Joan Baum

This summer on Shelter Island music will once again fill the air. Young musicians, from around the world, will gather at The Perlman Music Center for their Summer Music School. WSHU’s Culture Critic Joan Baum sat down with PMP founder and President, Toby Perlman at their Shelter Island facility to learn more about the program.

A group of ultra-right extremists in New York City organized to overthrow the U.S. government. And they nearly succeed. It was just one plot in a broad effort to replace Democracy with Fascism in the 1940’s. Our book critic Joan Baum read all about it in journalist Rachel Maddow’s latest work, Prequel.

One Hundred Saturdays, a collection of edited interviews the author Michael Frank did with Stella Levi, is in part a history lesson that goes back thousands of years, as well as a dark narrative of the mid-20th century.

He was born Melvin Kaminski in Brooklyn, New York. He’s been a 1,000 year-old man, the King of France and Dr. FRAHN-ken-steen. But he’s best known as Mel Brooks and he has a new memoir out.

Books that grace many summer reading lists are often filled with tales of daring exploits and steamy liaisons. And it would be all the more compelling if those stories were true. Well, relatively true. Yale University Press has released a new biography on the audacious life of Italian adventurer, Giacomo Casanova. Book critic Joan Baum has this review.

WSHU commentator David Bouchier has gathered his “few well-chosen words,” and published them in his latest book, Out of Order.

A new biography of Abraham Lincoln explores the president’s efforts to build a plan that would heal a nation recovering from a civil war.

In 1938 a complex plan was underway to remove Adolf Hitler from power. A new historical novel takes a closer look at that plot and how it all went wrong.

Brutally realistic about the effects of war and realpolitik, but also affectingly personal and nostalgic, The Bucharest Dossier is suspenseful enough to make one forget the woes of the world for a while.

In his first novel, author Jeff Schnader sets his novel during the volatile student protests on the Columbia University campus in 1972.