The Women Books & More’s Podcast

Lisa Genova a best-selling author and Harvard-trained neuroscientist. I talked with her for her book about Still Alice—an emotional look at Alzheimer’s. I’ll look in “the vault” to find that interview for you. Still Alice was made into a major motion picture starring Julianne Moore. She won an Oscar for her role as Alice Howland, a renowned linguistics professor descending into Alzheimer’s. The fi...

One of my favorites from the archives. Huston was born in London, the love child of a widely adored ballerina and the 2nd Viscount Norwich. When she was four, she lost her mother in an auto accident and was sent to Ireland to live with her mother’s estranged husband, the acclaimed, eccentric and intimidating film director John Huston. (The African Queen, Casino Royale, Prizzi’s Honor….) “I was a m...

Here is one of my favorites from the archives. So…you’ve probably heard of Abigail Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Annie Oakley and Eleanor Roosevelt. But what about the female mathematician who laid the groundwork for abstract algebra. Or the women of NASA who helped send John Glenn, the first American astronaut, into orbit. From artists and writers to doctors, scientists and activists—Jill S. Tietjen’s...

The Nazis were banging on the door. The Fenves family was about to be rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Their  gentile cook had the presence of mind to save the family recipe book by hiding it under her apron. Chef Alon Shaya found the recipe book in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)  in Washington, D.C. and was reunited with 93-year-old Steven Fenves, the lone survivor of...

With his lover imprisoned in a Russian gulag, the Gray Man will stop at nothing to free her—in Midnight Black, Mark Greaney’s latest thriller in the NYT #1 bestselling Gray Man series.  A winter sunrise over the great plains of Russia is no cause for celebration. The temperature barely rises above zero and the guards at penal colony IK22 take their misery out on the prisoners—mainly on Zoya Zakhar...

This is one of my favorites from the archives. It is 1921 and a forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio comes into a modest inheritance and uses it to escape her tyrannical mother by taking a trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. She stays at Cairos’ Semiramis Hotel (It’s still there, now an InterContinental) just as the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference convenes. She meets Winston Churchill, T....

A favorite from the archives Barry Petersen is a CBS News correspondent. He has reported on wars, natural disasters and royal weddings but his most difficult assignment was writing Jan’s Story—a personal account of his wife’s diagnosis (in her mid-50s) of early-onset Alzheimer’s.  It is a true story. It is a love story. Barry has put into words the daily struggle he had to face, caring for the lov...

Here’s one of my favorites from the archives. On a grey day in March of 1941, acclaimed British writer Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the fast flowing River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later miles downstream. It was the tragic end of a brilliant novelist and essayist—one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. Or was it?  Six decades af...

One of my top favorites from the archive. Isabelle Allende’s books are a seductive blend of magical realism, accurate historical details and exude the alluring scent of Chilean jasmine. She comes into my recording studio trailing the scent of sweet vanilla and something musky, perhaps sandalwood. We sit and talk like old friends—about books and life. She revels that she puts on full make up, stock...