Free Library Podcast

Robert Kuttner is the cofounder and coeditor of The American Prospect, one of the country's most popular progressive political and public-policy quarterlies. His many books include Everything for Sale, The Squandering of America, Obama's Challenge, and Debtors' Prison. A former columnist at the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and Business Week, he is currently the Ida and Meyer Kirstein Chair at Brandeis University. In his new book, Kuttner uses historical precedent to propose a bold course back to a healthy capitalistic society that favors the rights of the worker as much as it does the corporation.

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Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Endowed Lecture

 

(recorded 4/19/2018)

In conversation with Marty Moss-Coane, host of Radio Times on WHYY

Leslie Jamison is the author of the bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams, a personal and probing look at pain and how we understand others' suffering, praised for ''its ethical generosity, the palpable sense of stretch and reach'' and ''the lovely vividness of the language itself (The New York Times Book Review). She is also the author of the novel The Gin Closet, a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, and a professor of nonfiction writing at Columbia University. In her new book, Jamison synthesizes memoir, literary criticism, and cultural history in a reinvention of the addiction and recovery memoir.

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(recorded 4/23/2018)

''Intensely personal ... funny and poignant'' (New York Times), Gregory Pardlo's poetry collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. An out-of-nowhere coup for the relatively unknown Columbia University MFA student and teacher, it was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, among other honors. In his new memoir, Pardlo tells the story of his strained New Jersey upbringing, fatherhood, addiction, and African American masculinity.

The poetry editor for The New Yorker and the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, Kevin Young is the author of the poetry collections Blue Laws, Book of Hours, and Jelly Roll, a finalist for the National Book Award. His nonfiction books include Bunk and The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. From James Brown to John Brown's raid to Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education, Young's new poetry collection riffs on the themes of collective experience and color.

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(recorded 4/24/2018)

In conversation with Jennifer Weiner, author of numerous bestselling books including her recent memoir Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing and the Little Big Foot series of young adult novels.

''Popular but intellectual, accessible but mysterious'' (NPR), Curtis Sittenfield's bestselling novels-including Prep, American Wife, and Sisterland-offer blueprints of the inner architecture of such diverse female protagonists as a wayward boarding school student, a former First Lady, and an identical twin with psychic abilities. Her most recent novel, Eligible, is a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice starring a Cincinnati-born magazine writer. You Think It, I'll Say It is a debut story collection featuring a shy Ivy Leaguer, overly intimate acquaintances, a powerful but insecure lawyer, and other characters endemic of an unsure and adrift era.

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(recorded 5/1/2018)

Jen Sincero is the no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, a sass-filled self-help book for people who want better lives but don't want to get caught reading a self-help book. She is a success coach and self-described ''motivational cattle prod'' whose work has transformed scores of personal and professional lives. In You Are a Badass at Making Money, her ''cheerful manifesto on removing obstacles between yourself and the income of your dreams'' (New York Magazine), Sincero draws on her own financial transformation to explain how to vault over the mental roadblocks that keep us from realizing our earning potential.

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(recorded 4/26/2018)

The principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, a planetary scientist, and an aerospace executive and consultant, Dr. Alan Stern has participated in a mind-blowing 29 space missions and has served in the loftiest strata of contemporary American space exploration. The chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress, Dr. David Grinspoon studies climate evolution, the conditions for life elsewhere in the cosmos, and space-exploration strategy. He has consulted on interplanetary missions for several international space agencies and is on the team for NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover. He is the author of Earth in Human Hands, a ''remarkable synthesis of natural history, planetary science, extinction histories ... and the human effect on the world'' (Forbes). In Chasing New Horizons, Stern and Grinspoon go inside and then beyond the science, politics, and egos of the 3 billion-mile trip to the edge of our solar system for the once-in-a-lifetime 32,000-miles-per-hour flyby of Pluto.

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(recorded 5/2/2018)

Jake Tapper is anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN, where he hosts the weekday program The Lead with Jake Tapper and the Sunday morning show State of the Union. He is the former White House correspondent for ABC News and contributor to Good Morning America, Nightline, and World News with Diane Sawyer. His many honors include an unprecedented three Merriman Smith Awards for presidential coverage. Tapper is the author of The Outpost, the tragic but inspiring true story of a small U.S. military besieged by the Taliban. In The Hellfire Club-his debut political thriller-an unlikely 1950s congressman discovers a D.C. conspiracy that could change the course of history.

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(recorded 5/3/2018)

A fellow of the American Meteorological Society and director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, geographer Mark C. Serreze is one of the world's foremost experts on the planet's cryosphere-Earth's snow and ice cover-and its relatively recent changes. Spanning three decades of astonishing and alarming discovery, Brave New Arctic blends Serreze's research and experiences with that of other pioneering geographers and climatologists to explain the extraordinary circumstances of man-made global warming and the consequences to come. 

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(recorded 5/8/2018)

In Conversation with Kalela Williams, Director of Neighborhood Enrichment Programming

A ''hypnotic'' novelist whose ease with vernacular puts her ''in fellowship with such forebears as Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner'' (The New Yorker), Jesmyn Ward won the 2011 National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, the story of a pregnant teenager and her Mississippi family in the days surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Her elegiac 2013 memoir Men We Reaped was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Last year she won a stunning second National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, a 21st-century road novel about the difficulty of family bonds and the ugly underside of the American story.

*Spoiler alert: the first question during the Q&A (minute 42:00) reveals a critical event in the book.

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(recorded 5/9/2018)

Celebrated by critics and readers alike for ''interweaving history, fascinating trivia and acute observation'' (New York Times Book Review), Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of the nonfiction books The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, and Pacific. Formerly an Oxford-trained field geologist in Uganda and a war correspondent for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2006. Stretching from the dawn of the Industrial Age to the bleeding edge tech of tomorrow, The Perfectionists tells the story of the engineers and instruments that gave birth to modern manufacturing.

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(recorded 5/9/2018)