On this edition of ST Medical Monday, we offer the second of three consecutive installments of the popular Life Kit podcast from NPR, which is an ongoing feature presenting useful "how to" tips to listeners on various aspects of daily living. Our own John Schumann co-hosted a trio of health-related Life Kit podcasts which originally appeared earlier this summer, and those are the three episodes we'll be sharing on our program (last week, today, and next week). Today's episode, number 2 of 3, is

(Note: This show first aired earlier this year.) Our guest is Mallory O'Meara, an author, screenwriter, and film producer who lives and works in Los Angeles. She tells us about her new book, which is a biography of Milicent Patrick -- one of Disney's first female animators and the only woman in history to create one of Hollywood's classic movie monsters: The Creature from the Black Lagoon. As was noted of this volume in a starred review in BookPage: "Fascinating.... This is a book that O'Meara

(Note: This show first aired earlier this year.) Nathan Englander is our guest; he's the bestselling author of "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," and other books. He joins us to discuss his new novel, "Kaddish.com." Per a critic writing for The New York Times, this book is "sublime.... [It] reads like a modern-day Hasidic tale in which religious characters are bedeviled by the challenges of upholding God's word in an all too human world....

(Note: This show first aired earlier this year.) Our guest is the bestselling young-adult writer Laurie Halse Anderson, who's widely known and appreciated for the brave manner in which she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Her novel "Speak," which first appeared two decades ago, was groundbreaking in this regard. Anderson's new book, which she tells us about, is a memoir in poetry called "Shout." As was noted of this moving book in a starred review in Publishers

(Note: This show first aired earlier this year.) The acclaimed journalist and bestselling author Daniel Okrent is our guest; he tells us about his book, "The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America." This book looks back to the 1920s is reveal a dark, forgotten chapter of American history -- a troubling era with serious implications for the present day. "The Guarded Gate" tells the story of the

On this edition of ST Medical Monday, we offer the first of three successive installments of the popular Life Kit podcast from NPR, which is an ongoing feature presenting useful "how to" tips to listeners on many various aspects of daily living. Our own John Schumann co-hosted a trio of health-related Life Kit podcasts which originally appeared earlier this summer, and those are the three episodes we'll be sharing on our program (today, next week, and the week after). Today's episode, number 1

(Please note: This interview first aired last year.) Our guest is Vanessa Hua, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, who joins us to discuss her debut novel, "A River of Stars." It's a powerful and moving saga of modern-day motherhood, immigration, and identity in which a pregnant Chinese woman makes her way to California (i.e., Los Angeles, and then San Francisco's Chinatown) in pursuit of the American dream.

(Note: This show originally aired back in February.) Our guest is the novelist Margaret Verble. Her new book, which she tells us about, is "Cherokee America." Set on the American frontier in the spring of 1875, and specifically in the Cherokee Nation -- which would later be part of Oklahoma -- this novel follows a series of complex family alliances and cultural and racial clashes in the aftermath of the Civil War. It's a vivid (and often funny) novel of blood relations and home lands, of buried

Our guest is Carla Rachel Sameth, a writer who teaches at the LA Writing Project (at California State University Los Angeles) and at Southern New Hampshire University. She joins us to discuss her new book, "One Day on the Gold Line: A Memoir in Essays." As Sue William Silverman, author of "The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew," has noted of Sameth's book: "Race, class, drugs, sexuality, otherness.... Twenty-first century American hot-button issues are on full display in

The executive director of Riverparks, Matt Meyer discusses the recovery effort from this spring's Arkansas River flood, and the $8.3 million in damage to trails, infrastructure and bank erosion along the river. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has approved the park authority's application for relief, but Meyer says it will be a reimbursement for repairs made, and Riverparks has access to less than half of the required amount. Meyer discusses the repairs that have been made, and