Author Interviews

How Eisenhower's Strategies Could Help Obama When It Comes To ISIS

7:33am December 30, 2015

Steve Inskeep talks to Evan Thomas, author of Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World — about lessons that can be learned from Eisenhower's national security strategies.

Queue Listen Now

Books
Arts

Ta-Nehisi Coates On Police Brutality, The Confederate Flag And Forgiveness

1:26pm December 29, 2015

Growing up in Baltimore, the writer faced threats from both the streets and the police. His book, Between the World and Me, is an open letter to his teenage son. Originally broadcast July 13, 2015.

Queue Listen Now

The American Political Invention That 'Let The People Rule'

8:29am December 26, 2015

NPR's Linda Wertheimer speaks with Geoffrey Cowan, author of "Let the People Rule," on Teddy Roosevelt's invention of the modern political primary.

Books
Arts

'Our Gang' Chronicles Lives Of African-American Actors In 'The Little Rascals'

4:12pm December 25, 2015

NPR's Robert Siegel talks to author Julia Lee about her book Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals. She chronicles the story of the African-American actors in the films. They were hailed as heroes of the black community for a time but were later reviled for their roles.

Lee Child attends the World Premiere of Jack Reacher at Odeon Leicester Square in London on Dec. 10, 2012.

Arts

Not My Job: Best-Selling Author Lee Child Gets Quizzed On Worst Sellers

3:29pm December 21, 2015

Child is the author behind the beloved Jack Reacher novels. We'll ask him three questions about books that sold really, really badly.

Queue Listen Now

Books

'The Comedians' Stand-Up History And Some Laughs

6:01am December 21, 2015

The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy traces what we know now as stand-up comedy. Kliph Nesteroff tells Renee Montagne where the term stand-up comedy came from.

An excerpt from Victor Alfred Lyon's notebook.

Bad Poetry, Great Booze: The Story Of The Hidden Bootlegger's Manual

5:41pm December 18, 2015

by Angus Chen

The book's outside cover boasted poems by a disgraced writer. But inside was page after page of handwritten recipes for alcohol — the secretly preserved know-how of a Prohibition-era doctor.

"There's no way I'd be doing what I'm doing today if it weren't for those mentors." — Jarrett J. Krosoczka

Books
Arts

How Can Mentors Turn An Uncertain Journey Into A Heroic One?

9:55am December 18, 2015

by NPR/TED STAFF

Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a successful author and illustrator. But, he says, his life could have gone in a completely different direction, if he hadn't had a long line of mentors.

Queue Listen Now

Thomas Laqueur is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. His other books include Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

Bodies Through Time: A Historian Traces Our Evolving Relationship With The Dead

12:40pm December 16, 2015

Thomas Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead, discusses the ways people have dealt with human remains over the course of history. Modern cemeteries, he says, are byproducts of the French Revolution.

Queue Listen Now

Author Joan Morgan says Beurré Superfin is one of her favorite pears. It's "truly delicious: very buttery, juicy, cream to pale yellow flesh, intensely rich with plenty of sugar lemony acidity," she writes in The Book of Pears.

Books
Arts

'The Book Of Pears': A Love Letter To A Once Pre-Eminent Fruit

4:58pm December 15, 2015

by Eliza Barclay

A British fruit historian convincingly argues in a new book that the pear is "the most exciting of the tree fruits." And she says it's time to revive pear culture and explore the fruit's diversity.