Episodes
Wednesday Sep 29, 2021
Season 5 Ep. 106 The Age Old Story of a Sisterhood with guest Grace Sammon
Wednesday Sep 29, 2021
Wednesday Sep 29, 2021
Society doesn’t really know what to do with older women. People give a lot of lip-service to the value of older women’s wisdom and experience but older women are often forgotten. As if they don’t have anything worth contributing once they hit a certain age.
Our guest this week, Grace Sammon, has written a novel that tackles this modern dilemma for older women. Titled The Eves, it features a main character named Jessica who struggles with her own aging but is helped along in her journey by a group of even older women whose experiences and insights get Jessica to screw her head on straight again.
You can find Grace Sammon on Instagram at @gracesammonwrites and on Facebook on the group "Bookish Road Trip". You can find links to her radio show at her website www.gracesammon.net.
Books we discuss in this episode:
1- The Eves by Grace Sammon
2- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
3- Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz
4- Dolly Madison and the War of 1812 by Libby Carty McNamee
5- Susannah’s Midnight Ride: The Girl Who Won the Revolutionary War by Libby Carty McNamee
6- The Spiral Shell: A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II by Sandell Morse
7- Little Tea by Claire Fullerton
8- Mourning Dove by Clair Fullerton
9- Brave Girl, Quiet Girl by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Podcasts mentioned—
1- The Storytellers with Grace Sammon
Movies mentioned—
1- Nomadland (2020)
Social Media Group
1- The Bookish Road Trip
You can find us here:
Website - www.perksofbeingabooklover.com.
FB - The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Insta: @perksofbeingabookloverpod
Tuesday Sep 21, 2021
Perks RePlay Ep. 80 Resistance Reading with Guest Farrah Alexander 9-22-21
Tuesday Sep 21, 2021
Tuesday Sep 21, 2021
** We have a replay this week. We want our listeners to have a second chance to listen to our talk with author Farrah Alexander about her book, 'Raising The Resistance' about how to work social justice into our everyday lives. With some court cases on the horizon and strikes against women's rights in Texas, this seemed like a good episode to revisit. Farrah is working on her second book and has started law school at Indiana University. Next week there will be an all new episode **
Sometimes it only takes a spark to start a fire. For writer and activist Farrah Alexander, the small flicker of an idea that eventually became her first book was her January 2017 participation in the historic Women's March in Washington DC. She encountered so many women who were emboldened to make change but weren’t sure how to channel their energies.
Farrah wrote her book titled "Raising the Resistance: A Mother’s Guide to Practical Activism" which gives suggestions on how to be a leader in your life and a model for change for your children. But the book is also witty and whimsical which makes it accessible to a wide audience.
Farrah has been a journalist and freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, and BuzzFeed. Her work focuses on feminism, social justice, parenting, and politics. She is also a Jeremiah Fellow with Bend the Ark, a Jewish partnership for justice which aims to combat white supremacy and mobilize communities for social change.
In this episode, Farrah talks to us about how even as a child she was drawn to books with strong female characters like Amelia Bedelia, how she wants to make the ideas of feminism less academic and more accessible, why she feels essay writing can be a powerful tool for women to share their stories, and which item of her political memorabilia collection is her most cherished.
Books mentioned in this episode:
1- Raising the Resistance: A Mother's Guide to Practical Activism by Farrah Alexander
2- Amelia Bedelia books by Peggy Parish
3- Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
4- The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols
5- A Promised Land by Barack Obama
6- Becoming by Michelle Obama
7- Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen
Tuesday Sep 14, 2021
Tuesday Sep 14, 2021
Most weeks we talk about books and being a booklover in terms of exciting new releases or the ways in which writers create their imagined worlds and the characters who inhabit them. But today we are talking about how books can literally change lives because books are a business and can generate income.
In this week’s episode, we speak to Elizabeth Senn-Alvey, executive director of Emerging Workforce Initiative, a nonprofit in Louisville that targets ways to help marginalized youth who have systemic or personal issues that could impede their journey into the workforce and develop marketable skills. One of the programs they offer is The Book Works.
The Book Works is a social enterprise, which is a program that helps address local teens and young adults unmet needs such as poverty, homelessness, and limited education through a market-driven approach; or in other words teaching through learning a business.
The folks at Emerging Workforce Initiative were inspired by More Than Words in Boston; a youth program that for 20 years has empowered young people to take charge of a business and their lives through books.
So we take a look at how our secondhand books in the Louisville community have helped young people in our city.
The Book Works Sale takes place September 18-19. Go to their website for more details.
You can find The Book Works on instagram at @thebookworkslou or on Facebook at The Book Works Louisville. Their website is www.thebookworks.org.
Books mentioned in this episode:
1- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
2- Towers Falling by Jewel Parker Rhodes
3- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
4- The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
5- Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
6- Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
7- Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe by Preston Norton
Wednesday Sep 08, 2021
Season 5 Ep. 104 Stories of the Crown with guest St. Clair Detrick-Jules 9-8-21
Wednesday Sep 08, 2021
Wednesday Sep 08, 2021
Our guest this week is St. Clair Detrick-Jules, a Brown University graduate who is a filmmaker and a new author. Her book 'My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories from the Sisterhood' debuts on September 28 and features essays by and photographs of Black women who have come to some deeper understandings about what their hair and how they wear it means to them.
We talk to St. Clair about chemical treatments for Black hair and how they differ from the treatments white women know, how hair can play a role in mother/daughter relationships, and the important reason she wanted to create this book in the first place.When we recorded this episode, Black hair had recently made the news because of the International Swimming Federation’s ban on Soul Caps at the Tokyo Olympics which are made for Black swimmers with natural hair.
You can find St. Clair on social media at @stclairdetrickjules or at her website www.mybeautifulblackhair.com.
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
1- My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories from the Sisterhood by St. Clair Detrick-Jules
2- The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination With the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson
3- Litany for the Long Moment by Mary-Kim Arnold
4- Water Street by Crystal Wilkinson
5- Blackberries, Blackberries by Crystal Wilkinson
Shows/Films mentioned--
1- Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
2- Good Hair ((2009 documentary)
Tuesday Aug 31, 2021
Season 5 Ep. 103 Travel Expectations with Amber Share and Suzanne Roberts 9-1-21
Tuesday Aug 31, 2021
Tuesday Aug 31, 2021
Lots of people travel around Labor Day and start thinking about fall break adventures so this week’s episode is jam-packed with travel writing. We chat with two guests this week.
Our first guest is not a writer, but a graphic designer who began making cool illustrated posters of national parks on an Instagram account called Subpar Parks. Amber Share couples her illustrations with terrible one-star Yelp reviews those parks receive from visitors who weren’t terribly impressed with majestic things like The Grand Canyon and Old Faithful. Those illustrations have gone viral and she recently collected them all in book format and included facts about each national park from park rangers. Her book, SubPar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors is a New York Times Bestseller.
Our second guest is writer Suzanne Roberts, who National Geographic named a “Next Great Travel Writer.” Her most recent book, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, has received many awards including the Independent Publisher Book Award and National Indie Excellence Awards. She weaves a story of maturing as a woman and becoming a veteran traveler. Her book will make you laugh but it also gets serious, and those serious essays make her humor seem all the more poignant.
You can find Amber Share on social media at @subparparks or at her website www.ambersharedesign.com. And Suzanne Roberts can be found on instqgram @suzanneroberts28 or on her website at www.suzanneroberts.net
Books Mentioned in This Episode:
1- SubPar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors by Amber Share
2- Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love & Travel by Suzanne Roberts
3- My Antonia by Willa Cather
4- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
5- Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
6- The Innocents by Michael Crummey
7- The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
8- Dispatches from Pluto: Lost & Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant
9- The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner