UMich Retirees Podcast

UMRA Reads: The Toledo War: The First Michigan Ohio Rivalry by Don Faber

Most are familiar with the Michigan-Ohio football rivalry, an intense but usually good-natured contest that stretches back over one hundred years. Yet far fewer may know that in the early nineteenth century Michigan and Ohio were locked in a different kind of battle---one that began before Michigan became a state. The conflict started with a long-simmering dispute over a narrow wedge of land called the Toledo Strip. The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry gives a well-researched and fascinating account of the famous war. Don Faber is best known as the former editor of the Ann Arbor News .

Attack from Within with Barbara McQuade

Attack from Within

Barbara McQuade

Professor from practice at Michigan Law

 

Professor McQuade will discuss observations and recommendations from her recent book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America (Seven Stories Press, 2024). The book defines disinformation as "the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people, whether to extract profit or to advance a political agenda." She will discuss why disinformation is especially dangerous at this point in U.S. history, especially the threats it poses to democracy, public safety, and national security. National, social media, and individual strategies to recognize disinformation and counter its effects will be discussed. Attack from Within will be available for purchase on site from a local book seller.

Barbara was appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan by President Barack Obama in 2010. The first woman in that role, serving until 2017. Her interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, data privacy and civil rights.

Estate Planning, Elder Law, Probate

Legacy Law Center: Estate Planning,
Elder Law, Probate

Terrance (Terry) Bertram
President of the Legacy Law Center

Terry Bertram is a U-M alum, who has been providing estate and elder law planning services in the greater Washtenaw County area for over 30 years.  His talk will focus on the importance of keeping estate plans updated and the steps to assure solid planning for elder life, as well as protecting one's legacy for family members and/or designated recipients.

UMRA Reads: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

"Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known."

-- Goodreads

UMRA Reads: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Considered to be one of Agatha Christie's greatest, and also most controversial mysteries, 'The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd' breaks the rules of traditional mystery.

The peaceful English village of King’s Abbot is stunned. The widow Ferrars dies from an overdose of Veronal. Not twenty-four hours later, Roger Ackroyd—the man she had planned to marry—is murdered. It is a baffling case involving blackmail and death that taxes Hercule Poirot’s “little grey cells” before he reaches one of the most startling conclusions of his career.

 

-- Goodreads

UMRA Reads: Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom by Carl Bernstein

"Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of All the President’s Men and pioneer of investigative journalism, recalls his beginnings as an audacious teenage newspaper reporter in the nation’s capital―a winning tale of scrapes, gumshoeing, and American bedlam."

"In Chasing History, Bernstein recalls the origins of his storied journalistic career as he chronicles the Kennedy era, the swelling civil rights movement, and a slew of grisly crimes. He spins a buoyant, frenetic account of educating himself in what Bob Woodward describes as “the genius of perpetual engagement.”

"Funny and exhilarating, poignant and frank, Chasing History is an extraordinary memoir of life on the cusp of adulthood for a determined young man with a dogged commitment to the truth."

-- Goodreads

UMRA Reads: Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

"Andy Borowitz argues that over the past fifty years, American politicians have grown increasingly allergic to knowledge, and mass media have encouraged the election of ignoramuses by elevating candidates who are better at performing than thinking. Starting with Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for governor of California in 1966 and culminating with the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House, Borowitz shows how, during the age of twenty-four-hour news and social media, the US has elected politicians to positions of great power whose lack of the most basic information is terrifying. In addition to Reagan, Quayle, Bush, Palin, and Trump, Borowitz covers a host of congresspersons, senators, and governors who have helped lower the bar over the past five decades."

"Profiles in Ignorance aims to make us both laugh and cry: laugh at the idiotic antics of these public figures, and cry at the cataclysms these icons of ignorance have caused. But most importantly, the book delivers a call to action and a cause for optimism: History doesn’t move in a straight line, and we can change course if we act now."

UMRA Reads: Into the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

From Goodreads: "The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change."

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.