Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

Latest Episodes:

Rachel Khong’s ‘Real Americans’ Jul 12, 2024

Show notes

Lily Chen is not endowed with good fortune — despite the fact that her scientist mother managed to grow a backyard of four-leaf clovers. She doesn’t win raffles or lotteries. She scrapes out a meager living as an unpaid intern with the hopes that it might give her a shot at an entry-level gig.

In short: Not lucky.

But then a chance encounter upends her life and changes her idea of what fortune really is.

Rachel Khong’s new book, “Real Americans,” is already a New York Times bestseller and one of the hottest novels of the summer. She joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about teasing out the truth between luck and choice, soul mates and chance.

The shadow fighters of the Civil War Jul 05, 2024

Show notes

The Civil War is remembered for its sweeping battles: Gettysburg, Atlanta, Antietam. Less known are the small troops of men, enlisted by both sides, to fight far from the battlefields.

These ruthless soldiers relied on stealth to sneak behind enemy lines — often wearing their opponent’s uniform — and destroyed supply lines, assassinated military officials and gathered critical information.

Today, we know this kind of warfare as shadow ops — which is a specialty of military historian Patrick K. O’Donnell. A roadside marker he happened to see in rural Virginia ignited years of research into the Civil War era special forces who were tasked by President Lincoln to undertake spy operations and secrete missions against Confederate units.

This week, he joined MPR News host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold ideas to talk about his new book, “The Unvanquished,” which masterfully tells the story of this forgotten chapter of history.

Minnesota author Tai Coleman on families, hope and surviving America while Black Jun 28, 2024

Show notes

Taiyon Coleman has been writing since she was a child. At age 8, she announced to her family that a novel was in the works.

Today, she’s a published author and a professor of literature at St. Catherine University. But the road from there to here wasn’t as straight-forward as you might think.

Coleman joins host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk about what happened in the in-between. Some of it is detailed in her new collection of personal essays, “Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America.”

But the deeper story is held in Coleman’s body, in her voice, in her strength. Don’t miss this vulnerable and moving conversation about mothers and ancestors, writing and truth-telling and the power of being a teacher.

Guest:

Taiyon J. Coleman is a poet, a author and a literature professor at St. Paul’s St. Catherine University. Her new book is “Traveling without Moving.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Can you create your own luck? Jun 21, 2024

Show notes

America is steeped in the notion of rugged individualism. It’s comforting to think success is based on our own hard work and self determination.

But social scientist Robert Mark Rank says random chance governs far more of our lives that most of us want to admit.

This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, Rank joins MPR News host Kerri Miller to talk about his new book, “The Random Factor.” He shares how luck and chance play a crucial role in shaping history, the natural world and our everyday lives.

Samira Ahmed on ‘This Book Won't Burn’ Jun 14, 2024

Show notes

Noor Khan is still reeling from the disintegration of her family when she stumbles across a library cart stacked with books in her new small-town high school.

In her heart, she just wants to finish her senior year and get back to Chicago as quickly as possible.

But when she learns the books are being removed by a group of parents trying to ban literature they deem as obscene, she is enraged.

Will her values force her to act, even if doing so puts a target on her back? Or is the fight not worth the cost?

That’s the premise of Samira Ahmed’s new YA novel, “This Book Won’t Burn.” No stranger to book bans herself, Ahmed joins host Kerri Miller this week on Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about the freedom to read and how teenagers today are finding the courage to act against a national movement to ban books.

Talking Volumes: Leif Enger on ‘I Cheerfully Refuse’ Jun 07, 2024

Show notes

Dystopian novels aren’t known for being hopeful.

But that’s exactly what Leif Enger brings to the genre with his new book, “I Cheerfully Refuse.”

The beloved Minnesota author joined MPR News host Kerri Miller at the Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing on June 4 for a special “on the road” version of Talking Volumes.

Their conversation revolved around books: the unpredictable journey of writing them, the sometimes haphazard way of finding them, the way a good book leaves a mark that cannot be erased. As Enger’s protagonist Rainy says, “I banged and barged through dozens and hundreds of books. Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking.”

Talking Volumes with Leif Enger

They also touched on how to maintain hope when the world around you feels like it’s going up in flames. “I Cheerfully Refuse” is set in the “near future” when climate change, wealth concentration and religious zealots who are proudly illiterate flourish.

But Rainy and his cherished wife, Lark, “refuse apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.” When tragedy strikes, and Rainy is forced to set out in a small sailboat on a near-sentient Lake Superior, hoping to reunite with Lark, the quest unfolds.

Spoiler alert: Despair never wins.

Guest:

Leif Enger is the author of many books, including the 2001 breakout hit, “Peace Like a River.” His new novel is “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Before he became an author, Enger worked as a reporter for MPR News. He lives in Duluth with his wife, Robin.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Alua Arthur says facing death is the key to living well May 31, 2024

Show notes

What do you imagine your death will look like?

It’s not a morbid or depressing question to Alua Arthur. She’s a death doula, and she firmly believes that giving thought to that question is the key to living a meaningful life.

Arthur herself thinks about dying a lot. As she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, she has detailed plans for what she’d like her deathbed to be like. But more importantly, she says living with an awareness of mortality helps her live with intention.

“Every day that I live is a day that I can get closer to the life that I actually want,” she says.

Arthur’s new book, “Briefly Perfectly Human” is both memoir and a surprisingly joyful treatise on why facing mortality is the key to living well. Don’t miss this wise, tender and inspiring conversation.

Guest:

Alua Arthur is a recovering attorney and the founder of Going With Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. Her new book is “Briefly Perfectly Human.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Lea Carpenter explores what happens when the business of spying gets personal May 24, 2024

Show notes

Who knew boring could be an asset?

In Lea Carpenter’s new spy novel, “Ilium,” we meet our young and restless unnamed narrator on a day when she’s urging herself to be less mundane, to take more risks.

She has no idea that the spies she’ll soon be working for want her precisely because she’s inexperienced, untested and ordinary.

She quickly gets pulled into a high-stakes mission against a target who has a complicated backstory when it comes to American intelligence forces.

Carpenter joined spy novel enthusiast Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. They talked about how Carpenter’s own family history inspired her interest in America’s intelligence agencies, why women are exceptionally good spies, and how family life both complicates and clarifies the work.

Guest:

Lea Carpenter is a novelist and a screenwriter. Her new book is “Ilium.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Lydia Millet writes a devotion to the species disappearing from our planet May 17, 2024

Show notes

Birds, bats, freshwater mussels and a small catfish. They all slipped away in 2023, among the 21 species declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Grief is a rational response. So are the questions novelist and conservationist Lydia Millet articulates in her new book, “We Loved It All.” A blend of memoir and ecological truth-telling, Millet’s first nonfiction work examines what the vanishing will mean for the coming generations and for our sense of self.

“No one wants to tell our children how glorious it was before you were around,” she writes.

Millet joins host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about how she carries hope, even as she mourns the destruction in the natural world.

Guest:

Lydia Millet is a novelist and conservationist. Her new book is, “We Loved It All: A Memory of Life.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Minnesota’s best writers on Big Books and Bold Ideas May 10, 2024

Show notes

Big Book and Bold Ideas talks with authors from around the globe.

But our favorite moments come when host Kerri Miller sits down with Minnesota writers to talk about story, craft and how calling this state home influences both.

This week, we took a look back at some conversations with notable Minnesota authors, including Shannon Gibney, who just won her third Minnesota Book Award, Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang and not-ashamed-to-be-a-mystery-writer William Kent Krueger.