Katy Waldman, Laura Miller, and Susan Matthews discuss Hope Jahren's budding debut memoir, Lab Girl. Join us next month to discuss Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld.
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.
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Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s.
Challenging the notion of early colonial America as an uninformed backwater, Alejandra Dubcovsky uncovers the ingenious ways its inhabitants acquired timely news through largely oral networks. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. For many, content was often inseparable from the paths taken and the alliances involved in acquiring it. The different and innovative ways that Indians, Africans, and Europeans struggled to make sense of their world created communication networks that linked together peoples who otherwise shared no consensus of the physical and political boundaries shaping their lives.
Exchanging information was not simply about having the most up-to-date news or the quickest messenger. It was a way of establishing and maintaining relationships, of articulating values and enforcing prioritiesa process inextricably tied to the regions social and geopolitical realities. At the heart of Dubcovskys study are important lessons about the nexus of information and power in the early American South.
Andrew Bard Epstein is a graduate teacher and researcher at Yale University. Follow him on twitter @andeps.
This month, as part of the World Service’s Identity Season, World Book Club is in Cape Town, home of acclaimed Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, where we’ll be talking to him about his novel, Maps.
This moving and dramatic book is the first of three novels which make up Nuruddin Farah’s Blood in the Sun trilogy. Maps traces the journey of a young orphaned boy, Askar, who is taken under the wing of a loving surrogate mother, Misra.
Set in both Somalia and Ethiopia with an ever looming backdrop of conflict and political turmoil, Askar struggles to find and forge his identity in a land ravaged by war. Farah’s lucid exploration of struggle – both internal and external; personal and political – is as profound as it is compelling and draws on his own complex relationship with his native Somalia.
Critics Katy Waldman, Parul Sehgal, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss Paul Kalanithi's bestselling memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. Join us next month to discuss A Hologram for the King by Dave Egger's.
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Fun Home, winner of five Tony Awards including Best Musical. The Associated Press calls this groundbreaking production, “The best of what Broadway can do.” Get tickets at FunHomeBroadway.com.
And by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.
Heather Miyano Kopelson explores how religion, primarily expressed through bodily action, contributed to colonial notions of difference in her recent book Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (NYU Press, 2014). She examines the religious rituals of TaÃno, Algonquian, and West African peoples in the New World, and how they intersected with Puritan theology and expression. By comparing these interactions in both New England and Bermuda, she demonstrates how divergent attitudes toward race could be, even among like-minded colonists. Her book demonstrates the centrality of religious attitudes in Puritans’ changing conceptions of colonized bodies, and therefore how racial ideologies developed in two radically different imperial outposts.
Critics Katy Waldman, Laura Miller, and Laura Bennett discuss A.O. Scott’s insightful new book, Better Living Through Criticism. Next month, Slate's Audio Book Club will be chatting about When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Read the book and join us for our conversation in April!
Slate's Audiobook Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.
And by Texture, the mobile app that gives you full access to more than 150 of the world's most popular magazines, anytime, using your phone or tablet. Read Vogue, People, Esquire, Time—and hundreds more—from back issues to the one currently on the newsstand. Right now, try Texture for free at Texture.com/ABC.
This month we talk to the much-loved German-born, British author and illustrator Judith Kerr about her classic children’s novel, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.
Set during World War Two, this semi-autobiographical novel traces the story of a young Jewish girl and her family who flee Berlin just as the Nazis come to power. The journey of a family splintered by conflict, driven by fear and eventually rewarded with reunion is seen through the eyes of the nine-year-old Anna. Judith Kerr’s novel, by turns heart-lifting and heart-rending has stood the test of time. Celebrating its 45th anniversary this year it continues to be enjoyed by readers of all ages to this day.
This quixotic ‘novel of ideas’ blends philosophical reflection with the haunting tale of Herman Mussert, a retired, outmoded ancient language teacher preoccupied with Classical antiquity. After falling asleep one evening in Amsterdam, he mysteriously wakes the next morning in a hotel room in Lisbon where he slept with another man’s wife twenty years earlier. From here Mussert embarks on an enigmatic journey of the mind, contemplating passion, death, wisdom and disillusionment. Presented by Harriet Gilbert.
Critics Christina Cauterucci, Mark Harris, and Katy Waldman discuss Lucia Berlin's dazzling short story collection.
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/abc.
Next month, Slate's Audio Book Club chats about Better Living Through Criticism by A.O. Scott. Read the book and join us for our conversation in March!
Slate critic, Katy Waldman, is joined by Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review and culture critic, Meghan O'Rourke, to discuss Jonathan Franzen's Dickensian novel – Purity.
Next month, Slate's Audio Book Club will discuss A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. Read the book and join us for a conversation in February!
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.
