click pod icon above TO LISTEN

Tahmima Anam  (born 1975) is a Londoner and a Bangladeshi writer and novelist. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray in 2007 and was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Anam comes from an illustrious literary family in Bangladesh. Her father Mahfuz Anam is the editor and publisher of The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Bangladesh's most prominent English-language newspaper. Her grandfather Abul Mansur Ahmed was a renowned satirist and politician whose works in Bengali remain popular to this day

Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh but she grew up in Paris, New York City, and Bangkok, largely due to her father’s career with the Unicef. After studying for her undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College she turned to anthropology earning a PhD from Harvard.

She was inspired to write her first novel (2007) “A Golden Age”, she says, by her parents who were freedom fighters during the Bangladesh Liberation War. For that work, she stayed in Bangladesh for two years and interviewed hundreds of war fighters. She talks here with KGNU’s Claudia Cragg about her second novel ‘A Good Muslim’, the second in what Anam says is now to be a trilogy.

The framing narrative of Eric Poole’s memoir Where’s My Wand? One's Boy's Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting, is that of a young boy who hasn’t yet figured out that he’s gay. To survive, he becomes obsessed with TV pop culture (particularly with 'Bewitched's Endora' suffers from his parents’ neuroses, and believes he has magical powers that enable him to survive the traumas of growing up. KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with him here about his journey. 

If you have enjoyed this interview, please consider making a donation to KGNU Denver/Boulder public radio which makes this programming possible.

Thank you.

Here KGNU’s Claudia Cragg meets poet and legendary feminist author of the 1970s ‘Fear of Flying’ for a lunchtime interview in New York to discuss Jong’s opus as a whole and an anthology she has just edited ‘Sugar in My Bowl’. The lively ambience provided excellent cover for a frank discussion of, among other topics, Jong’s invention of the ‘Zipless “Banana' (well, they had to say that since the FCC does not of course allow ****.) The interview itself, though, is not explicit.

In "Sugar in My Bowl", Erica Jong and a host of prominent female voices answer the question, What do women want? in essays that explore our fascination with sex and the realm of female desire - what it is, what sparks it, and what satisfies it.

The revelations are as varied as the writers. Daphne Merkin celebrates beautiful male bodies. Jennifer Weiner explores sex and death. Min Jin Lee pairs sex and racism. And Gail Collins offers an amusing take on the anti-sexuality of a Catholic education. Here, too, are the voices of a younger generation who reveal attitudes far more reserved than their liberated mothers. From wild nights to the innocence of inexperienced youth, "Sugar in My Bowl" explores women's sexuality with daring and candor, challenging us to examine ourselves and our own desires.

As Jong writes, 'The truth is-sex is life-no more, no less. As many of these stories demonstrate. It is the life force. If we attempt to wall it off in a special category of its own, we make it dirty. By itself, it is far from obscene. It is just a part of life-the part that continues it and makes it bloom.

Contributors include: Karen Abbott; Anne Roiphe; Jessica Winter; Jann Turner; Julie Klam; Susan Kinsolving; Susie Bright; Fay Weldon; Linda Gray Sexton; Elisa Albert; Barbara Victor; Daphne Merkin; Marisa Marchetto; Min Jin Lee; Honor Moore; Jennifer Weiner; Gail Collins; Liz Smith; Naomi Wolf; Rebecca Walker; Jean Hanff Korelitz; Eve Ensler; Meghan O'Rourke, and Rosemary Daniell.

Erica Jong’s Personal Website.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Jim Geary who, in October 1981, formed the first support group in the world for people with AIDS and served as The Shanti Project’s executive director in San Francisco for seven years. He developed the agency into an internationally acclaimed model of AIDS services.

Now he has recently released his memoir Delicate Courage which tells the story of his revolutionizing AIDS care and his "poignant crossing from joy to grief" as his lover faces his own AIDS diagnosis. Geary’s memoir concludes with journal entries he kept following his lover’s passing which are interwoven with "after-death" communications he believes he has shared with his now deceased partner of 20 years. 

The conversation begins with Geary’s recollection of his early activism to protest The Briggs Initiative and the emotional onslaught of the assassinations in San Francisco of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone which coincided with the Jonestown "massacre" in which many San Francisco residents took their own lives. [See also, Sean Penn's 'Milk'].

You can read more about Geary at www.delicatecourage.com

Ann Patchett has dazzled readers with her award-winning books, including The Magician's Assistant and the New York Times bestselling Bel Canto. She speaks here with Claudia Cragg about her latest novel, State of Wonder, a provocative and ambitious narrative set deep in the Amazon jungle.

Patchett writes of Marina Singh who gave up a career as a doctor after botching an emergency delivery as an intern, opting instead for the more orderly world of research for a pharmaceutical company. When office colleague Anders Eckman, sent to the Amazon to check on the work of a field team, is reported dead, Marina is asked by her company's CEO to complete Anders' task and to locate his body. What Marina finds in the sweltering, insect-infested jungles of the Amazon shakes her to her core. The team is headed by esteemed scientist Annick Swenson, the woman who oversaw Marina's residency and who is now intent on keeping the team's progress on a miracle drug completely under wraps. 

Marina's jungle odyssey includes exotic encounters with cannibals and snakes, a knotty ethical dilemma about the basic tenets of scientific research, and joyous interactions with the exuberant people of the Lakashi tribe, who live on the compound. In fluid and remarkably atmospheric prose, Patchett captures not only the sights and sounds of the chaotic jungle environment but also the struggle and sacrifice of dedicated scientists. 

FOLLOW on Twitter @KGNUITEClaudia

Claudia Cragg speaks in this interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times’s chief mergers and acquisitions reporter and columnist whose book ‘Too Big To Fail” just aired in a televised version on Home Box Office.  Particularly topical here, is the discussion of Christine Lagarde (the French Minister of Economic Affairs, Finance and Indusry) who, following the scandalous demise of Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be in line to replace him as the IMF chief. 

Mr. Sorkin is also the editor of Deal Book, an online daily financial report he started in 2001. In addition, Sorkin is an assistant editor of business and finance news, helping guide and shape the paper’s coverage.

Sorkin, who has appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and on “Charlie Rose” on PBS, is a frequent guest host of CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” He won a Gerald Loeb Award, one of the highest honors in business journalism, in 2004 for breaking news. He also won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award for breaking news in 2005 and again in 2006. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. In 2008 and 2009, Vanity Fair named him to its “Next Establishment” list. He was also named to the Directorship 100, a list of the most influential people on the nation’s board of directors. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Friday, March 25th of this year was the 100th anniversary of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York that killed 146 young female workers.  This tragedy propelled reforms in the labor conditions of these sweatshops with laws enacted to protect workers. However, sweatshops even for legal immigrants are not necessarily a thing of the past as Jean Kwok relays in her memoir largely based on her life 'Girl In Translation' which has just come out in paperback.

Jean Kwok immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She won early admission to Harvard, where she worked as many as four jobs at a time, and graduated with honors in English and American literature, before going on to earn an MFA in fiction at Columbia.

Her debut novel Girl in Translation (Riverhead, 2010) became a New York Times bestseller. It has been published in 15 countries and chosen as the winner of an American Library Association Alex Award, a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, an Orange New Writers' title, an Indie Next Pick, a Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award nominee and the winner of Best Cultural Book in Book Bloggers Appreciation Week 2010. It was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. The novel was a Blue Ribbon Pick for numerous book clubs, including Book of the Month, Doubleday and Literary Guild. Jean lives in Leiden, in the Netherlands. with her husband and two sons. She talks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg.

FOLLOW on Twitter @KGNUITEClaudia

Ever a ready critic of what some call the 'US military industrial complex', Claudia Cragg was at first extremely hesitant to interview Rye Barcott on his memoir 'It Happened on the Way to War' (Bloomsbury). Before she read the book, it appeared as though it might possibly be just another warped US military propaganda message to justify the ever-burgeoning expansion of the US Armed Forces around the world in the guise of 'doing good'. 

CLICK POD BUTTON ABOVE TO LISTEN (RIGHT-CLICK TO SAVE)

FOLLOW on Twitter @KGNUITEClaudia

The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its second annual conference April 8-11, 2011 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. This was the same scene of the great conference that established a renewed global economic architecture as World War II drew to a close.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with INET's Robert A. Johnson who serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Global Finance Project for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in New York.

Johnson is an international investor and consultant to investment funds on issues of portfolio strategy. He recently served on the United Nations Commission of Experts on International Monetary Reform under the Chairmanship of Joseph Stiglitz.

Previously, Johnson was a Managing Director at Soros Fund Management where he managed a global currency, bond and equity portfolio specializing in emerging markets. Prior to working at Soros Fund Management, he was a Managing Director of Bankers Trust Company managing a global currency fund.

Johnson served as Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee under the leadership of Chairman William Proxmire (D. Wisconsin). Before this, he was Senior Economist of the US Senate Budget Committee under the leadership of Chairman Pete Domenici (R. New Mexico).

Johnson was an Executive Producer of the Oscar winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney, and is the former President of the National Scholastic Chess Foundation. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of both the Economic Policy Institute and the Campaign for America’s Future.

Johnson received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.S. in both Electrical Engineering and Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The program begins, however, with an introduction to INET by University of Colorado Denver's Professor Steven G. Medema. He is a recipient of a grant from the Institute to write an intellectual history of the Coase Theorem.

Exceptionally for a high level conference of this type, and at this level, an abundance of video material and documentation is freely available on INET's site. This radio interview includes only snippets from presentations by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Andrew Sheng (of the PRC's Regulatory Commission), and George Soros and Paul Volcker, moderated by The Financial Times' Gillian Tett. Viewing of the original longer form presentations is highly recommended.

KGNU Denver/Boulder's Spring Fund Drive fell slightly short in its goal to raise much-needed funds that keep the eclectic music and vital news (local, national and international) programming on air. If you feel that independent public radio deserves support (in this age of corporate, monolithic media), please consider a donation (however small) especially in the light of the potential slash and burn, politically motivated, cuts. Please visit: KGNU and give if you enjoy this podcast. Even a tiny donation to the station that makes this podcast possible is very gratefully received. Thank you.

PHOTO (with kind permission) taken in the Washington DC independent bookstore, Politics and Prose by Kirstin Fearnley (Copyright ©2011).

CLICK POD BUTTON ABOVE TO LISTEN Claudia Cragg talks here with Jasper Fforde who spent his early career in the film industry working on films such as 'Goldeneye' and 'The Mask of Zorro' as a focus puller. Today, though, he is the author of several novels, which cross over genres, a mixture of fantasy, crime thriller, and humorous fiction and which glory in an abundance of metafictional devices. They are noted for their literary allusions, wordplay and tight plots. His latest books in the 'Thursday Next' series has just come out and is called 'One of Our Thursdays is Missing'.