Sheila Curran Bernard, "Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the S...
28 Jul 202432min
Robyn Hitchcock, "1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left" (Akashic Books, 2024)
1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left (Akashic Books, 2024) explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive-compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding...
27 Jul 202450min
Justin B. Stein, "Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon. By the early twenty-first century, p...
27 Jul 202454min
Naomi Westerman, "Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures" (404 Inklings, 2024)
Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit into something dee...
26 Jul 202450min
Steven Powell, "Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in American literature. The so-called “Demon Dog of...
25 Jul 202458min
Dan Morrison, "The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s Murder That Shocked the World" (Juggernaut, 2024)
It’s the 1930s. Amarendra Chandra Pandey, the youngest son of an Indian prince, is about to board a train when a man bumps into him. Amarendra feels a prick; he then boards the train, worried about wh...
25 Jul 202444min
David Burke, "The Puppet Masters: How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis" (Mercier Press, 2024)
In The Puppet Masters: How MI6 Masterminded Ireland's Deepest State Crisis (Mercier Press, 2024), David Burke uncovers the clandestine activities of Patrick Crinnion, a Garda intelligence officer who ...
25 Jul 20241h 11min
Francis X. Clooney, S.J., "Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
This autobiography--Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story (Bloomsbury, 2024)--traces Francis X. Clooney's intellectual and spiritual journey from middle-class American Catholicism to a ...
25 Jul 20241h 4min
