Booktalk with Diana Korte

Host Diana Korte speaks with  Don Winslow , bestselling author of CITY IN RUIN S, the last book in a trilogy featuring crime boss Danny Ryan. The lesson for him is as hard as it is true: sometimes you must become what you hate to protect what you love.   Now a billionaire gambling mogul, he builds an empire of glittering mega-hotels and casinos along the Las Vegas Strip. Battles of money, influenc...

Host Diana Korte speaks with Manal al-Sharif , author of DARING TO DRIVE , who grew up in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. In her teens she was a religious radical, by her twenties she was a college-educated computer security engineer. Then she lived for a while in Boston, learned to drive and became a women’s rights advocate. Back home she was the first Saudi woman who defied the ban on driving and i...

Never one to shy away from controversial topics, Joyce Carol Oates ’ “The Sacrifice” is based on the story of Tawana Brawley of upstate New York who made headlines in the late 1980s with allegations of kidnapping and rape that were later proven false. When we spoke about this book in 2015, JCO was already the author of more than 100 books—novels, short story collections, a memoir, children’s books...

Host Diana Korte speaks with New Mexico-based  Michael Benanav , a photo-journalist known for searching out and living with nomadic tribes and bringing their compelling stories and images back from distant places.  In  “Himalaya Bound: One Family’s Quest to Save Their Animals–And an Ancient Way of Life”  he travels to northern India to journey with the Van Gujjars, a tribe of forest-dwelling nomad...

Tracy Clark is an award-winning author of 6 crime novels including the Cass Raines Chicago Mystery series.  FALL is her newest book and second in the Detective Harriett Foster thriller series.   In this page-turner of a book, the Chicago PD is on high alert when two city aldermen are found dead: one by apparent suicide, one brutally stabbed in his office, and both with thirty dimes left on their b...

Host Diana Korte speaks with  R. David Edmunds , author of 12 books about Native Americans. His newest title is “VOICES IN THE DRUM that features 9 stories about these people spanning hundreds of years of history.  Times and places range from Mound City, AL as it existed a century or so before Columbus to what it was like for a job-hunting family in the 1950s to move from a reservation in the Dako...

Host Diana Korte speaks with Douglas Preston , author of "THE LOST TOMB." Some of the stories in this book have taken him from the haunted country of Italy and the largest tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings to the booby-trapped Money Pit on Oak Island in Nova Scotia and a cannibal site in the American Southwest. Listeners might be familiar with some of his other 40 books including &quot...

Cary Elwes, who was then age 23, played the dashing character known as Westley in this cult movie classic . He talked about the behind-the-scenes making of the movie   in his book, “ As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride ” when we spoke in 2014. The continued unexpected popularity of this happy movie made 36 years ago didn’t begin until ten years after it was relea...

Today I spoke with the James Beard Award-winning  Fuchsia Dunlop about her 7th book, “Invitation To A Banquet. The Story of Chinese Food.”   Based in London, she speaks, reads, and writes Chinese and has traveled, often writing down recipes, for 30 years all around China. Rather than another cookbook, “Invitation to a Banquet” is an exploration of the history, techniques, and philosophies of Chine...

Author of more than a dozen books, historian Nathaniel Philbrick’s   “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War”  details the perilous ocean crossing the European pilgrims made.  Imagine the struggle of moving 2 mph for 3,000 miles over two months.  Yes, the Native American Wampanoags shared bounty with the Pilgrims at that first tense Thanksgiving, but unlike what many of us learned in gra...

Host Diana Korte speaks with  Alexander McCall Smith , the author of more than 100 books sold around the world in 40 languages. This includes the  No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency  novels, plus other series and stand-alone books.   His newest title in this cozy series, the 24th, is From a Far and Lovely Country featuring Mma Precious Ramotswe and her world of familiar characters.  In this latest...

At age 84 Madeleine Albright passed away last year. She was the first woman US Secretary of State, US Ambassador to the United Nations, and author of numerous books including PRAGUE WINTER.    She came to the US with her family as a political refugee, a daughter of a diplomat, and spent her teen years in Colorado. She spoke of the indispensable role of international diplomacy as the world often fa...

Taras Grescoe , author of   “THE LOST SUPPER” , his eighth book, explores an understanding that is quickly spreading among chefs, food producers, and scientists: that the key to sustainable eating lies not in looking forward, but in looking back to the foods—many of them forgotten or on the verge of extinction—that have sustained us through our half-million year existence as a species. Grescoe is...

Craig Johnson , author of a Wyoming mystery series featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire is back with his 19th in the series,  THE LONGMIRE DEFENSE .  This long running string of books is not only a bestseller in the book world, but continues as a popular TV show,  Longmire , on Netflix despite being cancelled some years ago.   This new novel takes readers deep into the heart of the Wyoming countryside...

In 2018 former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor , author of  BLOWBACK: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump  wrote an anonymous opinion piece in  The New York Times  from inside the Trump administration. He revealed publicly what Trump’s cabinet was saying privately: the president was dangerously unfit for office.  He unmasked himself 2 years later to urge Ame...

James McBride’s newest book is  THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE , a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them. As the story begins, it’s 1972. Workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania are digging the foundations for a new development, and the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held...

“I Have Something to Tell You” by Chasten Buttigieg is the young adult adaptation of his candid bestselling memoir about growing up gay in his small Midwestern town.  This version is completely rewritten with new stories, including resources for readers, parents, and teachers. It focuses on the author’s young years and his coming of age story. He also explores the support systems he’s built and de...

Jake Tapper regularly interviews world leaders and other newsmakers, but he also brings his knowledge of politics and the past to his political thrillers that are historically accurate.  “All The Demons Are Here” is set in 1977. The story revolves around a brother and sister, Ike and Lucy Marder, son and daughter of U.S. Senator Charlie Marder and Margaret Marder, a well-known zoologist. Ike is a...

The latest historical novel,  LADY TAN'S CIRCLE OF WOMEN , from writer Lisa See  who is the author of 12 books, is inspired by the true story of a woman physician from 15th-century China whose remedies are still used today some 500 years later. According to Confucius who was influential at the time, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family in the late...

Gloria Steinem , author of  My Life on the Road , had an itinerant childhood. Based in New York City, she is now 89 and has never stopped traveling. When she was a young girl, her father would pack the family in the car every fall and drive across country searching for adventure and trying to make a living. The seeds were planted: Gloria realized that growing up didn’t have to mean settling down....

Silvia Pettem’s   “In Search of the Blonde Tigress,"   dips into the world of sensationalized Chicago newspaper headlines in the 1930s that claimed Eleanor was not only “the blonde tigress,” but also “the most dangerous woman alive.”  But a closer look at her life shows that she was an otherwise ordinary woman who got caught up in a Chicago crime spree, then was convicted as an accomplice to...

Award-winning African ecologist  Paula Kahumbu , author of SECRETS OF THE ELEPHANTS , is one of the world’s preeminent advocates for elephant conservation and the fight against illegal poaching of elephants for the ivory trade.  Her gorgeous co-authored National Geographic coffee table book is a companion to the TV series of the same name. As big as a bus and weighing up to 11 tons, elephants have...

The always fun Lisa Scottoline is back with her 37th novel, LOYALTY , a historical novel about the beginnings of the Mafia on the island of Sicily in the 1800’s.  Readers will be transported to the dramatic and ruggedly beautiful island of Sicily, the jewel of the Mediterranean, where lush lemon groves and mouth-watering cuisine contrast with a turbulent history of colonization and corruption.   ...

Steven Simon, author of seven books, is currently a fellow at MIT after spending nearly 40 years specializing in the Middle East in a variety of high-level jobs both in and out of government.  In his newest book, “GRAND DELUSION: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East,” he is both candid and clear about the gap between US policymakers’ fantasy and reality in this part of the wor...

Inspired by a 25-year-old New York Times article about World War II evacuated English children revisiting their U.S. foster homes as adults,  Laura Spence-Ash tells her own well researched story,  ⁠BEYOND THAT, THE SEA . The book follows the lives of two families over three decades. Their lives become intertwined when Beatrix, the eleven-year-old daughter of the English family, is sent to live wit...