Can one decision be the fulcrum of a life? Or is destiny really millions of tiny choices swirled with events out of our control? That’s one of the many questions at the heart of Eric Puchner’s gorgeous new novel, “Dream State.” It’s received a dizzying amount of praise since it was released in February — making the New York Times best seller list, becoming an Oprah Book Club pick. But despite the buzz, the novel is deceptively hard to pin down. Set in rural Montana, the book begins with two coll...
Apr 11, 2025•51 min
For more than 20 years, author Chris Bohjalian carried the seed of a Civil War story in his imagination. It was inspired by the true story of a Southern woman who nursed a Union soldier back to health after he was injured on the battlefield. But the idea didn’t grow roots until the racial uprisings after the murder of George Floyd, when Confederate statues came tumbling down. “Years ago, Tony Horowitz wrote a remarkable book called ‘ Confederates in the Attic ,’ wondering why so much of the Sout...
Apr 04, 2025•52 min
When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums? That distressing question provoked her first novel, “ All the Water in the World .” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at the American Natural History Museum have taken up residence on the museum’s r...
Mar 28, 2025•58 min
Lauren Francis-Sharma was a young law student interning in Johannesburg in 1996 when she was given the opportunity to observe portions of the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings, which were set up to expose the horrors of apartheid in South Africa. Listening to testimony of atrocities and knowing that these public confessions came with exoneration changed her. She filled legal pad after legal pad with stories and kept them for decades. “I think it’s brilliant, in some respects — how a coun...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 1 min
When historian Martha Jones began excavating the history of her own family, she found a remarkable story of what she calls the trouble with color. But that might not mean what you think. “In this book, the term trouble has two meanings,” Jones tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. ”I open the book with the lyrics of a spiritual, ‘ Wade in the Water .’ You know, ‘God’s gonna trouble the water.’ And that comes from the book of John. In the book of John, we learn that when God...
Mar 14, 2025•51 min
Why do some people view winter as a magical season when others see it as something to dread? The secret is in the mindset, according to health psychologist Kari Leibowitz. She spent a year doing research in Tromsø, Norway studying how the people who live above the Arctic Circle celebrate deepest winter. What she discovered is that it goes beyond hygge. It depends on where your brain settles its focus. “Winter is many things. It’s paradoxical,” says Leibowitz. “Yes, it’s cold and dark, and it can...
Mar 07, 2025•54 min
Grief didn’t come easily to novelist Geraldine Brooks. When her husband, journalist and author Tony Horowitz, died of a cardiac event on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, she was stunned. He was only 60. What happened? But she didn’t have time to mourn, seeing as her boys needed support, her books needed writing, the world needed answers. As she describes in her new book, “Memorial Days,” it took her three years to recognize she was operating on autopilot, disassociated from her life and her body du...
Feb 28, 2025•51 min
Lindsay Chervinsky knew other historians had written extensively about America’s second president, John Adams. But none of those books were written before January 6, 2021, when an insurrection at the nation’s capitol ended the tradition of peacefully transferring power in the U.S. — a tradition that started with Adams himself. In her new book, “Making the Presidency,” Chervinsky looks back at Adams life and focuses on how George Washington’s successor shaped the presidency in the final years of ...
Feb 21, 2025•53 min
It’s Valentine’s Day! To mark the occasion, Big Books and Bold Ideas is dipping into the archives to focus on love — and not just romantic love. This show highlights love of all kinds: familial love, love between friends, even the love of books. We start with Leif Enger, who joined host Kerri Miller in Red Wing last June to talk about his novel, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Enger’s latest book is dystopian in nature, but at its heart, it’s a love story. We then dip into Miller’s conversation with Brit...
Feb 14, 2025•54 min
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...
Feb 07, 2025•54 min
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, esp...
Jan 31, 2025•53 min
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...
Jan 24, 2025•58 min
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...
Jan 17, 2025•52 min
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 publicat...
Jan 10, 2025•58 min
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 Bol...
Jan 03, 2025•52 min
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 i...
Dec 27, 2024•56 min
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 thou...
Dec 20, 2024•51 min
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 jo...
Dec 13, 2024•52 min
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 ...
Dec 06, 2024•54 min
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 inabi...
Nov 22, 2024•48 min
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 ...
Nov 15, 2024•59 min
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 ani...
Nov 08, 2024•51 min
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 str...
Nov 01, 2024•2 hr 48 min
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 ...
Oct 25, 2024•57 min
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 th...
Oct 18, 2024•52 min
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 ...
Oct 11, 2024•30 min
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 wi...
Oct 04, 2024•2 hr 31 min
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.
Sep 27, 2024•1 hr 16 min
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 w...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 11 min
It was a celebration at St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater Tuesday night, as the 25th season of Talking Volumes launched with Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat . She joined host Kerri Miller on stage to talk about the vulnerability inherent in her new book of essays, “ We’re Alone .” They also talked about the challenges facing the Haitian-American community at this moment and how Danticat’s own family — who moved to American when she was 12 — faced the immigrant journey. Speaking of the violent t...
Sep 19, 2024•2 hr 30 min
