Lindsay Chervinsky knew other historians had written extensively about America’s second president, John Adams.

But none of those books were written before January 6, 2021, when an insurrection at the nation’s capitol ended the tradition of peacefully transferring power in the U.S. — a tradition that started with Adams himself.

In her new book, “Making the Presidency,” Chervinsky looks back at Adams life and focuses on how George Washington’s successor shaped the presidency in the final years of the 18th century. She argues that it was Adams who established political norms for the executive branch — norms that are quickly being discarded by the current administration.

What can the second president teach us about our country’s 47th? That’s on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

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• Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her new book is “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic.”

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It’s Valentine’s Day! To mark the occasion, Big Books and Bold Ideas is dipping into the archives to focus on love — and not just romantic love. This show highlights love of all kinds: familial love, love between friends, even the love of books.

We start with Leif Enger, who joined host Kerri Miller in Red Wing last June to talk about his novel, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Enger’s latest book is dystopian in nature, but at its heart, it’s a love story.

We then dip into Miller’s conversation with British-Nigerian author Ore Agbaje-Williams, whose subversive and wickedly funny novel, "The Three of Us,” delves into love between friends. Is it possible our friendships are more foundational than the bonds we form with romantic partners?

We end with Jedidiah Jenkins and his memoir, “Mother, Nature.” It recounts a five-thousand-mile road trip he and his mother took to retrace the route his parents traversed in the 1970s as they walked across America. It sounds sentimental. But it’s really Jedidiah’s attempt to reconcile two conflicting truths: that his mother loves him completely and that she does not accept that he’s gay.

If you want to hear the complete conversation from any of today’s authors, click the links above or look for the episodes in your favorite podcast.

At what cost revolution?

In Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel, “Kingdom of No Tomorrow,” 20-year-old Nettie Boileau trades the turmoil of Duvalier’s Haiti for the tumult of 1960s America. Settling with her aunt in Oakland, she is drawn to the social programs spearheaded by the burgeoning Black Panther Party.

But her focus on healing and public health is soon subsumed by the revolution and her passionate relationship with Black Panther leader Melvin Mosley.

Josaphat drew on her own family’s history for insight into the activism of the Panthers. Her father, an attorney, was imprisoned during Francois Duvalier’s reign in Haiti. And she remembers reading her father’s books as a child, biographies and memoirs of leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.

“I remember starting to do my research about the Black Panthers and thinking to myself, ‘I think I know about this already but I don’t know how. Where did I learn this?’” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then I realized, it was probably me going through [my father’s] books.”

Josaphat brings the gift of those books full circle with her new novel as she brings the inner workings of the Black Panthers to fresh light, including how the fight for social justice didn’t always mean equal rights for women.

Guest:

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• Fabienne Josaphat was born and raised in Haiti. Her new novel “Kingdom of No Tomorrow” was awarded the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2023.

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Sarah Hoover knows her new memoir, “The Motherload,” isn’t flattering. She’s made peace with the fact that “people will judge me on the internet,” as she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

She’s telling her story anyway because she believes an honest rendering of modern motherhood is necessary.

“In my defense, birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I’d been fed, and it felt like a nasty trick,” she writes. “And while my mental breakdown was embarrassing at times, especially considering how it exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool, it also showed how pernicious it is to sell tales of motherhood as being so wonderful and feminine, the very essence of womanhood.”

Hoover’s memoir is brutally honest about the disassociation and rage she felt the year after her son was born, and how her eventual diagnosis of postpartum depression felt like like both a relief and a betrayal. She joined host Kerri Miller on this week’s show to talk about the taboos of motherhood, the trad wife trend and why she was compelled to go public with her story.

Guest:

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• Sarah Hoover’s new memoir is “The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood.” She lives in New York with her husband and two children.

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David Wright Faladé didn’t learn the truth about his lineage until he was 16. That’s when his mother told him that his biological father was a West African student she initially met in post-war Paris, as she grappled with the trauma of her Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. It was a shock to a mixed-race boy growing up in the panhandle of Texas, playing football and drinking Slurpee’s in 1970s America.

But the surprises didn’t stop there. When Wright Faladé eventually moved to France and met his father, he discovered a connection to Dahomey royalty and a past complicated by the slave trade and colonialism.

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  From 2022 David Wright Faladé on the all-Black brigade that inspired his new historical novel
  
  
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This made-for-TV personal history inspired his new novel, “The New Internationals,” which details the love triangle formed by a Holocaust survivor, a Sorbonne student from colonial West Africa and a Black GI from America. This week, he joined Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas to share even more of his family’s history and discuss how the potent mix of grief, guilt and hope found in post-war Europe created the world as we know it today.

Guest:

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• David Wright Faladé is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Illinois and the author of several books, including “Black Cloud Rising.” His just-released novel is “The New Internationals.”

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Robin Wall Kimmerer embodies an abundance mindset.

The naturalist and author sees the world through the lens of her Anishinaabe ancestors, where interdependence is reality, and humans are neither above nor below the natural world. We are just one part, kin to every animal and plant and stream.

Her beloved book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” laid out this philosophy. Published in 2013, it enjoyed a gentle rise to public consciousness, not jumping onto the bestseller list until six years after publication. But it remains there to this day, a beloved devotional to millions.

Now Kimmerer is back “The Serviceberry” — with a slim book that expounds on one of her core tenants: that nature’s generosity is an invitation to explore our own.

Kimmerer joined Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to take us all on a virtual field trip to behold the humble serviceberry, where we get a lesson on generosity, gratitude and relationship.

Guest:

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• Robin Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a plant ecologist, a professor and an author. Her newest book is “The Serviceberry: Abudnance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.”

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In Nov. 2024, The Atlantic’s cover article rang alarm bells among readers, writers, college professors and parents alike. The article was headlined: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.

The premise is that many students admitted to elite colleges arrive having read very few books all the way through.

“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” says the article. “It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”

This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, two writers who have also been college literature professors share their views on the article’s argument. What have they seen in their own students? And how can deep reading be encouraged?

Guests:

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• Karen Swallow Prior is an English professor, a monthly columnist for Religion News Service and the author of, among other books, “On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books.”

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• Taiyon Coleman is dean of liberal arts and academic foundations at North Hennepin Community College. Her latest book is “Traveling without Moving,” which you can also hear about on a past episode of Big Books and Bold Ideas.

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