Mpr News With Kerri Miller

At what cost revolution? In Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel, “Kingdom of No Tomorrow,” 20-year-old Nettie Boileau trades the turmoil of Duvalier’s Haiti for the tumult of 1960s America. Settling with her aunt in Oakland, she is drawn to the social programs spearheaded by the burgeoning Black Panther Party. But her focus on healing and public health is soon subsumed by the revolution and her passionate relationship with Black Panther leader Melvin Mosley. Josaphat drew on her own family’s history for insight into the activism of the Panthers. Her father, an attorney, was imprisoned during Francois Duvalier’s reign in Haiti. And she remembers reading her father’s books as a child, biographies and memoirs of leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. “I remember starting to do my research about the Black Panthers and thinking to myself, ‘I think I know about this already but I don’t know how. Where did I learn this?’” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then I realized, it was probably

Sarah Hoover knows her new memoir, “The Motherload,” isn’t flattering. She’s made peace with the fact that “people will judge me on the internet,” as she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.She’s telling her story anyway because she believes an honest rendering of modern motherhood is necessary. “In my defense, birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I’d been fed, and it felt like a nasty trick,” she writes. “And while my mental breakdown was embarrassing at times, especially considering how it exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool, it also showed how pernicious it is to sell tales of motherhood as being so wonderful and feminine, the very essence of womanhood.” Hoover’s memoir is brutally honest about the disassociation and rage she felt the year after her son was born, and how her eventual diagnosis of postpartum depression felt like like both a relief and a betrayal. She joined host Kerri Miller on this week’s show to talk about the taboos of motherhood, the trad wife tren

David Wright Faladé didn’t learn the truth about his lineage until he was 16. That’s when his mother told him that his biological father was a West African student she initially met in post-war Paris, as she grappled with the trauma of her Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. It was a shock to a mixed-race boy growing up in the panhandle of Texas, playing football and drinking Slurpee’s in 1970s America. But the surprises didn’t stop there. When Wright Faladé eventually moved to France and met his father, he discovered a connection to Dahomey royalty and a past complicated by the slave trade and colonialism. From 2022 David Wright Faladé on the all-Black brigade that inspired his new historical novel This made-for-TV personal history inspired his new novel, “The New Internationals,” which details the love triangle formed by a Holocaust survivor, a Sorbonne student from colonial West Africa and a Black GI from America. This week, he joined Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold

President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated for a second term on Monday, Jan. 20. So this week, Big Books and Bold Ideas asked two historians who’ve written about America’s past to reflect on America’s future and give us a broader view of where we are. They point to eras in our past that predict our present. They also discuss what they’ll be watching for as Trump returns to the Oval Office.Guests:Carol Anderson a historian and professor of African-American studies at Emory University. She’s the author of many books, including “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” and “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy.”Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the author of “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic.” If you missed it, be sure to check out Big Books and Bold Ideas 2024 series on the state of American democracy. It kicked off with historian

Robin Wall Kimmerer embodies an abundance mindset. The naturalist and author sees the world through the lens of her Anishinaabe ancestors, where interdependence is reality, and humans are neither above nor below the natural world. We are just one part, kin to every animal and plant and stream. Her beloved book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” laid out this philosophy. Published in 2013, it enjoyed a gentle rise to public consciousness, not jumping onto the bestseller list until six years after publication. But it remains there to this day, a beloved devotional to millions.Now Kimmerer is back “The Serviceberry” — with a slim book that expounds on one of her core tenants: that nature’s generosity is an invitation to explore our own. Kimmerer joined Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to take us all on a virtual field trip to behold the humble serviceberry, where we get a lesson on generosity, gratitude and relationship. Guest: Robin Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation,

In Nov. 2024, The Atlantic’s cover article rang alarm bells among readers, writers, college professors and parents alike. The article was headlined: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.The premise is that many students admitted to elite colleges arrive having read very few books all the way through.“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” says the article. “It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, two writers who have also been college literature professors share their views on the article’s argument. What have they seen in their own students? And how can deep reading be encouraged?Guests: Karen Swallow Prior is an English professor, a monthly columnist for Religion News Service and the author of, among other books, “On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books.”Taiyon Coleman is dean of liberal arts and academic foundations at North Hennepin Community College. Her latest book is “Traveling wi

Maggie Burkhardt is 81, a deceptively sweet former Wisconsinite who now resides in Egypt at a once-fashionable hotel. She’s landed there somewhat mysteriously, but hotel staff and guests alike are charmed by her eccentric wit — until they find themselves on the receiving end of her “help.”Widowed Maggie believes it is her life’s mission to fix what she perceives as broken. Or as puts it: “I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. … I change people’s lives for the better whether they see it that way or not.”If that sounds ominous, that’s on purpose. Christopher Bollen wanted to crank the lines of suspense tight for his newest novel. And when Maggie meets her match in an equally troubled little boy and the two wage battle, this thriller takes readers on the wildest of rides.Bollen joined host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to dive into the creation of “Havoc.” They talk about the destabilizing force of loneliness, how both the elderly and the young are conventionally overlooked, and

Charles Bock is honest from the beginning of his new memoir, “I Will Do Better”: He never wanted to be a dad. He was much more interested in pursuing his literary dreams than shepherding a child to adulthood. But his wife really wanted a baby. And he didn’t think it would be right to tell her no. “In the book, I say: She wants to be a mom? OK. Let her. I’ll continue with my ambitions. On weekends, I’ll put on the Baby Bjorn, tell friends ‘we’re parenting,’ using that plural. That’s what I thought I was going to do. I was going to put in my time, let [my wife] handle the heavy lifting.” But then Diana, Bock’s wife, was diagnosed with an advanced form of leukemia when Lily was just six months old. She died a few days before Lily’s third birthday. Bock had to step up.As he tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, his new memoir “is about the emotional and physical journey, of this little girl with no mom who wants to go to the ball, and I have to grow up and be man enough to take her and handl

The pandemic shook up the way many of us work. It accelerated change in a system often slow to adapt. But more change is needed, argues journalist Brigid Schulte. Her new book, “Over Work,” is centered on the idea that work has not really worked for “far too may people for far too long.” Americans increasingly say they are dissatisfied with their jobs and burned out. It’s a bleak setting for employees — and employers. So how do we make work work? Can the daily grind be transformed? Schulte joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about why we work the way we do and the changes that could make work more productive, autonomous and joyful. Guest:Brigid Schulte is a journalist and the director of the Better Life Lab. Her new book is “Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life.”Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the

The gut is all the rage these days. Many an influencer has built a platform on how to keep our digestive systems happy, healthy and moving. But humans have long fetishized the gut. Doctors and philosophers have deliberated its influence on our emotional stability. Theologians declared it wicked. Disposing of bodily waste in both sanitary and silent ways is a mark of modernity. Historian Elsa Richardson found it all utterly fascinating. So she wrote a book to probe the organ’s colorful and often boisterous past. This week, she joins host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas to explore the age-old question: Are we really ruled by our stomachs? Guest: Elsa Richardson is a historian at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Her new book is “Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut.” Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recom

If you stopped eating eggs for fear it could raise your cholesterol, or you avoided giving peanuts to your toddler to prevent allergies, or you stayed away from hormone replacement therapy because you were told it could cause breast cancer — you are a victim of what Dr. Marty Makary calls “medical dogma.” Long known as an iconoclast in the medical community, Dr. Makary’s latest book, “Blind Spots,” examines how health care can go so wrong. He chalks much of it to groupthink and a growing inability for science to identify its own biases. His diagnosis? Humility. “Medical science is about transparency and civil discourse. Great ideas and truths have always emerged from a healthy debate within the scientific community,” he tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And tragically, what we’ve seen in the modern era is a small group of people making the decisions for everybody — many times with a paternalist and hierarchical philosophy.”Guest: Dr. Marty Makary is a surgeon and public health resea

When faced with the realities of climate change, marine biologists must hold two competing thoughts simultaneously: The seas are warming, the fish are waning, the corals are bleaching. But that doesn’t mean the global ocean is doomed. After all, this is the planet’s largest ecosystem. It knows how to adapt.The question is really: Will we enable it or hinder it?Helen Scales lives at the balance of those two intersecting points. A marine biologist, writer and broadcaster, Scales is honest about the scale of change. But as she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, she believes it’s not too late. We still have time to figure out how to co-exist sustainably. Her new book, “What the Wild Sea Can Be,” explores practical solutions — like no-fish zones and banning undersea mining — that can give the planet’s oceans time to heal.Guest:Helen Scales is a marine biologist, a writer and a storytelling ambassador for the Save Our Seas Foundation. Her newest book is “What the Wild Sea Can Be.” Subscribe

In his 2019 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, “The Overstory,” Richard Powers imagines a world where only a few acres of virgin forest remain on the continent. A group of strangers band together to protect those few remaining trees, and in the process, discover the trees are communicating with each other. Powers’ new novel, “Playground,” turns the same eye to the planet’s oceans. As he tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, his hope is that the power of storytelling will animate humans to behold the sea with fresh wonder — and act to preserve it before it’s too late. “These last three novels of mine are attempts to find ways of telling stories that challenge that separateness or sense of entitlement,” he says, “that sense that we are the essential and perhaps the only interesting game in town and that everything else is a resource for our project.”Guest: Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including “The Overstory,” “Bewilderment” and “Orfeo.” His new book is “Playground.” Subscr

Beloved children’s author Kate DiCamillo published three new books this year: “Ferris,” “Orris and Timble: The Beginning,” and “The Hotel Balzaar.” She has two more coming next year — plus 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of the book that started it all, “Because of Winn-Dixie.”She is a prolific writer, a lifelong reader and a delightful human. Which made her the perfect guest to close out Talking Volumes celebratory 25th season on Tuesday, Oct. 29. Talking Volumes: Kate DiCamillo No stranger to the stage at the Fitzgerald Theater, DiCamillo came with stories and quips. She and host Kerri Miller talked about the impact of Winn-Dixie on DiCamillo’s life, what she knows now that she didn’t know then, and how stories can change your life.It was an evening full of wonder and laughter. Singer-songwriter Humbird was the special musical guest. Click here.

You might know Katharine Lee Bates wrote the poem that eventually became the song, “America the Beautiful,” after she visited the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado and was overcome by its beauty. But did you know she grew up a precocious youngest child in a family that struggled after the death of her father? And that she was a budding feminist who chafed at menial tasks like sewing and wished for nothing more than to be a scholar? And did you know she was only ever paid $5 for the song that would become America’s unofficial national anthem? It’s another example of an ordinary person whose contributions to our country’s legacy are extraordinary. That’s a class of people government teacher Sharon McMahon finds especially compelling. In her new book, “The Small and Mighty,” she highlights unsung Americans who changed history but didn’t make it into the textbooks (often, “because they weren’t a white man,” she reminds her readers). It’s a take fans of her podcast, “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting,” will find fami

As we approach Election Day, Big Books and Bold Ideas returns to our Americans and Democracy series. Here are some of the question we’re confronting. How nimble and flexible and resilient is our democracy? What is required of Americans to build and support a healthy democracy? Do we still want it?Eboo Patel writes in his book, “We Need to Build,” that a fresh manifesto for a new era in America could sound like this: “We, the varied peoples of a nation struggling to be reborn, are defeating the things we don’t like by building the things we do.”It’s a realistic but hopeful take from a man who is considered by many to be an expert on how to tolerate and even celebrate differences in a pluralistic society. During his conversation with host Kerri Miller, Patel admits he was a fire-breathing activist when he was young, more inclined to burn the whole system down. But after years of working with Americans of different beliefs, he says, he has come to value being more of “an architect than an arsonist.”“You don’t cr

It’s a winter night when we first meet Tom Rourke. He’s penning love letters, preening in mirrors, pushing dope, partaking of booze, singing and flirting and fighting. It's just another night in Butte, Montana, for the feckless young Irishman. And no one writes the Irish quite like Kevin Barry. Barry’s new novel, “The Heart in Winter,” is his first set in America. But true to form, it features the Irish. That’s because, in the 1890s, Irish immigrants by the thousands descended upon the tiny frontier town of Butte to work the copper mines — a historical nugget Barry learned in 1999. 'The mind of Irish author' Kevin Barry lives in a hilariously malevolent world As he told host Kerri Miller, at the time, he thought to himself: “My God, this is a Western but it's a Western with County Cork accents. I’m in. This is my book.” He immediately hopped on a plane to Montana, where he was welcomed warmly. Butte remains proud of its Irish heritage. And he went back to Ireland and

Louise Erdrich is, without a doubt, a beloved writer. The Minnesota Native American author has won nearly every literary award out there — including a Pulitzer for “The Night Watchman” and a National Book Award for “The Round House” — and her stories captivate, haunt and delight millions of devoted readers.She can accept the praise. But the title beloved? She’s not into it.That’s just one of the many stories that unspooled over the course of Erdrich’s conversation Tuesday night on stage with MPR News host Kerri Miller for Talking Volumes. Talking Volumes: Louise Erdrich on ‘The Mighty Red’ Talking Volumes: Louise Erdrich In front of a sold-out crowd, Erdrich talked about how growing up in the Red River Valley — where her new novel, “The Mighty Red,” is set — shaped her, why writing villains is a particular kind of torture and how the relatable and generous relationship between Crystal and Kismet in “The Mighty Red” was influenced by her own experie

Novelist Alice Hoffman’s new middle grade book, “When We Flew Away,” imagines Anne Frank’s life before her family was forced into hiding. She joined MPR News host Kerri Miller on stage for Talking Volumes to talk about the emotional arc of re-creating Frank’s too-short life.

Immigration is a hot topic this election year, and many Minnesota communities are asking questions about how to face the challenges and opportunities immigrants bring. That’s why MPR News host Kerri Miller traveled to Worthington for the final Rural Voice town hall of the 2024 season. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Nobles County, where Worthington is located, is Minnesota’s most rapidly diversifying county. In 2020, the county’s population was 43 percent people of color, up from two-thirds white in 2010. Much of that diversity comes from immigrants who move to southwest Minnesota for job opportunities. And while there have been setbacks, Worthington has worked hard to incorporate the new residents into their community. Rural Voice in Worthington What have Worthington residents learned? How can other rural communities ensure everyone thrives as immigrants put down roots? That was the topic of lively discussion at the R