Dan Pelzer died in July at age 92 and left behind a detailed list of every book he read from 1962 to 2023, totaling 3,599 books across 62 years—all of them checked out of his local library. His list went viral after his children wanted to print it and hand it out at his funeral, choosing to post it online instead. Stan explores Dan’s impressive reading list and many of the titles he read, and how it’s inspired him and so many others to “read a good page turner.”
Did Hernando De Soto travel near what is now DeSoto Falls in North Georgia? Or Desoto, Georgia, in Sumter County? Why don’t we know where he went and why is the evidence so hard to find? Stan’s guest this week is Dennis Blanton, professor of anthropology at James Madison University, author of Conquistador’s Wake: Tracking the Legacy of Hernando De Soto in the Indigenous Southeast (UGA Press, 2020). Dr. Blanton discusses the myths and realities of De Soto’s 16th-century expedition, based on his years of painstaking archaeological research—and how his current finds in southwest Georgia may re-define what we know about the infamous Conquistador’s entrada.
Stan’s guest this week is long-time Atlanta Journal-Constitution sports columnist Mark Bradley, who retired from the AJC last December after 46 years as a sports journalist. Mark shares some of his favorite moments in Georgia sports history across nearly five decades, including the joys of two Braves World Series championships, the crushing Falcons Super Bowl loss, as well as the ups and downs of tight deadlines, covering lousy teams, and why the current Braves are painful to watch.
Stan opens Season 9 of Off the Deaton Path talking about his summer reading (so far)—books by Nina Stibbe, Jane Gardam, Leah Hager Cohen, Helene Hanff, James Hilton, Ferrol Sams—short thoughts on the Braves lousy season (so far), a sneak peek at upcoming podcasts, and AJC political writer Jim Galloway on the 1956 Georgia state flag in the summer GHQ.
Stan’s guest this week is Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin, who discusses her new book, The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2025). Was Ben Franklin the first climate scientist? The Franklin stove became one of the Revolutionary era’s most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to Italy, and beyond. It was also a hypothesis. Armed with science, Franklin proposed to invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters brought life to a standstill. He believed that his stove could provide snug indoor comfort despite another, related crisis: a shortage of wood caused by widespread deforestation. Joyce Chaplin demonstrates that it’s not so easy to engineer our way out of a climate crisis, an ongoing challenge as old as the United States itself.
