Between the Lines 2009 Schedule for Public Radio Affiliates
Between The Lines, a literary radio interview series is being offered free and weekly to all public radio stations on our FTP server or via DVD/CD.
Programs Will be made Available in Order of Appearance
Beginning January 5th, 2009
26 New Programs Will Be Posted
Alan Alda, author of Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
Randomhouse
Picking up where his bestselling memoir Never Have Your Dog Stuffed left off—having been saved by emergency surgery after nearly dying on a mountaintop in Chile—beloved actor and acclaimed author Alan Alda offers an insightful and funny look at some impossible questions he’s asked himself over the years: What do I value? What, exactly, is the good life? (And what does that even mean?) Here, Alda listens in on things he’s heard himself saying at critical points in his life—from the turbulence of the sixties, to his first Broadway show, to the birth of his children, to the ache of September 11, and beyond. Reflecting on the transitions in his life and in all our lives, he notices that “doorways are where the truth is told,” and wonders if there’s one thing—art, activism, family, money, fame—that could lead to a “life of meaning.” In a book that is candid, wise, and as questioning as it is incisive, Alda amuses and moves us with his uniquely hilarious meditations on questions great and small.
About the Author: Alan Alda is the author of Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. He is the winner of numerous awards, including six Emmys and six Golden Globes, and has been nominated for an Academy Award. He played Hawkeye Pierce for eleven years on the television series MAS*H, has acted in, written, and directed many feature films, and has appeared often on Broadway. His avid interest in science has led to his hosting PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years. He is married to the children’s book author and photographer Arlene Alda. They have three grown children and seven grandchildren.
Randa Jarrar, author of A Map of Home
Other Press
Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), and her family’s last flight to Texas. Nidali mixes humor with a sharp, loving portrait of an eccentric middle-class family, and this perspective keeps her buoyant through the hardships she encounters: the humiliation of going through a checkpoint on a visit to her father’s home in the West Bank; the fights with her father, who wants her to become a famous professor and stay away from boys; the end of her childhood as Iraq invades Kuwait on her thirteenth birthday; and the scare she gives her family when she runs away from home.
Funny, charming, and heartbreaking, A Map of Home is the kind of book Tristram Shandy or Huck Finn would have narrated had they been born Egyptian-Palestinian and female in the 1970s.
About the Author: Randa Jarrar was born in Chicago in 1978. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved back to the U.S. at thirteen. She is a writer and translator whose honors include the Million Writers Award, the Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Award and the Geoffrey James Gosling Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares as well as in numerous journals and anthologies. Her translations from the Arabic have appeared in Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers; recently, she translated Hassan Daoud’s novel, The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A Map of Home is her first novel. Visit Randa online at rockslinga.blogspot.com.
Philip and Alice Shabecoff, authors of Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children
Random House
In this shocking and sobering book, journalists Alice Shabecoff and Philip Shabecoff directly and definitively link industrial toxins to the current rise in childhood disease and death. In the tradition of Silent Spring, Poisoned Profits: the Toxic Assault on Our Children is a landmark investigation, an eye-opening account of a country that prizes money over children’s health.
From autism to cancer With indisputable data, the Shabecoffs reveal that the children of baby boomers—the first to be raised in a truly “toxified world”—have higher rates of birth defects, asthma, cancer, autism and a frightening range of other neurological illnesses from ADHD to mental retardation, and other serious chronic illnesses compared to previous generations. They reveal that one out of two pregnancies fails to come to term or results in a less than healthy child, that premature births and infertility are on the rise as this generation matures, while the ratio of male babies dwindles. These children are victims of a (perhaps unwitting) crime; the perpetrators are the companies who manufacture and use poisonous products. Environmental exposures from conception to early life can set a person´s cellular code for life and can cause illness at any time from childhood until old age. Parkinson´s and Alzheimer´s diseases and breast cancer are examples.
Covering up the evidence Why does the toxic assault on our children´s environmental health continue?: because the evidence is routinely obscured by controversy deliberately generated by the companies that profit, abetted by government collusion, scientists-for-hire, lobbyists, lawyers and cynical public relations.
Poisons in the environment From fetus to adulthood, in our homes, yards, schools, cars and buses, and playgrounds. the assault is everywhere: air pollution, water pollution, pesticides, mercury and lead, industrial solvents, food additives, artificial growth hormones, arsenic, synthetic hormones (bisphenol A and phthalates) in bottles and teething rings and other plastic products, radioactive pollutants in the water, and even rocket fuel in lettuce.
Solutions Poisoned Profits is in the end a book about hope and optimism. Now we know what is happening. These poisons are manmade; manufacturers can take them out of our children´s lives and make profits from safe products. Find here the policy changes to spur this shift. Find here the solutions to reduce your child´s risk and to alter the system. Powerful, unflinching, and eminently readable, Poisened Profits is a wake up call that is bound to inspire talk and force change.
About the Author: Philip Shabecoff was the chief environmental correspondent for The New York Times for fourteen of the thirty-two years he worked there as a reporter. After leaving the Times, he founded and published Greenwire, an online daily digest of environmental news. He has appeared on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Washington Week in Review, CNN News, C-Span, National Public Radio, and the BBC. For his environmental writing, Shabecoff was selected as one of the “Global 500” by the United Nations’ Environmental Program. He received the James Madison Award from the American Library Association for leadership in expanding the public’s right to know. His previous books include A Fierce Green Fire: A History of the American Environmental Movement.
Alice Shabecoff is a freelance journalist focusing on family and consumer topics. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and the International Herald Tribune, among other publications. She was executive director of the National Consumers League, the country’s oldest consumer organization, and executive director of the national nonprofit Community Information Exchange. Her previous books include A Guide to Careers in Community Development.
Stephen L. Carter, author of Palace Council
Random House
USA Today called Stephen L. Carter’s last novel “the perfect summer read … Carter slips in so many original, thought-provoking observations that the reader is sad the killer has been caught.” Now Carter, the best-selling author of New England White, is back with Palace Council, a gripping political thriller set in the era of Watergate and Vietnam.
Philmont Castle is a man who has it all: wealth, respect, and connections. He’s the last person you’d expect to fall prey to a murderer, but when his body is found on the grounds of a Harlem mansion, the young writer Eddie Wesley, along with the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into a twenty-year search for the truth. The disappearance of Eddie’s sister June makes their investigation even more troubling. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics all the way to the Oval Office and President Nixon himself.
Suspenseful, provocative, and witty, Palace Council turns our assumptions inside out and reminds us how the struggles of that era set the stage for America today.
About the Author: Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He is the author of the best-selling novel The Emperor of Ocean Park, and seven acclaimed nonfiction books, including The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion and Civility: Manner, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. He and his family live near New Haven, Connecticut.
Sarah Vowell, author of The Wordy Shipmates
Riverhead Books
The Wordy Shipmates is New York Times—bestselling author Sarah Vowell’s exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”—a shining example, a “city that cannot be hid.”
To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means— and what it should mean. What was this great political enterprise all about? Who were these people who are considered the philosophical, spiritual, and moral ancestors of our nation? What Vowell discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoe-buckles-and-corn reputation might suggest. The people she finds are highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty. Their story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance. Along the way she asks:
- Was Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop a communitarian, a Christlike Christian, or conformity’s tyrannical enforcer? Answer: Yes!
- Was Rhode Island’s architect, Roger Williams, America’s founding freak or the father of the First Amendment? Same difference.
- What does it take to get that jezebel Anne Hutchinson to shut up? A hatchet.
- What was the Puritans’ pet name for the Pope? The Great Whore of Babylon.
Sarah Vowell’s special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where “righteousness” is rhymed with “wilderness,” to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout, The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America’s most celebrated voices. Thou shalt enjoy it.
About the Author: Sarah Vowell is the author of Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Take the Cannoli, and Radio On. A contributing editor for public radio’s “This American Life”, she lives in New York City.
Kabir Sehgal, author of Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology
Better World Books
Sometimes a jam session includes trading fours, where each member of the band takes four measures to solo. If someone forgets to play his four, there is a flagrant void of sound. If you play one measure extra, you’re not respecting the form. In the jam session of a Jazzocracy, Americans trade fours with each other. Talk and listen. In the 1950s, jazz musicians became the literal embodiment of American democracy. Through one of the largest ever funded cultural projects, premier jazz musicians traveled to places beyond the Iron Curtain, and throughout the Third World in an effort to promulgate ideals of democracy. Now, from a new generation, we have a new challenge. It s the challenge to see the evolution of jazz and democracy as forming our next set of mythologies, ones that cast beyond the tired legacy of Billy the Kid, or the degraded trends of popular music. This young author asks the big question are we forgetting the very spirit that inspired jazz in the first place? Kabir Sehgal shows us how jazz can help us recapture America s rightful soul.
About the Author: Jazz bassist, political consultant, entrepreneur, and author Kabir Sehgal received degrees from Dartmouth College and the London School of Economics. While a high school student, Sehgal also won the “National Outstanding Soloist Award,” and was invited to join Wynton Marsalis to tour during the summer of 2004. During that same summer, Sehgal served as a special assistant to Senator Max Cleland on the John Kerry presidential campaign.
Jazzocracy first took form in the summer of 2005, when Sehgal served as a Visiting Fellow at the Roosevelt Center at Tulane University.
Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology is Sehgal’s first book. He currently works at JP Morgan and lives in San Francisco
Salman Rushdie, author of The Enchantress of Florence
Random House
A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence.
The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers—the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power.
Vivid, gripping, irreverent, bawdy, profoundly moving, and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers.
About the Author: Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993, was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction—Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and The Wizard of Oz. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.
Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
W.W. Norton and Company
This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings’s siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson’s wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family’s compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello. Much anticipated, this book promises to be the most important history of an American slave family ever written.
About the Author: Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She lives in New York City.
Marilynne Robinson, author of Home
Farrar Strauss and Giroux
Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize—winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.
Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.
Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
Marilynne Robinson (born 1943) is an American author. Her 1980 novel Housekeeping won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Gilead (see 2004 in literature), was acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2005 Ambassador Book Award. Her third novel, Home, was published in 2008. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop
Roy Blount, Jr, author of Alphabet Juice
Farrar Strauss and Giroux
Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince? Ever wonder why so many h-words have to do with breath?
Roy Blount Jr. certainly has, and after forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, he still can’t get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the electricity, the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is “over the counter.” Three and a half centuries ago, Thomas Blount produced Blount’s Glossographia, the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. This Blount’s Glossographia takes that pursuit to other levels, from Proto-Indo-European roots to your epiglottis. It rejects the standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their meanings is “arbitrary.” Even the word arbitrary is shown to be no more arbitrary, at its root, than go-to guy or crackerjack. From sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency, at whisk) and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has contributed the number-one definition of “alligator arm”), and especially from the author’s own wide-ranging experience, Alphabet Juice derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.
About the Author: Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty previous books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount now lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife, painter Joan Griswold.
Gregory Maguire, author of A Lion Among Men: Volume Three in the Wicked Years
William Morrow
Since Wicked was first published in 1995, millions of readers have discovered Gregory Maguire’s fantastically encyclopedic Oz, a world filled with characters both familiar and new, darkly conceived and daringly reimagined. In the much-anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion—the once tiny cub defended by Elphaba in Wicked.
While civil war looms in Oz, a tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before her final hour, an enigmatic figure known as Brrr—the Cowardly Lion—arrives searching for information about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West. As payment, Yackle, who hovered on the sidelines of Elphaba’s life, demands some answers of her own.
Brrr surrenders his story to the ailing maunt: Abandoned as a cub, his earliest memories are gluey hazes, and his path from infancy in the Great Gillikin Forest is no Yellow Brick Road. Seeking to redress an early mistake, he trudges through a swamp of ghosts, becomes implicated in a massacre of trolls, and falls in love with a forbidding Cat princess. In the wake of laws that oppress talking Animals, he avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the war-mongering Emperor of Oz.
A Lion Among Men chronicles a battle of wits hastened by the Emerald City’s approaching armies. What does the Lion know of the whereabouts of the Witch’s boy, Liir? What can Yackle reveal about the auguries of the Clock of the Time Dragon? And what of the Grimmerie, the magic book that vanished as quickly as Elphaba? Is destiny ever arbitrary? Can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets—cowardly, wicked, brainless, criminally earnest—to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they’re skinned alive?
At once a portrait of a would-be survivor and a panoramic glimpse of a world gone shrill with war fever, Gregory Maguire’s new novel is written with the sympathy and power that have made his books contemporary classics.
About the Author: Gregory Maguire received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University. His work as a consultant in creative writing for children has taken him to speaking engagements across the United States and abroad. He is a founder and codirector of Children’s Literature New England, Incorporated, a non-profit educational charity established in 1987. The author of numerous books for children, Mr. Maguire is also a contributor to Am I Blue?: Coming Out From the Silence, a collection of short stories for gay and lesbian teenagers.
Annie Liebovitz, author of AT Work
Random House
Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon’s resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama’s campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.
About the Author: Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father was a career officer in the Air Force and her childhood was spent on a succession of military bases. While studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute she took night classes in photography, and in 1970 she began working for Rolling Stone magazine. She became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973. By the time she left the magazine, ten years later, she had shot one hundred and forty-two covers and published photo essays on scores of stories, including her memorable accounts of the resignation of Richard Nixon and of the 1975 Rolling Stones tour. She joined the staff of Vanity Fair in 1983 and in 1993 also began working for Vogue. In addition to her magazine editorial work, Leibovitz has created influential advertising campaigns for American Express, the Gap, the Milk Board, and Louis Vuitton. She has worked with many arts organizations, including American Ballet Theatre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Mark Morris Dance Group, and with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Her books include Annie Leibovitz: Photographs (1983), Photographs: Annie Leibovitz, 1970—1990 (1991), Olympic Portraits (1996), Women (1999), American Music (2003), A Photographer’s Life (2006), and Annie Leibovitz: At Work (2008). Exhibitions of her work have appeared in museums and galleries all over the world, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Leibovitz has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress and is the recipient of many other honors including the Barnard College Medal of Distinction and the Infinity Award in Applied Photography from the International Center of Photography. She was decorated a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. She lives in New York with her three children, Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle.
Louise Erdrich, author of The Plague of Doves
Harper Collins
Louise Erdrich’s mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives.
Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices,
Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages.
The Plague of Doves is one of the major achievements of Louise Erdrich’s considerable oeuvre, a quintessentially American story and the most complex and original of her books.
About the Author: Louise Erdrich is the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
Ted Turner, author of Call Me Ted
Grand Central Publishing
A shrewd businessman, an outspoken maverick, and a generous philanthropist, Ted Turner’s story is the stuff of legend. But what drives him? Where did he get such a powerful will to succeed? What has he learned over his illustrious life? Never before has the controversial businessman shared his personal story. Here, for the first time, he will.
From his difficult and troubling childhood to his hard-partying college life, from his vision of CNN to the drama and turmoil of the AOL / Time Warner deal, and from his ownership of the Braves to his news-making philanthropy, Turner spares no details of his extraordinary career and provides fascinating businesses insights along the way - many of which are sure to surprise.
Turner will also reveal the never-before-told details of his personal life. He frankly discusses a childhood of loneliness (he was sent to boarding school at the tender age of 4), the impact of devastating loss (his sister died at 17 and his hard-charging father committed suicide when Ted was in his early 20s). Turner also goes into great detail about his marriages, including his marriage to Jane Fonda, the “love of my life.”
It’s been a helluva life. Ted Turner truly is the great American maverick of our time. His story will educate, enlighten, entertain, and inspire - for the first time, Turner will tell the public how he went from being a young billboard salesman in the South to being the largest private landowner in the country. The release of this long-awaited memoir will be a major media event, and Ted’s captivating story promises to deliver on the hype.
About the Author: Since the early 1970’s, Ted Turner has stepped into the international spotlight with one accomplishment after another. Whether in billboard advertisement, cable television, sports team ownership, sailing, environmental initiatives or philanthropy—Turner’s vision, determination, generosity and forthrightness have consistently given the world reason to take notice.
Turner now dedicates his time and resources to making the world a better, safer place for future generations. His current philanthropic interests include: the Turner Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Captain Planet Foundation, and the Turner Endangered Species Fund.
In addition, he remains actively involved in business with the rapidly expanding Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain.
Nami Mun, author of Miles From Nowhere
Riverhead Books (imprint of Penguin Putnam)
Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father’s infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she would be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing and often tragic journey that exposes the painful difficulties of a life lived on the margins. Joon’s adolescent years take her from a homeless shelter to an escort club, through struggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes, and, finally, toward something resembling hope.
In raw and beautiful prose, Nami Mun delivers the story of a young woman who is at once tough and vulnerable, world-weary and naive, faced with insurmountable odds and yet fiercely determined to survive. In the process, Mun creates one of the most indelible characters in recent fiction and establishes herself as an extraordinarily talented new voice.
Brutally honest, linguistically inventive, and profoundly moving, Miles from Nowhere is a work of fiction that will haunt and inspire a generation of readers.
About the Author: Nami Mun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. She has worked as a door-to-door Avon Lady, a dance hostess, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal investigator. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she garnered a Hopwood Award for fiction and the Farrar Prize. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her stories have been published in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Evergreen Review, Witness, and other journals.
Counterpoint Press
Legacy of Secrecy tells the full story of JFK’s murder and the tragic results of the cover-ups that followed, as revealed by two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy, backed by thousands of files at the National Archives. The result of twenty years of research, it finally tells the full story long withheld from Congress and the American people.
About the Authors: Lamar Waldron’s groundbreaking research has been featured by hundreds of newspapers and radio stations. His book Ultimate Sacrifice has been the subject of its own special on the Discovery Channel, produced by NBC (“Conspiracy Files: JFK Assassination”). A new special about Ultimate Sacrifice aired on German Public Television in October 2007. The author has been featured on “Geraldo Rivera” and Fox News, and his work has been acclaimed by publications ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to foreign publications such as the Sunday London Telegraph and Germany’s Der Spiegel. He is the co-author of Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination.
And
Thom Hartmann is a best-selling author and national radio host for Air America. Heard by millions of radio listeners daily, Hartmann is the author of seventeen books, including The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which helped to inspire Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent documentary “The 11th Hour,” which features Hartmann. His other books include: We the People; Unequal Protection; What Would Jefferson Do; and Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination.
Bernardine Evaristo, author of Blond Roots
Riverhead Books
A provocative novel that upends the history of the transatlantic slave trade, reversing and reexamining notions of savagery and civilization, as it follows a young woman’s journey to freedom.
Award-winning writer Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Blonde Roots asks: What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? And how would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers—and sometimes festers—today?
We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman who is kidnapped one day while playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields near their home. She is subsequently enslaved and taken to the New World, as well as to the imperial center of Great Ambossa. She movingly recounts experiences of tremendous hardship and dreams of the people she’s left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.
A poignant and dramatic story grounded in provocative ideas, Blonde Roots is a genuinely original, profoundly imaginative novel.
About the Author: Bernardine Evaristo was born in London to a Nigerian father and an English mother. Her first novel, Lara, won the EMMA (Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards) Best Book Award in 1999. A former Poet in Residence at the Museum of London, she won an Arts Council of Britain Writers’ Award in 2000.
Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon, authors of Make Em’ Laugh: The Funny Business of America
Twelve
From the most popular routines and the most ingenious physical shtick to the snappiest wisecracks and the most biting satire of the last century, Make Em’ Laugh illuminates who we are as a nation by exploring what makes us laugh, and why. Written by Laurence Maslon and Michael Kantor, this companion to the six-part PBS series draws on countless sources to chronicle the past century of American comedy and the geniuses who created and performed it—melding biography, American history, and a lotta laughs into an exuberant, important book.
Each of the six chapters focuses a different style or archetype of comedy, from the slapstick pratfalls of Buster Keaton and Lucille Ball through the wiseguy put-downs of Groucho Marx and Larry David, to the incendiary bombshells of Mae West and Richard Pryor. And at every turn the significance of these comedians—smashing social boundaries, challenging the definition of good taste, speaking the truth to the powerful—is vividly tangible. Make Em’ Laugh is more than a compendium of American comic genius; it is a window into the way comedy both reflects the world and changes it—one laugh at a time.
Starting from the groundbreaking PBS series, the authors have gone deeper into the works and lives of America’s great comic artists, with biographical portraits, archival materials, cultural overviews, and rare photos. Brilliantly illustrated, with insights—and jokes—from comedians, writers, and producers, as well as film, radio, television, and theater historians, Make Em’ Laugh is an indispensable, definitive book about comedy in America.
About the Authors:Laurence Maslon is an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His books include Broadway: The American Musical, with Michael Kantor, as well as The Sound of Music Companion, The South Pacific Companion, and the Library of America edition of George S. Kaufman’s comedies. He lives in New York City and on the North Fork of Long Island with his wife and son.
Michael Kantor is the Emmy award-winning filmmaker who created the landmark documentary series, Broadway: The American Musical, for PBS. A nominator for the Tony Awards, he is president of Ghost Light Films and Almo Inc., companies dedicated to bringing the arts to film and television. He lives 28 minutes from New York City.
Steve Berry, author of The Charlemagne Pursuit
Ballantine Books
As a child, former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone was told his father died in a submarine disaster in the North Atlantic, but now he wants the full story and asks his ex-boss, Stephanie Nelle, to secure the military files. What he learns stuns him: His father’s sub was a secret nuclear vessel lost on a highly classified mission beneath the ice shelves of Antarctica.
But Malone isn’t the only one after the truth. Twin sisters Dorothea Lindauer and Christl Falk are fighting for the fortune their mother has promised to whichever of them discovers what really became of their father—who died on the same submarine that Malone’s father captained.
The sisters know something Malone doesn’t: Inspired by strange clues discovered in Charlemagne’s tomb, the Nazis explored Antarctica before the Americans, as long ago as 1938. Now Malone discovers that cryptic journals penned in “the language of heaven,” inscrutable conundrums posed by an ancient historian, and the ill-fated voyage of his father are all tied to a revelation of immense consequence for humankind.
In an effort to ensure that this explosive information never rises to the surface, Langford Ramsey, an ambitious navy admiral, has begun a brutal game of treachery, blackmail, and assassination. As Malone embarks on a dangerous quest with the sisters—one that leads them from an ancient German cathedral to a snowy French citadel to the unforgiving ice of Antarctica—he will finally confront the shocking truth of his father’s death and the distinct possibility of his own.
About the Author: Steve Berry has been writing since 1990, and though his undergraduate degree was in political science and he’s trained as a lawyer, it was Steve’s interest in history that led to him writing international suspense thrillers. They were the kind of books he liked to read, so naturally they became the kind of book he liked to write.
Steve’s first two books, The Amber Room and The Romanov Prophecy, were both national bestsellers.. His next novel, The Third Secret, became an instant bestseller, debuting at #13 on The New York Times hardcover list and climbing to #5 on the Times paperback list. His fourth, The Templar Legacy, entered at #4 on The New York Times list and spent 8 weeks in the top 10. It also climbed into the top 10 on the USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Booksense bestseller lists. The *Alexandria Link debuted on The New York Times hardcover list at #2. The Venetian Betrayal, became an instant New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today bestseller in both hardcover and paperback. His latest, The Charlemagne Pursuit, opened in the top 10 on both The New York Times and Publishers Weekly lists. It also was a USA Today bestseller and was selected as one of the 5 Best Thrillers for 2008 by Library Journal.
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