Bookpod

What, you think it’s nothing to walk in on your wife making it with your boss — in your bed? Think it’s nothing to lose your father too and then get to spend a week with your newly lesbian mom and your scrabbling brothers and sisters?

Listen to Jonathan Tropper talk about This Is Where I Leave You, his novel about the craziness of family when your life goes off the rails.

You and your dad always scoffed at religious fanatics. Time passes and suddenly he gets a little too interested in Judaism. What’s a nice Jewish girl to do?

Listen to Risa Miller talk about My Before and After Life in Bookpod, a weekly podcast that features writers of lasting value.

Political repression. The love of two men. Freedom of the press. The Heretic’s Wife by Brenda Rickman Vantrease has everything. Listen to Brenda talk about her book in this week’s episode of Bookpod (6-min. mp3, pdf transcript included).

How’s it feel to expose your humiliation to your family? Jonathan Tropper has written a novel called This Is Where I Leave You on this very subject. 

Listen to Tropper talk about his fifth novel in this latest installment of Bookpod (7 min. mp3; pdf available).

Take 25% off on the e-book purchase of Founders at Work: Stories of Start-ups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston, co-founder of venture capital group Y Combinator. Get the coupon code at Bookpod.

And listen to Livingston talk about Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, in Why did the good dot-coms succeed, a 7-minute audio story (mp3). Transcript available (pdf).

I would like to throw out a challenge to the software development community to come up with a Jewish Mother GPS that will capture the best of the deprecatory voice that has made me the neat, book-reading adult I am today.

(From bookpod.wordpress.com)

Nobody will ever forgot the photograph of an American soldier — on a humanitarian mission — dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. In this episode of Bookpod, Mark Bowden talks about Black Hawk Down, the book he wrote to chronicle the events that led to the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Somalia.

mp3, 8 minutes

Jonathan Brent, executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, talks about the Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, a vast book and online project that recovers the long, diverse history of the Jews in Poland, Russia and other European countries.

This short audio story is part of Bookpod, a weekly podcast about writers of lasting value.

YIVO executive director Jonathan Brent talks about some extraordinary pro-women judicial decisions made by a Polish Talmudic scholar before the French Revolution in Metz, France. A backward Polish rabbi in sophisticated France? Who knew.

This short audio story is part of Bookpod, a weekly podcast about writers of lasting value. mp3 & pdf

It’s hard for us in the twenty-first century to imagine the role that George Armstrong Custer played in American popular culture well into the 1970s. The lieutenant colonel of the Seventh Cavalry was famous for leading 210 men into a bloody rout by Chief Sitting Bull – and Custer became the mixed symbol of bravery, spectacular military failure and Native American resistance to America’s manifest destiny.