Tell Me What You’re Reading

While we refer to a few books in the discussion that follows, this discussion with my dear old friend Albert Lerman is primarily about his experience as an 18 year old infantryman in World War II. And when I say old friend, I really mean it. Albert turned 100 earlier this year and Albert’s son Bill, a dear and old friend as well, suggested that it would be timely to have this discussion. Albert was a grunt in the Army, an infantryman, tough, resilient, essential,  the backbone of the army, and part of The Greatest Generation.Carol and I have known and loved Albert for more than 50 years, and he's exemplified The Greatest Generation his entire life.  I’m so pleased to have had this discussion with Albert and Bill. (U.S. forces met allied Russian forces at the Elbe River in Germany on April 25, 1945, effectively splitting Nazi Germany in half and symbolizing the imminent end to the war.  In the picture above, Albert is the grunt with the cigarette in his mouth greeting Russian soldiers at the Elbe.)Albert discusses the drafting of the entire freshman and sophomore classes from Penn into the Army gearing up to fight the war; the hell of war for the soldiers (“you know, the guy beside you, all of a sudden, he ain’t alive anymore. That’s tough. That’s tough”), including the misery of living in foxholes, and for the German civilians as well (“absolutely, war is hell for them too, the people that we flushed out of these houses were women and children“); his war injuries; the historic meeting of U.S. and allied Russian forces at the Elbe River; the preference of the Germans to surrender to American forces (“they were deathly afraid of the Russians”); his extended honeymoon with Evelyn after the war; and his hope for the U.S. to avoid war in the future.My 2018 discussion with Evelyn, who we all loved beyond measure - Tell Me What You’re Reading No. 32: Evelyn Lerman - Ev's tribute to her Mom, and my tribute to Ev - can be found on Spotify or Apple PodcastsBooks referred to in my discussion with Albert.D-Day, June 9, 1944, by Stephen AmbroseThe Greatest Generation, by Tom BrokawWhen Time Stopped, A Memoir of my Father’s War and What Remains, by Ariana NeumannSome of the other WWII books I’ve read.Roosevelt the Soldier of Freedom, by James MacGregor BurnsNo Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns GoodwinEleanor and Franklin, by Joseph P LashRoosevelt and Hopkins, by Robert  E SherwoodLeadership in Turbulent Times, by Doris Kearns GoodwinFive Days in London, May 1940, by John LucasChurchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew RobertsThe Last Lion, by William ManchesterThe Conquerors, by Michael BeschlossFrom the Crash to the Blitz 1929 1939, by Cabel PhillipsIn the Garden of Beasts, by Eric LarsonHitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Jonah GoldhagenInside the Third Reich, by Albert SpeerThe Brass Ring,by Bill MauldinUnbroken, A World War II Story, by Laura HillenbrandHiroshima, by John HerseyTruman, by David McCulloughThe Winds of War, by Herman WoukWar and Remembrance, by Herman Wouk#WWII #Veterans #104th Infantry #First Army #First Canadian Army #The Big Red One - The First Infantry Division #General Patton - The Third Army #Terrible Terry Allen. 

My interview on October 24, 2025, of storyteller Martha Frankel, a memoirist, essayist, celebrity profiler, book editor and reviewer, and founder and producer of Woodstock’s Bookfests and Story Slams. A condensed and edited version of this interview was published on  November 7, 2025, in The Overlook, community journalism serving Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken, and Woodstock, New York. The full text of the interview can be found on my website, and the interview can be heard on my podcast, “Tell Me What You’re Reading”, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever else you listen to podcasts. (Photo Credit: Dion Ogust) 

Writers of the Catskills: In Conversation with Elizabeth LesserA series of self-portraits by Catskills’ literary voices My interview on August 15, 2025, of Elizabeth Lesser, New York Times bestselling author and the co-founder of Omega Institute, the renowned conference and retreat center located in Rhinebeck, New York. A condensed and edited version of this interview was published on  October 17, 2025, in The Overlook, community journalism serving Hunter, Hurley, Olive, Saugerties, Shandaken and Woodstock, New York. The full text of the interview can be found on my website, and the interview can be heard on my podcast, “Tell Me What You’re Reading”, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Susan Brown is a professional editor, writing coach, and book doctor. She’s had forty years of teaching college creative writing and book editing, and has guided dozens of books into print as an editor, and as a writing coach.My friend Jeff Moran in Woodstock had previously mentioned Susan to me, and so I was intrigued when I heard that Susan was going to run a five week online writing workshop called “The Secrets of the Great Writers”.Jeff had told me that Susan was a James Joyce scholar.  That was a little bit intimidating, but also immediately credentializing. I’ve appreciated a number of books on writing, by Stephen King, George Saunders, Anne Lamotte, Mary Karr and others, and thought it might also be instructive, and interesting, to be part of a writing workshop, so I signed up for Susan’s class. I learned a lot in the workshop, we had a terrific group of very talented fiction and memoir writers in the class, and it was a lot of fun. ​One of the dozens of sources Susan identified for us during the workshop was a book called Hit Lit - Cracking the Code of the 20th Century’s Biggest Bestsellers, by James Hall. In his book, Hall identifies the features common to the biggest bestsellers of all time. Susan and I discussed her Secrets of the Great Writers Workshop. Susan actually conducted an abbreviated Workshop on the Air. We discussed Hall’s Hit Lit and we discussed Ulysses. We discussed storytelling. I loved this discussion.The books examined in Hit-Lit, many of which are referred to in our discussion.Gone with the Wind*Peyton PlaceTo Kill a Mockingbird*Valley of the DollsThe Godfather*The ExorcistJawsThe Dead ZoneThe Hunt for Red October*The Firm*The Bridges of Madison County; andThe Da Vinci Code**I’ve read these.Some of the other books referred to by Susan:Moby DickThe Scarlet Letter The LighthouseSound and the FuryThe Lincoln LawyerBlack Cherry BluesGone Baby GonePride and PrejudiceLet the Great World Spin Madame BovaryThe Glass CastleAngela’s AshesWildCatcher in the RyeLolitaUlyssesI encouraged Susan to run a class guiding us through Ulysses!

I had a delightful discussion with Hank Neimark, one of the Directors and Eric Hefler, who plays Falstaff, in The Bird-On-A-Ciff’s Woodstock Shakespeare Festival production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor”,  Shakespeare’s light heartened, and raucous, comedy, truly a farce, which focuses on middle class domestic issues and the agency of its female characters.            The Merry Wives of Windsor is Shakespeare’s only contemporaneous play, and features two very clever and able women who turn the tables on the bumptious, raucous, drunken rogue and scoundrel, womanizing, egotistical, deceitful, epicure and glutton, the fragile and fearful, morbidly obese and impoverished knight, Sir John Falstaff.     “Tell Me What You’re Reading” wherever you listen to podcasts. #Shakespeare #Bird-On-A-CliffTheatreCompany #WoodstockShakespeareFestival #communitytheater #summerstock  #woodstock #bookwormsinthewild

Jenni Knight, an artist in residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony (Bard MFA grad with a background in sculpture, drawing, painting and working with New York City experimental culture institutions, and currently writing about bodily integrity), discusses Autoportrait by Édouard Levé, 112 pages of mostly unconnected sentences, profound and mundane, serious and lighthearted, many irreverent, several entries referring to suicide, all in just one paragraph; a stream of consciousness exercise perhaps. Comic, unsettling, tragic.

Jeffrey Gurock is the author of a great new comprehensive biography of the premier voice of New York sports from the 1940s through the 1990s. The book is Marty Glickman, The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend. I loved the book and our podcast discussion. It's a sweet, sweet, bittersweet biography.  Romania, the Bronx and Brooklyn, the example set by Hank Greenberg and by Sandy Koufax, track and football in high school and college, quotas limiting the number of Jews in certain colleges, the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Jews who were precipitously excluded from the competition, American Nazis (truly, American Nazis), the great Jessie Owens, and a phenomenal sportscasting career for a gracious and generous gentleman. Really terrific.

Elizabeth Lesser discussed on my Podcast the founding of Omega Institute - internationally recognized for its wellness, spirituality, creativity, and social change workshops and conferences - as well her beautiful and inspiring books about finding protection and blessings in the broken moments of our lives; enjoying the passage of time; realizing what we have in life; appreciating every moment we are alive - Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow - and about being present to each moment; being who you are, answering the call of your soul, authenticity; unconditional love; learning to avoid straining against pain; being impeccable with our words; understanding that the only purpose of life is to shine the light you were given - Marrow: Love, Loss & What Matters Most. Elizabeth also discussed Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town, and Ann Pachette’s magnificent novel, Tom Lake, and the themes they share with her books.  Elizabeth is one of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100 - a collection of leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity - and a two time TED talker - “Take The Other to Lunch” and  “Say your truths and seek them in others”

I enjoyed talking with Amy Shearn and Hannah Oberman-Breindel this summer when they were in the Artist-in-Residence writing program at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, and even more so on our recent podcast discussion of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which is considered to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century.  I had not previously read any Virginia Woolf and I had not studied literary modernism. Despite being uninitiated, I was struck by the way Woolf captured the human condition and, in a realistic way, the unstructured non-linear thought processes of her characters. Written in 1927, the novel spans the time from just before to just after World War I The story itself, which has numerous autobiographical overlaps, revolves around the Ramsey family and their guests at their summer home by the sea in the Scottish Hebrides. Lots goes on, but only in the sense that life goes on, and it’s all really great.  Our podcast discussion was very much in the vein of Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative style, depicting “the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator, “an overlapping of images and ideas”. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary,  “The method of writing smooth narrative can’t be right. Things don’t happen in one’s mind like that, we experience, all the time, an overlapping of images and ideas, and modern novels should convey our mental confusion instead of neatly rearranging it. The reader must sort it out”. And we did try to sort it out!

Our Woodstock friend Carol Graham recently told me that her new book was just about to be published. She said something like, “Howard, this is not like one of the big, great fiction books you read, this is a ‘cozy’“. I had no idea at the time what a “cozy” was. but I do now. British crime novelist and detective fiction writer, P. D. James has been credited with saying that “All fiction is largely autobiographical” Carol is a Texan but has lived in Brooklyn and Woodstock for the last 21 years, and is now a real estate agent in both areas. Carol is also a member of the Woodstock Writers Group and a two-time winner of the Woodstock BookFest Story Slam! Carol’s newly published book, Passion! In Park Slope features a Texas born Brooklyn real estate agent who has not lost her drawl. Coincidental or autobiographical? We discussed Carol’s new book as well as “cozy” mysteries generally on our recent podcast discussion.. Carol’s website Brooklynmurdermysteries.com

On an Upper Byrdcliffe Road walk in Woodstock this past summer, I noted to my friends, Perry Beekman and David Gordon, the recent death of Robert Gottlieb, the most acclaimed book editor of the last 50+ years. I’ve previously mentioned on the podcast, Gottlieb’s really great memoir, Avid Reader. David noted that writer Cormac McCarthy had also then recently died. David expressed enthusiasm for McCarthy’s great works over the years. I had read McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, The Road, many years prior and I still get a chill in my bones when I think about it. I asked David whether he would like to come on the podcast to commemorate Cormac McCarthy and to talk about The Road, and the rest of McCarthys great works. And here we are. Published in 2006, The Road is a dystopian, post-apocalyptic and frightening warning, but it’s also a story of the love between a father and a son and of the lengths to which a father might travel for his son, literally and figuratively. It’s emotional, chilling and also beautifully written.

Carol and I walked up the road in early September to visit the Open Studios of the Artists-in-Residence Program at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. The Byrdcliffe Arts Colony was founded in 1903 by Ralph Whitehead, the son of a wealthy mill owner from Yorkshire, England. Whitehead was influenced by utopian ideas when he studied at Oxford, and he developed an enduring vision to found his own “brotherhood of artists” community. The Artists-in-Residence program is one of the many Byrdcliffe programs today that carry on Whitehead’s legacy. Carol and I saw some really interesting works at the Open Studios and were really struck by an outdoor installation by my guest, artist Kelly M O’Brien. On the podcast, Kelly and I discussed her installation, which is called “Ecotopia Conversation”, and its relationship to the 1975 novel Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, by Ernest Callenbac. “Ecotopia” describes a utopian world created by the secession in 1980 of Oregon, Washington and Northern California from the United States. It was a cult novel at the outset, and over the years became required reading as environmental studies took off. We truly had an Ecotopia Conversation.

Steph Kent, co-founder, with her husband Logan Smalley, of the Call Me Ishmael project joined me to discuss Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, the book I have recommended more than any other over the last few years.  Hamnet is a work of fiction, but it’s based in part on certain core facts on which O’Farrell builds this beautiful, devastatingly sad story, albeit with a sweet ending, of the impact of Hamnet’s death on his family, and its relationship to the writing of Hamlet. The book is a master class in the use of detail to tell a story, and the production of Hamlet produces a beautiful, poetic and moving conclusion. I frequently describe Hamnet as one of the best books I have ever read. Shakespeare is never mentioned by name in the book. I realized who Hamnet’s father was when I read of his letters home reporting on rival playhouse owners, crowds and costumes. Leaving Shakepere’s name out of the narrative is a useful tool to avoid Shakespeare stealing the limelight, which is left to his wife Agnes, who is a strong, mystical and intriguing presence throughout the book. I greatly admired Agnes, and I also was deeply moved by the grief of both Agnes and Shakespeare over the loss of their son.  Steph and Logan’s Call Me Ishmael project invites readers to celebrate the books they love. Anyone can call Ishmael at 774.325.0503 and leave an anonymous voicemail message about their favorite book. Thousands of readers have called and over a million readers have listened to this library of stories.  Steph and Logan joined me on the podcast in November 2019: Ep. 20: The Call Me Ismael Project; Steph Kent and Logan Smalley

My friend Tony Wolf and I discussed “Tales From The Wolf”, Tony’s memoir about his years living in Greenpoint, and including a compilation of his  New York Times “food cartoon” features, his superhero stories, a moving 9/11 tribute, and Trump era political cartoons. “Tales From The Wolf” can be purchased here. Tony is a cartoonist, an actor (including on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), a singer, film director, and illustrator. He’s essentially a storyteller, a journalist at heart. Tony’s website. We discussed Tony’s cartooning journey from the time he was a young child, his cartoonist role models, and how he “unwittingly created a new genre in the New York Times food section … a whole new world of visual comics about food.” This is one wide ranging discussion, longer than my usual but great fun. Hope you enjoy it. “Tell Me  What You’re Reading”, wherever you listen to podcasts. #bookwormsinthewild

Our discussion about Erica Obey’s mystery novel, the Brooklyn North Murder, turned into a discussion of The Typology of Detective Fiction, by Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, and literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov, a discussion about AI bots, their invasion into the publishing industry, plagiarism charges, and what it means for a book to be ghost written. We discussed Mountweazels, the dark web, The Chronicles of Narnia, early 19th century English aristocrat, publisher and linguist, Lady Charlotte Guest, locked-room murder mysteries, plotters and pantsers, and Erica’s “chaotic” writing style. We also conducted a ChatGPT experiment. Rabbit holes abound. Erica is a graduate from Yale University and has an MA in creative writing from City College of New York and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York, where she published articles and a book about female folklorists of the nineteenth century. In addition to The Brooklyn North Murder, Erica is the author of six other mysteries, most set in the Hudson Valley. Erica is also the past president of the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

Tom pulls no punches in his new book as he vividly and colorfully, and also convincingly, describes our cyber security vulnerabilities. As he explains, we are living on the razor’s edge between prosperity and devastation; the possibility of a digital Pearl Harbor, of a geopolitical D-day, of a technological and geopolitical tsunami, and of systemic vulnerabilities, including to our entire financial system, with the risk of a financial meltdown and economic annihilation, and also, among other things, vulnerability to the world’s food supply. He refers to unprecedented threats and describes the cyber security risk as one huge virtual improvised explosive device, a quintessential existential threat, the greatest threat to the future of humanity. He also refers to the “technological euphoria“ in the market, as  we all “mindlessly” click “yes” to accept terms of service, whatever they may be, and as tech start ups “move fast and break things”,  get to market first and worry about security later; and he refers to all of this as the twenty-first century version of the tulip bulb mania. He concludes that there has been for the most part short term thinking, an absence of any sense of urgency, a failure of vision, will and leadership, lack of technological expertise within the regulatory agencies, a pedestrian approach; which he describes as penetrating insights into the obvious and rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That’s a pretty damning conclusion. As a result of what Tom refers to as the norm of inaction and rudimentary analysis, we have today a “kindergarten level” cyber defenses, a practice of apologize, rinse and repeat, an attitude of defeatism in the face of a three-alarm fire. At the same time, we have no cyber police or virtual firefighters, no internet police.

Carol and I recently attended a lovely dinner party hosted by Abigail Sturges and other supporters of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. On its website, the Guild describes itself as “a vibrant center for arts and crafts in the beautiful and unique rural community of Woodstock, New York, while preserving the historic and natural environment of one of the earliest utopian arts colonies in America.”  Carol and I live in the Woodstock Byrdcliffe community and the beauty abounds whichever way you turn. I had the good fortune of being seated next to Katherine McKenna at Abigail's dinner party. Katherine is on the Board of the Guild and was Carol’s painting and color Instructor at the Woodstock School of Art, which is a sweet coincidence. Katherine and her brothers Douglas, Andrew and Bruce grew up in Englewood New Jersey, and Carol was Bruce McKenna’s 8th grade elementary school teacher. Small world. Katherine now divides her time between the Hudson Valley and the American West. Her landscape paintings of Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Arizona reveal an attachment to the natural geology and essence of place that she was first exposed to on the childhood trips she writes of in her memoir. Katherine has exhibited widely, and her paintings reside in permanent collections of the Rockwell Museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Booth Museum, the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, and the Desert Caballeros Museum in Wickenburg, Arizona Katherine also serves on the boards of Pratt Institute, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Arts Society of Kingston. Over dinner, Katherine told me of her father’s work as a paleontologist, including at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and of her own field work out West with her father when she was very young. I was fascinated that her artistic journey started with what she was exposed to at a very young age, and what she learned at the side of her father. Katherine mentioned that she had written a memoir, which I then ordered from the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and that we discussed on the podcast

My podcast guests are Alison Gaylin , a bestselling mystery writer who has been nominated for the Edgar Award four times, and has won the award in the category of Best Paperback Original for If I Die Tonight, and New York Times bestseller, and Wendy Corsi Staub, the award-winning author of more than ninety novels, best known for her psychological suspense novels. We discussed The Collective  – No Killer Goes Unpunished (by Alison) and The Other Family (by Wendy), both compelling, chilling page turners. We also discussed psychological suspense thrillers generally in which the perpetrator is coming from inside the house, or from inside the mind.

Todd Spire is a licensed fly fishing guide and instructor, and is the owner of Esopus Creel, a company devoted to fly fishing in the Catskill Mountains, where he’s lived since 2008. Todd’s on the board of the local Trout Unlimited chapter, which helps to protect the Esopus Creek, which feeds into the Ashokan reservoir, which provides New York City with about 40% of its drinking water. Todd is a scholar of our local river, the Esopus Creek. Todd discusses Neversink - One Angler's Intense Exploration of a Trout River, by Leonard M. Wright, Jr., and also the beauty and the rhythm of trout fishing in the Catskills, learning through observation and experience, and the futility of trying to control mother nature.  After the credits, Todd discusses the relationship of birds over the water to the presence of insects, the relationship between the blooming of flowers and insect hatches, turbidity on the Esopus, and the impact of warm temperatures on our trout fishing, and particularly whether we will be fishing earlier or later in the season as a result of warming temperatures. All consistent with Todd’s drive to learn from observation and experience rather than solely from what others have written and from Google.

Jen Maxfield is an Emmy® Award winning correspondent for NBC 4 New York. She covers breaking news and general assignment stories in New Jersey, and is a fill-in anchor on all of NBC 4 New York’s newscasts. Jen has covered many of the Tri-State area’s most memorable and powerful stories throughout her long career. More After the Break describes her initial reporting and follow up many years later for the 2003 Staten Island ferry crash, Katrina and Sandy in 2005 and 2012, a 2011 horrendous hit and run casualty, and several other accidents, tragedies and moving stories. The stories themselves are compelling, but mostly I loved Jen’s honesty, and her humility and introspection; the way she expressed the vital role of local news reporters in the community; her bouts of what she referred to as “news guilt”; and her expression of the "moral ambiguity" of her job, while recognizing her professional obligations.