Books & Looks

Belle Benchley took a two-week bookkeeping job at a struggling San Diego Zoo and stayed nearly three decades, becoming the world's first female zoo director. On Books & Looks, host Blaine DeSantis talks with historian Dr. Sandra E. Bonura about her new biography, The Zoo Lady: How Belle Benchley Built the San Diego Zoo, and why the woman who built the zoo has been all but forgotten.

Dr. Sandra E. Bonura is a historian, lecturer and retired professor of education whose award-winning books, published by University of Nebraska Press, bring forgotten Californians out of the shadows, among them The Sugar King of California: The Life of Claus Spreckels and Empire Builder: John D. Spreckels and the Making of San Diego. Denied access to the zoo's archives, she built The Zoo Lady from Benchley's scrapbooks and personal correspondence, shared by her granddaughter, and the collections of the San Diego History Center.

Bonura explains how Benchley, with no biology or science degree, kept every animal alive through the Depression and World War II after losing 44 men to the draft; how she won the gorillas Mbongo and Ngagi at half the price, brought west the 1938 hurricane giraffes that inspired West with Giraffes, and broke a 25-year Australian embargo on koalas; and how she became the first woman elected president of what is now the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. She also recounts why the zoo objected to the word "built" in her title, and previews her next book, San Diego Rising, on Henry G. Fenton, due in May 2027.

Resources:
- The Zoo Lady (University of Nebraska Press)
- Dr. Sandra E. Bonura's website
- Bonura on The Sugar King of California, an earlier Books & Looks episode
- West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

Connect with us:
- Website: https://booksandlookspodcast.com/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@booksandlookspodcast
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/books-looks/id1514324351
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/154FztkUJ5HHRvi8bA5HDa

Tom Olson's Daughters of the Islands tells how six island-born nurses shaped health care in Hawaii before statehood, in their own words. Olson interviewed the women 25 years ago and promised not to tell their stories until they had passed away. On Books and Looks, he talks with host Blaine DeSantis about the women and why he waited.

Tom Olson is a psychiatric nurse who spent much of his career as a nursing faculty member and university administrator, with roles at the University of Hawaii and California State University San Marcos. He lived in Hawaii for 15 years, and his earlier book, Handling the Sick, is an award-winning history of nursing.

The conversation covers Chiyo Miyabara, on duty at Honolulu's Japanese Hospital (now Kuakini) the morning of Pearl Harbor, who kept speaking Japanese to her patients after the U.S. military took the hospital over and banned it; Eleanor Silva, who went to nurse at the Kalaupapa leprosy settlement on Molokai at 18; and Josephine Duvauchelle, denied tenure a month after winning a University of Hawaii teaching award, who earned a master's degree, came back and won it. Olson also explains why "talk story" made the interviews possible and what today's nurses can take from these women.

Resources:

• Daughters of the Islands (Koehler Books)
• Tom Olson's author website

Connect with us:

• Website
• YouTube
• Instagram

Anna Pitoniak talks The Swiss Agent, her smart CIA thriller of female spies, Russian oligarchs, and Swiss bankers, plus the real research behind it.

• Pre-order The Swiss Agent
• The Swiss Agent audiobook
• Read book one, The Helsinki Affair
• Visit Anna's website
• Follow Anna on Goodreads

Most spy novels lean on car chases and gunfights. Anna Pitoniak's The Swiss Agent is built around psychology, atmosphere, and careful detective work instead. Anna joins Blaine DeSantis to talk about her second Amanda Cole novel, a cat and mouse story between two veteran CIA officers, Amanda Cole and Kath Frost, who must work together to stop a Kremlin-backed conspiracy. The catch is that Kath is hiding a secret, and Amanda has to uncover it before time runs out. Anna explains how a murder at a villa on Capri sets everything in motion, and how a single plate of foie gras becomes the clue that cracks the case open.

Many of the book's strangest details turn out to be true. Anna shares the real story of Margaret Scattergood, the Quaker philanthropist whose Virginia farmhouse became part of CIA headquarters. She also confirms that there really is a hot dog vending machine at Langley. She describes how a trip to Sarajevo shaped the novel's 1990s timeline, how conversations with Swiss bankers helped her build the character of Julian, and how she and her husband worked out how a Russian oligarch could smuggle billions in Bitcoin out of the country. The answer involves a Ferragamo loafer.

Anna also talks about her path from Random House editor to full-time novelist, and how working with spy fiction master Alan Furst made her fall in love with the genre. She explains why she wanted to write women who drive the story instead of standing beside the hero, and why Kath Frost's brilliance, arrogance, and sobriety make her such a compelling character. Anna also shares how she keeps three timelines straight, along with what comes next for Amanda, her father Charlie, and fan favorite Bram in the third book of the series.

A century ago, the birds at your feeder were fair game. Egrets were shot for their breeding plumes, passenger pigeons were shipped to city markets by the barrel, and fashionable women wore hats topped with whole stuffed birds, sometimes with hummingbird earrings to match. On this episode of Books and Looks, Blaine DeSantis talks with Dr. James McCommons about his new book, The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds, which traces how the country went from hunting birds to protecting them between roughly 1870 and 1930.

The fight wasn't always polite. McCommons describes rival egg hunters arming themselves with small cannons on California's Farallon Islands, night riders and burned hunting lodges in the Big Lake and Reelfoot duck wars, and market hunters paddling out with punt guns that could kill as many as 100 ducks in a single blast. He also shares the stories behind the laws that changed everything, including the wormy apple that helped win over a skeptical House Speaker for the Lacey Act, and the bird protection bill President Taft signed on his last day in office after swearing he never would.

Along the way you'll meet the teenage "shotgun ornithologists" who grew up to lead the early bird protection movement (one of them went on to sculpt the Lincoln Memorial), Tabasco heir Edward McIlhenny, who raised snowy egrets by hand on Avery Island, and Coco Chanel, whose simple cloche hat helped make feathered hats obsolete. Whether you're a backyard birder, a history buff, or just curious how conservation took hold in America, this conversation is packed with stories you've probably never heard.

📖 Get the book: "The Boleyn Secret" by Alison Weir is available now wherever books are sold. Buy it here: https://a.co/d/03qMbBcy

🎧 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe, share, and leave us a review. And as always — may all your leaves be pages in a book.

Step inside the Tudor court with bestselling historian and novelist Alison Weir as she joins Blaine DeSantis to discuss her new historical novel, The Boleyn Secret. The story follows Catherine Carey, niece of Anne Boleyn, from the shadow of her aunt’s execution through years of service, marriage, motherhood, religious upheaval, exile, and her complicated bond with her cousin, Elizabeth I. Weir explains how Catherine’s life offers a fresh way to experience one of the most dramatic eras in English history.

The conversation explores the research behind the novel and the thin line between documented history and informed imagination. Weir discusses the legend that Catherine attended Anne Boleyn in the Tower, the Knollys family Latin dictionary that records the births of Catherine’s children, and the evidence behind a portrait believed to depict her. She also examines Elizabeth I’s demanding friendship with Catherine, the Knollys family’s Protestant exile under Mary I, and the court scandals surrounding Lettice Knollys and Robert Dudley.

Weir also reflects on Anne Boleyn’s enduring fascination, Henry VIII’s relationship with Jane Seymour, the cultural influence of the Renaissance in Tudor England, and the books she is working on next. Rich with history, personality, and behind-the-scenes insight into how historical fiction is built, this episode is a lively conversation for readers who want to understand the people behind the famous Tudor names.

📖 Get the book: "The Boleyn Secret" by Alison Weir is available now wherever books are sold. Buy it here: https://a.co/d/09sQbPGu

🎧 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe, share, and leave us a review. And as always — may all your leaves be pages in a book.

What if the Lewis and Clark story you learned in school got almost everything wrong? On this episode of Books and Looks, Blaine DeSantis sits down with Craig Fehrman, author of the bestselling book This Vast Enterprise, to reexamine one of the greatest journeys in American history. Fehrman reveals that the expedition began before the Louisiana Purchase was even finalized, that the famous $15 million price tag hides a true cost of more than $400 million, and that the journey itself ran over $100,000, the equivalent of NASA's budget in its day.

Fehrman's book tells the story as an ensemble, rotating between ten points of view. Listeners will meet York, the enslaved man whose skill and diplomacy proved essential yet who was denied his freedom after the journey. They will meet Sacagawea as she truly was, a teenage mother navigating enslavement with remarkable resolve. And they will meet Black Buffalo, the Lakota leader who prevented a war on the banks of the Missouri while pursuing his own political strategy against a rival chief.

The conversation is full of surprises: an arrest warrant issued from Santa Fe, more than a thousand Spanish soldiers dispatched to capture the expedition, an American general secretly spying for Spain, a heroic Newfoundland dog named Seaman, and the media frenzy that made Lewis and Clark the Artemis mission of 1804. Perfect listening as America celebrates its 250th birthday, this episode will change how you see a story you thought you already knew.

📖 Get the book: "This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark" by Craig Fehrman is available now wherever books are sold. Buy it here: https://a.co/d/0iP0BnAg

🎧 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe, share, and leave us a review. And as always — may all your leaves be pages in a book.

Before the Hearsts and the Pulitzers, before the front page as we know it, the American newspaper was built by teenagers covered in soot, women who risked hanging, and editors who settled arguments with pistols. Alex Wright joins Blaine DeSantis to talk about Empire of Ink, his sweeping history of how a young republic printed itself into existence between the 1700s and the close of the 1800s. It's a project that started as a personal search into Wright's own family of country newspaper publishers in Georgia and turned into fifteen years of research.

The conversation moves fast and covers ground most newspaper histories skip entirely. Wright explains what a printer's devil actually was and why the job cut a man's life expectancy in half. He tells the story of the entrepreneur who imported Egyptian mummies by the boatload because their wrappings were cheaper than American rags, and the French naturalist who watched wasps chew wood into pulp and wondered whether people could do the same thing. There's Mary Katherine Goddard, whose name appears at the bottom of the first Declaration of Independence to carry the signers' names, an act she knew could be read as treason. There's the Vicksburg Sentinel, which burned through eight editors in roughly a dozen years, several of whom died in the line of duty.

Wright also takes us to the corners of the story that shaped whole communities. The Cherokee Phoenix, published in an alphabet invented from scratch by Sequoyah, became a political voice for the Cherokee people until their press was taken from them. In San Francisco, Yee Gen hand-built a workaround for printing thousands of Chinese characters and launched the first Chinese American paper. Union soldiers carried portable presses into camp and printed papers with blank pages so the men could write home on the other side. And a young Samuel Clemens swept floors as a print shop apprentice before he ever thought to call himself Mark Twain. If you have ever suspected that today's media chaos is something new, this episode is a useful corrective.

📖 Get the book: Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper by Alex Wright is available now wherever books are sold. Buy it here: https://a.co/d/0e52u7jO

🎧 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe, share, and leave us a review. And as always — may all your leaves be pages in a book.

In July 1831, the whaleship Mentor sailed out of New Bedford Harbor with 22 men aboard, hoping to strike it rich hunting sperm whales in the Pacific. They never made it. Caught in a raging storm, the ship smashed into the remote island chain of Palau — and within hours, half the crew was dead.

What followed is one of the most harrowing survival stories in American maritime history. In this episode, host Blaine DeSantis sits down with New York Times bestselling author Eric J. Dolin to unravel what happened to the men who lived: hostage negotiations demanding 200 guns, years of forced labor and starvation on a tiny island just one mile long, forced tattooing meant to absorb the castaways into island culture, daring escapes aboard passing ships, and a naval rescue mission ordered by President Andrew Jackson himself.

Along the way, Dolin pulls back the curtain on the golden age of American whaling — the stench you could smell before you saw the ship, the teenage "green hands" who'd never been to sea, and why most whalemen came home with almost nothing to show for years of brutal work. He also shares how he pieced together this forgotten story from logbooks, journals, Palauan oral histories, and more than 100 rare illustrations from archives around the world.

Only 7 of the 22 men ever made it home. This is their story.

📖 Get the book: The Wreck of the Mentor by Eric J. Dolin is available now wherever books are sold — and it just hit the New York Times bestseller list. If you love true stories of the sea, this one belongs on your shelf.

🎧 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe, share, and leave us a review. And as always — may all your leaves be pages in a book.

Who truly drove TR's presidency? Discover the untold story of Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet, the diverse, athletic advisors who shaped his legacy.

Resources:
【"Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet" By Michael Cullinane】https://a.co/d/0a7YRTmp
【Connect with Michael Cullinane】https://www.michaelpatrickcullinane.com

Did you know Theodore Roosevelt's most trusted advisors weren't traditional politicians, but a diverse group of tennis-playing frontiersmen, foreign ambassadors, and bankers? In this episode of Books and Looks, Blaine DeSantis sits down with presidential historian Michael Patrick Cullinane to explore his groundbreaking new book, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet". Tune in to discover how this unconventional inner circle bypassed traditional bureaucracy to establish the foundation of the modern American presidency. 

Michael reveals how TR’s bipartisan, multi-class network—featuring everyone from "Deadwood" sheriff Seth Bullock to a wolf-wrangling stuntman—became the driving force behind monumental conservation efforts and historical trust-busting. We delve into the grueling physical fitness tests required to gain the President's ear and explore the striking parallels between Progressive Era administrative politics and today's government efficiency debates. But what caused the sudden collapse of this loyal advisory group, and why did William Howard Taft literally bulldoze their legacy? Listen closely to uncover how a skinny-dipping French ambassador and a record-breaking wave of executive orders forever altered American history. 

If you love uncovering the hidden mechanics of the past, be sure to subscribe to Books and Looks and leave us a review!

Discover the untold story of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Jim Rasenberger reveals their bitter rivalry and the miracle of their shared July 4th deaths.

Episode Links:

• "A Perfect Coincidence" by Jim Rasenberger
• Jim Rasenberger Website

The odds of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on the exact same day—exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence—were estimated at one in 1.2 billion. In this episode of Books and Looks, Blaine DeSantis sits down with author Jim Rasenberger to explore his acclaimed new book, “A Perfect Coincidence”, unraveling the complex, intertwined lives of America's most famous founding frenemies. Listeners will discover the hidden historical twists, bitter rivalries, and surprising reconciliations that shaped the birth of a nation just in time for its 250th anniversary.

This historical deep dive exposes the realities of the Revolutionary War and the deeply contrasting personalities of our founding fathers, from John Adams’ blunt vanity to Thomas Jefferson’s lavish, debt-fueled lifestyle at Monticello. Jim reveals why the legendary July 4th signing of the Declaration of Independence is actually a myth, how Benjamin Franklin drove Adams to his breaking point in Paris, and the complicated truths behind the Hemings family tree. You will also uncover the mysterious, prophetic dream that finally pushed these two bitter political rivals to mend their relationship after a decade of silence, but you will have to tune in to find out if sheer willpower alone kept them alive to fulfill American history's most miraculous coincidence. 

If you love uncovering the untold stories of our past, be sure to subscribe to “Books and Looks” and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform!