Madison BookBeat

Stu Levitan welcomes UW Prof. Paige Glotzer to discuss the origins of system racism in suburban housing developments on Madison BookBeat on WORT 89.9 FM Madison WI

Stu Levitan welcomes Rick Perlstein to Madison Bookbeat to discuss his new book, Reaganland.

In the presidential campaign of 1964, Lyndon Johnson so thoroughly crushed Barry Goldwater that political commentators declared Goldwater conservatism dead and buried. But just 16 years later, the man who became a political campaigning for Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, won even more electoral votes against incumbent president Jimmy Carter than Johnson had against Goldwater.

How and why that happened is the business that has occupied Rick Perlstein for almost half his life, through a literary tetralogy encompassing more than 3000 pages – Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001); then Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008); then ” (2014), and now Reaganland. We still might not know where we’re going, but thanks to Rick Perlstein, we now know where we’ve been

“The Beginning or the End” was a B movie about the A bomb, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in February, 1947. It promised to disclose what it called “the biggest, best-kept secret in the history of the world – the men, the magic, the machines behind the world’s strongest force – the atom bomb.” The movie was, the studio declared in all caps with exclamation points "FACTUAL! AUTHENTIC!”

Well, not quite. Because a movie set in motion by scientists wanting the world to know the truth was taken over by the military and the White House needing the world to believe a lie. How that happened is the business that occupies Greg Mitchell in his twelfth book, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. It’s not just a great yarn with some surprising participants, it’s also an urgent warning about secrecy, manipulation and suppression.

Those are frequent topics in Greg Mitchell’s oeuvre. I had the pleasure of interviewing Greg eight years ago this week for a related book, his important expose Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and the Greatest Movie Never Made (http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-new-book-atomic-cover-up-reveals.html). Among GREG’s earlier books, two fascinating looks at politics in California. The Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair’s radical campaign for Governor in 1934, which won the Goldsmith Book Prize, and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, about Richard Nixon’s redbaiting campaign for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin has a great, even historic, baseball heritage, dating to the late nineteenth century. Mid-twentieth century, the minor league Milwaukee Brewers were frequent league champs, and were even owned during the war years by the legendary Bill Veeck.

Which is, indirectly, why in 1953, the owner of the Boston Braves, a Major League baseball team in the National League, moved the team to Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee Braves found immediate success on the field and in the stands. They took the National League title in 1957 and 58, winning the World Series in just their fifth year over the mighty and haughty New York Yankees. Attendance at the county-owned County Stadium lead the league and even set records, and was second over that entire period only to the Dodgers of Flatbush and Chavez Ravine. It meant a lot to Milwaukee to be a Big-League city, and it was very good for everybody’s business.

But then in October 1964 the owners – the new owners – announced they were moving the team to Atlanta. Milwaukee County sued them, and kept the Braves for another year, but in 1966, they opened the season in Atlanta stadium.

And that’s why there’s an “A” on Henry Aaron’s cap on his plaque in the Hall of Fame.

How the Braves came to Milwaukee, and why they left is the business that occupies Patrick W Steele in his award-winning history Home of the Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee, from our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press. That award is the Gambrinus Prize from the Milwaukee County Historical Society.

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a farm boy from the Fox River Valley, grandson of Irish-German immigrants. Highly intelligent and industrious, a teenage poultry tycoon, and a war hero as well. But the truth was not in him, and he was a bully, and an alcoholic. May have been bi-polar as well.

From the early spring of 1950 to the summer of 1954, Joe McCarthy was one of the most popular and powerful politicians in the country, and certainly the most destructive.

How this man became an ism in the fifties, and the implications of his story for the America of today, is the business that occupies Larry Tye in his new biography Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, just out from Houghton Mifflin. It’s a revelatory book because Larry has hit the historian’s jackpot – unprecedented and exclusive access to McCarthy’s personal papers and official records, material kept secret for sixty years, but now providing lots of news and insights.

Stu Levitan welcomes  P. Carl, author of “Becoming A Man: The Story of a Transition,” his transition from the misgendered Polly Kathleen Carl to the man he always knew he was, and  the man he is today.

Writing in the Progressive magazine, our friend Bill Lueders calls Becoming A Man “a powerful blend of raw candor and tender vulnerability,” a “celebration of self-discovery” filled with “heartbreaking honesty” and fresh insights into gender, power and injustice. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert calls it “Raw and honest, probing and skeptical, a thoroughly compelling and deeply moving meditation on love, loss, and what makes a self.” It is all that and more, and as I said you can hear about in person when P. Carl appears at Room, that’s of course the former Factory nightclub at 315 W Gorham St. next Monday February 24 at 6 pm.

P. Carl is a writer, director and dramaturg, the distinguished artist in residence at Emerson College in Boston, on leave this semester as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University.

Over the past few years he has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the University of Washington. He has served as Co-artistic Director of ArtsEmerson, Director of Artistic Development at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, Producing Artistic Director at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis and a co-founder of the online theatre forum HowlRound. He was named Theater Person of the Year in 2015 by the National Theater Conference, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Edward Albee, Wendy Wasserstein, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, Tennessee Williams, John Housman and Joseph Papp. Heady company indeed. Carl holds a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota, where he is on the list of Alumni of Notable Distinction. He was born in Elkhart, Indiana, and now lives in Boston with his spouse, the writer Lynette D'Amico, and their dogs Lenny Obama and Sonny. He is currently working on the stage adaptation of Becoming a Man, commissioned by American Repertory Theater, in which he will be portrayed by seven actors, apparently getting the same treatment Todd Haynes gave Bob Dylan in the movie I’m Not There. Again, heady company indeed.

It is a real pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, P. Carl.

The Madison BookBeat conversation with Black, Queer, Poz poet/performer Danez Smith. Their new collection is Homie, poems about friendship and loss and violence and love.

As long-time listeners know, it is Madison BookBeat policy to regard students at the UW as Madisonians, so Danez hits two of the three criteria. Because before Nezzy was a finalist for the National Book Award and the youngest person ever to win the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Don’t Call Us Dead, before the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for [insert]boy, before the video of “Dear White America” got 387,000 views, thank you very much, before the fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, before the individual and team slam championships, before the Poetry Foundation podcast VS with Franny Choi, before they were on WORT’s A Public Affair with Ali Muldrow last January, it’s in the archives, check it out, before all that -- Danez Smith was in the first cohort of the ground-breaking First Wave program in the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and a member of the University of Wisconsin Class of 2012, On Wisconsin. Their third collection of poems, Homie, is now out from Graywolf press, and receiving rapturous reviews, NYT calling it a work of ‘startling originality and ambition.” which as I said is what brings them back to town for a Wisconsin Book Festival event at the Central Library, 201 West Mifflin St.  tonight at 7, it is a special reading and conversation with Sofia Snow, the director of the aforementioned Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and the First Wave Scholarship Program. It is a real pleasure to welcome Danez Smith to Madison BookBeat.