In her genre-bending memoir Tastes Like War — a finalist for this year’s National Book Award — CUNY professor Grace Cho chronicles her quest to understand her mother’s journey as a Korean War bride who endured the traumas of war, dislocation, racism and, eventually, schizophrenia. Cho, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island who earned her doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center, learned how to cook the food her mother remembered from childhood as a way to connect through the fog of time and mental illness. The book, published by CUNY’s Feminist Press, is a melding of personal memoir and  sociological investigation — and “a wrenching,  powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience,” wrote Kirkus Reviews.
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Episode Transcript
Joe Tirella: Last month, Grace Cho’s harrowing new book, Tastes Like War, was named a finalist for the National Book Award in the category of nonfiction.  Cho, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, takes readers on a journey through the life and psyche of her mother, a Korean immigrant who began to experience schizophrenia when Cho was a teenager growing up in rural Washington state. Tastes Like War is part personal memoir — the story of Cho’s life as a young Korean-American in a xenophobic small town. It’s partly an examination of how race and gender impact mental health, and the story of Cho’s struggles to help her mother navigate the health care system. But at its heart, Cho’s book is the tale of a daughter’s deep and abiding love for her mother — a spirited and gifted woman who suffered immensely while growing up during the Korean War, only to endure the traumas of dislocation, racism and mental illness after emigrating to America.
Grace Cho, welcome to Book Beat.
Grace Cho:  Thank you so much for having me.
JT:  In your memoir, Tastes Like War, you detailed the prejudice and hostility directed at you growing up biracial in rural Washington State. You’re the daughter of a Korean mom, and an American born dad who was a Merchant Marine. Can you talk about your early childhood as a Korean American at that time?
GC: So it’s interesting because my earliest early childhood memories all take place in the world of my mother. Since my dad was a Merchant Marine he was gone six months out of the year and so I remember being in this world with her that felt very safe. She took us to Korea during summers, so I had some early childhood memories of being with her family with my aunt and my grandmother. And then once I started school, my experience really started to change. So I started school in this small town, a rural town that was very xenophobic. We were the first Koreans to arrive in this town. There were not any other immigrants there at that time that I was aware of. And so very quickly, once I started school, I learned all the ways in which I was “the other” to the people in that town. Constant reminders that I was Asian. I learned racial slurs at that time. I experienced children, you know, pulling the skin of their eyelids to try to make them look Asian, and often felt like, you know, I was sort of the object of their mockery. And it was, you know, like a weekly if not a daily occurrence to experience those types of things. So, you know, even though I was biracial, no one ever let me forget that I was Korean. So my identity definitely developed as Korean American, and I had a really strong Korean American identity prior to starting school.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In “Sparring with Smokin’ Joe,” CUNY journalism professor Glenn Lewis recalls the epic rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali that started with the ‘fight of the century” in New York 50 years ago–a rivalry that transcended sports, became a cultural and racial touchstone and ultimately defined Frazier’s life inside and outside the ring. Lewis draws on the months he spent with Frazier in 1980 when the ex-champ was  contemplating a comeback, rendering a revealing and intimate portrait of an underappreciated champion whose legacy has been consigned to Ali’s shadow.
Lewis is a veteran journalist and author who directs the journalism program at York College and also teaches at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. “Sparring with Smokin’ Joe” — a book Lewis waited 40 years to write — has been named one of the “Top 10 Sports Books of 2021” by the American Library Association’s Booklist.
Follow Glenn on Twitter at @glennlewisnyc and find him on Facebook at glenn.lewis.nyc


Episode Transcript
Rick Firstman:   Welcome, Glenn, to CUNY Book Beat. Joe Frazier was was one of the great fighters of any era but he was and will forever be overshadowed by Muhammad Ali. But at the same time, Ali’s legend probably wouldn’t be what it is if not for his intense rivalry with Frazier. It’s not a coincidence that Ken Burns’s new PBS film on Ali is out, like your book, at the 50th anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier bout at Madison Square Garden — the fight of the century. But this is about more than boxing. It was a rivalry and a relationship that transcended the sport, wasn’t it?
Glenn Lewis:   Definitely. As a matter of fact, it was much more than just a sporting event. I mean, the fight of the century really connoted the atmosphere that was going on around the fight. First of all, it was the first time that two undefeated champions, heavyweight champions, met for the undisputed heavyweight title. You got to remember, Ali was stripped of his title in 1967 when we he was undefeated. And Frazier came into the fight of the century, undefeated and holding all of Ali’s former titles. They were far and away the two best heavyweights in the golden era of the heavyweight. This was a time when there were more great heavyweights than any other time in history. And these were the two best or supposedly the two best. Also, the fight of the century incorporated really a political and cultural confrontation like the sport had never seen before. A lot of people came to boxing because of Ali. Ali was exciting. He was young. He moved, he was constant motion. He was entertaining. He was political. The Fight of the Century represented Ali’s politics and the politics that he assigned to Joe, in a way. You know, he called himself the Black man’s champion. And at the same time, he would refer to Joe as the white man’s champion. Sort of insinuating that Joe was a traitor to his race. Joe was an Uncle Tom, Joe represented the establishment.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Jimmy Carter, who turns 97 on October 1, is often thought of as a failed one-term president whose best work came as an ex-president. But in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY’s Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he’s given credit for — and in ways that illuminate what made him one of our most unlikely, uncommon and least understood presidents. Bird says that Carter’s election in 1976–and his rejection four years later by an electorate that embraced Ronald Reagan–was a tipping point in American politics that adds context to the four decades that led to our current moment.
Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist and the author of six previous books. Since 2017, he’s been been executive director and a distinguished lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY’s Graduate Center. (Photo above by Stephen Frietch)

Related Links
More about Kai Bird
New York Times review of The Outlier
Leon Levy Center conversation with Bird, interviewed by Sam Roberts
 
Episode Transcript
Rick Firstman:  Welcome to CUNY Book Beat. I’m Rick Firstman. Jimmy Carter, who turns 97 on October 1, is often thought of as a failed one term president whose best work came as an ex-president. But in his new political biography of Carter, CUNY’s Kai Bird argues that Carter’s presidency was actually highly accomplished, and in ways that illuminate what made him one of our most unlikely, uncommon and least understood presidents. The book is called “The Outlier: the Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter,” and it’s been hailed as a landmark of presidential biography that contributes new context to the four decades that led to our current moment. Kai Bird is an historian and journalist and the author of six previous books, including “American Promethean,” a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written with Martin J. Sherwin, that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Since 2017, Bird has been executive director and a distinguished lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Here’s our conversation.
Kai Bird, welcome to CUNY Book Beat and it’s a real pleasure to talk with you about your new biography of Jimmy Carter, The Outlier. So let me start by asking you a little bit about how you came to the project. I know it was a long road that started some 30 years ago, but you dropped the idea back then, partly because you felt at the time that you weren’t the right person to write this book. So why was that? And what brought you back to it?
Kai Bird:   In 1990 I went down to Georgia, and thinking that I wanted to explore the notion of doing a biography of Jimmy Carter and his presidency. And I did a magazine article about all the great things he was doing with his ex presidency at that point with the Carter Center. But this is just about 10 years after he left the White House. And I decided it was too early, partly because his presidential papers were still classified. But also, I realized, in my visit to Georgia, that it was really a foreign country. I didn’t understand it and didn’t understand their religion, Southern Baptists, his religion, his religiosity. I didn’t understand race in the South. And because it was a foreign country, I thought I’d have to move there, like a foreign correspondent and dig into the culture a...

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Ralph Blumenthal’s “The Believer” tells the beguiling story of John Mack, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner whose career came to be defined by his study of people who said they’d had encounters with aliens. Mack believed them, and his life was never the same.  Blumenthal, a long-time New York Times journalist and now a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College, explores what happens when a brilliant and unshackled mind confronts a question of the ages — Are we alone? — and comes up with an elusive and ultimately unprovable answer.  The book is especially timely with the government’s release of a report last week about nearly 150 sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena that did not rule out aliens.
Ralph Blumenthal was a staff reporter for The New York Times for 45 years, joining the paper after graduating from City College in 1963. His long and prolific career has ranged from from investigative to cultural reporting, included foreign postings in Vietnam and Europe and 7 nonfiction books. He still writes for the Times and last year broke the story of Navy pilots reporting encounters with unexplained aerial phenomena. At Baruch, he is a Distinguished Lecturer who supervises historical collections in the Newman Library.

* Read more about Ralph Blumenthal

 
 

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robert Jones Jr., a Brooklyn College alumnus, has written a different kind of love story. “The Prophets”– a finalist for the National Book Award–centers around the refuge that two enslaved young gay men find in each other on a plantation in the antebellum American South. It’s “an often lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood,” said The New York Times. Jones took a long and searching route to his acclaimed debut novel. He went back to Brooklyn College at 31, stayed on to earn his MFA in creative writing and began a long-running social justice blog called “Son of Baldwin.” He spent nearly a decade and a half writing a novel from his soul. “Toni Morrison said, ‘If you cannot find the book you wish to read, then you must write it,” Jones tells Joe Tirella on this episode of Book Beat.

Related Links
Acclaim for “The Prophets”
Robert Jones Jr. Is Son of Baldwin, and More (The New York Times)
Son of Baldwin blog
Jones is part of CUNY’s longstanding cultivation of top literary talent

Episode Transcript
Joseph Tirella:  With the publication of his critically acclaimed debut novel “The Prophets,” Robert Jones, Jr., a Brooklyn College alumnus, has written a different kind of love story. “The Prophets” centers around the loving relationship between two enslaved homosexual Black men in the antebellum American South. As far as he knows, it’s the first novel to deal with the personal lives of Black gay men attempting to find some semblance of normalcy amidst their tortured existence on a plantation. Jones, who for years has written the social justice blog Son of Baldwin, weaves together a number of disparate narrative threads: The lives of plantation’s other enslaved people, the spirits of their collective African ancestors who address the reader as an otherworldly chorus, and the white slave-owning family who control every aspect of their lives. He even conjures up the tale of King Akusa, a fierce female African warrior with six wives, to create a story-within-a-story in a symphonic novel that wrestles with America’s blood-soaked racist legacy. Like the multi-faceted story he has written, Jones has traveled a long road to get to this point in his life. After more than one attempt, he returned to Brooklyn College at 31 and stayed on to earn a graduate degree in creative writing. It was another decade before he realized his dream of becoming an author. The Prophets is a bold and audacious debut from an exciting new voice in American fiction.
Robert Jones, Jr., welcome to Book Beat and congratulations on the success of your debut novel, “The Prophets,” which has been published to rave reviews. Could you discuss how long it took you to write “The Prophets” and what that process was like for you?
Robert Jones Jr.: Absolutely. It took me from start to finish 14 years. Fourteen years from the moment I put pen to paper, to the moment my editor said we are done with revisions was 14 years. And it started when I was at CUNY.

Phil Klay–an alumnus of Hunter College’s MFA writing program and an Iraq War veteran–won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction for his collection of short stories, Redeployment. In his acclaimed debut novel, Missionaries, he explores the globalization of war through the stories of four people caught up in the nearly 60-year conflict in Colombia. Among the book’s fans is Barack Obama, who put it on his list of favorite books of 2020.
From the Los Angeles Times review of Missionaries:  “Using his formidable gifts for scene-setting, meaningful irony and deep human empathy, Klay weaves together a set of stories over the course of nearly three decades . . . Amid raging fires and illness and constitutional crises, Klay’s book roars something vital: Never forget about war or the blood and bone and the evil and the reckless idealism of who we all really are. Well worth the wait, “Missionaries” is (among its many virtues) a prime example of what can ideally follow a first great war book.  . . “Missionaries” is horrifying and refreshing, challenging us to reflect not just on the destruction of our own national institutions but also on the ugly and ongoing consequences of American power abroad.”
> More about Phil Klay and Missionaries

 
In her new book, We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, CUNY legal scholar Julie Suk takes full measure of the century-long — and recently resurgent — battle to enshrine full equal rights for women as a Constitutional amendment. She joins Book Beat to talk about the history of the fight, the victories along the way and the sisterhood of warriors who have fought across generations to make the ERA law. And why it still matters.
Julie Suk is dean for master’s programs and a professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. A graduate of Yale Law School and a scholar of comparative law and society, she was a professor at Cardozo Law School for 13 years before joining CUNY. In recent years, she’s become a prominent expert on the renewed efforts to ratify the ERA.

Related Links
More about “We the Women”
More about Julie Suk