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Martin Bandyke Under Covers: Martin Bandyke interviews Dylan Jones, author of David Bowie: A Life.
Dylan Jones’s engrossing, magisterial biography of David Bowie is unlike any Bowie story ever written. Drawn from over 180 interviews with friends, rivals, lovers, and collaborators, some of whom have never before spoken about their relationship with Bowie, this oral history weaves a hypnotic spell as it unfolds the story of a remarkable rise to stardom and an unparalleled artistic path. Tracing Bowie’s life from the English suburbs to London to New York to Los Angeles, Berlin, and beyond, its collective voices describe a man profoundly shaped by his relationship with his schizophrenic half-brother Terry; an intuitive artist who could absorb influences through intense relationships and yet drop people cold when they were no longer of use; and a social creature equally comfortable partying with John Lennon and dining with Frank Sinatra.
By turns insightful and deliciously gossipy, David Bowie: A Life is as intimate a portrait as may ever be drawn. It sparks with admiration and grievances, lust and envy, as the speakers bring you into studios and bedrooms they shared with Bowie, and onto stages and film sets, opening corners of his mind and experience that transform our understanding of both artist and art. Including illuminating, never-before-seen material from Bowie himself, drawn from a series of Jones’s interviews with him across two decades, David Bowie is an epic, unforgettable cocktail-party conversation about a man whose enigmatic shapeshifting and irrepressible creativity produced one of the most sprawling, fascinating lives of our time.
Martin’s interview with Dylan Jones was recorded on September 21, 2017.
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers: Martin talks to Howard Markel, author of The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
John Harvey Kellogg was one of America’s most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast.
In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America’s notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.
As Markel chronicles the Kelloggs’ fascinating, Magnificent Ambersons–like ascent into the pantheon of American industrialists, we see the vast changes in American social mores that took shape in diet, health, medicine, philanthropy, and food manufacturing during seven decades—changing the lives of millions and helping to shape our industrial age.
Martin’s interview with Howard Markel was recorded on August 23, 2017.
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Doug Stanton Discusses His New Book: "The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War"
On January 31st, 1968 as many as 100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers attacked thirty-six cities throughout South Vietnam in an attack known as the Tet Offensive. This was a turning point in the decade-long war that led to, among other things, President Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election. It was a national watershed moment, but for 19-year-old Stan Parker and the young men of the US Army’s recon platoon, Echo Company of the 101st Airborne Division, the attack was the start of a brutal fight for survival.
As the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive approaches, The Odyssey of Echo Company offers a breathtaking portrait of war, homecoming, and a search for peace.
More than ten years in the making, and based on hours of interviews with soldiers, detailed letters written to and from Echo Company, Pentagon after-action reports, photographs and video footage, this new book by the New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers offers the untold and remarkable story of a platoon of American soldiers and their heroic efforts to survive the Vietnam War – both on the battlefield and after their return home to the US.
Doug Stanton is a journalist, lecturer, screenwriter, and author who has appeared on numerous TV and radio outlets, including NBC’s “Today,” CNN, Imus In The Morning, Discovery, A&E, Fox News, NPR, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and NBC’s Nightly News, and has been covered extensively in prominent publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times. He has written on travel, sport, entertainment, and history, and his writing has appeared in Esquire, Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, the New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, Slate, The Daily Beast, and the Washington Post.
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Nerd Nite #49 - Psychology and Stimulation
About Kulky: Psychologist Kulky Nakai is more than a scholar, researcher, and clinician, she’s also a philosopher, creative writer, and entertainer who enjoys pushing socio-cultural boundaries and provoking common thought to the cutting edge. She recently launched her very own b/vlog and podcast titled “More To Be Revealed,” a space dedicated for exploring the unknown with a curious heart and a funny bone.
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#44 Ann Arbor Stories: Professor Foxy Truesport
This is the story of Thomas Clarkson Trueblood—the first golf coach at the University of Michigan, one of the most respected orators in the world during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and noted professor --- of lovemaking.
Get to know Professor Foxy Truesport.
Music by Tunde Olaniran
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Howard Markel Discusses His Book: "The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek"
University of Michigan Professor Howard Markel, medical historian, and author, discusses his critically-acclaimed new book The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek as well as John and Will Kellogg, brothers whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America’s notion of health and wellness.
John Harvey Kellogg was one of America’s most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast.
Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D. is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, and editor in chief of The Milbank Quarterly. His books include "Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892," When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed, and An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Markel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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#43 Ann Arbor Stories: How the Hippies Almost Killed Football
In 1970, one man tried to stop the University of Michigan and Michigan State from playing their annual football game. And he kind of had an argument. A story of rock music, drugs, sex, love-ins, college football and judicial precedent - fun for the whole family!
Music by Hollow & Akimbo
Listener Warning: Episode contains references to sex, drugs, and the Ann Arbor band The Seventh Seal which played music so mind bending that it drove people to riot.
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Dining with Shakespeare
Travel back into the culinary past and discover how Shakespeare and his contemporaries dined in the 16th century. Author and historian Susan L. Nenadic discusses 16th-century attitudes towards food, how food was obtained, and the many laws regulating food at that time. She considers foods eaten by people at the time that we do not, and foods that are still part of our 21st-century diet. Quotations from Shakespeare and recipes are included.
This event was cosponsored by The Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (CHAA), which was founded in 1983 by Jan Longone and friends and is an organization of scholars, cooks, food writers, nutritionists, collectors, students, and others interested in the study of culinary history and gastronomy.
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#42 Ann Arbor Stories: The Chameleon
You're going to hear a story about a man. It may seem too good and too weird to be true, but trust me—what you are about to hear is 100% real. This is the story of William Douglas Street, better known as The Chameleon.
Music by Shout Out Out Out Out
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers: Martin talks to Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar, editors of Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z.
Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar's Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a recording session with Otis Redding; Ellen Willis traces the meteoric career of Janis Joplin; Ellen Sander recalls the chaotic world of Led Zeppelin on tour; Nick Tosches etches a portrait of the young Jerry Lee Lewis; Eve Babitz remembers Jim Morrison. Alongside are Lenny Kaye on acapella and Greg Tate on hip-hop, Vince Aletti on disco and Gerald Early on Motown; Lester Bangs on Elvis Presley, Robert Christgau on Prince, Nelson George on Marvin Gaye, Nat Hentoff on Bob Dylan, Hilton Als on Michael Jackson, Anthony DeCurtis on the Rolling Stones, Kelefa Sanneh on Jay Z. The story this anthology tells is an ongoing one: “It’s too early,” editors Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar note, “for canon formation in a field so marvelously volatile—a volatility that mirrors, still, that of pop music itself, which remains smokestack lightning. The writing here attempts to catch some in a bottle.”
Martin’s interview with Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar was originally recorded June 7, 2017.