David Plunkert

Podcast Archive

Listen to previous podcasts from the Book Review.

In this Sunday’s Book Review, the composer John Adams reviews Richard Rhodes’s “Hedy’s Folly,” about the wartime inventions of the movie star Hedy Lamarr. Mr. Adams writes:

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ¬munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined to help defeat the German attacks.

On this week’s podcast, Mr. Adams talks more about “Hedy’s Folly”; Liesl Schillinger discusses “Death Comes to Pemberley,” P.D. James’s murder-mystery sequel to “Pride and Prejudice”; Julie Bosman has notes from the field and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review’s editor, is the host.