Book Nook

Over the years that I have been reading books and listening to music I have found that the creative processes of writing fiction and writing music have something in common when it comes down to preserving the literature or music which is being created; some authors have just one really great book to write and some musicians have just one really great album to record. Life is funny that way. I suppose that these creative people sometimes get all their really good stuff out in just that one package.

When Michael Koryta was a teenager in Bloomington, Indiana an abduction and homicide took place just down the road from where he was living. A young woman had been riding her bicycle in the area when she vanished without a trace. The police were baffled by the crime. Later on a confession was made by someone who claimed to have been involved in her abduction. When they attempted to verify the details of that confession in the hope of locating the victim they discovered that the confession had been spurious. It wasn't true.

Dennis Turner was feeling perturbed about some things that have been happening in our country. Fortunately he found a distraction that took his mind away from current events. Turner heard about an archive of letters in Cincinnati-these missives penned by nuns who were living in convents in Europe during World War Two inspired him to write this book.

The opioid crisis is a national emergency. The scourge of opioid abuse and addiction has hit the Appalachian region especially hard. It has been documented that there's a town in West Virginia that was literally inundated with Oxycontin by the manufacturer. Southern Ohio has seen more than our share of overdoses and tragedy.

After Sue Grafton died last December I put together a special memorial program in her honor. You can locate that program in our podcast archive. I took excerpts from my first interview with Sue for her book "M is for Malice" and my third and final interview with her for "W is for Wasted."

The Star Wars movie franchise is alive and well after all these years and the physicist and Star Wars aficionado Patrick Johnson decided that it was high time Star Wars fans had a handbook to help them understand the physics that come into play in the films. So he decided to write one.

Lake County, Florida used to be a very dangerous place to live. It wasn't because there was a high crime rate. In fact Willis McCall, the long-time sheriff of Lake County presented more of a hazard to some residents than any criminals ever would. In his book "Devil in the Grove" the author Gilbert King wrote about a horrible injustice that took place there and the crimes that were perpetrated by that corrupt and violent sheriff.

Pamela Wechsler is a former prosecutor who has taken up a new career writing for television and penning crime novels. Her latest book is her third in a series set in Boston. Her protagonist is Abby Endicott, the chief homicide prosecutor for the city. The author is a former prosecutor in Boston so she is writing about matters that she knows rather well.

Gloria Stuart was a movie star in early Hollywood. Back in those days they would have called her a starlet. She left Hollywood and the movie business and began a second career as an artist and a maker of hand-made books. Today her work is in museums.

William T. Vollmann writes some massive books. His current offering is so enormous that his publisher had to split it into two volumes. The first installment is "No Immediate Danger-Volume One of the Carbon Ideologies." Volume Two, "No Good Alternative," will be published in June.

I spoke to Bill Vollmann about the first volume-we had a sobering discussion about this very important book. Vollmann has written this book by taking the approach that he is leaving this text behind for some reader in the future to peruse. A reader who will probably be fairly miserable and living in a world that is far different from the one we know now.