Midday on WNYC

Lee Child talks about his latest Jack Reacher novel, Never Go Back. Combining an intricate puzzle of a plot and a chase for truth and justice, Child makes Reacher question who he is, what he’s done, and the very future of his untethered life on the open road.

Ray Suarez, PBS Newshour senior correspondent, chronicles the history of Latinos and the ways they’ve helped shaped the nation. His book Latino Americans is the companion to the PBS miniseries, and it explores the lives of Latino American men and women over a 500-year span, from the early European settlements to the Wild West to the Cold War to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement. The book is a companion to the PBS series Latino Americans, which premieres September 18, at 8:00 pm. 

Robert Sullivan looks at the role New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania played in the American Revolutionary War. He talks about his adventure re-creating a heroic part of the past in the urban, suburban, and sometimes even rural landscape of today. In his book My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78, Sullivan sets off on a personal odyssey that involves camping in New Jersey backyards, hiking through lost “mountains,” and traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan by handmade boat.

Investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld traces the FBI’s secret involvement with three iconic figures who clashed at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power looks at the campus counterculture and reveals how the FBI’s covert operations—led by Reagan’s friend J. Edgar Hoover—helped ignite an era of protest, undermine the Democrats, and benefit Reagan personally and politically.

Dr. Robert Lustig documents the science and the politics that has led to the growthof chronic disease over the last 30 years. In the late 1970s the government mandated that we limit fat in our food, and the food industry responded by putting more sugar in. Dr. Lustig argues that the result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control. In Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease he presents strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress, and suggests ways to improve the health of the next generation.

Mary Beth Keane discusses her new novel, Fever, about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary”—Mary Mallon. She was in Irish immigrant who became a cook for some of New York's wealthiest families until someone noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked. The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again.

Aleksandar Hemon talks about his first book of nonfiction, The Book of My Lives, about growing up in Sarajevo, moving to Chicago just as war broke out in Sarajevo, leaving him no way to return home, and about starting a new life and family in this new city. He writes of his love of two different cities, the bonds of family, the joys of soccer, and the feelings of displacement.

The 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright states that all defendants facing significant jail time have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders. Karen Houppert chronicles the stories of people in all parts of the country who have relied on public defenders in Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice.

Richard Rubin talks about finding and interviewing living American World War I veterans, aged 101 to 113, to capture their life stories before they died. The Last of the Doughboys is his decade-long odyssey to recover the stories of a forgotten generation and their experience in the Great War

Philipp Meyer talks about his new novel, The Son, an epic of the American West and a multigenerational saga of power, blood, land, and oil that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family, from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the to the oil booms of the 20th century.

Mary Williams talks about being born into the Black Panther movement, being raised amid violence and near-poverty, and being adopted as a teenager by Jane Fonda. Her memoir The Lost Daughter is a chronicle of her transformed life, her time working with the Lost Boys of Sudan, and reconnecting with her biological family in Oakland.

Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Mark Mazzetti gives an account of the transformation of the CIA and America’s special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines around the world. In The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, Mazzetti tells the story of that shadow war, a campaign that has blurred the lines between soldiers and spies.

Conspiracy theories don’t just exist on the fringes of society—they’ve has always been part of our national identity, argues Jesse Walker. He presents a history of conspiracy theories in American culture and politics, from the colonial era to the War on Terror. The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory shows how they reflect the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe them, even if they’ve unfounded and untrue.

Humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders announced earlier this month that it will withdraw from operations in Somalia. And last week, it revealed that medical centers were flooded with patients showing signs of exposure to toxic nerve agents around the time of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria. Sophie Delaunay, Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States, talks about these recent developments, as well as the challenges and ethics of providing medical care in war-torn countries.

Mike Hart, President and CEO of Sierra Energy, will talk about their FastOx Pathfinder, a machine that turns common trash into useable energy. While still in its infant stages of development, this waste-to-energy system was recently bought by the U.S. Department of Defense in the hopes of reducing oil consumption. He’ll also discuss the ongoing national hunt to make alternative fuels like Ethanol from trash in an environmentally and economically sound way.