Books

This segment originally aired on March 6, 2012.

Part 2 of our two-hour special on the Newtown tragedy.

She died eight years ago, but Julia Child's influence on American food and appetites lives on. French chef, public television pioneer, author and cult icon, Julia Child is the subject of a new, 500-page biography by Bob Spitz, our guest. Spitz is the author of “Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child.” Original airdate 12/4/12

Redefining what masculinity looks like in the 21st century, with Carlos Andres Gomez, author of “Man Up: Cracking the Code of Modern Manhood. Original airdate 10/10/12

Maryland made history on Election Day by becoming, with Maine and Washington, the first states to make same-sex marriage legal by ballot. Nine states and the District of Columbia now allow gay and lesbian couples to be married. But there’s still a very different story in the South. Author Bernadette Barton says the Bible Belt is full of gays and lesbians trying to live ordinary, spiritual lives, but the conventions of small town life, Southern attitudes and the political power of Christian institutions smother them with both passive and active homophobia.

What was health care like in early America, before and after the revolution? Elaine Breslaw, retired professor of history at Morgan State University, provides a fascinating and skin-crawling chronicle of the 18th Century -- the practitioners and their practices, from purging to pain relief, and the whole realm of alternatives to the infection-fighting medicine that was being developed in Europe.

Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall is an American legal legend for his role in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, and for later becoming the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. In Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice, University of Maryland law professor Larry S. Gibson delivers the definitive look at Marshall’s Maryland years. Original airdate 12/12/12

Lawrence Blum, acclaimed philosopher and professor at the University of Massachusetts, taught a course on race and racism over four years at an ethnically and economically diverse high school in Cambridge, Mass. He's written a book about his surprising and sometimes humorous conversations with uninhibited teenagers -- the new face of America.

With the number of Americans in poverty at its highest level since the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and cartoonist Joe Sacco chronicle poverty's advance in four areas of the country -- a native American reservation, an impoverished New Jersey city, a rural mining region, and the farms where migrant workers toil under harsh conditions. Hedge's vivid commentary and Sacco's trenchant illustrations are published in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Nation Books. Original airdate 11/29/12

As Barbara Ehrenreich did to chronicle the lives of the working poor, Tracie McMillan took jobs picking produce in California, stocking lettuce in a Walmart in Detroit and working as an "expo" in a busy Applebee’s in Brooklyn to tell stories about how the country eats. The result is an odyssey through the food industry, and through class and American culture. McMillan is the author of "The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table." Original air date 11/16/12