Alan Furst

Alan Furst talks about writing and about his historical thrillers, SPIES OF THE BALKANS (2010) and THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (2006).

Master of suspense Alan Furst sets his novels in Europe just prior to and during WWII. Most of them take place in the Balkans, with sorties to his favorite city in the world, Paris. They deal with the fight between freedom and fascism and the choice between saving yourself or risking your life for the common good.

His latest, SPIES OF THE BALKANS follows on the heels of his 2008 SPIES OF WARSAW. It takes place in the ancient port of Salonika, Greece, a rough and tumble town of wharves and warehouses, gangsters and spies. It’s 1940. Mussolini’s Italy threatens from the North — and behind Italy, the shadow of Hitler’s war machine menaces. Furst’s new hero, Senior Police Official Costa Zannis, is drawn into the effort to save his homeland — and Europe’s Jews from the evil that is hunting them.

Francesca sat down with Alan Furst in his tiny writing studio in Sag Harbor, New York. He’s a disciplined writer, putting in four hours every morning, during which time he’s sustained just by coffee and the occasional cigarette. It’s a pace that’s produced 11 published works, among them Night Soldiers, The World at Night, Dark Voyage, and The Foreign Correspondent.

Read an excerpt from SPIES OF THE BALKANS

Writers Voice interviewed Furst in 2006 about THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT. It takes place mainly in Paris. This time, his hero is a journalist, Carlo Weisz, an expatriate Italian fighting the Mussolini regime by writing for the opposition newspaper, the Liberazione. The year is 1938, the storm clouds of war are gathering on the horizon, and Weisz is struggling to keep both his paper and himself alive. The book is a compelling portrait of Europe as it struggles with the opposing forces of fascism and freedom — forces that find their echoes today as the world grapples with terror and war.

Read an excerpt from THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

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Bruce Frankel

Bruce Frankel
Bruce Frankel’s book, What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life? introduces the reader to a host of unforgettable everyday people he interviewed who found fulfillment, happiness and a measure of success in following their passion — after the age of 60.

Sometimes, the passion wasn’t new, just the success, like Harry Bernstein, who finally got a book published at age 94, after writing 40 unpublished novels. Other times, the passion was new, like the former intelligence officer, Thomas Dwyer, who became a modern dancer in his mid-fifties, and continues to dance professionally in his seventies. Or even more surprising, the Orthodox Jewish banker’s wife Naomi Wilzig, creator of The World Erotic Art Museum and one of the world’s greatest experts on erotic art.

Frankel got the idea for the book when he faced his own professional crossroads in life. He quit his job as reporter for People Magazine (he also worked for USA Today) to become a poet and poetry teacher. That didn’t work out — instead, he wrote a wonderful, thoughtful book that shows it’s never too late to follow your dream.

Susan Whitbourne

Susan Whitbourne

Susan Krauss Whitbourne has been following the same group of people around for 40 years. No, she’s not a stalker. She’s a psychology professor at UMass-Amherst. What she’s been studying is how some find fulfillment in life, while others never seem to get it together or still others remain too fearful to take the risks that might bring them happiness. She’s distilled what she’s found into her book, The Search for Fulfillment: Revolutionary New Research That Reveals the Secret to Long-term Happiness. It outlines different pathways people take in their lives: which ones to avoid or leave behind, and which ones to take to find happiness and fulfillment.

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Eric Pooley

Eric Pooley, THE CLIMATE WAR

A record heat wave in Russia, with forest fires raging out of control. Record floods in Pakistan, 20 million people affected. Floods and mudslides in China — 1500 people dead there. And that’s just in one week! And more worries: Russia has announced a 25-30% drop in wheat production and cut off all wheat exports. And in Canada, wheat crops are off by 21% due to the opposite reason: excess rain. From climate scientists to Russian President Medvedev, agreement is growing that what is happening now is evidence of global climate change.

But the U.S. Senate hasn’t gotten the memo from Mother Nature. It looked like it might happen — last year the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill. While it wasn’t enough to cool the climate, it was a start. But, with the failure to pass any bill on the climate — or even energy — that start is now dead in the water for the foreseeable future.

Eric Pooley has written a spell-binding political thriller about who killed the climate bill and how they did it. It’s called THE CLIMATE WAR. Francesca went to the Bloomberg building in Manhattan where Pooley works as deputy editor of Business Week to talk with him.

Excerpt from Pooley’s The Climate War

More info:

Cost of Climate Action: pay now or pay later

Report from the Presidential Climate Action Project on what Obama could do right now to tackle the climate crisis without Congress

California’s choice: Build the future, or burn the planet (Salon)

Eli Kintisch

Eli Kintisch, HACKING THE PLANET

Researchers in Europe have just come out with a new climate change model that says the tipping point for runaway climate change is a whole lot closer than we thought — 2015, a mere five years from now. If we don’t start cutting global carbon emissions by then, we’re toast — literally.

Or are we? Is there another approach, one that can buy us time? It’s the engineering that dare not speak it’s name -geo-engineering. That’s what science reporter Eli Kintisch writes about in his book HACK THE PLANET. It’s controversial — for one, when you start messing around with Mother Nature, there could be some serious unexpected blowbacks, like starving the ocean of oxygen. Or cutting off so much light from the sun, crops can’t grow. On the other hand, what we’re doing to the climate may force us to consider geo-engineering, just to buy us time until we can get our carbon emissions down to a safe level.

Eli Kintisch is a reporter for Science magazine, and he has also written for Slate, Discover, and The New Republic. In 2005 he won the Space Journalism prize for a series of articles on private spaceflight.

Excerpt from Hack The Planet

Coming up on The Climate Series from Writers Voice

Heidi Cullen, THE WEATHER OF THE FUTURE
Juliet Schor, PLENITUDE
John Michael Greer, THE ECOTECHNIC FUTURE
Heather Rogers, GREEN GONE WRONG

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Harvey Sachs

Also, in an archived interview, Mark Lamster tells us about MASTER OF DECEPTION. It’s about Peter Paul Rubens and his secret diplomatic career. We first aired it in March of 2010.

Can you write a whole book for the general public about one piece of music? Yes, if you are writing about Beethoven’s stirring Ninth symphony, which was always about more than the music. As Anthony Tommassini wrote in his New York Times review of Harvey Sachs’ book about the Ninth, “for generations, the symphony, with its choral finale espousing universal brotherhood, has been the work of choice to solemnize a peace treaty, open a new concert hall or foster communal bonding.”

But Beethoven never pegged the piece to any particular political philosophy. Instead, through the music he called upon the listener to attain a higher, more heroic state of being, one free of the prisons of the mind that society and its enforcers tried to impose.

Harvey Sachs first became inspired by the Ninth Symphony when he was a child, growing up in Cleveland, with its great symphony orchestra. When Sachs was twelve years old, he asked for a recording of the Ninth as a birthday present. He was attracted to the power and excitement of the music, but more than that, Beethoven was for the young Sachs, an example of someone who lived as he wanted to. Being true to oneself as an individual was an idea birthed by Romanticism, and Beethoven was present at that birth.

Harvey Sachs is the author of eight previous books, including biographies of Arturo Toscanini and Arthur Rubinstein. He teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

COMING UP SOON:

We talk with Business Week editor Eric Pooley about why the Senate failed to pass climate legislation and thereby failed America’s future.  His terrific, true-crime political thriller is THE CLIMATE WAR.

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James Lee Burke

Mystery writer James Lee Burke talks about his latest novel in the Dave Robicheaux series, THE GLASS RAINBOW. And poet Doug Anderson reads two poems.

Burke sees his fictional alter ego as the better man of the two — a hero who puts his life on the line defending the powerless and the abused. But Robicheaux is also haunted by his own psychic demons — his alcoholism, intimations of mortality, and moral ambivalence around the use of force against the forces of darkness.

Burke, who has written more than 20 books, won an Edgar Award for two of them, BLACK CHERRY BLUES and CIMARRON ROSE. His character Dave Robicheaux has been played by Tommy Lee Jones in the film The Electric Mist and by Alec Baldwin in Heaven’s Prisoners.

The setting for the latest novel in the Robicheaux series, The Glass Rainbow is the sugarcane and bayou country of Louisiana, where crime, corruption and the twisted strands of class and race are the ground for epic battles between good and evil. Robicheaux teams up with his best friend Clete Purcel to solve the mystery of the young woman’s murder. The trail heads at first into the seamier side of town, but then veers into a thorny thicket leading to the plantations of the most powerful people in the parish.

Tune into this wonderful conversation with James Lee Burke as he talks about his latest book, what’s happening to the Gulf Coast in the wake of the BP catastrophe, the history of the region, and his writing.

Read an article James Lee Burke wrote about writing

Also, Doug Anderson reads two poems, Petitionary Prayer on Nguyen Duy’s Roof, and a birthday poem, Sixty Seventh.
Read other poems by Anderson

Sneak Preview: Next week, Writers Voice talks with Harvey Sachs about his book, THE NINTH: Beethoven and the World in 1824

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Philip Schultz

Host Francesca Rheannon spends the hour with poet Philip Schultz talking about his poetry, his method of teaching writing — and his dyslexia. His latest book is THE GOD OF LONELINESS.

Philip Schultz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his book about his father, Failure. Ironically, that book, published when Schultz was 63, brought him a measure of success and fame that had eluded him throughout decades of writing verse, including five previous volumes of poetry. His new collection of poems, The God of Loneliness, brings together poems written across the span of those decades, from 1978 through 2009.

Schultz’s themes center around family, especially the immigrant Jewish family he grew up in in Rochester, New York. His larger than life father — who held the record in New York for the most failed businesses, Schultz claims — is a major inspiration. But so are his grandmother with her acerbic pronouncements on life, his Uncle Jake, who dreamed big while running the projector at a local movie theater, and, perhaps his best-loved character, his guardian angel Stein.

But Schultz has a new inspiration for his writing these days, and he’s expressing it for the first time not in poetry, but in memoir. It’s his dyslexia, which he discovered when one of his own children was diagnosed with the learning disability. He’s much engaged in writing the memoir now, entitled My Dyslexia — it will be published by Norton Press.

Philip Schultz is the founder of The Writers Studio, which teaches fiction and poetry. In addition to The God of Loneliness, he’s also the author of Like Wings (Viking Penguin, 1978), Deep Within the Ravine (Viking Penguin, 1984), My Guardian Angel Stein (State Street Press, 1986), The Holy Worm of Praise (Harcourt, 2002), Living in the Past (Harcourt, 2004), and Failure (Harcourt, 2007).

Poems by Philip Schultz
The God of Loneliness
Attention

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Lester Brown

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute talks about the latest edition of his book PLAN B. It’s updated to PLAN B 4.0. And social change expert David Gershon talks about how to create the social and political will to do something about climate change in his book, SOCIAL CHANGE 2.0.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced plans to bring clean energy legislation to the Senate floor the week of July 26. The House passed such legislation last year, but the Senate has been dragging its feet.

What will be in the final bill and whether it will do much to get us off fossil fuels in time to stave off climate catastrophe is not yet known — but many in America aren’t holding their breath. They’re moving ahead, with or without government to lay out a vision of a clean energy future and a way to get ordinary citizens mobilized to bring it about. Both our guests today are committed to that future.

We speak with Lester Brown, longtime writer and activist on global environmental issues. He is a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and was called “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” by the Washington Post. Founder of Worldwatch, he helped to pioneer the idea of sustainable development back in the 1970s.

His best known books are perhaps the Plan B series. His latest, PLAN B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, is centered around the idea that tackling climate change isn’t just about changing our energy technology from dirty to clean; it’s also about social change — specifically, eradicating poverty. He says unless we all get together to do that, our civilization could be doomed and that we need to educate poor women, empower poor farmers, and create food security along with energy security.

David Gershon

Writers Voice first spoke with David Gershon several years ago about his book, LOW CARBON DIET: A 30 Day Program to lose 5,000 pounds. That book and a companion workbook for children was a guide for families and communities to get together to slash their carbon footprint.

Gershon is the founder and president of the Empowerment Institute, a school for social change. It works with government, organizations and businesses to help institutions change behavior on a system-wide scale. The city of Seattle is one of his clients, putting his ideas about reducing our carbon footprint into practice. His newest book is SOCIAL CHANGE 2.O.

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Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Writers Voice talks with Sasha Polakow-Suransky about his book, THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE. And, in an excerpt from our 2009 interview, Israeli journalist Amira Hass talks about her Holocaust survivor parents’ involvement in the Israeli peace movement.

As we produce this show, the World Cup Soccer games in South Africa are over and a new word has entered the American vocabulary — vuvuzela. But six decades ago, a much more sinister word came into our vocabulary from South Africa: apartheid. After decades of struggle, Black South Africans were able to overthrow the apartheid regime — an effort that was helped by an international embargo against trade with South Africa.

But not all countries observed the embargo. And some that claimed to, did not do so, in fact. One of them was Israel — and the lucrative trade it carried on with the apartheid regime was in weapons. The relationship extended to high level sharing of information and supplies for the secret nuclear weapons programs of both countries.

That’s what Sasha Polakow-Suransky shows in his controversial new book, THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.

The day before the book was released, the Guardian published a story about top level secret documents Polakow-Suransky found revealing that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime. In response, Shimon Peres issued a denial. But the author stands by this and even more damning revelations that he uncovered through painstaking research and face-to-face interviews with key officials involved.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky is a senior editor of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. His writing has appeared in The American Prospect, the International Herald Tribune, The New Republic, and Newsweek.

Excerpt THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE

I spoke with Israeli journalist Amira Hass back in November of 2009 She was visiting the US on a tour to promote her mother’s diary of internment in Bergen Belsen during WWII (DIARY OF BERGEN BELSEN), which Hass edited. Both her parents were Holocaust survivors; after the war, they emigrated to Israel. Hass says the suffering her parents experienced during the holocaust made them very vulnerable to any suffering — and very attentive to the suffering of the Palestinians. They both became active in the Israeli peace movement.

In this excerpt from our 2009 interview, Hass says her mother felt deeply betrayed by what she saw as the use of the Holocaust by Israeli authorities to attack those who criticize their Palestinian policy. Her mother referred to it as ” the merchandizing of the Holocaust” and called for it to stop.

Listen to the entire 2009 interview

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Marisa Silver

Writers Voice spends the hour with fiction writer Marisa Silver, talking about the craft of writing, her new collection of short stories ALONE WITH YOU and her 2008 novel, GOD OF WAR.

The New York Times called Marisa Silver “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers”. We first spoke to her in 2008 about her wonderful novel, THE GOD OF WAR. Now she’s come out with an equally wonderful collection of stories, ALONE WITH YOU. They explore the ambiguities in human relationships — the push and pull we feel towards those we love — and the responsibilities we have toward one another.

I sat down with Silver at the office of her publisher, Simon and Schuster, in New York recently to talk about the craft of writing and her latest story collection of stories.

In addition to ALONE WITH YOU, Silver is the author of the 2001 story collection, BABE IN PARADISE, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her novel, GOD OF WAR was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. We spoke to her about it in 2008.

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Ann Jones

With the firing this week of Stanley McChrystal as commander of the US-led forces in Iraq, it’s a good time to be reminded of the impact of the war on the civilian population — and especially on Afghani women.

In this archived show from March, 2010, journalist Ann Jones talks about women, the war in Afghanistan, and whether life is any better for its people since the US invaded their country.

Read the full article about this show from the original air date.

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David Shenk

Shenk reads a section from his book, THE GENIUS IN ALL OF US, about the baseball champion Ted Williams. The lesson? With practice-practice-practice, new science tells us you, too, can be a champion.

Listen to the full David Shenk interview.

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David Shenk

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with journalist David Shenk about THE GENIUS IN ALL OF US: Why Everything We’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Are Wrong. It’s about what the science of epigenetics is telling us us about the potential for human achievement. And David Chura talks about his memoir of teaching incarcerated adolescents, I DON’T WISH NOBODY TO HAVE A LIFE LIKE MINE: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. He says the War on Crime is a war on kids.

Child prodigies like YoYo Ma, Mozart, or Tiger Woods are born, not made, right? They just got lucky in the genetic lottery, while the rest of us have to be satisfied with mediocrity or, at best, the modest achievements we can reach by dint of hard work.

Not so fast, says David Shenk in his new book, THE GENIUS IN ALL OF US. He says everything we’ve been told about genetics, talent, and IQ are wrong. He says, new science is showing that great achievement isn’t about what’s in the genes. It’s about how the environment influences genetic information — and that information can be changed by dedication, practice, and ambition.

Shenk is the bestselling author of five previous books, including The Forgetting and Data Smog, and has written for The Atlantic.com, National Geographic, Slate, Harper’s, among other venues.

Web Extra: Shenk reads a section from his book about the baseball player Ted Williams.

David Chura

David Chura spent 10 years teaching students being held in adult jails for crimes ranging from drug sales to assault. He says the War on Crime is all too often a war on kids, one that neglects the environment in which his students were raised.  The young men he taught were the victims of abuse, poverty, and neglect.  Yet, despite their histories, they are capable of compassion, enthusiasm for learning, and joy. Chura brings their stories to life in his book, I DON’T WISH NOBODY TO HAVE A LIFE LIKE MINE.

Read an excerpt

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Amanda Little

Amanda Little talks about her book POWER TRIP: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells. It’s about our addiction to fossil fuels and how to get off them. And Anna Lappé tells us about her new book, DIET FOR A HOT PLANET: The Climate Crisis At the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.

What a difference an oil spill makes. Before the BP spill happened in the Gulf, the media was full of reports that Americans were getting less concerned about the environment. With oil prices down and worries about jobs up, climate change and other looming environmental disasters fell off the radar screen.

But BP has focussed the collective mind on our addiction to oil and the disasters it brings. And, with oil-smeared communities on the Gulf Coast seeing their economic lifelines of fishing and tourism threatened with extinction, the connection between environmental catastrophe and economic ruin is finally becoming clear.

In her quest to trace the development of our fossil fuel economy for her new book, POWER TRIP, Amanda Little went out on a deep sea oil drilling platforms that was built by Transocean for Chevron. The company built a sister platform for BP — the well that now is spewing oil uncontrollably into the fragile ecosystem of the Gulf.

Amanda Little writes about the environment, energy and technology. Her syndicated weekly column, “Muckracker,” appeared on Grist.org and Salon.com. She also wrote “Code Green,” a monthly column on green innovations for Outside magazine, where she was a contributing editor. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone, among other venues. She was given the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for excellence in environmental journalism.

Read an excerpt from POWER TRIP

Anna Lappe

Our food system is a major contributor to the greenhouse gases that are playing havoc with the Earth’s climate, from cutting down forests for farmland, to raising meat animals in huge industrial operations, to the thousands of carbon spewing miles our food travels.

The connection between environment and food was first brought to public awareness by Frances Moore Lappé. Her hugely influential book, DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET, advocated vegetarianism as a healthy, environment friendly alternative to the predominant meat heavy diet Americans followed.

Now her daughter, Anna Lappé, has come out with DIET FOR A HOT PLANET. It’s about creating a climate friendly food system that is healthy, tasty, and sustainable.

Anna Lappé is also co-author, with Frances Moore Lappé, of HOPE’S EDGE and of GRUB (co-authored with Bryant Terry). A bestselling author, she is respected for her work on sustainability, food politics, globalization, and social change.

Read an excerpt from DIET FOR A HOT PLANET

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David Grann

We spend the hour with journalist David Grann, talking about his latest book THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession and his first book, THE LOST CITY OF Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything man could invent”, Sherlock Holmes once said. The strangeness of life is at the heart of journalist David Grann’s new book THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession. It’s a collection of 12 true stories. In them, Grann unlocks the mystery behind the murder of a Sherlock Holmes expert, goes with sandhogs into the depths under New York City’s streets to warn about a terrifying threat to the city’s water supply; he reports on the infiltration of the Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system. And he recounts the strange fate of Toto Constant, a leader of the Haitian death squads – and a man called “the devil” by Haitian refugees.

David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He’s previously written for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, among others.

We also hear part of our 2009 interview with David Grann about his last book, THE LOST CITY OF Z . It’s being made into a movie starring Brad Pitt as Percy Fawcett, the explorer who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925, looking for the ruins of a lost civilization in the heart of the Amazon jungle.

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Roy Morris, Jr.

Roy Morris, Jr. talks about LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain. And Diane Wilson talks about AN UNREASONABLE WOMAN: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas. A shrimp boat captain turned environmental warrior, she went up against one of the biggest polluters in America to save the waters of the Gulf.

The Mark Twain of the flowing white hair and big mustache we all know was made, not born. His real name was Samuel Clemens and, as a youth, he tried his hand at a number of trades, from printer to river boat captain and even gold miner. He was clever but  didn’t much like hard work. And when war broke out between the states, he found he didn’t much like the idea of fighting. He grew up in the slave state of Missouri and when the conflict began heating up, he went gallivanting off to the Wild West, out to the Nevada territories, joining the stream of Americans going west to make their fortunes. There he learned to bend his story-telling talent to the professional life of a writer.

Clemens got a job as a reporter for a newspaper — although it was more entertainment than journalism. “Never let the facts”, he was wont to say, “get in the way of the story.” He created himself as a character, the character Mark Twain.

Roy Morris, Jr.’s book about Sam Clemens and how he became Mark Twain is LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY:  How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain. He’s the editor of Military Heritage magazine and the author of four books on the Civil War and post-Civil War eras, including Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 and The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War.

Read The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Diane Wilson

As we find ourselves riveted by scenes of BP’s epic oil spill catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico — the spreading plume, the dying birds, the grieving fishermen — it may come as a surprise that toxic pollution is not new to the area.  Long before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, chemical plants have been spewing poisons into the Gulf, threatening shrimp fisheries, wildlife, and residents.

Diane Wilson started shrimping on Texas Gulf Coast with her family at the age of 8 and became a shrimp boat captain when she was 24. She’s been an environmental activist since 1989, when she took on Formosa Plastics, one of the biggest polluters in the US. Her 2005 book, AN UNREASONABLE WOMAN: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas (Chelsea Green Press), describes her struggle to preserve a way of life that is now even more endangered and may never recover.

Writers Voice spoke to her in October of 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina hit the coast — that was the last time the shrimp fishing industry was devastated. I was joined by Daisy Mathias, who was WV co-host at that time.

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Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides talks about HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin. And Steven Church tells us about THE DAY AFTER THE DAY AFTER. It’s a memoir about growing up in the shadow of apocalyptic visions, including the making of THE DAY AFTER in his home town of Lawrence, Kansas.

Hampton Sides

When James Earl Ray was arrested for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it was all too easy for most white Americans to dismiss him as racist “white trash” that had nothing to do with the moderate mainstream. But the route that Ray traversed from a childhood steeped in violence and poverty to the day he gunned King down was one that was paved as much by society as by the complex currents of his own individual life and psyche.

In HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL, Hampton Sides traces Ray’s journey as an assassin in parallel with King’s evolution from a civil rights leader to an advocate for an America of greater opportunity for all. It was a vision bent on healing the very forces that made a James Earl Ray possible: the forces of violence, poverty and racism. The book is part police procedural, part psychological analysis, and part social critique. It’s also a spellbinding examination of the lives of the two men, Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Earl Ray as they approached each other on their fateful trajectory.

Hampton Sides is the author of Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder. He’s also the editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Washington Post.

Stephen Church

Steven Church

As a child growing up during the Reagan era in Lawrence Kansas, Stephen Church had febrile seizures where he would be visited by hallucinatory visions of the apocalypse. He became obsessed with the end of the world.

Then, his visions seemed to be borne out when his hometown became the stage set for the filming of the apocalyptic TV movie, The Day After. His memoir, THE DAY AFTER THE DAY AFTER, gives the lie to idyllic notions of heartland America — we learn about Bloody Kansas and F5 tornados as well as the breakup of Church’s family.

Steven Church is also the author of  THEORETICAL KILLINGS: Essays and Accidents  and THE GUINESS BOOK OF ME: a Memoir of Record . He’s a founding editor of the literary magazine, The Normal School.

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Nancy Rappaport

Child psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport talks about how parents can lessen the impact of divorce and custody decisions on their children.

Listen to the full interview.

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Nancy Rappaport  talks about her haunting memoir, IN HER WAKE: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide. It’s about her mother’s suicide, how it affected her family, and how she came to terms with her loss. And Joan Wickersham tells us about her memoir of her father’s suicide, THE SUICIDE INDEX, in this 2008 interview she gave Writers Voice. The memoir was a National Book Award finalist.

In 1963, Nancy Rappaport’s mother killed herself after a bitter divorce and custody battle. Rappaport was four years old. As one of eleven children in a prominent Boston family, she struggled to come to terms with the reasons why her mother took her own life.

Her memoir, IN HER WAKE, is a profoundly moving exploration of her mother’s death and its aftermath. Rappaport spent 18 years interviewing family and friends — persisting despite opposition from some family members, including her father — and went to court records and even an unpublished novel by her mother, all along evolving her own understanding of her mother. She uncovers the story of a conflicted and troubled activist, socialite, and community leader, who was also a warm and loving mother.

Rappaport is a child psychiatrist and she draws thoughtful lessons from her own story that can help families deal with the trauma of suicide and also help prevent it.

Read an excerpt from IN HER WAKE

Hear a Web-only audio clip of Nancy Rappaport talking about how parents can lessen the impact of divorce and custody decisions on children.

We also air a 2008 interview with Joan Wickersham about her memoir, THE SUICIDE INDEX.  Read more about it here.

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Dr. Devra Davis

Isabel Allende

Author Isabel Allende talks about her new novel, ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA. It tells the story of a remarkable woman, the slave Tété, during the Haitian revolution against French rule. And we talk with Dr. Derva Davis about her book THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER. It’s about environmental causes of cancer and industry and government cover-ups of the issue. A presidential panel has just come out with a new report about it.

When an earthquake hit Haiti earlier this year, evangelist Pat Robertson laid the blame at the feet of the Haitian people, implying that, in overthrowing their French colonial slave masters in the 18th century, their forebears had made a pact with the devil — and the earthquake was God’s revenge. Robertson’s wacko commentary was a reminder of how deep and long lasting is the rage of the rulers against those who dare to free themselves from it. Haiti’s revolution still remains unique in world history as the only successful slave rebellion.

Now Isabel Allende has written a sweeping historical novel, ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA, that brings that time in Haiti’s history alive for the reader. It tells the story of the slave Tété, a woman born into slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue.  Rich in historical detail, ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA explores several themes:  the toll slavery takes on both the oppressed and the oppressor, the melding of different cultures in the cauldron of colonialism and revolution, and the deep personal relationships that persist in spite of the rigid social barriers of slave society.

Isabel Allende is one of the best-known women writers in the Americas and the author of the 18 books, including THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS and INÉS OF MY SOUL.

On May 6, a scientific panel on cancer convened by President Obama released a report finding that Americans are facing “grievous harm” from chemicals in the air, food and water. Charging that the chemicals largely gone unregulated and ignored, it said the nation needs to do a better job in reducing the risk of cancer to the public. Typically, only 5% of cancers are linked to environmental exposure. But the report said this grossly underestimates the true rate — a claim that’s brought howls of protest from groups representing industry.

The panel says the risk to all Americans is understated because U.S. policy fails to take into account the cumulative effect of exposure to many different harmful chemicals in the environment and that infants, children and teens are especially vulnerable. Finally, it faulted US regulations for reacting to harm that already has been done rather than trying to prevent the entry of harmful chemicals into the environment in the first place.

I spoke about all these issues with my next guest, Dr. Devra Davis, back in 2008, when she came out with her book THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER.  She says 95% of all cancers are caused by our environment – and that powerful special interests have colluded with government and watchdog organizations like the American Cancer Society (or ACS) to sow doubt on longstanding research proving that. The ACS disputes the Presidential cancer panel’s claim that environmental causes of cancer had been underestimated.

Dr. Davis is director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she also teaches epidemiology.

Other Useful Links Mentioned in the Show:

Toxics Use Reduction Institute

Collaborative on Health and Environment

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Fernanda Eberstadt

Sadie Jones

Sadie Jones talks about her new novel, SMALL WARS. Set in war torn Cyprus in 1956, it tells the story of a young British solider, and the effects of that war on him, his wife and their family. And we hear from Fernanda Eberstadt about her acclaimed new novel RAT. It’s about a girl of extraordinary courage who travels from a hardscrabble region of France to London in search of her father.

When Hal Traherne, a main character in Sadie Jones’ novel SMALL WARS, is promoted to the rank of major in the British Army, the young soldier thinks he’s dedicating himself to a life in service of honor and courage. But then he’s sent to put down a rebellion by Cypriots who are seeking to overthrow the British and unite with Greece. Traumatized by the atrocities he sees his own troops committing — and unable to stop them — Hal finds his moral courage waning even as his courage in battle is proven. What happens to him takes a toll on his marriage, as trust and intimacy fall victim to his rage and self-loathing. The novel’s exploration of the impact of war on families is as relevant today as it is to the period in which the book takes place.

British author Sadie Jones’ acclaimed first novel, The Outcast, was a finalist for the Orange Prize. John Madden is directing a film version. SMALL WARS is her second novel.

Poet Jon Anderson reads his poem “Chimeras”. Writers Voice recorded the reading at a poetry event in South Hadley, Massachusetts in March.

And Jon Anderson reads a “Hand Dance”, an unpublished poem by Richard Wilbur (listen to the Web Extra).

Fernanda Eberstadt’s new novel RAT features one of the most appealing characters you’ll ever encounter in fiction. Fifteen-year-old Celia, whose nickname is Rat, lives in a hardscrabble region in the south of France where things are ready to explode at any moment, Eberstadt says. It’s a place where poverty abounds and racial tensions between poor whites, North African immigrants and gypsies are high. Rat is being raised by a single mother, who she loves and is more of a mother to, than the other way around. But it’s the father she’s never known that she’s thinking about mostly – and she intends to find him. In doing so, she tests the limits of her prodigious courage.

Eberstadt lived in southwestern France for several years and wrote a nonfiction book about the Gypsies there called LITTLE MONEY STREET. Born into a literary tradition, she’s the daughter of a writer and the granddaughter of poet Ogden Nash. Eberstadt has written essays for the New Yorker among other magazines, nonfiction books and novels. RAT is her sixth book.

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