North Carolina Bookwatch 2007-08 | UNC-TV

The first single-volume reference to the events, institutions, and cultural forces that have defined the state, the Encyclopedia of North Carolina is a landmark publication that will serve those who love and live in North Carolina for generations to come.

In this episode, Hobson shares his story of a boyhood that never ends, relived each year during basketball season in the frantic, tortured life of a fan.

In this episode, Joe and Teresa Graedon, the best-selling authors of The Peoples Pharmacy, fill in the void with all the information readers need to become savvy health-care consumers from their latest comprehensive guide to healthful living.

In this episode, Statesville lawyer Mike Lassiter shares the many images he captured on his travels along North Carolina's rural highways and byways, exploring an era before Internet shopping, big-box stores, shopping malls, chain restaurants and strip malls.

In this episode, the Hillsborough native shares her enlightening and revealing story set amid a chorus of swamps, voodoo, floods, and the inevitable cold-running creek.

An aging Zen master and bicycle repairman confronts his mortality and looks for a successor in this new novel by Duke Professor, and longtime Buddhist practitioner, David Guy. In this episode, the Durham author explores the Zen landscapes of Jakes Fades, acknowledged as a low-key tale of meditation, mentoring, and mouth-watering baked goods.

An aging Zen master and bicycle repairman confronts his mortality and looks for a successor in this new novel by Duke Professor, and longtime Buddhist practitioner, David Guy. In this episode, the Durham author explores the Zen landscapes of Jakes Fades, acknowledged as a low-key tale of meditation, mentoring, and mouth-watering baked goods.

Byer’s new poetry collection, entitled Coming to Rest, is considered a re-articulation and a culmination of her distinguished career, which includes her present position as a North Carolina Poet Laureate. In this episode, the award-winning local poet shares her latest works and how they reflect on remembered seasons of personal, familial time and which are said to bring words alive.

Drawing from interviews with 60 veterans, The Marines of Montford Point relates the experiences of these pioneers in their own words. In this episode, author Melton McLaurin shares the Marines' stories and reasons for enlisting; their arrival at Montford Point and the training they received there; their lives in a segregated military and in the Jim Crow South; their experiences of combat.

This memoir recounts the deep eight-year friendship of young Texas newspaper journalist Tim Madigan and famed children's television host Fred Rogers (1928-2003). Their contact began with an interview assignment but developed steadily into numerous visits, letters, and emails. In Rogers, Madigan found an archetypal father, a nurturing mentor whom he could trust.

In this episode, Peacock explores both the present and the past to develop the idea of 'grounded globalism' in which global forces and local cultures rooted in history, tradition, and place reverberate against each other in mutually sustaining and energizing ways.

As Judge Deborah Knott presides over a case involving a barroom brawl, it becomes clear that deep resentments over race, class, and illegal immigration are simmering just below the surface in the countryside. An early spring sun has begun to shine like a blessing on the fertile fields of North Carolina, but along with the seeds sprouting in the thawing soil, violence is growing as well...

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle, head-on, these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that 'stick' and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas....

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, Dodson shares Beautiful Madness — his true tale of shared horticultural obsession and burrows deeply into the story of how Americans became such fanatical gardeners and are today, in fact, at the forefront of what everyone agrees is a new Gold Age of Gardening, an unprecedented growth in gardening's popularity that has—according to a recent Gallop poll.

Joanna Catherine Scott was born in England, raised in Australia, and took her graduate degree in Philosophy at Duke University. From this award-winning author of Cassandra Lost and The Lucky Gourd Shop, comes The Road From Chapel Hill -- a sweeping tale of the Civil War South, in which three people, worlds apart, are joined in a struggle for something greater than themselves.

Joseph Bathanti was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He came to North Carolina as a VISTA (domestic Peace Corps) volunteer in 1976 to work with prison inmates and for nearly thirty years he has continued to teach in prisons, battered women’s shelters, and homeless shelters.

Neal Thompson was born (1965) and raised in New Jersey, outside New York City. After graduating from the University of Scranton, he began his award-winning journalism career as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For the next 15 years, he worked at newspapers up and down the East Coast - specializing in profiles, narratives and investigations.

Michele Andrea Bowen is a native of St. Louis, MO. She was raised on the city’s north side or the traditional African American Community by everyday, hardworking black folk. And she was a member of Washington Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where both her mother and father’s family have been members for over half a century.

Now serving in his second term as Governor of North Carolina, Mike Easley has compiled an impressive wide-ranging record on education reform. His highly successful More at Four program ranks as one of the nation’s best Pre-K programs for at-risk four-year-olds.

J. Peder Zane is the Ideas Columnist for The News & Observer newspaper of Raleigh, N.C. Peder’s writing has won several national awards, including the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.