AOT #20: Frank McCourt Podcasts Teacher Man

Frank McCourt, nearly a decade ago, became an unlikey star when, at the age of sixty-six, he burst onto the literary scene with Angela’s Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland.

After Angela’s Ashes came ‘Tis, McCourt’s glorious account of his early years in New York. Now McCourt reads from and discusses the third volume in his life story, Teacher Man, the long-awaited book about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer.

($26.00) Scribner ISBN # 0743243773

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AOT #19: Joan Didion Podcasts The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion discusses her National Book Award-nominated book The Year of Magical Thinking, with author, friend and radio host, Sara Davidson. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband, wife, child, relative or friend. From one of America’s iconic writers, comes a stunning book of electric honesty and passion.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma (she later dies).

This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

Joan Didion is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction including Play It As It Lays, Where I Was From, Political Fictions, The Last Thing He Wanted, After Henry, Miami, Democracy, Salvador, A Book of Common Prayer, and Run River.

(The audio for this podcast was furnished courtesy of KGNU radio in Boulder which also broadcast the event.)

($23.95) Knopf ISBN # 140004314X.

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AOT #18: Nicholas Sparks Podcasts At First Sight

Nicholas Sparks, the author of many bestsellers including The Rescue, Nights in Rodanthe, The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, True Believer and his moving memoir, Three Weeks with My Brother (written with his brother Micah), discusses his new novel, At First Sight.

At First Sight is an astonishing tale about the love between a man and a woman and between a parent and a child. Continuing the story of the young couple introduced in Sparks’s bestselling True Believer, this novel captures all the heartbreak, tension, romance and surprises of those who are newly wed.

($24.95) Warner Books ISBN 0-446-53242-8. Please visit Nicholas Sparks’s web site as well.

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AOT #17: Will Arntz Podcasts What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Will Arntz, a research physicist and spirtual seeker, and co-creator of the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!?, discusses his book What The Bleep Do We Know!?: Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality.

With the help of more than a dozen research and theoretical scientists, this book takes readers through the looking glass of quantum physics into a universe that is more bizarre and alive than ever imagined. This science leads not just to the material world, but deep into the realm of spirituality, and offers mind stretching questions and details endless possibilities for individual reality.

($26.95) HCI Books ISBN 0-7573-0334-x. Go down the rabbit hole in the official What the Bleep!? web site as well.

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