Madison BookBeat

Host David Ahrens spends the hour with Jeffrey Boldt (https://www.jeffreydboldt.net/about), a Madison author with deep experience in the subject of his new environmental legal thriller, Blue Lake (River Grove Books, 2022).It’s a novel that combines romance and a thrilling mystery, amidst the rich beauty black spruces, white pines, and austere Upper Midwest lakes. It’s a novel that Jeffrey Boldt was well-primed to write, drawing on his legal experience as a retired administrative law judge for the state.

Stu Levitan welcomes a Madison author with a remarkable life story, Dr. Patrick McBride. His book, written with his twin brother Dennis is, “The Luckiest Boy in the World.”Dr. McBride earned a zoology degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1976, a medical degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980, and a master’s degree in public health from the University of South Carolina in 1982. Two years later he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, and with a senior colleague started the first inpatient family practice service at the UW Hospital and Clinics while also serving as the director of a new UW clinic in DeForest. He would later serve as Associate Dean of Students, Associate Dean for Faculty and as Director of Alumni Relations for the renamed School of Medicine & Public Health (UW-SMPH). In his 37-year career, he published over 200 journal articles, abstracts, and book chapters, brought in millions of dollars in grants to fund medical research, received 16 teaching awards, and upon his retirement in 2017, was named professor emeritus. Among his many other honors, enshrinement on the Wauwatosa East High School’s “Wall of Inspiration.” He has been married to Kimberly Schappe McBride for forty-two years, and they have two adult children, Sean and Gabrielle.His twin brother and co-author Dennis has an equally impressive resume. In 2020 he was elected to a four-year term as Mayor of their hometown of Wauwatosa, following ten years on the city’s common council. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from UW-Milwaukee, a master’s degree in public administration from Princeton University, and a law degree from New York University, and spent the bulk of his professional career as Senior and Supervisory Trial Attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A former track star and champion marathoner, he was inducted into the Athletic Halls of Fame at UW-Milwaukee and Wauwatosa East.But before all of Pat’s accomplishments and honors, a unique entry on his resume that presaged all that was to come – he was, and remains, the youngest Equipment Manager and Assistant Trainer in professional sports history.And all because of a 25-word answer he wrote in 1969 to the question – why would you like to be a bat boy for the Milwaukee Brewers? He got the gig when he was just 15, and from that opportunity came the chance to also work for the Green Bay Packers. Then he hit the trifecta, as a ball boy for the new Milwaukee Bucks.But it was not an idyllic life growing up in Wauwatosa for Paddy and Dinty, and their five siblings. In fact, it was a living hell, because their parents – both of them successful and popular journalists – were alcoholics who fought constantly before finally separating.“The Luckiest Boy in the World” tells the amazing and inspirational story of how Pat McBride not only survived but thrived, first in locker rooms and arenas, then in medical clinics and the halls of academia. It is a real pleasure to welcome him to Madison BookBeat.

Madison BookBeat host Angie Trudell Vasquez speaks with writer Maria Elena Scott (https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/sparks-of-light-fly-by-maria-elena-scott/) on her new memoir about moving to Madison, Wisconsin from Matamoros, Mexico when she was a young girl in 1967. Maria Elena and her brother Juan grew up in an orphanage during the 1950s and the 1960s. When she was 10 she was adopted but her brother was not. How they end up together is a testament to their love and devotion to each other. This is a collection of prose, poetry and found text.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, David Ahrens speaks with Rebecca Donner, author of a compelling and deeply-researched biography about her great-great-aunt Mildred Fish Harnack, a Wisconsin woman who went on to lead an anti- Nazi espionage ring in Berlin.It's titled "All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/rebecca-donner/all-the-frequent-troubles-of-our-days/9780316561693/)," (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), was an instant New York Times bestseller, and has since received multitudinous honors, including being listed for a 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, a New York Times Notable Book of 2021, and a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year.Rebecca Donner (https://www.rebeccadonner.com/) is the winner of many awards and is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She is also the author of the novel Sunset Terrace and Burnout, a graphic novel about ecoterrorism. Ms. Donner is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and has taught writing at Wesleyan University, Columbia University, and Barnard College. She is the great-great niece of Mildred Harnack.

Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers.Stu Levitan welcomes back to the program the Rock and Roll Detective himself, Madison’s own Jim Berkenstadt, to talk about his latest book Mysteries in the Music: Case Closed.Who really discovered Elvis Presley? What role did the CIA play in the gun attack on Bob Marley and his eventual death from cancer? How seriously did the FBI take its investigation into whether the lyrics to Louie, Louie were dirty? Did the Beach Boys steal a song from Charles Manson? Did Bob Dylan really record an album with members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?These are just some of the controversies and conspiracy theories Jim Berkenstadt investigates as only he can, before providing definitive answers. It’s a book he is uniquely qualified to write.He is, after all, the Rock and Roll Detective, LLC, specializing in uncovering the lost histories and solving the mysteries of pop music. And because musicians know and trust him, he has great access to the people who were there when the deals went down. The book is filled with revealing interviews with such legendary musicians as Elvis’s late great guitarist Scotty Moore, drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Keltner, producer Glyn Johns, and my old cab driving colleague Butch Vig, who also wrote the forward, and more. And not just musicians – this may be the only book which features interviews with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, disgraced Col. Oliver North, a sitting federal judge, and even a former CIA agent.Jim is especially authoritative about the Beatles, serving as historical consultant for Martin Scorcese’s HBO Emmy-wining film, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, as well as to the estate of George Harrison and the Beatles’ Apple Corps. Itself. Sharp-eyed viewers will have spotted his name among those thanked in the credits to Peter Jackson’s majestic new 8-hour film about the recording of the Beatles’ Let It Be album, Get Back.In addition to the new book tour, Jim is currently serving as co-executive producer and script consultant on the feature film adaptation of his book The Beatle Who Vanished, about the drummer Jimmie Nicol, who at the height of Beatlemania in 1964 filled in for a fortnight when Ringo Starr was felled by tonsilitis just before a world tour. That best-seller has been included in the Library and Archives of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as have his earlier books Black Market Beatles and Classic Rock Albums: Nirvana-Neverrmind,. He was also a featured expert for several seasons on the Reelz Channel TV series Celebrity Legacies and Celebrity Damage Control.He lives north side with his wife, Holly Cremer Berkenstadt.Jim was with us last fall to discuss The Beatle Who Vanished, and it is a pleasure to welcome him back to MBB.

Milwaukee poet Ed Werstein's latest collection is titled Communiqué: Poems From The Headlines. The book is sectioned like a newspaper, and Werstein's poems are inspired by headlines both new and old.In this edition of Madison Book Beat, hosts Angela Trudell Vasquez and Devin Trudell speak with Ed about his newest collection and revisit some topics in the news over the last decade.

Stu Levitan welcomes William S. Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and author of, The Creeks Will Rise: People Coexisting With Floods, from the good people at Chicago Review Press. Floods are a fact of life, and have been that way forever. Almost every culture around the world has a creation myth that features a flood. Today, they remain a necessary part of nature, renewing the soil, creating new habitats. But while floods are natural, flood damages are not – they are solely the responsibility of humankind. And it’s a massive responsibility – thanks to our decades of building in floodplains, floods are also the most frequent and most expensive type of weather disaster in the United States, accounting for 90 percent of our natural disasters. From 1980 to 2019,  the United States suffered 32 billion-dollar floods, averaging about $5 billion in flood damages a year, part of the $1.6 trillion in weather-related damages during that time. During that period, the Kickapoo River in southwest Wisconsin suffered four floods, after seven between 1907 and 1978.  And even though none of them billion-$, the people of the valley had had enough after the flood of 1935, and in 1937 asked Washington for help. It finally came in 1962, authorization for a dam on the upper river, just below La Farge –designed not only to stop floods, but also to create an income-generating recreation area. And those disasters are only going to get worse, as the climate crisis produces ever-more intense weather events and the aging infrastructure of 92,000 dams and 30,000 miles of levees fails at an ever-increasing rate. According to the University of Bristol 43 million Americans, and $ 1.2 trillion in assets are currently at risk of floods in the lower forty-eight states. And if we make it to the next century, analysts expect that 2.5 million properties worth more than $ 1 trillion will experience chronic flooding and thirty cities to be underwater. How and why we need to change our national water policy from trying to control floods to avoiding them is the business that occupies Bill Becker in this book that is both frightening and inspiring. It is a book he is uniquely qualified to write, as an expert in alternative energy, and one of the key figures in the successful effort in the late seventies to oppose that dam across the upper Kickapoo and get the village of Soldiers Grove to move its business district out of the floodplain and onto higher ground.  After helping move SD, he moved on to become became Counselor to the Administrator, Small Business Administration, spent 12 years as Regional Director and Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary U.S. Department of Energy, founded and was co-director of The Future We Want, and since 2011 has been a Senior Fellow at Natural Capitalism Solutions, a non-profit founded by environmentalist and author Hunter Lovins. But before all that, and critical to his narrative, he was a photo-journalist, first for the US Army in Vietnam in the mid-sixties, later for the Associated Press in Madison, but most critically with the Kickapoo Scout in Soldiers Grove. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison Book Beat, Bill Becker.

Guest host George Dreckmann welcomes Stu Levitan to discuss his book Madison in the Sixties, from the very good people at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Documenting those issues, along with stories of the public schools, highways and transportation, law and disorder, planning and economic development, and other topics, is the business that occupies Stu Levitan in this first comprehensive account of the most famous decade in our history.Stu did not spend the sixties in Madison. He first passed through Madison on the Grateful Dead tour in early 1973, then came for good in August, 1975. But still, he is uniquely qualified to write about them. As a newspaper reporter for the Capital Times and then the Madison Press Connection in the mid-late seventies, he covered many of the issues and individuals from the sixties. As a county supervisor representing a downtown district in the early to late eighties, he dealt with the legacy of the actions and decisions from then. And as a longtime member and chair of several city commissions, including the Plan Commission and Community Development Authority, he knows what it’s like to make those kind of decisions.After the Madison Press Connection folded in 1980, Stu went to work for the legislature’s powerful Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules. In 1983, he finally gave in to his father’s expectations and went to law school, then in 1987 quit the county board to accept a job as a mediator/arbitrator for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, implementing the collective bargaining law that Scott Walker destroyed. That’s when he retired and got serious about the book, which was published in November, 2018.In addition to being the host/producer of Madison Book Beat for its first two years, Stu does the weekly Madison in the Sixties feature on the WORT Wednesday nights news, for which he has received 2 first place awards for writing in the past three years from the Milwaukee Press Club. He has also written extensively for local and national publications, including Isthmus, Madison Magazine and High Times. And he will insist that Bob Dylan is the greatest singer-songwriter since Homer.It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat its founder, Stu Levitan.

Madison BookBeat - Your listener-supported, community radio home for Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers.Stu Levitan gets 2022 off to a wondrous start with an encore presentation of a conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil about her an enchanting and stimulating collection of illustrated nature essays called “World Of Wonders: In Praise Of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments.” Published by the good people at Milkweed Editions, it was named Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. And Aimee met two of the criteria as a former Badger who was at the Wisconsin Book Festival.If you took Aldo Leopold’s expert eye for Nature and Marcel Proust’s ability to evoke memory out of experience and filtered it all through a poet and essayist who was the daughter of a Filipina mother and South Indian father, you might come close to what Aimee Nezhukumatathil has accomplished in World of Wonders.Born in Chicago in 1974, she lived as a child in Iowa, Arizona, Kansas, New York and Ohio; received her undergraduate and master’s degrees in poetry and nonfiction from The Ohio State University; was awarded a poetry fellowship to the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing; spent 14 years teaching in western New York, and in 2016 accepted appointment as Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where her husband, the essayist Dustin Parsons, also teaches. Since 2003, she has published four collections of poetry and a chapbook of garden poems with the poet Ross Gay, and has been included in several collections and anthologies. She has been awarded a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, among other honors.A real pleasure to have Prof. Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Madison BookBeat.

Our guest today is Madison author Christina Clancy, for a conversation about her new novel, Shoulder Season.  Christi gave a very interesting and engaging talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October, and I’m delighted to bring her to you today.As you may, or more likely may not know, from 1968 to 1981 there was in southeast Wisconsin the Lake Geneva Playboy Club Hotel, a full-service facility featuring big-name entertainment, championship golf course, a restaurant, cocktail lounge, and, yes the requisite colony of bunnies – many of whom were from small towns around Wisconsin. Towns like East Troy, about 15 miles up HWY 120, where the Alpine Valley Music Center opened in 1977 – the largest amphitheater in the country until 1993. The former Playboy Club, which had become the Americana Center in 1982, has been the Grand Geneva Resort since 1993, What life was like for the young women who became Bunnies, and how the resort and the amphitheater affected East Troy, are the main issues which concern Christi Clancy in this, her second novel for St. Martin’s Press. It is so interesting and well-written I expect it will do at least as well as her first work, The Second House, so successful it has been optioned for TV miniseries A Ph D in English from the UW-Milwaukee, Christi worked eight years as a marketing specialist for IBM, then almost a decade as an adjunct English professor at Beloit College before becoming a full-time writer. Her work has also appeared in our best newspapers and literary journals. She lives in Madison with her family. It’s a real pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Christina Clancy.