This is the twenty-second episode of "Talking with Authors" by HEC Media and HEC Books. We're a program dedicated to speaking with some of the best selling authors around, covering many different genres.

We’re very excited to be able to come back to you after an unplanned hiatus due to the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020. Since no authors were able to travel, and our partners at the St. Louis County Library and Left Bank Books were physically closed  in the early days of social distancing, we were unable to conduct many of the scheduled interviews that we had planned.  But, after the initial weeks of the global shutdown, we were able to set up remote video interviews with many authors. And in the coming weeks, we’ll be providing you with the audio of these interviews. Now sound quality may be slightly different than our previous podcasts, but they all still contain the great content that you’ve come to expect.

Today, our author is a New York Times economic reporter and writer, Eduardo Porter. We spoke with him via Zoom in March of 2020 about his book “American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed our Promise” by publisher Penguin Random House.

Being an economic reporter and having focused on the cost that people are willing to pay for things in their everyday lives in his first book “The Price of Everything”, Eduardo Porter wanted his second book to focus on how the United States seemed to be unwilling to pay as much for a social safety net as compared to its peer nations. But the path to writing that book lead him down the road to why that unwillingness exists…Race.

And throughout the book he dives into how and why those lines have diminished the potential that the US has.   We’ll hear some of these details, talk about some possible solutions, and learn a bit about the life of reporter and writer Eduardo Porter on this edition Talking With Authors from HEC Media and HEC Books.

Our host and interviewer this time is Christina Chastain.

HEC Media is a production company out of St. Louis, Missouri.  With the help of independent bookstore Left Bank Books and St. Louis County Library, we are able to sit down with these amazing writers and thought leaders to discuss their work, their inspiration, and what makes them special. You can watch video versions of most of our interviews at hecmedia.org.

Producer, Host, and Video Editor - Christina Chastain
Audio Editor- Ben Smith
Supervising Producer - Julie Winkle
HEC Media Executive Director - Dennis Riggs
Talking with Authors Podcast Executive Producer - Christina Chastain
Podcast Producer - Rod Milam
Podcast Host - Rod Milam

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