All Things Considered gave a review of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip during yesterday’s show. The novel, which ATC calls a “brilliant and compelling work of fiction,” was on the short list for this year’s Booker Prize for Fiction. “Set on a remote South Pacific island called Bougainvill, it’s narrated by an eloquent 13-year-old island native named Matilda. As civil war breaks out, she tells of how a local copper-mining enterprise arranges for the evacuation of nearly all the white residents, leaving the islanders to the mercy of indigenous rebels and the ravages of soldiers flown in by helicopter from nearby Port Moresby.” The one white resident who stayed behind takes it upon himself to educate the children by reading to them each day from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Also on the show, Robert Siegel speaks to Cathy Wilkerson, a former member of the Weatherman, a faction of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society. She is also the author of the memoir, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman. “In her book, Wilkerson is apologetic for Weatherman’s tactics, but not for her radical politics: She is still a radical, but one who prizes the right to vote, which she regained several years ago. In March 1970, Wilkerson and four others were using her father’s townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village as a bomb factory. Wilkerson was cleaning up when a box of dynamite sticks downstairs accidentally went off. One of two survivors of the explosion, Wilkerson went underground for 10 years. Eventually she served a prison sentence, got out and now trains math teachers.”

Listen to both segments here.