Book Beat – CUNY Radio Podcasts

Crystal Hana Kim says the Korean War is so deeply ingrained in her family's history--but so remote for Americans today--that it became the driving force for her to become a writer.

National Book Award finalist Grace Cho talks about "Tastes Like War," a memoir of her quest to understand her mother's journey from Korean War bride in the Pacific Northwest to her struggle with schizophrenia.

In "Sparring with Smokin' Joe," CUNY journalism professor Glenn Lewis recalls the epic rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali -- one that transcended sports, became a cultural and racial touchstone and ultimately defined Frazier's life inside and outside the ring.

Jimmy Carter is often thought of as a failed one-term president, but in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY's Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he's given credit for.

Ralph Blumenthal's "The Believer" tells the beguiling story of John Mack, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner whose career came to be defined by his study of people who said they'd had encounters with aliens. Mack believed them, and his life was never the same.

Brooklyn College alumnus Robert Jones Jr.'s debut novel, "The Prophets," is a different kind of love story: It reaches across centuries, continents and cultures to tell a soulful story of love between two young men enslaved on a plantation in the antebellum American South.

In his novel Missionaries, Phil Klay--Hunter College MFA alum, Iraq War veteran and National Book Award winner--explores the globalization of war through the stories of four people caught up in the nearly 60-year conflict in Colombia.

CUNY legal scholar Julie Suk discusses "We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment," her book about the women behind the long battle to enshrine full equal rights for women as a Constitutional amendment.

A conversation from Mexico City with Carmen Boullosa, one of the world's most celebrated Spanish-language writers and a CUNY literary treasure whose 18th novel, "The Book of Anna," has just been translated into English.

The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality. Richard Haw of John Jay College talks about his fascinating new biography, "Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling."

In February 1861, Abraham Lincoln journeyed 13 days and 1,900 miles by rail from his Illinois home to his inauguration in Washington. It was a long, tumultuous and dangerous trip through hundreds of towns where millions saw and heard Lincoln as the country hurtled toward the Civil War. Macaulay Honors College's Ted Widmer tells the dramatic story in "Lincoln on the Verge."  

In her latest collection of poems, Donna Masini, a professor of English at Hunter College, moves back and forth in time--and human experience--as she copes with her younger sister's death and celebrates life through the communal act of movie-watching. She talks with Joe Tirella about 4:30 Movie, which is now out in paperback.

Matthew Goodman's "The City Game" tells the dramatic and heart-wrenching story of the 1950 City College basketball team: a moment of glory that collapsed in scandal and forever changed college basketball.

One of the most influential groups of the radical '60s was the Young Lords, an organization of poor and working class Puerto Ricans that began as a street gang and rose to confront the racism of institutions from government to religion. Johanna Fernandez, a professor of history at Baruch College, traces their roots and tells the story of their rise and fall in The Young Lords: A Radical History.

The 1940 discovery of a radioactive version of carbon -- the element that is the basis for all life -- led to the technique of carbon dating that transformed virtually every field of science. How it all happened is the story Brooklyn College environmental scientist John Marra tells in Hot Carbon: Carbon 14 and a Revolution in Science.

CUNY political scientist Corey Robin's "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas" explores the puzzle of Clarence Thomas: How did a young black nationalist grow up to be the most extreme right-wing justice on the Supreme Court--and without abandoning the core ideas that once animated him as a radical leftist?

In Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey, Mikhal Dekel discovers--and retraces--the agonizing three-year journey her father made as a teenager  fleeing the Nazis--from Poland to Palestine via an unlikely refuge in Iran. Dekel is a City College English professor who grew up in Israel as part of a post-war generation that was largely shielded from Holocaust history. In this CUNY Book Beat podcast, she talks about how digging into her father's little-known survival story became a pursuit of self-identity.

In "The Shadow King," Queens College's Maaza Mengiste digs into the history of her native Ethiopia and unearths a true-to-life story of women who fought for the right to defend their country against Mussolini's army in the years before World War II. Mengiste's second novel is a mythic tale inspired by the stories she heard growing up--and the discoveries she made doing meticulous research in Italy and Ethiopia.