Read Beat (...and repeat)

You know you've made it in the book world when the author's name is bigger than the title. That's where Mark Greaney finds himself with the publication of The Chaos Agent, the 13th in the Gray Man spy thriller series. This time around Court Gentry is battling a diabolical plot to wipe out the world's leading experts on robotics. Greaney said he deliberately focused on AI's...

Put aside your fears about a robotic uprising, says Ruth Aylett, a computer science professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a robotics researcher for 30 years. Talking with Steve Tarter, she emphasized that robots, whatever you may have heard to the contrary, are machines, made and controlled by man. "Forget the hype and the unrealistic speculations about so-called new...

Beavers have a long and illustrious history. There were beavers as big as bears for millions of years until some 10,000 years ago. Since then the beaver has dutifully carried out the work of an environmental engineer, creating dams and managing water flow, helping both wildlife and plants prosper. "Beavers are the only animals apart from man that radically transform their environment," s...

Race into space? Not so fast, say Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the husband-and-wife team whose book, A City on Mars , lays out some of the challenges that face space settlements on the Moon, Mars or wherever man (and woman) might be heading in the future. Space may look more promising with all the problems on Earth but while there may not be pollution on Mars, there are plenty of issues to face bef...

Godzilla is one of the great movie franchises of our time. But how many people know about the 1955 novella written by Shigeru Kayama, the Japanese science fiction writer who produced the original Godzilla screenplay? Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again are works translated by Jeffrey Angles, a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University, that were published in 2023 by the Univers...

If you're one of those people who has shuddered at the thought of spiders, snakes, or other creepy crawlies invading your space, you might get new insight from Bethany Brookshire, whose book about pests makes the point that animals are just being animals. "We believe we're in charge, entitled to space only for us," said Brookshire. "What we really hate about the pests is t...

Elmwood is a small town in Illinois that had a population of 1,500 when Nelson Dean Jay was growing up. But the small-town boy went on to make a name for himself in Paris, France.  “In my opinion, you simply can’t name anyone from central Illinois who had this much influence on America and the world, and (yet) no one knows about him,” said William Engelbrecht, the co-author of "The American B...

The past 20 years have not been kind to the newspaper industry. Margot Susca, a communications professor at American University in Washington, D.C. and former reporter, provides details on some of the financial dealings involving newspapers during that time. Susca outlines the furious activity taken by private investment funds and hedge funds in the past 20 years, outlining practices such as profi...

We had another busy year on Read Beat in 2023--more than 50 interviews, almost one per week. Your host is Steve Tarter, a retired newspaper reporter living in Peoria, Illinois.  I try to find issues that might prove interesting to a general audience. A lot of books get published each year and you hear about the most popular ones on a lot of fronts. Here we try to find the ones you may not hear so...

Media folks have been taking questions about the magazine industry to "Mr. Magazine" for decades. Samir Husni, 70, now retired after more than 30 years as a professor at the University of Mississippi, is still the oracle when it comes to magazines with his Mr. Magazine blog (https://mrmagazine.me/). "It's the world of bookazine these days," said Husni, referring to the sin...

J.P. Telotte has been writing about film since 1985. As the man who introduced film studies to Georgia Tech University, Telotte, now professor emeritus at the Georgia school, has produced Selling Science Fiction Cinema , a study of the effort to market sci-fi films in the 1950s and 1960s. His book focuses on a period when science fiction first exploded on the screen.  In this postwar period both t...

Most of us are familiar with Nancy, the comic strip penned for decades by Ernie Bushmiller, but what about the new Nancy now produced by Olivia Jaimes? That's the focus of Jeff Karnicky's new book, "The New Nancy." Bushmiller died in 1982 but Nancy has been sustained by the syndicate that owns the rights to the character and she just keeps going. Despite fears--with newspapers...

Route 66 still stands as a symbol of the road west, the open highway representing independence and mobility, two values that Americans consider part of their heritage. Yet Nat King Cole’s 1946 hit song, “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” stands more than a celebration of the open road. It’s a reminder that the road wasn’t open to everyone Nat King Cole, himself, wouldn’t have been able to stay at most...

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guide book for African Americans published between 1936 and 1967. The publication served as a guide to finding businesses that were welcoming to black Americans, including hotels and restaurants, during an era when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against nonwhites was widespread. That description comes from New York’s Museum of Arts & Design...

Of all the general-interest magazines that held sway for decades before bowing out in the mid-20th century, Look is the one that’s often forgotten, said Peter Yarrow, whose book on the magazine points out that the publication had 35 million readers at its peak. Unlike Life, Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post , the other major magazines of the day,  Look tends to be overlooked, he told S...

Peoria native Anthony Suau won awards for his photography while taking pictures for big-city dailies like the Chicago Sun-Times and Denver Post . His photographs have appeared in Life, National Geographic and Paris Match . He won the Pulitzer Prize for his images of the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 while in 1996 he received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for coverage of the war in Chechnya. Now the 67-y...

Advertising has been part of the American scene since the beginning. Jennifer Black, in her new book, "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America," points to ads at the time of the American Revolution by "a growing contingent of Americans who expressed their classed identities through the goods they purchased." But things really got going in the 18...

Being labeled “the Czar of Noir” isn’t anything new for Eddie Muller. The San Francisco-based author and TCM film host has been writing and talking about film noir for more than 25 years. His 1998 release, “Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir,” was just selected as one of the top 100 movie books by the Hollywood Reporter (the book will soon be rereleased from TCM). Muller has produced an entire...

While Rosie the Riveter is a vivid symbol of World War II, emphasizing the vital role women played in the workplace during the war, an "Airplane Annie" tag was never developed that might have fit Ann Baumgartner, the American aviator who became the first woman to fly a jet aircraft as a test pilot during WWII. As a member of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) program, Baumgartner w...

The publishing industry has undergone change since 1960, notes Dan Sinykin, the Emory University English professor whose new book is "Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature." If you're familiar with names like Ballantine, Bantam, Berkley, Dell, Doubleday, Knopf, Putnam and Viking, these once-independent publishing houses are among the...

Fifty years after his death, Pablo Picasso remains a central figure in the art world. Along with his famous periods--blue, rose and African, for example--there were the many women that shared his life. Picasso's love life was almost as colorful as his art, critics have noted. That triggered Jeanne Mackin into writing "Picasso's Lovers," a work of historical fiction. "I wan...

When Betty Friedan returned to her home town of Peoria in 1978 for a high school reunion (Peoria High School, class of 1938), she'd already covered a lot of territory. Rachel Shteir (pronounced sh-tire) outlines much of that activity in the book, "Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter." Friedan, of course, wrote "The Feminine Mystique," a book that one can say with some con...

Born on a farm in Oklahoma's Cherokee Nation in 1879, Will Rogers went on to become one of the most celebrated people of the 20th century, hobnobbing with the rich and famous while entertaining millions in movies, on radio and through his newspaper column. Gary Clayton Anderson, an accomplished author (previous books focus on Sitting Bull and the Indian Southwest), offers a portrait of Rogers...

Dawidziak, a former TV critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal , has written books about three prominent TV shows: Columbo, Twilight Zone and Kolchak the Night Stalker. Columbo ran for 10 seasons while Twilight Zone ran for five and been repeated endlessly over the years. Kolchak, on the other hand , lasted for only the 1974-75 season and 20 episodes. Dawidziak told Steve Ta...

In turning their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places, the authors of "The Injustice of Place" discovered that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice but rural areas that are often ignored. Kathryn Edin and Tim Nelson, both of Princeton University, noted that, along with Luke Shaefer, who co-authored a previou...