Podcasts
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• Recorded Apr 21, 20122012 Philadelphia Book Festival In what Psychology Today called the “remedy for the modern glut of frivolous self-help literature,” award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis was a widely praised demystification of life.… more
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• Recorded Apr 21, 20122012 Philadelphia Book Festival In The Sounding of the Whale , D. Graham Burnett provides a comprehensive study of cetacean science, history, and policy. Called “the definitive account of whalekind’s transformation from cipher to signifier” in… more
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• Recorded Apr 19, 20122012 Philadelphia Book Festival An editor, poet, and critic, Robert Polito is Director of Writing Programs at The New School and the author of National Book Critics Circle Award winner Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which untangled… more
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2012 Philadelphia Book Festival “Sanchez has long been regarded as the city's unofficial poet laureate. But now the job is truly hers,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer after acclaimed activist Sonia Sanchez’s appointment, at the end of 2011, as… more
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2012 Philadelphia Book Festival Known for his "big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit" (New York Times), Philip Levine was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2011. Levine’s early poems, often written in narrow,… more
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For his two tours of duty in Iraq, writer and former U.S. Army Captain Luis Carlos Montalván earned the Combat Action Badge, two Bronze stars and the Purple Heart. After returning home, the pressures of physical wounds, traumatic brain injury,… more
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Born in Philadelphia, 95-year-old Rosamond Bernier has tamed wild animals, flown her own plane, and befriended the likes of Henri Matisse, Leonard Bernstein, and Frida Kahlo. The first-ever European features editor for Vogue in post-war Paris,… more
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• Recorded Mar 29, 2012The longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history, Senator Arlen Specter began his goodbye speech after 30 years in office by declaring: "This is not a farewell address but rather a closing argument." Referring to the internal ideological… more
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• Recorded Mar 27, 2012Lionel Shriver is the author of 10 novels and the recipient of the 2005 Orange Prize for her acclaimed book We Need to Talk About Kevin, recently adapted into a major motion picture. With her gift for psychological portraiture and a knack for… more
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Cultural critic and public radio giant Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for National Public Radio's This American Life and the author of The Partly Cloudy Patriot , Take the Cannoli , and Assassination Vacation . Known for her witty and… more
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• Recorded Mar 16, 2012One Book, One Philadelphia Grand Finale Featured author Edwidge Danticat will discuss the themes in the 2012 One Book, One Philadelphia selection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. The evening will also feature an exciting musical… more
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• Recorded Mar 15, 2012Elaine Pagels burst the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement in her 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as… more
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• Recorded Mar 13, 2012In the 1940s and 1950s, a group of brilliant engineers led by John von Neumann gathered in Princeton, New Jersey with the joint goal of realizing Alan Turing's theoretical universal machine—a thought experiment that scientists use to understand… more
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• Recorded Mar 11, 2012Alain de Botton's aphoristic first novel, On Love, was a winking dissertation on romantic love, published when he was just 23. It was followed by several books that explored a philosophy of everyday life, including The Architecture of Happiness… more
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• Recorded Mar 8, 2012Jonathan Safran Foer became a certified literary wunderkind at the age of 25 with his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated , which told the story of a young man's search across the obliterated Ukrainian landscape for the woman who saved his… more
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The queen of the book club, Jodi Picoult is known for her fictional page-turners that feature nuanced characters, pitch-perfect descriptions of suburbia—and the darkness it often conceals—and unfettered insight into the shape-shifting terrain of… more
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• Recorded Mar 1, 2012After publishing several stories in The New Yorker , Ann Beattie burst on the literary scene in 1976 with Chilly Scenes of Winter and promptly became the unofficial diarist of a generation, delivering "irony-laced reports from the front line of… more
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As founder of StoryCorps, David Isay has dedicated his career to preserving an oral history of the United States. Modeled—in spirit and in scope—after the interviews of the 1930s Works Progress Administration, StoryCorps seeks out ordinary… more
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• Recorded Feb 21, 2012As a teenager in the Bronx ghetto of the 1960s, Eddie Joseph was introduced to the tenets of the Black Panther Party just as it gained a national foothold. The cause swallowed him into one of the most emblematic criminal cases of the '60s. After… more
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• Recorded Feb 16, 2012Called a literary lion of the gay world, Edmund White is best known for his autobiographical novels in which unabashed hedonism thrives, including A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty . A chronicler of gay life since the 1970s,… more
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