Terry Tempest Williams has spent much of her life trying to understand her mother - both a private woman and a trickster. Her memoir is also an exploration of silence and finding one's voice.
Terry Tempest Williams has spent much of her life trying to understand her mother - both a private woman and a trickster. Her memoir is also an exploration of silence and finding one's voice.
Sherman Alexie wrote a novel in response to 9/11. He thinks the fanaticism of flying planes into buildings is the end game of tribalism and he wanted to teach his sons something else.
Larry Brilliant is a doctor, co-founder of the digital social network the Well, and he was the first executive director of Google.org. But back in the Sixties, he was a hippie doctor who joined Wavy Gravy's traveling bus caravan and then landed in an Indian ashram in the Himalayas, where his guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox. Miraculously, his U.N. team of doctors eradicated the world's remaining cases of this terrible disease. He tells Steve Paulson about a remarkable moment in history when anything seemed possible.
Tom Brokaw, former anchor and managing editor of NBC News, talks with Anne Strainchamps about the polarizing effects of the sixties.
Shulem Deen was a Skverer— a member of one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S. Then he got curious about secular life and the world outside his small village in Rockland County, NY. The community branded him a heretic and expelled him. And his wife and five children renounced him.
One way to live dangerously is to stand up for your principles, especially if it means challenging those closest to you. Documentary filmmaker Kendall Wilcox and feminist activist Kate Kelly both exposed themselves to enormous risk when they pushed for change within the LDS Church and community.
Nelson Algren wrote “A Walk on the Wild Side” and won the first National Book Award for “The Man with the Golden Arm,” but was too gritty for most critics
Stephen Braude chairs the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland, but he's long been interested in parapsychology, especially psycho-kinesis.