http://www.divineroot.com/ David A Taylor en-us Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:53:14 GMT 1440 CPG-Nuke Dragonfly David A. Taylor News http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.divineroot.com/images/header_03.gif http://www.divineroot.com/ http://www.divineroot.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4 David Taylor writes about revealing connections between people and their worlds. His articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Outside, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. His view inside Africa's hottest music scene appears in Washington Post Travel. Read a related interview with Malian music stars Amadou and Mariam on Afropop Worldwide. Listen to more from Studio Mali, featured in the article. Watch a delightfully goofy video of Abdoulaye Diabate's song Sere. Read other stories from that Africa trip in Senegal and Mali, including more about Dr. Nimaga and his clinic's work. And about how simulation experts in Africa and beyond compete to track malaria's shape-shifting ways. The stories come out of a recent IRP fellowship. David's book Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America, which explores America in the 1930s, made the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Best Books of 2009. Read about the twists and turns of friendships among WPA writers in The American Scholar. Soul of a People has been featured on CSPAN's BookTV. This article in Poets & Writers explores the story's meaning in the era of Occupy Wall Street. Check out David's blog. The documentary film Soul of A People: Writing America's Story follows a handful of those individuals and their dramatic challenge of portraying America at a crucial juncture. The film's Spark Media team won top honors at the TIVA DC Peer Awards. You can watch the film on the Smithsonian Channel or catch upcoming screenings. The dvd is available here. Click here to see a short promo. Or here. See a review. Reviewer Mark Athitakis shares insights about Soul of a People on his lit blog. Listen to an NPR interview with Jacki Lyden on All Things Considered. Watch the program on Book TV here. Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:53:14 GMT http://www.divineroot.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3 Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America(Wiley & Sons) is about a handful of people in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. They were caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA travel guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, Soul of a People reveals their experiences and the most vivid excerpts from selected guides and interviews: Harlem schoolchildren, truckers, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, a Florida midwife, and Nebraskan meatpackers. This book and the documentary film illuminate what it felt like to live that experience, and how it affected their lives and work afterward.  Praise for Soul of a People: "A wonderful and engaging book." - Robert Whitaker, author of On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation “David Taylor goes inside the project to give us intimate snapshots of the writers and what they saw and felt during that hard time. Soul of a People is a revealing and a valuable resource.” - Nick Taylor, author of American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA "An excellent history..." - Washington City Paper "An unmatched collective portrait of a people battered but not beaten by the Great Depression. Soul of a People should be mandatory reading as the storm clouds of hard times hover over us again." - Bernard Weisberger, editor of The WPA Guide to America "David Taylor's Soul of a People is a vivid reminder of two things: the creative power of America's government at its best and the remarkable richness and diversity of America's people." - Geoffrey C. Ward, author of The War "With accessible prose, a wealth of detail and vintage photos, Taylor recounts the project and some of the writers who benefited from it -- and who benefited the nation with what they produced." - Richmond Times-Dispatch "The WPA books in the American Guide Series ... were ... a splendid collective achievement, filled with material that might otherwise have been lost... [R]eaders, especially writers and editors, who have discovered the somewhat outdated volumes in recent decades have found them useful and illuminating, and even inspiring." - Wall Street Journal "Taylor's book takes us back to the Depression days of the 1930s and reminds us that the state guides are still in use today." - Lincoln Journal Star "The place to start learning about that remarkable era." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Best Books of 2009 "An excellent study of the personalities behind the Federal Writers’ Project... [A]s the book makes clear, doing government work left many of the writers feeling conflicted, and the project was consistently under scrutiny by Congress for potentially harboring Communists, a hint of the McCarthy hearings that would come years later." - Mark Athitakis, American Fiction Notes "Soul of a People is an excellent and sensitive account..." - Oral History Review Sat, 21 Jan 2006 16:48:03 GMT http://www.divineroot.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2 Praise for Ginseng, the Divine Root: "Adventurous." —Booklist A "fascinating tour... a master storyteller." —Library Journal "An engaging cultural history." —The Brooklyn Eagle "An excellent job. I would highly recommend this book ... reminds me of Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma" —Herbalgram "An intelligent, wide-ranging account." —Publishers Weekly "Ginseng, the Divine Root is one of those rare works that remind us what an endlessly surprising place the world is..." —The Boston Globe "Taylor has a gift for capturing the colorful characters along his journey. Ginseng, the Divine Root chronicles ... much about this plant and even more about human nature." —Orion "One of the most fascinating garden-oriented books I’ve read." —London Free Press "Like John McPhee, Taylor has the ability to turn nonfiction into a story with many plot turns and surprises... [A]fter reading this book, you’ll scan the forest floor a bit more diligently." —Winston-Salem Journal "Taylor knits these diverse aspects of the plant’s influence, as well as his visits to ginseng haunts, into a charged historical narrative his book approaches having as powerful an effect on the imagination as that strange, puckered root." —American Geographical Society Sat, 21 Jan 2006 16:30:49 GMT