Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning producer and interviewer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated To The Best Of Our Knowledge, Madison’s own Charles Monroe-Kane.

Charles Monroe-Kane has had a more interesting life than anybody any of us are ever likely to know. After an itinerate childhood around Ohio and a summer as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, he was a teenage faith healer in Haiti and the Philippines, edited an international environmental magazine based in Holland, was a professional anti-nuclear activist in Belgium, had an embarrassing encounter with the President of the United States in Munich, and even helped start Eastern Europe’s first Internet Café, in Prague – which required him to deliver a quarter-million dollar payment from an Italian mobster to his Chechen counterparts.

He took a prodigious amount of hard drugs and had a frightening amount of unsafe sex. He also has bipolar 1 disorder. Chronicling that life, and trying to understand it, is the business that occupies Charles Monroe-Kane in his first book, Lithium Jesus: A Memoir of Mania, now out in paperback from our good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.

I had the pleasure of talking with Charles when the book came out in hardback in 2016, and I’m delighted I get to continue that conversation as I welcome to Madison BookBeat Charles Monroe-Kane.