books

May 21, 2013

Books about learning from failure have been trendy the last couple years; Tavis Smiley published Fail Up, for example. And, there’s a new book for managers, The Wisdom of Failure.

Web Extra: Our conversation with Mario Livio about his book "Is God A Mathematician?"

In the Internet age, bullying has taken on new, complex, and insidious forms. Journalist Emily Bazelon explains how bullying has evolved online and what social media companies are doing about it. Bazelon is author of "Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy." Also, we talk to Chris McComas, mother of Grace McComas, the Howard County teenager who committed suicide last April after being bullied in social media.

Have you ever had a fit of the hiccups or found yourself yawning and sneezing and wondering what your body was up to? Why does tickling make us squirm and giggle? University of Maryland Baltimore County professor Robert Provine has studied the behavior and physiology of our bodies’ mundane actions in an effort to explain them. He is the author of Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccuping, and Beyond.

Author Charlie LeDuff examines the gritty past and present of his once-prosperous hometown in Detroit: An American Autopsy. LeDuff, a Pulitzer-winning former staff writer for The New York Times and former reporter for The Detroit News, is currently a television reporter for Detroit's Fox 2 News. 

With Sunday's Super Bowl presenting an historic fraternal faceoff -- Coach John Harbaugh's Baltimore Ravens versus Coach Jim Harbaugh's San Francisco 49ers -- we take a look at famous brothers, from the Booths to the Van Goghs to the Marx Brothers, with George Howe Colt, author of Brothers, a memoir of his siblings and iconic brothers through history.

Dan Fesperman joins me in the studio. He’s a former journalist and an award-winning author who lives in Baltimore. After serving as a foreign correspondent and reporter for The Baltimore Sun for many years, he now writes espionage thrillers.

This segment originally aired on May 8, 2012.

If you talk to most opera fanatics, they’ll tell you that their love of opera started early. Maybe their parents listened to the Met broadcasts every Saturday afternoon. Or, maybe they were taken to the opera by their grandparents.

A new kind of library is slowly spreading across America. It’s about the size of a bird-house, holds about 50 books, and you can put it in your front yard.

Web Extra: Lesley Noll on the response to the little free library prototype