Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.
Lawrence Millman wrote the foreward and saw through the publication of Edward Beauclerk Maurice's diary.
K.C. Cole is working on a book about her friend Frank Oppenheimer. Frank was barred from practicing physics during the McCarthy era, and was deeply troubled by the devastation of the bomb.
John Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University, and the author of “God After Darwin” and “God and the New Atheism.”
Jim Fleming talks with Mairin Ui Cheide, a sean-nos singer. Sean-nos is old-style traditional singing where songs usually tell a story.
Richard Davidson is a neuro-psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a longtime friend of the Dalai Lama. He tells Steve Paulson about observing contemplatives with a brain scanner.
Mitchell is a literary virtuoso, best known for his 2004 novel “Cloud Atlas.” He’s famous for the intricate structure of his novels - which weave together multiple narrators, interconnected stories and even different genres - all within the same book. He’s done it again with “The Bone Clocks."
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