Just The Right Book With Roxanne Coady

How do we respond to the immensity of suffering that confronts us and overwhelms us without losing our compassion or sanity? This week, we revisit Roxanne Coady's conversation with Tim Desmond as they discuss his book, How to Stay Human in a F*cked-Up World: Mindfulness Practices for Real Life. Tim Desmond is a psychotherapist, student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and author of Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy. He has dedicated his life to creating peace and compassion in the world through meditation, psychotherapy, conflict resolution and nonviolent social change. This episode is sponsored by Care/Of. For 50% off your first Care/of order, go to TakeCareOf.com and enter the code book50.

Dr. Beverly Tatum's 1997 book on race relations, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, has become a modern classic found in many classrooms. In this week's episode of Just the Right Book Podcast, the former Spelman College president joins Roxanne for a live event at Wesleyan RJ Julia to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of her time-honored book and how race relations has evolved in the past two decades.

This week, we revisit our conversation with Mitchell Jackson. The legacy of growing up black in a state whose original constitution stated "no free negro or mulatto not residing in the state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall come, reside or be within the state or hold any real estate or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them." This legacy is explored with brutal honesty and humor, poetry, and above all, with love for the family that is Mitchell Jackson's American family. It is a memoir that uses original storytelling methods to encompass a vibrant personal journey of race, violence, manhood and tragedy. But it is defined by survival within that chaos.

No birth certificates, no school, no doctors, no registered existence, and abuse at the hands of one of her brothers. Westover’s first book “Educated” describes how she escaped a traumatic childhood to graduate from Brigham Young, Harvard, and Cambridge University with a PhD. Also in this episode, Roxanne discusses some of her favorite memoirs and some of yours!

Joseph J. Ellis is the author of many works of American history including Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with his wife and is the father of three sons.

Julia Samuel’s first book Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death, And Surviving is organized by the type of loss; losing a parent, losing a child, and confronting your own death. Is the way which someone grieves different by the loss or is it more defined by who they are? Samuel, a psychotherapist specializing in grief who spent the last 25 years working with bereaved families describes grief as a process that's unique to every person, but universal in the need to be experienced and discussed.

The Galvins looked like the manifestation of the post-World War II American Dream. Hard work. Upward mobility. A handsome, accomplished dad. A remarkable mother of twelve. But all was hardly what it seemed. Shockingly, six of the ten boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia, creating chaos of breakdowns, violence, abuse, and secrets. How could this happen to one family? How could this family even remain a family in the midst of such disruption and damage? And scientifically, what does this kind of concentration of this disease teach us?

According to the NIH, there has been a seventy-percent decline annually in the death rate from cardiovascular disease in the last fifty years and a one percent decline annually in the death rate from cancer over the last fifty years. How can this be when we keep hearing about great new drug discoveries and immunotherapy advances? And if true, isn't there another way to approach the nightmare that is cancer?  This week on Just the Right Book, Dr. Azra Raza join Roxanne Coady to discuss her latest book, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, out now from Basic Books.

During our time practicing social distancing, in between new conversations we are revisiting some of our favorite interviews from our archives. In 2018, 200 years since the birth of Frederick Douglass, we received the first major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by prize-winning historian and Yale Professor David Blight is based on nearly a lifetime of research as well as letters and private documentation to which no biographer has previously had access. It’s this revealing collection that helped shed new light on Douglass, particularly in the latter third of his life.  Today's episode is brought to you by Skylight Frames. As a special holiday offer for Just the Right Book listeners, you can get $10 off your purchase of a Skylight Frame when you go to SkylightFrame/BOOK and enter the code BOOK.

Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux, and Schoolgirls. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, she has been published in USA Today, Parenting, Salon, the New Yorker, and other publications, and has contributed commentary to NPR's All Things Considered. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter. Today's episode is brought to you by Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui, out now from Algonquin Books, and Skylight Frames. As a special holiday offer for Just the Right Book listeners, you can get $10 off your purchase of a Skylight Frame when you go to SkylightFrame/BOOK and enter the code BOOK.

Anne Bogel is the author of Reading People and I'd Rather Be Reading and creator of the blog Modern Mrs Darcy and the podcasts What Should I Read Next? and One Great Book. Bogel's popular book lists and reading guides have established her as a tastemaker among readers, authors, and publishers. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Today's episode is brought to you by Then the Fish Swallowed Him by Amir Ahmadi Aarian, out now from HarperVia.

Over a forty-year span of working forty hours a week, which most of us will do, we will spend eighty-thousand hours in what poll after poll shows that almost seventy percent of the employed are disengaged. Globally, almost 85 percent are unhappy and unhappy with work likely means unhappy with life. Is this the way it has to be? It is work. Well, the answer is delightfully an unequivocal no.  Bill Burnett is the executive director of the Stanford Design Program, and was a product leader for Apple's groundbreaking PowerBook business. He directs the undergraduate and graduate program in design at Stanford. Dave Evans is the co-director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, and a cofounder of Electronic Arts, one of the world's largest interactive entertainment companies. He holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford

The legacy of growing up black in a state whose original constitution stated "no free negro or mulatto not residing in the state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall come, reside or be within the state or hold any real estate or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them." This legacy is explored with brutal honesty and humor, poetry, and above all, with love for the family that is Mitchell Jackson's American family. It is a memoir that uses original storytelling methods to encompass a vibrant personal journey of race, violence, manhood and tragedy. But it is defined by survival within that chaos.

We spend a lot of time talking and listening. But are we really listening and are we being heard? Do you fail to register the name of a person that you were just introduced to? Do you find that someone is texting or looking at their phone while you're having a conversation with them? And why, with all the connecting that we're doing, are more people lonely and unheard?  Kate Murphy is a Houston, Texas-based journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Economist, Agence France-Presse, and Texas Monthly.

Doctors are acculturated and socialized to maintain life. Sometimes at all costs, even the human costs of suffering. The relatively new field of palliative care looks for the way that medicine can embrace and relieve the tension of seeking to preserve life while embracing life’s temporality. Dr. Sunita Puri explores the issues with exquisite elegance and humanity in her book That Good Night, out now in paperback from Penguin Press. Dr. Sunita Puri is an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California, and medical director of palliative medicine at the Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center. She has published essays in The New York Times, Slate, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and JAMA-Internal Medicine. She lives in Los Angeles.

A fine spring and a beautiful evening on May 10, 1940, didn’t seem the type of day that would portend a sequence of events that would define our world to this day. Yet, on Winston Churchill’s first day as Prime Minister, Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and that succeeding year, May 1940 to May 1941, saw the death of 45,000 Britains through a blistering series of bombings amounting risks that Germany would occupy and rule all of Europe, and the emergence of Churchill as a man that would define for all time true leadership. Erik Larson again brings his extraordinary talent in making history relevant and riveting to his latest book, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz.

Richie Jackson is currently producing Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song on Broadway. He executive produced Showtime's Nurse Jackie (Emmy and Golden Globe nominee for "Best Comedy Series") for seven seasons and co-executive produced the film Shortbus, written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. He and his husband, Jordan Roth, were honored with The Trevor Project's 2016 Trevor Hero Award. They live in New York City with their two sons.

The #MeToo movement is thriving. Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose have lost their seats. Harvey Weinstein is on trial for rape. The veil of secrecy and shame has been lifted. Does this mean that we can check that box—mission accomplished? Not really. The real corporate world has yet to do all that it will take for environments to fundamentally change. Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her new book, #MeToo in the Corporate World: Power, Privilege, and the Path Forward uses data, analysis, interviews, and her considerable and award-winning skills to help us understand the day-to-day contributing factors of corporate culture that must change. In her fourteenth book, she gives us another critically acclaimed book that is practical, smart, and slightly optimistic.

Our democracy is dependent on the free flow of information, but it is as critically dependent on the reliability of that information. Since waging an information war is easier and cheaper than buying tanks and tridents, we’re at a critical stage of protecting our democracy. We could have no better guy to this conversation than Rick Stengel. Among his esteemed positions and experience—being Time magazine’s editor in chief and serving three years as President Obama’s Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Affairs. In his latest book, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What Can We Do About It, we have a lively front seat into what’s happening right now and whether democracy is safe.

Men have defined the space of midlife crisis for decades — the sporty cars, the affairs, etc. But what does a midlife crisis look like for women, and do Gen X women have a particular vulnerability? Ada Calhoun has used her uncanny ability to define the zeitgeist along with countless interviews, research, and data to answer these questions, resulting in her latest book, Why We Can’t Sleep. In this episode of Just the Right Book, Roxanne Coady talks with Calhoun about her latest book and how seemingly having it all can make you miserable.