Read Beat (...and repeat)

Hosted by Steve Tarter

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Aug 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 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.

August 21, 2026Episode 2324 min

"A Protest History of the United States" by Gloria Browne-Marshall

"The world will be made better by those who refuse to be silent." That statement tells you where Gloria Browne-Marshall stands. A law professor atJohn Jay College in New York, Browne-Marshall is the author of A Protest History of the United States , a book that explores 500 years of protest and resistance in North America. "The Declaration of Independence is a protest document," she noted. Browne-Marshall said she joined her first protest movement in third grade to pass a tax levy her teacher said would help the schools. "It failed miserably," she said. But that tax levy passed some years later, providing another protest message for the author. "You learn that protest takes time. You have to stay with it," she said. The founder of Martyrs Day, a day to honor the lives of slain American activists, Browne-Marshall said the July 5 commemoration was held officially for the first time this year. The martyrsday.us website provides information on the designation as well as citing martyrs such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Vernon Dahmer, the NAACP official who died when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home in Mississippi. As for present-day protest, Browne-Marshall would like to see more definite goals and organization. "The 'No Kings' protest gave me hope--past tense," she said. "I want that hope renewed with a plan." Just going out to wave signs isn't enough, said Browne-Marshall. "I need to see alliances. I'm looking for the creativity. If a plan is not shared with the people out there protesting, it gives me grave concern," she said. "There's so much we're not doing when it comes to protest," she said, recalling the impact of past protest tactics such as sit-ins and teach-ins.

August 15, 2026Episode 2232 min

"If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened" by Justin Glawe

Justin Glawe's new book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened , provides a reporter's account of some of the biggest news stories of the past decade. Starting with the chaos that followed the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, If I Am Coming plunges the reader into the middle of the action both inside and outside the crime-scene tape. Glawe covered the civil unrest outside St. Louis for the Daily Beast and Vice . As a free-lance journalist, Glawe was on the road following Ferguson, tracking what seemed an endless stream of police killings, before heading to the border where immigration battles during the first Trump presidency were making headlines. "Sinclair Lewis wrote in 1935 that fascism could come to America. El Paso in June shows it's here," Glawe wrote for Medium in 2019. "The president and his anti-immigrant allies have decided to separate migrant mothers and fathers from their children, regardless of their reasons for coming here, which include extreme violence, poverty, and government corruption back home," he noted. In 2024, Glawe wrote a story for Rolling Stone about nearly 70 pro-Trump conspiracists who were made election officials in key battleground counties. Now 42, Glawe isn't on the road as much these days, choosing to file stories from his Savannah, Ga. home. His Substack column, American Doom , lists over 13,000 subscribers. The central Illinois native, who got his journalistic start as an intern with the Peoria Journal Star , now balances chasing down threats to democracy with a home life that includes his wife Sarah, two dogs, and playing with his band, the Savannah Morning Blues.

August 14, 2026Episode 2124 min

"Sugar Coated" by Marion Nestle and Lisa Sutherland

To understand how the food business works, merely take a trip down the cereal aisle at your local supermarket. Cereal boxes represent food industry billboards: big, bold, and shouting for your (or your child's) attention, said Marion Nestle, who co-authored Sugar Coated with Lisa Sutherland. Nestle has been collecting cereal boxes since the Reagan Administration, when she served as a nutrition policy advisor in Reagan's Department of Health and Human Services. "I made slides of them (cereal boxes) to illustrate teaching points about health claims, food labeling rules, or over-the-top marketing," she said in Sugar Coated 's introduction. The book points out that the 120-year-old cereal industry provides a master class in both nutrition (or the lack of it) and persuasion (often aiming ads at kids). Nestle points to the amount of sugar in many cereals as an ongoing problem, along with the inability to convince the industry to stop pitching products to kids. That's not to say all cereal is bad, she said. Shredded wheat, oatmeal and corn flakes are fine, said Nestle, adding, "Cheerios are okay, but they don't have much fiber." What's a consumer to do? "Read labels. Understand labels. Learn to cook," said Nestle. While still occupying prime real estate at the supermarket, problems are brewing, she said. "Big Cereal appears to be in a financial free fall. Sales have been declining for years," said Nestle. In the book's closing, the authors noted, "We hope the cereal continues to reinvent itself--but with better-quality ingredients, less sugar, no artificial colors or flavors, and more organic ingredients in cereals priced so everyone can afford them."

August 14, 2026Episode 2020 min

"The Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization" by Peter Coleman

Toxic polarization is the division in society that pits neighbor against neighbor and family member against family member when political fervor reaches a fever pitch. It's a time when it's dangerous to be a public official, not just in Washington, but when threats are leveled at officeholders at the local level, said Peter Coleman, author of The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization . A professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, Coleman has been researching the problem since 2000. Reasons for the split include a president who's been in attack mode since first elected in 2016. Coleman said Roger Ailes at Fox News helped orchestrate the division by weaponizing the news channel before Trump ever took office. At the same time, newspapers went into serious decline across the country, the internet changed the way people receive information. The press not only provided local news but helped moderate the climate for communities across America, said Coleman. The loss has been significant, he noted. "The internet is an accelerant," said Coleman, noting that now divisive material gets distributed faster and wider than before. "In an attention economy, the media has turned angry," said the author Another factor is that Americans spend less time in groups than before. Being around people who are different from you builds awareness and tolerance, said Coleman, citing Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community , written in 2000, which indicated membership in traditional groups like the PTA, Red Cross, and YMCA has declined. But Coleman still has hope that our polarization isn't permanent. "We've been through eras before when people were at odds with one another," he said. Coleman suggested connecting with people individually is one way to combat the problem. "Walk with a person and talk--not about politics--but about life, about what's going on with family. It's a great way to reconnect," he said.

August 8, 2026Episode 1923 min

"America Unfinished" Edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles

“A new status quo has taken hold in Washington DC,” writes Jody Freeman, one of the Harvard Law School professors offering up short essays in America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance . “The federal government is more partisan and less professional than at any time in the modern era,” continues Freeman. “The administrative state on which we rely for the bulk of regulatory governance and protection is also weaker, having lost substantial expertise and capacity. The current administration has pushed longstanding legal boundaries and violated deep-rooted governance norms to exert unprecedented political control over the federal bureaucracy, prioritizing loyalty over competence,” she noted. “For the moment, the Supreme Court has largely allowed these monumental changes to the administrative apparatus to proceed. The federal government, as we have known it for decades, has thus been substantially transformed in ways that may be difficult if not impossible to reverse. At least for now, many agencies charged by Congress with protecting the public interest are less objective, less competent, less expert, and less legally constrained than at any time in recent memory,” noted Freeman. That’s just a sample of the many views included in a collection edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles, both professors at Harvard Law School, themselves. Among the issues tackled are the Supreme Court, power of the presidency, voting rights, criminal law, corporate law, technology, and democracy itself. “Sometimes a moment in history invites you to pause and take stock. That’s how this book got started,” write Natapoff and Charles in their introduction. “Many of us in the legal academy have been grappling recently with our roles as legal scholars and teachers, and our relationship to the American legal experiment,” the pair stated. Grappling with changes that have come at us non-stop since the second Trump administration took office in January 2025. In case you haven’t been keeping notes, a partial list of the administration’s actions includes: --mass deportations of foreign-born individuals; --the downsizing of federal agencies and the wholesale firing of civil servants; --the implementation of tariffs; --withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement; --bolstering coal-industry development while abandoning solar and wind projects; --directing ICE agents to round up immigrants; --opening federal lands to oil exploration and increased timber production; --seeking to curtail mail-in and absentee voting; --ending funding for public broadcasting; --going to war with Iran. America Unfinished puts many of these actions in context by providing history so that, instead of just reeling with the headlines, we can fully understand what’s happened. Back to Professor Freeman for a moment: “Shortly after the president took office, the Justice Department was swiftly converted into a political weapon, with the president personally directing investigations and prosecutions of political foes, in a drastic shift from prior administrations… Scores of career prosecutors and officials resigned rather than follow orders they viewed as unlawful or unethical, and thousands more employees left the department, in a mass exodus unparalleled in the nation’s history,” she noted. Little wonder that Natapoff and other members of the Harvard Law faculty feel the need to remind the public of how America has always placed its faith in being a country of laws. The inaction of Congress is also taken up in the collection. “Today, the Supreme Court has replaced our national representatives in Congress as the forum for resolving our most fundamental disagreements,” noted Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, whose own book on the subject will be published later this year. As America celebrates 2026 as the 250th year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, concern is raised about the democratic process. “Public confidence in American democracy is in crisis … Large numbers of people believe, with good reason, that government is unresponsive, captured by special interests and fundamentally out of touch with their lives,” stated Sharon Block. “Under this new America, opposition is punished, loyalty is pardoned, and the rule of law is in tatters,” wrote Andrew Manuel Crespo. Sixty-two different viewpoints with one unifying theme: democracy is a work in progress that you best not take for granted. In the book, former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer quotes Sandra Day O’Connor, another Supreme Court jurist: “The practice of democracy is not passed down through the gene pool. It must be taught and learned anew by each generation.” Some of the learning might start with America Unfinished .

August 6, 2026Episode 1829 min

"We Are Eating the Earth" by Michael Grunwald

Michael Grunwald provides another take on the climate crisis. It's not just about reducing exhaust fumes from gasoline-powered cars; it's about agriculture. The world's fossil-fuel problem is still number one, but agriculture is number two, the author maintains. Farming is taking up too much of the world's land, land that we need to use for forests and wetlands, notes Grunwald, whose book, We Are Eating the Earth, makes the case for having to do more with less if we're ever going to get out of this mess. The star of the Eating show is Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University that Grunwald has known for some 25 years. Grunwald chronicles Searchinger's steadfast opposition to biofuels, a conviction based on land use. "I had last worked closely with Searchinger a decade earlier, when his first scientific paper had exposed farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol as climate disasters masquerading as climate solutions, and I had mined his work for a man-bites-dog Time cover story on 'The Clean Energy Myth,'" stated Grunwald. Searchinger went on to develop a 564-page paper, Creating a Sustainable Food Future, a decade-long investigation of the entire food and agriculture sector. That paper emphasizes the importance of saving whatever forests we have left. As the climate crisis worsens, we all understand the importance of trees, Mother Nature's carbon sinks that absorb and store heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation, said Grunwald. Agriculture now encompasses 20 million square miles of land on Earth, 400 times the size of Iowa, the author noted. Agriculture now uses 70 percent of our fresh water, added Grunwald. We have to eat, but we have to do it more efficiently on less land--if we're going to get through this, said Grunwald. "Beef is the coal of our food system," he said, pointing out that nearly 80 percent of the world's agricultural land is used to feed livestock. "Pound for pound, beef generates 50 times more emissions than coal," said Grunwald. We Are Eating the Earth explores many of the efforts to solve the problem. There are accounts of Norwegians seeking to raise salmon on a giant fish farm in Florida, the excitement over the creation of the Impossible Whopper, and a miracle tree called pongamia. Initial success is often followed by disappointment. Grunwald suggests it won't be easy to solve a puzzle centuries in the making. "The climate fight is not the kind of war that will end with carbon dioxide's surrender on a battleship," he noted. But with human ingenuity, technology and maybe a little luck, especially in the political arena, we might actually make some headway, declared Grunwald. Thanks to people like Searchinger, whose tenacious appetite for truth remains intact, there's hope, he said.

July 30, 2026Episode 1726 min

Interview with Bill Kemp, McLean County Museum of History

It’s a museum dedicated to McLean County, home to Bloomington-Normal, but the displays are as broad-based and American as apple pie: Abraham Lincoln, Route 66, and baseball. The McLean County Museum of History, 200 Main St. in Downtown Bloomington, occupies the old courthouse building where a staff of 12 come up with concepts and collections that keep the past alive. Since Route 66, now celebrating its 100th year as America’s highway, runs right past the old courthouse so it’s only fitting that the celebrated road be celebrated inside the museum. As for Lincoln, what many don’t realize is that Abe spent more time in Bloomington in his adult life than anywhere else besides his hometown of Springfield, noted museum librarian Bill Kemp, the archivist who’s worked there since 2003. Between 1837 when he became a lawyer and 1861, when he went off to Washington to be president, Lincoln spent time in Bloomington, the county seat, as both lawyer and judge. He made a number of speeches in Bloomington, had friends and associates there, and owned property in Bloomington, said Kemp. While you find Lincoln and Route 66 on the ground floor at the museum’s visitors center, “More Than a Game” is the baseball display on the building’s third floor. That’s a deep dive into baseball and softball over the past 150 years in McLean County, a county that can claim four baseball Hall of Famers, Kemp said. The four include Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, who went from Bloomington to play in the National League with five different teams from 1880 to 1891. He won 60 games in 1884, a record that Kemp said will never be broken. “The last man to get half as many wins in a year was Denny McClain with the Detroit Tigers, who won 30 games in 1968,” he said. Another Hall member was Clark Griffith, who grew up in Normal. Griffith blossomed as a pitcher in the 19th century before turning to managing and ownership. He was the first manager of the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees before becoming the owner of the Washington Senators. The other two members of the Hall from McLean County are baseball announcers: the late Bill King, the voice of the Oakland A’s for decades, and Denny Matthews, who’s been calling games for the Kansas City Royals since 1969 and is still going strong at age 83. “More Than a Game” involved more than a year of research and planning, said Kemp, adding that an oral-history component included interviews of area players, umpires and fans. Other exhibits at the museum cover home-building over the years, agriculture, labor, politics and power. Among his many duties at the museum, Kemp continues to chronicle area history through columns. He wrote 670 history columns for the Bloomington Pantagraph, starting in 2006. Other staff members now pitch in to file stories, but Kemp still knocks out a column every two months or so. Born and raised in Chicago, Kemp admits to being someone not interested in frequent-flyer miles. “When I’m in Livingston County (just north of McLean County), I like to say I feel I’m in a foreign country,” he joked. Museum hours are Monday to Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors with children free. Admission is free on Tuesday when hours are extended to 8 p.m.

July 17, 2026Episode 1628 min

"Dreamsville" by Jon Burlingame

What was the most influential television show of the 1950s? I Love Lucy? Disneyland? Twilight Zone ? Few would probably choose Peter Gunn , the private-eye show starring Craig Stevens that producer Blake Edwards launched in 1958. But a case could be made for the program. It wasn’t the plot or the players that made Peter Gunn so significant but the Henry Mancini soundtrack that introduced West Coast jazz to a national TV audience. After this, TV soundtracks would never be the same. The driving Peter Gunn theme song instantly became a classic, synonymous with action, adventure, and danger, noted Jon Burlingame in Dreamsville , a book that chronicles Mancini’s TV career between 1958 and 1961. Burlingame points out that Mancini wrote scores for each of the 114 Peter Gunn episodes over the show’s three-year run using the cream of West Coast jazz artists (such as Johnny Williams before he became known as John Williams of Star Wars/ Jurassic Park fame) as well as 34 episodes of Mr. Lucky , the show Edwards produced for CBS between 1959 and 1960. Mancini released two records from Peter Gunn and two from Mr. Lucky , all best-selling albums, said Burlingame. But a lot of original music produced for the shows didn’t make it onto vinyl, said the author, suggesting that Mancini’s prolific creativity is another reason to watch the shows again. In an earlier interview (Mancini died in 1994), Burlingame said the composer told him that RCA Victor had so little confidence in the success of the first Peter Gunn soundtrack album that the company only pressed 8,000 copies for the initial run. They soon had to produce more. Peter Gunn sold 75,000 records in the first two months of its release in 1959, he said. The album went on to be the top-selling album on Billboard charts and received the first-Grammy awarded in the album of the year category. RCA Victor soon saw the error of their ways, signing Mancini to a 20-year contract, said Burlingame, who provides a comprehensive guide to the Peter Gunn series in Dreamsville, offering plot summaries along with acting and music credits for each program. That’s where I noticed a similarity to several Peter Gunn plots and early Richard Diamond radio shows written by Edwards. The book also contains little tidbits like the fact that Herschel Bernardi, who played Lt. Jacobi in the Peter Gunn series, was the voice of Charlie the Tuna in Starkist TV commercials that ran into the 1980s. Mancini’s success with Peter Gunn kicked off a seven-year stretch between 1958 and 1964 that proved as productive a period as any musical artist short of Beethoven or the Beatles might have enjoyed. A Mancini Top 10: TV shows/movies and significant songs: Peter Gunn (Peter Gunn, Dreamsville) Mr. Lucky (Mr. Lucky) Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Moon River) Hatari (Baby Elephant Walk) Experiment in Terror (Experiment in Terror) Days of Wine and Roses (Days of Wine and Roses) Pink Panther (Pink Panther, It Had Better Be Tonight) Charade (Charade) A Shot in the Dark (A Shot in the Dark) The Great Race (The Sweetheart Tree)