Read Beat (...and repeat)

Dwyer Murphy believes he has the dream job: "I get to read crime fiction all day long."
As the editor of the CrimeReads website, a site that , as the title might imply, brokers a wide variety of criminal literature, book and movie reviews, profiles and feature articles on such subjects as the role of cheese in murder mysteries or a look at the works of TV producer Quinn Martin ("Fugitive," "Streets of San Francisco" and "The FBI") who had a primetime show on television for 21 straight years.
Now Murphy has a book out, the novel, "An Honest Living," which calls on his lawyer background (before he took on the crime website five years ago), the city of New York (his home), book collectors and elements of film noir.
He told Steve Tarter that it was important to include Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows," the classic 1969 film noir about the French Revolution, in his book because "everyone I ran into for a two week period in New York back in 2006 was either coming from or going to see 'Army,' a film just released in the United States that year.
"I know that not everybody was concerned with French noir but it seemed like it at the time. My father came down from Boston to see that movie with me," he said.
Murphy tosses out the possibility of running an all-inclusive noir list on CrimeReads that would blend books, movies, TV shows and other forms of media.
Meanwhile, he plans on more books, including a sequel to "Honest Living" set in Miami.  

When Ken Auletta wrote a lengthy profile on movie producer Harvey Weinstein for New Yorker magazine in 2002, Weinstein didn't like it.
That was because Auletta pictured Weinstein as a brilliant moviemaker with a dark side, a bully who blew up frequently. 
But Auletta said while he'd heard reports that Weinstein had gone too far in his dealings with a number of women, he hadn't been able to get the women involved to talk.
In 2017, journalist Ronan Farrow got women on the record, stating that Weinstein had molested them. Things snowballed from there for Harvey as many as 80 women  charged him with everything from groping to rape.
Auletta provides the full rise and fall story now 20 years after his first profile on Harvey Weinstein. He also documents how the man was able to get away with bad behavior for so long. Included is an account on how Harvey's brother Bob has fared. The pair worked together for years,  making a number of critically-acclaimed and financially successful hits, films like  "Shakespeare in Love," "Cider House Rules," "Chicago" and "Pulp Fiction."
Today, Weinstein faces lengthy jail time. His health is deteriorating and other charges may be brought against him, said Auletta. The man who declared himself the king of Hollywood has been deposed.    

"Aurora" is the painful recollection of one of the nation's mass shootings, this one at the Aurora, Colo. theater outside Denver in 2012 when a troubled grad student opened fire on a packed movie house, killing 12 people and injuring 70.
Dr. Lynne Fenton is the psychiatrist who had six sessions with gunman James Holmes before the shooting took place. Fenton relates the bizarre behavior that Holmes exhibited, noting that from their first meeting, Holmes struck her as deeply troubled and someone she sought to help.
As a psychiatrist on the University of Colorado's School of Medicine and director of the Student Mental Health Center, Fenton provided counseling to Holmes, one of the academically-gifted students in the college's prestigious neuroscience program.
When he talked of killing people, Fenton noted that such destructive and violent thoughts were not abnormal for a depressed patient.
As she sought to help Holmes in subsequent sessions, Holmes was gathering guns and making plans--unbeknownst to Fenton.
After the horrific shooting in which Holmes survived to stand trial, Fenton's name was accidentally released to the public. Death threats followed. You should have known, anonymous callers demanded.
Fenton quit her job as a result and went into seclusion. Today she continues to work at the medical school and has raised her voice in the raging debate about mass shootings in this country.
She told Steve Tarter that more mental health screening is necessary but that alone won't solve the problem. Fenton said society would be better off if the age when someone can purchase a gun was raised from 18 to 21 because of the mental state of young males who are often the perpetrators of the mass shootings.

Mark Greaney's on a roll. His new book, "Armoured," is out and so is the first Gray Man movie.
As the author of more than 20 books, three of them collaborations with Tom Clancy before the author's death in 2013, Greaney is enjoying unqualified success.
But his Gray Man character took his time before making a movie debut. "The movie rights were actually secured when I wrote the first Gray Man novel (he's working on his 11th now) in 2009," he told Steve Tarter.
Brad Pitt was initially set to play the part and a script was written but that didn't happen. Things looked up when the Russo brothers, producers of "Avengers" and "Captain America" blockbusters, came on board to tackle the project.
Netflix will stream the Gray Man movie starting July 22.
Greaney used to write at the Starbucks in his native Memphis but had to give that up, he said, because too many folks were asking him to consider writing proposals of their own.
For "Armoured," a story about high-powered mercenaries in Mexico, Greaney said he spent time living and training with real-life members of private armed forces to gain insight for the book.

The Trump years--neatly cataloged in history now? Not so fast says one of the best chroniclers of the Washington scene, Mark Leibovich, whose new book, "Thank You For Your Servitude," whisks us through the tumultuous Donald Trump presidency with an emphasis on the followers, "the accomplices who make Trump possible," he said.

Leibovich, who spent 10 years as the chief national correspondent for the New York Times magazine before joining Atlantic magazine, logged more than 250 interviews  over six years with folks like Senator Lindsey Graham, Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. John McCain, whose funeral is described in some detail in the book.

While it's great to be able to look back and laugh at all the foibles, the impeachments, the engagement with the Russians (you remember that), the control that Trump holds over the Republican Party makes it a distinct possibility that there may have to be a sequel,  Leibovich told Steve Tarter, looking ahead at the 2024 election.

Joe Biden will be 82 at that time and with no heir apparent in sight yet in either party, Leibovich is fully prepared to record another presidential run for the Disrupter in Chief.

Paul Hawken  has written books like “The Next Economy,” “Growing a Business” and “The Ecology of Commerce”. “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution,” co-authored with Amory Lovins, was referred to by President Bill Clinton as one of the most important books in the world. 

He has served on the board of many environmental organizations including Center for Plant Conservation, Shelburne Farms, Trust for Public Land, Conservation International, and National Audubon Society.

So the man has credibility when it comes to the environment. All of which gives us reason to hope. Hawken’s new book, “Regeneration” offers a new approach to climate change, one that could mean ending the crisis in one generation.

"Regeneration means bringing the Earth back to life," says Hawken simply. "Regeneration" describes how an inclusive movement can save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions. 

Describing the climate crisis as the greatest civilization may ever face, Hawken ponders why so many of the world's citizens are disengaged--an estimated 98 percent. The problem, he says, has been in the communication area. "Guilt, fear and obligation are not inspiring motivators," he told Steve Tarter.
 
Instead we need to look at solutions to global warming not as a curse but as an opening, a chance to reconnect with nature. The website, regeneration.org, offers more on the subject.


 
 

Carpenter has been tending to his family's three kids as a stay-at-home dad since 2008 so he had plenty of experience to draw from for a manual for full-time fathers.
"The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad" is a collection of tips, words of wisdom, warnings and ideas for the guys who stay home. There are even recipes (Carpenter planned on enchiladas the day he interviewed with Steve Tarter).
He wants to encourages others to follow in his footsteps. "Don't freak out over 14 years (the amount of time he's been at home). Try it for six months or a year and see how it goes," he said.
It comes down to self-worth, said Carpenter. "I'm not babysitting. I'm not helping out Mom. I'm parenting," he said.
With the pandemic creating more homebound parents than ever before, Carpenter's guidebook may be just the ticket to facilitate family time in a lot of households.

Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. For a decade she’s been a columnist at the Washington Post.and written about food for two decades, she told Steve Tarter in the interview.

When Haspel and her husband move from Manhattan to the quaint community of Barnstable on Cape Cod, they decide to take a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. There’s fishing, too.

They find a couple of perennials to start with: Turkish Rocket and Good King Henry. Both are "promises that don't deliver," said Haspel. But with “first-hand food” as her guiding principle, Haspel gamely embarks on a grand experiment to start using her own ingenuity and creativity when it comes to what you put on the table. All the while, there’s humor and common sense to dispense. 

Some of her experiments are a rousing success (refining her own sea salt). Others are a spectacular failure (the turkey plucker engineered from an old washing machine). Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her while discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about food--and ourselves.

Haspel also delivers a tip of the cap to Euell Gibbons whose "Stalking the Wild Asparagus," a book written in the 60s, serves as her "primer on foraging." "He was so adventurous so you don't have to be," she said.

After spending some 40 years at Eastern Illinois University, Charles Titus, a retired history professor, decided to share some of that history in his home state with readers.

In his interview with Steve Tarter, Titus shares some of the highlights that he spotlights in his book, “Exploring the Land of Lincoln.”

Titus shares views on 20 places across the state of Illinois including Cahokia, Lincoln sites in and around Springfield, Bishop Hill, Nauvoo, and Chicago's South Side Community Art Center.

The pandemic has brought a lot to light, perhaps most notably a new attitude towards work and one's behavior at work.
A social psychologist at New York University, Tessa West has delivered a handbook on some of the bad behavior to watch for--whether you're back at the office or working remotely.
She even provides a watch list of problem personalities you need to be aware of: the bulldozer, the free rider and the kiss-up and kick downer, to name a few.
Bad bosses and obnoxious colleagues are nothing new, of course. But West doesn't believe you need to just grin and bear it. "(Bad behavior) is part of human nature. But to just suck it up and deal with it can lead to low-level stress and, over time, that builds up," she told Steve Tarter.
There are things you can do, she offers, pointing to strategies outlined in "Jerks At Work."
West said the wave of resignations that have followed the pandemic are the result of the number-one reason people leave a job: a toxic workplace.