Hi, I’m Tucker Legerski, and I am the host of the new podcast Book Stuff! First episode is released today! It’s a dawn, a trumpet, an alarm clock chime start to something new.
I started Book Stuff because I want to advocate for the power of the written word. I want to celebrate literary communities, spaces, and impact. Despite pivots to video, the mechanical ghost kraken of Artificial Intelligence, hot breath book ban legislation, and the general decades-long-ho-hum of, “books are dying” rhetoric, books still thrive and matter. I wanted to be a bon fire for a medium I love.
Book Stuff is for readers and the reading curious. By my estimation, reading is still one of the most human and fun ways to spend your time these days. A book usually isn’t trying to sell you something, or surveil you.
I don’t have to tell readers here this, but it’s my belief reading can change how you see and feel about the world. It can change how you feel about your day, even. Through a podcast, I wanted explore how literature does that in all its forms and subjects. I want to thank the Chicago Review of Books for this partnership in being a place to publish the podcast.
For the first guest, I chatted with author Craig Fehrman about his recently published book The Vast Enterprise, a “new history of Lewis & Clark.” Fehrman power washes the stereotypes and myths of Meriwether Lewis & William Clark and puts body and breath back on the fossils of this years-long journey of the Corps of Discovery. A journey that began in 1804 near St. Louis and ended at the Pacific Ocean in what is now the northwest United States.
What makes this new history fresh is Fehrman’s approach to putting us on the ground and in the bodies of those who were involved. In a Game of Thrones reading style, each chapter is dedicated to a different person connected to the expedition. Each perspective moves the story along and builds the complexity of the narrative.
Sure, we get the the leaders Lewis, Clark, and President Thomas Jefferson. We ride along riveting, heartbreaking, and illuminating chapters from Sacajawea’s perspective. But readers also hear from lesser known voices like York, a man Clark enslaved, and who accompanied the mission the entire way. Fehrman notes with such vibrant detail of how York’s life changed during the trip:
On the expedition, his material existence improved. York had alternated between body servant and laborer, with the second role typically meaning meals that were meager and repetitive. Now he prepared and enjoyed salt pork and venison, catfish and elk. He ate new foods like Black Buffalo’s pemmican, and he ate delicious standbys like wild cherries soaked in whiskey. At Mulberry Hill, the slave quarters probably consisted of a few small cabins, with York, his parents, and his siblings all squeezing into one. Now, on the barge, York slept alone. He stretched out, probably on the deck under some mosquito netting, where the current’s soft percussion pulled him toward sleep.
The book changed the story I knew about one of the most enduring pieces of American history. To hear more about this book, tune into the podcast where Craig and I got into how he did the five-years worth of research, and his harrowing story of being mauled by a dog that informed how he wrote a history book. I also asked him if there is a connection between writing about sports (a subject he has taught before) and writing about people who have been dead for over a hundred years.
Check out our conversation and the podcast. See it’s website. Listen on Apple and Spotify. To learn more about me, you can see my website, follow my newsletter, where I’ll have weekly updates about the pod.
