Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchChristina Rice, "Mean...Moody...Magnificent!: Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend" (UP of Kentucky, 2021)
Episode 158
By the early 1950s, Jane Russell (1921–2011) should have been forgotten. Her career was launched on what is arguably the most notorious advertising c…
3 years, 3 months ago
Andrea Friederici Ross, "Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick" (Southern Illinois UP, 2020)
Episode 51
Young Edith and her siblings had access to the best educators in the world, but the girls were not taught how to handle the family money; that respon…
3 years, 3 months ago
Kieron Pim, "Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth" (Granta Books, 2022)
Episode 213
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta Books, 2022) travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Aus…
3 years, 3 months ago
Jacob Norris, "The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub: Or, How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerka" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Episode 212
This is the fantastical, yet real, story of the merchants of Bethlehem, the young men who traveled to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth cen…
3 years, 3 months ago
Rose Marshack, "Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
Episode 153
In Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Poster Children bassist Rose Marshack details her life in the 80…
3 years, 3 months ago
From China's Lost Generation to American Private Equity Professor
Episode 133
Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, Be…
3 years, 3 months ago
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile" (Duke UP, 2009)
Episode 210
Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-d…
3 years, 3 months ago
Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman
Episode 129
What Is to Be Done?
In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this questio…
3 years, 3 months ago
Sherine Tadros, "Taking Sides: A Memoir about Love, War, and Changing the World" (Scribe, 2023)
Episode 46
Taking Sides: A Memoir about Love, War, and Changing the World (Scribe, 2023) is a personal memoir by Sherine Tadros, the United Nations Representati…
3 years, 3 months ago
R. J. M. Blackett, "Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle" (Yale UP, 2023)
Episode 369
Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for …
3 years, 3 months ago