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It’s summer—time to put your feet up, get a cool drink
and read! Here are some reading suggestions from the
hosts and producers of AM 580’s Focus 580 (10 am
M-F) and The Afternoon Magazine (noon M-F). Click
on the link to hear an archived interviews with the
author. |
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 Martha
Diehl,
associate producer,
Focus 580
Craig Allen Johnson’s Walt Longmire Mystery
series, set in eastern Wyoming, offers strong character
studies and sense of place.
Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery
gives the police procedural from an Italian view, and
presents the Venice visitors don’t see. One gets a
feeling for Italian life and politics with, again, a
very strong sense of place.
David Inge, host,
Focus 580
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of
Henry Ward Beecher, by Debby Applegate.
Although he has since been eclipsed by his sister
Harriet Beecher Stowe, he was one of the best-known
Americans of his day. This book won the 2007 Pulitzer
Prize for biography.
 RealAudio
| MP3 Download
Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome, by Robert
Harris.
Historical fiction based on the life of Cicero.
 RealAudio
| MP3 Download
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s
Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
The story of the failed effort to rebuild Iraq after the
fall of Saddam Hussein. Written by a reporter for the
Washington Post.
RealAudio
| MP3 Download
 Celeste
Quinn, host,
The Afternoon Magazine
Twinkie Deconstructed, by popular reference book
writer Steve Ettlinger.
This is an enlightening and entertaining look at the
ingredients in processed foods. Ettlinger calls the
Twinkie “the uber-iconic food product.”
 RealAudio
| MP3 Download
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and
the Arts, by the critic Clive James.
This is a collection of more than 100 essays about 20th
century culture and politics, its villains and its
heroes.
West from Appomattox, by historian Heather Cox
Richardson.
A story of the construction (for better and for worse)
of America’s middle class world view in the wake of the
Civil War. The story is told through the life stories of
a wide range of individuals from a wealthy former
Confederate general to a former slave turned cowboy to
Andrew Carnegie, Buffalo Bill, Booker T. Washington and
Julia Ward Howe, among others.
RealAudio
| MP3 Download
Harriet Williamson,
producer Focus 580 and
The Afternoon Magazine
My three nonfiction choices are wonderfully written
memoirs where the book title captures the core story.
To overcome the horror and boredom of the first Gulf War
in Kuwait’s desert Marine Marcus Eriksen dreams of
rafting the 2000 mile Mississippi River. My River
Home: A Journey from the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico
is about his boyhood to manhood development,
adventure on the river and reconciling war and anti-war
behavior.
RealAudio
| MP3 Download
Time journalist Michael Weisskopf’s act of
heroism while reporting from Iraq sends him for
treatment to the amputation ward of Walter Reed Hospital
in 2003. Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward
57 is about Weisskopf’s loss, pain, prostheses,
changes in family life and parallel stories of three
other soldiers as they too learn to live without limbs.
RealAudio
| MP3 Download
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is
witnessed through a history of the ancient and
illustrious Nusseibeh family in the book Once Upon a
Country: A Palestinian Life by Sari Nusseibeh, a
philosopher and president of Al-Quds University of
Jerusalem, a man of humanity and peace.
RealAudio
| MP3 Download
See other suggestions
and add your own!
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