For more than 20 years, author Chris Bohjalian carried the seed of a Civil War story in his imagination. It was inspired by the true story of a Southern woman who nursed a Union soldier back to health after he was injured on the battlefield.

But the idea didn’t grow roots until the racial uprisings after the murder of George Floyd, when Confederate statues came tumbling down.

“Years ago, Tony Horowitz wrote a remarkable book called ‘Confederates in the Attic,’ wondering why so much of the South was still fighting the Civil War,” Bohjalian tells host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “Horowitz journeyed through the (region) to understand why the Lost Cause still existed in the minds of so many Southerners. I thought about that book a lot in 2020, as the statues came down on Monument Avenue in Richmond. That’s when it really clicked in my mind.”

Bohjalian and Miller also talk about the delicate dance of writing historical fiction — when facts must be accurate but the story enticing — and how the current day echoes our nation’s past.

Guest:

• Chris Bohjalian is the author of many books including “The Flight Attendant,” which was turned into a streaming series. His 25th novel is “The Jackal’s Mistress.”

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When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums?

That distressing question provoked her first novel, “All the Water in the World.” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at the American Natural History Museum have taken up residence on the museum’s roof, forming a new sort of family and thinking about how to preserve the artifacts still in their power.

“Museums are … the repositories of our collective understandings, evidence of discoveries, warehouses of materials that will fuel discoveries in the future,” writes Caffall. “They hold the past in trust for the future.”

This week, Caffall joins host Kerri Miller to talk about the hope she wants to see in dystopian fiction.

“The narratives we have in the popular culture about what disasters do to people are mostly incorrect,” she says. “There isn’t usually vast looting or mass violence. There’s usually a coming together of people trying to remake community, trying to support each other, trying to think about what happens in the aftermath.”

“To me, that’s a more interesting, more important, maybe more feminine story about what it takes to rebuild.”

Guest:

• Eiren Caffall is a musician, writer and researcher. Her first novel is “All the Water in the World.”

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Lauren Francis-Sharma was a young law student interning in Johannesburg in 1996 when she was given the opportunity to observe portions of the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings, which were set up to expose the horrors of apartheid in South Africa.

Listening to testimony of atrocities and knowing that these public confessions came with exoneration changed her. She filled legal pad after legal pad with stories and kept them for decades.

“I think it’s brilliant, in some respects — how a country moves forward from such an atrocious history. What can we do to heal a nation?” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “But I was left asking myself: Is this enough? Do people feel satisfied by truth alone?”

And in fact, that’s the question at the center of Francis-Sharma’s taut new thriller, “Casualties of Truth.” Shifting between South Africa in the late 1990s and Washington, D.C., in 2018, the novel tells the story of Prudence Wright who is forced to confront a violent past she has tried to ignore. But violence begats violence, and trauma begats trauma. How can one truly atone?

Guest:

• Lauren Francis-Sharma is the author of “‘Til the Well Runs Dry” and “Book of the Little Axe,” as well as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and a recovering corporate attorney. Her new thriller is “Casualties of Truth.”

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When historian Martha Jones began excavating the history of her own family, she found a remarkable story of what she calls the trouble with color.

But that might not mean what you think.

“In this book, the term trouble has two meanings,” Jones tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. ”I open the book with the lyrics of a spiritual, ‘Wade in the Water.’ You know, ‘God’s gonna trouble the water.’ And that comes from the book of John. In the book of John, we learn that when God troubles the water and we step into it, we are healed. This is the way forward for us. I think in some ways, trouble is precisely what we need.”

Her new book, “The Trouble of Color” tells the honest story of her own family — filled with pain but also joy and resilience. Because, as Jones says, she believes we all have the capacity to sit with hard stories and be healed.

Guest:

• Martha S. Jones is a historian and writer with numerous titles to her name. Her latest book is “The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir.”

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Why do some people view winter as a magical season when others see it as something to dread?

The secret is in the mindset, according to health psychologist Kari Leibowitz. She spent a year doing research in Tromsø, Norway studying how the people who live above the Arctic Circle celebrate deepest winter. What she discovered is that it goes beyond hygge. It depends on where your brain settles its focus.

“Winter is many things. It’s paradoxical,” says Leibowitz. “Yes, it’s cold and dark, and it can be gloomy and depressing. But it can also be beautiful and quiet and cozy and magical. The mindset we have about winter helps us make sense of this paradox. Is winter wonderful or dreadful? Is the season a limiting time of year, or is it full of opportunity? Research shows us mindsets matter most in these ambiguous situations.”

Leibowitz joins Kerri Miller this week on Big Books and Bold Ideas to explore how shifting your mindset about winter can be a useful life skill. She also tackles the question about who has the worst winter, and how the debate over Daylight Saving Time should be settled.

Guest:

• Kari Leibowitz is an health psychologist, speaker and writer. Her debut book is “How to Winter.”

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Grief didn’t come easily to novelist Geraldine Brooks.

When her husband, journalist and author Tony Horowitz, died of a cardiac event on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, she was stunned. He was only 60. What happened?

But she didn’t have time to mourn, seeing as her boys needed support, her books needed writing, the world needed answers.

As she describes in her new book, “Memorial Days,” it took her three years to recognize she was operating on autopilot, disassociated from her life and her body due to unrealized grief. So she traveled home to Australia and forced herself into solitude to relive the worst days of her life and finally give her grief sway.

This week, Brooks joined host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about what happened next.

Guest:

• Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author. Her new memoir is “Memorial Days.”

Audio book excerpts courtesy Penguin Audio.

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Lindsay Chervinsky knew other historians had written extensively about America’s second president, John Adams.

But none of those books were written before January 6, 2021, when an insurrection at the nation’s capitol ended the tradition of peacefully transferring power in the U.S. — a tradition that started with Adams himself.

In her new book, “Making the Presidency,” Chervinsky looks back at Adams life and focuses on how George Washington’s successor shaped the presidency in the final years of the 18th century. She argues that it was Adams who established political norms for the executive branch — norms that are quickly being discarded by the current administration.

What can the second president teach us about our country’s 47th? That’s on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her new book is “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic.”

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It’s Valentine’s Day! To mark the occasion, Big Books and Bold Ideas is dipping into the archives to focus on love — and not just romantic love. This show highlights love of all kinds: familial love, love between friends, even the love of books.

We start with Leif Enger, who joined host Kerri Miller in Red Wing last June to talk about his novel, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Enger’s latest book is dystopian in nature, but at its heart, it’s a love story.

We then dip into Miller’s conversation with British-Nigerian author Ore Agbaje-Williams, whose subversive and wickedly funny novel, "The Three of Us,” delves into love between friends. Is it possible our friendships are more foundational than the bonds we form with romantic partners?

We end with Jedidiah Jenkins and his memoir, “Mother, Nature.” It recounts a five-thousand-mile road trip he and his mother took to retrace the route his parents traversed in the 1970s as they walked across America. It sounds sentimental. But it’s really Jedidiah’s attempt to reconcile two conflicting truths: that his mother loves him completely and that she does not accept that he’s gay.

If you want to hear the complete conversation from any of today’s authors, click the links above or look for the episodes in your favorite podcast.

At what cost revolution?

In Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel, “Kingdom of No Tomorrow,” 20-year-old Nettie Boileau trades the turmoil of Duvalier’s Haiti for the tumult of 1960s America. Settling with her aunt in Oakland, she is drawn to the social programs spearheaded by the burgeoning Black Panther Party.

But her focus on healing and public health is soon subsumed by the revolution and her passionate relationship with Black Panther leader Melvin Mosley.

Josaphat drew on her own family’s history for insight into the activism of the Panthers. Her father, an attorney, was imprisoned during Francois Duvalier’s reign in Haiti. And she remembers reading her father’s books as a child, biographies and memoirs of leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.

“I remember starting to do my research about the Black Panthers and thinking to myself, ‘I think I know about this already but I don’t know how. Where did I learn this?’” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then I realized, it was probably me going through [my father’s] books.”

Josaphat brings the gift of those books full circle with her new novel as she brings the inner workings of the Black Panthers to fresh light, including how the fight for social justice didn’t always mean equal rights for women.

Guest:

• Fabienne Josaphat was born and raised in Haiti. Her new novel “Kingdom of No Tomorrow” was awarded the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2023.

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Sarah Hoover knows her new memoir, “The Motherload,” isn’t flattering. She’s made peace with the fact that “people will judge me on the internet,” as she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

She’s telling her story anyway because she believes an honest rendering of modern motherhood is necessary.

“In my defense, birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I’d been fed, and it felt like a nasty trick,” she writes. “And while my mental breakdown was embarrassing at times, especially considering how it exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool, it also showed how pernicious it is to sell tales of motherhood as being so wonderful and feminine, the very essence of womanhood.”

Hoover’s memoir is brutally honest about the disassociation and rage she felt the year after her son was born, and how her eventual diagnosis of postpartum depression felt like like both a relief and a betrayal. She joined host Kerri Miller on this week’s show to talk about the taboos of motherhood, the trad wife trend and why she was compelled to go public with her story.

Guest:

• Sarah Hoover’s new memoir is “The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood.” She lives in New York with her husband and two children.

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