Synopsis
Just the Right Book is a podcast hosted by Roxanne Coady, owner of famous independent bookstore R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, CT, that will help you discover new and note-worthy books in all genres, give you unique insights into your favorite authors, and bring you up to date with whats happening in the literary world.
Episodes
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JTRB Shorts #3 - A quick look at what's new
30/03/2023 Duration: 23minRoxanne and Bill Goldstein discuss what they are reading, bestsellers, and what coming up that is keeping them awake at night in the new Just the Right Book Shorts. Sign up for our podcast newsletter!
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Every Family Has A Story with Julia Samuel
23/03/2023 Duration: 01h03minPsychotherapist Julia Samuel joins Roxanne to discuss transgenerational trauma. They discuss the twelve touchstones for family well being and also explore the idea that the relationships that touch us the most are often the ones that can hurt us the most. Buy Every Family Has a Story from RJ Julia Sign up for our podcast newsletter!
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JTRB Shorts #2 - A quick look at what's new
16/03/2023 Duration: 18minRoxanne is joined again by Bill Goldstein to talk about what they are reading now, the bestsellers and what's coming out soon that has caught their eye. What we are reading now: Burnam Wood Perish Bestsellers we are talking about: Its OK to be Angry About Capitalism The Silent Patient What’s new that we are excited about: The Lost Americans American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal Sign up for our podcast newsletter
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American Women and the Fight for Equality with Elisabeth Griffith
09/03/2023 Duration: 47minElisabeth Griffith discusses the history of equal rights for women, the 19th Amendment, and how a century later all women are still grappling to secure their rights. Buy the book here Just The Right Book Subscription Promo Code (15% off): Podcast Email us at: podcast@rjjulia.com Sign up for our podcast newsletter
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JTRB Shorts #1 - A quick look at what's new
02/03/2023 Duration: 21minRoxanne introduces a new biweekly podcast, Just the Right Book Shorts in conversation with Bill Goldstein. Find out about new books, what they’re reading now, and commentary on bestsellers. What are we reading now I Have Some Questions for You The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression Best Seller Lessons in Chemistry It Starts With Us New and exciting! Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age Hang the Moon Email us at: podcast@rjjulia.com
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Unscripted by James B Stewart and Rachel Abrams
23/02/2023 Duration: 01h30sRoxanne and James Stewart discuss the family drama and boardroom backstabbing in his new book co-authored with Rachel Abrams, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy. Buy the book here Just The Right Book Subscription Promo Code (15% off): Podcast Email us at: podcast@rjjulia.com
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Courtney Maum on Exploring Depression and Forgiveness Through Horseback Riding
09/02/2023 Duration: 01h10sIn this episode of Just the Right Book, Courtney Maum talks about her exploration with depression and forgiveness in her memoir, The Year of the Horses, by revisiting her past and finding an old love in horseback riding. Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Costalegre, Touch, and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, and an award-winning guide for writers, Before and After the Book Deal. A writing coach and educator, Courtney's mission is to help people hold on to the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. Courtney's essays and articles about creativity have been widely published in outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, and Interview. She lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut, with her family, where she runs a nonprofit learning collaborative for artists called The Cabins.
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Billy Collins on the Small Poem
27/01/2023 Duration: 53minPoet Billy Collins joins Roxanne Coady to discuss his new collection, Musical Tables: Poems and the power and pleasure of the small poem.
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Looking back at Paul Newman and The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man
12/01/2023 Duration: 55minClea Newman Soderlund and editor, David Rosenthal talk with Roxanne on the process of finding and compiling a series of interviews conducted over a period of time and writings from Paul Newman to create the posthumous memoir of an ordinary man who led an extraordinary life. Listen in as we discover the celebrated actor, husband and father, Paul Newman who does not hold back in this intimate and candid memoir.
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Jacques Pepin and The Art of the Chicken
29/12/2022 Duration: 55minLegendary chef and painter, Jacques Pepin shares the story of his life with Roxanne Coady. The award-winning chef looks at life through the essence of the bird - the chicken, the most democratic food in the world.
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The 2022 Holiday Gift Guide Episode!
15/12/2022 Duration: 49minJoin Roxanne Coady and the staff of RJ Julia Booksellers as we explore the best books of the year to give as gifts to the readers in your life. See the full list of books discussed here.
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Why Is Samuel Adams the Forgotten Founding Father?
01/12/2022 Duration: 47minThomas Jefferson considered Samuel Adams the earliest, most active, and most persevering of the revolution. Yet when we think of the founders, his name is often missing, submerged by other founders, his cousin John Adams or John Hancock, or obviously Washington and Jefferson himself. Now, Stacy Schiff does what she does brilliantly in The Revolutionary: Samuel Adam, using her Pulitzer Prize0winning skills as a biographer to bring to life the revolution, the politics, the propaganda, and the man who insidiously and deliberately became a revolutionary of the first order. Resurrecting a man history has almost forgotten, a man without whom our history might have taken a different course. ________________________________ Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner
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How the Injustices of Racism and Inequality Continue to Reverberate Through the Generations
18/11/2022 Duration: 01h20minIt is not often that you read a book that is both heartbreaking, infuriating, inspiring, eye-opening, and riveting. Nicholas Dawidoff’s new book, The Other Side of Prospect, brilliantly uses the particular story of the Newhallville neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, and a young black man wrongly convicted of murder to tell the universal story of the violence, poverty, and injustice that exists in too many of our American cities. There is a reason Nicholas has been a finalist for the Pulitzer, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of a slew of other honors and fellowships. He wraps his compassion and journalistic devotion to research and details into a story that takes us into his grip, leaving us more informed, more understanding, and hopefully more committed to being part of a solution. As James Baldwin said, “If one wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprote
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Dani Shapiro: How Writing Fiction Can Expose More of Yourself Than Writing Memoir
03/11/2022 Duration: 52minSignal Fires is Dani Shapiro’s first novels in fifteen years, and has everything most of us want in fiction: indelible characters, a book we can’t put down, and the ability to provoke how we think about our lives by understanding of their lives. She joins Roxanne Coady for a live conversation held at RJ Julia Booksellers. Dani Shapiro is a best-selling novelist and memoirist and host of the podcast Family Secrets (now in its seventh season). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Time. She has taught at Columbia and New York University and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference. She lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from b
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How Much Has Changed—And Not Changed—Since the First Rape Trial in American History
20/10/2022 Duration: 48minJohn Wood Sweet is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the former director of UNC’s Program in Sexuality Studies. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC, and the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, among others. His first book, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830, was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. He was named a Top Young Historian by the History News Network and has served as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. He lives in Chapel Hill with his husband, son, and daughter. Related Episodes: Richard Haass on Why History Matters Has Our Thinking About Regret Been All Wrong? Elizabeth Strout Knows "Anything Is Possible"
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David Dennis, Jr.: Why American Civil Rights Activists Should Be Treated as War Veterans
06/10/2022 Duration: 53minMany of us may know the broad outline of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But for most of us, the details, the headline names, the level of malevolent violence and the horrific sacrifices were, at best, vague. But David Dennis, Jr., in his new book, The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride, poignantly and vividly gives us an intimate portrait of the personal side of the civil rights movement. David wrote this book in collaboration with his father, David Dennis, Sr. His father had a pivotal role in the civil rights movement as an organizer and hero of the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins, and voter registration drives, as well as an official of the Congress of Racial Equity. Dennis, Sr.’s story exposes the risk, the relationships, and repercussions on families and lives that brings the movement to life for us. Dennis David, Jr. is an award -winning journalist and educator creates the stories of his father and the movement that has lingered in my mind and forced me to r
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Tina Brown: While the Monarchy Will Not End, It Will Shrink Nevertheless
22/09/2022 Duration: 01h07minIn this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, she is joined by Tina Brown to discuss her new book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and the Turmoil, out now from Crown. Please note: This episode was recorded before the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II. Tina Brown is an award-winning writer, the former editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, and the founder of The Daily Beast and of the live event platform Women in the World. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Diana Chronicles, and in 2017 she published The Vanity Fair Diaries, chosen as one of the best books of the year by Time, People, The Guardian, The Economist, Entertainment Weekly, and Vogue. In 2000 she was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to journalism. She lives in New York City. More to listen: Senator John McCain In His Own Words: A Tribute How Can We Stay Human in a F*cked Up World? Sheryl Turkle on Why Some S
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Anthony T. Kronman on How to Find God in a World Full of Disappointment and Disenchantment
08/09/2022 Duration: 01h05minIn this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, she is joined by Anthony T. Kronman to discuss his new book, After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and Joy, out now from Yale University Press. ________________________________ Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law and a former dean at Yale Law School. He is the author of Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan and Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. He lives on Block Island, Rhode Island. Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.
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How Do We Eradicate the Great Challenge of Our Age: Unconscious Bias and Discrimination?
25/08/2022 Duration: 01h08minIn this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, we revisit our conversation with Jessica Nordell discussing her book, The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias, out now from Metropolitan Books. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! ________________________________ Jessica Nordell is a science and culture journalist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Republic, and many other publications. A former writer for public radio and producer for American Public Media, she graduated from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The End of Bias is her first book. Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children
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Elizabeth Alexander: How Do You Keep Yourself Safe But Not Live in Fear?
11/08/2022 Duration: 01h07minWhen we think of racism, we often think of actions, obstacles, systems. What we often overlook is the power of images, movement, art, and words. They represent the power of both harm and hope. Elizabeth Alexander in her new book, The Trayvon Generation, uses this prism to share poetry, art, and film. And along with her exquisite, evocative language, we find ourselves educated, provoked and challenged. Elizabeth is singularly equipped to tell us this story. She is a poet. Many were introduced to her when she read her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at President Obama’s inauguration. She is a bestselling, award-winning author and is now the president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities. But at her core, she is an educator, having had that role as chair of African-American studies at Yale University. In her new book, that is just what she does. She educates us, and the poet in her delivers the education with lyrical beauty. Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-win