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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Pistols and Petticoats: 175 Years of Lady Detectives

For TTBOOK host Anne Strainchamps her only encounters with guns happened in the pages of crime fiction -- usually, stories featuring women. Give her a woman and a gun and she was there for 200 plus pages.   Kinsey Milhone, VI Warshawski, Miss Marple, Nancy Drew…She could name dozens of fictional female crime fighters -- but not one real-life woman detective.  

That was until she picked up historian Erika Janik’s latest, “Pistols and Petticoats.”   It’s the story of how women moved from crime solving in fiction to the real world.   

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Katha Pollitt on "Learning to Drive"

Katha Pollitt is a celebrated feminist writer and columnist for The Nation magazine. Her new book is "Learning to Drive."

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Julian Barnes on "England, England"

Julian Barnes talks about “England, England.”  It’s his latest novel, in which all the tourist attractions of England (Stonehenge, the Tower of London, the Royal Family) are recreated in one theme park.

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Mark Kingwell on the Experience of Procrastination

Mark Kingwell is a Canadian philosopher who knows all about the terror of the blank page and the procrastination that leads to.

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Mohsin Hamid on Getting Rich in Asia

Mohsin Hamid is having a big year. His last novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” just opened as a film by Mira Nair. He's got a new novel out too, called  “How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.” In this EXTENDED interview, Anne talks with him about that get-rich scheme...

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Jeremy Seifert on Food Waste in America

Jeremy Seifert fed his family on pickings from the local dumpsters in Los Angeles California.  The adventure awakened him to the immense waste of food going on in America every day. The result is his documentary "Dive!" which tackles food waste in our throw-away culture.

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Kids Go Wild

"See them before they're gone" is the Lanza family's motto.  Michael Lanza describes his quest to take his two young kids -- ages 7 and 9 -- to as many wilderness locations as possible, to see glaciers and icebergs and coral reefs, before climate change destroys them.

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Pain Wars

Americans spend billions of dollars a year on over-the-counter pain relievers. In fact, all over the world, easing pain is big business. And Aspirin’s one of the top sellers.  Why? Charles Mann, author of “The Aspirin Wars”, tells Steve Paulson what happened when a German company called Bayer came to America:

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