Great Podversations

John Lewis is Georgia’s 5th Congressional District Representative and an American icon who has witnessed history in the making and made history himself as one of the key figures of the Civil Rights Movement. To share his story with new generations, Lewis turned to the graphic novel format and has published "March" (Top Shelf Productions.) "March" is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, including his key roles in the historic 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma-Montgomery March. Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Congressman Lewis is interviewed in this Kentucky Author Forum by Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC’s primetime news and information program, “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Pat Conroy was the featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum on Oct. 30, 2013, concurrent with the release of his new memoir, The Death of Santini. He was interviewed by Maureen Corrigan, critic-in-residence and lecturer at Georgetown University, and book critic for NPR's Fresh Air. The new book delves into Conroy's past, furthering the account of family struggle, expanding on the story of his father, the inspiration for his novel, The Great Santini. In the forward, he states, “I’ve been writing the story of my own life for over forty years. My own stormy autobiography has been my theme, my dilemma, my obsession, and the fly-by-night dread I bring to the art of fiction.” With both his parents now deceased, Conroy is able to view them with a bit more detachment, appreciating some redeeming qualities in his father, Marine Corps Colonel Don Conroy, and mother, Peg Conroy Egan.

Rick Pitino, coach of the 2013 NCAA men's basketball champs, author of "The One Day Contract," interviewed by Joe Nocera, opinion and business columnist for the New York Times on Oct 9, 2013.

Jared Diamond spoke in Louisville on January 9, 2013 as featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum, discussing in detail his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies. Diamond is an author, physiologist, evolutionary biologist and bio-geographer, as well as a medical researcher and professor of geography at UCLA. Diamond argues that developed, Western cultures can learn much from small-scale, traditional societies, like those of the New Guinea Highlanders. In evolutionary time it has only been a very short while since traditional cultures and so-called "modern" cultures diverged, and Diamond asserts we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional conditions. His research for the book draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness still have much to teach us today. As he notes, "While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgably wide, we can glimpse most of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies that still exist or were recently in existence." Of course, his arguments have provoked some strong reactions from other anthropologists who disagree with some of his conclusions. Diamond is also the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

"The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It's the most controversial. It doesn't have any stories, moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams and nightmares. Not many people say they understand it, but for 2000 years, this book has been wildly popular." So says scholar Elaine Pagels, who was in Louisville recently as featured guest at the Kentucky Author Forum. Pagels discussed in depth her latest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, in a sprawling interview conducted by Gustav Nieburh, a professor of religion at Syracuse University. Pagels tracks The Book of Revelation back to its historical origin, written as its author John of Patmos took aim at the Roman Empire after what is now known as "the Jewish War," in 66 CE. Militant Jews in Jerusalem, fired with religious fervor, waged an all-out war against Rome's occupation of Judea and their defeat resulted in the desecration of Jerusalem and its Great Temple. Pagels interprets Revelation as a scathing attack on the decadence of Rome. Soon after, however, a new sect known as "Christians" seized on John's text as a weapon against heresy and infidels of all kinds: Jews, even Christians who dissented from their increasingly rigid doctrines and hierarchies.

Ray Kurzweil, arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist, is one of the leading inventors of our time and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Among his inventions, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition device, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. In his book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the limitless potential of reverse engineering the human brain. He examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness, while envisioning the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating. Kurzweil was the featured guest at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum on Nov. 26, 2012, and he was interviewed by Jim Fleming, Peabody Award-winning host of Public Radio International's To the Best of Our Knowledge.

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was the guest at the Kentucky Author Forum on Oct. 2, 2012, interviewed by NPR's Neal Conan. Pinker is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition and is the author of numerous books, including The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, and most recently, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker examines human violence through the centuries. We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In the book, Pinker argues that violence in the past was actually much worse than now. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down. How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? What led people to stop sacrificing children, stabbing each other at the dinner table, or burning cats and disemboweling criminals as forms of popular entertainment? The key to explaining the decline of violence, Pinker argues, is to understand the inner demons that incline us toward violence (such as revenge, sadism, and tribalism) and the better angels that steer us away. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.