human behavior

The Book Show #1292 - Meg Wolitzer

Joe Donahue — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:06:00 +0000

Novelist Meg Wolitzer has written several popular novels including, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Uncoupling. Her new novel is an exploration of friendship, coming-of-age, talent and success. The Interestings follows six artistic friends who meet as teenagers one pivotal summer at a camp called Spirit-in-the-Woods.

Anne Lamott

Joe Donahue — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:35:00 +0000

Renowned author Anne Lamott, whose latest work of non-fiction is Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers is in town this morning to speak at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy at 11 AM. We are thrilled she stopped by here first.

Lamott uses humor to get her messages across about motherhood, loss, spirituality and alcoholism in her novels and non-fiction. Among her works are Operating Instructions, Hard Laughter, Rosie, and Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son – which is just out in paperback.

"Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity"

Joe Donahue — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:42:17 +0000

Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn have long consulted with businesses and organizations around the world, looking to streamline products, services, processes and communications. And they have achieved dramatic results.

In the new book, Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity, Siegel and Etzkorn show us how having empathy, striving for clarity, and distilling your message can reduce the distance between company and customer, hospital and patient, government and citizen-and increase your bottom line.

Examining the best and worst practices of an array of organizations big and small-including the IRS, Google, Philips, Trader Joe's, Chubb Insurance, and ING Direct, and many more - Siegel and Etzkorn recast simplicity as a mindset, a design aesthetic, and a writing technique.

"Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing" with Po Bronson

Joe Donahue — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:35:00 +0000

What are the differences between a winning and losing performance? Why are we able to rise to the challenge one day, but wilt from it the next? Can we in fact become better competitors? In Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman use cutting edge science to tease out the hidden factors at the core of every great triumph - and every tragic failure.

Po Bronson joins us.

"American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things" by Bob Dotson

Joe Donahue — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:35:00 +0000

For the six million people who watch the Emmy Award–winning “American Story with Bob Dotson” on NBC’s Today Show, Bob Dotson’s reports celebrate the inspirational stories of everyday Americans. Dotson has been crisscrossing the country for more than forty years—logging more than four million miles—in search of people who have quietly but profoundly changed our lives and our country for the better.

Here we speak with Dotson about his new book, American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things.

"Hidden Cities" by Moses Gates

Joe Donahue — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:40:00 +0000

Moses Gates is a new breed of adventurer for the 21st century. He thrives on the thrill of seeing what others do not see, let alone even know exists. It all began quite innocuously. After moving to New York City and pursuing graduate studies in Urban Planning, he began unearthing hidden facets of the city—abandoned structures, disused subway stops, incredible rooftop views that belonged to cordoned-off buildings.

In his memoir of his experiences, Hidden Cities, Gates details his travels through underground canals, sewers, subways, and crypts, in metropolises spanning four continents.

Gates describes his immersion in the worldwide subculture of urban exploration; how he joined a world of people who create secret art galleries in subway tunnels, break into national monuments for fun, and travel the globe sleeping in centuries-old catacombs and abandoned Soviet relics rather than hotels or bed-and-breakfasts.

"Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now" by Douglas Rushkoff

Joe Donahue — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:12:00 +0000

This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we don’t seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead we remain poised and frozen, overwhelmed by an always-on, live-streamed reality that our human bodies and minds can never truly inhabit. And our failure to do so has had wide-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives.

Well, the future’s arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this “now” is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.

Douglas Rushkoff brings together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture.

"Poor Man's Feast" by Elissa Altman

Joe Donahue — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:10:00 +0000

Elissa Altman is a James Beard Award-winning writer whose new book marries wit to warmth, and flavor to passion. Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. In fact, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical.

But love does strange things to people, and when Elissa met Susan — a small-town Connecticut Yankee with a devotion to simple living — it would change Elissa's relationship with food, and the people who taught her about it, forever. Her new book, Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, is a universal tale of finding sustenance and peace in a world of excess and inauthenticity, and shows us how all our stories are inextricably bound up with what, and how, we feed ourselves and those we love.

"Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures" by Virginia Morell

Joe Donahue — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:10:00 +0000

Did you know that ants teach, earthworms make decisions, rats love to be tickled, and chimps grieve? Did you know that some dogs have thousand-word vocabularies and that birds practice songs in their sleep? That crows improvise tools, blue jays plan ahead, and moths remember living as caterpillars?

Animal Wise takes us on a dazzling odyssey into the inner world of animals, from ants to elephants to wolves, and from sharp-shooting archerfish to pods of dolphins that rumble like rival street gangs. With 30 years of experience covering the sciences, Virginia Morell uses her formidable gifts as a story-teller to transport us to field sites and laboratories around the world, introducing us to pioneering animal-cognition researchers and their surprisingly intelligent and sensitive subjects.

"Dignity" by Dr. Donna Hicks

Joe Donahue — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:35:00 +0000

The desire for dignity is universal and powerful. It is a motivating force behind all human interaction - in families, in communities, in the business world, and in relationships at the international level.

We talk about Dignity with Harvard Professor, Dr. Donna Hicks. Her book is Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict