Booktalk with Diana Korte

ANGELS OF THE PACIFIC by Elise Hooper (her fourth novel) tells the powerful story of American army and navy nurses kept as prisoners for nearly three years during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. Many of them had fled the hardships of the Great Depression at home before the war for the glamour and adventure of Manila, one of the most desirable postings in the world....

Early in Brit Bennett’s “THE VANISHING HALF” light-skinned Desiree and Stella, now age 16, run off to New Orleans, two hours away. But "after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find." It’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their famili...

Bob Shea has written and illustrated over a dozen children's picture books. His newest is the award-winning “CHEZ BOB,” a story about a lazy yellow alligator named Bob who is intent on gobbling birds. To that end, he opens Chez Bob, a bird restaurant, on his nose. It becomes so popular that Bob finds himself a pillar of the bird community. Bob even coaches a local bird basketball te...

" THE STEAL. The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It ," co-authored by Mark Bowden , concentrates in week-by-week, state-by-state fashion on the 64 days between Election Day, November 3 and January 5th, 2021. All the judges in the 61 election lawsuits during this period made their unanimous decisions against Trump’s claims based on the law. So did the election worke...

Can a lawyer in their first courtroom case win against the mighty power of the US federal government? Yes, she did. The Farmer’s Lawyer by North Dakota attorney and advocate Sarah Vogel is a memoir about her successful landmark class action lawsuit against the federal government. She did it on behalf of 240,000 family farmers facing illegal foreclosures during the 1980s farm crisis in the Presiden...

Prolific (36 books) storyteller Ken Follett, author of the contemporary thriller  NEVER,  says, “When I was doing the research for “Fall of Giants ”  I was shocked to realize that the First World War was a war that nobody wanted…I came to believe that it was all a tragic accident. And I wondered:  Could that happen again? ” His compelling book speaks to our polit...

Prompted by the onset of Covid, Doughty has created a book that is a charming collection of lists, musings, prompts, and illustrations—from the extraordinary to the everyday, from the big to the little.  Here are examples.  Best advice. Handwritten thank-you notes. A stroll through the park at dusk, just as the crickets start to hum.  One of my favorites is that YouTube video of “Up...

“Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Doerr takes readers on a 600-year epic journey. There are three storylines: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city wall during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and gentle octogenarian Zeno, in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for a distant exoplanet, decades fr...

Bestselling, award-winning historian Nathaniel Philbrick's "Travels with George" is a blended account of two road trips separated by about 230 years.   In the fall of 1789, Washington, only six months into his presidency, set out on his first of four road trips as he attempted to unite what were in essence thirteen independent states into a single nation.  In the fall of 2018, Philbrick,...

Dylan Thuras is co-author of " Gastro Obscura A Food Adventurer’s Guide ," a book with 500 entries that span all seven continents and fifty states. Complete with photographs and illustrations, it’s all about food that ranges from the Antarctica Base Stations’ often elegant cuisine for scientists to the largest Asian night market in North America at Richmond in British Columbia.  But...

"The Devil in the Gallery” is a lavishly illustrated book, the latest of more than a dozen books by Noah Charney. It’s a guided tour of the history of art through its scandals, rivalries, and shocking acts, each of which resulted in a positive step forward for art in general and, in most cases, for the careers of the artists in question. Charney is an American expat who lives with his family and t...

This book, “How Magicians Think. Misdirection, Deception, and Why Magic Matters,” is my love letter to magic,” says Jay, ”and it answers the questions people ask me every night after the show.”  This book is divided into 52 essays, same number as a deck of cards, and is filled with Jay's insights from working as a magician since he was a kid. Jay answers common questions like "How d...

Ever wonder why some parents don’t get their kids vaccinated? How reliable are childhood and Covid-19 vaccines anyway? Tune in… It’s not often that a book published five years ago is more pertinent today. But University of Colorado Denver Professor Jennifer Reich’s  “Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines” is that book because of the Covid-19 pandemic. “For over a decade, Jennifer Rei...

Scott Small’s debut book is “Forgetting. The Benefits of Not Remembering.” He's an expert on the memory losses of old age and Alzheimer’s who now introduces us to a third kind of forgetting. The normal one, the one that’s good for us and enhances our lives. "Small, director of Columbia University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, puts forgetting in a new light in his eye-openin...

 “From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer--now ninety-one years old and at the top of her game--has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers, who “raises ordinary people and everyday occurrences to a new height.” (Washington Post) These collected short stories--most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, in the 1960s an...

"Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek Tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike—particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one membe...

“Cold Case Chronicles” tells the stories of victims – some missing, some murdered and some with changed identities. All are true, and each are mysterious in their own ways. The cases in this nonfiction narrative date from 1910 through the 1950s and include an evolution in forensics, as well as historical context in order to view the men, women and children through the lens of time.” One of these n...

“Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and N...

“The change was immediate. The country opened up west of Harrisburg and suddenly we could drink from streams and build fires without getting caught and sleep pretty much anywhere we wanted. We’d walked the railroad track from Washington to Baltimore to Philly and then turned west at the Main Line and made Amish country by winter.  The Pennsylvania fields lay bare and hard in the cold but...

As a child, Jory Fleming was wracked by uncontrollable tantrums, had no tolerance for people, and couldn’t manage the outside world. Slightly more than a decade later, he was bound for England, selected to attend one of the world’s premier universities, Oxford University, on a Rhodes Scholarship. Jory Fleming’s unconventional memoir is “ How to Be Human. An Autistic Man’s Guide to Life .” Thi...

“Tessa, born and raised in Belfast, is a news producer for the BBC. She is also the single mother of a six-month-old son, who she is raising in the shadow of escalating threats to peace by a reemerging IRA. While she’s at work one day, news breaks of an IRA raid at a gas station a few hours to the north. Tessa freezes as security camera footage reveals a familiar face: her sister, Marian, who is a...

“A floundering second-generation teen growing up in Atlanta’s suburbs, Neil Narayan doesn’t have the same drive as everyone around him. His parents’ expectations for him are high, but he just wants his neighbor Anita Dayal.  But Anita has a secret: she and her mother, Anjali, have been brewing an ancient alchemical potion from stolen gold that transfers the ambition of the jewelry’s original...

“I grew up in a family of foodies, chefs, butchers, and hunters (yes, it’s true). My household had a flock of chickens (both for eggs and for eating), the freezers were stocked full of meat, steaks were cooked rare, and there were even real animal heads decorating the walls (not that I ever liked the heads). … So, as I’m sure you can imagine, switching to veganism was a BIG change for me.” Sam Tur...

“In the decade I’ve worked for the New York Times, I’ve reported from terrorist hot spots in West Africa, to wildfire ravaged California, and the globe. And as soon as I file each story, I do one thing before I head home. I search for the horses.” Sarah Maslin Nir ‘s first book, Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal describes why so many people are passionate, even o...

New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto is the author of five books and numerous science-linked articles. This is the Voice begins with a story about how he blew out his own voice singing in a band.  Along the way, he shows us why the voice is the most efficient, effective means of communication ever devised. Even babies hear their mother’s voices in the womb. Our voices can be calibrated to r...