Between teaching at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, writing for the Kansas City Star, and hosting Up To Date, you might think KCUR’s Steve Kraske doesn’t have time to spend reading. But you'd be wrong.
The voracious non-fiction reader has brought some titles from his bookshelf to share. He spoke with the authors of three of his picks on Up To Date.
From the American hunt for Chinese art, to conflicts between two of our most respected Founding Fathers, to the man behind Apple, we’ll take a tour through Kraske’s library.
Here are three of his recommendations:
1. The China Collectors: America’s Century-long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures, by Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac.
- This book tells the story how Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries roamed the Chinese country looking for valuable art, much of which is housed at Kansas City’s Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.
“This interested me because of how much the book talked about the Nelson Atkins Museum of art. It connected me to home.”
2. The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation, by Thomas Fleming.
- A historical account of the deeply rooted ideological differences between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and how those differences shaped this country.
“I never realized there was as much bad blood between those two as there was.”
3. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli.
- We get a more compassionate view of Steve Jobs in the latest book chronicling his life.
“This book paints a slightly more sympathetic portrait of him than Walter Isaacson’s book did a year or two ago, and that intrigued me a lot, along with the fact that the author had so many personal interactions with Steve Jobs over the years. He really knew Jobs.”
