NPR's Book of the Day

Today's book evaluates the price of assimilation when representation, identity and belonging are erased. In Why Didn't You Tell Me?, author Carmen Rita Wong recounts how she discovered her origin story was all but true. She talks with Ailsa Chang about navigating her life after that discovery – and the impact of colonialism.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Today's episode features two books that reach deep into the animal world. First, E.O. Wilson sits down with Robert Seigel to discuss how the narrative of war is used in his story featuring ants, called Anthill. Then writer Ed Yong talks with Ayesha Roscoe about trying to show the experience of life through a different perspective – animals – in An Immense World.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Today's fictional book is set in very non-fictional circumstances. Novelist Ann Leary was trying to learn about her grandmother's history as an orphan and found that she worked at a eugenics asylum in Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. This became the basis of her story in the book 'The Foundling' which explores the state of women's rights, the relationship between it and eugenics, and a commentary over the long history of control over women's bodies.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Today's Book of the Day spans across two places: Hawaii and the Korean Peninsula. The story, though, goes beyond the two realities. In Joseph Han's debut novel Nuclear Family, a Korean family goes through hurdles when one of them is haunted by a long lost family member, crosses a dangerous border, and questions the blurred history of their past. Han shares with B.A. Parker how his own background and upbringing helped tell the story of this book.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Today's Book of the Day is a little bit of everything: punk rock music, high school dynamics, some horror tropes, and pointing out the dangers of nostalgia. Author Paul Tremblay discusses with Shannon Bond why that is, and explains the influence his own high school experience and Stephen King brought to his book The Pallbearers Club.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

As the House's committee hearings on Jan. 6 continue, today's episode offers some context from The Atlantic reporter Mark Leibovich, who has a new book out this month titled Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission. He sits down with Juana Summers to talk about the price of blind loyalty under the Trump administration, and how that affected the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Today, two books from indigenous authors who make a similar, wry argument: it's a miracle there are any Indigenous people in the Americas alive at all. First, Stephen Graham Jones talks about his horror novel The Only Good Indians, a reworking of an old, hostile phrase attributed to Theodore Roosevelt; plus the literary reasons why he chose to make it a horror story. Then, author Lisa Bird-Wilson talks about how her personal experience influenced her new book, Probably Ruby, a novel that follows the legacy of forced Indigenous adoption and residential schools in Canada.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In this episode, we're going back in time to 1722 to examine the different approaches to justice between Native Americans and Pennsylvania colonists in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by historian Nicole Eustace. In an interview with Here & Now's Scott Tong, Eustace discusses how reparative justice has deep roots in American history.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In celebration of the new U.S. poet laureate this year, Ada Limón, today's episode revisits another poet laureate's conversation with Michel Martin about how poetry has been used to deal with pain and healing. Joy Harjo, who has been the U.S. poet laureate since 2019 says she has always been drawn to healing ever since she was little. She even studied pre-med in college. But it wasn't until Harjo heard Native poets that she realized "this is a powerful tool of understanding and affirmation." She shares her poetry and story in the book, Poet Warrior.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

According to Jessica Hernandez, "as long as we protect nature, nature will protect us." Hernandez, from the Maya Ch'ortí and Zapotec nations, is a University of Washington postdoctoral fellow. In her new book, Fresh Banana Leaves, she makes a plea for the climate conversation to include indigenous expertise, and highlights practices she believes should be more widespread. In an interview with Celeste Headlee on Here and Now, Hernandez said that, if we want to be successful in the fight against climate change, we need to listen to those who have spiritual connections to Mother Earth.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy