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PODCAST

Read Beat (...and repeat)

If you"re like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That"s the question. Here"s the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren"t book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there"s a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will

history

All Episodes

28:46

“Building Bridges” by Douglas Bristol Jr.

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/05/25

World War II is a never-ending source of history. Decades after the conflict’s conclusion, research and examination continue as we seek to understand how we got to where we are today. In Building Bridges, Douglas Bristol examines how the military treated Black Americans before, during, and after the national emergency that WWII represented. Initially, Black Americans weren’t accepted into the service like their white counterparts. When the first peacetime draft was instituted in 1940, m...

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29:55

"To Die With Such Men" by Shannon Monaghan

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/05/09

Shannon Monaghan is a military historian whose last book, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men, offered an account of select British special operations unit members who were so important during World War II. This time around, Monaghan covers a more recent conflict, one that’s still going on: the war between Ukraine and Russia. In To Die With Such Men (Hurst & Co.), the reader is taken behind the lines as Monaghan recreates some of the missions fought in the early stages of a war that started ...

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22:11

"Pacific Atrocities Education" by Jenny Chan

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/04/30

World War II may have ended 80 years ago, but it’s still happening for Jenny Chan, a 2012 University of Illinois graduate. Chan is president and founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a non-profit based in San Francisco that churns out history regarding World War II’s Pacific front. In addition to publishing 29 books by a wide variety of authors that document human rights abuses, military battles, resistance efforts, and relate other untold efforts from the war, Chan’s group has produced ov...

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27:46

"Welcome to Florida" by Craig Pittman

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/04/25

Craig Pittman is one writer who doesn’t have to spend a lot of time digging up story ideas. As a 30-year veteran of the Tampa Bay Times and now a reporter for the Florida Phoenix, Pittman gets tips online or by phone as well as having dozens of reliable sources who will alert him to the latest goings-on in his home state of Florida. Florida has been Pittman’s beat for decades. “Nine hundred people move to this state every day. I look at it as my job to tell them what they’re in for. A lot of ...

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29:50

"Southern News, Southern Politics" by Rob Christensen

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/04/25

Rob Christensen’s new book, Southern News, Southern Politics (University of North Carolina Press), is more than the history of the newspaper, the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., described at one point by a politician as “pretty damn fearless.” It’s a profile of the Daniels family, starting with Josephus Daniels in 1895, whose family’s ownership of the paper spanned most of the 20th century. The book chronicles the involvement of members of the Daniels family with U.S. presidents Woodrow...

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29:58

"Baseball's First Superstar" by Alan Gaff

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/04/17

When Christy Mathewson burst upon the scene with the New York Giants in 1900, baseball had a less-than-perfect image. It was a rowdy game played by roughnecks known for their consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco, said Alan Gaff, author of Baseball’s First Superstar. Mathewson’s good looks and his quiet, easy-going manner made him a hit with the ladies, Gaff said. “Women came to baseball games,” he noted, adding that “opposing clubs would schedule Ladies Days for games in which Christy w...

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27:57

"Mrs. Cook & the Klan" by Tom Chorneau

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/04/14

True crime accounts are all the rage these days. But Tom Chorneau didn’t want to just add another cold case to the national docket. Instead, the unsolved murder of Myrtle Cook in 1925 is related to political forces flowing through the state of Iowa at the time, with Chorneau, a former reporter, explaining the state’s near-constant battle over temperance. During the first half-century of statehood, Iowa lurched from wet to dry eight times before Prohibition was ratified in 1919. Cook was presi...

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32:51

"Rebranding the Western: A History of Comics and the...

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/21

How did you learn about the American West? Books came first. Reading material included notorious dime novels that made legends of Buffalo Bill and Jesse James. Newspapers and magazines, meanwhile, focused on the American West in the 19th century as railways turned the frontier into an attraction for tourists who watched herds of buffalo disappearing while Native Americans were being herded onto reservations. Western history was recorded in so many movies—from silent films like On the War Path...

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31:52

Pink Cars & Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought...

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/20

Chrysler released a special edition of the Dodge Royal Lancer that Chrysler in 1955 called LaFemme. Marketed as “a car for the modern woman,” the model offered a pink-and-white color scheme along with matching accessories. There was only one problem: women didn’t buy it. Chrysler soon dropped the concept due to low sales. That’s just one of the examples that Jessica Brockmole details in her book, Pink Cars and Pocketbooks, a study of U.S. auto industry efforts to win over female customers thr...

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27:59

"Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet" by Lisa...

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/14

Much is made of the temples and striking artwork of the ancient Maya. Justifiably. Ever since U.S. travel writer John Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood explored the ruins of Copan in Honduras, publishing Incidents of Travel in Central America in 1841, the world has been aware of the “lost world” of the Maya. Stephens’ dramatic accounts and keen insight at what he found along with Catherwood’s meticulous engravings at numerous Maya sites proved to be a revelation. The public lea...

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20:34

"What's Up With Women and Money?" by Alison Kosik

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/07

Before Alison Kosik wrote What's Up With Women and Money?: How To Do All the Financial Stuff You’ve Been Avoiding she’d been a business correspondent for CNN, often filing stories from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Kosik interviewed heads of business and corporate experts regularly but relegated financial decisions to her husband. Although dealing with business on a daily basis on the job, when it came to her own personal finances, she decided not to get involved. Although in what...

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22:19

"One Death at a Time" by Abbi Waxman

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/07

Abbi Waxman, a British-born Californian, is the author of eight books including I Was Told It Would Get Easier, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, and The Garden of Small Beginnings. Her latest, One Death at a Time, is promoted as a “feel-good mystery,” a categorization that Waxman seems relatively happy with. But then Waxman confesses to be a relatively happy person. “One Death at a Time is funny. All my books are lighthearted,” she said. Born in England in 1970, Waxman came to the United ...

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25:01

"Becoming Madam Secretary" by Stephanie Dray

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/05

Frances Perkins is one of those figures in history that you need to know more about. Helping in that regard is the latest book from Stephanie Dray, a historical novel called Becoming Madam President. Published in March 2024, Becoming is the 10th work of historical fiction for Dray who likes to write about revolutionary women, both those involved in the American Revolution and, as in Perkins' case, women whose work was revolutionary. Perhaps best known as the Secretary of Labor in Franklin D. ...

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18:58

"Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)" by...

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/05

Jesse Sutanto is a successful writer educated at Oxford and California, lives in Jakarta, and has found her niche: the cozy mystery. I didn’t know what a cozy mystery was until Jesse explained it. “Nothing truly bad happens to the primary characters. For example, I couldn’t kill off Vera Wong,” she said. “Cozy mysteries have a lot of standard features,” said Richelle Braswell, a writer who explains some of the many varieties out there in her online essay, “Cozy Mystery Plots.” The stories usu...

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36:37

"Maya Blue: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Ancient...

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/03/01

The ancient Maya civilization is known for many things: pyramids, stone sculptures, complex astronomical calculations, a writing system, a rubber-ball game and the subject of anthropologist Dean Arnold's latest book, Maya Blue (University Press of Colorado). Arnold, an adjunct curator of anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and professor emeritus of anthropology at Wheaton College, has published more than 60 articles about potters, pottery and pottery production. He has p...

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26:22

"Unveiling the Color Line" by Lisa McLeod

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/02/27

W.E. B. DuBois went on record in 1896 saying that white supremacy significantly warps whites' perceptions and behaviors. Even earlier--in 1890--as a 22-year-old Harvard College student--he called out Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy during the Civil War. He outlined the Davis career in a 10-minute speech as one who "advanced civilization by murdering Indians" and participated in the "national disgrace called the Mexican War" before attaining "the crowning absurdity" of his caree...

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24:55

"Ida Lupino: Forgotten Auteur" by Alexandra Seros

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/02/27

Ida Lupino's "problem" was that she constantly found herself the smartest person in the room, noted biographer Alexandra Seros, a Hollywood screenwriter and the author of Ida Lupino: Forgotten Auteur (University of Texas Press). Lupino was more than a great actress but also a successful director. The Hitch-Hiker, a film made in 1953, is now considered a film noir classic. The fact that a woman directed the movie places when few women directors worked on major film releases places her in exclu...

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25:35

"Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases" by...

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/02/14

Maia Lee-Chin, whose book, Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases (Andrews McMeel), was published last year, got more out of Latin class than I did. But she admits it didn't just happen. "I was forced to enroll in Latin. I considered dropping the course several times, especially while translating Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico. I couldn't understand his long-winded explanations of wartime strategies, and I had no love for Roman history," wrote Lee-Chin. "Something changed when I f...

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29:05

"Midnight Black" by Mark Greaney

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/02/11

The Washington Post calls Mark Greaney the Tom Cruise of thriller writers. Like the Mission Impossible star, Greaney is on a roll, following in the footsteps of Tom Clancy, the thriller writer whose books have sold over 100 million copies. Greaney, who said he became obsessed with Clancy’s work as a teenager, co-wrote several books with Clancy before the author died in 2013. While carrying on the exploits of Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan, in several books, Greaney started a successful series of hi...

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30:11

"Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit...

Read Beat (...and repeat) ·

2025/01/18

Kimberly Kay Hoang, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, traveled over 300,000 miles, conducting hundreds of interviews to trace the flow of capital from offshore funds in the Cayman Islands, Samoa or Panama to holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong.Her book, Spiderweb Capitalism, reveals how some of this money finds its way into risky markets in Vietnam and Myanmar."Not only was getting access to wealthy individuals around the world highly challenging, but then trying...

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235 results

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