Read Beat (...and repeat)

Nick Medina’s Indian Burial Ground   is a horror novel that combines stirring storytelling with an exploration of historical racial injustices in America – in this case, the epidemic of alcoholism, suicide, and mental health disorders on Indigenous reservations. Medina’s sophomore novel again sheds light on issues affecting Native communities, while also delivering a genuinely terrifying and engag...

William McKinley was assassinated before completing his first term of office as U.S. president in 1901 "after leading the nation to victory in the Spanish-American War," noted the White House Historical Association. That's the war perhaps best known for the slogan, "Remember the Maine," the U.S. war cry over the battleship sunk in Cuba, an incident that reportedly set off...

In a presidential election year, eyes turn toward the many distinct groups that make up the electorate. So what's up with the rural voter? It's a group that voted Republican by a margin of 70 to 80 percent over their Democratic rivals in many rural communities, noted Nick Jacobs and Dan Shea, the authors of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. While the G...

Buffalo Bill Cody is one of the iconic figures of the Old West but did you know his Wild West show often involved a cast of 1,500 people who had to be fed and transported from town to town? Or that Cody dined with presidents and royalty? Those are just some of the things you learn in Steve Friesen's book, Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill. Yes, Cody was an accomplished...

Annabel Abbs-Streets discovered she didn't have to suffer at night when insomnia struck. She discovered something else: her night self. "The night self is a version of ourselves you experience when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're all alone. Most of us start to ruminate or be worried," she said. Abbs-Streets said she learned that if you can dial down that voice...

If you don't understand math, you can still enjoy Paul Nahin. Don't get blinded by the 24 books the professor of electric engineering has written or that he's busily at work on book 25. The longtime University of New Hampshire faculty member has just published The Mathematical Radio , a book complete with equations and diagrams. One needs only the familiarity of advanced high-school...

You know you've made it in the book world when the author's name is bigger than the title. That's where Mark Greaney finds himself with the publication of The Chaos Agent, the 13th in the Gray Man spy thriller series. This time around Court Gentry is battling a diabolical plot to wipe out the world's leading experts on robotics. Greaney said he deliberately focused on AI's...

Put aside your fears about a robotic uprising, says Ruth Aylett, a computer science professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a robotics researcher for 30 years. Talking with Steve Tarter, she emphasized that robots, whatever you may have heard to the contrary, are machines, made and controlled by man. "Forget the hype and the unrealistic speculations about so-called new...

Beavers have a long and illustrious history. There were beavers as big as bears for millions of years until some 10,000 years ago. Since then the beaver has dutifully carried out the work of an environmental engineer, creating dams and managing water flow, helping both wildlife and plants prosper. "Beavers are the only animals apart from man that radically transform their environment," s...

Race into space? Not so fast, say Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the husband-and-wife team whose book, A City on Mars , lays out some of the challenges that face space settlements on the Moon, Mars or wherever man (and woman) might be heading in the future. Space may look more promising with all the problems on Earth but while there may not be pollution on Mars, there are plenty of issues to face bef...

Godzilla is one of the great movie franchises of our time. But how many people know about the 1955 novella written by Shigeru Kayama, the Japanese science fiction writer who produced the original Godzilla screenplay? Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again are works translated by Jeffrey Angles, a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University, that were published in 2023 by the Univers...

If you're one of those people who has shuddered at the thought of spiders, snakes, or other creepy crawlies invading your space, you might get new insight from Bethany Brookshire, whose book about pests makes the point that animals are just being animals. "We believe we're in charge, entitled to space only for us," said Brookshire. "What we really hate about the pests is t...

Elmwood is a small town in Illinois that had a population of 1,500 when Nelson Dean Jay was growing up. But the small-town boy went on to make a name for himself in Paris, France.  “In my opinion, you simply can’t name anyone from central Illinois who had this much influence on America and the world, and (yet) no one knows about him,” said William Engelbrecht, the co-author of "The American B...

The past 20 years have not been kind to the newspaper industry. Margot Susca, a communications professor at American University in Washington, D.C. and former reporter, provides details on some of the financial dealings involving newspapers during that time. Susca outlines the furious activity taken by private investment funds and hedge funds in the past 20 years, outlining practices such as profi...

We had another busy year on Read Beat in 2023--more than 50 interviews, almost one per week. Your host is Steve Tarter, a retired newspaper reporter living in Peoria, Illinois.  I try to find issues that might prove interesting to a general audience. A lot of books get published each year and you hear about the most popular ones on a lot of fronts. Here we try to find the ones you may not hear so...

Media folks have been taking questions about the magazine industry to "Mr. Magazine" for decades. Samir Husni, 70, now retired after more than 30 years as a professor at the University of Mississippi, is still the oracle when it comes to magazines with his Mr. Magazine blog (https://mrmagazine.me/). "It's the world of bookazine these days," said Husni, referring to the sin...

J.P. Telotte has been writing about film since 1985. As the man who introduced film studies to Georgia Tech University, Telotte, now professor emeritus at the Georgia school, has produced Selling Science Fiction Cinema , a study of the effort to market sci-fi films in the 1950s and 1960s. His book focuses on a period when science fiction first exploded on the screen.  In this postwar period both t...

Most of us are familiar with Nancy, the comic strip penned for decades by Ernie Bushmiller, but what about the new Nancy now produced by Olivia Jaimes? That's the focus of Jeff Karnicky's new book, "The New Nancy." Bushmiller died in 1982 but Nancy has been sustained by the syndicate that owns the rights to the character and she just keeps going. Despite fears--with newspapers...

Route 66 still stands as a symbol of the road west, the open highway representing independence and mobility, two values that Americans consider part of their heritage. Yet Nat King Cole’s 1946 hit song, “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” stands more than a celebration of the open road. It’s a reminder that the road wasn’t open to everyone Nat King Cole, himself, wouldn’t have been able to stay at most...

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guide book for African Americans published between 1936 and 1967. The publication served as a guide to finding businesses that were welcoming to black Americans, including hotels and restaurants, during an era when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against nonwhites was widespread. That description comes from New York’s Museum of Arts & Design...

Of all the general-interest magazines that held sway for decades before bowing out in the mid-20th century, Look is the one that’s often forgotten, said Peter Yarrow, whose book on the magazine points out that the publication had 35 million readers at its peak. Unlike Life, Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post , the other major magazines of the day,  Look tends to be overlooked, he told S...

Peoria native Anthony Suau won awards for his photography while taking pictures for big-city dailies like the Chicago Sun-Times and Denver Post . His photographs have appeared in Life, National Geographic and Paris Match . He won the Pulitzer Prize for his images of the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 while in 1996 he received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for coverage of the war in Chechnya. Now the 67-y...

Advertising has been part of the American scene since the beginning. Jennifer Black, in her new book, "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America," points to ads at the time of the American Revolution by "a growing contingent of Americans who expressed their classed identities through the goods they purchased." But things really got going in the 18...

Being labeled “the Czar of Noir” isn’t anything new for Eddie Muller. The San Francisco-based author and TCM film host has been writing and talking about film noir for more than 25 years. His 1998 release, “Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir,” was just selected as one of the top 100 movie books by the Hollywood Reporter (the book will soon be rereleased from TCM). Muller has produced an entire...

While Rosie the Riveter is a vivid symbol of World War II, emphasizing the vital role women played in the workplace during the war, an "Airplane Annie" tag was never developed that might have fit Ann Baumgartner, the American aviator who became the first woman to fly a jet aircraft as a test pilot during WWII. As a member of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) program, Baumgartner w...