This is the 400th episode of Historically Thinking. And while it’s a podcast that focuses on history, and how historians and everyone else think about the past, I do that each week through conversation. For a long time I have really wanted to believe something that Plato wrote, that “Truth, as human reality, comes about only in conversation.” 

So it’s fitting, I think, that we devote Episode 400 to having a conversation about conversation with Paula Marantz Cohen, author of Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation. In this stimulating book, Cohen travels over all the terrains of conversation, from familial conversations to the restaurants most conducive to good conversation; from gatherings of great conversationalists to surprisingly useful self-help books on conversations;  and to gossip, and those little keys that somehow unlock what Samuel Johnson termed “solid conversation”. 

Paula Marantz Cohen is Dean Emerita of the Pennoni Honors College and Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University. Among her books are Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy and six novels, including Jane Austen in Boca, which is “Pride and Prejudice set in a Jewish retirement community in Boca Raton”; the literary mystery What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper; and Beatrice Bunson’s Guide to Romeo and Juliet, a novel for young adults.