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This week's Book Picks come from Kira Wizner of Merritt Bookstore in Millbrook, New York.

We welcome back travel expert Jean Gagnon to take your questions! To join the conversation, give us a call at 1-800-348-2551 or you can e-mail us at VoxPop@wamc.org. WAMC's Ray Graf hosts.

Before Covid-19, public health programs constituted only 2.5 percent of all US health spending, with the other 97.5 percent going towards the larger health care system. In fact, the United States spends on average $11,000 per citizen per year on health care, but only $286 per person on public health. It seems that Americans value health care, the medical care of individuals, over public health, the well-being of collections of people. In "Me vs. Us," primary care doctor and public health advocate Michael Stein takes a hard, insightful look at the larger questions behind American health and health care.

Comedian and actor Fortune Feimster is coming to our region this week during a busy time in her burgeoning career.

Jori Lewis is an award–winning journalist who writes about agriculture and the environment. Her new book "Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History," weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. Americans consume over 1.5 billion pounds of peanut products every year. But few of us know the peanut’s tumultuous history, or its intimate connection to slavery and freedom.

The Hudson Valley has one of America’s newest members of Congress. In today’s Congressional Corner, Democrat Pat Ryan of New York’s 19th district speaks with WAMC’s Alan Chartock.

In Annie Hartnett's new novel "Unlikely Animals" (Ballentine Books), natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she’s lost her way. A medical school dropout, she’s come back to small-town Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days.

Peter Orner is the author of the novels "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" and "Love and Shame and Love" and the story collections "Esther Stories," "Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge," and "Maggie Brown & Others." His previous collection of essays, "Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His new essay collection is "Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin."

The Roundtable Panel: a daily open discussion of issues in the news and beyond.Today's panelists are WAMC’s Alan Chartock, UAlbany Lecturer in Africana Studies Jennifer Burns, immigration attorney and Partner with the Albany law firm of Whiteman Osterman & Hanna, Cianna Freeman-Tolbert, political consultant and lobbyist Libby Post.

If you’re like most people, the relentless daily grind of go-go-go, do-do-do, can run down your energy and deplete your resources. While most of us find our lives full of “Upstate” moments that rev up our stress engines, it doesn’t have to be this way.Sleep researcher Dr. Sara Mednick, shows how we can access the most replenishing and repairing aspects of sleep through activities and moments that happen during our day by diving into our “Downstate.” Dr. Mednick shows that bringing ourselves back to the Downstate is critical for our health, well-being, and cognitive longevity.Her new book is: "The Power of the Downstate."