The Women Books & More’s Podcast

Since the moment I chatted with Lisa Genova about her new book, More or Less Maddy, I’ve been getting messages from you all, asking me to air the interview we did a few years ago when Lisa wrote Still Alice. Here it is—by popular demand. For those who don’t know Still Alice, here’s the story: Dr. Alice Howland is a renowned linguistics professor at Columbia University. When words begin to escape h...

Here’s what we think we know about arguably the most famous Native American women who ever lived: she was interpreter and guide for Lewis & Clark; she traveled 1000s of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean and she died tragically young.   But…what if everything we know about Sacagawea is wrong…including how we pronounce her name…   Sandra and Dennis Fox sit down to talk with us. They a...

Today, we sit down with Black Tomato’s Carolyn Addison to talk about travel. Black Tomato is one of the world’s leading luxury travel companies. Carolyn is one of the standout female leaders at Black Tomato and is the driving force behind some of Black Tomato’s most imaginative and compelling travel experiences. She’s been called an “experience architect.” She tells us about solo travel, mother-da...

Margie Goldsmith is one of the most accomplished women I know. She has traveled to more than 150 countries on seven continents and written more than 1,000 award-winning articles about her adventures. You can read them in Forbes, National Geographic, the New York Times and many other publications. She is a film maker, a former marathoner and triathlete. She plays blues harmonica and jams with some...

Casting for Recovery (a national nonprofit) delivers healing for women diagnosed with breast cancer that traditional medicine alone can’t offer — powerful, oncology-informed weekend retreats held on a river, not in a hospital room. CfR celebrates its 30th anniversary and currently hosts 60 free fly-fishing retreats in all 50 states, serving over 800 women each year. Women at any age and any stage...

Darla Worden is the Editor-in-Chief of Mountain Living magazine and Colorado Homes & Lifestyles magazine. She joins us to talk about Cockeyed Happy, her book about Ernest Hemingway’s summers in Wyoming with his second wife, Pauline. This story is not well known. I mean…we can picture Hemingway in Paris. Fishing in Key West. Drinking rum at his favorite bar (The Floridita) in Havana. But…Wyomin...

Maybe you want to write a book. A children’s book. A children’s picture book. Maybe about a wee hedgehog who wants to be a ballerina. Or an alligator who dreams of becoming an astronaut. Maybe about learning to cook in Nona’s kitchen. Or a nonfiction book about the secret language of spiders   I mean…how difficult can it be to write a book for children?   The answer is…not as easy you might think....

This one’s out of the vault and one of my favorite vampire stories. It is the second (in a series of five) President’s Vampire books by Christopher Farnsworth. It is about a vampire that works for the president of the United States. The book was published in 2011 so the president referenced could have been President Obama or it could have been West Wing’s President Bartlet. The story is paranormal...

OK. OK. Thank you for your messages. I get it. Everyone wants more Lisa See. So today...I dove deep into the vault and found this interview—Shanghai Girl—from 2009. It is about the complex relationship between two sisters who live a privileged life in 1930s Shanghai—full of great wealth and glamour and called The Pearl of the Orient. Twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister May beauti...

New York Times best-selling author Lisa See is Chinese American—although her tawny hair, freckles and pale skin belie her Asian heritage. Starting 30 years ago with family memoir, On Gold Mountain, her books always are drawn from and reflect her cultural roots. She talks with us about some of her favorites: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (secret writing developed by women best-friends in 19th cent...

This is one of my favorites from the vault. It originally ran on my radio show more than 10 years ago. I just listened to it again and laughed until I got the hiccups. How can talking about death be funny? Listen in and you’ll find out. Here’s the story: From angels to zombies and everything in between, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates is a seriously funny take on the philosop...

Here’s the story: Sisters on the Fly was started by two real-life sisters, Maurrie Sussman and Becky Clarke, who loved fly fishing, camping in their vintage trailers, a glass of good wine, campfire cooking, and playing poker for pennies. They invited their friends to join them and soon there were 20.  Pretty soon there were 100. “When we started, we wanted to bring women together as best friends a...

Explore what comes next for the Women Books & More Podcasts

Lisa Genova a best-selling author and Harvard-trained neuroscientist. I talked with her for her book about Still Alice—an emotional look at Alzheimer’s. I’ll look in “the vault” to find that interview for you. Still Alice was made into a major motion picture starring Julianne Moore. She won an Oscar for her role as Alice Howland, a renowned linguistics professor descending into Alzheimer’s. The fi...

One of my favorites from the archives. Huston was born in London, the love child of a widely adored ballerina and the 2nd Viscount Norwich. When she was four, she lost her mother in an auto accident and was sent to Ireland to live with her mother’s estranged husband, the acclaimed, eccentric and intimidating film director John Huston. (The African Queen, Casino Royale, Prizzi’s Honor….) “I was a m...

Here is one of my favorites from the archives. So…you’ve probably heard of Abigail Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Annie Oakley and Eleanor Roosevelt. But what about the female mathematician who laid the groundwork for abstract algebra. Or the women of NASA who helped send John Glenn, the first American astronaut, into orbit. From artists and writers to doctors, scientists and activists—Jill S. Tietjen’s...

The Nazis were banging on the door. The Fenves family was about to be rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Their  gentile cook had the presence of mind to save the family recipe book by hiding it under her apron. Chef Alon Shaya found the recipe book in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)  in Washington, D.C. and was reunited with 93-year-old Steven Fenves, the lone survivor of...

With his lover imprisoned in a Russian gulag, the Gray Man will stop at nothing to free her—in Midnight Black, Mark Greaney’s latest thriller in the NYT #1 bestselling Gray Man series.  A winter sunrise over the great plains of Russia is no cause for celebration. The temperature barely rises above zero and the guards at penal colony IK22 take their misery out on the prisoners—mainly on Zoya Zakhar...

This is one of my favorites from the archives. It is 1921 and a forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio comes into a modest inheritance and uses it to escape her tyrannical mother by taking a trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. She stays at Cairos’ Semiramis Hotel (It’s still there, now an InterContinental) just as the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference convenes. She meets Winston Churchill, T....

A favorite from the archives Barry Petersen is a CBS News correspondent. He has reported on wars, natural disasters and royal weddings but his most difficult assignment was writing Jan’s Story—a personal account of his wife’s diagnosis (in her mid-50s) of early-onset Alzheimer’s.  It is a true story. It is a love story. Barry has put into words the daily struggle he had to face, caring for the lov...

Here’s one of my favorites from the archives. On a grey day in March of 1941, acclaimed British writer Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the fast flowing River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later miles downstream. It was the tragic end of a brilliant novelist and essayist—one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. Or was it?  Six decades af...

One of my top favorites from the archive. Isabelle Allende’s books are a seductive blend of magical realism, accurate historical details and exude the alluring scent of Chilean jasmine. She comes into my recording studio trailing the scent of sweet vanilla and something musky, perhaps sandalwood. We sit and talk like old friends—about books and life. She revels that she puts on full make up, stock...