Maia Weinstock, "Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus" (MIT Press, 2022)
Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus (MIT Press, 2022) follows Mildred Dresselhaus (or Millie, as everyone calls her) from her childhood in New York City to her...
29 Apr 202242min
Ellen S. More, "The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health" (NYU Press, 2022)
Mid-century America had a problem talking about sex. Dr. Mary Calderone first diagnosed this condition and, in 1964, led the uphill battle to de-stigmatize sex education. Supporters hailed her as the ...
29 Apr 20221h 6min
Nancy Barile, "I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises-And-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion" (Bazillion Points, 2021)
Nancy Barile shares her love of hardcore punk in her new memoir, I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises and All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion (Bazillion Points, 2022). From disaffected Catholic schoolg...
28 Apr 202259min
Amadou Hampâté Bâ, "Amkoullel: The Fula Boy" (Duke UP, 2021)
“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns.” We’ve all heard this phrase, or some version of it, but not all of us know who uttered it. It was the singular Amadou Hampâté Bâ. By the end of his lo...
26 Apr 202245min
Mary Childs, "The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All" (Flatiron Books, 2021)
From the host of NPR's Planet Money, the deeply-investigated story of how one visionary, dogged investor changed American finance forever. Before Bill Gross was known among investors as the Bond King,...
20 Apr 202240min
Priyambada Sarkar, "Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore" (Oxford UP, 2021)
What does a Bengali intellectual and poet have in common with a British-Austrian logician and philosopher? In Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore (Oxford Universit...
20 Apr 202256min
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill" (Norton, 2021)
Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill is generally considered one of the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, if not the greatest of all, revered for his opposition to appeasement, his defiance in the...
19 Apr 202242min
Book Talk 51: Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde
Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a seri...
18 Apr 20221h 5min
