Thinking Aloud

Though almost every American knows about baseball, very few realize that there were hundreds of women's professional baseball teams as far back as the late 1800s. Today's guest has spent years researching their fascinating history and shares it with guest host Mark Burns on today's Thinking Aloud.

Author Renee Beard believes it's wrong to think of Alzheimer's only as a medical diagnosis of doom.  She researches the actual lives of those diagnosed with Alzheimer's and finds that the disease means something much different to those who have it. Today she'll discuss the real world meaning of Alzheimer's above and beyond its basic medical description.   

Where does the science of organ transplantation stand today? Many of these procedures have become routine, with extraordinarily high success rates. But this doesn’t mean that organ donation is a given in our society. There remains a supply and demand issue, even as procedures improve and more is learned by medical practitioners. Marcus Smith thinks aloud today with Richard Gillroy, a doctor who performs such operations and who is perhaps in as much demand for his leadership in the field as for his skill in the operating room. Lives are being saved by the thousands, but could we save even more?

Few American hopes or dreams have persisted as tenaciously as the recurring desire to find not only spiritual fulfillment but economic security in flight from the city and a return to the country. The soul-crushing stress of being a mere cog in urban gears, in a system that can bleed one dry, has always led to dreams of escape. Today on Thinking Aloud, Marcus Smith speaks with Dona Brown about our longing to get back to the land.

What is it about books that so smites and enraptures some people?  Our guest today on Thinking Aloud is Deidre Lynch, a professor of English literature at Harvard who studies just this very question.  Her most recent book is entitled Loving Literature: A Cultural History.  In it, Lynch looks at how we love books, why we love books, and how the meaning of that loving has changed over centuries.  If you are a bibliophile or even a scholar of literature, today’s show will help you discover the origin and nature of the passion you feel so strongly.

Since marriage and family seem to us like they have been around forever, we assume that weddings with all their important rituals have been as well.  But surprisingly, the formal wedding as we know it today is a relatively recent invention of western society.  Our guest today is Karen Dunak and she will tell us the origins and purposes of the formal white weddings we have all either been to or participated in ourselves.

His Excellency Mninwa Johannes Mahlangu is Ambassador of the Republic of South Africato the United States of America.  Today, he talks to host Marcus Smith about the ongoing challenges facing democratic, post-apartheid South Africa.

His excellency Germán Rojas, the Paraguayan ambassador to the United States, joins host Marcus Smith to discuss Paraguay’s economics, geography, demography, history, and culture. The two also deliberate on a distinct characteristic of the Paraguayan people: their ability to tolerate and accept people as they are.

John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath is an incomparable chronicle of the United States' Great Depression of the 1930s.  Today on Thinking Aloud, leading historian of the American West David Wrobel discusses the historical context from which Steinbeck created his Nobel Prize-winning work.  

Nine Mile Canyon in Utah was the last resort and always a disappointment—a region of fierce beauty that rebuffed every attempt by would-be settlers at domestication into a “home sweet home.” From marksmen, fur trappers, cattle rustlers, moonshiners, and gamblers to indigenous peoples who decorated Nine Mile's walls with petroglyphs and pictographs, Nine Mile was the setting of more stories than you could tell in a lifetime--some of them true, some just memorable. Authors Jerry D. and Donna K. Spangler discuss their book “Last Chance Byway: The History of Nine Mile Canyon,” which shares some of the stories of this desolate and beautiful canyon.