Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchInna Faliks, "Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage" (Backbeat Books, 2023)
Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic …
10 months, 2 weeks ago
W. Henry Sledge, "The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed" (Knox Press, 2025)
Episode 291
Because events like D-Day and the Battle of Okinawa took place an entire lifetime ago, it is rare to find any new accounts and memories from veterans…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Raffale Bedarida, "Corrado Cagli: Transatlantic Bridges (1938-1947" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)
Episode 670
As a Jewish and openly gay artist, Cagli became the target of virulent attacks, especially after Italy promulgated its racial laws in 1938. In respon…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)
The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity.
Two material artifacts defined the middle-class America…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Episode 287
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s blood…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Alan M. Wald, "Bohemian Bolsheviks: Dispatches from the Culture and History of the Left" (Brill, 2025)
Episode 546
For several decades now, Alan Wald has been thoroughly documenting the history of the literature and cultural output of the American left. While his …
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Episode 10
Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into …
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives
Episode 282
Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives.…
10 months, 3 weeks ago
Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025)
Episode 66
Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her E…
10 months, 3 weeks ago
Robert Morstein-Marx, "Julius Caesar and the Roman People" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Episode 5
Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against …
10 months, 3 weeks ago