Madison BookBeat

Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers

Stu Levitan welcomes one of the most interesting and insightful essayists on the scene today, Barrett Swanson, here to discuss his outstanding first collection, Lost in Summerland, published this spring by the good people at Counterpoint Press.

Addressing toxic masculinity at a men’s retreat in Ohio. Embedded on an organic produce farm in Waunakee run by a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Dealing with the traumatic brain injury to his older brother, and the drowning death of his best friend. Sussing out a utopian compound in the Florida swamps. Working on his football technique with his father. Role-playing a victim at FEMA’s massive disaster simulation site in Texas. Hanging out at the West Wing Weekend outside Washington. Being moved beyond comprehension at a spiritualist retreat he attended with his brother in upstate New York. Just some of journeys Barrett Swanson takes to find America – and himself – in the age of Trump.

Lost in Summerland is a tour de force of cultural anthropology and vibrant writing, 14 essays that reveal both who Barrett Swanson is and who we are. Because he believes what James Baldwin wrote in 1962 – that the artist “must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

Barrett Swanson grew up in Brookfield, went to Catholic high school in Waukesha. After graduating with a degree in political science and English from Loyola University in Chicago, he got his MFA in creative writing from the UW-Madison – making him our third guest from the UW creative writing program, following Aimee Nezhu-ku-matathil and Steven Wright. He received a Pushcart Prize in 2015, and the next year returned to the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing as a Halls Emerging Artist Fellow.

A contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, his short fiction and essays have been featured in the New York Times magazine, the Guardian and numerous other periodicals, and collected in several anthologies, including Best American Sports Writing, Best American Travel Writing and Best American Essays.

He is now also a tenure track assistant professor in the department of languages and literatures at the university of Wisconsin whitewater, where his rate my professor rating is 4.8 out of 5, with such praise as awesome, inspirational and would smoke with him. Which, of course, Barrett would certainly not do. He lives with his wife on Madison’s east side.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Barrett Swanson.

Stu Levitan welcomes one of the brightest stars in the firmament that is the University of Wisconsin faculty, Professor Jordan Ellenberg, here to talk about his New York Times best-seller, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else.

As coined by the ancient Greeks, “geometry” literally means “measuring the world,” and the world which Jordan Ellenberg measures in Shape is wide and far-flung indeed. Gerrymandering, the tv show Survivor, Abraham Lincoln, pandemics and flitting mosquitoes, artificial intelligence, even an answer to the question ‘how many holes in a straw’? And it’s an accessible world – yes, there are symbols and equations, and you’re welcome to have pad and paper with you as you read, but the book is mainly a narrative built on stories and people.

Jordan Ellenberg was not a late-bloomer. The son of two biostatisticians, he taught himself to read at age two by watching Sesame Street, he was competing in high school math competitions while in the fourth grade, and four years later he was taking honors calculus at the University of Maryland. At 17, he beat out 400,000 North American high school students to win the USA Mathematical Olympiad, and over a 3-year period took two golds and a silver at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

He took his BA and Ph D at Harvard, with a masters from Johns Hopkins in creative writing in between, then started his academic career at Princeton. He came to the University of Wisconsin in 2005, made full professor in 2011, was named a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in 2014 and since 2015 has been the John D MacArthur Professor of Mathematics.

His previous books include How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking in 2014 and the novel The Grasshopper King. He also has a credited cameo in the 2017 movie Gifted in the role of math professor, giving him a Kevin Bacon degree of separation of two and making him one of the extraordinarily small and select group of people with an Erdos/Bacon number. He maintains a blog Quomodocumque.wordpress.com and tweets at JSEllenberg.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to MBB Professor Jordan Ellenberg

Stu Levitan welcomes the social justice activist, educator, award-winning columnist, and author Joan Steinau Lester. Her memoir Loving Before Loving: A Marriage in Black and White is just out from our very good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press. Along with her Madison publisher, Joan also could have joined us as a Madison author, with a Ph D from the fabled UW history department; but, for reasons we’ll discuss, she was unable to accept the department’s offer.

Personally, and professionally, Joan Steinau Lester has been at the forefront of most of the great social justice movements of the last seven decades. As a teenager, she refused to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath and picketed for civil rights. At 22, she married a Black man, the writer, educator and activist Julius Lester, in 1962, when mixed-race marriages were illegal in 27 states. At 64, she married a White woman when that wasn’t legal anywhere.  In the late sixties, she was part of an early Women’s Liberation group with such prominent feminists as Robin Morgan, Kate Millet, Flo Kennedy, Ti-Grace Atkinson and others. And long before diversity, equity and inclusion were common buzzwords, she used her doctorate in multicultural education from the University of Massachusetts to give anti-racism workshops, then co-found and direct the nonprofit Equity Institute in 1981.

Her previous books include the novel Mama’s Child, with a foreword by Alice Walker; the young adult novel Black, White, Other; a biography of her friend from Antioch College, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Fire in My Soul; Taking Charge: Every Woman’s Action Guide, and The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas.

Her columns have been published in USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan and  New York Times.

She received the National Lesbian and Gay Siegenthaler Award for Commentary on National Public Radio and was a Finalist from the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and for the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction award for narrative nonfiction. She lives in Berkeley California with her wife Carole, to whom Loving Before Loving is dedicated. It is a pleasure to welcome to MBB, Dr. Joan Steinau Lester.

WORT 89.9 FM airdate - July 5, 2021

Stu Levitan welcomes R. Richard (Dick) Wagner for a special Pride Month encore presentation of our conversation about his award-wining We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History, from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. The book covers the period from territorial days to the 1960s; Dick’s companion volume, Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History brings the story up to the present day.

In 1982, under Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to adopt a gay rights law, making discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation illegal. In 1983, under Democratic Governor Tony Earl, Wisconsin became the first state to have a Governor’s Commission on Lesbian and Gay Issues. Wisconsin is the only state to have elected three openly gay members of Congress – 2 Democrats, 1 Republican.

But the dairy state has not always been so friendly to non-normative sexuality. In fact, laws against gay sex predate the state. When the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836, territorial legislators took the law against sodomy from the Michigan Territory and increased the penalty from three years to five.

In 1905, the Wisconsin Attorney General called oral sex “this unspeakable offense,” ‘the infamous crime,’ degrading and disgusting.” In 1928, the Supreme Court called sodomy “repulsive and detestable,” but “too prevalent to be ignored.”

In the 1940s, Wisconsin criminalized even thinking gay, passing the Sexual Psychopath Law to prosecute people whose impulsiveness of behavior rendered them sexually irresponsible – whether or not they ever acted on those supposed impulses.

Even that citadel of sifting and winnowing, the University of Wisconsin, got into the gay-bashing business, investigating hundreds of gay students in the fifties and early sixties, and sending many of them for therapeutic discipline. UW business manager A.W. Peterson even took the doors off the toilet stalls in the Bascom Hall men’s rooms, to stop gay assignations.

It’s part of our state’s history that most people, straight or gay, don’t know, but should. Because a community cannot fully know itself, or be fully known by others, without knowing its history. As they say, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

There is no one more qualified or appropriate to write this groundbreaking history of early gay life in Wisconsin than Dick Wagner, who is himself historic, as the first openly gay member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. He even lives in a landmarked building on Jenifer Street which long before he came to town was a center of Madison gay life.

Dick came to Madison as a graduate student in history in 1965, getting his doctorate in 1971. In 1972, Gov. Pat Lucey named him executive director of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. After Lucey resigned in the summer of 1977 to become Ambassador to Mexico, Dick ran the executive residence for Gov. Martin Schreiber until January 1979, when he joined the Department of Administration as a budget analyst. Dick retired from state service in 2005.

In addition to serving on the Dane County Board from 1980-1994 – including four years as the first openly gay county board chair in Wisconsin – Dick’s record of state and local public service is extensive. In 1983, Gov. Tony Early appointed him co-chair of the aforementioned Governor’s Council on Lesbian and Gay Issues. That same year,

Stu Levitan welcomes award-winning and bestselling author Andrew Maraniss for a special Pride month conversation about Glenn Burke, who was a rising young star in Major League Baseball in the late seventies until he was effectively run out of the game because he was gay. The book is Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, from the good people at Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Andrew is that rarest of authors – not just a true son of Madison, but a grandson of Madison, born right here in 1970 to Linda and David Maraniss, Linda an environmentalist and David of course also being an award-winning and bestselling author and the son of Mary Maraniss, a book editor at the UW Press, and her husband Elliott, the subject of David’s most recent book and during the very period that Andrew writes about, my editor at the Capital Times.

This is Andrew’s third book examining the intersection of sports and society, and our third conversation, following Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the collision of race and sports in the south in 2015 and Games of Deception: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany in 2019. He received the Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the RFK Book Awards for Strong Inside and the Sydney Taylor Honor Award for Games of Deception. He is also a Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics and a contributor to ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com.

It is a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat, Andrew Maraniss.

Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning journalist, music critic and author Joel Selvin for a conversation about his new book Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise, from the good people at House of Anansi Press. It’s the inside story of how one of the first great pop styles was born in a high school locker room and then went on to conquer the world.

It’s a story Joel Selvin is exceptionally well-qualified to tell. No only is he an award-winning journalist and music critic who covered pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle for more than thirty-five years, and the author of best-selling books about the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Ricky Nelson, Haight-Ashbury and more. He is also a native Californian, albeit one from the Bay Area, who first visited Los Angeles as a 10-year-old, just at the time the events in this book were transpiring.

As to the requisite Madison connection, well, it’s through me. Because this is the third time Joel has appeared with me, following conversations about his books Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day; and Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues. At least we’ve finally got a book that is mainly about sun and fun, although there are some dark, even tragic moments as well. And btw – with three appearances, Joel is now tied with Madison’s own Ben Sidran for the number two spot on my all-time roster, behind only our former neighbor, David Maraniss.

It's a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat, Joel Selvin

Airdate on WORT 89.9 FM - June 14, 2021

Stu Levitan welcomes the renowned broadcast journalist, educator and author Patty Loew, formerly of Madison, for a conversation about the second edition of her award-winning book Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Wisconsin has about 87,000 American Indians living on about 647,000 acres of reservation and in various urban and rural settings, about 1.5% of the state’s population on about 1.5 percent of the state’s land mass. But despite those small percentages, the 11 federally recognized nations and tribal communities – Menominee, Oneida, Ho-Chunk, Forest County Potawatomi, Stockbridge-Munsee, and the six bands of the Lake Superior Ojibwe, plus the unrecognized Brothertown Indian Nation – have played a huge role in our history, economy and culture.

Telling that history is the business that occupies Patty Loew in Indian Nations of Wisconsin, a comprehensive and accessible account, heavily illustrated, with maps and tables showing the changes over time in the location and population of the Nations. It’s a book she is extremely, perhaps uniquely qualified to tell. Because, as an enrolled Member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe with a Ph D, she has both studied this history, and lived it.

Now, while you were watching Patty Loew the award-winning reporter/anchor on WKOW-TV from the mid-70s to the late-90s and producer/host on Wisconsin Public Television from 1991-2011, you probably didn’t realize that Patty Loew the student was also working towards a masters and doctorate in mass communications from the UW-Madison, with a dissertation on “The Chippewa and Their Newspapers in the ‘UnProgressive Era.’”

Upon getting that doctorate in 1998, she continued on TV for a few years, but also became Patty Loew the Professor, in the UW’s Department of Life Sciences Communication, where she remained until 2017. That’s when she became Professor Emerita and moved to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she also directs the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.

As broadcast journalist and author, she has won numerous state, national and even international awards, and has received numerous honors, including the Outstanding Service Award, Great Lakes Inter-tribal Council. Her book Seventh Generation Earth Ethics: Native Voices of Wisconsin, also from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, won the Midwest Book Award in 2014, while the first edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin received the 2001 Outstanding Book Award, Wisconsin Library Association, so we know how good a third edition would be. She has also written an award-winning textbook for fourth-graders, Native People of Wisconsin, along with a teacher’s guide co-written by our own Back to the Country co-host Bobbi Malone.

It is a real pleasure to welcome to MBB, a friend to us all, Patty Loew.

Stu Levitan welcomes someone who’s had an exceptionally interesting and varied career in music, movies, finance and technology - Jonathan Taplin, author of The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock and Roll Life. And what a life it’s been, with scenes filled with figures from the pantheon of pop culture – Bob Dylan, George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, the Band, Judy Collins, Martin Scorcese, Wim Wenders, even the Walt Disney Studios.

And as the founder of the first streaming Video On Demand Platform in 1996, called Intertainer, and holder of two patents for that technology,  Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, and former Professor at the USC Annenberg School, Jon is also among our foremost thinkers and doers concerning the intersection of technology and culture, a topic he addressed in his very prescient book in 2017, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.

As for the requisite Madison connection, I was at two of the seminal concerts he tour managed, saw three of the movies he produced, and still listen to the music he helped bring into the world.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jonathan Taplin

Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning comic novelist and just-retired columnist for the Miami Herald Carl Hiaasen, coming to the Wisconsin Book Festival for a virtual appearance at the Madison Public Library Foundation’s Lunch for Libraries next Tuesday May 25. Carl will be discussing his uproarious new bestseller Squeeze Me, now out in paperback with a brand-new epilogue, which will be sent to all who attend that annual fundraising event.

Squeeze Me is a sharp, even savage satire set in Palm Beach FL involving a giant Burmese python, a missing society matron, a gutsy wildlife wrangler, a mystery man with one eye and a great library, hapless crooks, a wrongly accused immigrant, a crude and stupid president of the united states in residence at Casa Bellicosa, and much more. It is classic Carl Hiaasen, which means it is a fiercely funny social commentary about life, death and the environment in the Sunshine State.

It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Carl Hiaasen.

Stu Levitan welcomes Jeff Kannel, author of Make Way For Liberty: Wisconsin African Americans in the Civil War from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

When the civil war began in April 1861, neither the US Army or the Wisconsin state militia allowed Black men to serve. But on April 9, 1865, Black men – some of them from Wisconsin — held the rifles that fired the last shots preventing Robert E Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia from escaping at the Battle of Appomattox Court House. By that time, more than 450 Black men, residents of Wisconsin or credited to the state, had served in the US Colored Troops. In addition, several hundred, maybe thousands, had served in support roles for Wisconsin officers and regiments.

Who those men were, and what their lives were like before, during and after the war, are the questions Jeff Kannel answers in this comprehensive survey of an overlooked aspect of our shared history. They’re answers he started researching ten years ago, after attending a presentation at Kenosha’s Civil War Museum, where he was a volunteer. And after retiring as an instructor at Gateway Technical College, he had time to continue that research, and turn it into this book, for which we are all indebted.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jeff Kannel