Category Archives: Podcast

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Howard Mansfield, DWELLING IN POSSIBILITY & Rebecca Stefoff, A DIFFERENT MIRROR FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

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Howard Mansfield

Rebecca Stefoff

Howard Mansfield talks about his profound and delightful book, Dwelling In Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter. And as we become a country of minorities — including whites — we need to change our outmoded narrative about America. Rebecca Stefoff discusses her adaptation of Ronald Takaki’s classic study of the multicultural history of America into a book for middle and highschool readers. It’s called A Different Mirror For Young People.

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Kalyanee Mam, A RIVER CHANGES COURSE & Rowen Jacobsen, AMERICAN TERROIR

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Kalyanee_4429.r — Kalyanee Mam

Rowan Jacobsen

Filmmaker Kalyanee Mam talks about her powerful, award-winning film, A RIVER CHANGES COURSE. And Rowan Jacobsen discusses his book, AMERICAN TERROR (encore).

REQUEST OR FIND A SCREENING OF A RIVER CHANGES COURSE

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Mark Binelli, DETROIT CITY IS THE PLACE TO BE

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Mark Binelli

Mark Binelli talks about his book, Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis. It goes beyond the narrative of apocalypse to explore the resilience of Detroit’s residents as BinelliÂ “tracks both the blight and the signs of its repurposing.”

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Jim Douglass, JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE (encore)

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James W. Douglass

Christian theologian and peace activistÂ James W. DouglassÂ tells us why he thinks JFK was assassinated. He says it was because Kennedy went up against the military-industrial complex and the national security state. His carefully researched book is JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE. On the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s assassination, we re-air this interview from 2009.

“This is the story…of a person who turned against a way that was destructive toward a way that is peaceful and just — and from that point on he and his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, begin to work together and that’s the beginning of the end of John Kennedy.” –James W. Douglass

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Jason Mott, THE RETURNED & Christian Parenti (encore), TROPIC OF CHAOS

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Jason Mott

Christian Parenti

Jason Mott talks about his terrific debut novel, The Returned. It’s about what happens when loved ones who have died return to their families unscathed.

And world leaders are once again discussing climate change, this time at the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland. Meanwhile, the Phillipines is struggling to recover from supertyphoon Haiyan. We put climate change and conflict into context with Christian Parenti. We re-air our 2011 interview with Parenti about his book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.

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David Bollier on The Commons: GREEN GOVERNANCE & VIRAL SPIRAL

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David Bollier

Journalist and activist David Bollier talks about his most recent book, co-written with legal scholar Burns Weston, GREEN GOVERNANCE: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons. Then we re-air our 2010 interview with him about the digital commons, VIRAL SPIRAL.

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Kevin Baker, THE BIG CROWD; Steve Volk, FRINGEOLOGY (encore); & CAT SENSE reviewed

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Kevin Baker

Steve Volk

Kevin Baker talks about talks about his newest novel, THE BIG CROWD. It’s the first of a new trilogy about New York, City of Gold; we hear a true ghost story from Steve Volk, author of FRINGEOLOGY; and Francesca reviews John Bradshaw’s, CAT SENSE.

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Russell Banks, A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY & George Saunders (encore), TENTH OF DECEMBER

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Russell Banks

George Saunders

Novelist and short story writer Russell Banks talks about his new collection of stories, A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY. And George Saunders just received the National Book Award for his story collection, TENTH OF DECEMBER. We re-play Writers Voice associate producer Drew Adamek’s February 2013 interview with Saunders in the second half of the show.

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Rebecca Solnit, THE FARAWAY NEARBY & Martine Bellen, THE WABAC MACHINE

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Rebecca Solnit

Martine Bellen

Rebecca Solnit talks about her latest book, THE FARAWAY NEARBY (Viking, 2013.) It weaves memoir, history and natural science into a contemplation of the stories that define, comfort, and entrap and free us. And Martine Bellen reads from and tells us about her new poetry collection, THE WABAC MACHINE (Furniture Press Books, 2013.)

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Carla Kaplan: Miss Ann in Harlem & Rilla Askew, KIND OF KIN

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Carla Kaplan

Rilla Askew

Cultural scholar Carla Kaplan talks about her acclaimed new book, Miss Ann in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance. It explores the lives, contributions and contradictions of white women who supported the African American cultural ferment of the 1920s. And we re-air a clip from our interview with Rilla Askew about the impact of anti-immigration laws on families and communities. Her novel is Kind of Kin.

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Emily Brady, HUMBOLDT & Susan Stinson, SPIDER IN A TREE

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Emily Brady - credit: Caroline Bennet — Emily Brady – credit: Caroline Bennet

Susan Stinson

Emily Brady talks about her book, HUMBOLDT: Life on America’s Marijuana FrontierÂ (Grand Central Publishing, 2013). And Susan Stinson discusses her just published novel, SPIDER IN A TREEÂ (Small Beer Press, 2013), in a new interview with Drew Adamek. It’s about the brilliant, 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards.

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The River Runs Through Us, Episode Six: Russell Powell, A Sense of Place & Series Highlights

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Russell Powell (photo by Bar Lois Weeks) — Russell Powell
(photo by Bar Lois Weeks)

Thomas_Cole,_The_Oxbow — Thomas Cole — “The Oxbow”

Writer, artist and historian Russell Steven Powell talks with Drew Adamek about the intersection of the natural world and our place within it, as it relates to the Connecticut River, the metaphorical spine that flows through our region. And in this, our last episode in our special series The River Runs Through Us, we also air highlights from previous episodes in the series.

Our thanks to Mass Humanities for their support for this series.

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Richard Heinberg, SNAKE OIL & Bill McKibben, OIL AND HONEY

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Bill McKibben

Richard Heinberg

When it comes to fracked fossil fuels, are we being sold a bunch of snake oil? Energy analyst Richard Heinberg talks about his riveting new book, SNAKE OIL: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future. And journalist Bill McKibben helped spark the global mass movement to save the climate. McKibben tells the story of how that movement developed — and a parallel story of his neighbor in rural Vermont who just happens to be a foremost beekeeper. McKibben’s latest book is OIL AND HONEY: The Education of An Unlikely Activist.

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Ivy Pochoda, VISITATION STREET & Sandra Boynton, FROG TROUBLE

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Ivy Pochoda

Sandra Boynton

Novelist Ivy Pochoda talks about her new work of fiction, VISITATION STREET. And children’s book Sandra Boynton discusses her new book and CD set of country music songs, sung by some of country music’s greatest. It’s called FROG TROUBLE.

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Veronica Gonzalez PeÁ±a, THE SAD PASSIONS & Carl Safina, GYRE

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Veronica Gonzalez PeÁ±a

Carl Safina

Veronica Gonzalez PeÁ±a talks about her new novel, THE SAD PASSIONS ; it’s about a family of four daughters and a mother dealing with mental illness, set in Mexico in the 1960s. And ecologist Carl Safina talks about the new National Geographic film he narrates: GYRE: Creating Art From a Plastic Ocean.

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