Bookpod

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

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).

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.

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.

Heidi Holland talks about Dinner With Mugabe, a personal account of the Zimbabwean president whom she describes as a bookworm who became a dictator.