The Avid Reader Show

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Dr. H.W. Brands. Dr. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr.. Chair in history at The University of Texas. An incredibly prolific author of American history and its most evocative and important periods, Dr. Brand has written 25 books, edited at least five others and has published dozens of articles and scores of reviews. He has written for the NYT, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and many others. His latest work is Heirs Of The Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, The Second Generation of American Giants. published byDoubleday and just released These three men, successors of our founding fathers, each born within four or five years of The American Revolution, through their rivalry and, in some cases their similarities, helped to forge for good or bad the conditions which led to our great Civil War. Each had aspirations for the Presidency. Each failed. However, Clay served as Speaker of the House, and John Quincey Adams’ Secretary of State and forged the Missouri Compromise which indeed was that, allowing one state to remain slave free and the other to hold on to an unspeakable tradition. That alone is an issue that is brought with questions and wonder, and I will ask those questions today. Calhoun was Vice-President to both John Quincey Adams and andrew Jackson, essentially extolled slavery, the crown of the southern culture. I wonder why he didn’t become President just from sheer tenure. Just as I wonder today about Joe Biden. And Webster, my favorite, I guess because of Steven Vincent Benet’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, was a senator, secretary of state to three presidents and the most gifted courtroom advocates of his time and maybe of any time, save for Clarence Darrow maybe, well he abandoned his anti-slavery position in an attempt to wrest the Presidency from his erstwhile rivals. Once again much as Mitch Mcconnell and Charles Grassley have done today, in their flip-flops on the absurd Presidency of Donald Trump. In any event and to stop my railing, Dr. Brand has in an accessible and compelling narrative has woven the threads of the lives of these three men, The Great Triumvirate, and given us a good object lesson of the origins of Constitutional Cris and what it can lead to.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Dr. H.W. Brands. Dr. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr.. Chair in history at The University of Texas. An incredibly prolific author of American history and its most evocative and important periods, Dr. Brand has written 25 books, edited at least five others and has published dozens of articles and scores of reviews. He has written for the NYT, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and many others. His latest work is Heirs Of The Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, The Second Generation of American Giants. published byDoubleday and just released These three men, successors of our founding fathers, each born within four or five years of The American Revolution, through their rivalry and, in some cases their similarities, helped to forge for good or bad the conditions which led to our great Civil War. Each had aspirations for the Presidency. Each failed. However, Clay served as Speaker of the House, and John Quincey Adams’ Secretary of State and forged the Missouri Compromise which indeed was that, allowing one state to remain slave free and the other to hold on to an unspeakable tradition. That alone is an issue that is brought with questions and wonder, and I will ask those questions today. Calhoun was Vice-President to both John Quincey Adams and andrew Jackson, essentially extolled slavery, the crown of the southern culture. I wonder why he didn’t become President just from sheer tenure. Just as I wonder today about Joe Biden. And Webster, my favorite, I guess because of Steven Vincent Benet’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, was a senator, secretary of state to three presidents and the most gifted courtroom advocates of his time and maybe of any time, save for Clarence Darrow maybe, well he abandoned his anti-slavery position in an attempt to wrest the Presidency from his erstwhile rivals. Once again much as Mitch Mcconnell and Charles Grassley have done today, in their flip-flops on the absurd Presidency of Donald Trump. In any event and to stop my railing, Dr. Brand has in an accessible and compelling narrative has woven the threads of the lives of these three men, The Great Triumvirate, and given us a good object lesson of the origins of Constitutional Cris and what it can lead to.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Dr. Kara Cooper. Dr. Cooper is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA. She’s worked with National Geographic and the Discovery channel. And produced and appeared in a series you may have seen entitled Out Of Egypt which I believe is still available on Amazon and Netflix. Although she has published prolifically, we may know her best from her first general public book The Woman Who Would Be King: Hat Shep Sut’s Rise To Power. That was released in 2014. Her latest work is When Women Ruled The World, which is an strikingly accessible journey along the timeline of ancient Egypt, where we find, surprisingly, periods of time in which women ruled the old world. For a number of different reasons. Along the journey, Dr. Cooney highlights the comparison between the way women were treated in Egyptian history versus the manner in which they find the same treatment in modern society.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Dr. Kara Cooper. Dr. Cooper is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA. She’s worked with National Geographic and the Discovery channel. And produced and appeared in a series you may have seen entitled Out Of Egypt which I believe is still available on Amazon and Netflix. Although she has published prolifically, we may know her best from her first general public book The Woman Who Would Be King: Hat Shep Sut’s Rise To Power. That was released in 2014. Her latest work is When Women Ruled The World, which is an strikingly accessible journey along the timeline of ancient Egypt, where we find, surprisingly, periods of time in which women ruled the old world. For a number of different reasons. Along the journey, Dr. Cooney highlights the comparison between the way women were treated in Egyptian history versus the manner in which they find the same treatment in modern society.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. This week our guest is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black, published in October by Mariner. Nana has an MFA from Syracuse. Has appeared, or will appear, in Esquire, Guernica, Printer’s row and the Breakwater review. He was chosen as one of the five under 35 by the National Book Foundation. Black Friday displays, in unflinching detail, the cruelty that we inflict upon another and the absurdity of that cruelty, a cruelty serration and repetitious that at some point we begin to see, for good or bad, the humor of it. The characters that we are introduced to, are uncomfortable in their own skin, whatever color. They know that something wrong, something that that can see or feel, sometimes, but sometimes lurks in shadows that we all create and retain in our own consciousness or psyche. The weird thing is that this bizarro world type stuff is placed inside our malls, or in a science fiction universe that mulls the boredom and cruelty (again) of our universe and its inhabitants. This book will survive and when it is read by future generations they will wonder if it tells the story of our world or the story of what our world almost is. Being a sixty-six year old white Jewish man, at first I thought I could relate to a book like this, but as I read it I realized that it isn’t about black or white. It is about people. What they do and how they can justify doing it. Whoever they might be. When I interview George Saunders after he wrote The Tenth of December, I really began to understand how the most serious things in life can always be turned into a joke, as I said how fortunate or unfortunate this may be. With that welcome Nana and thanks for joining us today.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. This week our guest is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black, published in October by Mariner. Nana has an MFA from Syracuse. Has appeared, or will appear, in Esquire, Guernica, Printer’s row and the Breakwater review. He was chosen as one of the five under 35 by the National Book Foundation. Black Friday displays, in unflinching detail, the cruelty that we inflict upon another and the absurdity of that cruelty, a cruelty serration and repetitious that at some point we begin to see, for good or bad, the humor of it. The characters that we are introduced to, are uncomfortable in their own skin, whatever color. They know that something wrong, something that that can see or feel, sometimes, but sometimes lurks in shadows that we all create and retain in our own consciousness or psyche. The weird thing is that this bizarro world type stuff is placed inside our malls, or in a science fiction universe that mulls the boredom and cruelty (again) of our universe and its inhabitants. This book will survive and when it is read by future generations they will wonder if it tells the story of our world or the story of what our world almost is. Being a sixty-six year old white Jewish man, at first I thought I could relate to a book like this, but as I read it I realized that it isn’t about black or white. It is about people. What they do and how they can justify doing it. Whoever they might be. When I interview George Saunders after he wrote The Tenth of December, I really began to understand how the most serious things in life can always be turned into a joke, as I said how fortunate or unfortunate this may be. With that welcome Nana and thanks for joining us today.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Simon Van Booy. Simon is the award winning and best selling author of nine books of fiction and three anthologies of philosophy. He has written for the NYT, The Financial Times, NPR and the BBC. In 2013 he founded Writers for Children, a project which helps young people build confidence in their storytelling abilities through annual awards. His latest work is The Sadness of Beautiful Things published this month by Penguin. And as most of you know, I own an independent bookshop, Wellington Square Books, and I have just ordered all of Simon’s books, including his children’s books about Gertie Milk. The Sadness of Beautiful Things is a book of short stories that grab you, from the epigraph on, and hold you and release you throughout. In fact, I went back and read most of the stories two times and one specific one three times. Each time you read and re-read you discover more about yourself and the characters in the book as well as recognizing what the title represents and what that means to the characters’ lives and to our own. I love short stories and these are some of the best I have read. As I have told my customers, “Buy this book. If you don’t like it, bring it back”. So far they have each flown far away, never to return.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Simon Van Booy. Simon is the award winning and best selling author of nine books of fiction and three anthologies of philosophy. He has written for the NYT, The Financial Times, NPR and the BBC. In 2013 he founded Writers for Children, a project which helps young people build confidence in their storytelling abilities through annual awards. His latest work is The Sadness of Beautiful Things published this month by Penguin. And as most of you know, I own an independent bookshop, Wellington Square Books, and I have just ordered all of Simon’s books, including his children’s books about Gertie Milk. The Sadness of Beautiful Things is a book of short stories that grab you, from the epigraph on, and hold you and release you throughout. In fact, I went back and read most of the stories two times and one specific one three times. Each time you read and re-read you discover more about yourself and the characters in the book as well as recognizing what the title represents and what that means to the characters’ lives and to our own. I love short stories and these are some of the best I have read. As I have told my customers, “Buy this book. If you don’t like it, bring it back”. So far they have each flown far away, never to return.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Shane Bauer, author of American Prison: A reporter’s Undercover Journey Into The Business Of Punishment. Released just last month by Penguin. Shane is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Salon, the LATs, SFC, and many other publications. American Prison is a story about things we may not know, things we may not want to know and things that happen that we may find, after reading this book, that we do not wish to know. Nonetheless, this book is an important one, not solely because it exposes the soft white underbelly of for profit private prisons and their methods of amassing large sums of money. B passing profits on to its many corporate investors, and doing so by neglecting its charges and fortifying the bastions of slavery and involuntary servitude that have filled the coffers of many of our leaders, politicians and businessmen over generations. The meticulous and even handed reporting contain in this book provide a shocking and severely eye-opening portrait of incarceration in the most heavily disproportionately weighted prison population in the world.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Shane Bauer, author of American Prison: A reporter’s Undercover Journey Into The Business Of Punishment. Released just last month by Penguin. Shane is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Salon, the LATs, SFC, and many other publications. American Prison is a story about things we may not know, things we may not want to know and things that happen that we may find, after reading this book, that we do not wish to know. Nonetheless, this book is an important one, not solely because it exposes the soft white underbelly of for profit private prisons and their methods of amassing large sums of money. B passing profits on to its many corporate investors, and doing so by neglecting its charges and fortifying the bastions of slavery and involuntary servitude that have filled the coffers of many of our leaders, politicians and businessmen over generations. The meticulous and even handed reporting contain in this book provide a shocking and severely eye-opening portrait of incarceration in the most heavily disproportionately weighted prison population in the world.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Casey Legler, author of her new memoir Godspeed, published this July by Atria Books an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Casey is an artist, restaurateur, model and former Olympic swimmer. She is also a fascinating human being whose first book is startling, surprising and much more than what we think of as a memoir. The backstory of Lesley’s life, as documented in her book is the fact that she was an Olympic swimmer for France who used and sold drugs, was an alcoholic, broke the world’s record in 1996 in practice then came in 23rd in the finals of the event. She was the First Ford Agency model to wear men’s clothes exclusively. What I want to add to this, much of which you may have already heard on TV, Meghan Kelly, other interviews is that this book is lyrical, it is poetic. It uses language in a way that one seldom if ever encounters. The metaphors, the analogies are like shards of glass or iron filings or stabbings of the soul or mirrors that reelect the best and worst of who you think you are. And with that somewhat tortured introduction, welcome Casey and thanks for joining us today.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Casey Legler, author of her new memoir Godspeed, published this July by Atria Books an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Casey is an artist, restaurateur, model and former Olympic swimmer. She is also a fascinating human being whose first book is startling, surprising and much more than what we think of as a memoir. The backstory of Lesley’s life, as documented in her book is the fact that she was an Olympic swimmer for France who used and sold drugs, was an alcoholic, broke the world’s record in 1996 in practice then came in 23rd in the finals of the event. She was the First Ford Agency model to wear men’s clothes exclusively. What I want to add to this, much of which you may have already heard on TV, Meghan Kelly, other interviews is that this book is lyrical, it is poetic. It uses language in a way that one seldom if ever encounters. The metaphors, the analogies are like shards of glass or iron filings or stabbings of the soul or mirrors that reelect the best and worst of who you think you are. And with that somewhat tortured introduction, welcome Casey and thanks for joining us today.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of the Avid Reader. Today we are happy to have with us Deborah Harkness. Deborah a former Philadelphia native, graduate from Mount Holyoke, Northwestern and UC, Davis with her doctorate. She is renowned for her work as an historian of science and medicine. She has obviously studied alchemy, magic and the occult. She’s published two works of non-fiction, but it is the All Souls Trilogy that probably brings you to this show, and perhaps, if I can convince her, a visit to our bookstore. A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night and The Book of life make up the trilogy and now she has embarked on another journey, primarily that of Marcus in her new book, Time’s Convert. Oh and by the way, the trilogy will soon be a mini series that is scheduled for release, unless the date has been pushed back, this month. Time’s Convert seems to be the first book (we’ll ask) of a second trilogy one which explores characters that may have seem to have been peripheral to All Souls, but now take center stage and develop into protagonists with stories trait and agendas we haven’t seen before (at least in sharp detail). We learn a great deal more about time, maturity and love, along with a precis of about child rearing. With that in mind, if you care to take note aof anything I say, I tend to remable, Welcome Deborah and thanks so much for joining us today. I like to start with covers and epigraphs and here are two perfect ways to begin. The cover is amazing. (book by its cover). The cover conveys love, time, place and a kind of longing and an arc of antiquity, much like your own studies. And then the epigraph by Thomas Paine. His name and character are mentioned 82 times in this book. And the epigraph standing alone describes our times to a T. Was that meant to be? What is it about Common Sense, as a woman of common sense and an historaian that brings this man to a book about Vampires, Daemons and witches? ON to the book, cause that’s what we’re here for, I know that you started this book about Matthew. What made you pivot. What about the Father and Son dynamic. ANd the course, to me the most fascinating aspect of the book is time. What are your feelings about time. Is it a construct of man so as to avoid all things happening at once, or is it this skein (as your portray) that weaves us into space AND time? Is memory akin to time in any way? The medieval and the modern My bookstores logo and mascot is the Griffin. You can see it on our website.w What do they do for a living? Talk a little bit about your discoveries with regard to “raising the virtuous child”. Shakespearan order from chaos. How do we, in these times, given the epigraph create order of what seems like chaos. You know I have interviewed a lot of authors and when I ask them about our current situation they all agree, almost to a T. I have concluded that is because authors are bright. Talk about how you equated, to some degree, the recent royal wedding and the motifs of the book. TV show. Humbling. Are the stories in your head ready to put down on paper. You know what’s going on with these people don’t you?

The epigraph “…but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.” —-Anne Sexton Before that she says, “that she tried to reach into her page and breathe it back”. Why can’t one do that? Was Mae trying to accomplish that? Was she successful? Why/how do you put a kitten in a sack in the first place? Why doesn’t Dennis get to tell his story? And are we dealing with reliable narrators. You know some things happened a long time ago. It’s a bit like Barnes’ Sense of An Ending. Is what we remember what really happened? And with Mae is what she did to herself necessary, mandatory to release her from the bind (a true bind) that she finds herself in? Are the sisters really that much different? Is Dennis a bad man? Is Marianne a bad woman? Tell us what your Grandmother said about the title and what your thoughts were. I mean it’s not a quote, it's something you came up with. So as these girls delve down deeper and deeper into what the relationships with father and mother have done to them, what is the water, what is the fish and why do they get uglier? I asked why deep sea fish are ugly: The deep sea is cold and dark. The pressure is immense, and meals are hard to come by. (You have to adapt) May as well talk about the cover. The Ladies Home Journal 1889. Some reviews look at the book as a mix between fantasy and realism. Like Truman Capote’s, Answered Prayers or Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I mean through the side stories by friends it is clear that he massaged their life stories to make his books more interesting. Marianne’s father’s letter to Dennis is the most telling document in the book in many ways. And what was it that Dennis saw in Marianne as (barely a teenager) they began their correspondence and relationship. Were they in love with one another? Are you going to write a screenplay for the book because it seems very cinematic. Who do you identify most closely with. The two sisters seem to love one another and long for each other’s touch but they disappoint each other over and over.

The epigraph “…but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.” —-Anne Sexton Before that she says, “that she tried to reach into her page and breathe it back”. Why can’t one do that? Was Mae trying to accomplish that? Was she successful? Why/how do you put a kitten in a sack in the first place? Why doesn’t Dennis get to tell his story? And are we dealing with reliable narrators. You know some things happened a long time ago. It’s a bit like Barnes’ Sense of An Ending. Is what we remember what really happened? And with Mae is what she did to herself necessary, mandatory to release her from the bind (a true bind) that she finds herself in? Are the sisters really that much different? Is Dennis a bad man? Is Marianne a bad woman? Tell us what your Grandmother said about the title and what your thoughts were. I mean it’s not a quote, it's something you came up with. So as these girls delve down deeper and deeper into what the relationships with father and mother have done to them, what is the water, what is the fish and why do they get uglier? I asked why deep sea fish are ugly: The deep sea is cold and dark. The pressure is immense, and meals are hard to come by. (You have to adapt) May as well talk about the cover. The Ladies Home Journal 1889. Some reviews look at the book as a mix between fantasy and realism. Like Truman Capote’s, Answered Prayers or Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I mean through the side stories by friends it is clear that he massaged their life stories to make his books more interesting. Marianne’s father’s letter to Dennis is the most telling document in the book in many ways. And what was it that Dennis saw in Marianne as (barely a teenager) they began their correspondence and relationship. Were they in love with one another? Are you going to write a screenplay for the book because it seems very cinematic. Who do you identify most closely with. The two sisters seem to love one another and long for each other’s touch but they disappoint each other over and over.