799.5 Laurie Frankel's Enormous Wings (Revisited) | My Last Book with Julie Gilbert

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have in common? In addition to being literary luminaries who've been famous for nearly two hundred years, they all lived in Concord, Massachusetts, a little town roughly 20 miles northwest of Boston. How did a town of just over two thousand people come to host so many celebrated American writers? And how did their ideas end up changing the world? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Bruce Nichols about his new book The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World. PLUS a listener tells Jacke about his years of struggles to read - and how a surprisingly easy trick changed his life forever.

Jacke gets ready for the Halloween season with an episode filled with madness, murder, and ghosts! First, he recounts the story of Romantic period writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Although the brother-sister duo later became famous for their summaries of Shakespeare's tales, they each spent time in madhouses due to fits of "lunacy," one of which resulted in Mary killing their mother with a kitchen knife. Then Jacke talks to author Simon Wroe about his new novel Ghost Month, in which the spirits of the dead return to visit London for four weeks each year. What do they want? And how do Londoners respond? Happy Halloween!

What does it mean to live a good life? How can we accomplish it? For more than two thousand years, Western civilization has looked to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to help answer those questions. In this episode, Jacke talks to translator Robin Waterfield and scholar John Sellars about their new edition of Aristotle's classic text. PLUS Daniel Olivas (Chicano Frankenstein, Waiting for Godínez) stops by to discuss his choice for the last book he will ever read.

What do Iranians - both home and abroad - think of race? Does "blackness" exist in Iran? And what can we learn about race and slavery in Iran from folklore, ethnography, literature, and films? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Amy Motlagh about her book Colorblind: Racial Thinking and Cultural Production in Modern Iran and the Diaspora. PLUS James Baldwin biographer Nicholas Boggs (Baldwin: A Love Story) stops by to discuss his choice for the last book he will ever read.

Shakespeare himself didn't attend a university - and yet, for centuries, the world's greatest scholars have studied his works to learn about everything from poetry to politics. But have they missed the lessons that Shakespeare had for them in particular? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Sean Keilen about his book Shakespeare's Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts, which examines three plays with scholars as protagonists to see what advice the Bard might have for modern-day academics.