Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchIan Gittins, "The Cure: A Perfect Dream" (Gemini Books, 2025)
The story of The Cure: a tall tale of a truly unique British band.
The Cure's story is a fantastical pop fable, but their trajectory has not been one…
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Karen Bermann, "The Art of Being a Stranger: A Family Memoir" (New Jewish Press, 2025)
Karen Bermann grew up in the mad orbit of her father, Fritz, the rebellious child of a Viennese Orthodox Jewish family who fled Europe alone as an ad…
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Elizabeth A. DeWolfe, "Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)
Jane Armstrong Tucker was a Boston stenographer scrabbling to get by as a single woman in the Gilded Age, until she was offered a once-in-a-lifetime …
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Nicholas Boggs, "Baldwin: A Love Story" (FSG, 2025)
Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG, 2025) the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relations…
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Marc Mierowsky, "A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence" (Yale UP, 2026)
In 1706, Edinburgh was on the brink of a popular uprising. Men and women took to the streets to protest the planned union with England, fearing the e…
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Matti Friedman, "Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)
Episode 162
In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the G…
7 months ago
Chris Washburn and Ron Chepesiuk, "Out of Bounds: From Broken NBA Dreams to Redemption" (WildBlue Press, 2025)
Highly promising basketball player Chris Washburn was selected third overall in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Golden State Warriors. But a chance encount…
7 months ago
Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Episode 169
In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski was a household name not just in Poland, but across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as well. Yet this complex and …
7 months ago
Garrett Felber, "A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre" (AK Press, 2025)
The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.
A Co…
7 months ago
164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)
Episode 164
When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And ye…
7 months ago