Hello again friends and and welcome to Madison BookBeat, your listener-supported community radio home for Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers. I’m your fourth week host Stu Levitan, and I am very excited about today’s show, because our guest is not only a Madison author, he is, by the objective criteria of sales and critical acclaim, Madison’s greatest author, David Maraniss, whose brand new book is about America’s greatest athlete. It’s called Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, published last week by our good friends at Simon and Schuster, and already number2 on the NYT best seller list.

As you probably know, David is a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Washington Post, where he remains an associate editor, and the author of 12 previous books, including biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente and a history that was in part about Madison and the UW in October 1967, They Marched into Sunlight. His Madison credentials are top notch. He wasn’t born here, but did grow up here as the son of Mary Maraniss, an editor with the UW Press, and my former boss at the Capital Times, Elliot Maraniss, who was the subject of his most recent book A Good American Family. And he and his wife Linda have a house on the near west side of Madison where they summer whenever they can.

I usually spend a couple of minutes setting up the book, but you already know who Jim Thorpe was and  there is so much to talk about in these 626 pages of text and notes that I’ll just say I’ve had the pleasure of talking with David about his last seven books, and it is a real delight to welcome him now to MBB to talk about Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe