Originally aired April 19, 2022.
Dave opens the show with Chris Stark and her new book, Carnival Lights. Set in a summer of hippie Vietnam War protests and the moon landing, Carnival Lights also spans settler arrival in the 1800s, the creation of the reservation system, and decades of cultural suppression, connecting everything from lumber barons’ mansions to Nazi V-2 rockets to smuggler’s tunnels in creating a narrative history of Minnesota.
After the break, Liz welcomes Carole Lawrence and her new novel, Cleopatra’s Dagger. Elizabeth van den Broek is the only female reporter at the Herald, 1800s NYC’s most popular newspaper. Then she and her bohemian friend Carlotta Ackerman find a woman’s body wrapped like a mummy in a freshly dug hole in Central Park—the intended site of an obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle. The macabre discovery takes Elizabeth away from the society pages to follow an investigation into New York City’s darkest shadows.
