Library Talks

In this episode of Library Talks, award-winning journalist Margalit Fox joins Library Talks to discuss her latest book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss, the true story of a once-infamous criminal mastermind and visionary businesswoman in Gilded Age New York.   Drawing on deep historical research, Fox tells the true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies—and simultaneously upends—America's enduring rags-to-riches narrative, placing Mandelbaum's story within the larger context of nineteenth-century crime in New York City's Gilded Age.

In this episode of Library Talks, author Lance Richardson joins Library Talks to discuss his new book True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen.  He's joined by award-winning writer Sam Anderson.   A towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) defies categorization. He co-founded the Paris Review while working undercover for the CIA in postwar Paris, then escaped into a series of expeditions that found him floating through the Amazon to recover a fossil or embedding with a tribe in Netherlands New Guinea. His travels inspired prize-winning novels about Caymanian turtle hunters and outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his legendary nonfiction ranged from influential nature books like Wildlife in America to advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez and Leonard Peltier. Underlying all these disparate pursuits was Matthiessen's existential

In this episode of Library Talks, award-winning author and New York Times Magazine staff writer Jonathan Mahler joins the podcast to discuss the transformative, tumultuous era in New York City he evokes vividly in The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, with bestselling novelist Amor Towles.   The Gods of New York is an immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened. 

In this episode of Library Talks, the former director of the CDC Dr. Tom Frieden, joins Library Talks to discuss his new book The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives – Including Your Own. He's joined in conversation by Chelsea Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation.   Dr. Tom Frieden led New York's health department after 9/11, directed the CDC during the Ebola epidemic, and has fought tuberculosis and other lethal threats around the world. His new book draws on his decades of experience to outline practical approaches to winning the battle for health. Using real-world examples—from laboratories solving deadly mysteries to frontline fights against tuberculosis and drug-resistant outbreaks—Frieden shows how to spot invisible threats, pursue seemingly impossible solutions, and build a world where people live healthier, longer lives.

In this episode of Library Talks, Irin Carmon speaks with Melissa Murray about her new book Unbearable. In Unbearable, Irin Carmon draws on the history and politics of reproduction, showing how the American story of pregnancy has long been incomplete, hidden, or taken for granted. Pregnant herself while reporting on the lived experiences of five women navigating pregnancy during the Supreme Court's rollback of abortion, Carmon blends personal narrative with rigorous journalism to reveal systemic injustices that span from New York City to rural Alabama, touching lives across both urban and rural communities, rich and poor alike.   Carmon speaks with legal scholar Melissa Murray about how the healthcare system fails women at their most vulnerable—and why a more dignified future is urgently needed.