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Award winning, former Detroit Free Press columnist, Rochelle Riley discusses "The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery," a compilation of essays she edited and to which she contributed. Riley talks with Janet Webster Jones, the owner of Source Booksellers about the book and "Letters to Black Girls" an organization Riley co-founded.  

Coleman A. Young and George Crockett are a few of the Detroiters that show up in "A Good American Family" by David Maraniss, a chronicle of Maraniss' father's being swept up in the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. Motherhood's sometimes not-so-happy endings are the subject of the fiction collection "Look How Happy I'm Making You" by Michigander Polly Rosenwaike. Albert Kahn contributed many great buildings to Detroit, but was he also the father of early 20th Century Modernist architecture? His legacy and the place of gargoyles in city's skyline are explored in many great new books on Detroit buildings.

This inaugural episode features Janet Webster Jones of Source Booksellers discussing essays by Rebecca Solnit and Toni Morrison as well as James Baldwin's influence on nonfiction. Colleen Kammer of the Book Beat talks about the effect of reading aloud to older and younger children, and Susan Murphy of Pages Bookshop dives into two works of fiction, one where people living in homes from the Sears catalogue come up against gentrifiers and the other where a village of women come up against abusers who happen to be their relatives.