Madison BookBeat

On November 20 1945, the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union opened the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, putting on trial 22 Nazi leaders and seven organizations, charged with conspiring in a crime against peace, planning and waging wars of aggression, participating in war crimes, and committing crimes against humanity. On September 30 and October 1, 1946 judges from the four countries announced their verdicts – 12 of the accused, including Reich Marshall Herman Goering and German foreign minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, were sentenced to death by hanging, seven received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life, and three were acquitted. Four organizations -the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Secret State Police, or Gestapo, the Protective Squadron or SS, and the Security Service, or SD, were found criminal – but only for what they did after the start of the war on September 1, 1939; three organizations – the Reich Cabinet, the Storm Troopers, or SA and the German General Staff and High Command – were found not guilty.

In the collective memory of the west, these Nuremberg Trials – the only 4-power trials -  were first and foremost an American exercise of finding truth and dispensing justice. Chief US prosecutor Robert H Jackson, on leave from his post as associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, was both star and director, with able prosecutors from Great Britain in friendly support. The French were only marginally relevant, and the Soviets … well, they were at best an annoyance and at worst an embarrassment whose obvious and overwhelming conflicts threatened the very legitimacy of the entire exercise.

But what if that Nuremberg Moment was just a myth, and our memory is not of the whole story? What if, notwithstanding their own dealings with Hitler and their own war crimes, the Soviets were actually essential to the Tribunal happening at all? What if it was a Soviet lawyer who came up with the fundamental breakthrough in international law underpinning the entire trial? Those are the questions that Prof. Hirsch asks and answers brilliantly in this landmark account, for which she has already received the American Society for International Law’s 2021 Certificate of Merit for a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship.

It is no surprise that Fran Hirsch has produced such a work of scholarship and style. Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) received awards from the American Historical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the Council For European Studies. As you can tell, Prof. Hirsch specializes in Russian and Soviet History, Modern European History, Comparative Empires, the History of Human Rights, and Russian-American Engagement. She also scores a very healthy 4.4 rating on Rate My Professor.

Stu Levitan welcomes one of the brightest new stars in the literary firmament, Danielle Evans, coming back to Madison on December 2 -- 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

 

Air Date - November 30, 2020

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison author Stephen Coss, to discuss his all-too relevant book, The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics.

That fever was small pox, the infectious disease that killed, crippled or disfigured nearly one-tenth of all humankind in the three thousand years leading up to 1700, and in the 1600s alone killed about 400,000 Europeans every year. And on April 21, 1721, small pox returned to the largest town in colonial America at the time, Boston, which was also the third busiest seaport in the British empire. What happened next would produce a major advance in medicine, our first independent newspaper, maybe even help spark the American revolution itself.

It is quite a story, with a cast of characters that includes that scourge of Salem, Cotton Mather, an unhappy teenage printer’s apprentice named Benjamin Franklin, and the first populist politician in America. And it is a story with a profound paradox at its heart – it is the fundamentalist preacher who champions medical innovation and the iconoclastic journalist who attacks it for largely mercenary reasons, at least for a while.

Steve Coss was born and raised in Connecticut, earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia. He has worked as an advertising agency copywriter and creative director in Chicago, Detroit, and here in Madison, where he now works in marketing communications for CUNA Mutual. The Fever of 1721 was his first book. He’s now working on a novel that concerns the assassination of President Kennedy.

One disclosure – this interview was one of the first we did when things shut down in March, and we didn’t have a really good system yet for quality control on the sound. My audio in particular was pretty sketchy. So in addition to taping this new introduction, I have also taken the liberty of rerecording my questions, just to improve your listening experience.

With that, It was, and remains, a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Steve Coss.

An encore presentation of a conversation with Madison’s own David Maraniss, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, associate editor for the Washington Post and best-selling author, about his latest book, A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father. The hour originally aired in May, 2019, when David appeared at the Wisconsin Book Festival, and was rebroadcast Nov. 16, 2020, to mark the publication of the paperback edition.

David Maraniss has earned the sobriquet “Madison’s favorite journalistic son” because while he wasn’t born here, he did grow up here, West High class of 1967. That was because his father, Elliott Maraniss, was himself one of the city’s leading journalists as a reporter and editor for The Capital Times from 1957 to his retirement in 1982. But that is at the end of the story which David tells in A Good American Family, the very troubling and sadly still-relevant saga of how Elliott was blacklisted in 1952 when he was exposed as having been a member of the communist party, and what happened after.

Among David's eleven earlier books - biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente, and a trilogy of books about the 1960s - Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World; Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story, and They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America and Vietnam, October 1967. That book has special relevance for local listeners because it is the most comprehensive account of the events leading up to the protest against the Dow Chemical Company that month.

Before we begin, two disclaimers. First, like almost everyone who has reviewed the book or interviewed the author, I’m pleased to say that David is a friend of mine and in fact while he doesn’t realize it, our connection goes back to 1956. Second, unlike everyone else who has reviewed the book or interviewed David, I worked for Elliott at the Capital Times, as the Washington correspondent and then general assignment reporter from the summer of 1975 to the fall of 1977, when I quit the paper to support of the strike by the production unions. We'll get to that at the end of the hour.

Stu Levitan welcomes the distinguished author, educator and journalist Nicholas Lemann, who will be appearing this Thursday at the Wisconsin Book Festival to discuss his book Transaction Man: Traders, Disrupters and the Dismantling of Middle-Class America.

Once upon a time, American society revolved around institutions. Government, the church, corporations, unions. Then, about 40 years ago, we turned into a society driven by transactions, a new market-based financial model that profoundly changed politics and economics, both here and abroad, and not for the better. More recently, the network-based world of the Internet has started to take hold, providing vast wealth for some, but threatening most with more economic insecurity.

How we moved from institutions to transactions to networks – and what our next step might, or should be – is the business that occupies Nicholas Lemann in Transaction Man.

Nicholas Lemann in a native of New Orleans, where he began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for an alternative weekly. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1976, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson. He served as an editor at the Washington Monthly and Texas Monthly; on the national staffs at The Washington Post and The Atlantic Monthly, and as Washington correspondent and staff writer for The New Yorker, where his most recent piece, in the November 2 issue, is a very perceptive analysis of the Republican party after Trump.

From 2003-2013 he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where he is now Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus. He also directs Columbia Global Reports, a book publishing venture, and Columbia World Projects, on academic research outside the university.

Transaction Man is his fifth book, following Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War; The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy; American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions, and the award-winning The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Nicholas Lemann.

Stu Levitan welcomes a guest who meets two of the criteria as a former Badger who will be appearing next week at the Wisconsin Book Festival. Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of an enchanting and stimulating collection of illustrated nature essays called WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, AND OTHER ASTONISHMENTS, published this year by the good people at Milkweed Editions, and just named as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction.

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.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Madison BookBeat host Stu Levitan welcomes National Book Award- winner Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House, just out in a new paperback edition from Grove Atlantic. Her new virtual book tour starts tomorrow night at 7 in a Crowdcast conversation presented by our friends at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

{MUSIC – Ellis Marsalis}

Ellis Marsalis, of blessed memory, and his eldest son Branford, at the WWOZ Piano Night last April, asking the musical question, “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”

But what does it mean to be from New Orleans? Indeed, what does it mean to be from anywhere? And what does it mean when the place you’re from no longer exists?

In 1961, a 19-yo New Orleanian widow named Ivory Soule Webb, eight months pregnant with her third child, bought a camelback shotgun house at 4121 Wilson Avenue in the sprawling new development known as New Orleans East, seven miles but a world away from the fabled French Quarter. Ivory Mae and her second husband Simon Broom moved in with their blended family in 1964, and had some kids of their own. They named the twelfth and final child, born in the final hours of 1979, Sarah Monique.

The house eventually acquired new yellow siding, but inside was never finished and in constant disrepair, especially after Simon died just six months after Sarah was born. The house survived Hurricane Betsy in 1965, but would not last long after the water of Katrina and the federal flood forty years later.

What that house meant to one family, and what its loss means to the entire country, is the business that occupies Sarah M. Broom in her extraordinary debut, The Yellow House. Part narrative nonfiction, part memoir, it is also a profound meditation on race, place and class.  Published to enthusiastic, almost ecstatic acclaim last summer, it has enjoyed many printings and garnered Sarah the aforementioned National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle.

Sarah M. Broom received her undergraduate degree in anthropology and mass communications from the University of North Texas and a Master’s degree in Journalism from UC-Berkeley. She’s been a newspaper and magazine journalist from Rhode Island to Hong Kong, an editor at the Oprah Magazine, has taught nonfiction at Columbia University, worked for the mayor of New Orleans and a radio station in Burundi and as Executive Director of the global nonprofit, Village Health Works. She is married to the film director Dee Rees, with homes in Harlem and the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to welcome to Madison BookBeat, National Book Award-winner Sarah M. Broom

Stu Levitan welcomes back to Madison BookBeat R. Richard (Dick) Wagner, to continue the conversation about his new book, Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History. It’s the companion volume to his award- winning book We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History. Both are from our good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Dick was Stu’s guest for that book in May and the new book about a month ago. You can find both those conversations here on the WORT website.

In this age when same-gender marriage is a constitutional right, and an out gay man can be a serious candidate for President, it may be hard for some of our younger listeners to believe that there was a time, not too long ago, when Wisconsin criminalized what consenting adults did in the privacy of their own bedroom, and employers could fire someone just because they were gay.

How the LGBT community overturned a century and a half of oppressive legislation and made American gay history is the business that occupies Dick Wagner in Coming Out, Moving Forward, along with an in-depth analysis of Wisconsin’s response to AIDS, gay life and culture, heroes and villains of the fight for gay rights, and so much more.

There is no one more qualified or appropriate to write this groundbreaking history of recent gay life in Wisconsin than Dick Wagner, who was a leading player in several of these stories as co-chair of the Governor’s Council on Lesbian and Gay Issues and the first openly gay chair of a county board in Wisconsin.

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 co-chairing the Governor’s Council and serving on the Dane County Board from 1980-1994 – including four years as chair – Dick’s record of state and local public service is extensive. In recognition not just of his service but the way he served, Dick was named the first recipient of the city of Madison’s Jeffrey Clay Erlanger Civility in Public Discourse Award, in 2007. Not sure if it figured in the award, but Dick is also the man who single-handedly saved the Mazomanie nude beach. Although I’m not sure he ever went.

And on a personal note – As Stu  said when Dick was his guest in May, “I had the pleasure of serving with him on the Dane County Board from 1982-1987, and there is no one whose intelligence, integrity and decency I respect more. It is a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat my friend, Dick Wagner.”

Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning producer and interviewer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated To The Best Of Our Knowledge, Madison’s own Charles Monroe-Kane.

Charles Monroe-Kane has had a more interesting life than anybody any of us are ever likely to know. After an itinerate childhood around Ohio and a summer as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, he was a teenage faith healer in Haiti and the Philippines, edited an international environmental magazine based in Holland, was a professional anti-nuclear activist in Belgium, had an embarrassing encounter with the President of the United States in Munich, and even helped start Eastern Europe’s first Internet Café, in Prague – which required him to deliver a quarter-million dollar payment from an Italian mobster to his Chechen counterparts.

He took a prodigious amount of hard drugs and had a frightening amount of unsafe sex. He also has bipolar 1 disorder. Chronicling that life, and trying to understand it, is the business that occupies Charles Monroe-Kane in his first book, Lithium Jesus: A Memoir of Mania, now out in paperback from our good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.

I had the pleasure of talking with Charles when the book came out in hardback in 2016, and I’m delighted I get to continue that conversation as I welcome to Madison BookBeat Charles Monroe-Kane.

Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning filmmaker and UW alum Glenn Silber for a conversation about The War at Home, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about the antiwar movement in Madison in the 1960s he made with co-producer/co-director Barry Alexander Brown. And proving that everything old can be made new again, this feature release from 1979 is now streaming on several platforms in a new 4K restoration and is, sadly, as relevant as ever.