“Star Trek” isn’t just an old TV show—it’s an industry.  Or as Ryan Britt, the author of “Phasers on Stun!” might say, a universe.

Britt’s new book beams us down to the show’s origins back in the 1960s, its acceptance after initial resistance and relates the offspring of the series—both film and TV shows.

“Mr. Spock and Data weren’t just cool space superheroes to me as a kid, they were beacons of resilience,” wrote Britt. “Living long and prospering doesn’t jusat mean getting older and not dying. It means embracing change.”

And change is something that Trekkies can understand. After all, following the original 79 episodes of “Star Trek” that concluded in 1969, we’ve had “Star Trek: the Animated Series” (1973-74), “Star Trek: the Next Generation” (1987-94), “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” (1993-99), “Star Trek: Voyager” (1995-2001), “Star Trek: Enterprise” (2001-2005), “Star Trek: Discovery” (2017-present), “Star Trek: Picard” (2020-present), “Star Trek: Lower Decks” (2020-present), “Star Trek: Prodigy” (2021-present), and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (2022-present).

That’s just the TV side. There have also been 13 feature films, the first six featuring the original TV cast. It adds up to 800 hours of programming and Britt has consumed it all.

In his interview with Steve Tarter, Britt underscores the role Leonard Nimoy played, both as Spock and as the director of two of the films. He also points out what a contribution Nichelle Nichols (who played Uhura) made in the U.S. space program, calling for women and minority hiring at NASA.

Bill Shatner may have flown into space but as a passenger. Nichols, who trained as an astronaut, could have actually (wo-)manned the controls, noted Britt.

Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber serves up a treatise on the great American comic that takes you through over 150 years of history. He goes all the way back to Thomas Nast, who fashioned images of Uncle Sam and Santa we still abide by, and runs through the comics of the 21st century.

There’s Superman, of course, and all the super folks that followed along with the moral panic of the Eisenhower era that changed comics as we knew them, underground comix that brought more changes and then there are the developments that followed in the latter years of the 20th century (such as the graphic novel).

While recognizing that the erosion of the American newspaper has cost us editorial cartoons and comic strips, including favorites that ran for 60 years or longer, Dauber remains optimistic about the medium in general. 

You get the back story along with the cover story from a researcher who’s unapologetic about his love for the medium. “Some of my earliest reading memories are of lying on the floor, sprawled out with the Sunday comics pages,” related Dauber, who said his next book will focus on horror.

Cynthia Clampitt wants you to explore the Midwest. Her new book, “Destination Heartland,” serves as a guide to places of interest and foods of interest in a 12-state region.

“The region sometimes called ‘flyover country’ offers a multitude of great places to land,” she said. Now you might find an entire volume of Midwestern attractions that Clampitt didn’t include. She makes no claims to this being either all-inclusive or to serve as a definitive listing.

But what Clampitt covers is a number of historic attractions from Illinois and 11 Midwestern states, chronicling places she has personally visited.

Ah the Midwest: “It was ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and the Pony Express. It was the birthplace of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and Antonin Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony (both in 1890s Iowa). It gave us revolutionary farm equipment, but also gave us the first airplanes (the Wright Brothers lived in Ohio) and cheap cars (thank you Mr. Ford). It was and is a place where wide-open spaces led to big ideas,” notes Clampitt, a big fan of living history venues.

One she cites is Conner Prairie, just outside Indianapolis, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Museum. Another is Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa while Cahokia Mounds, near St. Louis, offers up a museum Clampitt calls amazing.

“Destination Heartland” also includes a nice little history where I learned about the Prairie Traveler, the bestselling manual published in 1859, that served as the pioneer’s guide to the west, how to fix your wagon and all that.

Clampitt adds another touch to her history survey: food. She makes a point of visiting the oldest restaurant, hotel or tavern in many of the places she visits and it's a move that seems to pay off.  If the Village Tavern of Long Grove (35 miles NW of Chicago) is still in business since it opened in 1847, chances are they know what they're doing.

Eugene Linden can say I told you so but he'd rather see progress towards heading off a catastrophe that he suggests is coming unless citizens of the world take climate change seriously. Indeed, it may be too late for seriously. What we face now is urgency, he says in his 11th book, subtitled "A People's History of Climate Change, From 1979 to the Present."
Linden revisits some of the most destructive examples of what a warming planet is capable of: Hurricane Andrew in 1992 (a storm that wrecked 125,000 homes in Dade County alone and led to the insolvency of 11 insurance companies), Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (bringing a 19-foot storm surge that damaged 70 percent of the homes in New Orleans), Hurricane Sandy in 2012 (sending torrents of water into New York's subways).
But Linden isn't just reciting bad storm statistics. He brings a message: recalling a book he wrote in 1998, "The Future in Plain Sight," he suggests that 24 years after publication a scenario for 2050 seems to be unfolding--that California's remaining redwoods, mighty trees that have dominated for eight million years could be wiped out within three decades.
"More than 90 percent of the excess heat created by our overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases has ended up in the oceans," noted Linden. Unbeknown to those of us on land, that's leading to a whole lot of change and a whole lot of trouble. When sea levels rise, coastal cities will feel it first but that isn't the only issue.
The wildfires that have torched western states will only get worse, said Linden. At some point, the cost to fight those fires will bankrupt the state of California.
But Linden isn't walking the plank--he's offering hope and looks for action to counter the impending crisis. His book may be depressing but it's important to understand what's going on.   

Armstrong, who has written previous books on "Seinfeld" and "Mary Tyler Moore Show," goes back to the early days of television in this one.
She focuses on four women who had a big impact on the TV medium. Irma Phillips defined the soap opera, establishing a format that would run for decades across all networks.
Gertrude Berg turned a hit radio show into one of TV's first hit comedies and later took the concept to Broadway.
Hazel Scott, an established jazz pianist, became the first African American (before Nat King Cole) to host an evening variety program.
Betty White started on daytime TV before television even knew what to do with programming during the daytime hours. 
This interview with Armstrong was conducted shortly before White's death earlier this year.

For many of us, the sentiment has been that the only good insect is a dead insect. After all, if they're not swiping plants in a farm field, they're buzzing around, destroying the ambience of a picnic or outing.
But insects have a big role to play in the wide world of life, says Oliver Milman, whose book, 
"Insect Crisis," spells out the dangers this world will be in if we let insect numbers continue to fall.
And they are falling precipitously. That's bad news for birds and a whole chain of life that depends on little bugs to play a major role. That's bad news for us at the end of the chain.
Insects, after all, are the ultimate survivors, notes Milman,
Around before the dinosaurs, insects have lived through five--or is it six--major catastrophes to impact our planet.
The problem is that now, while we have pulled back on DDT, one of the alternative chemicals in use is hundreds of times stronger than what Rachel Carson warned us about, said Milman. Regulation and moderation is required. Also a new mindset: we need bugs to survive.

The title is the answer Washington Post writer Travis Andrews received when he wondered to his newspaper associates why Goldblum had developed such a following even though he hadn't appeared in any recent "A" movies.
That led to this book, an interesting cruise through the spectacle of the Goldblum Factor, that intangible something that defines some celebrities, making them eminently likable.
Andrews tells Steve Tarter that he first came upon Goldblum through the jazz album he released a few years ago. That led to an exploration of the eclectic record that is Goldblum's.
You can't help but smile at the guy no matter what he does. It's the same with the book.

Louisa Lim grew up in Hong Kong and later covered China and Hong Kong for a decade as a correspondent for BBC and NPR. Her previous book, "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited," recalled China's brutal suppression of protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Now a teacher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, she found herself immersed in familiar territory when protests broke out in her native Hong Kong in 2019. The protests were a reaction to a crackdown by Chinese authorities who want to bring the city under its control.
Lim said she found herself caught up in the protests that swept through Hong Kong before the covid shutdown, forcing her to question her objectivity as a journalist in covering the scene.
"Indelible City" covers Hong Kong's past, from the British takeover in 1842 to its "return" to China in 1997 to the present situation as Beijing lays down ever-stricter rules for citizens.
Lim talks to Steve Tarter about an exodus from Hong Kong by citizens who seek to avoid Chinese domination and start little Hong Kongs across the globe. 

Building a future for coral reefs may not seem to be a priority in a world threatened with climate change, an ocean festooned with plastic and alarming extinction rates being registered even in insects, always thought of as the planet's ultimate survivors.
As Juli Berwald notes in her interview with Steve Tarter, coral reefs aren't just pretty places to view while on vacation. Coral reefs take up less than 1 percent of the ocean's area but help a fourth of all marine species survive at one time or another. "A billion people rely on those ecosystems for sustenance or work," she writes.
"The combined revenue from food, recreation and protection from storms attributed to coral reefs has been calculated at between 2.7 and 10 trillion dollars a year. The death of the reefs means food insecurity for tens of millions," noted Berwald.
Some predictions indicate that the world's great coral reefs could be lost by 2050.
But Berwald injects hope in her account. Coral farming is a real thing and, with more support, could show some great results.
One of the unsung heroes, among many individuals that Berwald consults in her research, is Frank Mars of the Mars candy firm, one billionaire who's not flying into space but diving into the problem of saving the coral reefs.
Berwald isn't just seeking answers to environmental problems but also provides a touching account of her daughter's battle with mental illness in "Life on the Rocks."

"This is Where You Belong--Finding Home Wherever You Are" covers Melody Warnick's own experience of moving about in the United States, never staying anywhere longer than a couple of years, traveling from California to Utah to Iowa to Texas--until she got to Blacksburg, Va.
There, Warnick has found peace and stability--not because Blacksburg is a model city or one of those places that always turns up among the top 10 small towns to live in or any of the lists that litter the internet--but because Warnick decided to make an effort to enjoy the place she was at.
That effort is accompanied by interviews, facts and formulas to urge others to understand what she's learned--that the place isn't as important as the person.
Chapters such as "Buy Local," "Say Hi to your Neighbors" and "Volunteer" steer one on ways to get out and commit to the place they live.