2012 Kansas Notable Books, Part II

with the holiday shopping season upon earth how about a good book or two for the readers on your christmas list i'm kate mcintyre and today on k pr prisons this year's kansas notable books part two each year the state library of kansas picks out the best new books by kansas authors or about kansas last week we heard from the authors of seven of this year's kansas notable books including tom a girl's road why in some ways poetry collection that the lives of trees and matthew polly's tapped out if you missed the program its archives on our website k pr like a u dot edu today the rest of this year's cannes is notable books as in previous years the list covers a wide range of books childrens to adult fiction to non fiction fantasy to travel guide our first book is by kansas more wired author of the two thousand five bestseller river of doubt theodore roosevelt's darkest journey morris newest book destiny of the republic

a tale of madness medicine and the murder of a president is receiving rave reviews as well it's been named a best book of the year by the new york times the washington post amazon and barnes and noble lord lives in the kansas city area like many of the others will hear from today i met up with her at the kansas book festival in topeka kansas i've got to tell you i loved your previous book river of doubt but i have to you know when i thought that this book was about the assassination of president garfield i thought most at night the only thing i know about him is that he was assassinated right i'm welling i knew that that would be an issue obviously the first book i wrote was about the heroes of other people who read absolutely anything about their associates built an audience and so i mean you know and i was nervous before it came out i thought i i don't know people in any given a chance i think they give it a chance i think you'll be interested in surprise because there's

so much that i was surprised as i was doing the research continually surprise and so it's been thrilling for me to watch the response i think to some degree and i think some people thought wow i like the first word i'll give this a try and i think that's helped i'm you know i think reviews have helped but surprisingly on there's been more responsive to this book about james garfield then there was to the first about the eurozone so it's it's been great what's a really it's a really compelling story for how you first became interested in president garfield and the story behind on his assassination what you it wasn't because of james garfield sound like you are like most americans unfortunately i am i didn't know anything about it beyond fact that he had been assassinated i was interested and i'm writing another book that had a lot of science in it like my first hand so sustained general research and i was researching alexander graham bell and i stumbled upon this story of him inventing an induction balance to try to find the bullet and garfield

and i was very surprised i had never heard the story of four and i wondered why he would do that scene and he says he's only thirty five years old he invented that the telephone five years earlier he was incredibly famous un and they could do anything he wanted and he had this he had this great lad and he was working all these exciting things so why did he drop everything he was doing turned his life upside down to try to help this man and so i thought i wonder whether garfield was like so i started researching him and was blown away and anne hawke from that moment on tough how to or how joseph lister figures and that this whole story so sixteen years earlier joseph lister had discovered in to sepsis and deciduous or was a famous and renowned i'm surgeon in england and then there's their death rate in his own surgical ward had plummeted and so he had gone around the world bank

lending the air and clinging to this acquisition and in the united states betting doctors to sterilize their hands and instruments and warning them that if they didn't they ran the very real risk of killing their patience unfortunately they're the most respected the most experienced actors united states dismissed and to sepsis as as useless maybe even dangerous and that's certainly the case with the doctor who's in charge and the president's medical care doctor doctor willard bliss doctor willard bliss whose first name was doctor his pants had named him dr these little and bizarre and wonderful stories you find it memorized as like you gotta be kidding me but it's true powerful bit about the man who sought the president charles gets how wise eight and a deeply dangerously delusional man who

had tried everything and had failed everything so he was sort of garfield smear artist said you know he and he also came from poverty and difficult situation his mother died when he was young but he had this growing madness and he had tried to line here tried evangelism here try to free love commune he had feared the women there had a nickname trolls get our teenagers failed again and again and again and simply had this month he was billy joe is also this obsessive personality and an abscess and we read the papers and when i'm garfield is nominating season republican nomination lisk please surprise everyone mostly garfield on bhutto decided that he will singlehandedly maker for president and this being the height of the spoils system and gratitude garfield course make an ambassador to france because why not and and so he begins to stalk the president can go to the white house every single day going to the state department every single day and growing more and more delusional more desperate

what a story you could not make these characters on any event was i say as i was doing research myself was continually surprise and went to me one of the most fascinating really most inspirational stories as that of chester arthur the vice president no never my editor when he read the manuscript saying i never thought there'd be anything interesting to say about just aren't there that he makes this extraordinary transformation you know and finding is the man he was absolutely a creation of that of patronage and you know it and likes fine close and dinner parties and why in an incident and does have very happily vice president gets this very prestigious reason have to do anything else and then when garfield a shy he is grief stricken and he'd he's sheehy cuts himself off and he refuses even to go to washington for fear that it will look like he's waiting in the wings and garfield dies she tries

to become the kind of present the garfield would've been had he lived and you know he becomes not a great leader but an honest and respected one and it's astonishing i mean the whole time she was terrified at the thought that you'd been would be president and that he surprises everyone most of oneself so i'm thinking like a real term this is from the beginning of chapter ten it's titled the dark dreams of presidents the idea came to deter suddenly like a flash she would later say an eighteenth two days of the country's dramatic resignation ditto depressed i'm perplexed wearied in mind and body and kind and to bed at eight pm much earlier than usual it been lying on its kind a small rented room for an hour unable to sleep his mind turning a new start by single poll sinn fein the president is out of the way everything go bad it i was certainly idea not come from his own feverish mind as divine inspiration a message from god he was he believed in unique position to recognize divine inspiration and it occurred because it happened to him before

even before the wreck of the steamship standing ten he had been inspired he said to join the oneida community to leave so the maestro religious newspaper and become a traveling evangelist each time that i called him he had answered this time for the first time he hesitated despite his certainty that the messaging come directly from bad he did not want to listen the next morning with our turn for new forests here quayle family has kept horrified he said controlling enough wherever he went and whenever he did however the idea stage with him kept growing on me pressing me go to me it still had no well to the person he insisted that facsimile that he given back at every opportunity to save his own life he was saying that i won in garfield out of the way because it's a danger the republican party and ultimately the american people that's candace more lard reading from her latest book destiny of the republic madness medicine and the murder of a

president it's the first of eight kansas notable books we'll hear about today honored by the state library of kansas my next arthur is making a back to back appearances on the camp was notable less elizabeth bunn is the author of lawyers moon you live a better life to see you again because i am a little surprised to be back again and so was so ayers known it is the sequel to your two thousand eleven kansas notable but star christ we meet up with bigger again for those people who maybe didn't read star crossed tells about bigger for my decision your main characters are crossing harrison and again about fantasies starring at an adolescent pickpocket and sneak peak named digger who keeps finding herself involved in political conspiracies and but religious civil wars themed murder plots entirely against her will she does everything she can to stay out of these things that they keep finding her and so in now and start us was kind of an

espionage thriller and outliers man richard kind fantasy know why are states that it's a murder mystery about the male equivalent of offend to tell who's in prison and do your house to clear his name have this poisoning murder of his wife so you're trying to work backwards through the commission of crimes and she she remarks early on in the story as she's working on this investigation that she has no experience on this side of criminal activity she says i have a lot of experience committing crimes but nah so pleasing them back together and association whilst her way through the city's underworld and through her of her acquaintances among the nobility and in sort of a renaissance italy kind of merchant classes very powerful in the city and along her passion covers various conspiracies

our human smuggling ring involving magic users and as you mentioned this is a fantasy book although it's sort of that in the italian region class it as diplomats that in italy it's set in a fantasy world that is characterized by its different religious groups talk a little bit about that fighting well to sort out its entire stew tudor england with the big clash between them the church of england and the protestants and i'm that have flex and diggers world is on the brink or actually in iris mann in the midst of a religious civil war between the ruling religious class on that worshipped the great mother goddess the earth goddess and the rebels who are proponents of the goddess of magic and part of this conflict is religious inquisition that insists that magic does not exist it can exist and if it

does exist around us at and so it's sort of served a diggers underlying quest to undermine that in christian as much as she can and toward the beginning digger is investigating the scene of the murder and she has a particular talent that that makes her both in demand answers at risk in this this world and around that time is that she can see magic which is invisible too the naked eye of most individual people sit here she is exploring the murder scene i wandered through them but only the outermost chamber had windows and the rest of the room's barely received any of that filtered and slight it didn't matter it was obvious that any evidence that might have been in this room was long gone whoever had stripped these rooms have done away with any clues as well i wondered which chamber touted died and lying in her

sweat and whore waiting for morales to finally stopped beating of her heart the stain on the floor to give up her position maybe a shaft of moon's light to show me the cold flights towns but there was nothing she could die here two weeks ago or twenty years and it would've made a difference with a grim site and went back downstairs it has a cost factor the antique or something that wasn't means life flashed in the corner of my vision swearing silently i spun slowly back around my eyes squeezed close until the last moment hadn't imagined it there by an arched doorway in a street like the mark left on the floor from heavy furniture was the faintest trace of something that should not have been there i know on the floor beside the market and cautiously dipped my fingers toward the flag stands tapping the floor just slightly enough that a stream of silvery missed spread out from my touch like the radiating arms of a star flooding the floor with wearing white there was magic and of course that was that's elizabeth bunn is reading from her young

adult fantasy novel liars man flyers known as the sequel to bonds is two thousand eleven kansas notable book star crossed thanks elizabeth things are having me from fantasy to the land of oz our third book of the day brings us back to kansas and the wonders you can find it right here in the sunflower state mercy penner is the executive director of the kansas sampler foundation the organization behind our next book he wonders of kansas guidebook welcome marcy they geo tv with this great audience with the idea behind this guy book come from well i have to start with the purpose of our foundation because the kansas sam cooke foundation is the publisher of the book i'm the director of the foundation our mission is to preserve and sustain rural culture so since nineteen ninety we've been helping educate kansans about kansas and i am i have two answers to your question two parts to it one is where the aid comes from because of course

seven wonders of the world is where we kind of took it from bag when dad and i started doing our guide books would go to a town and say what do you have that we can put in the book it's free and so many towns said we don't have anything in our town kind of awe you know self esteem issue so we came up with eight categories it helps detailed focus when you ask that question mike tall spare your architecture your art and so we had eight categories and ever since we've started that went to his prom in nineteen ninety one we use those elements and almost everything we do so when the seven wonders of the world was getting up again a week one of our kansas explore club members came to us and said why don't we do this seven wonders of kansas and it's a great idea let's do eight and so we it took four years but we did a contest for every one of the eight elements an

overall and we did that to engage the public and to make it out to give up a new way to interact to talk about kansas has to offer hopefully in order that raise the self esteem of kansans about their own state and others beyond kansas and then people said well now we got written a guidebook so you make it easy for us to go to these places and now we will get glad to comply with photographs from harlan schuster which now really helps make a book unique and i have to say it's the photographs are gorgeous well harlan did a great job he went to every one of the two hundred sixteen within a ten month period and then my sister is a graphic designer for our books and she took his great photos in and designed the book beautifully to focus on the photos in the places give them due recognition in and i feel like we've put

out a product that maybe looked at as our archive you know in twenty thirty a hundred years from now people look back and say at the turn of this century these were the things in kansas the people talked about and went to one outlet not just a hundred years now you know as useful well right now go to those places and they are now we got many places and they say well we get people in here all the time saying they're going to all of the two hundred sixteen or all of the cuisine or all of the geography and of course that's the bottom line of all we do is to help sustain rural communities so we're pretty pleased that the book is doing what it was supposed to do well on a personal note i can tell you three years ago my family spent spring break going to you they eat wonders of kansas now i have to say we didn't make it we made it to fix if we didn't make it all the way up to the northwest corner and the big well in korea was closed at the time you said that

remains for me one of the on my all time favorite spring breaks with our wonders of kansas i love that and i am a yogurt has final to national hero for one the big well is open again looking fabulous been alive people i've even heard others he's their spring break their families who are innocent when you just need this incentive of the last and you know things that you put on your refrigerator are always good things and down so our whole intent was to make the book work for the good of kansas we don't have time to talk about two hundred and sixteen of the things they came up on your list but remind us of that eight wonders ok the pa wonders range from the big well the dwight d eisenhower presidential library museum monument rocks and castle rock or one entry ngo county cheyenne bottom sync with their wildlife refuge were another single

entry is that the cathedral a plane say dallas in victoria hutchison head to the kansas caucuses there in that kansas underground salt museum that ceo ivan of course you gotta have the flint hills and theyre so the tallgrass prairie national preserve was chosen as a place to honor the flint hills said that then tells is really the focus there and i think that's a bit well and i think that's at the big well is interesting because that came up after the tornado it may have been a sympathy vote that i think it's one of our longest standing tourism attractions in the state and a lot of people or been there so i was glad to see it on the list where can you go to get that he wonders of kansas guidebook they're being sold in over two hundred locally owned stores across the state they can go to eight wonders eight the number wonders dot org to either ordered online or to find the list of retail outlets

but it's everywhere and when you buy it you also supporters locally owned stores which is part of our mission as well so it's a great christmas present great gift for the people who don't know what to buy it's a great gift to kansas mercy penner is the author of that he wonders of kansas guide book published by the kansas sampler foundation and smarty thank you and i appreciate that the state library as dennis program it's been a good this for a kansas and for authors we appreciate that my next guest visit a very different less of kansas destinations in her book tracey seeley lives in oakland calif she chronicles her return home in her book my ruby slippers the road back to kansas welcome tracy thanks so much and happy to be here part of the catalyst for your journey back to kansas was the loss of your parents and your own battle with cancer doesn't dance bring you back

home i lost my parents in nineteen ninety nine they both died in the same year about two months apart and i had for a very long time thought that i would go back where i came from at some point and follow my parents itinerary we had moved a lot and i had thirteen addresses by the time i was nine and i had long thought well someday i'll go back and i'll go visit all those old houses and to sort of see if i could figure out what that story had been about and i won my parents died suddenly it occurred to me that life is very short and fama make this trip by really better get on it so i really started planning the trip and then i was diagnosed with cancer so my plans were derailed for a little while i went through treatment end it really made it a very different sort of trip when i finally did come back to kansas i came with a home a sense of purpose in the home a sense of really wanting to connect in a much deeper way with my roots and then i never had

before so it turned out to be quite a different sort of journey i think that it would have been before this the sky watershed period in my life or lost a lot of things including the certainty that we all have when were young that will live forever so my ruby slippers just sort of picks up the threads of that story and a really pulled me home in a different way then i think i would have gone otherwise one of those places you called home as a child was goodland kansas i'd like you to read an excerpt from that part of your journey so this section of the book is called the good land and i of course through it from the name of the town good london i had been in colorado the previous week visiting all these addresses that my mother had written down and we left colorado when i was four so i had remembered anything when i went back and you know nothing really resonated for me but i i really anticipated when i was approaching goodman that it would feel quite different and then and then i come across good lennon i get off that they're free of the interstate highway and i and i

start to drive into town so this is my first impressed and so this was the place my parents had left colorado for this tiny place on the boundary between nowhere and a thousand miles of wheat having spent the past five days in the rockies i thought i knew how hard filled with mountains would feel how goodland must have seemed a stunning rebuke of the places my mother had loved yellowstone aspen juno all of them lost once my handsome charismatic father shook off the fairy dust the first romance and became who he was i sensed my mother's despair i thought her heart must have sunk her phrase what i know maybe the only sinking heart was mine maybe she'd been glad to leave colorado where two new babies and seven the us and four years had soured her even on mountains maybe she believes that in a place so different things would have to change

and she'd grown up in a town ten times smaller so maybe goodland size five thousand hadn't mattered like so many rural towns goodland was hurting now but things would have been likely or when we'd lived there with the sugar beet plant in addition to a week i'd also come into town along the racket outskirts never the best view of any town when i turned the corner a cherry street i laughed with love and pleasure they're on an easel forty feet high standard giant reproduction of van gogh sunflowers we may be small it said that look we have a giant van gogh and if the kansas state flower was good enough for van gogh it's good enough for us let us build a monument to the sunflower in san francisco a forty foot van gogh would be just another curfew mad or appointed statement about art in the age of the bottom line here it was a landmark a destination

just past van gogh cherry jog left at the high plains museum home of america's first helicopter and emptied in to residential shade this look like a town i could love sweet pastel houses with wooden shutters front porches and miniature lawns a pale maroon bigger than a barn hung heavy and full of bub a little house a chopper circled against a wash of blue i drove along caldwell to the grain elevators at the north end of town and back south down main blue banners hung from every light pole proclaiming kansas the good life turn right at thirteen toward center and my house a red brick church this couple on the corner chambers part of my right that must be the park i remembered ok here church empty lot house address thirteen fifteen

backup house thirteen fifteen and church i like the look of thirteen fifteen the white house with the screen front porch iced squint trying to turn the thirteen fifteen into thirteen ios seven no luck in the empty lot to narrow cement tracks led to grass and shade and nothing more i sat for a long while looking at the nothing more i felt blank now what as tracy seeley reading from her book my ruby slippers the road back to kansas if you're just joining us we're looking at the best books by kansans or about kansas is the second in a two part series on this year's kansas notable books selected by the state library of kansas if you missed last week's show we talked to seven of the kansas notable others you can find it archived on our website k pr that kay you that

edu i'm j mcintyre you're listening to kbr prisons on kansas public radio the unlikely friendship between doc holliday and the herb brothers is the subject of our next canvas notable book dark the novel is a fictionalized account of the holidays time in dimes to be written by mary doria russell welcome mary thank you very much mary how did you become interested in doc holliday and his story oh it's so oh easy to answer that question two words val kilmer and so you can see that she's not going to get caught anybody else i've seen tombstone hundred and fifty times and val kilmer it gave the most charming and wonderful performance of what was an extraordinarily good own screenplay by kevin jerry and i got interested in in the movie because i

am so many of the issues were so contemporary yet but it was just fun to watch originally and then are like the guy from the cleveland ohio isn't an attack which is like the films as a slut like they're discussing movies it's a film up society they were running mate but a series of films that were supposed to be chosen by cleveland celebrities and evidently i counted on and we were supposed to introduce them and lead a discussion afterwards and because of my earlier books it he probably expected me to pick something like the mission or two thousand when a space odyssey your life is beautiful and lots of raiders of the tourist on this a lot of silence and there was a refund so i'm a really good care case where us about this there's so much about the services not just vice control an end and gun ordinances that

are contemporary there's also equal pay for equal work there is other americans feeling threatened by the chinese you know i had there's also armed gang warfare on the mexican border in an important goods that have been used on the side of the border for cheap there is large amounts of cash and the kind of corruption in the police department and the and various levels of law enforcement becomes when gigantic amounts of cash are involved and like i mean it's the shield with apps so it was really quite radical biographies in order to get ready for this cause i want to see how much a tombstone was a historically accurate and i read karen holiday tanners biography of of doc holliday she is a member of his family holiday but she had access to bomb papers

and documents that had never been made public before and i found out that that john henry holiday was born in eighteen fifty one with a cleft palate and a cleft lip and i was absolutely blown away by that his uncle i just us how they perform the first cleft palate surgery in north america a deeper cuts an upstairs williamson crawford long was it was one of the very first to his developing either as an anesthetic this was the second pediatric surgery in history that was done under anesthesia this extraordinary family and i i fell in love with the sport kid and his mother that's what makes my take on doc holliday so different is that i'm not writing about a guy who shows up in tombstone at the age of thirty with a bad reputation and other crimean but no skate i'm writing about dallas holiday some and it was such a close relationship and so and mashed and so

devoted it just gave me an entirely different take on what their boy was like and what that mammoth like yes absolutely you've got this is a kid who it was very very sheltered as a child his mother basically she could use open his blunt and still in mourning for her first daughter who had just died and alice invented speech therapy for him because it was it became clear that he was going to have a significant speech impediment when he started to talk and she had him reading when he was four years old she had him at the piano jazz piano teacher quite talented and he was at the keyboard from the time he could he could reach it ol nick he like many educated man of his times he read it in greek and latin and french he played classical piano along by that he got his doctor of dental surgery degree when he was only twenty years old this is not a psychopath is

and at the age of twenty one he began to die he caught tuberculosis probably from his mother who died when he was fifteen and he watched that so he knew exactly what that disease was about a twenty to the diagnosis was confirmed and he went west for his health twenty two years old mr mason always we get here we've got the young he gets to dallas are on september nineteen eighteen seventy three and that's the day that the crash of seventy three took place the entire economy imploded so his story is so contemporary it is so much like so many kids who got their shiny new degrees and we're all set to start on their careers and the bottom falls out everything he gambled because nobody had money for dentistry before but nobody had money to pay him it was a chemical in ways so it's a different man this is a different

guy than the movies don't we married talked to me about the relationship between doc holliday and they are brothers i think that he made friends with the terps primarily because i get respect to carry cash says he's six feet tall at the time when he was relatively healthy and at seventy eight he read hundred forty poems utah bat masterson said this is a guy who could've gone ten minutes with your average forty year old he was scared he was sick and he was by himself it helps make friends with large guys who wear badges not exactly so thank you so much for visiting a precinct there's mary doria russell is the a author of dark a novel published by ballantine books russell lives in cleveland ohio she joined me at a campus but

festival in topeka russell is currently working on a sequel to dock it's working title is a cure for anger she describes the manuscript this way if the doctor is the apathy then this will be the iliad russell says it should be out in late two thousand fourteen no dentist gamblers or gunfighters in our next book but a number of other professions from professional musician to aquarium cleaner send me work is a collection of short stories by catherine carlin carlin teaches at kansas state university welcome catherine thank you the stories in semi worker all very different in terms of character plot and style but the one thing they all have in common is work talk to me about that theme i started looking around and noticing so so little of the literature i was reading particularly with women characters at the center was about the working lives now there are books

and stories about working women but generally dealt with their domestic lives or their love lives om i was really hard pressed to find things that are dealt with were essential conflict in women's lives and this seems so at odds with the life i was living and the lives of women i knew we spend eight twelve sixteen hours a day at work then when we're not at work were thinking about it a lot and some of our most intense relationships are formed work that might be fleeting they might be over once we leave the job or the workplace but was a less they are in tents and i was interested in exploring that aw that's so i drew somewhat on my own working experience could say used to work in oil refineries in our kinship yard bomb and also of the experiences of people i knew that i thought had interesting conflicts of work

aren't so from that i try to put together a kind of mosaic of working lives of american women and just scratch the surface i think i could do you know many other states are short stories about this topic along so that was sort of that it's a it became an infrared beam to me i just started writing one story after another and then i realized i did have this thing going i think it's certainly unconsciously at first and then i realized this is what i'm interested in as a writer this is what i'm interested in exploring katherine if i could get you to read one of your stories for us again this is kathryn carlin her collection of short stories is called send me work the starry eyes about rachel who's an oboist is the second vocalist in orchestra in the first vocalist is her lifelong nemesis peter du eighty nine close enough an age that she realizes she's never going to get his place in the orchestra along

even though she's a much more careful meticulous musician than he is and they were both brought up under the tutelage of a beloved teacher mr levine bought and he's dying in florida he's retired to florida and he's dying and the two of them rachel and peter make a pilgrimage to see him so rachel goes to visit him first she goes to visit him in the morning this is peter's decision and peter will go to make his entrance in the afternoon so this is a passage that you're going to visit next year living rachel expected the bourgeois clutter of the levin stock west end apartment to be transferred to florida the oriental rug the tender box the elongated african masks and porcelain statuettes and framed take out the florida home was alien clean spare sunday and smelling not of cabbage butterfly saul

they stood in the foyer of parquet floor which is so the kitchen to the right and to the left a carpeted hallway didn't other ones she relies most euro would not equate himself either he would be gray and dying and strapped iv lines go go madame file her fingers as if she were scattering droplets rich up headed into the cool white of the hallway and son opened ordered send she stopped before and craned her neck to peak wellness goldstein how good to see you it wasn't that he was sitting up on the edge of his bed in a pair of crisply i and cream colored pajamas his slippers dangled from his feet there was only one ivy stand in with the full bag of clear liquid hanging from it but this she was not plugged in hay she sidestepped into the rumen automatically reached on pack the oboe case she had not brought her a feeling not so bad

you look fine she said on a cane but in chairs facing the bed the visitors chair for the window she could see the identical houses on the treeless street and beyond them the blue of the inlet nice place she said i've never visited you here before the van comes to take you shopping or to cultural events miami it's very convenient rachel not that i'm a few days taken the room on the dresser set the portable seventy a player the only sign of their former bohemian life i remember that record player she step toward it and stroked its base a stack of dense black discs was on the spindle i'm a tall lean to get out of the classes i could listen to some old recordings he lifted a finger long and elegant there's some rare record several made when he was in paris under the vichy rachel snorted he played for the vichy iris is not to judge rachel i know chastened she moved to hand from the phonograph player as

if it were on fire go ahead and put one on the portable have rectangular brown bunsen panels lined with the coarse campus young was heavy and she placed a carefully in the groove was rick seaney the sound was a little scratchy the list the ambient noises the old seventy eights picked up a chair scraping against the floor the squeak of fingers and strings or wind player gasping for air in a moment several large tuna so when he later made famous in the philharmonic days but what he led a seventy eight was nothing like the music made with bernstein his sound was thin and horse slightly flat it was a kazoo why would say bret make a record was such a bad read she looked at living for an explanation that's catherine carlin reading from her collection of short stories send me work carlin teaches creative writing and literature at kansas state university just two more kansas notable books to go and they're both nonfiction julie core wright

is the author of prairie fire a great plains history published by the university of kansas press corps right teaches at iowa state university in ames welcome to lee thank you it's nice to be here how did you become interested in the phenomenon of prairie fire well i'm a native kansan i grew up in augusta kansas and the past is in the southern part of that because flint hills and every year growing up and living mostly in kansas at least he's drinking and zara was very aware of the burning that happened in this one tales and every every here you can smell the burning grass in march in early april and so i think i think that experience growing up had something to do with it i knew i wanted to research and write about the great plain speak as i am i still do consider kansas my home and and want to learn more about that and then i was looking for a

topic that hadn't been explored thoroughly and then i think that early experience with the fires lead me to think someone should write a history of this topic to your book is full of example after example after example of people mostly european settlers and writing about a fire that happened on their property and a fire that happened the town over to say it's chock full is such an understatement how did you go about finding all of these cases where people had written letters or in their journal happy to find other material about prairie fires where a fire is something that if you experience that you're going to write about it was such a dramatic frightening overwhelming event that people want to ride in the diary they wanted to write a letter you know to grandma back in the east and teller about it and

so it turned out it was everywhere and the stories are and my favorite part of this topic is their great ones are there are there any particular ones that have a really stuck with you or any the brits now well once identified color favoritism was a tragic that time the one that made me cry when i read it is sitting in our prize i was sitting in the north dakota historical society why is the fire in nineteen fourteen are relatively late father in near beltsville north dakota and now is one where the fire came upon a schoolhouse and the teacher an iowa native have the teacher had to decide what to do it you keep the kids in the schoolhouse or do you try to take in a plowed ground and she made the wrong decision and she she hadn't got a plowed ground in some of the the boys' you know got confused enough and a wrong direction and the children many

children were killed and it was just a terrific description of the with absolute worst case scenario in you know ninety nine out of a hundred the prairie fires are not nearly that tragic but that was the one that really got to me you know i read some sad stories over the years researching this book but that was that was the worst one but there were funny stories as well you know that stick with me and i am why and i remember a woman who that she thought the fire had passed her house and she was in a sod houses on houses don't burn so that's a good place to and she i'll be the fire had passed and she opened the door to you to go out and the air was still so hot that it literally burned the hair off her head and so you know probably not funny to her at the time that anything to me sitting in the archives

that reading about it there's great stories in a woman that climbing a at a windmill tower with her baby in one arm to save herself and her baby in another woman lowering herself down into a well again with a baby in her arms so there's some funny stories than i am at heart warming stories and then also stories there very tragic julia have you read an excerpt from her book prairie fire if you could just our way at the story that begins the book mr weeden did his best but he could not save his wife and son perhaps as a newcomer he simply did not know what to do the fire came to suddenly and left no refuge surrounded by open prairie weekend drove his oxen drawn wagon carrying his wife and two children on to the piece of ground with the widest grass cover the inadequacy of the plan was magnified by the family's disastrous decision to get out of the wagon and wait for the

fire soon it was upon them and the oxen spit in the seconds that we going to have to calm the team and then he grabbed his daughter and place her in the wagon the prairie fire overtook his wife and son we don't rush to their aid burning one hand so severely that he later lost it but he could not save them mother and son died a few agonizing hours later where is sweden's daughter the only person inside the wagon as the fire rushed by was uninjured the local newspaper editor in eldorado kansas appropriately shocked at the tragedy that had occurred just nine miles west of tampa used the occasion to warn his readers of the dreaded prairie fires of the planes into same inning careless residents think of this the editor wrote you who willfully set fire to are almost limitless prayers that's dooley core write reading from prairie fire a great plains history published by the university of kansas press

thank you julie thank you just one more kansas notable book to go and it may be a familiar one to regular k pr present listeners this year marked the seventy fifth anniversary of the disappearance of amelia earhart and on a previous program i talked to several others and historians about the famous pilot from acheson and the circumstances surrounding her final flight one of those others campus fleming won at cannes is notable award for her new children's book amelia lost the life and disappearance of amelia earhart she joined me by telephone from her home in the chicago area welcome candace you threatened dozens of children's books on a wide range of subjects why everyone about amelia earhart amelia earhart is there for the book one time in the coming and really long time coming i had only an estimated that amelia earhart and i you know the root of that when i was a child

my mother told me a story about her own childhood that she was thirteen years old on july third nineteen thirty famine and she was listening to the radio achieve heard that amelia earhart had been on was on that trip around the world and they believed that she had gone down in the ocean and my mother i'm good lord amelia earhart and could not possibly believe that if it happened to amelia earhart she looked at her the role model you know this woman that that one third of the living embodiment of of the possibility for young women at the time my mother and they could believe it into the colorful town in indiana on the shores of lake michigan and when he her death and she might be harm to the beach and i actually looked up into the cloudless blue to life right and floor then shifted their lineup on the family that she would surely the amelia winning highway home at

the end and my mother fed chief that they're in chief that guarantee that their have chris in amelia earhart never came in he never came armed and you she was telling me this story probably forty years after the attack and you can actually still hear that feather from mining in mind my own mother's voice which to me you know i think i'm a fashion from waste millions of my mother's heart because she didn't come back on and through my own mom my mother the memory he sort of broke my own arm and fellow with one of the stories that have always felt billy crystal me that my mother had this crystal action without a figure that for me like mary bennett christian from history suddenly made her very personal kenneth what about amelia did you find the most interesting the earlier

attacks and the research of collecting a lot of wonderful stories a lot of really wonderful anecdotes that i felt were really howling and billy enlightening about and she was really caught my young readers will appreciate it in my favorite story that i felt that i had found my favorite anecdote an event one that ej the all the time and it's about amelia earhart how when he was a life insurance coverage though church in iowa state fair game of nineteen oh eight and she fed that she had actually to actually obtain a first airplane when she left there at the age of i think she was like cement crypt <unk> issue of eleven and she wrote her own memoir he wrote but the plane she thought the state fair with a thing of wire and wet but that she's more interested in the fertile had made from an early key to that kid that you purchased for a fitting for an absolutely charming i don't when you think about it because fear is amelia earhart the whole future of white bear

and she didn't know if it could she was interested in something felker await i love that bob won a good for their research they discovered that that anecdote entirely natural and when you compare it to aviation history there's no way that there would have been an airplane in iowa state fair in nanking away mean you know it is not quite five years earlier the plane a ban on and they accumulated only went straight line for a very short carrie there's enough white time arm just makes her credit recovery i think there had been a fad now know there was a lot of the theater that year fell in with one of the anecdotes that had to mark up my life when i was a little discouraged but i figured my research all the things that i thought i had known about her that i had found another thirty for lonely i had to chip away at it the trick with them

off my left for example that wonderful mop of hair do that she had that you know the mid level of a life with wonderful mark of harry gaylor live it with the way that he was careless and she didn't care how she looked and she was just a compilation of you with that here and what i came to discover if their checks with a curling iron plate every morning fell it left them definitely an appearance she was thinking about in the public and ration their method and how to cover the story at richland loved that make it that love really thought showed me who she was and turned out that none of them are true and at one point i get really frustrated i remember coming into my office awaiting me and for my family and faith and accomplished both army of fire fire camp on phys ed i get frustrated and one of the things that i think that i thought the most fascinating about

her life the fact that he can't on the trail herself an american rower reason for that of course cheap of trying to make herself eligible for the public in the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties and women were not expected to be independent and have you know part of the strange and very funny i remain feminine monthly for that they continue to pay money to come in for her lecture and for that she could continue to fly today whether they'll return for that item and then i cut their lives especially fascinating when you think about the folk promoting amelia earhart us think about your throat fire i never really think about is the fight for motor author of amelia lost the life and disappearance of amelia earhart amelia earhart president garfield doc holliday so he wonders of kansas my ruby slippers liars

moon send me work prairie fire truck that's eight of this year's cannes is notable books the best new books by kansans or about kansas if you missed last week's program where we talk to the rest of the camp was notable others you can listen to it on our website k pr that kay you that edu you can also find previous k pr prisons on the kansas notable books of two thousand ten and two thousand eleven for more information about the camps as noble books and a complete list of this year and previous year's winners go to daddy daddy daddy you that casey at be bad info that the kansas center for the book daddy daddy daddy you that casey fbi that in fall i'm kate mcintyre kbr prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas

red states got redder and blue states blue or a view of the key actors trend line you go from radiation to read read too deeply read citizens' commission to about forty to fifty three days straight after the state legislature in kansas but awful and simon tay pierre presents the two thousand twelve election at kansas perspective i'm kate mcintyre joined me at a club next monday evening for a look at that national and state elections with analysis from political scientists at the university of kansas kansas state university emporia state university washburn university and more this is a group that he's a freshman class is going to have a lot of power an enormous amount how it will be like neil fights on parade in the legislature we are on to this thing paths forward

read half of wearable the moderate retired beaten the bird at our present that two thousand twelve election at kansas perspective it o'clock sunday evening on kansas public radio