Siouxland Public Media Interviews and Features

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending Winter Counts, a remarkable debut novel by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, a member of the Lakota Nation of South Dakota. At first glance it’s an action-packed, gritty thriller, but Weiden also explores many social issues faced by Native Americans.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I’m recommending Sarah Pearse’s debut novel, The Sanatorium. An instant New York Times bestseller, this book was also a recent Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium for tuberculosis patients has since been renovated into a 5-star minimalist hotel. 

This is Jennifer Havlik with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out.

This is Sarah Enright, with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

This is Jessi Wakefield with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

The next Woodbury County public COVID-19 vaccination clinics will take place Tuesday, April 6th, and Thursday, April 8th at the Siouxland Expo Center in Sioux City. Appointments will be open to all residents age 16 and older who need their first dose of vaccine. Clinics will be using the Pfizer vaccine, which is approved for use in individuals age 16 and older. You can register online at the Siouxland District Health Department website at siouxlanddistricthealth.org  beginning at 3:00 p.m. tomorrow. 

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehesi Coates. You may have read this author’s powerful nonfiction, including Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, but now Coates has focused his talent on fiction, and with a brilliance not often seen in a first novel.

Hamilton County authorities have found the body of a second Iowa State Crew Club member who went missing during an accident at Little Wall Lake yesterday morning.  Hamilton County Sheriff Douglas Timmons confirmed during a news conference Monday morning. According to a university news release, five members of the Iowa State Crew Club were practicing at Little Wall Lake on Sunday morning when their boat capsized. Three of the students were rescued from the water, treated, and released from Mary Greeley Medical Center, officials said.

This week on The Exchange we look back on one year and a few weeks since COVID came to Siuoxland. We talk about lessons learned during the pandemic with Unity Point-St. Luke's Medical Director of Quality and Patient Safety, Dr. Michael Kafka, and the hospital's Chief Nursing Officer, Wendy Lindley.

We also talk with the editor of a new book meant to unite people in the aftermath of the darkest days of the pandemic.  Timothy Shriver is the editor of The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening. Shriver also leads the Special Olympics International Board of Directors. 

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I’m recommending one of my new favorite authors, Rebecca Serle. An author and television writer who splits her time between New York and Los Angeles, Rebecca Serle codeveloped the hit TV adaptation of her YA series Famous in Love and is the author of six novels, including my two recommendations, The Dinner List and In Five Years.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I’m recommending one of my new favorite authors, Rebecca Serle. An author and television writer who splits her time between New York and Los Angeles, Rebecca Serle codeveloped the hit TV adaptation of her YA series Famous in Love and is the author of six novels, including my two recommendations, The Dinner List and In Five Years.

This is Jessi Wakefield with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

With his newest novel, The Removed, National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson has created a moving tale of an Oklahoma Cherokee family fractured from the tragic and unjust death of their son and brother, Ray-Ray who was shot and killed by a police officer years earlier. 

304 031121 On Thursday, the Iowa Department of Public Health reported 19 additional COVID-19 deaths and a further 412 confirmed cases.The department says in Woodbury County, there have been 31 new cases added to the total case count in the last 24 hours. Woodbury County has a 14-day COVID-19 positivity rate of 6.4 percent, which was unchanged from yesterday. Another Crawford County resident has succumbed to the novel coronavirus, according to state statistics.As of 1 p.m.

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending Scaled, Book One of the Deep Skin young adult trilogy by J.T. Ashmore, which is a pen name for two brilliant local writers you may recognize. Tricia Currans-Sheehan and Jeanne Emmons, both well-known for their years at Briar Cliff University, teamed up to write Scaled and the other two books in this science fiction series. 

This week on The Exchange, we hear from Siouxlanders who have lost loved ones to COVID-19 as they gather in downtown Sioux City for a memorial Monday evening.  Also, we hear from Ike Rayford, president of the Sioux City Chapter of the NAACP about some of the friends he has lost to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Also we remember Siouxland's Rick Mullin, who co-founded the Sioux City International Film Festival.  He died unexpectedly at the end of February. 

If the place sounds cliche-ish, you can't blame Garretson, because not every Siouxland burg is blessed with a built-in tourist trap. Seriously, Garretson has a brand—"Jesse James was there.” He was. Not some lousy impersonator. The. Real. Jesse James. And there lies the tale.

"Devil's Gulch," someone once called it, like something out of John Wayne--"the dust in Devil's Gulch was thick as hide on a buffalo hump." You know. 

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I’m highlighting one of my new go-to nonfiction duos Dan Abrams and David Fisher. Dan Abrams is probably best known as the Chief Legal Affairs Anchor for ABC News and over the last thirty years, David Fisher has authored or co-authored over 80 books with a quarter of them having been New York Times Bestsellers. Together they make for one dynamic writing duo.

Out of the hardships of 2020, the Sioux City Symphony Orchestra is emerging in new form. Christmas with the Symphony, with its quality of production matching the beautiful playing, gave us a glimpse of what is to come. And now with the release of the first in a chamber series, we are getting an ever greater sense, and we are gripped with excitement. Not only are we presented with the level of performance we have come to expect from this fine orchestra, we are able to experience each piece with an intimacy previously unknown.

This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today I would like to recommend a high fantasy series, which has gained in popularity and produced many more readers in the past several months. When a prominent streaming service makes a big budget, series based off of a series of books and then spends hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing, you had better bet that it will create interest in the original source material.  This is what has happened with Andrzej Sapkowoski’s The Witcher Saga. 

This is Kristina Yezdimer from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.  

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Pulitzer-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. A friend told me this book had “gobsmacked” her, giving her a profound new perspective on the racial constructs that divide America.

This week on The Exchange, we hear from US Senator Joni Earnst about the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.  Ernst says she has constitutional concerns about the process.

Also, we talk with Dennis Todey. He is the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Midwest Climate Hub in Ames about the possiblity of drought in Iowa this spring and summer.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

This week on The Exchange, we talk with a Neligh, Nebraska farmer who has long opposed the Keystone Excel Pipeline about President Joe Biden's vow to stop the project. Former President Barack Obama opposed the pipeline as well, but former President Donald Trump rescinded that order in 2017.  Art Tanderup has spent years organizing and raising funds and awareness to stop the pipeline. Many environmentalists says could pollute the land, water and air.

This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today I would like to recommend the quickly paced 2019 thriller, No Exit by Taylor Adams. 

This week on The Exchange, we hear highlights from Governor Kim Reynolds' Condition of the State Address and critique that speech with Woodbury County Democratic leader Jeremy Dumkrieger and Woodbury County Republican leader Suzan Stewart. 

We also preview the 2021 Legislative session with Sioux City Democratic State Senat0r Jackie Smith and Sioux City Republican Senator Jim Carlin. 

  Gov. Kim Reynolds is taking her annual Condition of the State address from day time to supper time.  She will break with tradition, by addressing a joint convention of the 89th Iowa General Assembly at the Iowa Capitol beginning at 6 p.m. tonight, rather than the typical 10 a.m. Siouxland Public Media will broadcast the speech live and a live stream of the speech will be available at kwit.org. Also, you can hear live reactions to the speech live on Siouxland Public Media as soon as Governor Reynolds is finished her address.  

011121a 3:04 News

 State lawmakers returned to the Iowa Capitol today. Education, taxation, safety are the top priorities for 2021 Iowa legislature. And today they were Joined  inside by hundreds of anti-mask protestors.

Hundreds of people --- few, if any, of them wearing face coverings --- packed into the Iowa Capitol rotunda today and then into the Senate and House chamber galleries. The were protesting mask-wearing and other public health measures designed to slow the spread of the new coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, an author you may remember for Station Eleven, the post apocalyptic novel that soared to the top of critics’ lists when it came out in 2014. In her new work, Mandel goes off in an entirely new direction, but with the same haunting intensity and intricate, interlocking characters and plot lines. 

This week on The Exchange, we remember a Woodbury County teacher who died from COVID-19. Cherie Dandurand taught at Woodbury Central Schools. She was the first teacher in northwest Iowa to die from the coronavirus.