John Pollack collected well over a hundred thousand wine corks and used them to build a replica of a Viking ship which he then sailed in Portugal.
John Pollack collected well over a hundred thousand wine corks and used them to build a replica of a Viking ship which he then sailed in Portugal.
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.
Lewis Buzbee has spent his life besotted with books. He's sold them, and now he writes them.
For Jeannette Walls, one of the things she struggled with most was keeping her past a secret from just about everyone.
What's the best piece of reporting you encountered this year? TTBOOK listeners recommend these stories. We'll add new suggestions as they come in.
Olivia Gentile is the author of "Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds." Gentile tells Anne Strainchamps that her book is a biography of Phoebe Snetsinger who saw some 8400 species of birds while fending off a cancer diagnosis.
Kieran Mulvany is the co-creator of a humorous website dedicated to Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the outrageous Iraqi Information Minister. He says that troops in the desert and war planners at the Pentagon love the site.
Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy (who is African American) is the author of the notoriously titled “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.” He talks with Steve Paulson about how the N-word has been used historically in America.