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Booked Up with Jen TaubSgt. Aquillino GonellToday nearly three years after the attack on the US Capitol my guest is American hero, Aquillino Gonell, author of the new book American Shield: The Immigrant Sergeant Who Defended Democracy. You know Staff Sergeant Gonell as one of the brave members of the Capitol Police who defended our country and our constitution when insurrectionist mobs attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
You saw Sergeant Gonell testify in July of 2021 at a televised Congressional hearing. At the witness table with him was his friend and fellow U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Harry Dunn. And also with t...2024-01-071h 10Booked Up with Jen TaubNorman Lear: Even This I Get to ExperienceWelcome back to Booked Up, a podcast that features you, me and our favorite authors. We release a new episode every Sunday morning.
Today for the December book club, we are discussing Norman Lear, the Hollywood legend who passed this month at the young age of 101. There are gazillion people who have a thing or two to say about this ground-breaking writer, director, producer, activist. So, to anchor our conversation, Jen selected his best-selling memoir Even This I Get to Experience, published by Penguin Books in 2014.
With a blend of sheer luck, immense creativity, and epic pe...2023-12-3156 minBooked Up with Jen TaubTHE OCTOPUS IN THE PARKING GARAGE with Rob VerchickRob Verchick, author of the award-winning new book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience is Jen’s guest today.
Why this unusual title? As he describes: “One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus—and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded—is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we will...2023-12-241h 02Booked Up with Jen TaubTHESE ARE THE PLUNDERERS with authors Gretchen Morgenson and Josh RosnerToday we are doing Jen’s favorite thing: following the big dirty money. This time the focus is on the world of private equity. Those two words together sound ever so restrained and elite, even contained. In reality though the world of private equity is rough and destructive and affects all of us from patients seeking health care to workers losing their jobs. There are more than $10 trillion in private equity assets under management. And many public pension funds as well as ordinary members of the public are invested. Not private at all.
Timing is everything. In early Dec...2023-12-171h 10Booked Up with Jen TaubChuck Collins on ALTAR TO AN ERUPTING SUNChuck Collins, author of several works of nonfiction including The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions is Jen’s guest today. They mostly discuss his debut novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun, a near-future story of one community facing climate disruption came out this May.
“My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R. My bologna has a second name, it’s M-A-Y-E-R….” Listeners of a certain age will remember that television ad jingle from their childhoods. Chuck Collins also has childhood and young adult memories as the great-grandson of Oscar F. Mayer, founder of the eponymou...2023-12-1054 minBooked Up with Jen TaubOrly Lobel on THE EQUALITY MACHINEToday Jen’s guest is Orly Lobel, author of the recent book THE EQUALITY MACHINE: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future. Orly just sold the film rights to her book on Barbie to CBS Studios. The book is called YOU DON’T OWN ME: How Mattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed Barbie's Dark Side. The book and the CBS production will follow the parallel journeys of Barbie inventor Ruth Handler and Bratz creator Carter Bryant.
“Inspiration exists; it must find you working.” Picasso. You can find this gem and other fascinating details in Orly Lobel’s new book...2023-12-031h 07Booked Up with Jen TaubTHE WOMAN IN ME by Britney SpearsFor our special book club episode today, we are discussing the new bestselling memoir – THE WOMAN IN ME by pop icon Britney Spears. As you know, Britney is a multiplatinum, Grammy-Award winning entertainer. She has sold an incredible 100 million records worldwide. She released her new book THE WOMAN IN ME around two years after she got free from the abusive and legally questionable 13 year long conservatorship during which her father and his team controlled her every move, every morsel, and every dollar, paying themselves handsomely, and more than she earned off the product that this one-time child star had become.2023-11-261h 03Booked Up with Jen TaubTaylor Lorenz is EXTREMELY ONLINEToday Jen’s guest is Taylor Lorenz, author of the new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Together they discussed many topics including the controversy around mommy bloggers and the credit due to Julia Allison and other women social media pioneers.
Taylor Lorenz is the sometimes controvesial, never boring technology columnist for the business section of the Washington Post, covering online culture and the content creator industry. She was previously a reporter for the New York Times and has written for numerous other publications including New York magazine and Rolling Sto...2023-11-1957 minBooked Up with Jen TaubAndrea Chalupa on DICTATORSHIP IS EASYToday Jen’s guest is journalist, filmmaker, author, and activist Andrea Chalupa. You know Andrea from her award-winning podcast Gaslit Nation that she founded with Sarah Kendzior. Fake populism. Demonizing the press. Scapegoating. Propaganda. Personal militia. All ingredients for a successful dictatorship and topics of their conversation.
Andrea and Sarah collaborated on the book we are discussing today called DICTATORSHIP: IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK. They describe DICTATORSHIP as “a wild ride showing the perks and pitfalls of becoming a dictator, and how to overthrow one.”
Part of the book focuses on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s...2023-11-1257 minBooked Up with Jen TaubIlleana Douglas on CONNECTICUT IN THE MOVIESFilm star Illeana Douglas is Jen’s guest today. Ileana is the author of the gorgeous new book: Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia. This spans around 100 years from the silent film era up through the early 21st Century. This beautiful coffee table book is filled with delicious never-before-seen movie stills and back lot stories.
Illeana has starred in too many films to mention. You know her from the movies including Cape Fear, Ghost of My Heart, Good Fellas, and To Die For, plus the many television shows like Entourage, Seinfeld, and Six Feet Und...2023-11-0558 minBooked Up with Jen TaubENOUGH by Cassidy HutchinsonToday for the October book club, Jen Taub’s friends, authors Jennifer Rubin and Brian Karem discuss Cassidy Hutchinson’s new best-selling memoir, ENOUGH.
Is Cassidy Hutchinson a heroic champion of the truth or just another Trump Administration insider who could have spoken sooner when it really mattered? Does the story she tells in ENOUGH make readers more empathic or more resentful? These questions and more are the focus of Jen’s conversation today with Jen and Brian.
Unless you have been living under a rock (which actually sounds kind of pleasant given the current overwhelm), you kno...2023-10-2954 minBooked Up with Jen TaubTRAE CROWDER & COREY RYAN FORRESTER on Round Here And Over YonderThe hilarious self-named “progressive hillbilly” comedians Trae Crowder and Corey Ryan Forrester are Jen’s guests today. They co-authored the super-funny book Round Here and Over Yonder. I’m just going to steal their bios right from their book because nothing I could say would compare.
Trae Crowder grew up in Celina, TN, a town sometimes described as having “more liquor stores than traffic lights” (2-0 as of the last count). He first cained national attention for his “Liberal Redneck” series of viral videos. He has been performing his particular brand of gravy-covered intellectual comedy for over a decade and touring...2023-10-221h 07Booked Up with Jen TaubZEKE FAUX on NUMBER GO UPZeke Faux, author of the new bestseller, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall is Jen’s guest today.
Of all the books, and scholarly articles, and news stories, and blog posts, and legal complaints and, you get the idea… on crypto, Number Go Up is truly the first one to pull everything together in one place. And that result is something immensely entertaining and informative. And to be clear, this is not a condemnation of those other works, readers can learn so much from. Instead, it’s an expression of high praise for what Zeke has...2023-10-151h 05Booked Up with Jen TaubMICHAEL LEWIS on Going InfiniteAuthor Michael Lewis joins Jen Taub today to talk about Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, his new book that focuses on Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-wunderkind who is now on trial on federal criminal charges including wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering.
Though Michael needs no introduction, here’s one anyway. You know Michael from his numerous bestselling works of narrative nonfiction. You may in fact be someone like John Williams of the New York Times book review who wrote: “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote...2023-10-081h 03Booked Up with Jen TaubWOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE with Helen FryWe are extraordinarily grateful that historian and biographer Dr. Helen Fry made time for us right as her latest book Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars was released in the UK and is poised to launch in the United States.
This new book is filled with intrigue hidden in plain sight. Spies recruited at cafés, ordinary women bicycling around town passing along messages to help the Allies, secret codes knit into jumpers (that’s the British English word for what we Americans call sweaters). Helen Fry has authored too many popular books to coun...2023-10-0150 minBooked Up with Jen TaubTUCKER with Rick Wilson and Martin PengellyBelieve or not, this month’s Booked Up Book Club is TUCKER, the book, the man, the walking grievance machine. It’s true, Jen read Chadwick Moore’s authorized biography of Tucker Carlson. And joining her are Rick Wilson and Martin Pengelly, to talk about it so you don’t have to.
Rick Wilson is a longtime Republican political strategist, award-winning ad-maker, and political commentator (and fifth generation Florida man). In 2015, Rick emerged as one of the earliest and most vocal critics of Donald Trump, helping found the Never Trump movement. His bestselling book EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES sprung fr...2023-09-241h 05Booked Up with Jen TaubALI VELSHI: Banned Book ClubAli Velshi is Jen’s guest today. You know him as an anchor and business correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. His show Velshi appears every Saturday and Sunday from 10 - noon. Ali is also the host of the podcast Velshi Banned Book Club. And, in keeping with the focus of Booked Up, Ali is a nonfiction author himself. He wrote Gimme My Money Back and co-authored How to Speak Money. Plus he has several new books forthcoming. On September 25th, is the publication date for The Trump Indictments comes out with his preface, and then in spring of 2023, Ali’s book...2023-09-171h 02Booked Up with Jen TaubHadley Vlahos, THE IN-BETWEENHadley Vlahos is the author of the bestelling new book The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments. She is a hospice registered nurse, mother, and wife. Hadley’s husband Chris also works in the medical field as a doctor of physical therapy. She started her career as a registered nurse at twenty-two. Today as a hospice nurse, she now visits people at their home while also educating and sharing stories about hospice care on social media, where she has 1.6 million followers on TikTok alone.
Jen read, or, rather listened on Audible to The In-Between in one sitti...2023-09-101h 00Booked Up with Jen TaubLAWYER, JAILER, ALLY, FOE with Eric MullerIn this haunting new book, LAWYER, JAILER, ALLY, FOE, Eric L. Muller brings into vivid color a world that is largely forgotten paper records. It’s no wonder that his book caught the attention of novelist John Grisham whose praise appears on the cover: “A fascinating and detailed account of one of America’s darkest chapters.”
Eric’s accomplishments with this work cannot be overstated. He made a complex topic emotionally moving by unearthing the stories of three men who worked as lawyers inside of the concentration camps in Wyoming, Arizona, and on an Indian Reservation where Japanese-Americans were held...2023-09-031h 19Booked Up with Jen TaubTrump Booked Up Club with Jill Wine-Banks and Morgan CloudDonald Trump is the subject of our book club today. Trump is not known to be a big reader or even an author – his most popular book Art of the Deal, was ghost written by Tony Schwarz, as you probably know. Nevertheless, our book club episode today focuses on him. Not a book, but on the day he got booked up in Georgia. We recorded this episode on Thursday, August 24th, just hours before Mr. Trump was scheduled to surrender at a jail in Georgia.
He will be there to answer to thirteen charges brought by Fulton County Dis...2023-08-271h 14Booked Up with Jen TaubConnie Schultz: She’s every genrePulitzer-Prize winning writer Connie Schultz is Jen’s guest today. Connie is the author of two memoirs. Her first Life Happens: And Other Unavoidable Truths and second …And His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man. Connie made her fiction debut in 2020 with her New York Times bestselling novel The Daughters of Erietown. And this coming February the youngest readers can welcome into the world her first children’s book, Lola and the Troll.
Formerly a columnist at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland she now writes a weekly column for USA Today. And, she just launch...2023-08-2056 minBooked Up with Jen TaubA PLACE FOR US with Brandon WolfBrandon Wolf, author of the memoir A Place for Us joins Jen on Booked Up today. Brandon is a survivor of the 2016 horric domestic terror attack at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida where his best friends, Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero, and 47 others were murdered. Brandon has honored the victims’ legacies with action, advocating for LGTBQ+ civil rights and gun-safety reform. Today Brandon is the press secretary for Equality Florida.
Brandon’s memoir is beautifully-written and incredibly moving. Here’s just one expression of glowing praise for A Place for Us. Joy Reid, host of TheReidOut said “One of the mo...2023-08-1357 minBooked Up with Jen TaubWHY SINÉAD O'CONNOR MATTERS with Allyson McCabeToday’s Booked Up guest is Allyson McCabe, author of the deeply felt, carefully researched book, Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters, which was published in May two months before the musician’s passing. Allyson interviewed Sinéad for NPR in 2021 in connection with her autobiography Rememberings.
As guitarist and songwriter Vernon Reid wrote, “Acknowledging that Sinéad's life story can be a difficult, contradictory mess, McCabe painstakingly relates this magnificent, irreplaceable artist's tale to her own heartfelt story, showing us in the process how and why so many of us also connect with Sinéad.”
A little more o...2023-08-061h 05
Booked Up with Jen TaubBARBIE Book club with George Hahn & M.G. LordToday is all about BARBIE. The new film, the doll, the legend. Too much hype? No, not enough. This month’s new blockbuster film directed by Greta Gurwig starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has more than just the best one-liners “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” It also provides theater audiences the opportunity to share howls of laughter delight about the humorous send up of the patriarchy, and also sob openly about what our lives could have been if more girl’s imaginations were able to flourish as grown women, instead of us becoming accessories, enlisted in service of the ambit...2023-07-301h 07Booked Up with Jen TaubBen McKenzieJen’s guest today is Ben McKenzie, author of the new book EASY MONEY: CRYPTOCURRENCY, CASINO CAPITALISM, AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF FRAUD. In this incredibly fast-paced, relatable book, Ben, joined by journalist Jacob Silverman, takes us on a journey into the dark side of crypto. You don’t need any kind of expertise to follow along.
Plus, even if you’ve been around the bitcoin block before, you will appreciate the jaw-dropping encounters with the key players including FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (before his indictment and extradition from the Bahamas), and Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky (before his indictmen...2023-07-231h 02Booked Up with Jen TaubFANCY BEAR GOES PHISHING: Scott ShapiroJen’s guest today is Professor Scott J. Shapiro, author of the new book FANCY BEAR GOES PHISHING. That’s phishing with a PH. But Fancy with an F, as in Fancy Bear, the Russian hack. Subtitled THE DARK HISTORY OF THE INFORMATION AGE, IN FIVE EXTRAORDINARY HACKS. With this book, Scott hopes “that these true-crime stories – some accidental, some not – will engage readers who have little or not prior interest in technology and equip them to read beyond the headlines.”
You know Scott from his famous shitposting on Twitter, which he kindly also offers up on Threads. Or, if you’r...2023-07-161h 27Booked Up with Jen TaubKathy Griffin is back, bitches!Kathy Griffin is Jen’s guest today. They cover everything from her life on the D-List to her cameo in Pulp Fiction (while she was dating Quentin Tarantino) to how Donald Trump tried to destroy her, to her SOLD OUT show in Vegas at the Mirage. Plus a chills and ugly cry-induscing story about Stevie Nicks. No spoilers. You’ll have to listen.
Kathy is “The Gays” favorite two-time-Emmy and Grammy award winning comedian. (Half-way to an EGOT). And, Kathy made the Guiness Book of World Records. That is the f’ing holy grail for a Gen-Xer like Jen. She g...2023-07-091h 06Booked Up with Jen TaubA MINOR REVOLUTION with Adam BenforadoThis week Jen’s guest is Adam Benforado, author of the compelling new book A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All.
The Atlantic said A Minor Revolution is “An extremely sympathetic and worthy attempt to protect kids…. [this is] a book that reads like a manifesto. His ideas are bold, to the point, and ambitious.” Salon praised Adam’s work as “Ambitious . . . His unifying argument is anti-inertial. . . . The book blew my mind.”
And friend of the podcast, Heather McGhee (author of The Sum of Us), said Adam “weaves compelling real-life stories with legal and economic analysis...2023-07-021h 08Booked Up with Jen TaubE. Jean Carroll and Mary Trump on their Backstory SerialAs featured in The New York Times, Mary Trump and E. Jean Carroll are collaborating with Jen on a serialized romance novel called THE ITALIAN LESSON. Mary is writing the novel, Jen is editing, and E. Jean is advising and responding to readers’ questions. The trio is releasing Mary’s novel in segments on backstoryserial.com (which is on Substack). You can read everything in one place through chapter two by linking: https://www.backstoryserial.com/p/the-italian-lesson.
Get a taste of the ITALIAN LESSON with this opening passage:
The last time I saw him, I want...2023-06-251h 01Booked Up with Jen TaubYES, I CAN SAY THAT by Judy GoldThey kvetched, they kvelled, they talked about Hitler. Naturally. What did you expect? This week Jen’s guest is two-time Emmy-Award winning comedian Judy Gold. Judy fit Booked Up into her busy schedule. This spring she finished her one-woman show called, “Yes, I can Say That”, based on her similarly titled book Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.
The New York Times called Judy’s show “A deliberately uncomfortable, laugh-packed show seeded with stealth missiles.” Time Out said her performance was “Funny and furious... a testament to the importance of sp...2023-06-181h 16Booked Up with Jen TaubACCEPTANCE by David L. MarcusToday Jen’s guest is her long-time friend and Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist David L. Marcus. They talk about Dave’s latest book Acceptance: A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges –– and Find Themselves.
Dave also happens to be the cousin of Roy Cohn the disgraced and disbarred attorney who represented the late Senator Joe “Have you No Sense of Decency” McCarthy and more recently Fred and Donald Trump.
Dave wears many hats. He’s a writing coach, career counselor and of course, writer. He has been a newspaper and newsmagazine reporter, a high school teac...2023-06-111h 08Booked Up with Jen TaubNAZI BILLIONAIRES by David de JongJen’s guest is David de Jong, the author of a mindblowing new narrative nonfiction book called Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties. Before he began researching for this book, David covered banking, finance, and hidden wealth for Bloomberg News.
This book puts the lie to the often-heard claims by descendants and apologists for the industrialists who collaborated for profit with Hilter. You’ve heard them too. That these business leaders did not know what was going on at the concentration and extermination camps, that they were helping Jews by buying businesses on the cheap...2023-06-041h 04Booked Up with Jen TaubMaggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A MemoirThis week for the book club, we have poet Maggie Smith talking about her tell-most own new bestselling memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
You know Maggie from a poem she wrote in an Ohio coffee shop in 2015. That poem “Good Bones” was so deeply true and beautiful that readers passed it around. And it went viral a year or two later. Poems don’t go viral, but this one did, so much so that the unimaginable happened. First. In April of 2017, Meryl Streep read that poem, “Good Bones” at a Lincoln Center gala. But there’s a next. Next...2023-05-281h 06Booked Up with Jen TaubSteve Vladeck on THE SHADOW DOCKETThis week Jen’s guest is Professor Steve Vladeck, author of the sensational new book: The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.
The Shadow Docket is a must-read book, not just for court-watchers and garden-variety nerds, but also for anyone and everyone who wants to sound smarter on Twitter. Okay, maybe that’s a low bar. But, you get the drift. Don’t just trust me. Publisher’s Weekly said “This insightful and accessible account raises an important alarm.” Plus, Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Purdue the Pharma book, Empire...2023-05-211h 14Booked Up with Jen TaubBen Smith on TRAFFICThis week, Jen’s guest is Ben Smith, author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. This hot new book takes a close look at the people and the patterns behind the click-bait-journalism-world that helped inflate Donald Trump but also gave us a renewed faith in humanity with an endless supply of baby-animal rescue videos.
You know Ben from his role as the founding editor-in-chief for BuzzFeed News where he released the Steele Dossier to the world. Today, Ben is the editor-in-chief of Semafor, a new global news organization that launched last ye...2023-05-141h 05Booked Up with Jen TaubAnastasia Curwood on her new biography of Shirley ChisholmThis week, Jen’s guest on Booked Up is Anastasia Curwood. They discuss her insightful new biography Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics. As you likely know, in 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress and in 1972, the first Black major party presidential candidate.
Anastasia Curwood is a beloved and brilliant professor at University of Kentucky and Interim Chair of the History Department. She also serves as director of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies at UK. Her scholarship focuses on the interface between private life and historical context for black Americans in the...2023-05-071h 16Booked Up with Jen TaubBook Club: YOUR BOOK!Booked Up with Jen Taub has a special episode for April’s book club. The topic is your book.” You’re the author, it’s you. Today we are talking about how books get proposed, sold, written, edited, published and promoted.
It’s kind of like back in 2006 when TIME magazine announced their person of the year. On the cover of that issue of TIME was a drawing of a large desktop computer. In the center of the monitor was a reflective surface that functioned as a mirror. If you picked up the magazine in the supermarket checkout line, you wou...2023-04-301h 06Booked Up with Jen TaubWajahat Ali Go Back to Where You Came FromIn his written work and public persona, Wajahat Ali is known for his quick wit. Humor seems to come naturally to him, and yet, he has turned his gift into a craft deployed deliberately. In Go Back to Where You Came From, he notes, “Humor, both sublime and silly, sophmoric and sophisticated, unleashed with purpose, can often help communicate very real, hard truths about American society.”
At times this book is laugh-out-loud funny. Consider Waj’s comment about his mother after she told him that Santa Claus did not exist. “That same year, she decided to become the serial k...2023-04-231h 14Booked Up with Jen TaubCarissa Byrne HessickJen speaks with Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick about her remarkable book, Punishment without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal. Her book goes beyond just showing why plea bargaining is a bad deal. She also shines a light on several other types of punishments without trial. These are pre-trial detention, civil forfeiture, and assorted fees from pre-trial, booking and diversion programs.
Punishment without Trial shares the stories of heroes trying to address the inequities in the system and what they are up against, namely others trying to keep things the same or make them less just. We l...2023-04-161h 12Booked Up with Jen TaubElie Honig asks –– is Donald Trump Untouchable?This week, Jen’s guest is her good friend Elie Honig. Elie is a former prosecutor and currently a Senior Legal Analyst at CNN. At the Southern District of New York Elie prosecuted federal cases involving organized crime, human trafficking, public corruption, and violent crime. Among his successes were prosecutions of 100 members and associates of La Cosa Nostra, including Bosses and other high-ranking members of the Gambino and Genovese Organized Crime Families.
But this program is called Booked Up, not Locked Up, so Elie is here to talk about his equally stellar writing career. He is the author of...2023-04-091h 05Booked Up with Jen TaubThe Kneeling Man by Leta McCollough SeletzkyThis week, Jen’s guest is Leta McCollough Seletzky. Leta is a former litigator who left the law to become a literary sensation. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.
If you don’t already know her name, you will soon. Leta is the author of a beautiful new memoir that will be published this coming Tuesday, April 4th. It’s called The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Get comfortable, because when you start reading you will not be able t...2023-04-021h 05Booked Up with Jen TaubBook Club: SPAREThis family has more money than God. Why in the world can’t they get some therapy? A Grandmother who never hugs her grandchildren? A father who does not hug his son after telling him his mother was killed?
No, our book is not a soap opera, it’s SPARE by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex is our Booked Up book club selection this month. Jen’s three special guests in alphabetical order are Christopher Bouzy, Linda Charnes, and Melissa Murray.
You know Christopher from his big splash of a social media site called Spoutible. Before that he...2023-03-261h 09Booked Up with Jen TaubThe Sum Of Us Heather McGheeHeather McGhee joins Jen this week to talk about the newly released, young reader edition of her best-selling book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Heather’s book helps show how racism affects and harms all of us and how we need to face it head-on, together. An expert in economic and social policy. Heather is also the former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos and now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization.
Heather and Jen cover the key themes of th...2023-03-191h 02Booked Up with Jen TaubRuth Ben-GhiatThis week, my guest Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in authoritarianism, democracy protection, and propaganda and author of the bestelling book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Ruth is both a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Outside of the classroom, Ruth frequently appears on cable news to discuss the frightening similarities between early fascism in Europe and current movements here in the United States within the Republican party and abroad.
On today’s episode, I speak wth Ruth about our current crop of authoritarian brutes who use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in...2023-03-121h 03Booked Up with Jen TaubMary TrumpYou may think that Mary Trump needs no introduction, because you believe you know who she is in relation to a certain distasteful someone who shares her surname. Or you have read her first bestselling book: Too much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. Or her equally stellar second, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal.
But what an author produces or shares with the public, as well as the degrees they collect (in Mary’s case a BA and MA in English literature as well as a doc...2023-03-051h 11Booked Up with Jen TaubMartin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” To help honor Black History Month at Booked Up, for our February book club we are discussing the letter Martin Luther King Jr. composed in April of 1963 from his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. Joining me are two regulars and two special guests. We have book club regulars, conservative attorney George Conway and book publicist Ivan Lett and special guests Bridgette Baldwin and Jonathan Metzl.
Professor Baldwin teach...2023-02-261h 19Booked Up with Jen TaubHow We Win The Civil War with Steve PhillipsThis week best-selling author Steve Phillips opens up about the very recent loss of his remarkable wife Susan Sandler and their shared goals on how to move America toward a multi-racial democracy.
In the dedication to her of his new book, How We Win the Civil War, Steve writes, “The reality of cancer forces one to a more spirtual place of contemplating life, meaning, and legacy. That reflection has fueled my work on this book to try to make it a lasting legacy for both of us.”
Steve notes that the post 2020 election coup “was not the fir...2023-02-191h 02Booked Up with Jen TaubServants of the Damned by David EnrichThis week Jen speaks with David Enrich about his nationwide bestseller, Servants of the Damned, praised by David Cay Johnston in the Washington Post as “A powerful and important picture of how mega law firms distort justice."
While other large corporate law firms appear in Servants of the Damned, David explains why he made one firm in particular the centerpiece. He views Jones Day as one of the chief enablers of the most corrupt actors over recent decades. Clients include Big Tobacco whom the firm continually represented in efforts to avoid products liability. Jones Day also represented Pudue Pha...2023-02-1258 minBooked Up with Jen TaubLisa GuerreroThis week, Jen’s guest is the award-winning journalist Lisa Gurrero, on to talk about her new book Warrior: My Path to Being Brave. Lisa is a pioneer in the field of sportsbroadcasting enduring verbal abuse and sexual harrassment. She began her sports career in the 1980s as an NFL cheerleader, then directed entertainment including the cheerleading squads for the Atlanta Falcons and New England Patriots. At the Patriots, the boss’s son told her to remove all of the “Black music” from the playlist and put the cheerleaders in skimpier outfits and high heels instead of sneakers. She refused and was...2023-02-051h 08Booked Up with Jen TaubBook Club: January 6th Committee ReportWho knows? One day perhaps we will look back on this episode of Booked Up to find out that Donald Trump has faced a different kind of booking. Or at least an indictment. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Today for our January book club meeting we are following the facts by discussing the content and implications of the Final Report of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US. Capitol..
We have two special guests. Andrew Weissman, lead prosecutor in the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation and NYU law professor. And, Jil...2023-01-291h 11Booked Up with Jen TaubHamlet’s Heirs with Linda CharnesDr. Linda Charnes –– Professor of English, European Studies and Gender Studies at Indiana
University, Bloomington where she has taught since 1989–– joined Jen to talk about Hamlet, Talionic Law (aka retributive eye-for-an-eye justice), and America’s revenge fantasies.
She is the author of several books about Shakespeare, contemporary politics, and political psychology. Her first book was Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare published in 1993 by Harvard University Press, followed by Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, originally published in 2007 by Routledge, 2007, with a second edition in 2015.
Dr. Charnes has bucked the trend of a...2023-01-221h 13Booked Up with Jen TaubLauren HoughLauren Hough is the author of the New York Times bestseller, LEAVING ISN’T THE HARDEST THING, a collection of essays about growing up in the abusive Children of God cult, coming out in the military, and piecing a life together, as Roxane Gay put it, “on the margins as a working class woman and what it’s like to grow into the person you are might to be.”
Jen caught up with Lauren before she headed out on the road with her dog, Woody to research her next book MONSTER OF A LAND. Though she pressed, Jen was not...2023-01-151h 05Booked Up with Jen TaubINVASION by Luke HardingNearly a year into Russia’s Febuary 2022 invasion of Ukraine, journalist and author Luke Harding reflects on the people he met in the war zone while researching for his new book INVASION: THE INSIDE STORY OF RUSSIA’S BLOODY WAR AND UKRAINE’S FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL. Some of these brave sources are survivors of the Bucha massacre, who shared with him the trauma of losing loved ones and direct experiences of the violent atrocities. Others include a once optimistic contact from Mariupol who turned desperate, phoning Harding (who was 1,000 kilometers away) begging him to save his wife and children.
Th...2023-01-081h 00Booked Up with Jen TaubThe Unfolding by A. M. HomesA.M Homes is an award-winning nonfiction author, novelist, short-storry writer, playwright, and librettist. This is the first time she and Jen speak together, having been introduced virtually by a mutual friend. In this conversation, AMH lives her axiom that, “People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.” In fact, she even commandeers the interview for a bit, getting Jen to talk about her past and future own writing projects.
A love of history permeates AMH’s fictional work, as she uses post-WWII American history as structural pins to help llustrate how we go...2023-01-011h 02Booked Up with Jen TaubBook Club: The Light We Carry by Michelle ObamaWe kvetched, we laughed, we cried. Never-Trumper George Conway and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll puzzled over Jen’s selection for this month’s book, but were quickly won over by THE LIGHT WE CARRY after just a few pages. In fact, George now plans to read BECOMING. Ivan Lett encouraged us all to share the light we carry and appreciated the message about being yourself. In the words of First Lady Michelle Obama, “We only hurt ourselves when we hide our realness away." Lisa Birnbach helped us see the value in self-forgiveness.
Jen and Ivan agreed that when th...2022-12-2555 minBooked Up with Jen TaubThe Shrink Next Door with Joe NoceraJournalist and author of several books including indentured and All the Devils are Here, Joe Nocera talks with Jen about the crooked psychiatrist Isaac (“Ike”) Herschkopf and his guileless patients behind the Wondery Podcast he created with Bloomberg called “The Shrink Next Door.” They recorded the conversation a few days before the arrest and indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), majority owner and leader of FTX, the collapse crypto trading platform. Joe also revealed details about the new book he’s co-authoring with Bethany McLean about Covid and the economy.
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You can email Jen & the Booke...2022-12-1856 minBooked Up with Jen TaubMichael CohenMichael Cohen was the personal lawyer and fixer for Donald J. Trump for more than a decade. He is now a top-selling author and host of the popular Mea Culpa podcast which, as of our Booked Up interview, had 65 million downloads. His new book, REVENGE, a New York Times bestseller, published in October 2022, reveals the high price Cohen paid for telling the truth about Trump.
In early 2019, Cohen testified under oath before a Congessional Committee, describing in detail the corrupt manner in which his former boss manipulated on paper the value of his various properties for purposes of d...2022-12-111h 16Booked Up with Jen TaubDahlia LithwickDahlia Lithwick –– senior editor at Slate and author of the instant New York Times bestseller, LADY JUSTICE –– joined Jen for the inaugural episode of Booked Up. Fresh off her book tour, Dahlia shared her writing secrets, tough love for the Supreme Court, and how she met (and almost scared away) her future husband.
Dahlia is the host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law and the Supreme Court. She is a praise and prize magnet. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg avidly read Dahlia’s “Supreme Court Dispatches,” column, once quipping with admiration, “she’s spicy.”
In 2018, Dahlia recei...2022-12-041h 08Booked Up with Jen TaubBooked Up with Jen Taub - TrailerJen’s guests include writers of current bestsellers and beloved backlist books. Conversations cover love, money, politics, early dreams, writing habits, reading tastes, procrastination techniques, self-doubt, and news of the day.
Creator and host, Jen Taub is a law professor, advocate, and author. Her nonfiction books include BIG DIRTY MONEY (Viking 2020) and OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES (Yale Press 2014). She focuses on “follow the money” matters— promoting transparency and opposing corruption.
Jen’s favorite poem is Prufrock (and yes she knows that Eliot held abhorrent views. She contains multitudes and can separate the dancer from the dance.)
Tau...2022-10-2706 min