Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

13,000-years ago, the people of the first identifiable culture in North America were hunting mammoth and mastodon, bison, and anything else they could launch their darts and spears at, and undoubtedly, most assuredly, they themselves were being hunted by gigantic short-faced bears, America lions and saber-toothed cats. Thus, in order to survive life in the Pleistocene, Clovis people developed a sophisticated tool and weapon technology. Clovis Technology (International Monographs in Prehistory, 2010) describes it in a step by step, easy to understand way using simple, common-sense terms with photos and drawings that makes a complex subject an absolute joy to read. Three (3) Paleoindian specialists, Bruce Bradley, Michael Collins and Andrew Hemmings, (with important contributions by Marilyn Shoberg, and Jon Lohse) have written a “must have” book for anyone interested in lithic, bone or ivory analysis, not just Clovis technology. The interview with Andrew Hemmings goes deep into the weeds of Clovis Technology and discusses new discoveries and information.

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Andrey Kurkov discusses his darkly comic novel Death and the Penguin with Harriett Gilbert, and responds to listeners' questions from around the world. The book is set in the grey and deeply surreal world of the former Soviet republic, in which aspiring writer Viktor, who lives with his pet penguin Misha, is asked to write obituaries for Ukrainian VIPs. But the VIPs are still alive - for now. His pride turns to terror as he realises that both he and Misha have been drawn into a trap, from which there seems to be no escape.

The programme is recorded live in his native Ukraine, at the historic Mikhail Bulgakov Museum in Kiev.*

*(Bulgagov was a Kiev-born Russian writer and playwright from the first half of the 20th Century)

(Photo: Andrey Kurkov sitting next to his literary hero, Mikhail Bulgakov, in Kiev. Credit: Daniel Simons)

In this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Bamforth focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use represented by the Allen Site and the adjacent smaller sites...

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When Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. “I used it as a text immediately,” she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a radically different kind of history, freed from patriotic bluster, was desperately needed.

But Dunbar-Ortiz was also concerned by Zinn’s narrative. While the opening chapters on the genocide of Indigenous people were “like no other general U.S. history book,” Native Americans largely fell out of the story until the Red Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. “I kept saying to Howard, ‘What happened to the Indians? Why did they disappear until Alcatraz in 1969?'” Dunbar-Ortiz recounts. “He would say, ‘You have to write that book.'”

And so last year, Dunbar-Ortiz published An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014). Covering several centuries in a brisk and moving narrative, this is a deeply unsettling tale. Dunbar-Ortiz lays bear a process of genocidal colonization and Indigenous resistance, the genesis of a American way of war born from frontier counterinsurgency and premised on annihilation, and how powerful origin myths continue to obscure the real history of this continent.

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Slate critics Dan Kois, Meghan O'Rourke, and Katy Waldman discuss Harper Lee's newly published sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird."

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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life.

Hear how important this ground-breaking novel has been for readers around the globe. British writer Jeanette Winterson is in conversation with Harriett Gilbert. (First broadcast in 2012.)

(Picture: Jeanette Winterson. Photo: Sam Churchill)

In his new book Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the ‘Good Indian’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), Michael Ray FitzGerald reviews how television represented Native Americans, including in both positive and negative stereotypes. He talks about these portrayals from early television shows to more recent characterizations.

 

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Slate critics Jamelle Bouie, Hanna Rosin, and Katy Waldman discuss Emily St. John Mandel's award-winning novel.

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British author Mark Haddon discusses his astonishingly successful novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Published in 45 languages around the world, it is a murder mystery like no other. Fifteen-year old Christopher knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings, and when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered with a garden fork, he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.

Mark Haddon answers readers’ questions from places as diverse as Iceland, Egypt and the Philippines, as well as in the studio in London.

(Photo: Mark Haddon. Credit: Nicky Barranger)

The Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra discusses his novel, The Swallows of Kabul - a portrait of life under a tyrannical theocracy. Khadra is actually a man, and took a pseudonym (his wife's!) during his career in the Algerian Army during the civil war. His book follows a group of people struggling to hold on to their humanity in a world where pleasure is a sin and death awaits anyone who breaks the rules. Khadra answers questions from BBC listeners worldwide, in discussion with Harriett Gilbert.

(Photo: Yasmina Khadra. Credit: E.Robert-Espalieu)