Jesse Sutanto has found a unique writing formula. The author of over a dozen books including the Aunties and Vera Wong (the previous interview with Sutanto came after the publication of Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) treats her writing like it’s a day job. After writing an outline, she walks about her Indonesian home, which she shares with a husband, two children, and a nanny “talking to myself about what characters would say and do,” said Sutanto. Allowing about five wee...
Apr 22
24 min
The first thing that makes a reader read a book is the characters. That was John Gardner. If the characters come alive, the novel comes alive. That’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Given the importance of characters, James Plath, an English professor at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Gail Sinclair, the executive director of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., and Kirk Curnutt, an English professor at Troy University in Troy, Ala., set about to identify th...
Apr 10
23 min
The date of June 18, 1940 proved to be the most important day in the lives of two of the best-known world leaders of the 20th century: Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. World War II had taken an ugly turn in Europe with the fall of France, and both men took to BBC radio on that day to rally their respective sides, England and France, said Richard Vinen, author of The Last Titans: How Churchill and deGaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World. “Both men made critical speeches....
Apr 3
27 min
An upcoming story on the CrimeReads website (https://crimereads.com/) will look at the performances of movie/TV good guys who later took on bad-guy roles and vice versa. It can only be another story by Keith Roysdon, whose previous stories on CrimeReads include looks at writers Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch, a historic scan of Universal monsters, and a review of 1970s disaster movies. Having served as a reporter and editor in Muncie, Ind. for some 40 years, Roysdon has written three novel...
Mar 27
23 min
"Making Democracy Count" by Ismar Volic Ismar Volic is one math professor who wants to use mathematics to improve our democratic process. His book, Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation, examines the mathematics that govern how our election systems work or, surprise, don’t work. Volic may be director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College but this isn’t a math textbook. It’s a exploration on better ...
Mar 19
34 min
The first woman to serve in the U.S. congress didn’t come from New York or Boston but from Montana. Jeannette Rankin served two terms in Congress—not in succession but terms separated by more than 20 years. Among her many distinctions is that she was the only legislator to cast votes against two world wars, once in 1917 and again in 1941. Lorissa Rinehart brings Rankin to life in her book, Winning the Earthquake, a reference to her stated belief you could no more win a war than win an earthqu...
Mar 17
26 min
Groundhog Day, Ed Wood, The Big Lebowski, Dark City, and 12 Monkeys. What do these movies have in common? They were all made in the 1990s and represented a middle-level film—neither franchise nor family fare. “That’s what we’re missing at the theater nowadays,” said Thomas Doherty, the Brandeis University professor and author whose work frequently appears in the Hollywood Reporter. “The middle-level melodrama or thriller used to be well attended at the movie house. Now it goes straight to Net...
Mar 7
29 min
In the mid-1950s, Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, writer and historian Emily Lieb tells the his...
Mar 2
30 min
We think nothing of ordering dinner, shopping for clothes, or banking on our phones anymore. So why not vote? That’s what Bradley Tusk has been working on. In his book, Vote with Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy, the New York venture capitalist spells out the details and the benefits of making it easier for people to vote. Along with the general public, Tusk wants to reach young people, folks who have grown up relying on their smartphones. “Typically, ...
Feb 28
28 min
An exploration into the perilous world of American sports gambling, journalist Danny Funt interviews the power players of the betting boom at FanDuel, DraftKings, and beyond. He relates the story of ESPN Bet, a failed attempt by the sports giant to compete with the major sports gambling operation. As the first major investigation into America’s sports gambling industry, Everybody Loses describes how fast that professional organizations such as the National Football League and Ma...
Feb 13
31 min
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