A new memoir by historian Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer and brother of Princess Diana, details a difficult childhood marked by alleged physical and sexual abuse at Britain's Maidwell Hall in the 1970s. In today's episode, Spencer tells NPR's Scott Simon how childhood naivete – thinking his parents were all-knowing authorities who must've known about the school's cruelty when they sent him there – prevented him and others from speaking up about what was happening, and why writing A Very Private School felt like an important reclamation of his boyhood. 


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Charles Spencer's memoir 'A Very Private School' opens up about boarding school abuse

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Today's episode is all about food – but not in the form of recipes. First, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Victor M. Valle speaks to Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes about The Poetics of Fire, his new book analyzing the history of chiles in Mesoamerican and Indigenous cuisine as a lens to understand Mexican-American and Chicano culture. Then, NPR's Scott Simon asks Michelle T. King about Chop Fry Watch Learn, a part-memoir, part-reported analysis of Taiwanese chef Fu Pei-mei's life and impact on Chinese food around the world. 

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Two books trace the social and historical impacts of food

Across seven decades, Claire Messud's novel This Strange Eventful History follows generations of a family from a colonized Algeria to far stretches of the world after the country's independence, always grappling with the idea of identity and belonging and political upheaval. In today's episode, Messud speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about how she took inspiration from her own grandparents' story, and how looking back at their past sparked a desire in her to chronicle the world she grew up in for her own kids. 

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Claire Messud's new novel is a sweeping tale of history, family and social change

When Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro went on the BBC program Desert Island Discs, he spoke about how much he loves the music of jazz singer Stacey Kent. In today's episode, Ishiguro and Kent tell NPR's Juana Summers how that mention led them to meet and embark on an artistic endeavor together – a new songbook called The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, featuring lyrics by Ishiguro set to music composed by Kent's partner, Jim Tomlinson. 

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Author Kazuo Ishiguro and singer Stacey Kent collaborate on new songbook

Writer and filmmaker Miranda July says the popular imagination sort of drops off once a woman gets married and has kids. Her new novel All Fours turns that on its head – it's a story about an artist in her 40s who departs from her husband and child on a road trip that takes her to some very unexpected places. In today's episode, July speaks to NPR's Brittany Luse about the interviews she conducted with women going through perimenopause and menopause for this book, and the whisper network with her friends that fueled her protagonist's deep desire for something new. 

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In 'All Fours,' Miranda July tackles love, sex and reinvention in middle age

When Dick Goodwin reached his 80s, he asked his wife – historian Doris Kearns Goodwin – to finally open and sift through the hundreds of boxes he'd kept from his time as a presidential aide and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and as advisor to Robert Kennedy. What resulted is An Unfinished Love Story, a new book by Kearns Goodwin with a personal lens to the history of the 1960s. In today's episode, she speaks to NPR's Steve Inskeep about what she found in her husband's archives and what she learned revisiting that time period. 

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Charles Spencer's memoir 'A Very Private School' opens up about boarding school abuse

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