In this episode of AADL Talks To, we interview Bill Zirinsky and Ruth Schekter. Bill and Ruth discuss their history running the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and the Crazy Wisdom Journal. They also talk about their time in Ann Arbor, including some of the city’s changes over the years. They discuss their experience as a unique “new age” bookstore in a town known for its book shops.

Video extra from the feature-length documentary Welcome to Commie High from 7 Cylinders Studio.

Guy Stern escaped Nazi Germany in 1937 and subsequently joined the U.S. army where he served as an interrogator of captured German soldiers. Guy and his life story are amazing. This might be our last best chance to hear what life was like in pre war Germany and WWII from someone who was there.

The 41 stories in the book include a suicide submarine parade. Ann Arbor’s top 10 astronauts. Shakey Jake, The Embassy Hotel, and stories of trains crashing into buildings. The birth of Iggy Pop. Punching Nazis. The day the dictator came to town. The music mobile, the naked mile, and a brief history of poop. Rich and his book are truly fun!

Little did they know that the Nazi’s would soon invade Hungary and how desperate their fight for survival would be. Join Chuck Newman and hear the amazing story of how Andrew Nagy survived WWII in Budapest in significant part due to the heroic efforts of University of Michigan graduate Raul Wallenberg.

He subsequently escaped Communist Hungary and eventually immigrated to the United States where he became a distinguished Professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan. He still consults for NASA at the age of 89.

Chuck Newman interviews Jennifer Mendelsohn, renown genealogist and journalist, who shares fascinating stories of how she finds relatives of holocaust survivors that they didn’t know existed.

Looking for the Magic is a cultural-historical remix, a fresh perspective on how Arista Records reflected its place and time, New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. Through interviews with dozens of artists and executives, music journalist Mitchell Cohen goes inside the business of making and marketing music during this vibrant and diverse period. Under Clive Davis, rock, pop, punk, jazz, R&B, disco, cabaret and Broadway were all represented on Arista. The label sounded like the city it was at the geographical center of.

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book―it’s just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history -- a New York Times Editors' Choice Book -- hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play.