Blake Maddux

Book Interview: Talking to BrownMark about “Life in the Purple Kingdom”

September 19, 2020
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Front and center in this memoir are BrownMark’s efforts to reconcile his resentment and gratitude toward the man who both sold him short and afforded him the “opportunity of a lifetime.”

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Book Review: “American Radicals” — Unrecognized Champions of 19th-Century Protest

July 9, 2020
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American Radicals is as revealing, riveting, and well-researched as any work of history that I have read in recent years.

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Author Interview: Peniel E. Joseph on “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”

June 5, 2020
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“Malcolm X and MLK evolved over time and came to converge in surprising ways. Malcolm’s movement for radical black dignity became a global human rights touchstone in a manner that made King’s struggle for radical black citizenship both necessary and more expansive.”

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Book Interview: Heather Cox Richardson on “How the South Won the Civil War”

May 25, 2020
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“Politics is driven by language, and America’s peculiar history has given oligarchs the language to undercut democracy.”

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Author Interview: Jared Ross Hardesty on “Slavery in New England” — More Pervasive Than You Thought

February 3, 2020
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“The idea that slavery was not economically important to New England as a whole is just emphatically not true.”

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Author Interview: “The Cult of Trump” — Deprogramming the GOP

November 15, 2019
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When someone recommended to Steven Hassan he write a volume called The Cult of Trump, “it just seemed like the most important book I could write, frankly.”

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Author Interview: Pulitzer Prize Winner David W. Blight — Speaking of Frederick Douglass in the Witch City

November 13, 2019
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“You can read Frederick Douglass forever and still just encounter new things, new ideas, new passages, new phrases. He’s that kind of writer. It’s like reading Emerson or even Shakespeare.”

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Music Interview: Musician and Writer Robert Forster — Life Before and After The Go-Betweens

November 9, 2019
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Robert Forster was apparently spot-on when he proclaimed that The Go-Betweens “were too good for the bloody charts.”

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Author Interview: Tim O’Brien — The Sound of a Father’s Voice

October 16, 2019
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I wanted to give my kids this gift of a book about them and for them.

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Music Interview: Talking to Rocker Amy Rigby — Musician Turned Author

October 10, 2019
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“I’ve put out records by myself before, but this is like 10 times the work!”

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