Off the Deaton Path

This week Stan kicks off the new year by reviewing his reading in 2025: how many books and pages, fiction and non-fiction, as well as the other ways he works reading into his life: audiobooks, podcasts, blogs, newspapers, and magazines. He also revisits and offers tips on age-old reading problems, including: setting reading goals (or not), how to get more reading into your life, reading in a distracted age, suffering from reading guilt and how to conquer it, and more.

Stan’s guest this week is Marci Pelzer, Dan Pelzer’s daughter, who talks about her father, his reading habits, and what it was like growing up with the man whose now-famous reading list of 3,599 books has inspired a whole new generation of readers across the world.

Stan’s guest this week is author and former This Old House host Steve Thomas, discussing the revised and expanded version of his book, The Last Navigator: A Young Man, an Ancient Mariner, the Secrets of the Sea (Abbeville Press). Steve hosted PBS’s This Old House for fourteen years, from 1989 through 2003, during which the show rose to the top of PBS’s list of most-watched ongoing series. He was honored with a 1997-1998 Daytime Emmy Award and in 2022 received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy for his work. A lifelong sailor, Steve developed a fascination with ancient methods of navigation. For thousands of years, the peoples of Oceania sailed across the Pacific without compass or charts, guided only by the stars, waves, and the flight paths of birds. In search of this secret knowledge, Steve traveled to the tiny island of Satawal in Micronesia, and his book he tells the story of how he convinced one of the last surviving navigators to accept him as his student and teach him the closely guarded Talk of Navigation. Forty years after his original journey, Steve has worked with a new generation of researchers and natives of Satawal to publish a revised edition of The Last Navigator.

Stan’s guest this week is author Leo Damrosch of Harvard University, discussing Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Yale University Press), his new biography of the author of Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. Stevenson’s short but adventurous life matched the magic of his writing. Damrosch discusses how Stevenson in his 44 years wrote 11 novels and hundreds of essays and poems, while creating some of the most memorable characters in literature: Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins, Dr. Livesay, Squire Trelawny, Billy Bones, Ben Gunn, David Balfour, Alan Stewart, Henry Jekyll, Edward Hyde, and scores of others.

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Stan’s guest this week is Georgia native and journalist Tom Johnson, whose remarkable career took him from Macon, where he worked for legendary newspaperman Peyton Anderson, to UGA’s Grady College of Journalism, to White House Fellow during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, to publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and finally as president of CNN during the crucial years of the 1990s during the invasion of Kuwait and the fall of the Soviet Union. Tom talks about his new memoir, Driven: A Life in Public Service and Journalism from LBJ to CNN, published this month by the University of Georgia Press.

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Stan’s guest this week is journalist and author Guy Gugliotta, discussing his new book, Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan, published on April 15 of this year by the University of Georgia Press. It’s the story of how Amos T. Akerman, a Georgian, was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870 to become the Attorney General of the United States, the first to lead the newly created Department of Justice, and how he waged war against and defeated the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan.

Please note, due to a recording equipment glitch, portions of the audio may sound distorted. Even still, we think you’ll enjoy this conversation!

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Dan Pelzer died in July at age 92 and left behind a detailed list of every book he read from 1962 to 2023, totaling 3,599 books across 62 years—all of them checked out of his local library. His list went viral after his children wanted to print it and hand it out at his funeral, choosing to post it online instead. Stan explores Dan’s impressive reading list and many of the titles he read, and how it’s inspired him and so many others to “read a good page turner.”

Did Hernando De Soto travel near what is now DeSoto Falls in North Georgia? Or Desoto, Georgia, in Sumter County? Why don’t we know where he went and why is the evidence so hard to find? Stan’s guest this week is Dennis Blanton, professor of anthropology at James Madison University, author of Conquistador’s Wake: Tracking the Legacy of Hernando De Soto in the Indigenous Southeast (UGA Press, 2020). Dr. Blanton discusses the myths and realities of De Soto’s 16th-century expedition, based on his years of painstaking archaeological research—and how his current finds in southwest Georgia may re-define what we know about the infamous Conquistador’s entrada.

Stan’s guest this week is long-time Atlanta Journal-Constitution sports columnist Mark Bradley, who retired from the AJC last December after 46 years as a sports journalist. Mark shares some of his favorite moments in Georgia sports history across nearly five decades, including the joys of two Braves World Series championships, the crushing Falcons Super Bowl loss, as well as the ups and downs of tight deadlines, covering lousy teams, and why the current Braves are painful to watch.

Stan opens Season 9 of Off the Deaton Path talking about his summer reading (so far)—books by Nina Stibbe, Jane Gardam, Leah Hager Cohen, Helene Hanff, James Hilton, Ferrol Sams—short thoughts on the Braves lousy season (so far), a sneak peek at upcoming podcasts, and AJC political writer Jim Galloway on the 1956 Georgia state flag in the summer GHQ.