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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Dee Williams (PAD, Portland Alternative Dwellings) to discover how she found a way to lower her monthly bills to only $8 dollars as outlined in her new memoir and 'how to' The Big Tiny.

After a heart condition diagnosis ten years ago, a new sense of clarity took hold for Dee Williams. As she looked around her overpriced, oversized house, Williams thought: What was all this stuff for? So she downsized, building a new life in 84 square feet. Now a pioneer in sustainable living and an accomplished teacher and lecturer on tiny house-building, Williams has achieved a happy balance and created a model for simple, sustainable, practical living.

Her book, as you will hear here, is a touching personal memoir of a woman rebuilding her life from scratch, as well as an account of the DIY tiny house movement. From suburban properties to city apartments, and from HGTV to local communities across the country, people are rethinking what it means to be a homeowner and how to build sustainable lives for themselves and their families.

But Williams also offers practical and philosophical guidance for aspiring tiny homeowners and for those just looking to de-clutter their lives (Williams can list all of her belongings on a single sheet of paper.) This is part how-to and part why-to and The Big Tiny is both a graceful and inspired meditation as well as an exploration of what it really means to build the good life and more importantly the right life.

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In April of 2014,  Elaine "Lainey" Lui fulfilled a lifelong dream when her first book, Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When a Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter to do? A Memoir (Sort Of) was published (by Random House in Canada and Penguin in the USA). 

Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks about the book, a paean to her mother aka 'The Squawking Chicken' and learns how Lainey co-founded LaineyGossip.com, an entertainment news and gossip blog and how she also became co-host of CTV's daytime talk show "The Social", and a reporter on CTV's "etalk", Canada's number one rated entertainment news show. She joined the show in 2006 as a special correspondent and has since covered the Red Carpet at the Oscars, SuperBowl XLII, Cannes and Toronto International Film Festivals, and other events worldwide. 

Her website in fact started as an email to small group of friends and colleagues in 2003 and spread by word of mouth to thousands of now loyal readers. It launched as a website in December 2004 and has since grown into an immensely popular entertainment destination visited by over 1.5 million monthly unique readers. Generating over 18 million monthly page views, it is now a leading international celebrity gossip source and a must read for well-read, educated females across North America. 

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(IMPORTANT NOTE: @KerryZuckus points out that Rusasebagina's is just one side of a complex story. Zuckus believes that in"INSIDE THE HOTEL RWANDA": a different 'truth' is perhaps exposed. wp.me/p3lmJ2-4g - cut & paste link - via @rwandaissues

Twenty years ago, beginning on April 6 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in a horrific genocide that spanned 100 days.  To mark the 20th anniversary of the horrendous events of that time, KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks where with Paul Rusesabagina, the part played by actor Don Cheadle in the film 'Hotel Rwanda'.

Genocide continues to be a tragic global issue. To raise awareness of and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, who saved thousands of lives during the horrific events of 1994 has been re-published. 

In his book, An Ordinary Man, Paul Rusesabagina provides an inside look into his life both before and after the horrendous mass murder in Rwanda. As the manager of the exclusive 'Hotel Les Milles Collines' he sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and Hutu moderates from the killings. The story brings the reader inside the hotel during those 100 days, relates the anguish of those who saw loved ones brutally murdered, and describe Rusesabagina's ambivalence at pouring scotch and lighting the cigars of killers in the Swimming Pool bar, even as he was trying to cram as many refugees as possible inside the guest rooms upstairs. Rusesabagina explores his inner turmoil as he discusses the racial complexity within his own life (he is a Hutu married to a Tutsi) and his complete estrangement from the madness that surrounded him during the genocide

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Francine Prose about her newest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. Emerging from the austerity and deprivation of the Great War, Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom.

It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club’s loyal patrons, including rising Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and caustic American writer Lionel Maine.

As the years pass, their fortunes-and the world itself-evolve. Lou falls desperately in love and finds success as a racecar driver.

Gabor builds his reputation with startlingly vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant 20s give way to the Depression of the 30s, Lou experiences another metamorphosis-sparked by tumultuous events-that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more sinister: collaboration with the Nazis.

Told in a kaleidoscope of voices that circle around the dark star of Lou Villars, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 evokes this incandescent city with brio, humor, and intimacy. Exploring a turbulent time defined by terror, bravery, and difficult moral choices, it raises critical questions about truth and memory and the nature of storytelling itself.

(There was an excellent Janet Maslin review of the novel also in the April 10 edition of The New York Times.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Kimberley Palmer who writes about money – how to have more of it and how to manage the money you have. Her new book, 'The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life' (January 2014, AMACOM), tells the stories of 100 successful side-giggers who built financial security by launching side-businesses. In addition, she writes about money as the senior money editor and Alpha Consumer blogger at US News & World Report. Palmer says she loves helping people make smarter money choices, especially when it comes to navigating big life milestones, from college graduation to parenthood to homeownership. In her first book, Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back, she covers many of those topics.

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For this week's KGNU programme, 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks with Tim Harford. His first book, the global bestseller The Undercover Economist was a sensation – and has gone on to sell well over a million copies worldwide. In it, Harford looked at the world through the eyes of a microeconomist, from the changing cost of a cappuccino to how supermarkets choose to display the products on their shelves. Now, in a world utterly transformed by the global downturn, Harford is back.

In The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, he turns to the wider picture – to macroeconomics – to help us unpick and understand the complexities of major economies – which, he says, putting you (the reader) in the driving seat.

With a word of advice now and then, the Undercover Economist encourages you to run the show. Along the way you’ll discover what happens to inflation when you burn a million pound notes, why even prison camps have recessions and why Coke didn’t change the price of a bottle for seventy years.

According to The New Statesman's Felix Salmon, 

“Tim Harford is perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world… his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics.”

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This interview for #KGNU and 'It's The Economy' (a show produced by a team of the station's reporters) is a weekly radio economics and all-things-business program with international reach. This week Claudia Cragg talks to Gayle Avery about 'Honeybees and Locusts' and discusses why all of us in business and the world at large should adopt as many of the traits of the former as possible to discourage the continuing plague of the latter.

In this interview, Avery, who is one of the founders of the instituteforsustainableleadership.com, points out that if only the 23 main principles of SL had been followed into the run up to the Great Crash of 2008, it more than likely could have been avoided or at least significantly minimized. Furthermore, many very successful companies, like BMW for example, purposefully follow SL principles to their very evident and consequent bottom-line corporate advantage. 

The idea is that the honey bee creators, makers and providers lend valuable things for others” to an environment while the locust “takers and predators” are those who, says Avery, “extract value from others without contributing much in return”. The distinction comes from a so-called founding work of modern capitalism, Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (which first appeared as a poem in 1705).

The implication for those who may still believe that capitalism, as we see it today, is viable in the long term, is that the adoption of these principles encourages bee-like virtues and so discourages the locusts.

But is that what we see today? The nasty little secret of much of C21st business may be that capitalism not only comes with moral hazards (as often required to meet sometimes greedy and ultimately unsustainable $$$ stockholder demands) but may actually depend on that climate for much of its success.  

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According to Gar Alperovitz, never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with the economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new movement demanding change are forming, he says, and it is this that he discusses here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg for 'It's The Economy.'

But just what is this thing called a new economy, and how might it take shape in America? In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about where we find ourselves in history, why the time is right for a new-economy movement to coalesce, what it means to build a new system to replace the crumbling one, and how we might begin. He also suggests what the next system might look like—and where we can see its outlines, like an image slowly emerging in the developing trays of a photographer’s darkroom, already taking shape.

He proposes a possible next system that is not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else entirely—and something entirely American.

Alperovitz calls for an evolution, not a revolution, out of the old system and into the new. That new system would democratize the ownership of wealth, strengthen communities in diverse ways, and be governed by policies and institutions sophisticated enough to manage a large-scale, powerful economy.

For the growing group of Americans pacing at the edge of confidence in the old system, or already among its detractors, What Then Must We Do?, Alperovitz believes, offers an elegant solution for moving from anger to strategy.

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In the week celebrating the 50th anniversary (January 8, 1964) since, in what many consider to be one of the most memorable ever State of the Union addresses, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his “War on Poverty” and introduced legislation that would expand the federal government’s role in poverty reduction efforts. This set in motion the creation of programs such as Head Start, food stamps (now SNAP), work study, Community Action Agencies, VISTA, Medicare and Medicaid. Our guest for this edition of KGNU's 'It's The Economy' is Jill Quadagno, author of The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty.