Stanford University Press Blog

Off Mike makes it to Bay Area Bestseller List

Three weeks into his book tour, Michael Krasny’s Off Mike makes it to the Bay Area bestseller list! Krasny has been making appearances in bookstores throughout the Bay Area to packed audiences of the KQED show Forum’s fans, curious to get to know the man behind the mike, the literary radio host they are used to encountering on the air waves on their commutes every morning.

The book takes readers inside Krasny’s world—his coming of age during the heady times of the 1960s with their blend of the civil rights movement, political activism, and sexual experimentation. Krasny talks of a strong desire to become a novelist in the footsteps of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth; and then discovering his real talent as a communicator—a deft ability to draw others out as an interlocutor and host of KQED Radio's Forum, which is rated as one of the most popular NPR shows today. He is a maestro for educated radio listeners, who prefer their discourse high and civil; he is a writer's interviewer.

The book provides insightful and amusing vignettes, and behind the scenes accounts, from his encounters and interviews with cultural, literary and political luminaries, including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Alice Walker and Salman Rushdie.  Forum fans and lovers of literature will be riveted by the sharp commentary and entertaining stories from one of the country's leading interviewers.

Hollywood v. Technology; Studios v. Consumer

Radiohead’s “pay what you will” release of its newest album, In Rainbow, earlier this month sparked renewed speculation about the outcomes of the entertainment industry’s troubled interactions with a world moving away from purchasing CDs, DVDs, and tickets to a movie theater, and other bands are already following their lead. 

In Coming Attractions?, Phillip Meza gives us an in-depth look at the difficulties Hollywood and the music industry have had in adapting to the rapid rise and evolution of digital technologies. As the entertainment industry has fought to limit access to the content it produces through encoding (DRM) and stronger copyright laws, its customers have increasingly come to view its interests as at odd with their own.  Instead of acknowledging that the consumer is calling for new kinds of access to content, entertainment companies have reinforced the us vs. them perception; after all, “suing your customers is a terrible idea.”

Meza provides the entertainment industry with a roadmap for rescuing itself from entrenchment in dying practices and the disdain of the consumer. A recent review from the Midwest Book Review says that you “will find Coming Attractions an outstanding, specific survey key to understanding long-standing issues, conflicts, and relationships between entertainment, high tech and media industries alike.”

You can listen to Meza discuss these issues here.

Michael Krasny launches “Off Mike” tour to Enthusiastic Reviews

Michael Krasny’s Off Mike was released on October 1.  In case you are wondering, here's what the critics have been saying....

Publisher’s Weekly remarked that, “His steadily honed love of language is palpable and infectious, suited more to the book party-hopping literary junkie than the broadcast historian. Eminent newsmakers, literary greats and iconoclasts open up to him like patients on a psychiatrist’s couch.”

Leah Garchik in SF Chronicle wrote that Krasny's knack reminded her of Grace Paley’s remark: "I hear people talk. When they're really speaking truthful, they speak well and I hear that. ... Of course, I help them."

Ben Fong-Torres (also in SF Chronicle) writes that, “Krasny, and his subjects, offer plentiful food for thought.”

Last Sunday Peter Laufer at KPFA spoke with Michael Krasny about his on and off mike personas, and his quest to write the great American novel. The two hosts also compared notes on the art of interviewing. Listen here. 

The book includes Krasny's interviews with eminent writers like Umberto Eco, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Art Spiegelman, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Joan Didion.

 

The value of a college education

In this week’s New York Review of Books, Andrew Hacker looks at the desire for wealth and prestige in two facets of American life: business and academia.  In Pursuit of Knowledge by Deborah Rhode, in Hacker’s words “a spirited book on what students and parents are—and aren’t—getting for their investments in higher education,” provides him with a lens into the desires and motivations of the country’s academics.

Although academia is one of America’s most trusted institutions, and higher education in the US is widely regarded as among the best in the world, Rhode exposes deep flaws in how our universities are structured and run. Because of tensions between research and teaching, the pull of the private sector, a lack of consensus on how to provide students with the best education, Rhode argues that students are not being very well educated by our universities, and shows how difficult it will be to change that.

From tenured professors who see no reason to work to students who choose a school for its dorm rooms, from adjunct professors who work incredibly hard for little pay to articles that devote “a third of [their] space to listing the names and institutional affiliations of 437 authors,” academia is revealed to be a troubled, if well meaning, institution.