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Madison BookBeat

Madison BookBeat

De : Stu Levitan Andrew Thomas Sara Batkie David Ahrens Lisa Malawski
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Madison BookBeat highlights local Wisconsin authors and authors coming to Madison for book events. It airs every Monday afternoon at 1pm on WORT FM.

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  • A Preview of the 25th Wisconsin Book Festival with Jane Rotonda and Meghan O'Gieblyn

    A Preview of the 25th Wisconsin Book Festival with Jane Rotonda and Meghan O'Gieblyn
    Oct 5 2026
    On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with festival director Jane Rotonda and author Meghan O'Gieblyn about her book Will and Attention, ahead of O'Gieblyn's appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Friday, October 16th. After leaving evangelical Christianity in her early twenties, kicking an addiction, and building a life as a writer, Meghan O'Gieblyn was admired by her friends for having a strong will. Then, in her late thirties, she began secretly attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest to discuss conversion. After eleven years of sobriety, she began drinking again. Both returns—to organized religion and to alcohol—felt to her like a regression, a personal defeat. Knowledge and determination had proven useless when it came to her most vexing personal battles. In Will and Attention, O'Gieblyn captures those perplexing days. Soon after her return to sobriety, she looked to a series of spiritual texts for answers and began putting them in conversation with her life. She was struck by the words of philosopher and mystic Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” Will had certainly failed her; perhaps the answer lay in attention to her wandering mind and heart? Inspired by this possibility, she set out to find a spirituality that could meet her longings and prove capacious enough to hold the dark side of human nature. Meghan O'Gieblyn is the author of Will and Attention, and the books God Human Animal Machine and Interior States. She writes essays, features, and criticism for Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, Wired, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum and other publications. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her essays have been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay anthologies. You can see a full list of this year's Wisconsin Book Festival events here.
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    52 min
  • Ben Sidran, "Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame"

    Ben Sidran, "Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame"
    Sep 21 2026
    Stu Levitan welcomes Madison’s musical Renaissance man Ben Sidran, making his fourth appearance on Madison BookBeat, to talk about his new book Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame (Equinox). And what a life and what times, a musical career with commercial and creative success from 1958 to 2022. Touring pianist and singer with rock and roll legends Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent at 16. Leading one of the leading British R&B group of the early sixties, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames -- the only UK band to tour with the Motown Revue in 1965. Being the only artist to twice knock the Beatles out of the top spot on the UK music charts, with the Blue Flames and as a solo pop singer. He financed the hip Bag O’Nails Club in Soho, where Paul and Linda McCartney met at one of his gigs and where Jimi Hendrix gave his first official London performance, featuring the drummer, Mitch Mitchell, whom Fame had recently fired. Then he became a respected jazz singer and songwriter. In the 1990s, charter membership in former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings and an intense ten-years as touring musical director for Van Morrison. A big band singer so popular in Scandinavia he lived for a while in Sweden, he also toured regularly in Australia with the Aussie Flames. A discography that encompasses 14 live albums, 50 singles and 34 studio albums – including three on the Go Jazz Records label. Plus scandal and tragedy both arising from the British noblewoman Nicollete Marchioness of Londonderry, whom he married in 1972 after she bore his child while married to the Marquis of Londonderry, and who jumped off a bridge to her death 21 years later. Quite a life for the man born Clive Powell in late June, 1943 in northwest England, Lancashire county, a land of coal mines and textile mills. And holiday camp singing contests that can send a 16-year-old apprentice cotton weaver into musical history. There’s no one better to tell Georgie Fame’s story than his friend and colleague, Madison’s own, Ben Sidran. He’s performed and recorded with Georgie, traveled with him, signed him to his Go Jazz Records label and produced three albums. To list all of Ben’s accomplishments would occupy the entire show, so I’ll just note this appearance on Madison BookBeat, follows episodes on his books The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma, about the colorful and successful music producer; There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream, about those three things, and his memoir A Life in the Music. As George Wein, the legendary founder of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival once told me, “Now Ben Sidran – he writes real books.” It is always a pleasure to see, and a special pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, our friend Ben Sidran.
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    1 h et 2 min
  • Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff, "Walt Whitman's American Dream"

    Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff, "Walt Whitman's American Dream"
    Sep 14 2026
    Stu Levitan welcomes playwright Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff for a conversation about her new play, "Walt Whitman's American Dream," a featured presentation at the Capital Times Idea Fest on September 19. Presenting Whitman's life and poetry in the context of his time -- born while the Founders were still alive, he mourned Lincoln and died on the cusp of the Gilded Age -- the play invites audiences to reflect on what it means to be an American, and whether a divided people can reconnect. And there's a good dose of Whitman's own words -- free and rhythmic, democratic and vast, sensual and erotic. (Thank you, Public Domain.) Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaff is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, NY Times and other national media, focusing on parenting, education and health. A graduate of Northwestern University with an MFA in Acting from the University of Alabama, she also has a certificate in television news production, which she put to use as an assistant producer at the CBS News magazine 48 hours. She has also created and taught a series of courses on Shakespeare for older adults and been the managing editor for the leading provider of online cognitive assessments. She is the granddaughter of the late executive editor of the Capital Times Elliott Maraniss and Mary Maraniss, an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press, and the daughter of two-time Pulitzer Prize journalist/historian/biographer David Maraniss and his wife Linda. Sarah's brother Andrew has also been a guest on Madison BookBeat, discussing his books on sports and society. "Walt Whitman's American Dream" is her third play. There will be a stage reading with soundscape of "Walt Whitman’s American Dream" at 5 PM on September 19 in the Memorial Union Play Circle on the UW campus. Registration for the free event is through captimesideafest.com.
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    1 h et 1 min
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