Spring…we listen to robins and other birds with renowned bird biologist Donald Kroodsma, author of .

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Also, when we think of slavery in the U.S., most of us think about the South. But as Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank demonstrate in COMPLICITY, the North promoted and profited from that “peculiar institution”. All journalists with the Hartford Courant Farrow, Frank and Lang drew from from long-ignored documents to create a fascinating and sobering work that uncovers this lesser-known aspect of the history of American slavery.

And we hear an excerpt from a longer archived interview with writer Patricia Klindienst, author of THE EARTH KNOWS MY NAME: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America. She tells us about about the traditional gardens brought by African slaves whose descendants became the Gullah people of the South Carolina Sea Islands.

Finally, award-winning poet Lynn Thompson reads “Grenadine”, a poem about her West Indian ancestors from BEG NO PARDON.

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