Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

Now in his 11th season in the NFL, Dhani Jones has had an unusually long career for a football player. Just a few years ago, however, Dhani thought his playing days were over. Cut by the Eagles and the Saints, he was at a professional crossroads. When the Bengals called, though, he was more than ready and in the best shape of his life. And for that, he credits his off-season.

The Sportsman follows Dhani's discovery that the parts of his life that, to many, seemed to be distractions -- including an off-season TV show that sent him around the world to learn and compete in other sports -- actually served to cross-train him in ways he'd never imagined. It made him more grounded, globally aware and, most surprisingly, a much better football player.

Part travelogue, part workout guide, The Sportsman is an invigorating account of Dhani's global sporting adventures and the lessons he has learned along the way. From dragon boat racing in Singapore to carrying 300-pound rocks in Iceland to biking in Italy, Dhani's adventures taught him to be tougher, smarter, and stronger than ever.

Recorded On: Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Thad Roberts, a fellow in NASA's prestigious Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, had a romantic, albeit crazy, idea: he wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Roberts convinced his girlfriend, also a NASA fellow, and another female accomplice to break into an impregnable lab at NASA's headquarters and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the moon rocks.

To get to the lunar vault, Thad and his accomplices would have to go through the high-security entrance of Building 31, the most protected structure at the Johnson Space Center, wind their way past a half dozen additional checkpoints until they came to an electronically-locked steel door with cipher security codes and monitored by a camera-lined hallway. The safe where the moon rocks were stored was labeled "Trash" and was something out of a Swiss bank: three-feet thick made out of steel with an enormous combination wheel that took at least two people to turn.

Against all odds, the team made a clean get-away (at 5 mph no less, the compound's inflexible speed limit). But what does one do with an item so valuable that it's illegal even to own? And was Thad Roberts -- undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable, a potential astronaut -- really what he seemed?

Ben Mezrich has created his own highly addictive genre of nonfiction, chronicling the amazing stories of young geniuses making tons of money on the edge of impossibility, ethics, and morality. Mezrich has authored 12 books, including Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires, which was adapted into the movie, The Social Network.

www.benmezrich.com

Recorded On: Wednesday, July 20, 2011

After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War.

Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Millions of lives were disrupted, and hundreds of lives were lost. Blacks responded by fighting back with an intensity and determination never seen before.

Red Summer is the first narrative history written about this epic encounter. Focusing on the worst riots and lynchings -- including those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Charleston, Omaha and Knoxville -- Cameron McWhirter chronicles the mayhem, while also exploring the first stirrings of a civil rights movement that would transform American society 40 years later.

Cameron McWhirter is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He was awarded a Nieman Foundation Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard in 2007. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Recorded On: Tuesday, July 19, 2011

In 2008, Elizabeth Warren took leave from her job teaching bankruptcy at Harvard Law School to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks. In 2010 Congress passed legislation to overhaul how the financial industry is regulated, and President Obama named Warren to a special position helping set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Professor Warren has most recently served as the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard. She was the Chief Adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission and was appointed by Chief Justice Rehnquist as the first academic member of the Federal Judicial Education Committee. She has served as a member of the Commission on Economic Inclusion established by the FDIC. She served as Vice-President of the American Law Institute and has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Warren has written nine books and more than a hundred scholarly articles dealing with credit and economic stress. Her latest two popular books, The Two-Income Trap and All Your Worth, were both on national bestseller lists.

Elizabeth Warren has been principal investigator on empirical studies funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and more than a dozen other foundations. She has testified several times before House and Senate committees on financial issues.

Time Magazine has twice named Elizabeth Warren one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World; the Globe named her Bostonian of the Year; and the National Law Journal named her one of the Most Influential Lawyers of the Decade. She has been recognized for her work by several other publications and professional groups, including Forbes, GQ and Smart Money.

Recorded On: Thursday, June 30, 2011

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon 's two families -- the public one and the secret one. When the two teenage daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered.

Tayari Jones is the author of two award-winning novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling. She holds degrees from Spelman College, Arizona State University, and the University of Iowa. She is on the MFA faculty at Rutgers.

www.tayarijones.com

Recorded On: Monday, June 27, 2011

Following his award-winning work on inner-city violence, Code of the Street, sociologist Elijah Anderson introduces the concept of the "cosmopolitan canopy" -- the urban island of civility that exists amidst the ghettos, suburbs, and ethnic enclaves where segregation is the norm. Under the cosmopolitan canopy, diverse peoples come together, and for the most part practice getting along. Anderson's study of this setting provides a new understanding of the complexities of present-day race relations and reveals the unique opportunities here for cross-cultural interaction.

With compelling, meticulous descriptions of public spaces in Philadelphia -- 30th Street Station, Reading Terminal Market, Rittenhouse Square -- and quasi-public places like the modern-day workplace, Anderson provides a rich narrative account of how blacks and whites relate and redefine the color line in everyday public life.

Elijah Anderson holds the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professorship in Sociology at Yale University, where he teaches and directs the Urban Ethnography Project.

Recorded On: Thursday, June 9, 2011

In A Chance to Make History, Wendy Kopp shares what she has learned in her 20 years at the center of a growing movement to end educational inequity in America.

Kopp shows that we can provide children in low income urban and rural communities with an education that transforms their life prospects, if we engage in the hard work required to achieve extraordinary outcomes in any endeavor -- establishing ambitious visions for success; developing capable teams to pursue the vision; building strong cultures of achievement and management systems that foster continuous improvement; and above all, doing whatever it takes to achieve the desired outcomes.

Offering insights and recommendations that may surprise Teach For America's champions and critics alike, A Chance to Make History sets forth what it will take to "scale up" the growing number of examples of education trumping poverty.

Presented in partnership with Teach For America Baltimore. All author proceeds from the book will support Teach For America corps members in urban and rural communities.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Nothing could be more important than the health of our children, and no one is better suited to examine the threats against it than Sandra Steingraber. Once called "a poet with a knife," she blends precise science with lyrical memoir. In Living Downstream, she spoke as a biologist and cancer survivor; in Having Faith, she spoke as an ecologist and expectant mother, viewing her own body as a habitat. Now she speaks as the scientist mother of two young children, enjoying and celebrating their lives while searching for ways to protect them from the toxic, climate-threatened world they inhabit.

Each chapter of Raising Elijah focuses on one inevitable ingredient of childhood -- everything from pizza to laundry to homework to the "Big Talk" -- and explores the underlying social, political, and ecological forces behind it. Through these everyday moments, Steingraber demonstrates how closely the private, intimate world of parenting connects to the public world of policymaking and how the ongoing environmental crisis is, fundamentally, a crisis of family life.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Citizens of London is the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John Gilbert Winant. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, Lynne Olson skillfully depicts the dramatic personal journeys of these men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and a reluctant American public to support the British at a critical time. Murrow, Harriman, and Winant formed close ties with Winston Churchill and were drawn into Churchill's official and personal circles.

Lynne Olson, a former Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press and White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, is the author of Troublesome Young Men and Freedom's Daughters. She co-authored, with her husband Stanley Cloud, A Question of Honor and The Murrow Boys.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Beating the Odds is the improbable, inspiring autobiography of financial guru, Eddie C. Brown, one of the nation's top stock pickers and money managers. It details how Brown skillfully kept Brown Capital Management afloat through the dot-com bust, 9/11, and the Great Recession. Born to a 13-year-old unwed mother in the rural South, this African American investment whiz created a Baltimore-based financial firm that amassed more than $6 billion under management.

Brown writes about the profound heartbreak and disorientation upon the death of his grandmother who was his surrogate mother. He describes how his moonshine-running Uncle Jake subsequently became the dominant adult figure in his life. Brown details how intellectual curiosity, abiding self-belief, hard work, and divine providence helped him earn an electrical engineering degree, become an Army officer, and later a civilian IBM engineer. He left IBM to earn an MBA, followed by investment jobs that prepared him to start his own money management company in 1983.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 10, 2011