Booktalk with Diana Korte

Ryan Busse, author of “GUNFIGHT. My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America” is a proud gun owner, sportsman, environmentalist, and conservationist and a former firearms executive who’s written an insider’s view of the radicalization of the US gun industry.

Busse explains how and when the US gun culture changed, that culture’s alliance with political factions in the US and abroad, and the most essential thing that we can do to change it.

Today, Busse is a policy advisor for gun control advocate and former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords who was shot and severely wounded during an assassination attempt.

Colorado-based Mark Lee Gardner’s ninth book, THE EARTH IS ALL THAT LASTS, is a dual biography of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders. The author's research features new primary sources, including diaries.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and their warriors crushed Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana and led Sioux resistance in the fierce final chapter of the “Indian Wars.”

This 1876 epic battle was the Sioux's greatest victory, but it was also the beginning of the end for their treasured sacred way of life.

David Gergen knows a thing or two about how leaders are made. He's been a White House adviser to four presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan & Clinton) of different parties, CNN senior political analyst, and founder of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In Hearts Touched with Fire. How Great Leaders Are Made he presents his ideas about leadership using numerous examples from the past and present.

He traces the journeys of historic icons like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as contemporary game changers like Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s time, he says, to pass the torch to younger leaders.

“I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”

Bill McKibben is an educator, environmental activist and author of more than a dozen books.  His newest title is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What The Hell Happened.” 

He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country except North Korea. His new project, organizing people over age sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act.

OVERBOARD by crime writer Sara Paretsky is her 21st book in her series about her legendary detective, V.I. Warshawski.

As this book begins V.I. is on her way home from an all-night surveillance job in Chicago and is led by her dogs on a mad chase that ends when they discover a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan.

Credited with transforming the mystery category of books with the creation of her female private eye 40 years ago, Paretsky's books featuring V.I. Warshawski are international best sellers in 30 countries. She’s also the founder of Sisters in Crime and recipient of numerous awards around the world.

She’s advocated for women and the underserved for decades and works closely with literacy and reproductive rights groups.

Colorado-based Paul Holes, author of UNMASKED, specializes in cold case and serial predator crimes. He began his career in the Contra Costa County (CA) Sheriff's and District Attorney's Offices in California's Bay Area.

He led the team that found the Golden State Killer, the most notorious and cunning serial predator in U.S. history who hid in plain sight for more than 40 years.  

His memoir of investigating America’s toughest cold cases and the rewards and toll of a life solving crime also includes details of Laci Peterson’s murder and the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.

He continues his work today applying innovative technology, including genetic genealogy, which was the key to identifying the Golden State Killer.

After dozens of travel guidebooks under his belt, Brandon Presser’s newest title is THE FAR LAND: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, And Mutiny In The South Pacific.

The mutiny on the British navy vessel HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific in 1789 when Fletcher Christian and his followers seized the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh. 

In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the area and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era. They found the whereabouts of the Bounty’s band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions.

Seven or so generations later, the island’s past still looms over its 48 residents-- descendants of the original mutineers, marooned like modern castaways. Today only a rusty cargo ship connects Pitcairn with the rest of the world a few times a year.

In WAYS & MEANS. Lincoln and his Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, author Roger Lowenstein not only spells out how each side in very different ways paid for the war, but reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation. 

Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

In our conversation he also describes the several ways that Mr. Putin in his invasion of Ukraine today are similar to what the Confederacy did more than 150 years ago.

Lowenstein is the author of 7 books, Including "America's Bank" and "Origins of the Crash." He reported for The Wall Street Journal for more than a decade, and his work appears in numerous other financial publications.  

Ted Conover's IMMERSION: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO GOING DEEP shares the how-to’s of his trade that he had to learn the hard way. How to get in, how to be ethical, and how to avoid being Googled are just a few of his topics he discusses.

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 is also the author of five 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.

This conversation with Ted Conover took place several years ago. His newest book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge, will be released later this year.

ANGELS OF THE PACIFIC by Elise Hooper (her fourth novel) tells the powerful story of American army and navy nurses kept as prisoners for nearly three years during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II.

Many of them had fled the hardships of the Great Depression at home before the war for the glamour and adventure of Manila, one of the most desirable postings in the world.

But everything changed when the Japanese army invaded with lightning speed and devastating results only hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

These angels of the Pacific served on the front lines until captured as prisoners of war on Corregidor, a US post on a fortified island near Manila, and subsequently held behind the high stone walls of Manila's Santo Tomas Internment Camp.

This book is dedicated to the author’s grandfather who served in the US Navy in the Pacific during the war.