Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Bishop Michael B. Curry joins Roxanne to discuss his new book, Love Is the Way: Holding On to Hope in Troubled Times. This week's sponsor: This episode is presented by Noom. Ready to learn how to live healthier? Sign up for Noom today at noom.com/justtherightbook.

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Janice P. Nimura joins Roxanne to discuss her new book, The Doctors Blackwell. This week's sponsor: This episode is presented by Noom. Ready to learn how to live healthier? Sign up for Noom today at noom.com/justtherightbook.

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Mark Salter joins Roxanne to discuss his book The Luckiest Man: Life with John McCain. This podcast is brought to you by Catapult, publishers of White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad. ________________________________ Mark Salter has collaborated with John McCain on all seven of their books, including The Restless Wave, Faith of My Fathers, Worth the Fighting For, Why Courage Matters, Character Is Destiny, Hard Call, and Thirteen Soldiers. He served on Senator McCain’s staff for eighteen years. * Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Mark Salter joins Roxanne to discuss his book The Luckiest Man: Life with John McCain. This podcast is brought to you by Catapult, publishers of White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad. ________________________________ Mark Salter has collaborated with John McCain on all seven of their books, including The Restless Wave, Faith of My Fathers, Worth the Fighting For, Why Courage Matters, Character Is Destiny, Hard Call, and Thirteen Soldiers. He served on Senator McCain’s staff for eighteen years. * Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Guy Raz joins Roxanne to discuss his book How I Built This.

In the fourth episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow join Roxanne to discuss their book, Big Friendship.  Aminatou Sow is a writer, interviewer, and cultural commentator. She is a frequent public speaker whose talks and interviews lead to candid conversations about ambition, money, and power. Aminatou lives in Brooklyn. Ann Friedman is a journalist, essayist, and media entrepreneur. She is a contributing editor to The Gentlewoman. Every Friday, she sends a popular email newsletter. Ann lives in Los Angeles. Together, Aminatou and Ann host the long-running podcast Call Your Girlfriend. Big Friendship is both Aminatou and Ann’s first book. * Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.

In the fourth episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Annik Lafarge joins Roxanne to discuss her new book, Chasing Chopin. Annik LaFarge is a writer, photographer, lecturer, and author of the much-praised On the High Line: Exploring America's Most Original Urban Park, winner of the IPPY award for Travel Guidebook. She has been writing about the High Line and urban landscapes since 2009 on the blog Livin The High Line. Her most recent book is Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across 3 Centuries, 4 Countries, and a Half Dozen Revolutions. She lives in New York City.

In the third episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Marc Brackett joins Roxanne to discuss his book, Permission to Feel. Marc Brackett, Ph.D., author of Permission to Feel, is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. Marc has published 125 scholarly articles on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health, and performance. He is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based, systemic approach to social and emotional learning that has been adopted by more than two thousand schools, pre-K through high school, across the United States and in other countries. Marc has received numerous awards and is on the board of directors for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). He is co-founder of Oji Life Lab, a digital emotional intelligence learning system for businesses. Marc also consults regularly with corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google on integrating emotional intelligence principles into employee training and product design.

In the second episode of our new season on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Jordan Blashek and Chris Haugh join Roxanne to discuss their book, Union: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground. Jordan Blashek is a businessman, military veteran, and attorney from Los Angeles, California. After college, Jordan spent five years in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer, serving two combat tours overseas. He holds degrees from Yale Law School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Princeton University. Jordan is based in New York, where he invests in entrepreneurial efforts to grow the American middle class as a part of Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Christopher Haugh is a writer from Kensington, California. After graduating with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, Chris attended Oxford University and started speechwriting as an intern in the Obama White House. He went on to join the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff where he served as a speechwriter to the Secretary. In 2018, Chris graduated from Yale Law School where he was a Yale Journalism Scholar. Chris is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York.

In the first episode of our new season, Senator Chris Murphy joins Roxanne to discuss his book The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy. Elected in 2012 as the youngest member of the U.S. Senate, Chris Murphy has earned a reputation as a serious legislator who is willing to stand up for his principles and reach across the aisle. Since the Newtown school shooting in December 2012, he has also become the best-known leader in Congress in confronting the plague of gun violence in America. Now in his second term representing Connecticut, he and his wife, Cathy, an attorney, have two young sons, Owen and Rider.

The legacy of growing up black in a state whose original constitution stated "no free negro or mulatto not residing in the state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall come, reside or be within the state or hold any real estate or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them." This legacy is explored with brutal honesty and humor, poetry, and above all, with love for the family that is Mitchell Jackson's American family. It is a memoir that uses original storytelling methods to encompass a vibrant personal journey of race, violence, manhood and tragedy. But it is defined by survival within that chaos.

Has confidence in our universities eroded? Is the price for making people feel included making universities inhospitable to controversial ideas? Have we become too politically correct or not politically correct enough? And, most critically, have our colleges become political institutions rather than institutions that are creating lifelong learners that are willing to engage in honest debate and equipped to effectively navigate in a heterogenous world? In his new book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses Michael Roth answers these questions and more. His book presents a much-needed template for honest conversations and he grounds these provocative topics in reality versus hype, and characterizes a path forward for our universities to fulfill their mission of developing self-awareness, subtlety of thought, and openness to the possibility of learning from others.

Stephen Schwarzman, with his cofounder Pete Peterson, built Blackstone into the largest private equity firm in the world, with over half a trillion dollars under management. Yet at the beginning, that success did not seem inevitable. In 1985, they sent out almost five hundred letters to potential investors and received two responses. Two years later, they closed an eight-hundred million fund, and they closed it on the eve on the largest one-day percentage drop in stock market history. Along the way, Steve Schwarzman became one of the sought-after advisors to business, governments, and leaders around the world as well as an incredibly active philanthropists in China, England, and the United States. In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Schwarzman joins Roxanne Coady to discuss his new book, What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence, out now from Avid Reader Press. This episode is sponsored by Amistad Books and the upcoming novel Africaville by Jeffrey Colvin, a stunning debut inspired the true history of a settlement in Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose black population—largely the descendants of slaves from the American South and the Caribbean-- carved out a community against the harsh maritime landscape and against bigotry and racism. Africaville by Jeffrey Colvin is available now wherever books are sold.

This week, Roxanne Coady and two members of the RJ Julia Booksellers staff, COO Lori Fazio and head book buyer Andrew Brennan, share their picks of the holiday season, including The Boy, the Mold, the Fox, and the Horse, The Martini Cocktail, Jubilee, The Complete Goal Manual, and much more. Listen and find the perfect gift for everyone on your list this holiday season!

How does memory create power? How do you define freedom, and how does the emotional savagery of selling and separating members of a family destroy and define a human being? And, most powerfully, in the midst of trauma and loss, how does one find courage and how does love survive? These ideas and more are explored in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel, The Water Dancer. In partnership with RJ Julia Booksellers, this event was recorded live at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut.

THE BOOK OF GUTSY WOMEN: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience is the first book that Secretary Clinton and Chelsea have written together, and they are excited to welcome readers into a conversation they began having when Chelsea was a little girl. Join them as they discuss the women throughout history who have had the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done. Inspired by women whose tenacity blazed the trail, the two global leaders lay out a vision for how these stories of persistence can galvanize women and men, boys and girls around the world. There’s Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist whose Asperger’s syndrome has shaped her advocacy. Civil rights activist Dorothy Height, LGBTQ trailblazer Edie Windsor, and swimmer Diana Nyad, who each kept pushing forward, no matter what. Writers like Rachel Carson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, historian Mary Beard, who used wit to open doors that were once closed, and activists like Harriet Tubman and Malala Yousafzai, who looked fear in the face and persevered. And so many more. This groundbreaking celebration of gutsiness is a call to action – not just for women, but for all of us, especially now. The authors write, “Ensuring the rights, opportunities, and full participation of women and girls remains a big piece of unfinished business of the twenty-first century. Finishing it is going to take all of us standing shoulder to shoulder, across the generations, across genders. This is not a moment for anyone to leave the fight, or sit on the sidelines waiting for the perfect moment to join.” The event took place at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale on October 29, 2019.

Mo Rocca is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, host of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation, and host and creator of the Cooking Channel’s My Grandmother’s Ravioli, in which he learned to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers across the country. He’s also a frequent panelist on NPR’s hit weekly quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Rocca spent four seasons as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He began his career in TV as a writer and producer for the Emmy and Peabody Award–winning PBS children’s series Wishbone. As an actor, Mo starred on Broadway in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Rocca is the author of All the Presidents’ Pets, a historical novel about White House pets and their role in presidential decision-making.

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American Magazine, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.

Steve Luxenberg is the author of Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation and the critically acclaimed Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret. During his thirty years as a Washington Post senior editor, he has overseen reporting that has earned numerous national honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes. Separate won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.  This episode was recorded live at RJ Julia Booksellers.