Madison BookBeat

Stu Levitan welcomes the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, whose long-awaited graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength comes out tomorrow and is already receiving rave reviews. It also features the extremely extensive coloring collaboration of her, wife, the artist Holly Rae Taylor. And on Thursday at 4 o’clock, Alison will be appearing at the Wisconsin Book Festival, in conversation with another best-selling memoirist, Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild.

“The unexamined life,” Socrates reportedly said during his trial for impiety, “is not worth living.” By that standard, as well as many others, Alison Bechdel has had a very worthwhile life. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, a decade-by-decade examination of her exuberant, sometimes excessive, pursuit of bodily and metaphysical fitness, is her third graphic memoir examining her life and that of her family. It follows Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, from 2006, about the strained relationship she had with her closeted gay father, and 2012’s Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, about the strained relationship she had with her emotionally distant mother. Two years later, she was rewarded for those works by being awarded a McArthur Fellowship, the so-called “Genius Grant.” Fun Home: The Musical came to Broadway in 2015, winning 5 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

She began her literary career with the syndicated comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008. It was in a 1985 strip that she popularized, but did not devise, the so-called Bechdel Test as a metric to measure the representation of women in fiction. She and Holly Rae Taylor live in Vermont, where she has also served as the state’s cartoonist laureate.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Alison Bechdel.

Stu Levitan celebrates National Poetry Month by welcoming Professor Richard Jones of DePaul University, editor of its award-winning illustrated literary journal Poetry East, now celebrating its 100th edition and 40th anniversary. Part two of our conversation with Howard Sherman about his book Another Day’s Begun” Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st century, originally scheduled for today, will be heard later this spring.

Richard Jones is the author of sixteen books of poems, most recently his quasi-memoir of a peripatetic life, Stranger on Earth. He has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems and Billy Collins’s Poetry 180, and his poems have been featured on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and The Writer’s Almanac. His selected poems, The Blessing, won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry in 2000.

It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Prof. Richard Jones.

Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers

Stu Levitan welcomes Edward Ball, his latest book is the most extraordinary family memoir I have ever read, Life Of A Klansman: A Family History In White Supremacy, from the good people at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Demographers tell us that about 137 million white Americans – more than half the current white population of the country – are direct descendants of members of the Ku Klux Klan, mostly from the second wave, from 1915 to 1925. Edward Ball’s link to the Klan goes back even further. His grandmother’s grandfather was Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, a downwardly mobile carpenter of French Creole descent born in New Orleans in 1832. He served – none-too-honorably —  as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War and then in its immediate aftermath joined the first generation of the Ku-Klux and other white terrorist groups in their murderous and successful effort to “redeem” their heritage, end Reconstruction and reestablish white supremacy.

The story of Constant Lecorgne is a profoundly important microhistory, showing how the life of this very ordinary, even mediocre person reflects an entire culture that helped change history. Because the tragic reality is that, through men like Constant Lecorgne, the South snatched victory from the jaws of defeat; the Klan was not put down; the Klan faded because it won, preserving white supremacy for another hundred years.

It is a story Edward Ball is exceptionally, even uniquely, qualified to tell. His first book, for which he won the 1998 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was Slaves in the Family, an account both of his father’s family, major slaveholders in South Carolina for 170 years, and the histories of ten Black families once enslaved on their rice plantations. His other books include The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South; The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures; The Genetic Strand: Exploring A Family History Through DNA, and Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. The recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and several fellowships, he has also taught at Yale University and the State University of NY, and joins us today from his home in New Haven.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Edward Ball.

Stu Levitan welcomes Sarah Chayes, her latest book is On Corruption in America and What is At Stake, from the good people at Penguin Random House.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. One of the ways that evil manifests itself is through corruption – individuals, or more likely networks, abusing public office for private gain. How to identify and fight that corruption is the business that occupies Sarah Chayes in her new book, as it has occupied much of her professional life, especially as special assistant on corruption to then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, and as advisor to military leaders David McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal.

After the Pentagon, she spent five years as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her previous books include Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, for which she won the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. A former award-winning reporter for National Public Radio based in Paris, France she now lives in Paw Paw, West Virginia.

Sarah comes by her interest in public service and integrity organically, as the daughter of the late law professor Abram Chayes, a State Department official under President Kennedy,  and Prof. Antonia Handler Chayes, attorney and undersecretary of the Air Force under President Carter.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Sarah Chayes

Stu Levitan welcomes Brian Alexander, his new book is The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town, just out from the good people at St. Martin’s Press.  Brian will be presenting at the Wisconsin Book Festival tomorrow evening, Tuesday March 30, at 7pm in a conversation with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Angela Fitzgerald. Brian’s appearance is part of a series on health care issues faced by underserved communities, made possible through a partnership with our very good friends at the Madison Public Library and a research program of the National Institutes of Health called All of Us, conducted locally at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Bryan Ohio is a small town of about eighty-five hundred people, the county seat of Williams County in the most northwestern corner of Ohio. Its largest employer, and most important community asset, is the non-profit Bryan Hospital, an 85-bed facility which opened exactly 85 years ago and is now the flagship campus of the three entities comprising Community Hospitals and Wellness Centers – CHWC.

For its size and resources, CHWC provides very good medical care, including to patients who can’t – or sometimes, won’t – always take good care of themselves. Last year, the National Rural Health Association named it one of the Top 20 rural community hospitals, along with two facilities in Wisconsin – the Monroe Clinic to our southwest, and SSM Health St. Clare Hospital just up the road in Baraboo.

How CHWC provides that very good medical care – and whether it can continue to do so, given its size and resources, as powerful forces far beyond its control continue to batter its business model – is what occupies Brian Alexander in this comprehensive and compassionate account, which lays bare in very human terms just how fraught and fragile is the American health care system.

Brian Alexander didn’t base his reporting just on interviews and documents, although there are plenty of those. No, he actually embedded himself in the Bryan hospital for 15 months, experiencing life – and sometimes death – everywhere from the emergency room to the board room.

Brian Alexander is very well-equipped to write this story. He is from Ohio, the small city of Lancaster, the economic decline of which he chronicled in his award-wining book from 2017, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. A former contributing editor at Glamour and Wired magazines, his earlier books touched on more, ah, intimate matters, including America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction and Rapture: A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism and the New Era of Immortality.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat the master of the subtitle, Brian Alexander.

Stu Levitan welcomes Miles Harvey for a conversation about his new book, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. Miles gave a very successful talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival last fall. Alas, Stu was not able to schedule him before that appearance, and he’s very happy to be able to bring him and his wildly entertaining book to you now.

James Jesse Strang was born in rural western New York in 1813. As a man, he was short and balding and entirely unprepossessing except for his eyes. He became a jack-of-many useful trades – most importantly attorney, postmaster, and newspaper editor. He called himself “a perfect atheist, an inveterate unbeliever and opposer of the Mormon faith.” Yet in early 1844, on a happenstance visit to the large Mormon enclave at Nauvoo Illinois, he was baptized by the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith himself. A week later, he was ordained an elder of the church by Smith’s older brother, Hyrum.

And when Joseph Smith was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob five months later, Strang declared that the prophet had chosen him as his successor. And he pressed his case so successfully that he attracted hundreds of followers to the Walworth County community of Voree, then thousands of devotees to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, where he proclaimed himself King of Earth and Heaven – and also got elected to the Michigan House of Representatives.

How James Strang pulled it off – and how he, too, met a violent end – is the business that occupies Miles Harvey in The King of Confidence, which also serves as a portrait of the weird and wild world that was antebellum America, and features cameos by P.T. Barnum, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, John Brown, and even the President of the United States, Millard Fillmore.

The King of Confidence is Miles Harvey’s third book, following the national and international bestseller The Island of Lost Maps and Painter in a Savage Land, which was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Booklist Editors’ Choice. He also teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.

It is a pleasure to finally welcome to Madison BookBeat Miles Harvey.

Stu Levitan welcomes Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century as we add a new category – books about plays by Madison playwrights. That’s right, Thornton Wilder – the only perso...

Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers

Stu Levitan welcomes University of Wisconsin Professor Chad Alan Goldberg, editor of an important new volume Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, from our very good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.

But before we hear from the good professor, you should know that you have dialed us up on a very special day. It is Madison Bookbeat's  last show of the winter pledge drive, giving you one more chance to call 256-2001 or go online to wortfm.org and show your support for what we’ve been doing every Monday afternoon for the past 14 months. And there are three folks who did just that last week whom we’d like to thank. Pete likes WORT because he learns something every time he listens; he says being in a town with an independent radio station is almost like being in college. That’s right, friends, you can regard your donations as voluntary, tax-deductible tuition. Terese says she enjoyed the book we featured last week, Madeline Uraneck’s “How to Make A Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted,” and can’t wait to read it. That’s why I do this, Terese, to share with listeners the books  I’ve found interesting and important, which I think you will, too. And our old friend Anonymous pledged with the comment, “book lovers love Madison BookBeat.” Well, MBB loves book lovers back. So be like Pete, Terese and Anonymous and give us a call at 256-2001 or go on line at wortfm.org. The book lovers in your life will thank you – as will I.

Now then, to the program at hand.

According to Wisconsin statute 36.01(2), the mission of the university of Wisconsin system is “to develop human resources, to discover and disseminate knowledge, to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society by developing in students heightened intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”

But not everyone agrees with that mission – especially the parts of public service, improving the human condition, and searching for truth. And over the years some people in high places have sought to change that mission in fundamental ways, even destroy it outright. Leaving us with some very important questions.

What is the role of the public university in a democratic society? Specifically, what is the role of the University of Wisconsin in the democratic, pluralistic society of the 21st century? And, harking back to the words of UW President Charles Van Hise from 1905, does the beneficent influence of the university continue to reach every family in the state? If not, how do we ensure that it once again does?

These are the questions Chad Alan Goldberg asks in Education for Democracy, questions he and his 11 contributors answer by examining how and why the Wisconsin Idea was born, expanded, honored – and then threatened and diminished. And they explain why it must be renewed, and suggest how to do so.

The list of those contributors is quite a collection of scholars and analysts, including Prof. Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, environmental historian and biographer of Aldo Leopold Curt Meine, our friend, repeat guest and LGBT historian Dick Wagner, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Emily Auerbach, and several other distinguished professors, both from the UW and elsewhere.

Prof. Goldberg is very well-equipped to edit this volume, which is based on an outreach course on the Wisconsin Idea which he helped organize in 2016,

Stu Levitan interviews Madeline Uraneck, author of How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted (Wisconsin Historical Society Press) on Madison BookBeat, WORT 89.9 FM Madison

Madeline Uraneck is part traveler, part global citizen, having worked, studied or had adventures in 64 of the planet’s 195 sovereign states – a fitting characteristic for the first international education consultant in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She’s taught English in Japan and researched globalization in Morocco, studied dance in Sweden and Poland, worked for the Peace Corps in Central Asia, and have been a Peace Corps volunteer in southern Africa. But perhaps her most important journey began and flourished right here in Madison. And it all started in 1994 with the simple act of befriending the cleaning woman in her state office building, a Tibetan refugee named Tenzin Kalsang.

That friendship would blossom into a deep relationship spanning three generations, taking Madeline Uraneck around the world and deep into her own heart.

Airdate - March 1, 2021

An encore presentation of a program which originally aired November 23, 2020.

Stu Levitan welcomes one of the brightest new stars in the literary firmament, Danielle Evans, coming back to Madison on Wednesday, virtually at least, to present her new collection The Office of Historical Corrections at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Grief and loss, apologies and corrections, anxiety and forgiveness. Women demanding to live full and complex lives. History. Performance. Race. These are the things which occupy Danielle Evans in the six stories and one novella which comprise The Office of Historical Corrections, just out from the good people at Riverhead Books, and already getting rave reviews.

Danielle Evans burst onto the scene at age 26 with Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, a collection of eight short stories which she finished while on a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. That collection received several awards and made her a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. In the decade since, she has taught creative writing at the aforementioned UW Institute for Creative Writing, American University and now the Johns Hopkins University. In recognition of her artistic excellence and merit, she is also the recipient of a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

It is a real pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Danielle Evans.