Afleveringen
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On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by UW classics professor and author Tara Mulder to discuss her new book, A Womb of One's Own, now available from University of California Press.In the well-trod history of the Roman Empire, a pivotal moment has long gone unnoticed: It was in ancient Rome that medical men first set their sights on childbirth, the traditional domain of female midwives. Taking us to the dawn of Western obstetrics, A Womb of One's Own offers a feminist account of how, against a long tradition of midwifery, male doctors began claiming authority in reproductive matters, with an emphasis on theoretical rather than practical knowledge. Their intrusion paved the way for the later criminalization of midwives and the cloaking of childbirth in secrecy and shame.Yet communities of Roman women continued to help each other through the journey from preconception to postpartum, guided by their own experience and the expertise of midwives. Tara Mulder recovers stories of ancient women living and resisting as they sought autonomy over their bodies and their health. Recounting their experiences in vivid, intimate detail, she reveals how old our modern conflicts about birth truly are.Tara Mulder specializes in medicine, sex, and gender in antiquity, focusing particularly on the history of reproduction. She has published articles on the history and reception of reproduction, midwifery, abortion, gender and sexuality, and herbalism. Her academic trade monograph, A Womb of Oneâs Own: Childbirth in Ancient Rome tells a composite birth story, made up of the experiences of multiple (mostly) women. Other current projects include editing A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Ancient World for Bloomsbury, and producing a translation of Metrodoraâs Conditions of the Womb, a Byzantine medical text written by a woman.She is an assistant professor in the Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies department at UW Madison. As the daughter of a homebirth midwife, she has assisted in over two dozen births.
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McNally transcriptStu Levitan welcomes historian, author and music publicist Dennis McNally, whose new book is The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. And while itâs mainly about San Francisco, with a bit of New York and London thrown in, it does feature several individuals and events pertaining directly to Madison. So thatâs why you get to hear about it here. Dennisâs first book was include Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; then came A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead, which he wrote after serving many years as the bandâs publicist; and in 2015 the award-winning On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom, tracking American music from minstrelsy to Bob Dylan. He also edited Jerry on Jerry, transcripts of conversations he had over the years with Jerry Garcia. Hereâs our conversation about The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Lisa Fishman to talk about her deubt novel, Write Back Now!Acclaimed poet Lisa Fishmanâs debut novel tracks a peripatetic 1970s childhood and the uprooted friendship between girls who stay connected by mail, until they donât. It opens in a borrowed house in wintry Nova Scotia, where the adult narrator faces the first-ever border closure between her two countries. Framed by these long-separated experiences, the novel keeps almost-beginning again as the narrator tries to figure out where she will be next by figuring out where she has been previously. Along the way, a dead horse, a lost crop, a miscarriage, an extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and more friendships between women emerge. Write Back Now! explores the tensions between experience and loss, imagination and memory, the real and the secretly real. It is now available from Guernica Editions.Lisa Fishman is the author of the story collection World Naked Bike Ride, short-listed for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, The Rupture, Guesthouse, Flash Boulevard, and Jerry Jazz Musician. A nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, Fishman has published eight poetry books, including One Big Time; 24 Pages & other poems; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; The Happiness Experiment; and Dear, Read. Her poetry is anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Fence Booksâ Not for Mothers Only. With origins in both Montreal and the Detroit area, Fishman is a dual citizen who divides her time between Wisconsin and Eastern Canada. Write Back Now! is her first novel.You can learn more about Lisa on her page at Wave Books
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Stu Levitan welcomes Nancy Kathman, for a conversation about her engaging new memoir, “Love, Cuba, Goats and Music,” about her life cutting sugarcane in Cuba, co-founding the Southwest Dairy Goat Cooperative and exploring world music with the late Bob Queen, founder of so many of the hallmark east side music festivals.
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On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Sahar Mustafah to talk about her new novel, The Slightest Green.In the middle of dinner one evening, Intisar Jaber receives a phone call that will upend her quiet life in Chicago: her father is dying and she must go to Palestine to pay her final respects. But Intisar hasn't seen or heard from Hafez for nearly two decades, ever since he abandoned her and her mother to join the resistance. After a fateful mission, Hafez was thrown into the notorious Gahana Prison to serve a life sentenceâpermanently removed from her life. As soon as Intisar arrives in his village of Bayt al-Hawa, she discovers what it means to be a stranger in her ancestral land, the inheritance of loss, and the high price of freedom. Meanwhile, Hafezâs mother Sundus battles to save the home that she built with her husband from thieving hands. Will Intisar, her estranged granddaughter, help Sundus fight to reclaim it? Can they close the gaping distance between them before itâs too late?The daughter of immigrants, Sahar Mustafah explores her Palestinian heritage in her writing. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Columbia College where she was a Follett Graduate Scholar. Her debut novel, The Beauty of Your Face, was named a The New York Times Book Review Notable Books of 2020 and one of Marie Claire Magazineâs 2020 Best Fiction by Women. It was a Finalist for the 2021 Palestine Book Award, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, and chosen for the Los Angeles Times âUnited We Read.â Her recent fiction is featured in Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction and The View from Gaza published in The Massachusetts Review. She was awarded a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship from New Literary Project and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. Mustafah writes and teaches outside of Chicago. Sahar will be in town to discuss The Slightest Green at A Room of Oneâs Own on May 17th.
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Jeff Oloizia was our guest on Book Beat with John Quinlan discussing his new weekly WI Literary Podcast "Writing Forward," which debuted on May 6th. We learned about the purpose of the cutting edge podcast, and about the man behind it.
The Brookfield native and 2007 UW alum left Wisconsin post-graduation, not necessarily expecting to return, settling into "an itinerant existence" in exotic places like Japan, San Francisco and New York as a journalist, and eventually earning a professorship as part of graduate studies in Wilmington, North Carolina. (This included a stint as an editor at the New York Times.)
As reported in this week's Cap Times, he once thought he had leave Madison to live a life of literature. âIt felt important to leave and go to the places where I thought writers were,â Oloizia said. After more than a dozen years interviewing famous people in these exotic locales, he returned home to Madison in 2020 to write extraordinary stories about the Wisconsin everyman as a prolific contributor to publications like Madison Magazine.
And this week, he creates a literary podcast interviewing Wisconsin authors walking a similar path back to their own roots here. A fascinating show about a fascinating guy. New editions of "Writing Forward" are available each week wherever podcasts are available. For more on Jeff, his podcast, and the overall scope of his work, visit his website at www.jeffoloizia.com .Photo courtesy of Jeff Oloizia
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Stu Levitan welcomes author and editor Dean Robbins, for a discussion about his career writing illustrated books for children â 13 of them at last count, inspirational stories about such role models as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., polio-eradicator Dr. Jonas Salk, NASA computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, the young Pakistani Noble Laureate Malala Yousafzai, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, suffrage leader Alice Paul, human rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, astronaut Alan Beam , and more. Deanâs books have been favorably reviewed in the New York Times and Daily News, USA Today, the Smithsonian Air & Space magazine, Publisherâs Weekly, Forbes magazine, along with the Madison, Milwaukee and Wisconsin statewide media. Steady BookBeat listeners will recall Deanâs appearance last July for a conversation about his first book for adult readers, Wisconsin Idols: 100 Heroes Who Changed the State, the World, And Me, from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Longtime Madisonians may remember Dean as the arts editor for Isthmus from 1991 to 2008, when he succeeded Marc Eisen as editor. Dean moved to the UW in 2014 as Communications Director for the Division of Continuing Studies and since 2019 has been editor of the alumni magazine On Wisconsin. It was a pleasure to welcome him back to Madison BookBeat.
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Author Theresa Evans of Sturgeon Bay discusses important end of life issues around her support of her mother in experiencing Assisted Death. "Choosing to Die: A Daughter's Story Of Supporting Her Mother's End Of Life Through Assisted Death," is about the journey her family took once her mother decided to define the date and terms of her death in the context of a small southwestern Ontario town.
Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, has been legal in Canada since 2016. By 2023, over 60,000 Canadians had chosen to die this way. By contrast, the United States has some of the most restrictive laws in the world around MAID. Canada allows a physician to administer the medications that will end a human life, often intravenously. However, in the US, one must be able to ingest the medication on their own, which can add additional stress and danger. For example, what if a person can't swallow, or if they vomit back the medication? What if because of the difficulties they face in attempting to die on their own, they lapse into a coma and don't die? Evans maps out what a more compassionate, patient-empowering approach in the US could mean.
Presented like a journal, Evans uses the metaphor of her mother's garden to powerful effect. Choosing to Die describes the author's vivid first hand experience, and is useful for caregivers, death doulas, and other professionals and volunteers involved in hospice care and palliative care. Mos of all, Choosing to Die is a gift for anyone seeking clarity and compassion in the midst of one of life's most confounding decisions.
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On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Lisa Low to talk about her new poetry collection, Replica.Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race.âThe problem of being with a white man is also a problem of writing,â Low says in a prose poem that turns writing about identity on its head. She peers in from outside the poem, as if through an open ceiling. The poem itself becomes a site of investigationâa counterpoint to constricting narratives about Asian American identityâreimagined as a dollhouse, a stage with props, an image the speaker wears like a bodysuit. Replica asks what it means to represent yourself and your experiences in a world where you are indistinguishable from others.Lisa Low is the author of Crown for the Girl Inside, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.Cover design by adam bohannon, with art by Yuqing Zhu
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On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Douglas Metoxen Kiel to talk about their new book, Unsettling Territory.How did the Oneida Nation of northeastern Wisconsinâstripped of nearly all its reservation lands by the early twentieth centuryârise to become a powerful political and economic force in Native America and the present-day Midwest? Doug Kiel traces the journey of resurgence, adaptation, and nation rebuilding of the Oneida people, who navigated federal policies and socioeconomic shifts to chart their own future, transforming adversity into opportunity.Kiel shows how Oneidas harnessed New Deal programs to advance their goals of self-determination; how urban migration, often seen as a marker of Indigenous displacement, became a tool of community empowerment; and how the Nation has reclaimed land and authority despite predictable backlash from neighboring towns. Drawing on extensive archival records, family photographs, and oral historiesâincluding stories from his grandmotherâKiel highlights the everyday acts that have sustained the Oneida Nation across generations and offers vital insights into the broader fight for Indigenous nationhood in twenty-first-century America.Doug Kiel, a citizen of the Oneida Nation, is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. They live in Chicago, IL.
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On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Melissa Faliveno about her debut novel, Hemlock, now available from Little, Brown.Sam, finally sober and stable with a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her familyâs deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods, where her mother disappeared years before and never returned. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Samâs mind. It starts, as it always does, with a beer.As Sam dips back into the murky waters of dependency, the inexplicable begins to arrive at her door in the forms of a neighbor who leaves no trace, a talking doe who sounds just like Samâs missing mother, and a series of mysterious gifts that might be a welcome or a warning. And as Samâs stay extendsâas the townâs grip on her tightens and her body takes on a strange new shapeâthe borders of reality begin to blur, and she senses she is battling something sinisterâwhether nested in the woods or within herself.Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Literary Hub, among many others. A first-generation college graduate, Melissa received a BA from the University of WisconsinâMadison and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently the Margaret R. Shuping Fellow and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Stu Levitan welcomes back to the program Doug Bradley to discuss his new book The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir, just out from the good people at Legacy Book Press. And it is exactly what the subtitle promises â Doug recounting the literal soundtrack of his life, putting the seminal events of his first quarter century or so in the context of the music that accompanied, or symbolized, those events. And since most of the events recounted took place in the sixties and seventies, itâs a pretty great 46-song setlist, which you can find on Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2SiTq5A3GboxJ4uTNdMGJ1Doug spent his early childhood in Philadelphia with his parents and older doo-wop singing brother, in a house filled with music. The family moved to Ohio for two years, then the Pittsburg suburb of Clairton, where Doug graduated from Thomas Jefferson HS in 1965, doing some party DJ work along the way, thanks to his brotherâs record collection. He was admitted to Notre Dame but couldnât afford the tuition; as a scholarship student to Bethany College in Bethany WV, Class of â69, he was a Big Man on Campus as two-term chairman of the Social Committee , booking a lot of major pop acts. That's how he came to share a joint with the Jefferson Airplaneâs Grace Slick and a drink with jazz legend Count Basie, play some pick-up hoops with Smokey Robinsonâs Miracles, and hold Dionne Warwickâs hand on a tragic night in American history.He was drafted into the US Army in March 1970 and fortunately for him aced the job aptitude test and so was made an Army journalist, first domestically and then in 1970-71 at the Armyâs Vietnam HQ in Long Binh. After his honorable discharge, he finally acceded to the entreaties of his high school mentor â whose interest in Doug may have been more that academic â and he received an MA in English from Washington State University in 1972.He also acceded to the entreaties of his wife, Pam Shannon, and relocated to Madison in 1974, where he was one of the first employees and later president of the community-based service center Vetâs House, which helped him work through some of his postwar issues. Pam also got him to appreciate the Grateful Dead, which gives her bonus points.Never a student at the UW, he spent more than 30 years in various communications and marketing positions there, including 15 years as director of public information at UW Extension, where his father-in-law Ted Shannon was a top administrator. He also for many years co-taught with his co-author Prof. Craig Werner a course based on their award-winning book âWe Gotta Get Out of this Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War.â Doug later continued the theme, writing Whoâll Stop The Rain: Respect, Remembrance and Reconciliation in post-Vietnam America, both books the subject of a BookBeat episode in February 2020.Itâs a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat the 2025 recipient of the Vietnam Veterans of Americaâs Excellence in Arts Award, Doug Bradley
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On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with Madison booksellers Mira Braneck from A Room of Oneâs Own, Hilary Burg from Mystery to Me, and Molly Fish from Lake City Books to see how their 2025 went. Take a listen to learn about the new releases they loved, event highlights from the past year, recommended reads that'll keep you cozy this season, and what's in store for them in 2026. And for those still doing some holiday shopping, stick around until the end to hear their order deadlines this December!Photo by Jessica Ruscello.
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WORT 89.9FM Madison · Cheryl Schiltz - When the World Falls AwayLisa Malawski talks with Cheryl Schiltz today on Madison Bookbeat, November 24, 2025. Cheryl Schiltz is no stranger to silenceâbut not the peaceful kind. After a reaction to antibiotics destroyed her vestibular systemâthe part of the inner ear responsible for balanceâCheryl was plunged into a world of disorientation, instability, and invisible suffering. Even while lying down, she felt as if she were falling through space. The noise of disability wasnât audibleâit was internal, relentless, and isolating.In her powerful book, Silencing the Noise of Disability, Cheryl shares her deeply personal journey of loss, adaptation, and transformation. With raw honesty and poetic insight, she invites readers into the lived experience of invisible disability and the groundbreaking science that helped her reclaim her life.Through her collaboration with neuroscientist Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita and the use of the BrainPort deviceâa tool that rerouted balance signals through her tongueâCheryl became a living example of neuroplasticity, the brainâs ability to rewire itself. Her story was also featured in Norman Doidgeâs bestselling book The Brain That Changes Itself, but in Silencing the Noise of Disability, Cheryl tells it in her own voice.âI didnât just learn to walk againâI learned to live again.âThis book is more than a memoir. Itâs a call to recognize the dignity and complexity of those living with invisible disabilities. Itâs a celebration of science, spirit, and the human will to adapt.
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Stu Levitan welcomes Cary Segall for a conversation about his engaging new book A Talk in the Woods: Voices Along the Appalachian Trail (Back Burner Books), recounting stories of the people he met along the world's longest hiking-only trail.Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the mid-1930s, the 2,197.4-mile Appalachian Trail runs through 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. More than three million people hike segments each year; fewer than one thousand earn the designation of thru-hiker, walking the entire trail within fifty-two weeks.Cary Segall set out in 2014 to become a thru-hiker, but soon took such enjoyment talking to his fellow hikers -- most with trail names like Deacon, Northstar, Birdman, Gearhead, Leave No Tracy, Mama Bear and the Cubs --that he took the time to interview them; every so often, he'd use the computer at a public library the trail was passing to write their stories. That slowed him down, so he only got to New York that first year; illness, injury and bad weather stymied his efforts in 2015-2017, but he finally summited in 2018.Impressive and no doubt satisfying, but nowhere near as extraordinary as what Segall, 75, accomplished on Nov. 9 â completing the Madison Marathon 26 days after a UW doctor replaced his defective aortic valve. That was on top of about 80 prior marathons in 31 states, plus a record 44 straight 20-mile Syttende Mai races.Segall began his racing and writing careers at Green Bay East High School, where he ran cross-country and was sports editor of the Hi-Light newspaper. He was also both a stringer and delivery boy for the Press Gazette, and delivered Vince Lombardi's Sunday Milwaukee Journal.Before joining the State Journal, Segall applied his UW degree in wildlife ecology as a ranger-naturalist for the National Park Service, and his UW law degree as a public interest environmental lawyer before quitting to raise his newborn son Craig, with whom he would later do much hiking.
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On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Emily Mitchell about her new short story collection, The Church of Divine Electricity, now available from University of Wisconsin Press.Delightfully blending literary fiction with speculative genres, the stories in The Church of Divine Electricity somehow manage to feel as though they could take place today. In Emily Mitchellâs created worlds, as in our own, technology bewitches, especially with its ability to heighten both connections and isolation.Whether being held by a giant and comforting machine, allowing micro-drones to record oneâs every moment for a year to win prize money, or choosing self-mutilation in exchange for a bionic hand, these characters navigate technological and social change. The familiar can turn unrecognizable and disorientingâsometimes in a flash, sometimes gradually. Lyrical, haunting, and often funny, these stories ask us to consider whatâand whoâgets left out of a seemingly utopian future of technological advancements. Finely observed, thoughtful, and vivid, Mitchellâs stories get under your skin. Itâs not that the best-laid plans could lead us astrayâitâs that they may already have. Emily Mitchell, associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of a collection of short stories, Viral, and a novel, The Last Summer of the World. Her fiction has appeared in Harperâs, Ploughshares, The Sun, and elsewhere; her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, the New Statesman, and Guernica. She serves as fiction editor for the New England Review.Author photo by J.M. Tyree.
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Stu Levitan welcomes Margaret Mooney, editor of Radical Family: Trailblazing Lesbian Moms Tell Their Stories and her wife Meg Gaines to discuss this collection of nine first-person accounts from mainly Madison-area lesbians who gave birth, adopted or came out between 1980 and 2003. Just out from the good people at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, the collection offers many important insights into the pressures and pleasures of participating in what Newsweek magazine called "the gayby boom" in the years before the US Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Among the well-known contributors: Mooney, former Meteorologist-in-charge at the Madison National Weather Service and Gaines, founding emerita director of the UW Law School's Center for Patient Partnership; Community Shares of Wisconsin co-founder and retired Project Home executive director Denise Matyka and her wife, education consultant Margaret McMurray; retired Madison Police Detective Alix Olson and her late wife Martha Dixon Popp; former Dane County Judge Shelley Gaylord; former Wisconsin Historical Society Press editor-in-chief Kathy Borkowski, and Janet Wright, one of the co-founders of the Advocates for Battered Women, now known as Domestic Abuse Intervention Services. From Left: Meg Gaines, Stu Levitan, Margaret Mooney
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On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie talks with author Pernille Ipsen about the new translation of her memoir, My Seven Mothers (University of Minnesota Press.)On New Yearâs Eve in Copenhagen in 1972, seven women had a child together: one gave birth and six others attended. They had met a year earlier at a feminist womenâs camp on a small island and now, with about twenty other womenâs liberationists, they occupied three dilapidated apartment buildings in the center of Copenhagen. One became the countryâs first Womenâs House, the nerve center of the Womenâs Movement in Denmark, and the other two were women-only communal living spaces that were Pernille Ipsenâs first home. In this intimate portrait of life during the exhilarating early days of womenâs liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the globe, she tells the stories of these seven women, her seven mothers.Recounting her mothersâ historyâfrom the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apartâIpsen captures the individuality of each of her mothers as well as the common experiences that drew them together. As she deftly reflects the practical and emotional realities of her mothersâ women-centered life, Ipsen presents an engrossing picture of intersecting lives that, half a century ago, raised questions we still grapple with today: What is a family? Who is a woman? And who gets to decide?A chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived, My Seven Mothers is an eye-opening account of the challenges and possibilities connected with liberation and radical social change during the 1970s. In this time of fierce struggles over family, sexuality, and child-rearing, it reminds us that new worlds are always possible.Pernille Ipsen was professor of gender and womenâs studies and history at the University of WisconsinâMadison for fifteen years and is now a full-time writer. The Danish-language version of this book, Et Ă„bent Ăžjeblik (An open moment), was published in 2020 and was awarded the Montana Prize for literature, one of Denmarkâs top literary prizes.
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Stu Levitan welcomes Wauwatosa Mayor Dennis McBride for a conversation about his new book A City on the Edge: Pandemic, Protest and Polarization. It's a gripping and insightful first-person account of what it was like to be the newly elected chief executive of a Wisconsin city during the twin traumas of 2020 â the onset of COVID and the murder of George Floyd. In particular, a city with its own unique history of racial extremes â founded by east coast abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century who made it a stop on the Underground Railroad, which by the early twentieth century had passed a âsundown lawâ requiring nonwhites to leave before dusk. And in the 21st century, a city where a Black police officer had fatally shot three persons of color in five years, the third coming less than four months before Black Lives Matter protests rocked urban areas around the country.Wauwatosa is politically liberal, home to the stateâs largest medical center, the state's busiest mall, leading manufacturers, research parks, and several college campuses.Th best thing about Wauwatosa, of course, is that Bob Dylan immortalized it as Wow Wow Toaster in lyrics he wrote in late 1961 he called âOn, Wisconsin,â which Milwaukee musician Trapper Schoepp developed into an actual song.Dennis McBride is Tosaâs 17th Mayor, elected to four-year terms in 2020 and 2024. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a masterâs degree in public administration from Princeton University, and a law degree from New York University, and served 24 years as a Senior and Supervisory Trial Attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Prior to his election as mayor, he served ten years on the Wauwatosa common council, including two terms as its president. Heâs also a member of the UWM and Tosa East Athletics Halls of Fame. Attentive longtime BookBeat listeners may recall the name Dennis McBride from an episode in 2022 featuring his twin brother, UW Prof. Emeritus Dr. Patrick McBride talking about his memoir as the youngest Equipment Manager and Assistant Trainer in professional sports history, âThe Luckiest Boy in the World,â which Dennis helped write.
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David Michael Miller transcriptStu Levitan welcomes David Michael Miller for a conversation about his new book, The Rise of Breese Stevens Field: Madison's ballpark and the team that made it home, the Centennial Edition.You may know Breese Stevens Field today as a city, state, and national landmark at 917 East Mifflin Street, the place for professional soccer and ultimate frisbee, concerts, and community events. But once upon a time, it was the place for baseball, especially as the home field from 1926 to 1942 for the Madison Blues, five-time pennant winners in three different leagues in the 1930s, and for many other activities as well. Over its first hundred years, everything from marbles to the National Football League. It's the oldest city-owned and operated athletic field in Madison and the oldest extant masonry grandstand in Wisconsin. It bears the touch of the notable local architects Claude and Stark and the federal largesse of the New Deal and served as the backdrop to some of the most noted athletes of the 30s and 40s. It's a great Madison story which David Michael Miller tells with a verve and nerve befitting its sporty milieu, dozens of well-chosen photographs and some hard-won statistics.
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