All posts tagged: interview

Jennie Erin Smith: “I didn’t want researchers to spoon-feed me the story”

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books
Author Jennie Erin Smith on a Zoom call

What fun to talk with Jennie Erin Smith, the author of Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families And The Search For A Cure, which was Curious Reading Club’s book of the month for January. It’s a really fascinating book about a major research trial in Colombia which focused on a huge group of people who carry a particular gene linked to early-onset Alzheimer’s. We chatted about all manner of things, including the complexity (or not!) of […]

Tania Branigan: “Everybody thinks they would have been in the Resistance in wartime.”

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interviews

This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do. Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired […]