Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums?

That distressing question provoked her first novel, “All the Water in the World.” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at ...

Lauren Francis-Sharma was a young law student interning in Johannesburg in 1996 when she was given the opportunity to observe portions of the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings, which were set up to expose the horrors of apartheid in South Africa.

Listening to testimony of atrocities and knowing that these public confessions came with exoneration changed her. She filled legal pad after legal pad with stories an...

When historian Martha Jones began excavating the history of her own family, she found a remarkable story of what she calls the trouble with color.

But that might not mean what you think.

“In this book, the term trouble has two meanings,” Jones tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. ”I open the book with the lyrics of a spiritual, ‘Wade in the Water.’ You know, ‘God’s gonna trouble the water.’ ...

Why do some people view winter as a magical season when others see it as something to dread?

The secret is in the mindset, according to health psychologist Kari Leibowitz. She spent a year doing research in Tromsø, Norway studying how the people who live above the Arctic Circle celebrate deepest winter. What she discovered is that it goes beyond hygge. It depends on where your brain settles its focus.

“Winter is ...

Grief didn’t come easily to novelist Geraldine Brooks.

When her husband, journalist and author Tony Horowitz, died of a cardiac event on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, she was stunned. He was only 60. What happened?

But she didn’t have time to mourn, seeing as her boys needed support, her books needed writing, the world needed answers.

As she describes in her new book, “Memorial Days,” it took her three years...

Lindsay Chervinsky knew other historians had written extensively about America’s second president, John Adams.

But none of those books were written before January 6, 2021, when an insurrection at the nation’s capitol ended the tradition of peacefully transferring power in the U.S. — a tradition that started with Adams himself.

In her new book, “Making the Presidency,” Chervinsky looks back at Adams life and focus...

Sarah Hoover knows her new memoir, “The Motherload,” isn’t flattering. She’s made peace with the fact that “people will judge me on the internet,” as she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

She’s telling her story anyway because she believes an honest rendering of modern motherhood is necessary.

“In my defense, birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I’d been fed, and it felt like a nasty ...

David Wright Faladé didn’t learn the truth about his lineage until he was 16. That’s when his mother told him that his biological father was a West African student she initially met in post-war Paris, as she grappled with the trauma of her Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. It was a shock to a mixed-race boy growing up in the panhandle of Texas, playing football and drinking Slurpee’s in 1970s America.

But the su...

President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated for a second term on Monday, Jan. 20.

So this week, Big Books and Bold Ideas asked two historians who’ve written about America’s past to reflect on America’s future and give us a broader view of where we are. They point to eras in our past that predict our present. They also discuss what they’ll be watching for as Trump returns to the Oval Office.

Guests:

Maggie Burkhardt is 81, a deceptively sweet former Wisconsinite who now resides in Egypt at a once-fashionable hotel. She’s landed there somewhat mysteriously, but hotel staff and guests alike are charmed by her eccentric wit — until they find themselves on the receiving end of her “help.”

Widowed Maggie believes it is her life’s mission to fix what she perceives as broken. Or as puts it: “I liberate people who don’t k...

Charles Bock is honest from the beginning of his new memoir, “I Will Do Better”: He never wanted to be a dad. He was much more interested in pursuing his literary dreams than shepherding a child to adulthood.

But his wife really wanted a baby. And he didn’t think it would be right to tell her no.

“In the book, I say: She wants to be a mom? OK. Let her. I’ll continue with my ambitions. On weekends, I’ll put on the...