True Stories People Never Thought They'd Dare to Share

The Risk! podcast heavily contributed to shaping the person I am today (which I am so grateful for). This book serves as the perfect introduction to the podcast. Highly recommend. Buy for yourself. Give as a gift.

Risk! is my favorite podcast and it is so wonderful to have these stories compiled in a book. I can’t wait to share this with my friends and family - especially those who don’t enjoy listening to podcasts! Kevin Allison is human treasure and he is doing God’s work.

This book is a great reminder of how different everyone’s lives are, and yet so relatable. So honest and raw there’s sure to be a story that makes you giggle even if some make you cringe. I recommend it and the podcast to everyone I run into.

This anthology is a damn good companion to the podcast, especially if you haven't heard it nearly as much as you'd like to. Even if you want to sample the irresistible charm of the show, shock moments and all, this book is for you.

In book form, Kevin Allison’s podcast covers 375 pages and is organized in the following chapters: Bad Samaritans, stories of friendships or attempts at decency gone bad; Bitter Pills, epiphanies of brutal truths that cannot be denied like learning a mother loves her husband more than her child; Trauma and Transcendence, in which a lot of the tales are about people who are made to feel like misfits and outright pariahs because they don’t fit in either through their self-identity or economic class; A Bridge Too Far, about people who experiment with their lives by going off the beaten track and finding it’s too late for them to return to mainstream society; In Plain Sight, stories about the walls we build to create a facade and how we tear down those walls; Making the Best of It, tales of finding a silver lining in the aftermath of a failure, a fiasco, or in inability to believe in something that your group adheres to.

The stories are followed by the authors’ Q & A in which they elaborate on the stories. Many of the contributors are people I know about through TV, already-published books, or their own podcasts such as Marc Maron, A.J. Jacobs, Dan Savage, Michael Ian Black, Paul Tompkins, and Aisha Tyler.

Reading these stories alerted me to the podcast, which I will now being listening to. Recommended.