Book Dreams

Latest Episodes:

Ep. 108 - Citizenship and an Age of Invisible War, with Phil Klay Jun 02, 2022

Show notes

How should we, as a country, execute our military power, and what role should we, as citizens, play in military policy? In what ways does our current engagement in modern warfare, as it has evolved during the war on terror, fall short of the ideal, and what’s the impact of that shortfall? What’s the connection between our deep polarization at home and the endless, invisible conflicts we’re mired in overseas? What does the conflict in Ukraine teach us about the power and significance of a clear and meaningful military mission, and about the inevitable tragedy of war? Phil Klay–a U.S Marine Corps veteran and the author most recently of the thought-provoking essay collection Uncertain Ground: Citizenship and an Age of Endless, Invisible War–tackles these questions and more with Eve and Julie on this episode of Book Dreams.

Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His first book, Redeployment, is a collection of short stories set in wartime Iraq. It won the National Book Award and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times. His debut novel, Missionaries, also involves the military tactics of U.S. soldiers. It was named as one of the 10 Best Books of 2020 by The Wall Street Journal and chosen by former President Barack Obama as one of his Favorite Books of 2020. Now, Phil has published a collection of essays called Uncertain Ground: Citizenship and an Age of Endless, Invisible War.

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Ep. 107 - A Deep History of Work, with James Suzman May 26, 2022

Show notes

What makes us human?

In this episode, Eve and Julie explore one of our favorite questions with James Suzman, PhD, in a wide-ranging conversation about his book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. They talk about which aspects of work are specific to our species and how so much of what we believe to be intrinsic to work is actually just a product of our culture. James also discusses how the way we evolved to find purpose and meaning in work is what distinguishes us from bacteria; why modern people work far more hours a week than we need to; and how we may be in a “plastic moment” where radical changes in the way we work may be possible.

A noted anthropologist specializing in the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa, James Suzman spent thirty years studying the Ju/’hoansi people, a hunter-gatherer society in southern Africa’s Kalihari desert, whose economic models provide a fascinating contrast to our own. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the Director of Anthropos Limited, a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary, social, and economic problems. James’s first book, Affluence Without Abundance: What We Can Learn from the World's Most Successful Civilisation, was a 2019 NPR Best Book of the Year and a Washington Post Notable Book. Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots was an Amazon Best Book of the Month. James’s writing has appeared in outlets, including The New York Times, Salon, The Guardian, and Financial Times.

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Ep. 106 - A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice, with Ellen McGarrahan May 19, 2022

Show notes

Ellen McGarrahan was a young reporter at the Miami Herald when she volunteered to witness the execution of Jesse Tafero, who’d been convicted of killing two police officers. That execution went horrifically awry, and watching it changed the course of Ellen’s life. She left journalism, became a private investigator, and reinvestigated the murders attributed to Jesse Tafero, in an effort to determine whether she’d witnessed the execution of an innocent man. Ellen details her reexamination of the crime, and the surprising evidence she uncovered, in Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice, an Edgar Award finalist, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and one of Marie Claire's 10 Best True Crime Books of the Year.

In this episode of Book Dreams, Ellen talks with Julie and Eve about the reasons that Jesse Tefaro’s execution “began to really feel like a haunting”; the forces that drove her to put her life on hold 25 years after his death to re-examine the crime that two noted death penalty scholars and many others believed he hadn’t committed; and the investigative skills she used to uncover evidence that goes far beyond what was revealed by the criminal justice system.

Ellen McGarrahan is the author of Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice. She worked for 10 years as an investigative reporter and staff writer at newspapers, including The Village Voice, The Miami Herald, and SF Weekly. In 1996, she began working as a private detective and has since founded a private investigation agency.

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Ep. 105 - A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, with Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling May 12, 2022

Show notes

What do wild bears and libertarians have in common? Turns out, more than you might think.

In 2004 a group of libertarians founded the Free Town Project, a movement to take over a town and turn it into a libertarian utopia. After some research, the Free Towners decided that Grafton, New Hampshire, a town with a history of resistance to taxation that goes back to the American Revolution, seemed like the perfect place for their experiment.

Enter investigative reporter Matt Hongoltz-Hetling. Matt was in Grafton working on an unrelated story when he discovered, quite by chance, that the bears in the area were acting very strangely. He dug deeper and discovered surprising reasons for their behavior connected to the Free Town movement, a journey he details in his book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears).

Now, Julie and Eve talk to Matt about what happens when a group of outsiders undertakes “the boldest social experiment in modern American history,” why Grafton’s bears were eating its cats and attacking its people, and whether an insidious parasite may be contributing to the mayhem.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting, and the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears). He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. Matt's work has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Associated Press, and elsewhere.

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Ep. 104 - Feed Drop: History of Literature, Sense and Sensibility May 05, 2022

Show notes

This week we’re running an episode from the fabulous podcast, History of Literature, about one of our favorite authors, Jane Austen. Each week on his podcast, literature enthusiast–and dear friend of Book Dreams–Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Recent episodes include conversations about Kafka; about the wonderful world of mysteries; and about poet-novelist Stephen Crane.

Here’s Jacke’s description of the episode we’re airing now on Book Dreams: “‘I am never too busy to think of S&S,’ Jane Austen wrote to her sister, referring to her 1811 novel by its initials. ‘I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her suckling child.’ Sense & Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first published novel. First begun when she was in the throes of her doomed dalliance with Thomas Lefroy, the novel contains the familiar Austen project of a Hero, a Heroine, a Search for Love, and the Obstacle Called Money. In this case, the heroines are two sisters named Elinor and Marianne, representing the ‘sense’ (prudence, restraint) and ‘sensibility’ (passion, impulsiveness) of the title. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the writing of Sense & Sensibility; the still common themes contained within this classic novel; and the 1995 film adaptation, in which Emma Thompson, herself in the midst of an Austen-like entanglement, nevertheless drives a shiv into Jacke’s battered old heart.”

Listen to History of Literature on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can find Book Dreams on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.

Book Dreams is a part Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.

Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature.

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Ep. 103 (Re-Release) - Native Americans and Comedy, with Adrianne Chalepah and Kliph Nesteroff Apr 28, 2022

Show notes

“My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.” -Charlie Hill, comedian and member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

(RE-RELEASE) In this week’s episode, Julie and Eve talk to comedian, writer, and actor Adrianne Chalepah and comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff about Native Americans and comedy. In her conversation with Eve and Julie, Adrianne describes how before becoming a professional comedian, she was kicked out of public school for being a class clown and then sent to a U.S. government-run boarding school for Native American children. She also discusses whether the increasing success of Native American comedians like herself and others is indicative of lasting change. Kliph also shares stories about Charlie Hill, the first Native American comedian to appear on network television and how he revolutionized opportunities for Native American comedians. (This episode was originally released on 9/2/21.)

An enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and a member of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, Adrianne Chalepah has been a stand-up comedian for more than a decade. She’s the founder of the indigenous femme comedy troupe, Ladies of Native Comedy, and she plays the role of Shannon Diabo on Peacock’s hit show “Rutherford Falls.”

Kliph Nesteroff was a stand-up comic for eight years. He’s the author of The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy and, most recently, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy.

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Ep. 102 - How to (and How Not to) Steal Like an Artist, with Austin Kleon Apr 21, 2022

Show notes

In 2011, a 27-year-old Austin Kleon gave a talk to college students outlining a simple list: 10 things he wished someone had told him about being creative when he was their age. Austin posted the advice to his blog after the talk, and the list went viral. A year later, his New York Times bestselling book Steal Like an Artist was born.

Now, in 2022, Austin joins returning guest host (and Book Dreams producer) Gianfranco Lentini to muse on the 10th anniversary of the publication of Steal Like an Artist, as well as on its bestselling sequels, Show Your Work and Keep Going. Austin explores where to find the inspiration for art and the permission to create it, whether from without or within. He also shares his reservations, a decade after writing his initial book, about using the word “steal” in the title, and his thoughts on the nuances of “like an artist,” which some of his readers have seemed to miss. Finally, Austin gives a brief, impromptu workshop–much to Gianfranco’s excitement–on the difference between imagination and creativity.

Austin Kleon is the author of the New York Times bestselling trilogy of books on creativity: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. He is also the author of Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poems made by redacting the newspaper with a permanent marker. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and have sold over a million copies worldwide. He's been featured on NPR Morning Edition and PBS NewsHour, as well as in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He speaks for organizations such as Pixar, Google, South by Southwest (SXSW), TEDx, and The Economist.

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Ep. 101 - The True Story Behind Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with Kevin Birmingham Apr 14, 2022

Show notes

“When Dostoyevsky was 28, he was arrested in the pre-dawn hours by the Czar's political police. ... [Nine months later] the men were brought out into a square in the middle of St. Petersburg in December. Three men were tied to stakes; there were hoods pulled over their heads. A firing squad came out to aim their rifles. Dostoyevsky was next in line to be executed.”

Thus begins our Book Dreams interview this week with Kevin Birmingham, author of The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece. We discuss with Kevin the many extraordinary twists and turns of Dostoevsky’s life that helped shape the writing of Crime and Punishment and other novels. Dostoevsky endured ten years of exile in Siberia, four of them in a Siberian labor camp among murderers, and he battled a gambling addiction that repeatedly brought him to the brink of ruin. Kevin explains how these experiences and more contributed to “[t]wo decades of hardship, contemplation, and experimentation [that] brought [Dostoevsky] to a spectacular period of creativity in which he wrote four of the greatest novels in Russian literature—in all literature.” Kevin also recounts the story of Pierre-François Lacenaire, the real-life criminal who became the model for Raskolnikov, the murderer depicted in Crime and Punishment.

Kevin Birmingham is the author of The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, which won the PEN New England Award and The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Kevin has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his PhD in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.

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Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature.

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Ep. 100 - Have We Got Book Recommendations for You! Celebrating 100 Episodes Apr 07, 2022

Show notes

We did it! We reached our 100th episode of Book Dreams! In celebration, we went back to our guests and asked them this question: What's one book you love and why do you love it? And so now, have we got book recommendations for you! Twenty-eight beloved books from twenty-four of our beloved guests. From old favorites to new discoveries, from short stories to epic doorstoppers, we’ve got your reading list mapped out for you for at least the next 100 episodes. Enjoy! And thanks, as always, for book dreaming with us.

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Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature.

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Ep. 99 - The Photographer Nanny, Vivian Maier, with Ann Marks Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

It was a story that captured the attention of the public and art critics worldwide: A treasure trove of exceptional photographs was discovered after a storage locker auction in 2007. The then unknown photographer? Vivian Maier, a woman who worked her whole life as a nanny. Even after two documentaries were made about Vivian–one of which, “Finding Vivian Maier,” was nominated for an Oscar–many questions remained about her life and art. After watching “Finding Vivian Maier,” retired executive Ann Marks spent years trying to answer those questions, becoming one of the few people who have seen all of Vivian’s personal records and the complete archive of her 140,000 images. That material, along with countless interviews and other research, became the basis for Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, a gorgeous book replete with Vivian’s photographs and telling details from Vivian’s life. In this week’s episode of Book Dreams, Ann talks with Julie and Eve about everything from the moment that Vivian’s photographs were discovered, to her astonishing talent and some of the reasons it remained hidden from the public for as long as it did, to the dysfunction in her family that contributed to the mystery surrounding her.

Ann Marks spent thirty years as a senior executive in large corporations and served as Chief Marketing Officer of Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal. She is now an internationally renowned resource on Vivian Maier’s life and work. Her research has been featured in major media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and the Associated Press.

Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.

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Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature.

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