Read Beat (...and repeat)

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Sep 2026

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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.

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September 30, 2026Episode 3329 min

"The Last Ride" by Chris Enss

Your typical cowboy movie features stagecoaches, lots of horses, Indians, and a saloon with swinging doors. The women depicted are either saloon girls or school teachers, noted Chris Enss, who’s worked hard for the past 30 years to dispel that image. Enss has written numerous books detailing the history of the Old West, most of it focusing on women's exploits during that period. Her latest book, The Last Ride , is the 61st book she’s had a hand in producing. Some of the titles that Enss has cranked out include Buffalo Gals (highlighting the women of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show ), A Bedside Book of Bad Girls, Gilded Girls and Entertaining Women (women entertainers), High Country Women (pioneers at Yosemite National Park), No Place for a Woman (suffrage), Hearts West (mail-order brides of the frontier), Daughters of Daring (stuntwomen), and Frontier Teachers , among many others. Enss believes that the accomplishments of women have been overlooked in general, but especially when tales of the Old West are recounted. Enss talks about female doctors like Sophie Herzog, who hung patients upside down in order to extract bullets from victims more safely. She had a necklace made of all the bullets she removed from patients, a necklace she was buried with, noted Enss. The first female photographers of the Old West made use of walking darkrooms, flipping big dresses over their heads in order to handle film safely, she said. Enss is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to recalling overlooked accomplishments of women such as actress Maude Adams, who not only was a friend of J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan , but also played Peter Pan on stage over 1,500 times. Adams was a star off the stage, later working on the development of stage lighting for General Electric. “(Adams) contributed to what became the largest light bulb patented to date. Adams, a giant in the art and science of theater, nonetheless kept fans in the dark as to her personal life and private passions,” noted Adam Bisno, writing on the website of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. In a previous interview, Enss noted that the quirkiest story she ever came across involved Calamity Jane. At her funeral held in Deadwood, S.D., mourners took pieces of her dress and hair as they passed by her body to pay their respects. The undertaker eventually had to cover Calamity with special wire to keep people from further disturbing her remains, said Enss. The most notorious woman of the West was Lola Montez, she said. The Irish-born entertainer was known worldwide for her “Spider Dance.” She was eccentric and daring, and had lovers everywhere, said Enss, adding that the most famous of Montez's paramours was King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Montez is reputed to be the inspiration for the saying “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets,” Enss noted. In her interview on Read Beat , Enss points out that many of the stunts you see executed so expertly in westerns from the silent movie era were performed by women. Ruth Roland, Alice Van Springsteen, and Mary Wiggins were among the former rodeo stars that performed in movies that starred Tom Mix and William S. Hart, she said. In The Last Ride , Enss recounts the story of Laura Bullion, who was part of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch around the turn of the century. After being jailed in 1900 for her part in a train robbery, she went straight, the author stated. Bullion changed her name, working at a department store in St. Louis before going into business for herself as a seamstress. She died in 1961 at the age of 85 without fanfare. Enss departs from her focus on the Old West next year when she returns to her comedic roots with the book Jessica of the Jungle , a rom-com romp already highlighted on her website, chrisenss.com .

September 25, 2026Episode 3225 min

"Forty Ways to Know a Tree" by Joan Maloof

Joan Maloof doesn’t think hugging a tree is silly. As the founder of the Old-Growth Forest Network, an organization that seeks to preserve the few old-growth forests we have left in this country, Maloof is passionate about trees. Today, less than 5 percent of Western and only a fraction of 1 percent of Eastern original forests, on average, remain standing. The author of Forty Ways to Know a Tree , Maloof, professor emeritus of biology at Salisbury University in Maryland, said old forests are rare because so many have been disturbed—sometimes by nature (insects or fire)--but mostly from logging. As a lifelong supporter of plant life in all forms, Maloof said she realized there was no one national organization that made it their mission to protect old forests. That’s why she founded the Old-Growth Forest Network (oldgrowthforest.net) 12 years ago. The organization has grown in that time, she said. The network website now provides information on where to find old-growth forests in every state across the nation. Maloof said those who have never experienced an old-growth forest are likely to be in for a pleasant surprise when they do. There are health benefits and psychological benefits to be gained from forests, but perhaps the chief attribute of older forests is their beauty, she said. Forests of all ages have an important ecological role to play, but the old-growth stage is especially important because of its unique structure, noted Maloof. Trees are important in their own right, but they’re also important for the community they create, she said. Various canopy layers and berry-producing plants are beneficial for many bird species. In a forest that has not been disturbed for hundreds of years some trees will develop hollow cavities. These cavities become important nesting places for animals. In an undisturbed forest, some large trees will die and fall, creating yet more habitat: numerous insects, fungi, reptiles and amphibians benefit from the fallen trees. The moisture retained within an old-growth forest benefits lichen and mosses, and the species they support. Along with encouraging visits to old-growth forests, the network also seeks to protect trees when “so many people are going after the forest to purposely destroy it,” said Maloof. “The roadless rule has protected more than 45 million acres of forest in this country, with 9 million of those acres old-growth forests. The present administration is looking to rescind that rule,” she said of the U.S. Forest Service rule limiting access on national lands. Information on the oldgrowthforest.net website provides information on that issue, said Maloof.

September 17, 2026Episode 3120 min

"When Women Ran Fifth Avenue" by Julie Satow

You remember the department store, that big, multi-level center of the downtown that offered everything from an afternoon tea to wedding attire? That's where Jack Benny went every year to find a tie for Don Wilson or something for Mary Livingston, but always ran into trouble. Julie Satow recalls the glory days of some of New York’s most distinctive department stores in When Women Ran Fifth Avenue . But Satow isn’t just documenting an aspect of the retail scene in the 20th century. She’s profiling three women who broke the glass ceiling to enter the executive offices at Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor, and Henri Bendel’s. The American department store was a palace of consumption that epitomized modern consumerism, noted Satow. It was a place of goods, display, and style. It was a place where women, shoppers and shopgirls alike, could stake out a newfound independence. Whether in New York or Chicago or on Main Street, USA, men owned the buildings, but inside, women ruled, Satow stated. In the 1930s, Hortense Odlum came to her husband’s department store (Bonwit Teller) as a housewife tasked with attracting more shoppers like herself, and wound up running the company. At Lord & Taylor, Dorothy Shaver championed American designers during World War II and beyond, becoming the first businesswoman to earn a salary of more than $1.5 million. Geraldine Stutz left a career as a magazine editor to take on Bendel’s, reinventing the look of the modern department store in the 1960s. Stutz served as store president from 1957 to 1986. While women dominated the department-store scene, both as clerks and consumers, the three women profiled by Satow rose to unprecedented heights at a time when men controlled the reins of power in almost every business. The department store was a cauldron of creativity in its day, recounted Satow, noting that Stutz “found” an unknown Andy Warhol to boost the store’s artistic offerings while store windows—not just Christmas displays—but actual window arrangements designed to draw customers into the store—involved everyone from L. Frank Baum, creator of The Wizard of Oz , to Salvador Dali. Dali was so upset with Bonwit Teller rearranging one of his window displays in 1939 that he pushed a bathtub through the store window (getting himself arrested in the process). (Julie Satow was interviewed earlier on Read Beat , but due to technical issues, that program wound up running only six minutes.)

September 17, 2026Episode 3021 min

Working-Class Girls Don't Become Artists" by Janet Zandy

Janet Zandy makes a case for art, both its appreciation and its execution, not just for the select few. In her book, Working-Class Girls Don’t Become Artists (University of Illinois Press), Zandy shares the exploits of nine artists whose work aligns with the histories and living conditions of working-class people. Zandy's work includes the quote, “Workers can also realize that art is a career and a social activity that is useful, and not the idle pastime that the bourgeois philosophers pretend it is.” That’s her point: Art must belong to everyone. The artists she includes in her book amplify that message. Through Elizabeth Catlett’s depiction of working Black women to Ruth Asawa’s rise from her time in a detention camp during World War II, Zandy shows that art isn’t reserved only for the pillars of the community but also for those who help build those pillars. “Asawa wanted to be a teacher but, because she was Japanese-American, she wasn’t allowed to student teach. She had to pivot,” said Zandy, pointing out that Asawa’s artistic talent was soon realized at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. “Asawa brought art out of her house/studio into the community—through public commissions and through centering art and gardening in public schools,” noted Zandy, adding that Asawa designed Garden of Remembrance at San Francisco State University in 2002 to honor the many Japanese and Japanese-Americans incarcerated during World War II. Zandy: “About incarceration, she said, 'The arts saved us.’” Zandy opens her book with a news item about a plumber denied entry to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1897. The New York Times editorial on the incident stated, “A plumber fresh from a job of work is no more eligible in a place where he is likely to come into contact with other people or with works of art than a painter in the same condition. For him to attempt to visit the Museum in such a guise and without removing the traces of his toil argues either mere carelessness or lack of self-respect.” The author demands that we see art as a teaching tool. Just as she was drawn as a youth to view Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Zandy wants art to be recognized for its ability to lead to self-taught history. “Much later, after college, after family losses, I learned about Guernica, the Basque market town bombed on April 26, 1937, and the international Abraham Lincoln brigades, the volunteers who fought fascism in Spain,” wrote Zandy.

September 11, 2026Episode 2923 min

"Woodlands of the Mind" by Kevin O'Donnell and Scott Honeycutt

Not all the lessons learned at college take place in the classroom. That’s one of the takeaways from Woodlands of the Mind: Rambles Through Campus Forests by Kevin O’Donnell and Scott Honeycutt. There’s more. You learn that stately old buildings aren’t the only prominent landmarks on campus. Some are growing right outside. "Readers should take note that this collection of essays is about more than the actual forests themselves," noted Joan Maloof, executive director of the Old-Growth Forest Network. "Here are stories about daughters, and deer, rivers, and roads, soldiers, and slaves, stiltgrass, and stones, politics, and pollutants, gales, and glaciers, hills, and history...These things determine the birth and the death of the forests," stated Maloof in the book's foreword. As you tour the forests of the 15 colleges the authors visited for their book. you learn that some schools have a lot of trees. Take Berry College in Rome, Ga., for example, the first stop on the Woodlands tour. Berry College is a private school with 2,300 students. The campus size is 27,000 acres, nearly as large as the peninsula that holds the city of San Francisco, O’Donnell notes. Not all of the land is developed, of course. Eighty percent of the campus footprint is unoccupied by buildings. Part of that land is a working pine plantation where the college cuts loblolly pine for income. A wildlife management area, maintained by the state of Georgia, occupies part of the college land while another portion of the property is devoted to restoring longleaf pines in the region. Longleaf pine used to dominate across the South, but by 1995, less than 3 percent of the tree’s original range of 92 million acres was still longleaf pine. In case you’re wondering (and one of the wonders of Woodlands is the information provided on a wide variety of topics), the longleaf pine holds a mystical place among forest lovers. “With no deciduous leaves to rustle, the wind blows through the long, finely tuned needles, creating a music that people who have heard it say is unlike any other sound on earth,” stated O’Donnell. There’s also the longleaf fragrance: “People who have experienced it say that the olfactory sensation of being in the middle of an intact longleaf forest is like no other,” he added. One of the quotes used in the book comes from Aldo Leopold, the celebrated author of A Sand County Almanac : “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Among the wounds we suffer in Woodlands is learning that, in 2010, at Ohio University’s Dysart Woods, one of the last remaining stands of old-growth trees (white oak, sugar maple, and beech) in the state of Ohio, the Ohio Valley Coal Co. dug a coal mine under the forest. Within a year, half of the old-growth trees died. Dysart Woods, which is an hour-and-a-half drive from the school campus, is now run by a conservancy. The book also focuses on those who love the trees on the various campuses visited. One of those is Clint Patterson, the 10th forester at Berea College in Kentucky, who follows in the footsteps of the school’s first forester, Silas Mason (1857-1931). Patterson said Suffolk Punch draft horses are now used to pull logs for selective logging done in the Berea Forest, where the money earned goes back into the school’s forestry program. Honeycutt said that white oak from the carefully maintained Berea Forest has helped restore two celebrated ocean-going vessels, Mayflower II, a replica of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to this country , and Western Flyer , a boat once used by author John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who collaborated on The Sea of Cortez (1941). Woodlands discusses the many challenges facing forest maintenance in the 21st century: money troubles (no small matter for some schools), invasive plant species, extreme weather, and deer. O’Donnell and Honeycutt included the following from a 2022 issue of Natural Lands Magazine : “The most dangerous wild animal in Pennsylvania has caused 69 deaths and 6,208 injuries in the past five years. It’s ruining crops, damaging future timber harvests, and changing the state’s forest composition. It’s not the black bear, bobcat, or wild boar. It’s the official state animal of Pennsylvania (and Illinois, along with 10 other states): the white-tailed deer. And humans made it so.” The problem with having so many deer is that they eat some plants but not others, so invasive plants take over forests in many places, the authors noted. Rutgers University finally had to install fencing around Mettler’s Woods to keep the deer out, allowing native plants to rebound. “The story of academic forests is still unfolding, and the future is anything but certain,” warn the authors, suggesting that since the 15 schools represented in Woodlands are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collegiate forests, readers would do well to explore some of the hundreds of others found across the country for themselves.

September 10, 2026Episode 2823 min

"The Illinois Terminal Railroad: The Road of Personalized Services" by Dale Jenkins

Passenger train service of the past is often depicted with bustling city stations and milling crowds pouring onto platforms. But that wasn’t the only way to catch the train back in the day. If you were out in the country in central Illinois, you could just stand by the track and wave. That’s the way one electric railway operated that connected central Illinois cities Peoria, Bloomington, Springfield, Decatur, Champaign, and Danville with St. Louis. It was the Illinois Traction System. The interurban was referred to as “an American transportation phenomenon” by William Middleton in his book The Interurban Era . “Evolved from the urban streetcar, the interurban appeared shortly before the dawn of the 20th century, grew to a vast network of over 18,000 miles in two decades of excellent growth, and then vanished after barely three decades of usefulness,” declared Middleton. The interurban lasted a little longer than that in Illinois, a state that boasted one of the top systems in the country, said Dale Jenkins, president and founding member of the Illinois Traction Society, the Decatur-based clearinghouse for history about the line. The Illinois Traction System started in 1901 when Champaign’s William McKinley (a cousin to the U.S. president with the same name) purchased the Danville Street Railway & Light Co. and joined it with the Urbana and Champaign Street Railway Co. By 1910, Mr. McKinley, as Jenkins reverently refers to him, had added over 500 miles of track to his system across the state. The Illinois Traction service was not only convenient for travelers in an era when the state’s road system was still a work in progress; it provided style, said Jenkins, who wrote The Illinois Terminal Railroad: The Road of Personalized Services in 2005. Parlor cars featured mahogany and Spanish leather. Illinois Traction, with its slogan, “The Road of Good Service,” was the first electric railway to offer sleeping car service, Jenkins noted. If you’re wondering why sleeping cars would be useful on a route between Peoria and St. Louis, you need to understand that a car trip between the two cities once took over six hours, said Jenkins, who gave a presentation on the service in August at Peoria’s Wheels O’ Time Museum. The Bloomington-to-Peoria line was considered one of the most scenic in the ITS system, reported the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington. While not as powerful as the steam-powered locomotives of the day, interurban cars had an advantage when it came to providing rural service. “It was much easier to stop and start an electric car than a steam engine,” stated the McLean County museum. “A 1948 list used by Illinois Terminal (the company dropped the Traction name in 1935) employees shows 48 stations and stops in the 37-mile route between Bloomington and Peoria. Most of these were not listed on passenger timetables,” according to the museum. They were “flag” stops where a passenger could wave a cloth or flag to signal for the train to stop. But the popularity of auto travel as the 20th century progressed spelled trouble for the ITS passenger service. The WWII era provided a profitable interlude when fuel and tires were limited but, after the war, the passenger spiral returned. “The damn autos came along and spoiled it all,” complained a former Terminal rider in a 1983 Bloomington Pantagraph story. Interurban service to Peoria ended in 1955 with the last passenger run coming between Springfield and St. Louis in 1956. ITS continued to deliver freight on the line until 1981 when the company was sold to the Norfolk and Western Railway. Jenkins, who retired after 40 years with ITS and its subsequent companies, continues to share the state’s interurban history on the society website, illinoistractionsociety.org , and the Flyer magazine, published twice a year, as well as an annual calendar.

September 9, 2026Episode 2720 min

"Kentucky Barracuda" by Joe Goodbody

What started as a routine genealogical search turned into a six-year research project for Joe Goodbody, a retired Army colonel and the author of Kentucky Barracuda. The book documents the 19th-century exploits of Parker Hardin French (1826-1878), an adventurer and one of the most extraordinary con men of his time. French began his career in an America where news generally traveled only as fast as a person, a horse, a steamboat, or a sailing ship. French was a gifted swindler who could defraud people in one state and be hundreds of miles away before word of the fraud arrived. In the genealogical search Goodbody conducted, the author learned that French swindled his great-grandfather by talking him into joining an expedition headed for the California Gold Rush. But that was only one of the many crooked projects that French engineered over the course of a lifetime. Over the years, French literally outran the truth; outrunning documented frauds totaling over $100 million in current value, estimated the author. Some of his efforts may actually have begun as legitimate endeavors, but they never finished that way, said Goodbody. French was a master of deception. He employed several aliases during his lifetime and was reported to have been killed no less than five times, said the author. Goodbody's research found that French had been involved in nefarious deals across the United States and beyond national borders. He traveled to Nicaragua, profiting from that country's civil war, while becoming the illegitimate ambassador to the U.S. from Nicaragua at one point. He also spent time in Mexico, where he portrayed a paramilitary hero. Some of the famous people he crossed along the way included financier Cornelius Vanderbilt and U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson, who later became President following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "I think he could be called the foremost conman unknown to history," said Goodbody.

September 6, 202629 min

“Agatha Christie: The Mother of the Cozy Mystery” by Nancy West

There’s more to Agatha Christie than slick plot twists and quaint settings (like the fictitious Chipping Cleghorn). Christie was an adventurous woman, said Nancy West, the University of Missouri English professor who authored the biography, the latest in the Simon & Schuster series of pocket portraits of famous writers. A world traveler who took up surfing in South Africa and pursued the hobby in Hawaii, Christie was one of the few British women to own her own car in the 1920s, said West. “And she liked to drive fast,” added the professor, citing British brands like the Humber Super Snipe and Morris Cowley among Christie’s vehicles. Christie was already an established writer in 1926 when her husband of 12 years asked for a divorce. The news caught Christie off-balance whose subsequent “disappearance” became a major press event in England when thousands combed the countryside looking for the lost author, unaware that Christie, initially despondent about the break-up, was enjoying a holiday in Yorkshire (the letter she left a relative explaining her whereabouts had been mislaid). Christie soon got back to writing—not just mysteries and plays—but she also joined fellow mystery writers like Dorothy Sayers to deliver original mysteries on BBC radio. West notes that Christie and her second husband stayed in London during World War II, braving the Blitz. Through it all, she kept writing, producing, among other things, The Mousetrap, the longest-running play of all time. A writer is fortunate to develop one literary character to draw a reader’s attention. Christie came up with two: Hercule Poirot (who starred in 33 novels including Murder on the Orient Express ) and Miss Marple (who starred in 12). Both have also been repeatedly featured in movies and TV adaptations. West said she and her family are especially fond of David Suchet's portrayal of Poirot on British television, programs that ran on British TV from 1989 to 2013. The latest Hercule Poirot TV series will air in 2027 (this time with 33-year-old Edward Bluemel as Poirot), West said. When Christie died in 1976, she left behind an estate valued at just over 110,000 pounds, not the lavish fortune one would expect from the woman who sold millions of books in her career. British tax laws dogged Christie throughout her life, said West. For her next book, West said she plans an account of her experiences as a youth attending films and film houses in New York with her father in the 1970s. She recounted one episode where, as an eight-year-old, she recognized Greta Garbo on the streets of New York. “We followed her for blocks until she went into an automat and watched her eat a piece of pie,” recalled West, who planned to approach the reclusive star and talk to her before “I chickened out,” she laughed.

September 3, 2026Episode 2525 min

"Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks & Gigs in the Age of Service Work?" by Annie McClanahan

To better understand Annie McClanahan’s book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks & Gigs in the Age of Service Work , one needs only peruse recent stories such as: --the Chicago Teachers Union’s bargaining to include a demand to end student homelessness by creating 10,000 new affordable housing units prioritizing Chicago public school households; --Amazon warehouse workers in Chicago who demanded childcare accommodations for Black and Brown single parents forced to work “megacycles” during the pandemic; --In California, the call for transport solutions for workers commuting across the border from Tijuana; --In Minnesota, the fight for housing for Somali immigrant women workers priced out of super-inflated real estate. The common denominator in all of the battles above is the involvement of service workers who make up the largest portion of our economy—80 percent, said McClanahan. Service workers who deliver takeout, mop floors, or work in daycare centers are traditionally among the least compensated for their labors, noted the author. But, with organization, they may be coming into their own. Rather than having less leverage than mass-production workers of the past, contemporary service workers arguably have a different kind of leverage entirely, said McClanahan. “A mass-scale strike of teachers and other child-carers, for instance, would have ripple effects far beyond those workers’ own workplaces, fundamentally interrupting work and commerce as parents and guardians are unable to work without access to childcare,” she said. “Labor stoppages of nurses and other health care providers can have similarly massive ramifications for social reproduction and vital social infrastructure, as can strikes by public-sector service workers in jobs from administration to sanitation. The increased concentration of grocery stores, retail stores, and especially the commercial logistics economy under an ever-shrinking number of employers means that regional strikes in those sectors can substantially disrupt consumers’ access to necessary goods and interrupt the ‘just-in-time’ model of circulation,” said McClanahan. “The idea for this book began when I realized that most histories and theories of wages presume the regulated, hourly wage as a norm. But as someone who has worked a lot of jobs where I mostly earned tips, I knew that wasn’t the full picture. The hourly wage is associated primarily with manufacturing work, where labor time is very rationalized, and output can be determined by the machine itself,” she said. “Service work, by contrast, tends to be much less predictable, much less technologically mediated, and with less quantifiable ‘output.’ Non-hourly methods of wage payment like tips—a form of compensation that dates back to eighteenth-century domestic service—were thus perceived as necessary to ensure that service workers would ‘self-manage’ effectively. In the United States, tipworkers were excluded from the minimum-wage provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act and instead are still paid a ‘subminimum wage’ supplemented by customer tips,” said McClanahan. As a professor of English at the University of California-Irvine, McClanahan sees a "new" problem for teachers, service workers who heretofore have been untouched by automation. She estimates that 25 percent of courses now offered at the California school of some 40,000 students are online courses. Despite data on student learning through the asynchronous online class, a lesson totally provided online that a student can take anytime, is “pretty bad,” schools seem to be willing to accept that because of lower overhead costs, she said. McClanahan makes the distinction between the asynchronous online model and a hybrid model where online classes are accompanied by classroom sessions. The hybrid model is “much more effective by every measure," she said. The problem is the hybrid model doesn’t save the university as much money as the asynchronous model, she said. “From online higher education to AI, technology is increasingly being used to intensify and deskill teaching labor,” McClanahan said. “The idea of ‘so-so automation’— automation that increases productivity a little bit but often at a significantly lower level of quality—really sums up what’s happening in higher education today,” she said.

August 25, 2026Episode 2425 min

"The Adventures of Jelly Bean" by Amy Pollack

You can't accuse Amy Pollack of rushing into print. Although she first had the idea of Jelly Bean, a fictional fourth-grader, back when she was in fourth grade herself (1960), it wasn't until Pollack had completed more than 40 years of teaching at every level--primary, middle, high school, and college--that she published a story that's now a series. The Still Further Adventures of Jelly Bean is the third in the series, a coming-of-age adventure that allows Pollack to explore issues such as friendship, popularity, death, race, drugs, and alcohol. "My books are about a forthright fourth-grader who confronts issues and challenges many children her age confront as well, and how she learns about friendship, relationships with family members, friends, teachers, and others; popularity, death, love, and what is important in life," said Pollack. "Much of what she learns is by trial and error – and her reactions to the results are much of what propels my story along," she said. Jelly Bean faces problems that fourth-graders can relate to. Her parents don’t approve of her favorite friend in the whole world. She has trouble getting along with the brother who is closest in age to her. The uncle she loves so much is about to marry the most awful woman she could ever imagine, and the girl who used to be her best friend has turned on her. Has school changed over the years? "The times have definitely changed. Many families are also different than they were, so that many of my students had little or no support at home. For one example, until I taught at the high school where I ended up teaching, I had never known (much less heard) of an 'emancipated minor' (a fifteen- year-old who lived on his own, and whose parents had both abandoned him). That would have been unheard of when I was growing up. I also had some (high school) students who were intelligent, but who were non-readers," said Pollack. Fear not, Jelly Bean makes it to the fifth grade in Pollack's next installment, a book she said she's halfway through writing. One of the subjects tackled in the upcoming effort is the matter of bullying, she said. Aside from her extensive educational background, having three kids (now grown) and seven grandchildren provides Pollack with plenty of resources to use in her writing. "My granddaughter Hannah helped bring my story up to date by enlightening me that girls play flag football 'nowadays.' That's why Jelly Bean does," she said.