2023 Fall Read

This is Leslie VonHolten from the High Plains of Kansas with another HPPR Radio Readers Book Byte.Here on the High Plains, we can forget that some folks live lives separated from animals. I have two dogs, which I am obsessed with, and every so often my work finds me on a gravel road, chatting it up with curious cattle gathered along a fence line.

This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “Running with Sherman” by Christopher McDougall.Chris McDougall was an almost accidental war correspondent, wandering after college, eventually landing in Madrid, Spain, teaching English for a bit, when he applied for a job with the Associated Press.

Welcome to HPPR Book Bytes. I’m Bob Seay. This is the first of three commentaries I’ll be doing about “Running with Sherman: How a Rescue Donkey Inspired a Rag-tag Gang of Runners to Enter the Craziest Race in America” by Christopher McDougall. The title says it all, or at least as much as you can say in twenty words and still have room to mention the author’s previous best-selling book on the cover.

I’m Shelley Armitage from Vega, Texas, sharing Radio Readers Book Bytes with you today. My new poetry book, A Habit of Landscape, celebrates the overlapping meanings of habit and habitat. Each share the root words “to dwell.”

Hello! I’m Cheryl Dunn in Lincoln, NE for HPPR’s Radio Readers Fall Book Club.The book Running with Sherman by Christopher McDougall was for the most part a very light-hearted book that was easy to sit and enjoy. I would caution you that Chapter 17 does go into some very dark material related to suicide and depression, but it provides you with an understanding that I hadn’t thought about.

This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “Running With Sherman” by Christopher McDougall.Sherman is a delight from page one, or page 40 or page anything, anywhere you land, whether you read from start to end or in spurts or you skim. If you love animals at all, Christopher McDougall’s always slightly bemused prose will endear you to the smart, funny, cantankerous Sherman.

Raylene Hinz-Penner here, retired English professor now living in North Newton, KS and talking about Running with Sherman: The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero by Christopher McDougall, former foreign correspondent, writer of the bestseller, Born to Run, collector of great human stories.

Yes, this story is about a donkey, but author Chris McDougall learns as much about perseverance as he does about animals in this work exploring family, culture and the connections often found between animal and humans.

This is Bailey from Garden City, Kansas reviewing Bewilderment by Richard Powers.This stylistically unique and prose-like novel takes the reader through the mind of a widowed astrobiologist who endeavors to find ways to help his brilliant and autistic son. Together they connect and share with each other through science fiction planets.

This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “Bewilderment” by Richard Powers.This is a book of overlapping metaphors and colliding worlds as order and science slide toward the dark hole of authoritarian chaos.