The Women Books & More’s Podcast

This one’s out of the vault and one of my favorite vampire stories. It is the second (in a series of five) President’s Vampire books by Christopher Farnsworth. It is about a vampire that works for the president of the United States. The book was published in 2011 so the president referenced could have been President Obama or it could have been West Wing’s President Bartlet. The story is paranormal but w...

OK. OK. Thank you for your messages. I get it. Everyone wants more Lisa See.

So today...I dove deep into the vault and found this interview—Shanghai Girl—from 2009. It is about the complex relationship between two sisters who live a privileged life in 1930s Shanghai—full of great wealth and glamour and called The Pearl of the Orient. Twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister May beautiful, m...

New York Times best-selling author Lisa See is Chinese American—although her tawny hair, freckles and pale skin belie her Asian heritage. Starting 30 years ago with family memoir, On Gold Mountain, her books always are drawn from and reflect her cultural roots.

She talks with us about some of her favorites: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (secret writing developed by women be...

This is one of my favorites from the vault. It originally ran on my radio show more than 10 years ago. I just listened to it again and laughed until I got the hiccups. How can talking about death be funny? Listen in and you’ll find out.

Here’s the story: From angels to zombies and everything in between, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates is a seriously funny take on the philosophy, theology, and psychology of dea...

Here’s the story: Sisters on the Fly was started by two real-life sisters, Maurrie Sussman and Becky Clarke, who loved fly fishing, camping in their vintage trailers, a glass of good wine, campfire cooking, and playing poker for pennies. They invited their friends to join them and soon there were 20.  Pretty soon there were 100. “When we started, we wanted to bring women together as best friends and sis...

Lisa Genova a best-selling author and Harvard-trained neuroscientist. I talked with her for her book about Still Alice—an emotional look at Alzheimer’s. I’ll look in “the vault” to find that interview for you. Still Alice was made into a major motion picture starring Julianne Moore. She won an Oscar for her role as Alice Howland, a renowned linguistics professor descending into Alzheimer’s. The film is ...

One of my favorites from the archives.

Huston was born in London, the love child of a widely adored ballerina and the 2nd Viscount Norwich. When she was four, she lost her mother in an auto accident and was sent to Ireland to live with her mother’s estranged husband, the acclaimed, eccentric and intimidating film director John Huston. (The African Queen, Casino Royale, Prizzi’s Honor….)

“I was a motherless girl who never quite felt...

Here is one of my favorites from the archives.

So…you’ve probably heard of Abigail Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Annie Oakley and Eleanor Roosevelt. But what about the female mathematician who laid the groundwork for abstract algebra. Or the women of NASA who helped send John Glenn, the first American astronaut, into orbit.

From artists and writers to doctors, scientists and activists—Jill S. Tietjen’s Her Story is a beautifully illustr...

The Nazis were banging on the door. The Fenves family was about to be rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Their  gentile cook had the presence of mind to save the family recipe book by hiding it under her apron.

Chef Alon Shaya found the recipe book in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)  in Washington, D.C. and was reunited with 93-year-old Steven Fenves, the lone survivor of the family. During the pandemic—hu...

With his lover imprisoned in a Russian gulag, the Gray Man will stop at nothing to free her—in Midnight Black, Mark Greaney’s latest thriller in the NYT #1 bestselling Gray Man series. 

A winter sunrise over the great plains of Russia is no cause for celebration. The temperature barely rises above zero and the guards at penal colony IK22 take their misery out on the prisoners—mainly on Zoya Zakharova. Once an master spy for Russian...

This is one of my favorites from the archives.

It is 1921 and a forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio comes into a modest inheritance and uses it to escape her tyrannical mother by taking a trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. She stays at Cairos’ Semiramis Hotel (It’s still there, now an InterContinental) just as the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference convenes.

She meets Winston Churchill, T. E Lawrence (Laurence of Arabia) an...

A favorite from the archives

Barry Petersen is a CBS News correspondent. He has reported on wars, natural disasters and royal weddings but his most difficult assignment was writing Jan’s Story—a personal account of his wife’s diagnosis (in her mid-50s) of early-onset Alzheimer’s. 

It is a true story. It is a love story. Barry has put into words the daily struggle he had to face, caring for the love of his life and watching her fade...

Here’s one of my favorites from the archives.

On a grey day in March of 1941, acclaimed British writer Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the fast flowing River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later miles downstream. It was the tragic end of a brilliant novelist and essayist—one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. Or was it? 

Six decades after Woolf’s death, landscape design...

One of my top favorites from the archive.

Isabelle Allende’s books are a seductive blend of magical realism, accurate historical details and exude the alluring scent of Chilean jasmine. She comes into my recording studio trailing the scent of sweet vanilla and something musky, perhaps sandalwood. We sit and talk like old friends—about books and life.

She revels that she puts on full make up, stockings and, shockingly, a girdle—plus...