Booktalk with Diana Korte

“I feel lucky to do what I do. I write about real people, often by living their lives for a while—visiting their lives, you might say. Trying them on for size. Though there are easier ways to make a living, I suppose, none strike me as a fraction so interesting.” T.C.    

In Ted Conover’s 7th book, CHEAP LAND COLORADO, he introduces us to the off-gridders and their families who live in an isolated part of southern Colorado’s enormous San Luis Valley.

In our conversation today Ted talks about why these folks seek out this difficult life, how they manage the bitter high-altitude winters, and the skills homeowners learn when there are no city services or utilities. 

Ted has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, and butchered beef in a meat-packing plant in Nebraska. His day job is teaching at New York University. He's also the author of six other books and numerous articles published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic, among many others. Perhaps his best-known book is “Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing,” an account of his ten months spent working as a corrections officer at New York’s Sing Sing Prison.

Christopher McDougall's Running with Sherman introduces us to the McDougall family and their menagerie--donkeys, rams, chickens, fainting goats--who all live on a small farm in rural Pennsylvania.

This book is part scientific exploration of the lost art of connecting with animals, part vivid telling of what life’s like in the southern part of Amish country, part radical rehabilitation story, part deep dive into the crazy sport that is burro racing (and the insane training required to run 15 miles with a donkey in tow in Colorado’s high altitude), and part road trip that cuts through the best of Americana.

Along the way impossibly, improbably, Sherman who starts out as a rescue donkey in this story learns to run.

This conversation with Chris McDougall took place several years ago. His newest book, Born to Run 2: The Ultimate Training Guide, will be released in December 2022. 

Delia Owens, the co-author of three nonfiction books on African research and wildlife, published her debut novel, “Where the Crawdads Sing,” in 2018, the year when this interview took place.  Since then this book has sold in the millions, attracted literary prizes, and has been made into a movie.  

Where the Crawdads Sing is a mystery, a love story, and a courtroom drama, but it is primarily about self-reliance and survival.  This nature-infused story features Kya, a young woman who was abandoned as a child in the remote coastal marshes of North Carolina and who learns to live by herself.  In our conversation Delia also talks about her research life in Africa studying wildlife and how that experience affects her today. 

"I learned from a book that crawdads don't really sing, but the important thing is that I learned from my mother that if you go deep enough into the wilderness, you'll hear them anyway."  Delia Owens

Private investigator Elvis Cole and his enigmatic partner Joe Pike are back on the case in RACING THE LIGHT by Robert Crais whose thrillers have been translated into 42 languages.

In Bob's 23rd novel, Adele Schumacher isn't a typical worried mom. When she hires Elvis to find her missing son, a controversial podcaster named Josh Shoe, she brings a bag filled with cash, bizarre tales of government conspiracies, and a squad of professional bodyguards.

Finding Josh should be simple, but Elvis quickly learns he isn't alone in the hunt. Then mix in super-secret security tech, corrupt politicians, vicious business cartels, and of course, humor and suspense.

RIVER OF THE GODS by historian Candice Millard is her fourth book. Known for her meticulously researched work, her newest book is an adventure tale full of danger that takes place in unchartered territory in Africa in the mid-1800s.

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery.  In 1854 Richard Burton and John Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England.

Finding the source of the Nile took years and would not have been possible for these Englishmen without the guidance, expertise and local knowledge of Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a former slave.

Richard Osman is an author, a well-known television personality and comedian in the UK. His newest book is The Bullet That Missed  in the popular “Thursday Murder Club” series that has already sold in the millions.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim are adventurous 70somethings who live at the Coopers Chase Retirement Village in rural England and are the crime solvers in these light-hearted, clever mysteries. In the latest installment they solve murders, take on an ex-KGB colonel, and a murderous money launderer. Tv hosts and the local cops show up, too. 

Trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned.  

Patricia Schultz of “1000 Places to See Before You Die” fame has authored a different kind of book this time.

“WHY WE TRAVEL: 100 Reasons to Get Up and Go” pairs beautiful color photos with pearls of wisdom, lists, and essential travel tips and focuses not on where or when to travel, but on how travel enriches us and why we choose to travel.

She told me why packing tips are a whole lot more than what you put in your suitcase, what the first thing is she does when visiting a new city, and why an assignment to cover “The Game of Thrones” in Northern Ireland was so challenging. 

Kimberly Garza’s debut novel, “The Last Karankawas” explores modern, diverse south Texas.  She takes readers to the salty aired streets of Galveston where a tight-knit community of Mexican and Filipino American families live on the Texas coast.

When word spreads of an approaching storm named Hurricane Ike in 2008, each Galveston resident is forced to decide: abandon their hard-won home and flee inland, or board up the windows and hunker down.

Born in Galveston and raised in Uvalde, Kimberly is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

An American retired judge of the Superior Court of California, LaDoris Hazzard Cordell was also the first black female judge in the northern part of the state.

Her memoir, "HER HONOR, My Life on the Bench...What Works, What’s Broken, and How to Change It,"  is a robust and colorful collection of stories from 20 years as a judge.

In her courthouse she rotated through various specialties—family and probate courts, criminal jury trials and traffic court, to name just a few.

She uses real cases to highlight how judges make difficult decisions, all the while facing outside pressures from the media, law enforcement, and the friends and families of the people involved.

With INVISIBLE STORM Jason Kander has written the book he himself needed in his darkest moments of PTSD. After Afghanistan, his day job was politics as a rising star in the Democratic party, first in his native Missouri and then running for national office. But that stopped when symptoms became too great.

It’s the best book I’ve read about PTSD—what it is, what it feels like, what to do about it, how it affects families (through the words of his wife Diana), and how it interplays with a life of politics. 

Today, Jason Kander works with national veterans groups.