Ann Jones speaks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg, in a special edition of 'It's The Economy' for the 2016 KGNU Denver/Boulder Spring Fund Drive.

Please do kindly consider supporting independent journalism and keeping it alive by making a tax deductible donation to KGNU Denver/Boulder. 

She recently wrote a highly respected article for TomDispatch's TomGram on 'Social Democracy for Dummies', a discussion which is particularly pertinent for #Election2016.

She is also the author of many well-known books including 

They Were Soldiers

War Is Not Over When It's Over

Kabul in Winter

Women Who Kill

Next Time She'll Be Dead

Ms. Jones is an independent scholar, journalist, photographer, and the author of ten books of nonfiction. 

Her work focuses on women "and other underdogs" and on the historical/social/political structures which, she considers, do so much to perpetuate injustice.

She has written extensively about violence against women, reported from Afghanistan, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East on the impact of war upon civilians, and embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan to report on the damage done to America’s soldiers.

Widely published, her articles currently appear most often in The Nation and online at TomDispatch.com. She holds a PhD in English and history from the University of Wisconsin.

In recent years, her work has received generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation. She is now (2015-16) an associate of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University

@KGNUClaudia (Claudia Cragg) speaks here with Sari Wilson whose beautifully crafted, just published novel, Girl Through Glass, is causing a sensation.

Her story tells the tale of a young girl’s coming of age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet—a story of obsession and the quest for perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.

In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet.

Enduring the mess of her parent’s divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism.

Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory.

It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her mentor.

Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness.

As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.

In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a Midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsizes the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self.

When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.

Told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us.

Author Janice Y K Lee comes to Denver's 16th Street 'Tattered Cover' this coming Monday 25th January at 7:00 pm. For further details, please call: 1 303 436 1070

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Janice Y.K. Lee "whose New York Times bestselling debut was The Piano Teacher (called “immensely satisfying” by People, “intensely readable” by O, The Oprah Magazine, and “a rare and exquisite story” by Elizabeth Gilbert.)"

"Now, in her long-awaited new novel, 'The Expatriates', Lee explores with devastating poignancy the emotions, identities, and relationships of three very different American women living in the same small expat community in Hong Kong."

Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling.

In this KGNU interview, for 'It's The Economy, Claudia Cragg speaks with David Montgomery, a professor of earth and space sciences, and his wife, biologist and environmental planner Anne Biklé. In their recent book, 'The Hidden Half of Nature', they unravel the universe of microbes that make dirt fertile and allow us to digest food.

Both the lining of our colons and the ground beneath our feet, the authors explain, are "bio­logical bazaars where plants and people trade nutritional wares and form alliances." Combining lucid explication of emerging science with personal anecdotes, Montgomery and Biklé, who confronted a cancer diagnosis while writing the book, reveal that our immune defenses depend on protecting and nourishing these microscopic brigades.

According to USC's 'Center for Effective Organisations' Alec R. Levenson, 'Millennials' have been burdened with a reputation as spoiled, lazy, and entitled, but the reality behind the stereotype is far richer and more complex. But who are Millennials and what do they really want?

In this interview for KGNU's 'It's The Economy' Claudia Cragg speaks with Levenson who explains who Millennials really are, and offers practical advice to help those who manage, lead, and work with them to improve teamwork, increase productivity, strengthen organizational culture, and build a robust talent pipeline.

'What Millennials Want From Work', co-written and researched with Jennifer J. Deal, is based on fieldwork and survey data from global research on more than 25,000 Millennials and 29,000 older workers in 22 countries, this book paints a comprehensive, scientifically accurate picture of what really motivates Millennials around the world.

For KGNU Claudia Cragg speaks here with Sheila McCauley Keys, author of 'Our Auntie Rosa', who is the niece of Rosa Parks for the 60th Anniversary of her aunt's famous 'bus incident'. McCauley Keys shares the family's remembrances of the woman who was not only the mother of the civil rights movement, but a nurturing mother figure to them as well. Her brave act on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, was just one moment in a life lived with great humility and decency.

After the deaths of Rosa Parks's husband and brother, her nieces and nephews became her only family and the closest that she would ever experience to having biological sons and daughters. In this book, they share with readers what she shared with them about her experiences growing up in a racist South, her deep dedication to truth and justice, and the personal values she held closest to her heart.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the delightful Philip Weinstein about his latest work Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. This is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity.

As Weinstein relates, Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?

Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life. 

(To listen to the interview, please CLICK on the 'Pod' icon above left next to the title. Thank you.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with advertising maven, Linda Kaplan Thaler (@lindathaler2), on 'Grit to Great', co-written with Robin Koval. In this, they tackle a topic that is close to their hearts, one that they feel is the real secret to their own success in their careers--and in the careers of so many people they know and have met. And that is the incredible power of grit, perseverance, perspiration, determination, and sheer stick-to-it-tiveness. They say we are all dazzled by the notion that there are some people who get ahead, who reach the corner office because they are simply gifted, or well-connected, or both. In fact, research shows that we far overvalue talent and intellectual ability in our culture. So many people get ahead--even the gifted ones--because they worked incredibly hard, put in the thousands of hours of practice and extra sweat equity, and made their own luck. Linda and Robin should know--they are two girls from the Bronx who had no special advantages or privileges and rose up through their own hard work and relentless drive to succeed to the top of their highly competitive profession. 

In a book illustrated with a cornucopia of stories and the latest research on success, the authors reveal the strategies that helped them, and countless others, succeed at the highest levels in their careers and professions, and in their personal lives. They talk about the guts--the courage--necessary to take on tough challenges and not give up at the first sign of difficulty. They discuss the essential quality of resiliency. Everyone suffers setbacks in their careers and in life. The key, however, is to pick yourself up and bounce back. Drawing on the latest research in positive psychology, they discuss why optimists do better in school, work, and on the playing field--and how to reset that optimistic set point. They talk about industriousness, the notion that Malcolm Gladwell popularized with the 10,000-hour rule in his book Outliers. Creativity theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes it takes a minimum of 10 years for one's true creative potential to be realized. And the authors explore the concept of tenacity--the quality that allows us to remain focused and avoid distraction in order to get the job done--an increasingly difficult task in today's fragmented, cluttered, high-tech, connected world.

(To listen to the interview, please CLICK on the 'Pod' icon above left next to the title. Thank you.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here with Vicky Unwin on her latest book compiled from letters her mother, Sheila Mills. wrote during World War Two.

Vicky Unwin when writing it, had also faced the tragic and untimely loss of her daughter Louise, as well as a vicious diagnosis of a malignant sarcoma on her leg.

But with regard to Sheila Mills specifically, she came Unwin says "from a sheltered middle-class upbringing" before she joined the WRNS in 1940.

The working life of a women’s naval officer in World War II was a hard one. The discipline and trials of living and working as a "Wren" plunged her head first into a life of bed bugs, last minute travel, secrecy, and huge responsibility.

But while Sheila met with hard and exciting work during one of the world’s most dangerous conflicts, she also found love, friendship, fun, and the human spirit. Her fascinating encounters, assignments, events, and, of course, the many loves she found and lost, are all seen through her eyes in this lively collection of letters home.

The book itself, and this conversation with Vicky Unwin, both offer unique insight into the coming of age of a young girl in the 1940s, as well as into the intricacies of this mother-daughter relationship. Sheila’s letters have readers laughing—and crying—at the extraordinary life of a young girl who traveled all over the world and witnessed key events in the war. 

Vicky Unwin's Vicky Goes Travelling blog. 

Her Facebook page for Healthy Living with Cancer.

@VickyUnwin

To listen to this interview, kindly click on 'Pod' icon above left.

In this interview Claudia Cragg, KGNU Radio Denver/Boulder, discusses Barbarian Days, that is, The New Yorker's William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.

Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa.

A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.

An exploration of the nexus that are his joint passions for surfing and writing, 'Barbarian Days. is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and a tale of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.

Finnegan has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1984 and a staff writer since 1987. Reporting from Africa, Central America, South America, Europe, the Balkans, and Australia, as well as from the United States, he has twice received the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism and twice been a National Magazine Award finalist. His article “Deep East Texas” won the 1994 Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Media; his article “The Unwanted” the Sidney Hillman Prize for Magazine Reporting. His report from Sudan, “The Invisible War,” won a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club, and he received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for “Leasing the Rain.” His article “The Countertraffickers” won the Overseas Press Club’s Madeline Dane Ross Award for International Reporting, and his report from Mexico, “Silver or Lead,” won the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Spiers Benjamin Award. Finnegan is the author of five books: “Crossing the Line,” which was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best nonfiction books of the year;  “Dateline Soweto”;  “A  Complicated War”; “Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country,” which was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism; “Barbarian Days,” his latest.