Coming up Monday 12/21/20 at 9:15am pst -- Lindsay Rechler, author of GOOD MORNING ZOOM, a parody book for families currently learning and working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic

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Lindsay Rechler is an NYC mom with a demanding full time day job. She wrote this book in April to help her children understand their new COVID-19 reality as they interacted with the world through technology from their NYC apartment. After releasing a highly successful self-published edition, Lindsay brought her book to Penguin, and has committed to donate all of her net proceeds from the first printing of 100,000 copies to COVID-19 relief charities.

A self-published edition of GOOD MORNING ZOOM, released in late June, struck a chord with fellow parents and became an instant success, selling hundreds of copies a day. Penguin’s revised edition features updated text and illustrations.


ABOUT GOOD MORNING ZOOM

The book takes readers on a lyrical journey through our "new normal.” From "Zoom school," to watching doctors and nurses on TV, to building pillow forts and talking to loved ones from a distance, this poignant book expresses the emotions young children might be feeling during the global pandemic and gives voice and hope to our youngest who are replacing school and hugs with technology.


In an interview, Lindsay discusses·

- The bizarre and sometimes funny realities of parenting in this moment

- How to balance a full time job and remote learning with your kid

- How the loss of a personal friend to COVID in April helped inform the book and its mission

- Why she decided to donate the proceeds from the book to COVID relief charities



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lindsay Rechler is a Managing Director at global investment bank Jefferies Group where she has worked for 13 years. She earned her bachelor's degree from Cornell University. While quarantining at home with her family, Lindsay wrote her first book, Good Morning Zoom. Like all parents, she and her husband Zack have also become chefs, bakers, coaches, teachers, musical directors and artists. She resides in Manhattan with her husband and two children. This book was written for today's children and for future generations to record the impact the pandemic had on our lives and how we weathered the storm together.

 

Kicking off the last segment of the show on 12/14/20 at 9:45am pst is Jeff Foster, AP Government teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Jeff shares details on his new book, For Which We Stand and why this is a great book for students and adults!

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Jeff Foster, AP Government teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for 20 years, brings a non-partisan guide to the basics in an honest, inspiring, respectful way. It could not be more timely! 

"Mr. Foster is an incredible teacher, one who helped me, and all his students, by teaching us to understand how the government actually works, how we could work it, and how we could become active citizens who stand up for what we care about."—Emma González, a former student and gun control advocate.

How Our Government Works and Why It Matters

By Jeff Foster

The AP Government teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for 20 years, Jeff Foster is a true expert on the subject, and responsible for teaching teen activists like Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, Delaney Tarr, and Emma González. Now, just in time for the 2020 presidential election, Foster puts his knowledge to the page to educate a much broader swath of readers and to inspire a new generation of activists. 

A highly designed, nonpartisan guide to the United States government, FOR WHICH WE STAND: How Our Government Works and Why It Matters (On sale September 1, 2020; Scholastic Inc.) presents information in a format that’s high interest and easy to digest, helping to fill a hole in the institutional market. Featuring infographics, maps, extensive back matter on how young people can get involved, and a foreward from youth activist Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. FOR WHICH WE STAND provides kids with the knowledge, skillset, and steps to rise up and right the wrongs in their world.

Now more than ever, it's so important for everyone to understand our government: where it came from, how it works, and how we can bring about change. And, after all, in the words of author and government teacher Jeff Foster, "If you don't participate, you can't complain."



FOR WHICH WE STAND is a comprehensive and highly accessible guide that answers questions like: 

What are the branches of the government? 

What is the Electoral College? 

What are the political parties? 

What are the different responsibilities of the city, state, and federal governments? Plus, discover the complete backstory on some of our government's most important moments, like why we wrote the Declaration of Independence, and how people since then have worked with—and protested against—the government to improve the lives of all Americans.

JEFF FOSTER is an Advanced Placement Government and Politics teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the tragedy that occurred at his school in February 2018, many students credited “Mr. Foster” with giving them the tools that inspired the Never Again movement and spawned the March for Our Lives. Jeff continues to motivate and inspire his students to become active participants in government. He believes that one person can make a difference, no matter their age. He lives in Boynton Beach, Florida with his wife Loren and two daughters.

FOR WHICH WE STAND by Jeff Foster

Coming up 11/30 at 9:45am pst - World-renowned picture-book maker of many beloved children’s books, Oliver Jeffers, talks about his NEW book, WHAT WE’LL BUILD

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WHAT WE’LL BUILD is the exquisite new title from Oliver Jeffers, world-renowned picture-book maker of many beloved children’s books including Here We Are and Lost and Found, and illustrator of the #1 bestsellers The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home. Written and illustrated by Oliver for his young daughter, WHAT WE’LL BUILD is an enchanting story of a father and a daughter who set about laying the foundations for their life together, building memories to cherish, a home to keep them safe and love to keep them warm. WHAT WE’LL BUILD is set to be another publishing masterpiece that not only showcases Oliver’s inimitable style and spectacular illustrations but also his hopes and ambitions for his own family that will, no doubt, resonate with parents everywhere.

What shall we build, you and I?
We’ll build a watch to keep our time.
I’ll build your future
and you’ll build mine.


This rare and enduring story is about a parent’s boundless love, life’s endless opportunities and challenges, and the tools needed to build a together future. The book is the perfect companion to Oliver’s million-copy bestseller, Here We Are, which published in 2017 and was inspired by the birth of his son.

Oliver said “When my son was born, Here We Are was written for him as I tried to make sense of the world for both of us. Not long after our daughter was born, I realized I’d never hear the end of it if she didn’t get a book too, so it’s a good thing I was experiencing a not-dissimilar internal dialogue of transition with new parenthood. For one thing, contemplating the importance of raising a daughter in what will hopefully soon no longer be a man’s world, but more than that, this poem contemplates what home is, the importance of family, but also the strength of the invisible bonds of any loving relationship through thick and thin. It is all about the pure potential of what will come, both good and bad, and how, ultimately, people need each other. Even if that is just for someone to listen to all your plans.”



ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oliver Jeffers makes art and tells stories. From his highly acclaimed debut, How to Catch a Star he has gone on to create a collection of bestselling picture books that have been translated into many languages all over the world, winning multiple awards including the Nestlé Children's Book Prize Gold Award, Blue Peter Book of the Year, and CBI Book of the Year, and he has been shortlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal five times. Lost and Found was made into a BAFTA-winning animated film. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Oliver now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and young children.

JUST POSTED! Janeane shares her incredible conversation with James Hibberd, Entertainment Weekly Editor at Large and Author of FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series, the behind-the-scenes story of making Game of Thrones, the most successful television series in modern history

FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series, Hibberd chronicles the making of GoT from the producers' very first meeting with Martin to the staging of the controversial series finale and all the epic battles in between.

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It’s easy to forget that Thrones was supposed to be impossible to make. Long before Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow became household names, George R.R. Martin was a frustrated TV writer who created his bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire novels to explore epic storytelling beyond the constraints of Hollywood. In 2008, HBO took an enormous gamble to produce his “unfilmable” saga and for the next 11 years, the Game of Thrones team faced one backstage obstacle after another while turning their series into an unprecedented global blockbuster, an Emmy Awards record-breaker (132 nominations and 47 wins in total) and a pop-culture obsession. Across its 8 seasons that aired in 207 countries and territories, GoT received perhaps more cumulative media coverage than any show ever made. Yet no one knows the inside story of GoT as well as Entertainment Weekly Editor-at-Large James Hibberd, a journalist who visited the top-secret show’s sets each season since 2012. In his debut book, FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series, Hibberd chronicles the making of GoT from the producers' very first meeting with Martin to the staging of the controversial series finale and all the epic battles in between.

James Hibberd gives fans an inside look at every aspect of the ground-breaking series and the people who created it, including:

• How Dan Weiss and David Benioff won over an author avoiding an adaptation and a network that wasn’t interested in a fantasy series, and how they then convinced HBO to bankroll the project – despite neither of the showrunners having ever worked on a television show before.
  
  
• The making of the show’s disastrous original pilot that you’ve never seen. Game of Thrones was an expensive gamble that almost didn’t make it to air. Hibberd portrays what went wrong when making of the show’s first pilot that was torn apart by the top-brass at HBO, and then all the changes that were made to create an iconic premiere episode.
  
  
• Perspectives from the cast and crew on all of the best – and most controversial – episodes, including: “Baelor” (which ends with the shocking execution of Ned Stark); “The Rains of Castamere” (aka “The Red Wedding”); “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” (which depicted Sansa’s horrific wedding night); “The Long Night” (which focuses on the long-awaited battle between the Night King’s undead forces and the living); “The Bells” (in which Daenerys Targaryen fully crosses the threshold into fascism and madness); and others.
  
  
• How Games of Thrones continued George R.R. Martin’s story… even though he hadn’t finished the books: When the first season of GoT premiered, Martin had already published four books in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, plenty of material for the first few seasons of the show. Then HBO had to continue the series without Martin’s roadmap. Hibberd’s shares how all involved learned to navigate new and treacherous territory as they moved beyond the books and how fans reacted to the changes they made along the way.
  
  
• Exclusive insight into the divisive final season: Hibberd invites fans into the writers’ room and on to the set as the Game of Thrones cast and crew worked to deliver an epic ending, sharing the cast’s reactions to every plot twist, their endurance of harrowing on-set conditions, and their reactions to the blowback after the series ended.
  
  
• The future of the Game of Thrones television universe, including the spin-off series currently in the works from HBO: the future and legacy of the GoT franchise, including the upcoming House of the Dragon HBO series (set to air in 2022), and other prequel projects currently in development.

Whether you’re a die-hard fan of everything Game of Thrones or love-to-hate various elements of the series, there’s no debate that GoT was a wildly ambitious project unlike anything viewers had witnessed before. Hibberd’s fascinating oral history is a must-read for every GoT fan.

About the Author
James Hibberd is an award-winning entertainment journalist who has written thousands of stories covering the business of Hollywood across nearly two decades. He's currently Editor-at-Large at Entertainment Weekly and was previously TV editor at The Hollywood Reporter. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias spoke with Janeane Bernstein about his new book, One Billion Americans

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What would actually make America great? More people, argues Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias. ONE BILLION AMERICANS is a bold, provocative, and data-driven case for massive population growth, presented with Yglesias’ signature humor and analytic rigor.

Matthew Yglesias’s articles for which receive an average of 2 million page views per month, have been cited by everyone from Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama to Jeff Bezos, and have influenced congressional action on topics like the relocation of federal agencies outside the Beltway. He hosts Vox podcast "The Weeds," which was hailed as the "best roundtable podcast" of 2018 by Quartz and draws on average 130,000 downloads per episode. 

If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that the US has lost the will and the means to lead the global community and marketplace. We can’t compete with the huge population clusters of the global marketplace by keeping our population static or letting it diminish, or with our crumbling transit and unaffordable housing. The winner in the future world is going to have more—more ideas, more ambition, more utilization of resources, more people.


Exactly how many Americans do we need to win? According to Yglesias, one billion.

From one of our foremost policy writers, ONE BILLION AMERICANS is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Yglesias challenges readers across the political spectrum to move beyond left-right divides and to look squarely at practical ways of moving forward and supporting many, many more of us.

In ONE BILLION AMERICANS, Yglesias draws on economic theory and research from leading policy experts to offer ideas from around the globe—from Singapore's approach to traffic jams to Canada's town planning—demonstrating not only that we can do this, but why we must.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Yglesias co-founded Vox.com with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell in 2014. He's currently a senior correspondent focused on politics and economic policy, and co-hosts "The Weeds" podcast twice a week. Before launching Vox, he wrote the Moneybox column for Slate and blogged for Think Progress, The Atlantic, TPM, and The American Prospect. Yglesias is the author of two books, most recently The Rent Is Too Damn High about the policy origins of the middle class housing affordability crisis in America. Yglesias was born and raised in New York City, but has lived in Washington DC since 2003.

Coming up 9/28/20 at 9:00am PT on KUCI 88.9fm - Janeane speaks with BISHOP MICHAEL CURRY. He shares his NEW and very timely book, LOVE IS THE WAY: Holding onto Hope in Troubling Times

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ABOUT THE BOOK
Walk the path of love with one of the warmest, most beloved spiritual leaders of our time, and learn how to put faith into action.

As the descendant of slaves and the son of a civil rights activist, Bishop Michael Curry's life illustrates massive changes in our times. Much of the world met Bishop Curry when he delivered his sermon on the redemptive power of love at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle. Here, he expands on his message of hope in an inspirational road map for living the way of love, illuminated with moving lessons from his own life. Through the prism of his faith, ancestry, and personal journey, Love Is the Way shows us how America came this far and, more important, how to go a whole lot further.

The way of love is essential for addressing the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing the world today: poverty, racism, selfishness, deep ideological divisions, competing claims to speak for God. This book will lead readers to discover the gifts they need in order to live the way of love: deep reservoirs of hope and resilience, simple wisdom, the discipline of nonviolence, and unshakable regard for human dignity.



While The Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church may be known in popular culture for his sermon at the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle, his life work has been to fight for human and equal rights, the respect and recognition immigrants at the border and Indigenous people, and the LGBTQ+ community. His work is based in the simple idea that if we live the way of love, we can change the world for the better. Now, his shares stories from his own life with messages of how we can all live the way of love in his book LOVE IS THE WAY: Holding onto Hope in Troubling Times.

Love comes in many forms - romantic love, brotherly love - but what Bishop Curry is talking about here is agape - the love for one another or sacrificial love that seeks the good and well-being of others. It is love that transcends religion or gender or background - it is the balm that can heal. Unselfish love of this sort is the only thing that can make the world a better place.

Bishop Curry shares:

· Stories about his ancestors and what he learned about life while sitting in his grandmother's kitchen (she was the daughter of sharecroppers, granddaughter of slaves, taught in old country segregated schools and buried a husband who fought in the segregated WWII units)

· His journey to realizing the need for a change in how the church approaches LGBTQ+, revelations when standing with Indigenous Peoples at Standing Rock

· His theory of what Desmond Tutu and Dolly Parton have in common

· How the way of love has not only been a guiding light but a beacon to an America (and a worldwide community) that is just and free.

The way of love is essential for addressing the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing the world today: poverty, racism, selfishness, deep ideological divisions, competing claims to speak for God. Love is the Way leads readers to discover the gifts they need in order to live the way of love: deep reservoirs of hope and resilience, simple wisdom, the discipline of nonviolence, and unshakable regard for human dignity.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry is the presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church. Elected in 2015, he is the first African-American to lead the denomination. He was previously bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. A noted advocate for human rights, and author of several books, Bishop Curry is recognized as one of the most popular preachers in the English language. He and his wife Sharon Curry have two daughters, Rachel and Elizabeth. They live in North Carolina.