Joe Donahue

The new book “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum,” by Peabody and Emmy-Award winning journalist Antonia Hylton, tells the story of Crownsville Hospital one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County Maryland.

Discussion of the climate crisis is always suffered from a problem of extraction, data points, and warnings of an overheated future struggle to break through the noise of everyday life. Deniers often portray climate solutions as inconvenient, expensive, and unnecessary. Many politicians cloistered by status and focused always on their next election do not yet see climate as a winning issue in the short run, so they don't take any action at all.

In "The Princess of Las Vegas," by best-selling author Chris Bohjalian, a Princess Diana impersonator and her estranged sister find themselves drawn into a dangerous game of money and murder in a twisting tale of organized crime, cryptocurrency, and family secrets on the Las Vegas strip.

From Tudor Queens to Pop Icons, the SIX wives of Henry VIII take the microphone to remix five hundred years of historical heartbreak into a Euphoric Celebration of 21st century girl power! “Six” runs tonight through Sunday, May 12th at Proctors in Schenectady, New York. Cassie Silva is currently playing Anne Boleyn in the 2024-25 North American "Boleyn" Tour of "Six the Musical," beginning just last month.

Celebrating 50 years in operation, Historic Albany Foundation is a private not-for-profit membership-based organization that works to preserve and protect buildings with architectural, historic, or civic value. They do this through educational and hands-on programming including tours, workshops and lectures; technical assistance; advocacy for endangered buildings; and they run a Tool Lending Library and Architectural Parts Warehouse.

The novel, "The Missing Star," (Small Town Girl Production) is based on the life of Vladimir Munk and Kitty Löwi. The book chronicles Vladimir and Kitty’s lives as children growing up under German occupation, and their deportation to the Terezin ghetto, where they met and fell in love. Julie Canepa is the author of the novel and co-author of documentary "Return to Auschwitz: The Survival of Vladimir Munk."

Alfredo Medina, Jr., serves as the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - College Diversity Officer at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Dr. Medina is a higher education professional with more than 20 years of experience working in the areas of diversity, inclusion, and equity, civic and public engagement, and risk management and compliance.

This week's book picks come from James Conrad from The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, New York and Lily Bartels from Open Door Bookstore in Schenectady, New York.

Norman Ohler, the author of the New York Times bestseller "Blitzed" (Mariner Books 2018), returns with a provocative new history of drugs and postwar America, examining the untold story of how Nazi experiments into psychedelics covertly influenced CIA research and secretly shaped the War on Drugs. The new book is: "Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age." (Mariner Books 2024)

For more than twenty-five years, Bill Maher has set the boundaries of where funny, political talk can go on American television. First on “Politically Incorrect”, and for the last twenty years on HBO’s “Real Time,” Maher’s work has garnered him 41 Emmy nominations.