Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady

In the fourth episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow join Roxanne to discuss their book, Big Friendship.  Aminatou Sow is a writer, interviewer, and cultural commentator. She is a frequent public speaker whose talks and interviews lead to candid conversations about ambition, money, and power. Aminatou lives in Brooklyn. Ann Friedman is a...

In the fourth episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Annik Lafarge joins Roxanne to discuss her new book, Chasing Chopin. Annik LaFarge is a writer, photographer, lecturer, and author of the much-praised On the High Line: Exploring America's Most Original Urban Park, winner of the IPPY award for Travel Guidebook. She has been writing about the High Line and urban...

In the third episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Marc Brackett joins Roxanne to discuss his book, Permission to Feel. Marc Brackett, Ph. D., author of Permission to Feel, is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. Marc has published 125 scholarly articles on the role of emotio...

In the second episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Jordan Blashek and Chris Haugh join Roxanne to discuss their book, Union: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground. Jordan Blashek is a businessman, military veteran, and attorney from Los Angeles, California. After college, Jordan spent five years in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer, ser...

In the first episode of our new season, Senator Chris Murphy joins Roxanne to discuss his book The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy. Elected in 2012 as the youngest member of the U.S. Senate, Chris Murphy has earned a reputation as a serious legislator who is willing to stand up for his principles and reach across the aisle. Since the Newtown school shooting in De...

This week, we revisit our 2019 conversation with Jenny Odell as she discusses her book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy with Roxanne Coady. JENNY ODELL is an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford, has been an artist-in-residence at places like the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department, and has exhibited her art all over...

In today's episode, we revisit our conversation with James Forman, Jr. from 2018 as he discusses his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. James Forman Jr. is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, numerous law reviews, and other publications. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, he spen...

This week, we revisit our conversation with Lisa Taddeo on her book Three Women, now out in paperback. Lisa Taddeo has contributed to New York magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour, and many other publications. Her nonfiction has been included in the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Political Writing anthologies, and her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. Lisa Taddeo's debut...

Steve Luxenberg is the author of Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation and the critically acclaimed Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret. During his thirty years as a Washington Post senior editor, he has overseen reporting that has earned numerous national honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes. Separate won the J. Anthony Lukas...

Doctors are acculturated and socialized to maintain life. Sometimes at all costs, even the human costs of suffering. The relatively new field of palliative care looks for the way that medicine can embrace and relieve the tension of seeking to preserve life while embracing life’s temporality. Dr. Sunita Puri explores the issues with exquisite elegance and humanity in her book That Good Night, out n...

In the 1990s, three to five percent of American children were believed to have what was referred to as "disordered attention." By 2013, 11 percent were believed to have disordered attention. In 1990, six hundred thousand children were on Ritalin, and by 201 three and a half million children were on stimulants. So was this better diagnosing of the problem? Is the diagnosis actually reliable...

Why is putting out the fire more fascinating than preventing the fire? And why do we think we don't have the money to prevent something, even if the lack of prevention creates a cost? Or worse, cost lives or quality of lives? We seem to be addicted to response, recovery and rescue. All that can change to our collective good., and in dramatic ways. In Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Befor...

David Kamp is an author, journalist, humorist, lyricist, and a charter member of the Sesame Street—viewing audience. A longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, he has profiled such cultural icons as Johnny Cash, Sly Stone, Lucian Freud, Bruce Springsteen, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Among his books are the national bestseller The United States of Arugula, a chronicle of America’s foodways. His first mus...

Dr. Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. An experienced diplomat and policymaker, he served as the senior Middle East adviser to President George H. W. Bush, as director of the Policy Planning Staff under Secretary of State Colin Powell, and as the U.S. envoy to both the Cyprus and Northern Ireland peace talks. A recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal, the State De...

BESS KALB is an Emmy-nominated writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Her writing for the show earned her a Writer's Guild Award in 2016. She has also written for the Oscars and the Emmys. A regular contributor to The New Yorker's "Daily Shouts," her work has been published in The New Republic, Grantland, Salon.com, Wired, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. This episode is...

How do we respond to the immensity of suffering that confronts us and overwhelms us without losing our compassion or sanity? This week, we revisit Roxanne Coady's conversation with Tim Desmond as they discuss his book, How to Stay Human in a F*cked-Up World: Mindfulness Practices for Real Life. Tim Desmond is a psychotherapist, student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and author of Self-Compassi...

Dr. Beverly Tatum's 1997 book on race relations, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, has become a modern classic found in many classrooms. In this week's episode of Just the Right Book Podcast, the former Spelman College president joins Roxanne for a live event at Wesleyan RJ Julia to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of her time-honored book and how race r...

This week, we revisit our conversation with Mitchell Jackson. The legacy of growing up black in a state whose original constitution stated "no free negro or mulatto not residing in the state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall come, reside or be within the state or hold any real estate or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall pro...

No birth certificates, no school, no doctors, no registered existence, and abuse at the hands of one of her brothers. Westover’s first book “Educated” describes how she escaped a traumatic childhood to graduate from Brigham Young, Harvard, and Cambridge University with a PhD. Also in this episode, Roxanne discusses some of her favorite memoirs and some of yours!

Joseph J. Ellis is the author of many works of American history including Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with his wife and is the father of three sons.

Julia Samuel’s first book Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death, And Surviving is organized by the type of loss; losing a parent, losing a child, and confronting your own death. Is the way which someone grieves different by the loss or is it more defined by who they are? Samuel, a psychotherapist specializing in grief who spent the last 25 years working with bereaved families describes grief as a pr...

The Galvins looked like the manifestation of the post-World War II American Dream. Hard work. Upward mobility. A handsome, accomplished dad. A remarkable mother of twelve. But all was hardly what it seemed. Shockingly, six of the ten boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia, creating chaos of breakdowns, violence, abuse, and secrets. How could this happen to one family? How could this family even re...

According to the NIH, there has been a seventy-percent decline annually in the death rate from cardiovascular disease in the last fifty years and a one percent decline annually in the death rate from cancer over the last fifty years. How can this be when we keep hearing about great new drug discoveries and immunotherapy advances? And if true, isn't there another way to approach the nightmare t...

During our time practicing social distancing, in between new conversations we are revisiting some of our favorite interviews from our archives. In 2018, 200 years since the birth of Frederick Douglass, we received the first major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by prize-winning historian and Yale Professor David Blight is based on nearly a lifetim...

Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux, and Schoolgirls. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, she has been published in USA Today, Parenting, Salon, the New Yorker, and other publications, and has contributed commentary to NPR's All Things Considered. She lives in Northern California with her husband and...