Wordy Birds

A Voyage Long and Strange

Original airdate: June 6, 2008

If your wondering how Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz ended up writing about Columbus and Ponce de Leon… wonder no more.

Here is the official “Story Behind the Book”…

On a New England road trip a few summers ago, I visited Plymouth Rock. The boulder’s surface was only five feet square, with a badly mended cleft in the middle. It looked like a fossilized potato. A park ranger told me that tourists often heaped scorn on the sacred stone. They also asked odd questions. Was it true the Mayflower crashed into the Rock? Did the Pilgrims serve Thanksgiving on top of it?

“Or they ask, ‘Is this where the three ships landed?’” the ranger said. “They mean the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. People think Columbus dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home.”

She had to patiently explain that Columbus’s landing and the Pilgrims’ arrival occurred a thousand miles and 128 years apart. “Americans learn about 1492 and 1620 as kids, and that’s all they remember as adults,” she said. “The rest of the story is blank.”

Back on the road, winding past cranberry bogs, I scanned the data stored in my own brain about America’s founding by Europeans. In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue . . . John Smith and Jamestown . . . Pilgrims in funny hats . . . Of the Indians who greeted the newcomers, I of course knew Pocahontas, Squanto, and . . . Hiawatha?

That was the sum of what I dredged up. Scraps from elementary school and the Thanksgiving table. As for dates, I’d mislaid an entire century, the one between Columbus’s sail in 1492 and Jamestown’s founding in 16-0-something. Expensively educated at a private school and university—a history major, no less!—I’d matriculated to middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America.

Returning home, I undertook some remedial study. This revealed a world unknown to me, of conquistadors, castaways, and other adventurers who roamed America long before the Mayflower landed. What would it be like, I wondered, to explore this New World, not only in books but on the ground? To take a pre-Pilgrimage through early America that ended at Plymouth Rock instead of beginning there? To rediscover my native land, the U.S. continent? – from www.voyagelongandstrange.com

Thanks for tuning in.

Liz

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Free Food for Millionaires

Original airdate: May 30, 2008

The official description of “Free Food for Millionaires” goes something like this:

“Casey Han’s four years at Princeton gave her many things, “But no job and a number of bad habits.” Casey’s parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots. “Free Food for Millionaires” offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as “Vanity Fair” and “Middlemarch,” Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one’s identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.”

Actually, it goes exactly like that. Forgive the cut and paste. Min Jin Lee was a great guest… listen for yourself.

Thanks for tuning in.

Liz

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Predictably Irrational

Original airdate: May 23, 2008

When Dan Ariely sat down on the couch to speak with me during the long day of interviewing the guests of the Junior League Book and Author Dinner I blurted. The first thing I said was, “How old are you?” To which he replied “42.”

He said he went to Burning Man for his 40th. Again blurting, I asked him if he did drugs while he was there. He said he “took pot.”

Extremely educated men unnerve me. I fumble, stammer and my throat clenches tight. I become the babbling female. What is it about them that dries up my verbosity? The only thing I could manage to respond to his comment about taking pot, was, “Dan- you don’t take pot, you smoke pot.”

I didn’t even get a smile. His credentials and long list of papers published is available on his website, http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/. The rest of our conversation is posted below.

I cut most of my own comments out of this show because, true to the nature of the program, what he has to say is much more interesting that what I asked. I hope you find this true too.

Read the book, give it to your Dad for Father’s Day. I highly recommend it. It’s also available on audible.com

Thanks for tuning in.

Liz

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.