Anne Bogel is the author of Reading People and I'd Rather Be Reading and creator of the blog Modern Mrs Darcy and the podcasts What Should I Read Next? and One Great Book. Bogel's popular book lists and reading guides have established her as a tastemaker among readers, authors, and publishers. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Today's episode is brought to you by Then the Fish Swallowed Him by Amir Ahmadi Aarian, out now from...
Apr 02, 2020•58 min
Over a forty-year span of working forty hours a week, which most of us will do, we will spend eighty-thousand hours in what poll after poll shows that almost seventy percent of the employed are disengaged. Globally, almost 85 percent are unhappy and unhappy with work likely means unhappy with life. Is this the way it has to be? It is work. Well, the answer is delightfully an unequivocal no. Bill Burnett is the executive director of the Stanford Design Program, and was a product leader for Apple'...
Mar 19, 2020•56 min
The legacy of growing up black in a state whose original constitution stated "no free negro or mulatto not residing in the state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall come, reside or be within the state or hold any real estate or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state and for the punishment of pe...
Mar 12, 2020•47 min
We spend a lot of time talking and listening. But are we really listening and are we being heard? Do you fail to register the name of a person that you were just introduced to? Do you find that someone is texting or looking at their phone while you're having a conversation with them? And why, with all the connecting that we're doing, are more people lonely and unheard? Kate Murphy is a Houston, Texas-based journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Economist, Agence France-Presse, an...
Mar 05, 2020•51 min
Doctors are acculturated and socialized to maintain life. Sometimes at all costs, even the human costs of suffering. The relatively new field of palliative care looks for the way that medicine can embrace and relieve the tension of seeking to preserve life while embracing life’s temporality. Dr. Sunita Puri explores the issues with exquisite elegance and humanity in her book That Good Night, out now in paperback from Penguin Press. Dr. Sunita Puri is an assistant professor of clinical medicine a...
Feb 27, 2020•1 hr 3 min
A fine spring and a beautiful evening on May 10, 1940, didn’t seem the type of day that would portend a sequence of events that would define our world to this day. Yet, on Winston Churchill’s first day as Prime Minister, Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and that succeeding year, May 1940 to May 1941, saw the death of 45,000 Britains through a blistering series of bombings amounting risks that Germany would occupy and rule all of Europ...
Feb 20, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Richie Jackson is currently producing Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song on Broadway. He executive produced Showtime's Nurse Jackie (Emmy and Golden Globe nominee for "Best Comedy Series") for seven seasons and co-executive produced the film Shortbus, written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. He and his husband, Jordan Roth, were honored with The Trevor Project's 2016 Trevor Hero Award. They live in New York City with their two sons.
Feb 13, 2020•52 min
The #MeToo movement is thriving. Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose have lost their seats. Harvey Weinstein is on trial for rape. The veil of secrecy and shame has been lifted. Does this mean that we can check that box—mission accomplished? Not really. The real corporate world has yet to do all that it will take for environments to fundamentally change. Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her new book, #MeToo in the Corporate World: Power, Privilege, and the Path Forward uses data, analysis, interviews, and her cons...
Feb 06, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Our democracy is dependent on the free flow of information, but it is as critically dependent on the reliability of that information. Since waging an information war is easier and cheaper than buying tanks and tridents, we’re at a critical stage of protecting our democracy. We could have no better guy to this conversation than Rick Stengel. Among his esteemed positions and experience—being Time magazine’s editor in chief and serving three years as President Obama’s Undersecretary of State for Pu...
Jan 30, 2020•54 min
Men have defined the space of midlife crisis for decades — the sporty cars, the affairs, etc. But what does a midlife crisis look like for women, and do Gen X women have a particular vulnerability? Ada Calhoun has used her uncanny ability to define the zeitgeist along with countless interviews, research, and data to answer these questions, resulting in her latest book, Why We Can’t Sleep. In this episode of Just the Right Book, Roxanne Coady talks with Calhoun about her latest book and how seemi...
Jan 23, 2020•45 min
From colonial times when qualities valued for sought-after wives were that she should be civil and up to fifty, to proposed legislation in 1915 that would have made it illegal for a woman over forty-four to wear cosmetics for the purpose of making a false impression, to today when we celebrate Ruth Bader Ginsburg lifting weights and issuing wise Supreme Court decisions, we are reminded that the stature of older women has been a roller coaster rides over U.S. history. These tidbits are a smidgen ...
Jan 16, 2020•47 min
A graduate of Wesleyan University, BECK DOREY-STEIN worked as a White House stenographer from 2012 to 2017. Previously she worked as a high school English teacher in Hightstown, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and Seoul, South Korea. This is her first book.
Jan 09, 2020•41 min
Has confidence in our universities eroded? Is the price for making people feel included making universities inhospitable to controversial ideas? Have we become too politically correct or not politically correct enough? And, most critically, have our colleges become political institutions rather than institutions that are creating lifelong learners that are willing to engage in honest debate and equipped to effectively navigate in a heterogenous world? In his new book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragm...
Dec 19, 2019•43 min
Stephen Schwarzman, with his cofounder Pete Peterson, built Blackstone into the largest private equity firm in the world, with over half a trillion dollars under management. Yet at the beginning, that success did not seem inevitable. In 1985, they sent out almost five hundred letters to potential investors and received two responses. Two years later, they closed an eight-hundred million fund, and they closed it on the eve on the largest one-day percentage drop in stock market history. Along the ...
Dec 12, 2019•1 hr 14 min
This week, Roxanne Coady and two members of the RJ Julia Booksellers staff, COO Lori Fazio and head book buyer Andrew Brennan, share their picks of the holiday season, including The Boy, the Mold, the Fox, and the Horse, The Martini Cocktail, Jubilee, The Complete Goal Manual, and much more. Listen and find the perfect gift for everyone on your list this holiday season!
Dec 10, 2019•43 min
How does memory create power? How do you define freedom, and how does the emotional savagery of selling and separating members of a family destroy and define a human being? And, most powerfully, in the midst of trauma and loss, how does one find courage and how does love survive? These ideas and more are explored in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel, The Water Dancer. In partnership with RJ Julia Booksellers, this event was recorded live at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut.
Dec 05, 2019•1 hr 14 min
THE BOOK OF GUTSY WOMEN: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience is the first book that Secretary Clinton and Chelsea have written together, and they are excited to welcome readers into a conversation they began having when Chelsea was a little girl. Join them as they discuss the women throughout history who have had the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done. Inspired by women whose tenacity blazed the trail, the two global leaders lay out a vision fo...
Nov 28, 2019•1 hr 26 min
Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the co-founder, along with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, which won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction three times and launched the careers of many writers. She was a book editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for many years and, currently, she is the Executive Director of Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. She has published essays in the New York Times. She splits her time betwee...
Nov 21, 2019•48 min
Mo Rocca is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, host of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation, and host and creator of the Cooking Channel’s My Grandmother’s Ravioli, in which he learned to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers across the country. He’s also a frequent panelist on NPR’s hit weekly quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Rocca spent four seasons as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He began his career in TV as a writer and producer for the Emmy and...
Nov 14, 2019•49 min•Season 3Ep. 15
Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American Magazine, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
Nov 07, 2019•54 min•Season 3Ep. 14
Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.
Oct 31, 2019•59 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Steve Luxenberg is the author of Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation and the critically acclaimed Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret. During his thirty years as a Washington Post senior editor, he has overseen reporting that has earned numerous national honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes. Separate won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland. This episode was recorded live at RJ Julia Book...
Oct 24, 2019•54 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Gina Rippon is Honorary Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at Aston Brain Centre at Aston University in Birmingham, England. Her research involves the use of state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as autism. In 2015 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association for her contributions to the public communication of science. Rippon is part of the European Union Gender Equality Network, belongs to WISE and ScienceGrrl, and is a mem...
Oct 17, 2019•53 min•Season 1Ep. 11
James B. Stewart is the author of Heart of a Soldier, the bestsellers Blind Eye and Blood Sport, and the blockbuster Den of Thieves. He is currently a columnist for the New York Times and a professor at Columbia Journalism School, and in 1988 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading.
Oct 10, 2019•57 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Tatiana Schlossberg is a journalist writing about climate change and the environment. She previously reported on those subjects for the Science and Climate sections of the New York Times, where she also worked on the Metro desk. Her work has also appeared in the Atlantic, Bloomberg View, the Record (Bergen County), and the Vineyard Gazette. She lives in New York. This episode was recorded live at RJ Julia in Madison, CT. Also, Dan Sheehan of Bookmarks stops by to discuss the best reviewed books ...
Oct 03, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being adapted as a television series with Eva Longoria. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic‘s weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times. She is on the Advisory Council for Bring Change to Mind and has appeared in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, The CBS Early Show, CNN, and NPR’s “Fresh Air....
Sep 26, 2019•58 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her mid-twenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming. Fuller is the author of several memoirs including Travel Light, Move Fast, Leaving Before the Rains Come, and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. On this week's episode, the memoirist discusses her latest book, her childhood in Rhodesia and the blatant racism that permeated her early life, and the deat...
Sep 19, 2019•41 min•Season 3Ep. 7
How do we respond to the immensity of suffering that confronts us and overwhelms us without losing our compassion or sanity? This week, Roxanne Coady sits down with Tim Desmond to discuss his book, How to Stay Human in a F*cked-Up World: Mindfulness Practices for Real Life. Tim Desmond is a psychotherapist, student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and author of Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy. He has dedicated his life to creating peace and compassion in the world through meditation, psychotherap...
Sep 12, 2019•29 min•Season 3Ep. 5
JAYSON GREENE is a contributing writer and former senior editor at Pitchfork. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vulture, and GQ, among other publications. Once More We Saw Stars is his first book. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Sep 05, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 4
JENNY ODELL is an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford, has been an artist-in-residence at places like the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department, and has exhibited her art all over the world. She lives in Oakland. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is her first book.
Aug 29, 2019•54 min•Season 3Ep. 4
