Free Library Podcast

Celebrated historian Nell Irvin Painter's many books include Sojourner Truth, Creating Black Americans, and, most recently, The History of White People, a national bestseller examining the dangerous socially constructed notion of whiteness. The Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University, Painter directed that institution's Program in African American Studies from 1997 to 2000 and has served on a number of editorial boards and professional groups, including the Society of American Historians, the Association of Black Women Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society. Old in Art School is a memoir of Painter's surprising decision to return to the academy as a student in her sixties to earn a BFA and MFA in painting.

(recorded 5/22/2018)

Journalist and lawyer Steven Brill is the founder of Court TV, 10 regional newspapers, and The American Lawyer magazine. His 2013 Time magazine cover story ''Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us'' won the National Magazine Award for Public Service and became the basis for a New York Times bestselling book. A regular expert analyst for the likes of CNN, NBC, and CBS, he teaches journalism at Yale. In Tailspin, he explains how bedrock American institutions function less for the vulnerable majority than for the ultra-elite minority, and he introduces people and organizations working to turn them around.

(recorded 5/30/2018)

In conversation with Tracey Matisak

A scion of America's most fabled political dynasty, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a clinical professor and supervising attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University's Elisabeth Haub School of Law. He is also the founder and president of the nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance, former senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the former chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper. He cohosts the syndicated talk radio program Ring of Fire and is the author of several books, including Crimes Against Nature and Framed. Kennedy's latest book is an intimate exploration of his turbulent childhood, his public and private pain, and the defining moments that shaped him.

(recorded 5/17/2018)

Kevin Powers won the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award  and the Guardian First Book Award for The Yellow Birds, ''the first great Iraq War novel'' (Rolling Stone), a work drawn from his experiences as a U.S. Army machine-gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. After being honorably discharged, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. In A Shout in the Ruins, Powers reckons with America's legacy of slavery and violence as he follows the fates of the inhabitants and descendants of a Virginia plantation.

Director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Elise Juska is the author of the novels One for Sorrow, Two for Joy; The Hazards of Sleeping Alone; Getting Over Jack Wagner; and The Blessings, the ''bighearted ... moving, multifaceted'' (Philadelphia Inquirer) story of a close-knit Irish-Catholic Philadelphia family across two decades.  Juska's latest novel tells the tragically relevant story of an English professor whose former student commits a mass shooting at a mall in rural Maine.

(recorded 5/16/2018)

Kevin Powers won the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award  and the Guardian First Book Award for The Yellow Birds, ''the first great Iraq War novel'' (Rolling Stone), a work drawn from his experiences as a U.S. Army machine-gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. After being honorably discharged, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. In A Shout in the Ruins, Powers reckons with America's legacy of slavery and violence as he follows the fates of the inhabitants and descendants of a Virginia plantation.

Director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Elise Juska is the author of the novels One for Sorrow, Two for Joy; The Hazards of Sleeping Alone; Getting Over Jack Wagner; and The Blessings, the ''bighearted ... moving, multifaceted'' (Philadelphia Inquirer) story of a close-knit Irish-Catholic Philadelphia family across two decades.  Juska's latest novel tells the tragically relevant story of an English professor whose former student commits a mass shooting at a mall in rural Maine.

(recorded 5/16/2018)

In conversation with award winning broadcaster and journalist Tracey Matisak.

Political commentator Alex Wagner is co-host of Showtime's The Circus and a contributor to CBS News and The Atlantic. She previously hosted MSNBC's Emmy-nominated Now with Alex Wagner, among many other credits. From 2007 to 2009 she served as the executive director of Not On Our Watch, an international advocacy nonprofit dedicated to preventing mass human-rights violations and atrocities. In Futureface, she searches the globe for the secrets of her ancestry, along the way confronting foundational questions of immigration and identity.

(recorded 5/15/2018)

''A marvelous storyteller'' (Chicago Tribune), Mary Morris explores some of her favorite themes-away versus home, childhood memories, and the Midwest-in such works of fiction as A Mother's Love, House Arrest, and The Jazz Palace. The winner of the Rome Prize and the Ainsfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, she is also the author of the travel classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. In Gateway to the Moon, Morris interweaves the stories of a secluded New Mexican town's present-day residents with those of its original settlers 500 years earlier. 

Nathaniel Popkin is the author and co-author of five books, including Lion and Leopard, Song of the City, and Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City. He is also co-editor of the literary anthology Who Will Speak for America?, the fiction editor of Cleaver Magazine, and the writer/editor of the Emmy-winning documentary film series Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. In Everything is Borrowed, he ponders regret, history, and the intransigence of the urban landscape through the strangely parallel lives of two men separated by centuries.

(recorded 5/10/2018)

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.

(recorded 5/9/2018)

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.

(recorded 5/9/2018)

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. 

(recorded 5/8/2018)