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Host Francesca Rheannon talks with writer Joan Wickersham about her powerful new memoir, [amazon-product text=”THE SUICIDE INDEX: Putting My Father’s Death in Order” type=”text”]0156033801[/amazon-product]. Also, we talk with Jennet Conant about [amazon-product text=”THE IRREGULARS: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington” type=”text”]0743294599[/amazon-product]. Continue reading
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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 [amazon-product text=”The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter” type=”text”]0767919440[/amazon-product]. 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.
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A best-seller, it came out first in 2001 and was updated and re-issued in 2004. Â Alan Kronzek co-authored the book with his daughter, historian Elizabeth Kronzek.
Kronzek is also the author of [amazon-product text=”FIFTY TWO WAYS TO CHEAT AT POKER: How to Spot Them, Foil Them, and Defend Yourself Against Them” type=”text”]0452289114[/amazon-product] . 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, [amazon-product text=”AND THEY ALL SANG: Adventures of an Eclectic DIsc Jockey” type=”text”]1595581189[/amazon-product].
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Host Francesca Rheannon talks with comix master Art Spiegelman. When Spiegelman’s [amazon-product text=”Maus I: A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History” type=”text”]0394747232[/amazon-product] was published in 1986, (followed by [amazon-product text=”Maus II: A Survivors Tale: And Here My Troubles Began” type=”text”]0679729771[/amazon-product] in 1991), it exploded notions about the limited role of comix as art and literature.
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Winning a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992–the only comic book ever to do so–Maus is a memoir in graphic form of Spiegelman’s father’s experiences in Auschwitz and the impact that had on the artist’s own childhood growing up in New York City. His mother was also a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. In 1968, she committed suicide, soon after Spiegelman himself was released from a mental hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown.
Maus was prefigured in an earlier work, Prisoner on the Hell Planet and in 1978 Spiegelman included that and other works in a collection of his underground comix called [amazon-product text=”Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!” type=”text”]0375423958[/amazon-product]. Innovative and drawn in a variety of styles in large format–the book sank like a stone. But now Spiegelman has “re-birthed it”, as he told me, with a new 20 page introduction and an afterword. We talk to him about BREAKDOWNS and breaking conventions in the comix.
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Also, investigative journalist Greg Palast talks about the new comic book he produced with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., [amazon-product text=”STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE!” type=”text”]061525781X[/amazon-product]. With illustrations by Ted Rall and other artists, the book is about the threat of massive voter suppression in the upcoming election and how to counter it. [Note: the audio to this segment has been removed.]
We talk with Fred Clarkson, co-founder of Talk2Action, about the book he just edited: Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. We also talk with Chip Berlet about the essay he contributed to the book. And contributor and organizer Leo Maley tells us about how the religious Left organized successfully in Massachusetts to support marriage equality for same-sex couples. Continue reading
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Francesca talks with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind about [amazon-product text=”The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism” type=”text”]0061430633[/amazon-product]. Also, Elizabeth Winthrop on [amazon-product text=”COUNTING ON GRACE” type=”text”]0553487833[/amazon-product], the story of an 11-year old girl working in the textile mills of Vermont at the turn of the twentieth century. Continue reading
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Francesca interviews reporter David Cay Johnston about his investigation into how government policy is rigged to enrich the super wealthy. And Francine Prose talks about GOLDENGROVE, her new coming-of-age novel. Continue reading
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Francesca talks with journalist T. J. English about the Mafia’s Cuba experiment, the parallels between the Mob and legal capitalism, and the role Mob activities played in spurring the Cuban Revolution into being. His bestselling book is HAVANA NOCTURNE: How the Mob owned Cuba…and Then Lost It to the Revolution.
Also, Marisa Silver tells us about her haunting novel, THE GOD OF WAR. Set in the arid landscape by the Salton Sea of California, GOD OF WAR is a powerful coming-of-age novel about a boy who confronts the need to balance his responsibility to his family with his emerging sense of self.
[amazon-product align=”right”]1416563172[/amazon-product]“Marisa Silver’s The God of War is a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty. It stays with you like a lesson well and truly learned.” — Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
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Francesca talks first with Stacy Malkan about NOT JUST A PRETTY FACE: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry. She’s communications director of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and admitted former teenage make-up diva.
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[amazon-product align=”right”]1597260843[/amazon-product]Francesca talks with journalist Nancy Nichols connects her wrenching personal story to the larger story of toxic pollution. Nichols grew up in Waukegan, on Lake Michigan. The lake has been massively contaminated by PCB and other toxic chemicals. She survived cancer but her sister did not. Her memoir is LAKE EFFECT: Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy.
EPA Report downplaying Bisphenol A hazards
John Peterson Myers on Bisphenol A link to metabolic disorders in Environmental Health News
We talk with David Lovelace about his memoir, SCATTERSHOT: My Bipolar Family. And Maggie Jackson tells us about DISTRACTED: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Continue reading
The current climate crisis isn’t the first time human beings have faced global climate change. Extreme weather, ice sheets melting into the Arctic ocean, and mega-droughts lasting a century or more: it all happened before, between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries. The global warming of the Middle Ages changed civilization, bringing both great disorder and great opportunity.
The audio for this episode is available upon request for a donation of $4.99 to Writers Voice. Contact writersvoice [at] wmua.org.
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor talks about her memoir, MY STROKE OF INSIGHT: A BRAIN SCIENTIST’S PERSONAL JOURNEY.
The audio for this episode is available upon request for a donation of $4.99 to Writers Voice. Contact writersvoice [at] wmua.org.
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We talk with Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker about her recent article, “The Island in the Wind”. And Ellen Beckerman tells us about her new play, MILK AND HONEY. And finally, a clip from an archived interview with Michael Sanders about FAMILIES OF THE VINE: Seasons Among the Winemakers of Southwest France.
Host Francesca Rheannon talks with two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lewis about his pithy and thought-provoking “biography” of the First Amendment, FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT WE HATE.
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We talk with Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine about his new novel, [amazon-product text=”THE HAKAWATI” type=”text”]0307386279[/amazon-product]. Framed around the story of a family in modern-day Lebanon, the novel weaves fiction, fable and epic into a wonderful tapestry.
And journalist and editor Greg Mitchell tells us about how the press and the punditocracy failed the public on Iraq. His book is [amazon-product text=”SO WRONG FOR SO LONG: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq” type=”text”]1402756577[/amazon-product].
The audio for this episode is available upon request for a donation of $4.99 to Writers Voice. Contact writersvoice [at] wmua.org.