Jean’s Pick of the Week: Bread of Angels, hands down. I so delighted in Stephanie Saldana’s memoir about the year she spent in Damascus, learning Arabic, exploring her ancient Christian roots and diving into the Qur’an, that I called her up and told her Bread of Angels is a book I’d like to sleep with. On top of all that, it’s the most delicate love story I think I’ve ever come across. It explained so much about the greater jihad, the Muslim Jesus, and Maryam, the Muslim Virgin Mary, that this could easily have been an official part of our Inside Islam series.
Monday: A Road Trip Through China: Peter Hessler, in his new book, Country Driving, views China through the windshield, showing us how the automobile is at the constantly moving boundary of modernization in China, from farm to factory.
Tuesday: The Future of Journalism: Media critics John Nichols and Bob McChesney are at it again. In their latest critique, they’re saying traditional journalism is in trouble and needs to reinvent itself in order to survive.
Wednesday: Crazy Like Us: Ethan Watters is tracking mental illness around the globe, and he’s finding that the world is going crazy—American style. As doctors and pharmaceuticals cross borders, illnesses as defined by Western medicine, like depression and anorexia, are popping up in places they never before occurred while local ways of understanding mental health issues—from melancholy to what we call schizophrenia—are being lost. We’ll talk about cultural differences in understandings of the inner life, and why homogenization might not be a good thing.
Thursday: The Routes of Man: Roads bind our world both metaphorically and literally and transform landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Ted Conover, author of the book The Routes of Man, explores six of these key byways worldwide. From highway checkpoints in the West Bank to congestion and chaos on Nigerian freeways to a road that will forever change the lives of the inhabitants of the Indian Himalayas, he tells us harrowing stories of the impact that roads have on our world and our lives.
Friday: Lucid Food: How do you integrate food politics into a daily cooking practice that is convenient, affordable, and delicious? Sustainable chef and caterer Louisa Shafia will show us how to make simple, earth-friendly choices in the kitchen, and share recipes from her new cookbook, Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life.
Despair not! Spring is in the air! Have a lovely weekend,
Jean
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1 comment:
Loved today's program and can't wait to try the chicken recipe from Lucid Food. You said you'd be posting it?
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