One of San Francisco’s most provocative writers, Rebecca Solnit explores major disaster and discovers people’s capacity to rise to the occasion with creativity and courage.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:54 — 26.0MB)

Former California State Historian Kevin Starr talks to KGO Radio’s John Rothmann about the final volume of his magnum opus on the Golden State.

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Internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev “creates a world that has the richness of invention and the obsessiveness of dreams,” wrote The New York Times Book Review of his novel A Pigeon and a Boy. Don’t miss this discussion with one of Israel’s foremost literary figures.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:34 — 25.9MB)

Maxine Hong Kingston, Chana Block and Susan Griffin celebrate the life of Grace Paley, whose generous spirit animated her writing, as well as her deep engagement with social and political issues. Whether fighting for equal rights for women or protesting American foreign policy, Grace was a tireless defender of free expression and human rights. Her compassion and vitality animated her poetry and short stories, making her one of America’s most influential and beloved writers.

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Born in 1945, Greil Marcus, an American author, music journalist and cultural critic, is notable for producing a series of scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.

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Former Soviet dissident, political prisoner, and human rights icon, Natan Sharansky has spent his life championing democracy and freedom. In 1977, he was arrested by the KGB for his activism and his support for Soviet Jewry’s demands to emigrate to Israel and imprisoned for nine years. His latest book, Defending Identity, is a piercing examination of the dominant force that shapes political interactions and its indispensable role in protecting democracy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:08 — 26.6MB)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres has written eleven novels. An outspoken anti-Bush blogger, Smiley speaks her mind on subjects ranging from horse training to marriage, Barbie, and impulse buying. Her new novel Ten Days in the Hills is about Hollywood and sex.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:26 — 26.7MB)

There may be as many as 300,000 child soldiers, high on drugs and wielding AK-47s, in more than 50 conflicts around the world. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. This former child soldier, who was swept up in Sierra Leone’s civil war, gives us one of the only first-person accounts of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare.

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One of Israel’s most celebrated poets, Agi Mishol discusses her work and her growing up in Israel as the child of Holocaust survivors.

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Thirty-something feminist activist Jennifer Baumgardner argues that the women’s movement didn’t necessarily provide her generation with a road map to the equal, fulfilling relationships that they expected. It is the insurgent voices of bisexual women, she says, that are furthering the aims of the feminist dream for a better world.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:54 — 21.9MB)