Vick Mickunas

Geraldine Brooks has made a seemingly seamless transition from her previous career as a foreign correspondent to her present occupation of novelist.

Brooks visited the Book Nook in early September, 2001 to talk about her first historical novel "Year of Wonders." She returns to discuss her latest effort, "Caleb's Crossing." This book is based on the true story of a Wampanoag Indian who graduated from Harvard College during the 17th century.

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a war correspondent for the New York Times. He was part of an investigative team that won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting.

Hedges reported from war zones in Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and the Balkans. He knows the horrors of war. His first book, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" is one of the most powerful anti-war manifestoes of the last decade. Hedges appeared in the Book Nook when that book was published and he returned for another visit when it was reissued in paperback.

George Vecsey has been writing about baseball for 50 years. When he was a kid Vecsey rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The St. Louis Cardinals had a hitting star then, a fellow named Stan Musial. They called him "Stan the Man." Vecsey has fond memories of those Dodger/Cardinal games of the 1940's and '50's.

Vecsey's new biography of Musial reveals the story of Musial's humble origins in a steel mill town in Pennsylvania. We learn how Musial achieved fame yet never lost his sense of kinship with ordinary people.

Melissa Fay Greene is the author of a number of highly respected works. Her book "Praying for Sheetrock" was named one of the top 100 journalistic works of the twentieth century by the journalism department at New York University. Greene has chosen some weighty topics to cover; the bombing of a synagogue in "The Temple Bombing", and the African AIDS-HIV pandemic in "There Is No Me Without You".