Read Beat (...and repeat)

It’s a story of World War II but it’s also a story of politics, power, seduction, and intrigue. Did I leave anything out? Pamela Churchill Harriman didn’t as Sonia Purnell’s book, Kingmaker, makes clear. The British biographer and journalist spent five years gathering information on Harriman’s life, including gaining access to a wealth of fresh research, interviews, and newly discovered sources. ...

The 20th century American department store: a palace of consumption where shopping meant something more than simply getting what one needed. Every major city had at least one department store with a name that lives on even in this age of discounters and online buying. New York, of course, was the nation’s business capital, main market and fashion center.  Julie Satow tells the story of how women h...

The overriding message you get after reading the essays collected by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor, and Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School, is that all the voting issues of today (charges of voting fraud, voter suppression, and foreign interference with the vote) have been with us a long time. Our Nation at Risk:...

By now most of us have heard of some of the daring deeds executed by the special operations teams that worked undercover during WWII. Shannon Monaghan has added to that body of work through her latest release, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men. Monaghan follows the exploits of four Britishers, David Smiley, Peter Kemp, Billy McLean, and Julian Amery. These four show remarkable courage and resilienc...

When Ellie Laks found herself communicating with animals early on, she said she didn't think anything of it. But as Laks, continuing with her communications, got older, "people looked at me as though I was crazy," she said. But Laks also rescued and rehabilitated animals. As co-founder of The Gentle Barn, a rescue mission for animals with no other place to go, she celebrated the org...

Anyone around youngsters knows that among the many benefits is reading children’s books—to your child or to yourself. Children’s literature offers stories and pictures that we all need to enjoy—not just kids. One of the best examples of that is some of the work done by Chris Sickles of the Red Nose Studio in Greenfield, Ind., just a stone’s throw from where Wilbur Wright was born. Sickles, 50, is...

On June 24, 1946, a bus carrying 16 members of the Spokane Indians baseball team careened off a mountain pass in Washington’s Cascade mountains, killing nine players. It remains the deadliest accident in the history of American professional sports. Eric Vickrey’s Season of Shattered Dreams  takes us back to that fateful season, providing an account of events leading up to the accident and how indi...

Among the digital giants that we've probably come to take for granted is the all-knowing Wikipedia site. Stephen Harrison has taken notice. In fact, for the past five years, he's been following Wikipedia in a column called "Source Notes" in Slate magazine. Recent articles of his carry titles such as "Wikipedia is covering the war in Israel and Gaza better than X" and...

As one of the Four Horsemen of the Noir Apocalypse (the others being Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, and Cornell Woolrich), Raymond Chandler has a unique place in our literary history. Chandler invented Philip Marlowe, after all. He wrote about the mean streets of Los Angeles years before Dragnet . His novels have been developed into quintessential noir movies such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My...

Matthew Algeo got the idea for writing The President is a Sick Man after visiting Philadelphia's Mutter Museum where the tumor removed from the mouth of Grover Cleveland in 1893 is among the exhibits. Fascinated by such an oddity, Algeo found out that Cleveland was going into his second term as president when the operation took place--in secret. Cleveland was incapacitated for six weeks until...

Radio drama was declared dead in September 1962 after CBS axed its last two network shows, Suspense , and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar . Hold on, said Eleanor Patterson, media studies professor at Auburn University. Scripted radio programs may have stopped from being the dominant form of entertainment which they were through most of the 30s, 40s and 50s but radio drama has always been around, she sa...

Bicycle racing was a legitimate spectator sport in the 1890s. Big crowds gathered in cities across America and Europe to watch men and women compete in a sport that exploded over the last decade of the 19th century. Perhaps the biggest star of that period was Major Taylor, an African American cyclist who first achieved success as a teenager in 1894, noted Robert Turpin, a history professor at Lees...

In the world of film noir, the leading lights are usually listed as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Cornell Woolrich. Hammett proved to be an inspiration for Mark Dawidziak, a writer whose published works include biographies of Mark Twain (the white-suited author who Dawidziak has impersonated for more than 30 years), Edgar Allan Poe (see previous podcast on The Death and Life o...

He belongs in the upper echelons of special-ops thriller authors. That’s one of the comments on the back of the book jacket of Mark Greaney’s new book, Sentinel (Berkley). You haven’t experienced a special-ops thriller? It’s a whirlwind tour of international intrigue, high-powered weapons, death, deception, and destruction as grizzled soldiers of fortune collide on unmarked battlefields. Greaney i...

Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations leaves you shaking your head. A history professor at the University of North Carolina, DuVal provides a view of this country’s colonial history we never got in school. This history comes from those already present when the French, British, and Spanish landed on North American shores. Her detailed account (the footnotes alone are an informational storehouse) raises t...

While growing up in Los Angeles and while attending school in Madison, Wisc., Eleanor Patterson was fascinated by old radio: shows like Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and the Jack Benny Show . Curious about the source of programming that long since left the air, she asked the host of the Madison public radio program how he came by the old radio programs he shared on the air. People just gave them to...

Dealing with someone who faces a life-or-death situation just once is enough for most of us. But what of someone involved in transplant surgery who goes through it time after time? How do you deal with having so much power and responsibility?  Those are some of the factors that led Dr. David Weill to write his first novel, All That Really Matters. The former director of the Advanced Lung Disease a...

So how does this little insect navigate between distant flower patches and the nest? That’s just one of the questions that bee researcher Lars Chittka seeks to answer. Chittka’s book, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press) not only covers bee navigation but explores research by himself and others that demonstrate that bees have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers, solve problems,...

Having been raised on TV westerns (my favorites were Cheyenne, Maverick , and the Rifleman ), I never looked at rustlers as anything more than bad guys out to steal cattle. It took Victoria Lamont, an English professor at Waterloo College in Ontario, Canada, to open my eyes. Her book, Westerns: A Women’s History , spotlights accomplishments made by women who wrote about the Old West in an era when...

Sarah Rose's D-Day Girls not only lets you understand what life was like in occupied France for four long years during World War II but also lets us understand the contributions that women made to overthrow the Nazi menace. It's a true story, drawn from recently declassified files, diaries, and oral histories, that follows the challenges women faced as French saboteurs. Trained in Englan...

An experienced auctioneer is in a good position to shed light on the human condition. After all, they're up there in front of a crowd, dealing with both buyers and sellers, as well as spending a lot of time evaluating the bric a brac we all love to collect. So it is with Bob Brunk who spent 35 years as an auctioneer in Asheville, N.C. Brunk's collection of essays, A Question of Value , s...

Deciding on “the best player you've never heard of” is a baseball pastime sure to involve arguments just as fruitless as those demanding a particular batter or pitcher be included in baseball’s Hall of Fame. But Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz, baseball historians whose previous publications have delved deeply into baseball’s early days, the so-called Dead Ball Era, make a convincing case for...

World War II may have ended nearly 80 years ago but it lives on as a subject endlessly reviewed with fresh insight and information supplied on an ongoing basis.  Movies and books haven’t stopped rehashing the great war since its conclusion, witness last year’s Oppenheimer and, now playing in your local metroplex, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare . Meanwhile, WWII offers an ongoing avalanche o...

"If you keep up with the headlines, you know computers are taking our jobs. Spying on us. Controlling what we buy and who we vote for. Even discriminating against us. When they're done beating us at our own pastimes, maybe they'll rise up and kill us. Our relationship with these machines has become, not to put a fine point on it, dysfunctional." That's how Michael Littman...

Climate change needs no introduction for most of us. Or does it? How do we confront it without being overwhelmed by the prospects of a planet in disarray? In his book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage , Rob Verchick seeks to tamp down the fear and loathing that goes with the subject and build up a plan of action, a call for climate resilience. "The world we inhabit is getting hotter, drier,...