History Author Show

October 30, 2017 - This week, our time machine bolts on its studded snow tires for a freezing journey to the North Pole -- a trip we'll make long before GPS, cell phones, or Gortex gloves -- with Gilded Age explorers aboard the schooner USS Jeannette.  Returning to the show are husband-and-wife writing team Rich Wallace and Sandra Neil Wallace. They last joined us to discuss their book Blood Brother: Jonathan Daniels and His Sacrifice for Civil Rights. You can hear that chat in our archives at HistoryAuthor.com, or wherever you're listening.

Their book today is a world away from the sweltering Alabama heat of the 1960s. It's Bound by Ice: A True North Pole Survival Story, and it's aimed at readers nine to eighteen years of age, although I enjoyed it even at a good distance beyond my high school graduation.

You've seen Sandra's work as a news anchor and ESPN sportscaster, and Rich has written over three dozen novels for children and teens, including such as Babe Conquers the World co-written with Sandra. The Young Adult Library Services Association named his novel Wrestling Sturbridge, one of the 100 Best of the Best for the Twenty-First Century.

You can visit our guests at SandraNeilWallace.com, and RichWallaceBooks.com, and follow them on Twitter @SandraNWallace and @RWallaceBooks.

October 23, 2017 - This week, our time machine shuttles back and forth between the 1880s and the 1980s, with a story anchored at the ends of family trees and DNA strands. Our guide on this journey is Fiona Davis, author of The Address: A Novel. It builds a bridge between two women, united across a century by the legendary Dakota apartment building.

Famous today as the home to celebrities and artists -- and infamous as the spot John Lennon met his doom -- it was originally a Guided Age an enigma, plopped in the middle of Upper Manhattan's muddy fields, still dotted with ramshackle farmhouses. By the 1980s, the Dakota had fallen into sooty disrepair, and found its grand apartments suffering architectural indignities like lime green shag carpets, bamboo walls, and mirrored closets.

The Address follows on the heels of Fiona Davis's acclaimed first book, The Dollhouse, about the famed Barbizon Hotel for Women. Born in Canada and raised in places as far-flung as Utah, Texas, and New Jersey, our guest worked for years as an actress on Broadway, and attended both the College of William & Mary and the Columbia University School of Journalism.

Find her online at FionaDavis.net, Facebook.com/FionaDavisAuthor, or @FionaJDavis on Twitter.

October 16, 2017 - This week, our time machine travels back to a date of infamy: September 9, 1971, when inmates seized control of Attica Correctional Facility in Western New York State. A four-day standoff resulted, ending when police and corrections officers stormed Attica, leaving 29 inmates and 10 guards dead and dying. In the immediate aftermath, newspapers and television reported the state-sanctioned version of events: The prisoners had murdered the hostages.

The medical examiner debunked that narrative the next morning, stating that police bullets had killed those held captive. From that point on, New York officials from Governor Nelson Rockefeller on down kicked into high gear to suppress the full truth -- a truth that remained buried and scoffed at for half a century.

Malcolm Bell -- hired by New York State in 1973 to prosecute any cases that might arise out of its investigation -- reveals what really happened when the state retook the prison. His book is The Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Cover-Up, and the Pursuit of Justice. While serving as a New York State prosecutor, Bell blew the whistle on the Empire State’s refusal to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the extensive torture and murder that they committed during the riots.

You can find our guest at Facebook.com/MalcolmBellAuthor

October 9, 2017 - This week, our time machine flies up to the Great White North -- the very heart of Canada -- for a road trip to Brandon, Manitoba's Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum, a national historic site dedicated to the memory of the men who fought and died in the skies during the Second World War.

It's the only museum of its kind in the world, marking where crews from Australia, New Zealand, England and Canada trained. Prime Minister Winston Churchill called Canada "the Great Dominion," and said the Commonwealth Air Training Plan was its greatest contribution to Allied victory over the Axis powers, specifically Germany and Italy in the European Theater.

Our guest is Museum president John McNarry. Visit the museum at AirMuseum.ca, join their Facebook group, or find them @CATPM_Brandon on Twitter.

October 2, 2017 - Today, our time machine follows professional baseball players, onto the battlefields of Europe in World War One a century ago. We hear the story about how the game, players, fans and the War Department clash in From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball During the Great War, by author Jim Leeke. Jim is a contributor to the Society for American Baseball Research Baseball Biography Project, as well as the writer or editor of several books on U.S. and military history.

We chatted a previously with Jim about his Civil War novel for young adults: Matty Boy, and talked about a single, special game along the lines of today's topic in his book: Nine Innings for the King: The Day Wartime London Stopped for Baseball, July 4, 1918. Which makes Jim, our three-peating guest.

Find Jim on at AABaseball.org or on Twitter @WW1Baseball.

September 25, 2017 - This week, our time machine follows one woman's modern quest to recover property stolen by Nazi Germany. It was only a single theft in the National Socialist State's vast, systematic plundering of Jewish wealth, but the Wolff family's story quickly becomes our story, and we find ourselves rooting for justice.

Author Dina Gold's grandmother, Nellie Wolff, told her stories of the glamorous life she had led in pre-war Berlin, and how she dreamed of reclaiming the majestic building that had housed the family business. Grandma Nellie didn't live to see the fall of the Berlin Wall, but when Germany reunified, Dina marched into a German government ministry and declared: “I’ve come to claim my family’s building.”

Dina tells the story in her book, Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice at Krausenstrasse 17/18, Berlin. Raised in the U.K. and is now an American citizen living in the nation's capital, she sits on the board of the Jewish Community Center and just completed her stint as co-chair on the council of the Washington Jewish Film Festival. A senior editor at Moment magazine, she started her career in London as a financial journalist after postgraduate studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Later, at the BBC, she worked as an investigative reporter and television producer.

Learn more about this story of a generational quest for restoration online at StolenLegacy.com, and follow her on Twitter @Dina_Gold and at @Stolen_Legacy for the book.

Myst Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

September 18, 2017 - Hello, true believers! This week, we meet a national treasure who serves as a bridge from the Golden Age of comic books to today's blockbuster, multi-film CGI universes. It's the origin story of the man who -- along with talented co-creators like artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon -- created such iconic characters as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man.

Filling in speech balloons is Bob Batchelor who brings us Stan Lee: The Man behind Marvel. Bob is a cultural historian who has written or edited more than two dozen books on popular culture and American literature, including books about John Updike, The Great Gatsby, and Mad Men. He lives in Oxford, Ohio, and teaches at Miami University.

Find him at BobBatchelor.com, on Facebook, or at the Twitter and Instagram handle @BobPBatchelor.

September 11, 2017 - his week, our time machine travels back to 1840 for a belt of hard cider courtesy of presidential candidate -- William Henry Harrison. A hero in the War of 1812, "Old Tippecanoe" and served in a variety of public offices, before winning the Whig nomination and making a bid for the presidency with Virginia Democrat John Tyler.

In 2017, we expect the atmosphere of a Coney Island summer to surround our campaigns. We demand style and charisma. Well, 1840 is when it all began. The big money, wild rallies, self-promotion, slogans and stagecraft. Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter Ronald G. Shafer tells this colorful story in his book, The Carnival Campaign: How the Rollicking 1840 Campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" Changed Presidential Elections Forever.

You can check out our guest online at CarnivalCampaign.com or follow @Ron Shafer1 on Twitter.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for an Author's Evening with Eva Stachniak at the Kosciuszko Foundation on Sept. 12, 2017.

September 4, 2017 - This week, our time machine travels back to early 20th Century Eastern Europe, where we'll meet ballerina Bronislava Nijinsky. Bronia was a remarkable dancer and woman, who charted a course for greatness despite the upheavals outside and inside her family. The Chosen Maiden blends fiction and fact seamlessly, while including cameos by giants of the period such as prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, Coco Chanel, and Pablo Picasso.

Bronislava Nijinsky was born in the last decade of the Victorian Era, and the inspiration for her brother Valaslav's play which gives the novel its title: The Chosen Maiden.

Our guide on this journey of historical fiction is Eva Stachniak. The Nijinskys inspired her with their lives as Polish dancers in a Tsarist Russia, that gave way to war and revolution. Born in a Poland still behind the Iron Curtain, Eva emigrated to Canada in 1981, and is the bestselling author of The Winter Palace, Empress of the Night, Necessary Lies, and Garden of Venus.

Visit her online at EvaStachniak.com, @EvaStachniak on Twitter, or Facebook.com/EvaStachniakAuthor.

August 28, 2017 - This week, our time machine takes us into Nazi-occupied France, to meet a bold patriot with a famous Uncle Charles. Her name was Genevieve de Gaulle, and she did the hard work of resistance behind enemy lines, that the general urged from exile.

Paige Bowers tells Genevieve's story in The General's Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France. It taps a rich historical well of interviews with family members, former associates, prominent historians, and never-before-seen papers written by de Gaulle herself, exploring her relationship as confidante and daughter figure to the legendary French patriot. This week, our time machine takes us into Nazi-occupied France, to meet a bold patriot with a famous Uncle Charles. Her name was Genevieve de Gaulle, and she did the hard work of resistance behind enemy lines, that the general urged from exile.

Paige Bowers tells Genevieve's story in The General's Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France. It taps a rich historical well of interviews with family members, former associates, prominent historians, and never-before-seen papers written by de Gaulle herself, exploring her relationship as confidante and daughter figure to the legendary French patriot.

For more on our guest, visit PaigeBowers.com, @PaigeBowers on Twitter, or Facebook.com/PaigeBowersAuthor.