Read Beat (...and repeat)

Steve Tarter
  • 4.7 (3)
  • History
  • Updated Daily

If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com. 

  1. America’s Downtowns—A conversation with Erik Reader

    3d ago

    America’s Downtowns—A conversation with Erik Reader

    If you have passed through small-town America in recent years, you may have noticed that, for the vast majority of towns, to use the phrase, “they ain’t what they used to be.”  The downtown buildings may still be in place, but are now empty or boarded up. That’s if you even make it to the downtown area to see for yourself now that some businesses have migrated to the highway to serve the traveling public.  Erik Reader seeks to do something about that. He heads his own consultancy, Reader Area Development, that works to bolster downtowns across the country. Reader has worked to promote Muscatine, Iowa, as well as Rock Island and Peoria in Illinois. He recently served as director of Illinois Main Street, a division of Main Street USA. As a result of his interest in downtown development, Reader has seen many towns and met with plenty of community leaders who want to make their town better. He understands what many have gone through. “They’ve had the strategic plans. Committees have met, but things aren’t moving. The people carrying the load are getting tired,” he said. He’s also seen what has succeeded at the small-town level: the profusion of national chain stores like Casey’s and Dollar General in so many communities. “Fresh concrete, large parking lots, bright corporate branding, and highway visibility define the commercial gateways of many small towns,” Reader said. Rather than blaming the chains, Reader suggests learning from them. The chain stores succeed because they serve a need, he said. Small towns can also serve a need by providing a unique or consistent attribute to attract the visitor looking for that unique experience. Reader acknowledged Galena, a town of 4,000 in northwest Illinois, as one of those small towns that’s been able to reinvent itself. The rolling hills, well-preserved downtown buildings, fine restaurants, and a historic connection (Ulysses S. Grant’s hometown) make Galena what it is today, he said. But in the 1970s, Galena wasn’t what the tourist attraction it is now, said Reader, adding that the community had to work to put the pieces in place. Other communities have done the same thing, said Reader, pointing to Door County, Wisc., as a place where small towns have maintained their appeal for decades. But now that a vacation home costs $800,000 or more, Door County faces a new challenge, he said. Reader cited successful small-town efforts across the Midwest, citing Western Michigan towns on Lake Michigan, Branson, Mo., Decorah, Iowa, and Havana, Ill., as examples. People are looking for a reason to get out, and the enterprising small town that can land a spot on the pork tenderloin trail or come up with a quirky connection can provide an outlet.  Consider what the Hinckley Historical Society came up with to celebrate the town of 2,000, 15 miles south of DeKalb, Illinois: “On Jan. 7, 1927, the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team played their first game in Hinkley, Illinois (before the “c” was added)…The Globetrotters were organized as an exhibition team in their hometown of Chicago, Illinois. The original team, the so-called ‘Savoy Big Five,’ was named after the legendary ballroom (the Savoy) where the team played games before dances.” So who had their first game in your town?

    26 min
  2. “Stealing America” by Linford Fisher

    4d ago

    “Stealing America” by Linford Fisher

    With the story of the American Revolution being retold as we approach this country’s 250th anniversary, we hear a lot about George Washington, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, among the many individuals who played a part in the formation of the United States of America. What we don’t hear much about is that, concurrent with the war that ousted the British, was what Linford Fisher, a history professor at Brown University, described as a war on a different front, one waged against Native Americans. In his book, Stealing America, Fisher said the prevailing opinion at the time in the American colonies was that “native people were in the way.” The American colonists wanted them out of the way and were willing to go to almost any lengths to accomplish that. Washington is known as the father of our country, but the Iroquois had another title for him: town destroyer, because, as a general in 1779, Washington led a ruthless campaign to destroy Indian lands. “In November 1776 the North Carolina General Assembly offered ‘considerable rewards’ for the scalps of Indians and allowed native children under a certain age to be taken prisoner as slaves,” stated Fisher. It’s not surprising that U.S. efforts to eradicate native people don’t turn up in many history books regarding the Revolution. “After the American Revolution, the United States debated the role slavery should play in the new nation,” Fisher noted. “Americans later rewrote the history of the era to focus solely on the conflict with the British…The war against native nations was an inconvenient aspect of the period that later Americans found less celebratory and so conveniently left out of the telling of history.” The rewrite of history is not the only thing that Fisher explores in Stealing America. The other is the enslavement of Native Americans. Fisher estimates that 600,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America. Between 1492 and the late 19th century, estimates range from 2.5 million to 5.5 million indigenous people were enslaved across North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean region. From the viewpoint of Native Americans in California, the California Gold Rush was anything but a windfall, Fisher stated. The sudden arrival of thousands of settlers looking for gold destroyed traditional homelands, polluted water supplies, and enslaved thousands of Native Californians in the 19th century. Fisher’s research has taken more than 15 years, since records and accounts of native enslavement are not readily available. Fisher points to resources like the Stolen Relations website (stolenrelations.org) that seeks to “illuminate the significance of the enslavement and servitude of Indigenous peoples in American history, as well as their resilience, through the recovery of individual stories.” Some 7,000 records are available on the site.

    32 min
  3. "Born Sick in the USA" by Stephen Bezruchka

    Jun 20

    "Born Sick in the USA" by Stephen Bezruchka

    Stephen Bezruchka has worked in the healthcare field for over 50 years. A graduate of Stanford Medical School, with a public health degree from Johns Hopkins University, Bezruchka began his career by setting up a community health project in the Himalayas. He spent over 30 years practicing as an emergency physician in the United States before joining the faculty of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in 1994. Such experience gives him a unique vantage point when it comes to examining the state of the nation’s health. Bezruchka’s new book, Born Sick in the USA, comes with a diagnosis: America, your health could be a lot better. “Our nation has misguided priorities, so we live shorter, less healthy lives,” he noted. “The root cause of our shorter and sicker lives is the huge economic inequality we tolerate, together with a lack of attention to our early years, when so much of our lifelong outlook for health and well-being is shaped,” said Bezruchka, adding that residents of the United States die younger than those in more than 40 other countries around the world. Other countries address matters that the United States neglects. Maternity leave for mothers, daycare, and universal healthcare are examples of that, he stated. The U.S. government already spends more on healthcare per person than any nation that has universal healthcare, so we can afford the single-payer system without additional costs, noted Bezruchka. But whether you call it Medicare for All or the Public Option, a universal system won’t solve all our health problems. As long as so many Americans are living in poverty, the nation’s health will suffer, he said. Change requires a strategy to tackle the enormous economic inequality that exists in America, said Bezruchka. “Once people realize that they don’t live the longer, healthier lives that people in other nations do, we must change the status quo and decrease inequality, and use the proceeds to support early life. Large public support for improving health through massive demonstrations and a far-reaching media campaign can result in profound changes, such as the demonstrations that ended the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Massive social movements are the forces we need now,” he said. Bezruchka advocates people find one-liners to help in the campaign to influence others. Examples in the book include "Inequality kills" and "Americans have the right to life, but it is only a short one." The author said his bumper sticker reads, "Don't believe everything you think!" To provide more ideas on addressing the nation’s inequality problem, Bezruchka has made his previous book, Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19's Health Lessons for the World, available online free of charge at his website stephenbezruchka.com.

    32 min
  4. “America’s Hometown Movie Houses: Please Remain Standing” by Benita VanWinkle

    Jun 12

    “America’s Hometown Movie Houses: Please Remain Standing” by Benita VanWinkle

    Benita VanWinkle likes going to the movies. She’s gone to theaters in every state of the union. But she doesn’t always stay for the main feature. Instead, VanWinkle, an art professor at High Point University in North Carolina, pursues a picture show of her own. Over the years, she’s photographed some 1,200 theaters across the country. Almost 400 of those pictures make up her new book, America’s Hometown Movie Theaters: Please Remain Standing.  It all started at her hometown theater near Largo, Fla. She had a college photo assignment and decided that the ornate theater she knew as a kid would make a great subject with its interior artwork of the history of sound and motion in movies with Egyptian characters and symbols (“They scared me as a kid.”) Part of the title of her book comes from Clarence, the former Marine who ran that Largo theater and always played the “Stars and Stripes” before every movie. “If you didn’t stand up, he would stop the film and put the house lights on until people stood up,” said VanWinkle. Sadly, two years after taking her pictures, the theater was torn down by the bank next door, she said. It was later in graduate school at Southern Illinois University that VanWinkle made shooting movie houses her graduate project and her life’s passion. “At first, I just shot theaters in Illinois. I’d stop in every small town and ask people if they had a theater or knew of any in the area,” she said. Soon she developed her own databank of movie houses. In addition to acquiring theater directories from different decades, she welcomed the Cinema Treasures website that started in 2003. “That was a history of theaters, a crowdsourcing project where people could provide additional details. That changed my life,” she said. “I will shoot abandoned theaters if I come across them, but I don’t focus on that,” she said. She credited photographer Matt Lambros, author of After the Final Curtain: The Fall of the American Movie Theater, with doing amazing work in the abandoned theater category. “I put more energy into theaters that are maintained, rebuilt, refurbished, or repurposed,” said VanWinkle. One of the most distinctive examples of a repurposed theater is in Kearney, Neb., she said. The old Fort Theatre is now a dentist's office but while the theater seats have been taken out, the place remains in good enough shape that it could be made into a theater again. Ironically, a popcorn machine and candy display, the very things that often drive one to the dentist, are displayed in the building’s front window, she said. Kearney is also home to the World Theatre, a nonprofit, volunteer-run theater, said VanWinkle, who’s come to know a lot about what communities around the country are doing with their theaters. In Viborg, S.D., a town of only 350 people, she photographed the Lund Theatre, where she captured the image of a four-year-old looking out through the theater’s glass door just as she snapped a picture of the theater’s exterior. VanWinkle also told of the art teacher, “a one-woman tornado,” who organizes a rummage sale twice a year to benefit the State Theater in Nashville, Ill. “I love hearing from people,” she said, referring to tips she gets on movie houses she hasn’t photographed yet. Her book is on the street, but VanWinkle still makes the rounds of movie houses with a camera in hand. This summer, she plans to visit the Russell Theatre in Maysville, Ky., the Maynard Arts Center just outside Boston, and the Little Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. The Little Theatre is one she’s been to before. When the pandemic hit, the theater backers decided it was a good time to overhaul a theater built in 1929. VanWinkle was there to photograph the project when it was completed.  Today, the Little Theatre runs a mix of indie and foreign films, rotating art displays, and music, along with a casual cafe. One of the customer comments online raves about real butter on the popcorn and “generous home-baked desserts at great prices.” When it comes to rave reviews, VanWinkle credits her editor, Beth Daugherty, founder of Bauer & Dean Publishers, a firm that specializes in architectural books, with bringing her book to life. “It wouldn’t have happened without her,” she said.  As for her next project, VanWinkle’s not sure if it will be a comprehensive look at theaters in Chicago, or another volume of movie houses from around the country (after all, she has 800 pictures that haven't been used yet). But whatever it is, she’s a believer in the power of entertainment as a group activity rather than a solitary exercise in front of a TV set.

    31 min
  5. "A High Price for Freedom" by Clyde W. Ford

    Jun 6

    "A High Price for Freedom" by Clyde W. Ford

    Don’t expect a big celebration on Juneteenth (June 19) from author Clyde W. Ford, who explains in A High Price for Freedom. “What a wonderful day that first Juneteenth must have been. Fetters gone. Shackles removed. Whips silenced. Uninformed formerly enslaved men and women reveling in their newly-found freedom. But there’s a problem with this idyllic picture of Juneteenth—most of the above events never happened, even though they are taken as unquestioned truth by Americans Black and white,” stated Ford. The facts, the author declares, are that, first of all, slaves in Texas were aware of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “We had papers just like we have now,” said Felix Haywood, a former slave who was in Texas for the first Juneteenth, when interviewed in the 1930s at the age of 92. The 2,000 Union troops that went to Texas after the Civil War didn’t go to tell the slaves they were free, but to remind the white Texas slaveholders that they had to release those they continued to enslave, said Ford. Texas is where a lot of slaves wound up because, during the Civil War, a number of southern slaveholders marched as many as 150,000 Black men and women to Texas in order to keep them out of the Union Army’s hands, stated Ford, describing that movement as the second slavery trail of tears. The first one involved the transfer of slaves from tobacco states like Virginia and Maryland to the deep South in the 1830s when cotton became the chief crop. At about the same time that Major General George Granger was delivering his Juneteenth message to Texan slaveholders, President Andrew Johnson, having taken over that spring for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, was derailing compensation plans for slaves worked out while Lincoln was still in office. “Union General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton seemed to recognize that President Lincoln needed a plan to deal with the four to five million men and women who would be freed by the Emancipation Proclamation if the Union prevailed in the war,” noted Ford. Rev. Garrison Frazier, himself a former slave, replied to questions from Sherman and Stanton on the evening of Jan. 12, 1865 at a meeting that sought to find an answer to a looming problem as the war drew to a close: the huge population of former slaves  “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it or make it our own,” said Frazier. Four days after the meeting, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, accepted by Lincoln and otherwise known as “40 acres and a mule,” said Ford. That order sought to redistribute 400,000 acres of prime Southern coastline to emancipated slaves, land that formerly belonged to Southern slaveholders. The plan was to allow African Americans to organize and govern their own communities, Ford said. But Johnson had other ideas. Shortly after Lincoln died in April 1865, Johnson issued 14,000 pardons to wealthy Southern slaveholders, and, within seven weeks of taking office, coinciding almost exactly with the first Juneteenth, Johnson rescinded Special Field Order No. 15. Any lands that had been confiscated were returned to their original owners, said Ford, recalling a quote from W.E.B. DuBois: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.” By June 1865, 40,000 Black Americans who had been awarded land were formally displaced, forced into becoming sharecroppers and tenant farmers. “Personally, as a Black Man, I find it very difficult to celebrate Juneteenth because what are we celebrating?” asked Ford. “Are you celebrating the fact that Black folks learned they were free? They already knew that. Or are you celebrating the fact that white folks were told to stop killing and brutalizing Black folks?" A High Price for Freedom features a number of other essays by Ford addressing the struggle for freedom by African Americans in the United States.

    19 min
  6. “Disposing of Modernity” by Rebecca Graff

    Jun 3

    “Disposing of Modernity” by Rebecca Graff

    If time travel ever becomes a thing, the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 might be one of the leading attractions for time travelers. Here was an exposition, spread across almost 700 acres in Jackson Park, some seven miles from Chicago’s Loop, that sold 27 million tickets in its six-month run. Some 200 buildings were erected that included displays from nations across the world, public comfort stations, soda pavilions, and restaurants. You had electricity and flush toilets for all to use. “Add to all of this an elevated train that looped around the fairgrounds, the sounds of tourists talking mixed with band concerts, sights of ‘Little Egypt’ performing the danse du ventre, or children doing gymnastics in the model kindergarten, smells of baking bread from the French bakery exhibit or beer and wurst from the German Village, and one starts to get a small sense of the teeming character of the 1893 fair,” noted Rebecca Graff, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College. Graff recalled a teacher telling her grad-school class years earlier that the Chicago fair site was “the center of the world” 100 years ago. That motivated her to find out what was left of the great fair often cited as a watershed moment in the development of modern, industrial American society. The result is captured in Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, Graff's book that details some of what lay behind (or under) White City. To fully appreciate the 1893 event in Chicago, one must first understand the concept of a world’s fair. Between 1865 and 1925, 360 million people attended world’s fairs in Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. “Fairs were venues within which to display the growing and changing material world,” noted Graff. The United States, and Chicago, in particular, were pulsing with power in 1893. While the U.S. frontier may have closed (Frederick Jackson Turner made that declaration in Chicago that year), the country was flexing its railroad and steam muscle in the era that became known as the Gilded Age.  Chicago, 20 years removed from the great fire, wanted to show its resurgence at the fair—not only as a meatpacking and transportation center, but also as a city with world-class architects such as Louis Sullivan and a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright. The fair saw the introduction of the frankfurter that became known as the Chicago hot dog. White City was also criticized by Frederick Douglass, then ambassador to Haiti, for excluding African Americans from a more prominent role at the fair.  It was a transformative event. Six months later, it was gone. That kind of conspicuous disposal, the disposing of modernity, is one of the stories of White City.

    25 min
  7. “The Courtyard” by Alexa Morris and Benjamin Parket

    May 30

    “The Courtyard” by Alexa Morris and Benjamin Parket

    The Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II brought hardship to many, especially if they were Jewish. As German rule tightened, Jewish families were at risk of being rounded up and sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz. The Courtyard is an account of one Jewish family that survived the war thanks to the assistance of brave neighbors and a miracle or two along the way, said Morris, whose father-in law was Ben Parket. Morris said the book came about through her collaboration with Parket, who turns 93 this summer. Before war broke out, the Parkets—Ben, his parents, and two older brothers—lived in a tiny but sunny fourth-floor apartment that overlooked a large, open courtyard, a busy place in the heart of Paris, a center of industry, she said. “The neighborhood was known for woodworking with furniture makers, upholsterers, and painters busy at their trade. Ben’s father, Joseph, was a varnisher who had his workshop in the same courtyard,” said Morris. In August of 1941, Joseph Parket was arrested along with other Jewish men who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. He was detained in a camp outside Paris that would become the primary French gateway to Auschwitz. The first of the miracles occurred when Joseph was released due to illness and sent home in November. “During the entire war, only 800 of the 70,000 people detained at the camp were ever released,” noted Morris. Ben’s father came home and recovered, but in July of 1942, the entire family was marked for arrest. Luckily, a courtyard neighbor who worked at the police station warned the Parket family in advance. The family wound up staying in an empty warehouse nearby. They made do in a single room the size of a one-car garage for two years without electricity, plumbing, or running water. At night, they had to be completely silent. “Protecting the family was a true community effort,” said Morris. Neighboring shopkeepers—a grocer and a deli owner—set aside food for the family each day, food that nine-year-old Ben had to go and collect each day, a task that "should have been terrifying, but Ben said it wasn’t. Perhaps because it was his only time outside, it became his favorite part of the day,” she said. After the war, the Parket family emigrated to Israel before Ben, on his own, traveled to the United States for college. He attended Stanford University and settled in the Bay Area. He was an architect until he retired in his 50s. Perhaps because of the time he spent hiding during the war, Ben developed a passion for the outdoors, said Morris, noting that he remains an avid biker and hiker to this day.

    23 min
  8. “The Devil’s Castle” by Susanne Paola Antonetta

    May 29

    “The Devil’s Castle” by Susanne Paola Antonetta

    The horrors of the Holocaust were preceded in Nazi Germany by the conversion of five asylums and an abandoned jail, which were transformed into gas chambers, killing tens of thousands of patients.  That’s a story that Susanne Paola Antonetta tells in The Devil’s Castle, a book that started with the Nazi massacre of the disabled, she said. “The subtitle, Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today, grew with the book,” stated Antonetta. ”Euthanasia grew out of the 19th-century eugenics movement, the drive to remove ‘tainted’ hereditary lines from society. Eugenics flourished in the United States before and after the war. It hasn’t ended,” she stated. Antonetta focuses on several people in the history she provides for a book she said took eight years to compile. “I even had to learn another language: German,” she stated. Two of Antonetta’s “heroes” are Paul Schreber, a German judge who was able to make his own case to force his release from an asylum, and Dorothea Buck, a longtime activist who wrote lucidly of her own psychotic episodes. “Buck had a vision in 1936 of Hitler’s coming war proving ‘monstrous.’ Buck’s mother took her to a doctor, the vision of monstrous war a symptom, like the loony cartoon prophet’s apocalypse sign. If only millions of people had had her symptom,” noted Antonetta. Buck died in 2019 at the age of 102, said Antonetta, who “found her book, her talks, her letters.” “I followed her star with her during my own psychotic break,” said the author, who’s had to deal with her own bipolar condition. Another major figure in the book is Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist who was both eugenicist and anti-semite. Kraepelin believed Jews had a natural connection to mental illness, and he trained some of the worst Nazi doctors, noted Antonetta. Kraepelin, who died in 1926, remains popular, even considered “the father of modern psychiatry,” having devised an elaborate system of psychiatric classification, she said. The title of the book refers to what the asylum known as Sonnenstein later became called. Once a castle-fortress dating back to the Middle Ages, the buildings were renovated in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1811, the Prussian government established an asylum at one end of the sprawling fortress. Antonetta noted that a study of how society treats mental problems shows that ideas on finding a cure often change over time. Under its first director, Ernst Pienitz, Sonnenstein became Europe’s pinnacle asylum, said Antonetta. Pienetz released a quarter of his patients, fully cured, within a year of their entry, remarkable for that time and that patient population, she said. The reputation made Sonnenstein a teaching hospital, the destination for hundreds of doctors to learn how mental illness could be treated humanely , said Antonetta, noting that less than a century later, the once-fabled institution had become a killing ground “where patients died by gas and were thrown in the river below in the form of ash.” While stressing the failures in the treatment of mentally disabled people, Antonetta sees progress being made despite a reliance on drugs for treatment. She looks to the future and calls for change. “It’s time to end the use of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in psychiatry,” she said. “This work is the fruit of the poisoned tree, in its Kraepelinian roots and in its development by those with a financial stake in finding people ill.”

    29 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.7
out of 5
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About

If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com. 

Information

  • Creator
    Steve Tarter
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    281
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Read Beat (...and repeat)
  • Show Website
    Read Beat (...and repeat)