Category Archives: Great Books

S10E9 Podcast: Pulitzer Prize Winner Alan Taylor

Stan’s guest this week is distinguished historian Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, and the 2026 Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Georgia Historical Society. Alan joins Stan to talk about his latest book, Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion (WW Norton, 2026), which draws on a previously untapped family archive to reveal the routines and perils of daily life on a slave plantation in southeastern Virginia in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, and its proximity to Nat Turner’s famous 1831 uprising, when Turner’s rebels struck slaveholding families near Tower Hill, killing more than fifty men, women, and children in a single day.

S10E4 Podcast: Contested Continent: The Oxford History of the United States

Stan’s guest this week is distinguished historian Peter Mancall of the University of Southern California, author of Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c.1000 – 1680, the new and first volume in the renowned Oxford History of the United States series. Contested Continent recounts the origins of “America” and how it came to birth the United States, from the Viking expeditions to the end of the 17th century. The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, two New York Times bestsellers, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous, European, and African women and men, from the Arctic to the West Indies.

S9E10 Podcast: The 2025 Reading Year in Review

This week Stan kicks off the new year by reviewing his reading in 2025: how many books and pages, fiction and non-fiction, as well as the other ways he works reading into his life: audiobooks, podcasts, blogs, newspapers, and magazines. He also revisits and offers tips on age-old reading problems, including: setting reading goals (or not), how to get more reading into your life, reading in a distracted age, suffering from reading guilt and how to conquer it, and more.

S9E9 Podcast: What Dan Read, Part 2: A Conversation with Dan’s Daughter Marci Pelzer

Stan’s guest this week is Marci Pelzer, Dan Pelzer’s daughter, who talks about her father, his reading habits, and what it was like growing up with the man whose now-famous reading list of 3,599 books has inspired a whole new generation of readers across the world.

S9E7 Podcast: Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Stan’s guest this week is author Leo Damrosch of Harvard University, discussing Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Yale University Press), his new biography of the author of Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. Stevenson’s short but adventurous life matched the magic of his writing. Damrosch discusses how Stevenson in his 44 years wrote 11 novels and hundreds of essays and poems, while creating some of the most memorable characters in literature: Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins, Dr. Livesay, Squire Trelawny, Billy Bones, Ben Gunn, David Balfour, Alan Stewart, Henry Jekyll, Edward Hyde, and scores of others.

Version 1.0.0