All About Books | Net Radio

“The Crane Wife: a Memoir in Essays” by C.J. Hauser, are frank and funny reflections on love and intimacy. Incorporating friends, lovers, family and chosen family, it’s a new more expansive definition of love.

The beginning was bleak. There was no dedicated practice space and they had to raise money themselves for uniforms. Nebraska Women’s Volleyball has come a very long way. Hear an interview with journalist and author John Mabry about what happened behind the scenes in this rags to riches sports story. His new book is, “Nebraska Volleyball: The Origin Story”

Since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have described the males of the animal kingdom as dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. A new book takes a fresh look at animal behavior with less bias. Hear a review of “Bitch: On the Female of the Species” by Lucy Cooke

Leading a team of chemists as woman in the corporate world of the 60’s was unusual. Elizabeth Zott is the unusual main character in the novel “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus. In store for Zott are single motherhood and hosting the countries best-loved cooking show. It's a witty take on mid century feminism.

Bird watching is the starting point for UNL Professor Thomas Gannon to visit other important topics. Enduring childhood poverty and prejudice, Indian Boarding School in South Dakota, and transcendent moments encountering birds of the Great Plains. Hear an interview with Gannon about his new book, “Birding While Indian: a Mixed Blood Memoir”.

“Horse” by Geraldine Brooks is a novel that leaps from 1850 to 1950 and finally to our time. It features an extraordinary race horse and the enslaved groom who helps him win and a painting of them both which haunts a modern art historian.

When a Lincoln man and his wife realized they were about to deal with Alzheimer’s together, there wasn’t a book that adequately explained everything they were to face. “Dear Judy: a Love Story Rewritten by Alzheimer’s” is the book Michael James wrote to help others make this journey.

The aptly named novel, “Trust” is about a man who accumulated a fortune in the early 20th century stock market. The flimflam nature of the stock market, its collapse in ’29 and even the unreliable nature of the story the author tells, are elements of this book that won the Noble Prize for Literature. “Trust” by Hernan Diaz

“Easy Beauty” is philosophy professor and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Chloe Cooper Jones memoir. It’s a frank depiction of her life with a congenital condition that affects her height, how she moves and her life with continuous pain- both physical, and always being seen as lesser.

In a mysterious, isolated town, motherhood has a different dimension- mothers sometimes disappear. In the novel “Elsewhere” author Alexis Schaitkin has written an allegory exploring motherhood, individual and community identity.

Three good friends leave Alabama to join the Army, eventually they're stationed in the exotic paradise of Manila. Then Pearl Harbor happened. What followed for U.S. servicemen in the Pacific was horrific. Nebraska author Tosca Lee has co-written a work of historical fiction about this time and place, “The Long March Home: A World War II Novel of the Pacific” by Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee.

It’s not often host Pat Leach reviews something other than a recently published book, but a novel from 1936 was mentioned to her that tells part of Nebraska’s story “Take All to Nebraska” by Sophus Keith Winter is the first in a trilogy about a family from Denmark who settled in Nebraska and struggled to adjust to a new land and culture.

During a sweltering week in July, we learn about the people who live in the "Rabbit Hutch", a low-cost housing complex in a decaying Indiana town. The novel “The Rabbit Hutch" by Tess Gunty is a beautiful and funny snapshot of contemporary America.

“Seeking Fortune Elsewhere: Stories” by Sindya Bhanoo. A collection of short stories featuring women who’ve emigrated from Southern India. The collection contains themes universal to the immigrant experience- the cost of staying or leaving your home.

Since it's the 150th Anniversary of Nebraska writer Willa Cather's birth, the guest on this week’s program is Rachel Olsen Director of Education and Outreach at the Cather Center. She’ll talk about their upcoming Spring conference which will spotlight both Cather’s story “A Lost Lady” and her essay "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle."

Molly is a maid at a luxury hotel who struggles with social skills and understanding the intentions of others. She’s also the chief suspect of “The Maid” by Nita Prose, an uplifting murder mystery.

A therapist finds herself caught in the caregiver sandwich of trying to help her elderly mother as well as her college-age son. Both her mother and son refuse to communicate for their own hidden reasons. The novel is “The Blue Window” by Suzanne Berne.

Linda Villarosa’s new book “Under the Skin” lays out the forces in American healthcare, and society, that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to white Americans.

This week on “All About Books” an interview with History Professor Jim Downs about his research into how modern disease research began and the unsuspected factors that played a role. His book is, “Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine.”

Only a handful of Jews ever managed to escape the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rudolph Vrba was the first in April of 1944. The remarkable story of how Vrba planned and carried it out is told in the book, “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World” by Jonathan Freeland. It’s reviewed this week on