August 2010
3 posts
6 tags
It's my family and everything's going wrong! →
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.
8 tags
What if your parents flipped out on religion? →
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.
7 tags
The Heretic's Wife: Terrific historical fiction →
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).
July 2010
2 posts
12 tags
What's It All About, Judd? →
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).
9 tags
25% off Founders at Work e-book
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).
June 2010
6 posts
6 tags
Build a Jewish Mother GPS →
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)
9 tags
What went wrong in Mogadishu? →
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
13 tags
The lost civilization of the Eastern European Jews →
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.
7 tags
The Pinkas of Metz →
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
6 tags
The last stand of Custer and Sitting Bull →
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...
5 tags
The kindness of Chinese strangers →
When you are young, your expectations about travel sound like a message in a Chinese fortune cookie: You will meet a handsome stranger. You will party ’til you drop. But when you finally arrive at your destination, people think of you as happy, stupid and fat. You feel as lost as a moth in a mitten.
May 2010
10 posts
6 tags
Hey, BP, take a page from Apple's book →
Why can’t BP be more like Apple or PayPal? (Bookpod blog)
14 tags
Raising a mentally ill son →
North Carolina-based writer Randi Davenport talks about The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes, the book she wrote about riding a healthcare merry-go-round in her quest to find appropriate care for her psychotic child. 7-minute Bookpod episode (mp3).
4 tags
Something to be said for anonymity →
I had found a guy in New York City who had carried a torch for me since college and now wanted to marry me. But within a couple of months, he was gone. “You’re fine for a man who likes blondes, but I really prefer dark women,” he said.
9 tags
Italian wet nurses and syphilis →
David Kertzer, provost of Brown University and historian, talks about Amalia’s Tale, the book he wrote to dramatize the state practice in nineteenth-century Italy of compelling unmarried women to give up their babies to a foundling hospital. The consequences were terrible for everyone involved.
7 tags
The transmogrification of Robert Mugabe →
Heidi Holland talks about Dinner With Mugabe, a personal account of the Zimbabwean president whom she describes as a bookworm who became a dictator.
8 tags
Lost in Manhattan again →
If I respected my inner James Bond, I would pop my H2 Handy Recorder into my purse and take the subway to Manhattan to do my Bookpod interviews. Instead, I load my techno-thingamagiggery into my Zaporozhets and begin a journey that inevitably gets me lost somewhere east of Omaha.
6 tags
Family swap →
It all started when two couples decided to swap husbands. Maybe this was fun for the adults for a while, but the four kids were devastated. Listen to Jane Alison talk about all this in her 6-minute podcast episode. Part of the Bookpod series.
6 tags
My ever-new and unknowable mother →
My mother cannot imagine why I would rather be like her than like me. For one, she’s noble and I’m not.
8 tags
My year of eating heavy eastern European food... →
Peter Mayle started the trend with A Year in Province. More recent time-bound books include Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life; Julie Powell’s My Year of Cooking Dangerously, and William Alexander’s 52 Loaves.
Maybe I spend too much time on the New Jersey Turnpike, but it occurred to me while driving home from my parents’ house in the southern part of the state...
13 tags
My father, Orson Welles →
Orson Welles’ daughter talks about the filmmaker, writer and magician whom she knew as a self-absorbed artist and one of the most humane influences in her life.
This 6-minute mp3 file is part of the Bookpod podcast.
April 2010
9 posts
8 tags
Can Rwanda forgive and forget? →
Listen to Philip Gourevitch, the New Yorker writer, talk about the Rwandan genocide and the questions he had that led him to write We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families. (8-minute audio mp3 file)
This episode is part of Bookpod, a podcast of short talks by writers of lasting value.
4 tags
Remember, acknowledge the Armenian genocide →
lovelolo:
Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia
6 tags
My handyman, the thief →
With each passing year, attention from men becomes like the appearance of Halley’s Comet — infrequent and spectacular — and it flattered my vanity to think that the handyman, fourteen years my junior, was smitten with me.
No fool like an old fool.
11 tags
Maria Finn is a travel and gardening writer, but...
Tumblr replies are a mixed blessing →
I have the same problem. I want to thank people for “tumbling” my posts, but there’s no way on Tumblr to do that :-(
10 tags
If a memory falls in the woods →
My sister and I saw James Taylor and Carole King in concert at the old Philadelphia Spectrum. We smelled pot for the first time. She lost her contact lens on the sidewalk. Our friend told us she was the victim of incest. Why doesn’t my sister remember that evening?
10 tags
The author of Black Dog of Fate talks about...
12 tags
The marrying kind →
My problem is that I picture being married to every man I meet. That includes you, honey.
7 tags
Phillip Lopate, author of novels, personal essays...
March 2010
6 posts
9 tags
British science writer Kathleen Taylor...
9 tags
My friend died from AIDS. I remember him. →
I wish I could tell Stewart Kaisen that I now look at the world as if I’m a visitor from an undiscovered tribe in the fourth dimension, and that I no longer grok the music, slang, books and movies making noise all around me.
But he’s long gone — a casualty of the AIDS epidemic of the eighties.
This short piece is part of Bookpod, a weekly blog associated with Bookpod.org, the...
12 tags
Anne Fadiman talks about The Spirit Catches You...
4 tags
Bookpod (March 8, 2010): New York Times reporter...
10 tags
Excitement around every corner →
As the bus made the turn on 231st Street that separates working-class Kingsbridge from more affluent Riverdale, I spied the slice of excitement I had been craving: A hundred kids were hurtling down Suicide Hill in Ewen Park on plastic flying saucers. The bus blocked out their howls of glee as they wove and spun with abandon around thousands of corners of gravity’s making.
Why hadn’t I...
10 tags
How could so many talented film people participate...
13 tags
Going naked →
Purim always makes me remember the times I could have gone naked. Queen Esther — and Lady Godiva — used nudity as a courageous political tool. In my small life, I was never able to figure out any good use for it.
This story was originally published at http://bookpod.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/going-naked/
February 2010
10 posts
10 tags
Give it to the kids, Erhard! →
How a phony brought health and blessings to the Bronx.
7 tags
“Report From Iron Mountain” was a...
How Am I Going To Pickup The Ladies With iPad In... →
How Google — and all the Share This widgets — have undermined the newspaper industry.
6 tags
I'm baaaack! →
How could a perfect babe like me become a computer scientist’s negative muse?
7 tags
Do you know how African-Americans feel about Gone...
8 tags
Imagine there's no heaven, Barbara →
Jay used to sit in the Rutgers student center with his do-nothing friends and ogle the girls. I fended him off when he tried to seduce me to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Maybe I’m wrong, but I always felt sorry for the guy.
10 tags
Doris Betts talks about the influences on her...
7 tags
Listen to Susan Jane Gilman in “Stripped in...
Portrait of a revolutionary manque →
A brief look back at Liberation News Service in its twilight years.
January 2010
8 posts
5 tags
Seeking illumination on the Grand Concourse →
Do you pride yourself on being free of racism?
Here’s a short tale of a visitor to the south Bronx who found a whit of bigotry — and redemptive goodness — inside her.
From bookpod.wordpress.com
4 tags
Writer and translator Peter Wortsman talks about a...
3 tags
My pinch of cayenne:Part II →
Within a month, the wife of my college crush was nursing a handicapped child and mourning the loss of her husband.
3 tags
My pinch of cayenne:Part I →
You always love your masculine ideal — but you outgrow it too.