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Today nearly three years after the attack on the US Capitol my guest is American hero, Aquillino Gonell, author of the new book American Shield: The Immigrant Sergeant Who Defended Democracy. You know Staff Sergeant Gonell as one of the brave members of the Capitol Police who defended our country and our constitution when insurrectionist mobs attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
You saw Sergeant Gonell testify in July of 2021 at a televised Congressional hearing. At the witness table with him was his friend and fellow U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Harry Dunn. And also with them were Washington Metropolitan Police Department officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges.
As I wrote in the Washington Monthly at the time, “These four heroes and their colleagues defended the U.S. Capitol from an angry mob hell-bent on murdering Vice President Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and stopping the House and Senate from officially counting electoral votes to declare Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the winners of the November presidential election.”
Gonell was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the United States in 1992. The first member of his family to attend college, he became a U.S. citizen just before his 21st birthday. He praised “this country” for giving him the opportunity to “become whatever I wanted.”
In his testimony, Gonell said he was more fearful on January 6 than when he was deployed in Iraq. In Iraq, he was scared to go in convoys or supply missions to Iraqis, but he knew the risks. At the Capitol, he didn’t. How could he? “I did not recognize my fellow citizens,” he said. He heard threats against Pelosi and Pence, and realized his own life was at risk. “The rioters called me ‘traitor,” he said. They shouted that he should be “executed.” These were not peaceful protesters: “The mob brought weapons to try to accomplish their insurrectionist agenda.” These included hammers, rebar, knives, batons, bear spray, and pepper spray. They wore tactical gear. Some seized officers’ batons and shields. One rioter attacked an officer with an American flag.
Rioters pulled Gonell by his leg, shield, and gear. “My survivor’s instincts kicked in,” he said. He hit a rioter who was grabbing him. Then he stood and fended off “new attackers as they kept rotating and attacking me again and again.” It was “like a medieval battle, fighting hand to hand.” The rioters were shouting “Trump sent us. Pick the right side. We want Trump.” Gonell heard an officer near him, whom he later learned was Hodges, scream in pain. He thought “this is how I’m going to die.”
Gonell wiped away tears as he described learning later on that his family had been texting him frantically because they saw the turmoil. Returning home in the middle of the night, he had to tell his wife not to hug him because of the chemicals on his uniform. His body was burning. He showered, barely slept, then returned to work at Capitol around 8 am.
“I’m still trying to recover from my injuries,” Gonell said. Both of his hands, his left shoulder, and his right foot were injured. He needed surgery on his right foot and now needs it on shoulder, too. He’ll likely require rehab for at least a year. He wants to know why the U.S. Capitol Police had all the support it needed during Black Lives Matter protests but not on January 6. “We don’t want medals,” he said. “We want justice and accountability.”
Today I am honored to have Aquillino Gonell as my guest to talk about his new book American Shield, how his recovery is progressing, and what is to come.
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Welcome back to Booked Up, a podcast that features you, me and our favorite authors. We release a new episode every Sunday morning.
Today for the December book club, we are discussing Norman Lear, the Hollywood legend who passed this month at the young age of 101. There are gazillion people who have a thing or two to say about this ground-breaking writer, director, producer, activist. So, to anchor our conversation, Jen selected his best-selling memoir Even This I Get to Experience, published by Penguin Books in 2014.
With a blend of sheer luck, immense creativity, and epic perseverance, Lear created programs for television and film that transformed television for the better. Known best for situation comedies: All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, and Good Times, Norman Lear brought diverse, complicated families into our living rooms night after night, year after year.
His films include cult favorites like This is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. May his memory be a blessing. Less known is his work in founding the non-profit People for the American Way.
Here to talk about Norman Lear today on the Book Club are two friends of the show and a new for us here at Booked Up. First the new guy: David Kusnet. David was one of the first staffers hired by Norman for People for the American Way where he was the VP for communications.. After working there, David went on to chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign.He is the author of Speaking American and Love the Work, Hate the Job and co-author
Also returning to the show today are Dr. Bridgette Baldwin and Comedian Judy Gold. Bridgette teaches courses in criminal law and also Critical Race Theory. Her scholarly work has examined the intersection of the 9th Amendment and social movements, as well as, the convergence of race, class and gender on welfare reform legislation. She is a Professor of Law at the Western New England University School of Law.
Also joining the book club today is two-time Emmy-Award winning comedian Judy Gold. Judy is a comedian, actor, and writer. She’s the author of: Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble. You can see Judy live doing her stand up schtict in on January 12 at City Winery in New York. Then the next day, January 13 at City Winery in Philly. Of course there are more shows. Look them up yourself. What am I, her booking agent?
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Rob Verchick, author of the award-winning new book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience is Jen’s guest today.
Why this unusual title? As he describes: “One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus—and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded—is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we will have to adjust.”
Replete with gorgeous writing and inspiring calls-to-action, The Octopus in the Parking Garage offers hope. Rob takes us on a journey with his words, including his description of kayak paddling with his law school class. “A forty-odd-minute drive from New Orleans, Maurepas Swamp consists of about ninety-six square miles of flooded forest consisting mainly of water tupelo and bald cypress trees and the rootlike ‘knees’ of the latter poking out of the water like dragon’s teeth. Dripping with Spanish moss, their branches shade an understory of wax myrtle, pumpkin ash, and an abundance of things that slide and crawl.”
Rob is a leading climate law scholar who designed and implemented climate-resilience policies in the Obama administration. Before graduating from Harvard Law School, he majored in English at Stanford where his senior thesis topic was “Mark Twain and Comic Theory.” Jen got to ask him about that. It’s not something you’ll see in his official buttoned up bio.
Rob holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans, is a senior fellow in disaster resilience at Tulane University, and serves as president of the Center for Progressive Reform. He has written four other books in addition to the Octopus in the Parking Garage of the podcast Connect the Dots.
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Today we are doing Jen’s favorite thing: following the big dirty money. This time the focus is on the world of private equity. Those two words together sound ever so restrained and elite, even contained. In reality though the world of private equity is rough and destructive and affects all of us from patients seeking health care to workers losing their jobs. There are more than $10 trillion in private equity assets under management. And many public pension funds as well as ordinary members of the public are invested. Not private at all.
Timing is everything. In early December, two U.S. senators launched a bipartisan investigation on the takeover of our nation’s healthcare by giant private equity firms. Today on Booked Up we have the top experts on this topic,Joining Jen to discuss this topic are authors Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. Their new bestseller These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America is a must-read for anyone and everyone who wants to understand why and how the rich get richer and the rest of us are struggling to make ends meet.
You may recognize Gretchen and Josh from their first book, about the 2008 financial and related mortgage crisis. It was a great resource for me when I wrote about that dangerous period. Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.
Gretchen is the senior financial reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. A former stockbroker, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her “trenchant and incisive” reporting on Wall Street. Josh is managing director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher and Co., advising regulators, policymakers, and institutional investors on banking and financial markets.
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Chuck Collins, author of several works of nonfiction including The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions is Jen’s guest today. They mostly discuss his debut novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun, a near-future story of one community facing climate disruption came out this May.
“My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R. My bologna has a second name, it’s M-A-Y-E-R….” Listeners of a certain age will remember that television ad jingle from their childhoods. Chuck Collins also has childhood and young adult memories as the great-grandson of Oscar F. Mayer, founder of the eponymous meat company, of giving up his fortune for the greater good. When he was 26, he received an inheritance of $500,000 (what would be around $1.4 million today). Instead of spending or investing the money, he donated it to various foundations.
Today, Chuck is the Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits the website Inequality Dot Org. He is an expert on U.S. inequality and the racial wealth divide and author of over ten books and dozens of reports about inequality, climate disruption, philanthropy, the racial wealth divide, affordable housing, and billionaire wealth dynasties.
Praise for Chuck’s work is voluminous. Truly a who’s who in politics, academia, and policy circles shared their admiration for The Wealth Hoarders. Senator Bernie Sanders said “Chuck's book reveals not only the inner workings of this elaborate scheme to hide more than $20 trillion in wealth, it offers us a blueprint for reversing this obscene inequality so we can take back our democracy and ensure that our government works for everybody—not just the billionaire class and wealthy campaign contributors.”
Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and author of Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent said Chuck Collins "Skillfully blends personal narrative with social scientific research to create unique insights into a world of privilege that is ordinarily out of sight and out of mind for the rest of us."
David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of Perfectly Legal said: “While government takes out taxes before we get paid, the wealthiest avoid taxes with trusts, evade taxes with help from tax haven governments and escape the IRS because Congress hobbles tax law enforcement. Collins, who rejected the privilege of his birth, explains in plain English how wealth hoarding works and shows how we can stop this costly corruption.”
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Today Jen’s guest is Orly Lobel, author of the recent book THE EQUALITY MACHINE: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future. Orly just sold the film rights to her book on Barbie to CBS Studios. The book is called YOU DON’T OWN ME: How Mattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed Barbie's Dark Side. The book and the CBS production will follow the parallel journeys of Barbie inventor Ruth Handler and Bratz creator Carter Bryant.
“Inspiration exists; it must find you working.” Picasso. You can find this gem and other fascinating details in Orly Lobel’s new book, THE EQUALITY MACHINE. She’s got it covered from virtual reality to sex robots.
If you don’t know Orly, you should. Beyond being an award-winning author she is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego. Professor Lobel is the Director of the Program of Employment and Labor Law as well as the founding faculty of the Center for Intellectual Property and Markets. In addition to the Equality Machine and You Don’t Own Me, Orly also authored Talent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding. Orly’s work has been covered in The Economist, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, NPR’s “Marketplace,” CNBC, and CNN Money.
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For our special book club episode today, we are discussing the new bestselling memoir – THE WOMAN IN ME by pop icon Britney Spears. As you know, Britney is a multiplatinum, Grammy-Award winning entertainer. She has sold an incredible 100 million records worldwide. She released her new book THE WOMAN IN ME around two years after she got free from the abusive and legally questionable 13 year long conservatorship during which her father and his team controlled her every move, every morsel, and every dollar, paying themselves handsomely, and more than she earned off the product that this one-time child star had become.
Joining Jen to discuss this book are two legends in their own fields.
Lisa Birnbach my long time idol, new time dear friend. Lisa is an award-winning journalist, cultural commentator and bestselling author. She also served as a witness at the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault trial against Donald Trump. If you are Gen X, you know Lisa from her runaway New York Times bestsellers: The Official Preppy Handbook and True Prep. Lis has published 20 other books, which have been translated into a dozen languages. I did not know The Preppy Handbook was a satire. It was my guide to life as a teenager.
Victoria Haneman is my brilliant legal academy colleague. She has a very fancy title: the Frank J. Kellegher Professor of Trusts & Estates at Creighton University School of Law. Victoria is the real nerdy deal. She has authored four books related to estate planning and taxation, and also published more than twenty other works including among them law review articles, essays, and peer-reviewed book chapters. Victoria is a sought after expert, appearing on television, radio, and in print.
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Twitter | Website | Author of MAKING TAX LAW
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Twitter | Website | Author of THE OFFICIAL PREPPY HANDBOOK and TRUE PREP
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Today Jen’s guest is Taylor Lorenz, author of the new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Together they discussed many topics including the controversy around mommy bloggers and the credit due to Julia Allison and other women social media pioneers.
Taylor Lorenz is the sometimes controvesial, never boring technology columnist for the business section of the Washington Post, covering online culture and the content creator industry. She was previously a reporter for the New York Times and has written for numerous other publications including New York magazine and Rolling Stone. Taylor frequently appears on NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and the BBC. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
In 2020, Taylor helped adapt a feature she wrote for the New York Times into the documentary Who Gets To Be An Influencer?, which ran on FX and Hulu.
The New York Times said Extremely Online “aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos.” The Washington Post said Taylor is “Infectious in celebrating the tsunami of creative youth culture ... Lorenz gives us a clear and compelling history of how the money came to flow into amateur-made short video content.
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Today Jen’s guest is journalist, filmmaker, author, and activist Andrea Chalupa. You know Andrea from her award-winning podcast Gaslit Nation that she founded with Sarah Kendzior. Fake populism. Demonizing the press. Scapegoating. Propaganda. Personal militia. All ingredients for a successful dictatorship and topics of their conversation.
Andrea and Sarah collaborated on the book we are discussing today called DICTATORSHIP: IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK. They describe DICTATORSHIP as “a wild ride showing the perks and pitfalls of becoming a dictator, and how to overthrow one.”
Part of the book focuses on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine in 1933. Andrea is also the writer and producer of the award-winning journalistic thriller that was produced by MGM called Mr. Jones that came out in 2019. Mr. Jones was directed by three-time Academy Award-nominee Agnieszka Holland (known for her work on Europa Europa; The Secret Garden; House of Cards; The Wire) and starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, and Peter Sarsgaard.
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Film star Illeana Douglas is Jen’s guest today. Ileana is the author of the gorgeous new book: Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia. This spans around 100 years from the silent film era up through the early 21st Century. This beautiful coffee table book is filled with delicious never-before-seen movie stills and back lot stories.
Illeana has starred in too many films to mention. You know her from the movies including Cape Fear, Ghost of My Heart, Good Fellas, and To Die For, plus the many television shows like Entourage, Seinfeld, and Six Feet Under. Her first book, I Blame Dennis Hopper: And Other Stories from a Life Lived In and Out of the Movies was named Best Pop Culture book of the year in 2015 by Entertainment Weekly.
With Connecticut in the Movies, readers revisit classic films and are introduced to deep cuts. Illeana also places more contemporary films in context. My favorite chapter is Dark Suburbia Redux which focuses on more contemporary films like The Ice Storm 1997, directed by Ang Lee and starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver.
I love it, but so do so many others. Here’s what Pulitizer-Prize winning investigative journalist Ronan Farrow had to say: “In Connecticut in the Movies, Illeana Douglas puts on her historian’s hat and takes readers on a compelling tour of her adopted state’s surprising, colorful, and sometimes dark history in cinema. Her adoration of the state, and the movies, leaps off of these pages—and it’s infectious.”
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Today for the October book club, Jen Taub’s friends, authors Jennifer Rubin and Brian Karem discuss Cassidy Hutchinson’s new best-selling memoir, ENOUGH.
Is Cassidy Hutchinson a heroic champion of the truth or just another Trump Administration insider who could have spoken sooner when it really mattered? Does the story she tells in ENOUGH make readers more empathic or more resentful? These questions and more are the focus of Jen’s conversation today with Jen and Brian.
Unless you have been living under a rock (which actually sounds kind of pleasant given the current overwhelm), you know Cassidy Hutchinson is a former special assistant to President Donald Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Cassidy became a public figure when she appeared as a key witness in June of 2022 before the House Select Comittee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol. The world watched her testify under oath that Donald Trump knew his supporters were armed and angry and that he physically assaulted his own driver in a failed attempt to force him to drive from the eclipse to the Capitol where the violent mob would gather.
Cassidy’s bombshell testimony last June took place during the “before times,” meaning this was just before the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August, before a special counsel was appointed in November to investigate her former boss for the national security document hoarding and for the insurrection. This was before Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury in Manhattan, a federal grand jury in Flordia, a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. and a Georgia grand jury in Fulton County.
With ENOUGH, we learn so much more from Cassidy about her painful family history and the adults around her who supported her so that she could find the strength to tell the truth and stand up to one of the world's biggest bullies.
Guest Jennifer Rubin writes a column for The Washington Post where she covers politics and policy, foreign and domestic, and provides insight into the conservative movement, the Republican and Democratic parties, and threats to Western democracies. Prior to her career in journalism, Jen Rubin practiced labor law for two decades, an experience that informs and enriches her work. She is the author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump” and is host of the podcast Jen Rubin's "Green Room."
And Brian Karem is an award-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated reporter and author of seven books including Free the Press: The Death of American Journalism and How to Revive It. Brian is a veteran White House correspondent and former senior correspondent for Playboy Magazine. He currently writes a weekly column on the White House for Salon.com. He is also a frequent guest on numerous radio shows throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe. Brian also hosts the podcast, “Just Ask the Question.”
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The hilarious self-named “progressive hillbilly” comedians Trae Crowder and Corey Ryan Forrester are Jen’s guests today. They co-authored the super-funny book Round Here and Over Yonder. I’m just going to steal their bios right from their book because nothing I could say would compare.
Trae Crowder grew up in Celina, TN, a town sometimes described as having “more liquor stores than traffic lights” (2-0 as of the last count). He first cained national attention for his “Liberal Redneck” series of viral videos. He has been performing his particular brand of gravy-covered intellectual comedy for over a decade and touring nationally with Corey and their comedy and drinking partner, Drew.
Corey Ryan Forrester grew up in Chicakmunga, Georgia where he fell in love with comedy watching Carson and then Leno from a blanket on the floor next to his daddy Dale. At sixteen lying about his age he worked up the nerve to do his first open mic. He also ran the family bakery with his mom, where he was known as the “head Quiche Chef.”
This is Trae and Corey’s second book. The first one they wrote with their aforementioned buddy Drew. Who has a last name although it’s not on the jacket flap. It’s Morgan. Drew Morgan. The book was called THE LIBERAL REDNECK MANIFESTO.
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Zeke Faux, author of the new bestseller, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall is Jen’s guest today.
Of all the books, and scholarly articles, and news stories, and blog posts, and legal complaints and, you get the idea… on crypto, Number Go Up is truly the first one to pull everything together in one place. And that result is something immensely entertaining and informative. And to be clear, this is not a condemnation of those other works, readers can learn so much from. Instead, it’s an expression of high praise for what Zeke has accomplished here.
If name-dropping is helpful for you in judging the strength of a book, then let me throw out a few who have heaped praise on Number Go Up.
Evan Osnos National Book Award–winning author of Age of Ambition said: “This book is ludicrously compelling. I, quite literally, couldn’t put it down—and I don’t even care about crypto.”
Matt Levine, the Money Stuff columnist said: “This book is what happens when the funniest financial journalist in America takes on the funniest story in modern finance. The results are as darkly hilarious as you could hope for.”
Bethany McLean, author of The SMartest Guys in the Room (that was made into a brilliant documentary said “Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the mass delusion that was crypto.”
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Author Michael Lewis joins Jen Taub today to talk about Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, his new book that focuses on Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-wunderkind who is now on trial on federal criminal charges including wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering.
Though Michael needs no introduction, here’s one anyway. You know Michael from his numerous bestselling works of narrative nonfiction. You may in fact be someone like John Williams of the New York Times book review who wrote: “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.” I’m certain that I would as well, and not just because my preliminary research of the stapler shows that there is some controversy as to its origins. But, I digress.
Michael Lewis may be best known for his follow-the-money books. These include his debut work Liar’s Poker about binge-eating bond traders on Wall Street in the 1980s, as well as The Big Short published in 2010, about a scrappy selection of investors who saw that the toxic-mortgage-linked securities bubble was about to burst and made billions on their related trades. Several of Michael’s books have been made into feature films including the Big Short, directed by Adam McKay; Moneyball, and The Blind Side.
Beyond his story-telling excellence, what makes Michael’s work so compellihg are the unexpected discoveries about the fragility of our government infrastructure such as with the Fifth Risk and his ability to make us think in a more nuanced way about high-profile topics, including his already controversial take on SBF. Jen and Michael Lewis talk about indicted crypto-wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF).
In their discussion they contemplated whether SBF ran his businesses like an absent-minded parent setting up an Easter Egg hunt without making note of how many and where the eggs were. As an alternative, he might have deliberately siphoned off customer and investor assets and hide them in accounts to use later for himself or his charitable causes.
Let’s dive in,
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We are extraordinarily grateful that historian and biographer Dr. Helen Fry made time for us right as her latest book Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars was released in the UK and is poised to launch in the United States.
This new book is filled with intrigue hidden in plain sight. Spies recruited at cafés, ordinary women bicycling around town passing along messages to help the Allies, secret codes knit into jumpers (that’s the British English word for what we Americans call sweaters). Helen Fry has authored too many popular books to count. These include: The London Cage, The Walls Have Ears, MI9, Spymaster: The Man who Saved M16 and more than twenty books on intelligence, prisoners of war, and the social history of World War II. She appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts and has been involved in numerous documentaries.
Here’s the official, delicious description of Women in Intelligence: “In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform. From spies who worked for the Belgian network ‘La Dame Blanche’, knitting coded messages into jumpers, to those who interpreted aerial images and even ran entire sections, Fry shows just how crucial women were in the intelligence mission.”
Nigel West, author of Spies Who Changed History described Women in Intelligence as “A fascinating, minutely researched study of women in the espionage business.” And Clare Mulley, author of The Spy Who Loved, warns us: “Beware – this is a book full of danger and deception, sabotage and secret codes, and some brilliant, unstoppable women.
“This account is long overdue. Helen Fry redresses the relative neglect of the contribution of women as intelligence officer and agents during and between the two world wars, with gripping personal stories of bravery, grit and analytic brilliance.”—Sir David Omand GCB, former Director of GCHQ
Helen Fry was raised in North Devon and went on to graduate from the University of Exeter with a degree and Ph.D. The focus of her (okay, we’ve counted now. It’s ) 25 books has been the 10,000 Germans and Austrians who fought for Britain, and intelligence, espionage and prisoners of war. Her highly acclaimed book The Walls Have Ears: The Greatest Intelligence Operation of WWII was in the top 8 Daily Mail’s Books of the Year in War, and has been optioned for film.
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You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: [email protected] or by writing to:
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Twitter| Website | Author of WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE and Many more books!
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Twitter| Money & Gossip Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY -
Believe or not, this month’s Booked Up Book Club is TUCKER, the book, the man, the walking grievance machine. It’s true, Jen read Chadwick Moore’s authorized biography of Tucker Carlson. And joining her are Rick Wilson and Martin Pengelly, to talk about it so you don’t have to.
Rick Wilson is a longtime Republican political strategist, award-winning ad-maker, and political commentator (and fifth generation Florida man). In 2015, Rick emerged as one of the earliest and most vocal critics of Donald Trump, helping found the Never Trump movement. His bestselling book EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES sprung from and perpetuated the acronym ETTD, used by millions on social media as a glib-schandenfraude-tinged response to each and every indictment or other misfortunte that befalls those who hitched their wagons to the Donald.
Martin Pengelly is the Washington-based breaking news correspondent for the Guardian U.S. Born in Leeds, Martin played rugby for Durham University and Rosslyn Park FC and worked for Rugby News, the Guardian and the Independent before moving to the US in 2012. Since then, he has written about politics, books, and rugby in America. His work has also appeared in Sports Illustrated and the New York Times. His first book, Brotherhood: When West Point Rugby Went to War with an introduction by H. R. McMaster comes out on October 31.
Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: [email protected] or by writing to:
BOOKED UP
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061
Get More from Rick Wilson
Twitter| Website | Author of EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES and RUNNING GAINST THE DEVIL
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Twitter| Guardian | Author of BROTHERHOOD
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Twitter| Money & Gossip Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY -
Ali Velshi is Jen’s guest today. You know him as an anchor and business correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. His show Velshi appears every Saturday and Sunday from 10 - noon. Ali is also the host of the podcast Velshi Banned Book Club. And, in keeping with the focus of Booked Up, Ali is a nonfiction author himself. He wrote Gimme My Money Back and co-authored How to Speak Money. Plus he has several new books forthcoming. On September 25th, is the publication date for The Trump Indictments comes out with his preface, and then in spring of 2023, Ali’s book Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy Of Endurance And The Fight For Democracy is coming out.
Ali Velshi has covered a broad range of breaking news events and global affairs throughout his career, including US presidential elections, the global financial crisis of 2008, and recently on the ground in the war in Ukraine.
An award-winning journalist, Ali Velshi has been honored with two National Headliner Awards. The first was for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. And, recently last year for his coverage of Hurricane Ian. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 also earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Born in Kenya and raised in Canada, Ali graduated from Queen’s University in Canada, which awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws in 2016.
Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: [email protected] or by writing to:
BOOKED UP
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061
Get More from Ali Velshi
Twitter| Velshi Banned Book Club Podcast | Website | Author of THE TRUMP INDICTMENTS
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Twitter| Money & Gossip Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY -
Hadley Vlahos is the author of the bestelling new book The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments. She is a hospice registered nurse, mother, and wife. Hadley’s husband Chris also works in the medical field as a doctor of physical therapy. She started her career as a registered nurse at twenty-two. Today as a hospice nurse, she now visits people at their home while also educating and sharing stories about hospice care on social media, where she has 1.6 million followers on TikTok alone.
Jen read, or, rather listened on Audible to The In-Between in one sitting. This is a story you cannot put down. Hadley has a way of easing readers, and listeners, into some of the most challenging, yet so enriching moments of human existence – the inevitable transition from this life to wherever and whatever awaits beyond.
Organized around the stories of twelve of her hospice patients (whose names and personally identifiable details have been changed), with The In-Between, Hadley also shares her own journey, including painful memories growing up and self-doubts as an adult. Her vulnerability allows readers to face and tend to our own wounds and grow stronger.
Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: [email protected] or by writing to:
BOOKED UP
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061
Get More from Hadley Vlahos
Instagram| Tik-Tok | Website | Author of THE IN-BETWEEN
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taubjen on Threads| Money & Gossip Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY -
In this haunting new book, LAWYER, JAILER, ALLY, FOE, Eric L. Muller brings into vivid color a world that is largely forgotten paper records. It’s no wonder that his book caught the attention of novelist John Grisham whose praise appears on the cover: “A fascinating and detailed account of one of America’s darkest chapters.”
Eric’s accomplishments with this work cannot be overstated. He made a complex topic emotionally moving by unearthing the stories of three men who worked as lawyers inside of the concentration camps in Wyoming, Arizona, and on an Indian Reservation where Japanese-Americans were held as prisoners during World War II. Like Eric, I choose to use the terms “concentration camps” and “prisoners” to describe what the officials euphemistically referred to then as “relocation centers” and “evacuees.” Today, you may be more familiar with them referred to as Japanese internment camps.
Eric is the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor of Law in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law. It won’t surprise you to learn that he is one of the leading scholars of the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II. He also focuses his research and writing in the areas of constitutional criminal procedure, the law of slavery, and the Nazi legal system.
Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: [email protected] or by writing to:
BOOKED UP
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061
Get More from Eric Muller
Twitter | Website | Author of LAWYER, JAILER, ALLY, FOE
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Twitter| Money & Gossip Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY -
Donald Trump is the subject of our book club today. Trump is not known to be a big reader or even an author – his most popular book Art of the Deal, was ghost written by Tony Schwarz, as you probably know. Nevertheless, our book club episode today focuses on him. Not a book, but on the day he got booked up in Georgia. We recorded this episode on Thursday, August 24th, just hours before Mr. Trump was scheduled to surrender at a jail in Georgia.
He will be there to answer to thirteen charges brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for racketeering and more in connection with his failed efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Joining Jen is Jill Wine-Banks and Morgan Cloud. Jill is an author, MSNBC legal analyst, and podcast host. Jill was the first woman to serve as an organized crime prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.. Just four years later, she was selected to be an Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutor in the obstruction of justice trial against President Nixon's top aides. You should read The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President to learn about that experience. Jill was also in the Organized Crime Section at Justice when the federal Rackeeteer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) passed.
Morgan is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law Emeritus, located in Atlanta, Georgia. Morgan has been working with RICO statutes since 1975, because Bob Blakey, the primary architect of the original federal statute, was his teacher and boss in law school. Before joining the Emory faculty, he was a trial lawyer and litigator in Florida and California, litigating cases throughout the United States. He writes and teaches about white collar crime, constitutional criminal procedure, and digital privacy. In addition to publishing in prestigious academic journals, Prof. Cloud has also taught courses in Germany, Hungary and France.
Contact Booked Up:
You can email Jen & the Booked Up team at: [email protected] or by writing to:
BOOKED UP
P.O. BOX 147
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061
Get More from Jill Wine-Banks
Twitter | Website | Author of THE WATERGATE GIRL: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President
Get More from Morgan Cloud
Website | Politics War Room
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Twitter| Money & Gossip Substack | Author of BIG DIRTY MONEY - Näytä enemmän
