Welcome to my message board.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
Fresh Air: Writers Speak with Terry Gross
This CD is a fine travel companion
SAM HODGES
Considerable ink has been spilled on Oprah Winfrey's role as encourager and shaper of reading in America. A book arrived here just the other day that is devoted solely to assessing the influence of Winfrey and her TV book club.
It's time for the Terry Gross effect to be analyzed as well. Her public radio program "Fresh Air" (heard weekdays on Charlotte's WFAE-FM, 90.7) is an intellectual oasis, not least because it often includes book reviews and author interviews.
When talking to authors, Gross always seems to have done her homework -- that is, read the author's latest book. She's thoughtful and enthusiastic in her questioning, and she gets out of the way.
I recently had a long road trip, and I took along "Fresh Air: Writers Speak with Terry Gross," a new, three-CD, HighBridge Audio package, lasting 3 1/2 hours and retailing for $22.95. It proved to be excellent company.
The collection consists of excerpts of her interviews -- some going back to the mid-1980s -- with Stephen King, Maurice Sendak, Richard Price, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson, John Updike, David Rakoff, Fran Lebowitz, David Sedaris and Billy Collins.
If you're looking for patterns, you'll notice that most are male and all are fiction writers, poets or humorists. The closest thing to a Southerner is David Sedaris, who spent some years -- did some years is how he would put it -- in Raleigh.
Lebowitz is painfully funny in discussing writer's block. Sendak, author of "Where the Wild Things Are" and other children's book classics, reveals that children cry when he does autograph sessions. (They fear he won't give their books back.)
The Updike interview turns on, of all things, how psoriasis has affected him as a writer. Roth discusses his Newark upbringing, sex and prostate cancer. Among his declarations: "Novels are an assault on generalization."
The King interview occurred after his recovery (more or less) from near fatal-injuries sustained when a van plowed into him as he was walking along a country road in Maine. King describes how the episode was and wasn't like an episode from his horror fiction.
Gross works in a riveting recording of Ginsberg doing the first public reading of his poem "America," in 1956. The interviews with him and Baldwin are poignant; both men, fearlessly iconoclastic in their lives and work, have since died.
Some of the interviews are frustratingly short. As there are plenty more in the "Fresh Air" vault to choose from for future CDs, I hope the trend will be to fewer, fuller selections.
SAM HODGES
Considerable ink has been spilled on Oprah Winfrey's role as encourager and shaper of reading in America. A book arrived here just the other day that is devoted solely to assessing the influence of Winfrey and her TV book club.
It's time for the Terry Gross effect to be analyzed as well. Her public radio program "Fresh Air" (heard weekdays on Charlotte's WFAE-FM, 90.7) is an intellectual oasis, not least because it often includes book reviews and author interviews.
When talking to authors, Gross always seems to have done her homework -- that is, read the author's latest book. She's thoughtful and enthusiastic in her questioning, and she gets out of the way.
I recently had a long road trip, and I took along "Fresh Air: Writers Speak with Terry Gross," a new, three-CD, HighBridge Audio package, lasting 3 1/2 hours and retailing for $22.95. It proved to be excellent company.
The collection consists of excerpts of her interviews -- some going back to the mid-1980s -- with Stephen King, Maurice Sendak, Richard Price, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson, John Updike, David Rakoff, Fran Lebowitz, David Sedaris and Billy Collins.
If you're looking for patterns, you'll notice that most are male and all are fiction writers, poets or humorists. The closest thing to a Southerner is David Sedaris, who spent some years -- did some years is how he would put it -- in Raleigh.
Lebowitz is painfully funny in discussing writer's block. Sendak, author of "Where the Wild Things Are" and other children's book classics, reveals that children cry when he does autograph sessions. (They fear he won't give their books back.)
The Updike interview turns on, of all things, how psoriasis has affected him as a writer. Roth discusses his Newark upbringing, sex and prostate cancer. Among his declarations: "Novels are an assault on generalization."
The King interview occurred after his recovery (more or less) from near fatal-injuries sustained when a van plowed into him as he was walking along a country road in Maine. King describes how the episode was and wasn't like an episode from his horror fiction.
Gross works in a riveting recording of Ginsberg doing the first public reading of his poem "America," in 1956. The interviews with him and Baldwin are poignant; both men, fearlessly iconoclastic in their lives and work, have since died.
Some of the interviews are frustratingly short. As there are plenty more in the "Fresh Air" vault to choose from for future CDs, I hope the trend will be to fewer, fuller selections.