North Carolina Bookwatch 2008-09 | UNC-TV

When NPR contributor Scott Huler made one more attempt to get through James Joyce’s Ulysses, he had no idea it would launch an obsession with the book’s inspiration: the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey and the lonely homebound journey of its Everyman hero, Odysseus.

For thirty years, Roy Underhill's PBS program, The Woodwright's Shop, has brought classic hand-tool craftsmanship to viewers across America. Now, in his seventh book, Roy shows how to engage the mysteries of the splitting wedge and the cutting edge to shape wood from forest to furniture.

When Catherine Morrow is admitted to the Esther Percy School for Girls, it's on the condition that she reform her ways. But that's before the charismatic and beautiful Skye Butterfield, daughter of the famous Senator Butterfield, chooses Catherine for her best friend. Skye is a young woman hell-bent on a trajectory of self-destruction, and she doesn't care who is taken down with her. No matter the transgression—a stolen credit card, a cocaine binge, an affair with a teacher, an accident that precipitates the end of Catherine's promising riding career—Catherine can neither resist Skye's spell nor stop her downward spiral.

In an all-new episode, Link reveals Righteous Warrior, sharing the story of one of the most powerful Americans of the twentieth century and the conservative mark he left on the American political landscape.

Martin Clark’s most remarkable novel yet is the gripping, complex story of a murder cover-up that wreaks widespread havoc even as it redefines the concept of justice—a relentlessly entertaining saga that delves deeply into matters at once ambiguous and essential.

Henry is a bible salesman. Clearwater is a car thief. Henry needs a ride. Clearwater needs an assistant. The second World War is over, and nineteen-year-old Henry Dampier walks the roads of North Carolina, selling bibles. When Clearwater offers him a lift, Henry thinks it is a lucky day that only gets better with Clearwater’s “confession” of being an FBI agent in need of aid. Henry joyfully seizes the opportunity to lead a double life as bible salesman and G-man.

In this episode, Shelia Moses shares how Twin Leon and Twin Luke stick together to face the odds as only twelve-year-old boys can do, managing to save themselves while also unexpectedly saving their entire family in a week's time, in moving, funny, and poignant novel.

In Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonksi and the Power of Information, investigative reporter and historian Anna Rubino tells the story of how a path-breaking journalist, Wanda Jablonski, contributed to the breakdown of Big Oil by lifting the veil of secrecy over its business, exposing its vulnerabilities, and drawing attention to its chief opponents, the founders of OPEC. Through exclusive access to Jablonski's private papers, interviews with more than a hundred people who knew her, including former oil executives and oil ministers, and her own experience working for Jablonksi's Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, Rubino has written the first-ever biography of this fearless and pioneering woman known to the oil world simply as "Wanda."

In A Broom of One's Own, Nancy Peacock, whose first novel was selected by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, explores with warmth, wit, and candor what it means to be a writer. An encouragement to all hard-working artists, no matter how they make a living, Peacock's book provides valuable insights and advice on motivation, craft, and criticism while offering hilarious anecdotes about the houses she cleans.

Well, the old tales are back, and they've grown up! Black Pearls brings you the stories of your childhood, told in a way you've never heard before. Instead of lulling you to sleep, they'll wake you up—to the haunting sadness that waits just inside the windows of a gingerbread cottage, the passion that fuels a witch's flight, and the heartache that comes, again and again, at the stroke of midnight.