I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen, wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerdat Book Club, which is just like a regular book club, except every once in a while. The author happens to stop by, and today is one of those

days. Our September book is called The Shadow King. It's by Maza Mingiste, and it's a novel about

underdogs and uprisings and the importance of hope.

The backdrop is a super important event in Ethiopian history.

Back in 1935, the fascist Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini decided he wanted to colonize an African country.

At the time, Italy had one of the most advanced

armies in the world, and Ethiopia did not. But somehow, after years of brutal fighting, against

all odds, Ethiopia finally drove out the Italians. Maza was born in Ethiopia, which means

the story is super familiar to her.

If you can imagine the stories that I grew up with, it nurtured my vision of what it means

to be Ethiopian, what it means to be African. In Ethiopia, this was a story that everybody talks about. You know, my grandfather's

generation, my great-grandparents generation, there would be people that would come visit us

and they were usually identified with, oh, so-and-so fought in this battle. So-and-so had this person

and they're related to and they were in this war. So I grew up with

this, but I didn't realize until I really started researching this book that there was a whole

other side of this history that I knew nothing about. Turns out a lot of women helped win this war

...