Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady

Anne Bogel is the author of Reading People and I'd Rather Be Reading and creator of the blog Modern Mrs Darcy and the podcasts What Should I Read Next? and One Great Book. Bogel's popular book lists and reading guides have established her as a tastemaker among readers, authors, and publishers. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Ins...

Over a forty-year span of working forty hours a week, which most of us will do, we will spend eighty-thousand hours in what poll after poll shows that almost seventy percent of the employed are disengaged. Globally, almost 85 percent are unhappy and unhappy with work likely means unhappy with life. Is this the way it has to be? It is work. Well, the answer is delightfully an unequivocal no.  Bill...

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 provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all s...

We spend a lot of time talking and listening. But are we really listening and are we being heard? Do you fail to register the name of a person that you were just introduced to? Do you find that someone is texting or looking at their phone while you're having a conversation with them? And why, with all the connecting that we're doing, are more people lonely and unheard?  Kate Murphy is a Ho...

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...

A fine spring and a beautiful evening on May 10, 1940, didn’t seem the type of day that would portend a sequence of events that would define our world to this day. Yet, on Winston Churchill’s first day as Prime Minister, Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and that succeeding year, May 1940 to May 1941, saw the death of 45,000 Britains thr...

Richie Jackson is currently producing Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song on Broadway. He executive produced Showtime's Nurse Jackie (Emmy and Golden Globe nominee for "Best Comedy Series") for seven seasons and co-executive produced the film Shortbus, written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. He and his husband, Jordan Roth, were honored with The Trevor Project's 2016 Trevor He...

The #MeToo movement is thriving. Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose have lost their seats. Harvey Weinstein is on trial for rape. The veil of secrecy and shame has been lifted. Does this mean that we can check that box—mission accomplished? Not really. The real corporate world has yet to do all that it will take for environments to fundamentally change. Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her new book, #MeToo in the C...

Our democracy is dependent on the free flow of information, but it is as critically dependent on the reliability of that information. Since waging an information war is easier and cheaper than buying tanks and tridents, we’re at a critical stage of protecting our democracy. We could have no better guy to this conversation than Rick Stengel. Among his esteemed positions and experience—being Time ma...

Men have defined the space of midlife crisis for decades — the sporty cars, the affairs, etc. But what does a midlife crisis look like for women, and do Gen X women have a particular vulnerability? Ada Calhoun has used her uncanny ability to define the zeitgeist along with countless interviews, research, and data to answer these questions, resulting in her latest book, Why We Can’t Sleep. In this...

From colonial times when qualities valued for sought-after wives were that she should be civil and up to fifty, to proposed legislation in 1915 that would have made it illegal for a woman over forty-four to wear cosmetics for the purpose of making a false impression, to today when we celebrate Ruth Bader Ginsburg lifting weights and issuing wise Supreme Court decisions, we are reminded that the st...

A graduate of Wesleyan University, BECK DOREY-STEIN worked as a White House stenographer from 2012 to 2017. Previously she worked as a high school English teacher in Hightstown, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and Seoul, South Korea. This is her first book.

Has confidence in our universities eroded? Is the price for making people feel included making universities inhospitable to controversial ideas? Have we become too politically correct or not politically correct enough? And, most critically, have our colleges become political institutions rather than institutions that are creating lifelong learners that are willing to engage in honest debate and eq...

Stephen Schwarzman, with his cofounder Pete Peterson, built Blackstone into the largest private equity firm in the world, with over half a trillion dollars under management. Yet at the beginning, that success did not seem inevitable. In 1985, they sent out almost five hundred letters to potential investors and received two responses. Two years later, they closed an eight-hundred million fund, and...

This week, Roxanne Coady and two members of the RJ Julia Booksellers staff, COO Lori Fazio and head book buyer Andrew Brennan, share their picks of the holiday season, including The Boy, the Mold, the Fox, and the Horse, The Martini Cocktail, Jubilee, The Complete Goal Manual, and much more. Listen and find the perfect gift for everyone on your list this holiday season!

How does memory create power? How do you define freedom, and how does the emotional savagery of selling and separating members of a family destroy and define a human being? And, most powerfully, in the midst of trauma and loss, how does one find courage and how does love survive? These ideas and more are explored in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel, The Water Dancer. In partnership with RJ Julia Book...

THE BOOK OF GUTSY WOMEN: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience is the first book that Secretary Clinton and Chelsea have written together, and they are excited to welcome readers into a conversation they began having when Chelsea was a little girl. Join them as they discuss the women throughout history who have had the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job...

Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the co-founder, along with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, which won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction three times and launched the careers of many writers. She was a book editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for many years and, currently, she is the Executive Director of Aspen Words, a progra...

Mo Rocca is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, host of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation, and host and creator of the Cooking Channel’s My Grandmother’s Ravioli, in which he learned to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers across the country. He’s also a frequent panelist on NPR’s hit weekly quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Rocca spent four seasons as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s ...

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American Magazine, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.

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...

Gina Rippon is Honorary Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at Aston Brain Centre at Aston University in Birmingham, England. Her research involves the use of state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as autism. In 2015 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association for her contributions to the public communication of science. Rippon...

James B. Stewart is the author of Heart of a Soldier, the bestsellers Blind Eye and Blood Sport, and the blockbuster Den of Thieves. He is currently a columnist for the New York Times and a professor at Columbia Journalism School, and in 1988 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading.

Tatiana Schlossberg is a journalist writing about climate change and the environment. She previously reported on those subjects for the Science and Climate sections of the New York Times, where she also worked on the Metro desk. Her work has also appeared in the Atlantic, Bloomberg View, the Record (Bergen County), and the Vineyard Gazette. She lives in New York. This episode was recorded live at...