Free Library Podcast

In conversation with Peter Dobrin, classical music critic and culture writer, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Jamie Bernstein is the oldest daughter of Leonard Bernstein, one of the 20th century's best known musicians. Chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, composer of such scores as West Side Story, Candide, On the Waterfront, and On the Town, Renaissance artist in a variety of musical forms, and all-around celebrity, he held court with everyone from the Kennedys to the Black Panthers to John Lennon. In this intimate portrait of a complicated and occasionally tormented artist and father, Jamie Bernstein-a celebrated concert narrator, broadcaster, journalist, poet, and radio producer/host in her own right-tells the story of the man who taught her to love this messy and beautiful world.

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(recorded 6/20/2018)

''The queen of the summer beach read'' (New York Post), Elin Hilderbrand has captured the flavor, scenery, and people of Nantucket in more than 20 New York Times bestselling novels, including The Beach Club, The Matchmaker, and The Identicals.  A Pennsylvania native, a graduate of Johns Hopkins, and a former fellow at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been a Nantucket resident for 25 years. In The Perfect Couple, Hilderbrand dives into natives' frustrations with the island's wedding season and the summer people it brings in a yarn of lavish nuptials and a murdered bride.

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(recorded 6/21/2018)

The Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a Professor of Vaccinology and Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Dr. Paul Offit is the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and a founding advisory-board member of the Autism Science Foundation. His many honors include election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of more than 140 papers and six books, including The Cutter Incident, Autism's False Prophets, and Bad Faith. Bad Advice pushes back against the pervasiveness of pseudoscientists, quacks, charlatans, and dangerously misinformed activists.

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(recorded 6/25/2018)

Please join Randi on the launch date of her latest book, Aroused, which takes us on a guided tour through the intellectually arousing history and science of hormones. Randi's prior book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank won high praise including being called by NPR a ''delightful-and sometimes disturbing'' romp through the history, fads, and science behind making and having babies. Randi earned her MD from Yale University, and MS and an MPH from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree, focusing in the history and sociology of science, from the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, among other national publications. She lives in New York City. 

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(recorded 6/26/2018)

Journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, ''who for more than 40 years has been one of our most accomplished and outspoken advocacy journalists and activists'' (Los Angeles Times), is the bestselling author of 16 books, including the working-class exposé Nickel and Dimed, in which she subsisted on poverty-level wages for a year; Living with a Wild God, an intimate reconstruction of the philosophical and spiritual inquiry of her youth; and Bait and Switch, in which she investigated the economic shadow world of white-collar unemployment. In Natural Causes, Ehrenreich employs science, sociological trends, and personal experience to examine the paradox of killing ourselves to live longer lives.

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(recorded 4/17/2018)

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)