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166852-1 | Phyllis Lee Levin | Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House | Elegantly written, tirelessly researched, full of shocking revelations, Edith and Woodrow offers the definitive examination of the controversial role Woodrow Wilson's second wife played in running the country. "The story of Wilson's second marriage, and of the large events on which its shadow was cast, is darker and more devious, and more astonishing, than previously recorded." —from the Preface Constructing a thrilling, tightly contained narrative around a trove of previously undisclosed documents, medical diagnoses, White House memoranda, and internal documents, acclaimed journalist and historian Phyllis Lee Levin sheds new light on the central role of Edith Bolling Galt in Woodrow Wilson's administration. Shortly after Ellen Wilson's death on the eve of World War I in 1914, President Wilson was swept off his feet by Edith Bolling Galt. They were married in December 1915, and, Levin shows, Edith Wilson set out immediately to consolidate her influence on him and tried to destroy his relationships with Colonel House, his closest friend and adviser, and with Joe Tumulty, his longtime secretary. Wilson resisted these efforts, but Edith was persistent and eventually succeeded. With the quick ending of World War I following America's entry in 1918, Wilson left for the Paris Peace Conference, where he pushed for the establishment of the League of Nations. Congress, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, resisted the idea of an international body that would require one country to go to the defense of another and blocked ratification. Defiant, Wilson set out on a cross-country tour to convince the American people to support him. It was during the middle of this tour, in the fall of 1919, that he suffered a devastating stroke and was rushed back to Washington. Although there has always been controversy regarding Edith Wilson's role in the eighteen months remaining of Wilson's second term, it is clear now from newly released medical records that the stroke had totally incapacitated him. Citing this information and numerous specific memoranda, journals, and diaries, Levin makes a powerfully persuasive case that Mrs. Wilson all but singlehandedly ran the country during this time. Ten years in the making, Edith and Woodrow is a magnificent, dramatic, and deeply rewarding work of history. —from the publisher's website | 2001-12-09T00:00:00 | 0743211588 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/166852-1 |
178993-1 | Rich Lowry | Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years | —from the publisher's website Bill and Hillary Clinton don't want you to read this book. Bill has spent his days since the presidency aggressively defending his legacy, and Hillary plans to run for president on it, and now, unfortunately for them, Rich Lowry uses sound fact and shocking detail to dispel the myth of the Clinton legacy once and for all. Showing how a politician with grandiose ambitions became a cautious, poll-driven placeholder and how a president who yearned to confront a great international crisis cringed and still shrank from the threat of Islamic terrorism when it arrived, Lowry destroys Clinton's record as president and sparks an intense debate about the nature of his legacy. Lowry reveals how: 1. Clinton didn't "grow" the economy; his economic record depends on lies 2. Clinton sold out US national security to campaign contributors 3. Clinton stood in the way of real welfare reform before being forced by Republicans to sign a reform bill 4. Attorney General Janet Reno was AWOL on domestic security 5. Clinton's scandals were very real and he deserved impeachment 6. Clinton made sexual liberation the only cause for which he took career-endangering risks 7. Clinton's unwillingness to use force abroad emboldened America's enemies 8. Clinton left the country vulnerable to September 11 terrorist attacks You won't know the truth about Clinton until you read this book. | 2003-11-09T00:00:00 | 0895261294 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/178993-1 |
176900-1 | Willard Scott | The Older the Fiddle, the Better the Tune | —from the publisher's website A humorous and touching look at the joys of getting older, introduced by one of the Today show's beloved weathermen. Willard Scott is famous for celebrating the wit and wisdom of age. In The Older the Fiddle, the Better the Tune , he asks a wide range of people, "What's the greatest thing about getting older?" From expressions of delight in senior citizen discounts to sage advice on life's challenges, the answers are always surprising, often moving, and sometimes very funny. | 2003-07-13T00:00:00 | 0786868929 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/176900-1 |
179909-1 | Nathaniel Philbrick | Sea of Glory | —from the publisher's website In 1838, the U.S. government launched the largest discovery voyage the Western world had ever seen-6 sailing vessels and 346 men bound for the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Four years later, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, or Ex. Ex. as it was known, returned with an astounding array of accomplishments and discoveries: 87,000 miles logged, 280 Pacific islands surveyed, 4,000 zoological specimens collected, including 2,000 new species, and the discovery of the continent of Antarctica. And yet at a human level, the project was a disaster-not only had 28 men died and 2 ships been lost, but a series of sensational courts-martial had also ensued that pitted the expedition's controversial leader, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, against almost every officer under his command. Though comparable in importance and breadth of success to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Ex. Ex. has been largely forgotten. Now, the celebrated Nathaniel Philbrick re-creates this chapter of American maritime history in all its triumph and scandal. Like the award-winning In the Heart of the Sea, Sea of Glory combines meticulous history with spellbinding human drama as it circles the globe from the palm-fringed beaches of the South Pacific to the treacherous waters off Antarctica and to the stunning beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and, finally, to a court-martial aboard a ship of the line anchored off New York City. | 2004-01-25T00:00:00 | 067003231X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/179909-1 |
9801-1 | Vassily Aksyonov | Say Cheese | Soviet dissident, Vassily Aksyonov, discusses his latest novel, “Say Cheese: Soviets & the Media.” It is a fictional account of a group of Soviet photographers who venture to publish their works without the approval of the Communist Party. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980, Aksyonov describes his novel as metaphorical: the photographers represent Metropol, the writers' group headed by Aksyonov which led to his expulsion. Trained in the Soviet Union as a medical doctor, he now is a professor of Russian literature at George Mason University. Also discussed is “In Search of Melancholy Baby: A Russian in America,” a travelogue published in 1986 detailing Aksyonov's impressions of life in the United States. In addition, he discusses Soviet education and the "miraculous rise" of Mikhail Gorbachev. | 1989-11-05T00:00:00 | 0394543637 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/9801-1 |
163715-1 | Diane McWhorter | Carry Me Home | The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, but a contemporary African American saying predicted that freedom would come only after another hundred years of struggle. That prediction was about right: the civil rights struggle erupted in the middle of the 20th century, with its violence epicenter in the industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama. There freedom riders and voter-rights activists faced down Klansmen and Nazis, who had put aside their own differences to cast a pall of terror—and the smoke of a well-orchestrated campaign of church bombingsr—over the South. Diane McWhorter, a journalist and native Alabamian, offers a comprehensive, literate record of the struggle that covers more than half a century and that involves hundreds of major actors. Her work is solidly researched and highly readable, and it offers much new information. Among the many newsworthy aspects of the book are McWhorter's discussions of internal power struggles within the civil rights movement, the uneasy role of Birmingham's small Jewish population, and the collusion of local governmentr—especially swaggering police chief Bull Connor. The author also addresses the segregationist and white-supremacist movements and recounts the tortuous quest to bring the church bombers to justice, which was finally accomplished in 2000. Carry Me Home is a worthy and highly recommended companion to Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters and Andrew Young's An Easy Burden. — Gregory McNamee | 2001-05-27T00:00:00 | 0684807475 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/163715-1 |
168868-1 | Ellen Joan Pollock | The Pretender: Martin Frankel | WALL STREET JOURNAL senior reporter Ellen Joan Pollock tracks the elusive, multimillionaire financier Martin Frankel in her new book, "The Pretender: How Martin Frankel Fooled the Financial World and Led the Feds on One of the Most Publicized Manhunts in History." (Available in hardcover and e-book formats in January.) "The Pretender" offers a dramatic account of how a nerdy, frightened man from Toledo, Ohio, who’d lived with his parents until his 30s turned himself into one of the most successful con men of the century. Ms. Pollock, who covered the story for the Journal, brings Mr. Frankel’s saga to life with new revelations and extensive first-hand accounts. —from the publisher's website | 2002-04-14T00:00:00 | 0743204158 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/168868-1 |
103970-1 | Jill Ker Conway | When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography | Jill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers—author of The Road from Coorain and True North —looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives. In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries—from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham—the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves. Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune—or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity. In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics—such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila—about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer's expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story. Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being's life and mind—and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives. —from the publisher's website | 1998-05-24T00:00:00 | 0679445935 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/103970-1 |
9970-1 | Robin Wright | In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade | Formerly with the Sunday Times of London and stationed in the Middle East, foreign correspondent Robin Wright catalogs her experiences of Iran in, "In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade." Wright explains that her rationale for writing the book was to take an objective look at the Iranian situation. Extensively researched and footnoted, Wright's book examines the era from the Iranian revolution forward, and looks at the social and religious motivations behind Iranian policy. Wright concludes that religious motivation has played the most important role in sustaining the revolution. She suggests that many of the actions taken by the Ayatollah's government were designed to divert attention away from internal social and economic problems. | 1989-11-19T00:00:00 | 0671725114 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/9970-1 |
159447-1 | Kenneth Ackerman | Dark Horse | —from the publisher's website In post - Civil War America, politics was a brutal sport played with blunt rules. Yet James Garfield’s 1881 dark horse campaign after the longest-ever Republican nominating process (36 convention ballots), his victory in the closest-ever popular vote for president (by only 7,018 votes out of over 9 million cast), his struggle against feuding factions once elected, and the public’s response to its culmination in violence, sets a revealing comparison with America approaching a new campaign year in 2004. Author and Capitol Hill veteran Kenneth D. Ackerman re-creates an American political landscape where fierce battles for power unfolded against a chivalrous code of honor in a nation struggling under the shadow of a recent war to confront its modernity. The murder prompted leaders to recoil at their own excesses and changed the tone of politics for generations to come. Garfield’s own struggle against powerful forces is a compelling human drama; the portrait of Americans coming together after his assassination exemplifies the dignity and grace that have long held the nation together in crisis. | 2003-07-27T00:00:00 | 0786711515 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/159447-1 |
7984-1 | Robert Christopher | Crashing the Gates | The influence of WASPs (white anglo-saxon protestants) on American society is explored by Robert Christopher in his new book, Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of the Power Elite. Christopher examines the reasons for the changing ethnic makeup of the power elite and why it is no longer dominated by WASPs. Christopher cites three major events that brought about this change: the G.I. Bill which granted ethnics access to a college education, the civil rights movement which brought down racial barriers, and the Vietnam War which brought public mistrust and doubt upon the WASP leadership. | 1989-06-11T00:00:00 | 0671473344 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/7984-1 |
115519-1 | A. Scott Berg | Lindbergh | From one of America's most acclaimed biographers, here at last is the definitive life of one of the most legendary, controversial, and enigmatic figuers in American history—Charles A. Lindbergh. National Book Award winner A. Scott Berg is the first and only writer to have been given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives—more than 2,000 boxes of personal papers, including reams of unpublished letters and diaries—and to be allowed to freely interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues, and family members, including his children and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The result is a brilliant biography that clarifies a life long blurred by myth and half-truth. From the moment he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, Lindbergh found himself thrust upon an odyssey for which he was ill-prepared—the first modern media superstar, deified and demonized many times over in a single lifetime. Berg casts dramatic new light on Lindbergh's childhood; his astonishing flight; the kidnapping of his son, which has been called 'The Crime of the Century'; Lindbergh's fascination with Hitler's Germany; and his unsung work in his later years. In all, this is a most compelling story of a most significant life: the most private of public figuers finally revealed with a sweep and detail never before possible. This is at once Lindbergh the hero and Lindbergh the man. —from the publisher's website | 1998-12-20T00:00:00 | 0399144498 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/115519-1 |
15288-1 | Sally Bedell Smith | In All His Glory: The Life of William Paley | Former New York Times media reporter, Sally Bedell Smith, discussed her new book, In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley: The Legendary Tycoon and His Brilliant Circle. The nearly 800-page biography, composed from 700 interviews, chronicles Mr. Paley's start as the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant through his rise to the top after creating CBS television network. "When I set out to write this book, I wanted to really show him as a broadcaster who had enormous influence over a medium that had a great effect on our lives," said Ms. Smith. Mr. Paley's personal identity is described as being "bound up in CBS." Ms. Smith also recounted the experiences she had during her five years of researching the book, such as a dinner party given by Henry Kissinger where she was invited expressly so she could see Mr. Paley. | 1990-12-09T00:00:00 | 067172780X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/15288-1 |
179037-1 | Tom Coburn | Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders | —from the publisher's website In Breach of Trust , former U.S. Congressman Tom A. Coburn explores how Washington resists critical reform by co-opting the men and women who seek to change the system. Tom A. Coburn, a congressional maverick who kept his promise to serve three terms and then leave Washington, offers a candid look at the inner workings of Congress—why the system changes politicians instead of vice versa. Breach of Trust shows readers, through shocking behind-the-scenes stories, why Washington resists the reform our country desperately needs and how they can make wise, informed decisions about current and future political issues and candidates. This honest and critical look at “business as usual” in Congress reveals how and why elected representatives are quickly seduced into becoming career politicians who won’t push for change. Along the way, Coburn offers readers realistic ideas for how to make a difference. | 2003-11-23T00:00:00 | 0785262202 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/179037-1 |
8678-1 | Bob Schieffer | The Acting President | Authors Schieffer and Gates assert in their book, "The Acting President," that for eight years American foreign and domestic policy was controlled and shaped as much by the advisers to President Ronald Reagan as by the president himself. Schieffer and Gates discuss their early careers in journalism and how network news coverage has changed over the past twenty years. They analyze how the presidency has also evolved to adapt to changing technology and how Ronald Reagan used that technology to his benefit. Schieffer and Gates look at the progress of the Bush administration, comparing it to the Reagan years. They provide insightful discussion concerning the controversial Dan Rather-George Bush interview during the 1988 campaign, using that event to show the power of the media. | 1989-08-13T00:00:00 | 0525485791 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/8678-1 |
8219-1 | Nathaniel Branden | Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand | Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand, is Nathaniel Branden's memoir of his 18-year relationship with Ms. Rand. Mr. Branden discusses Ms. Rand's philosophy as a champion of the individual and an advocate of capitalism. He also includes his experience as a confidant of Ms. Rand and a member of her inner circle and concludes by discussing the influence of Ms. Rand's philosophy on members of the Reagan administration. | 1989-07-02T00:00:00 | 0395461073 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/8219-1 |
11271-1 | Michael Fumento | The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS | Mr. Fumento talked about his book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics, published by Regnery. The author discussed problems in getting the book published and in getting it distributed because of controversy over AIDS. He described getting interested in the early 1980's myth of missing children and how the media "can terrify the American public with virtually nothing to go on." When he saw the AIDS scare growing he decided to expose myths surrounding the disease. He talked about serving as an AIDS analyst for the Civil Rights Commission and reaction to an article he wrote about conservatives using the AIDS scare to enforce traditional morality. He discussed the animosity and anger that has been directed toward him. He also talked about the groups that benefit from making AIDS "everybody's disease." The author argues that both the numbers of people infected with the AIDS virus and the risks to heterosexuals have been blown out of proportion. Mr. Fumento also asserts that the money spent on AIDS research has been drained from the fight against cancer. | 1990-02-25T00:00:00 | 0895267292 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/11271-1 |
26463-1 | R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. | The Conservative Crack-Up | Conservative political observer R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. discussed the ideas behind his book, "The Conservative Crack-Up," which studied the progress of the conservative movement in the 1990's. Mr. Tyrrell said the conservative crack-up occurred following the end of the Reagan administration, when the Bush administration failed to continue the consolidation of the conservatives achieved by President Reagan. Mr. Tyrrell also wrote The Liberal Crack-Up earlier in his career, which focused on the occasional crises afflicting the liberal movement in the 1970's. | 1992-06-07T00:00:00 | 0671660381 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/26463-1 |
164149-1 | Daniel Schorr | Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism | Long a familiar face to American television-news viewers, and more recently a familiar voice to public-radio listeners, Daniel Schorr recounts his 60-plus-year career covering some of the most significant events of the last century. Schorr knew that he wanted to be a journalist from a very young age, though his mother worried about her son entering a profession that required no advanced degree. ("Isn't it a little like being an actor?" she asked, presciently, given the shape of modern broadcast news.) Schorr's narrative begins before the Second World War, when, the son of Russian immigrants, he combed the streets of New York looking for news stories and eventually talking his way onto the staffs of newspapers and wire services. He had a gift for being in the right place at the right time, breaking news in the summer of 1941 that pointed to an impending war with Japan and reporting on the hostilities that followed the creation of the state of Israel, among many other events. That gift served him well as he rose through the ranks of foreign correspondents, eventually joining CBS and heading the network's bureaus in Bonn and Moscow, where he came to spend more time talking with Nikita Khrushchev than he would spend with the American presidents he was later charged with covering. Schorr had another gift: a particularly fine ability to irritate those who came under his scrutiny, from John Wayne to John Kennedy, from the KGB to the FBI. "It may be that I am just hard to get along with, but to me it always seemed that some principle was involved." Irascibility and high principle alike mark this memoir. Readers who grew up listening to Schorr's reports on such matters as Watergate and the Berlin Wall, as well as students of journalism and history, will find it illuminating. -- Gregory McNamee | 2001-07-01T00:00:00 | 0671020870 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/164149-1 |
170772-1 | Monica Langley | Tearing Down the Walls | —from the publisher's website TEARING DOWN THE WALLS is the story of Sanford "Sandy" Weill, a rough-edged kid from Brooklyn, who overcame incredible odds and deep-seated prejudice, to put together Citigroup, the world's largest financial empire, and to transform financial services in America. Tearing Down the Walls provides an unprecedented look at how business and finance are conducted at the highest levels, with extraordinary insight into the character and motivations of powerful men and women. And it's the enthralling account of the interplay between power and personality. Sandy Weill, the son of an immigrant dressmaker, is a larger-than-life character, a legendary Wall Street CEO whose innovation, opportunism, and even fear drove him from the lowliest job on Wall Street to its most commanding heights. Over a span of five decades he tangled with -- and usually bested -- some of the most prominent and powerful titans of finance. A consummate deal maker, Sandy Weill amassed and then lost an astounding assemblage of securities firms, only to plunge ahead to rebuild his empire and ultimately create the modern American financial-services supermarket. At the center of Citigroup's recent crises, he's the mogul many are waiting to see topple, while many more are trying to figure out how he succeeded. Using nearly five hundred first-hand interviews with key players in his life and career -- including Mr. Weill himself -- The Wall Street Journal's Monica Langley chronicles not only his public persona, but his hidden side: blunt and often crude, yet unpretentious and sometimes disarmingly charming. Tearing Down the Walls reveals Mr. Weill's tyrannical rages as well as his tearful regrets, the crass stinginess and the unprecedented generosity, the fierce sense of loyalty and the ruthless elimination of potential rivals -- even those he loves. | 2003-05-11T00:00:00 | 074321613X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/170772-1 |
9718-1 | Rev. Ralph David Abernathy | And the Walls Came Tumbling Down | Abernathy chronicles his personal experience in the civil rights movement in his autobiography, “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down,” published by HarperCollins. In the book, Mr. Abernathy gives an insider account of the Civil Rights movement detailing the organization of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and the 1965 March in Selma. Personally criticized for his account of the personal life of his close friend, Dr. Martin Luther King, Abernathy takes the opportunity to explain his motives and his view of the proper accounting of Dr. King and civil rights history. He discusses his controversial endorsement of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential elections and his subsequent frustrating efforts to communicate with the administration. He also comments on the status of current black leadership in America. | 1989-10-29T00:00:00 | 0060161922 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/9718-1 |
96629-1 | Carol Reardon | Pickett's Charge in History & Memory | If, as many have argued, the Civil War is the most crucial moment in our national life and Gettysburg its turning point, then the climax of the climax, the central moment in our nation's history, is Pickett's Charge. But as Carol Reardon notes, the Civil War saw many other daring assaults and stout defenses. Why, then, is it Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg—and not, for example, Richardson's Charge at Antietam or Humphrey's Assault at Fredericksburg—that looms so large in the popular imagination? As this innovative study reveals, by examining the events of 3 July 1863, through the selective and evocative lens of "memory" we can learn much about why Pickett's Charge endures so strongly in the American imagination. Over the years, soldiers, journalists, veterans, politicians, orators, artists, poets, and educators, Northerners and Southerners alike, shaped, revised, and even sacrificed the "history" of the charge to create "memories" that met ever-shifting needs and deeply felt values. Reardon shows that the story told today of Pickett's Charge is really an amalgam of history and memory. The evolution of that mix, she concludes, tells us much about how we come to understand our nation's past. —from the publisher's website | 1998-02-08T00:00:00 | 0807823791 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/96629-1 |
43009-1 | David Brock | The Real Anita Hill | Mr. Brock talked about the research behind his book, The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story. He talked about the credibility of Clarence Thomas's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the lack of credibility in Anita Hill's testimony. The author claimed that Hill's testimony was "shot through with false, incorrect, and misleading statements so much so that ... it is very difficult to believe that what she said about Clarence Thomas is also true." | 1993-06-13T00:00:00 | 0029046564 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/43009-1 |
23574-1 | Jimmy Breslin | Damon Runyon: A Life | Columnist Jimmy Breslin discussed his book, Damon Runyon: A Life, in which he described the New York literary scene of the 1920s and 30s, including the life and times of writer and reporter Damon Runyon. Mr. Breslin also discussed the current literary and political atmosphere of New York City, and spoke warmly of the rational crimes committed by gangsters in previous eras as opposed to the senseless crimes of contemporary society. Damon Runyon was an author of crime stories that became screenplays for dozens of movies glorifying the underworld of New York in the 1920's and early 1930's. | 1991-12-29T00:00:00 | 0899199844 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/23574-1 |
21448-1 | Robert Dallek | Lone Star Rising | Mr. Dallek discussed his book Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908-1960, which follows the president's life from childhood to his vice presidency. A second volume will cover the remainder of his life. Since President Johnson is usually remembered by the public and portrayed by biographers in negative terms, Mr. Dallek wanted to provide a balanced biography of Johnson. Mr. Dallek said, "Johnson was a magnificent scoundrel, a self-serving altruist, a man of high ideals and no morals." He pointed out that despite his unethical political actions, Johnson worked hard to improve the conditions of poor laborers and worked for civil rights. Mr. Dallek commented on some of the differences between his book and Robert Caro's Means of Ascent. | 1991-09-22T00:00:00 | 0195079043 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/21448-1 |
22332-1 | Don Oberdorfer | The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era | Mr. Oberdorfer, author of "The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era, The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983- 1990," discussed the history of U.S.- Soviet relations, and how interaction between the two countries has changed in recent years. He also talked briefly about the recently attempted Soviet coup, and how it was precipitated by the changes in Eastern Europe. | 1991-10-27T00:00:00 | 0671707833 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/22332-1 |
177866-1 | Victor Davis Hanson | Mexifornia: A State of Becoming | Mr. Hanson talked about his book Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, published by Encounter Books. The book examined the hybrid culture emerging in California and which citizens benefit from different political stances. He also talked about immigration policy and its impact on American culture. | 2003-09-28T00:00:00 | 1893554732 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/177866-1 |
151937-1 | Witold Rybczynski | A Clearing in the Distance | Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best remembered today as a landscape designer, well known for his plans for New York's Central Park and Prospect Park, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the campus of Stanford University, among other noteworthy sites. But, writes urban studies professor and accomplished author Witold Rybczynski, Olmsted was an American original, a 19th-century success story who packed many careers and wide learning and travel into a long life. He spent time in China and Europe, managed a California gold mine, edited The Nation, commanded a medical unit in the Civil War, and crisscrossed the United States many times over, writing long reports and articles all the while. (One series of reports urged, for instance, that the then-remote Yosemite region of California be made a national park.) Olmsted, Rybczynski suggests, changed the face of America: he had a vision of the American landscape as a reflection of the national character, with its broad vistas and open skies, and he was concerned to make America's urban spaces livable, bringing "trees and greenery into the congested grid of streets." At Olmsted's urging, many American and Canadian cities adopted his system of parks, broad avenues, and greenways, which encouraged the appreciation and preservation of nature; his influence is felt today in the so-called urban ecology movement, and in dozens of public spaces across the continent. Rybczynski's fine and illuminating biography of Olmsted shows him to have been a man of many parts, an important historical figure whose legacy remains strong nearly a century after his death. —from the publisher's website | 1999-10-17T00:00:00 | 0684824639 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151937-1 |
13505-1 | Roger Kimball | Tenured Radicals | Roger Kimball discussed his book "Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education," published by Abrams Books. A revised edition of this book was published in 1998 by Ivan R. Dee Publishers. In this book, he argues that the radicalism of the 1960s has worked its way into colleges and universities through feminists, neo-Marxists and "practicioners of deconstruction" who are now the professors. He argues that these liberals are corrupting the traditional goals, intellectually and morally, of a solid liberal arts education. They deprive students of a well-rounded education and are mounting a "concerted effort to attack the very foundations of the society that guarantee the independence of our institutions of higher education." | 1990-08-12T00:00:00 | 1566631955 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/13505-1 |
67133-1 | Susan Eisenhower | Breaking Free: A Memoir of Love and Revolution | Ms. Eisenhower discussed her book, Breaking Free: A Memoir of Love and Revolution, published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux. The book is the story of her love affair and eventual marriage to a member of President Gorbachev's inner circle and head of the Soviet civilian space program. These events happened during the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of Soviet Communism. | 1995-10-08T00:00:00 | 0374262462 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/67133-1 |
49562-1 | Peter MacDonald | Giap: The Victor in Vietnam | Peter MacDonald, an officer in the British Army for over thirty years, talked about his book "Giap: The Victor in Vietnam." The book is a biography of General Giap, the commander of the Vietnamese army during the Indonesia and Vietnam Wars. Mr. MacDonald discussed the research behind his work and the book's reception by readers. | 1993-08-29T00:00:00 | 0393034011 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/49562-1 |
17548-1 | William Strauss | Generations: The History of America's Future | The authors discussed their book, "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069." The book is about the effect of generational trends on history and American culture. The authors sort Americans into 18 generations, and then distinguish among four life cycle types. Each generation seems to take on one of the following characteristics: idealist (moralistic), reactive (pragmatic), civic (selfless), or adaptive (compromiser). The past, they said, showed there are often significant parallels between the "new" movements of each generation. "American society had pulsed to rhythms both within the family and within the world at large." They postulate that the four life cycle types can be used both to explain history and predict the future patterns of American culture. Their vision of the future is based on their study of America's past influences. They call this book the "full story of America around the 18 generations of our history." | 1991-04-14T00:00:00 | 0688119123 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/17548-1 |
153355-1 | Eugene Robinson | Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race | Eugene Robinson didn't expect to have his world turned upside down when he accompanied a group of friends and acquaintances to the beach at Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro one sunny afternoon. He had recently moved to South America as the new correspondent for the Washington Post, a position he had sought not only as an exciting professional challenge but also as a means of escape from the poisonous racial atmosphere in America's cities, which he experienced firsthand as a reporter and editor covering city politics in Washington, D.C. Black and white wouldn't matter so much, he thought, if he gave himself a little distance from the problem. At first Robinson saw Brazil as a racial paradise, where people of all hues and colors mingled together on the beaches, in the samba schools, and at carnaval. But that day on the beach, his most basic assumptions about race were shattered when he was told that he didn't have to be black in Brazil if he didn't want to be. The society looked at people through a broad spectrum of colors, ranging from "white" to "coffee with milk" to "after midnight," and not as members of two rigidly defined races. Like most African Americans, Robinson had always recognized the existence of color gradations the entire range from coal to cream—but he never looked at color the same way after that encounter at Ipanema. Coal to Cream is the story of Robinson's personal exploration of race, color, identity, culture, and heritage, as seen through the America of his youth and the South America he discovered, forging a new consciousness about himself, his people, and his country. As he immersed himself in Brazilian culture, Robinson began to see that its focus on color and class—as opposed to race—presents problems of its own. Discrimination and inequality still exist, but without a sense of racial identity, the Brazilians lack the anger and vocabulary they need to attack or even describe such ills. Ultimately, Robinson came to realize that racial identity, what makes him not just an American but a black American, is a gift of great value—a shared language of history and experience—rather than the burden it had sometimes seemed. A penetrating look at race relations in the United States and much of the rest of the hemisphere, Coal to Cream is both a personal memoir and a striking comment on the times in which we live. At a time when many are calling for the abandonment of racial identity, Robinson cautions that we should be careful what we wish for, lest we get it. —from the publisher's website | 1999-11-07T00:00:00 | 0684857227 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/153355-1 |
13063-1 | Denton Watson | Lion in the Lobby | Denton L. Watson, author of "Lion in the Lobby," discussed his book concerning the life and times of Clarence Mitchell. Mitchell served as the director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP and became the foremost civil rights lobbyist in Washington. He was popularly called the "101st senator" and former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker referred to Watson as the "lion in the lobby". Watson credits Mitchell as being an instrumental force in working to pass landmark civil rights legislation. | 1990-07-08T00:00:00 | 0688050972 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/13063-1 |
67754-1 | Marlin Fitzwater | Call the Briefing! | Mr. Fitzwater discussed his recent book, Call the Briefing! Bush and Reagan, Sam and Helen: A Decade with Presidents and the Press, published by Times Books. He reminisced about his years in the White House press office in his service as press secretary to both Presidents Reagan and Bush from 1983 to 1993 and his relationships with members of the press. Mr. Fitzwater discussed why television cameras bothered him during the daily news briefing and his involvement in the 1992 presidential campaign. | 1995-11-05T00:00:00 | 0738834572 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/67754-1 |
80864-1 | Pavel Palazchenko | My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze | Pavel Palazchenko discussed his book, "My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter," published by Pennsylvania State University Press. Mr. Palazchenko was the principal interpreter for Soviet Union premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze during the crucial period of 1985-1991 and participated in the talks that lead to the end of the Cold War. In his book, Mr. Palazchenko focuses on his impressions of the world's most powerful political leaders at the time--Presidents Reagan and Bush, Prime Minister Thatcher and others. He claims that the end of the Cold War was possible not only because of the preparation of all parties, but because of the mutual trust that was fostered by world leaders. Mr. Palazchenko is now a consultant to the Gorbachev Foundation, a Russian think tank in Moscow. | 1997-06-08T00:00:00 | 0271016035 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/80864-1 |
184076-1 | Mark Edmundson | Why Read? | —from the publisher's website If religion continues to lose its hold on consequential parts of society, what can take its place in guiding souls? In this important book reconceiving the value and promise of reading, acclaimed author Edmundson dramatizes what the recent identity crisis of the humanities has effectively obscured: that reading can change your life for the better. Mark Edmundson’s Harper’s Magazine article “On the Uses of the Liberal Arts” is reported to be the most photocopied essay on college campuses over the last five years. Ruminating on his essay and the intense reaction to it, Edmundson exposes universities’ ever-growing consumerism at the expense of a challenging, life-altering liberal arts education. Edmundson encourages educators to teach students to read in a way that can change their lives for the better rather than just training and entertaining. He argues that questions about the uses of literature—what would it mean to live out of this book, to see it as a guide to life—are the central questions to ask in a literary education. Right now they are being ignored, even shunned. And if religion continues to lose its hold on consequential parts of society, what can take its place in guiding souls? Great writing, Edmundson argues. At once controversial and inspiring, this is a groundbreaking book written with the elegance and power to change the way we teach and read. | 2004-12-05T00:00:00 | 1582344256 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/184076-1 |
166642-1 | Laura Claridge | Norman Rockwell: A Life | Norman Rockwell’s tremendously successful, prolific career as a painter and illustrator has rendered him a twentieth-century American icon. However, the very popularity and accessibility of his idealized, nostalgic depictions of middleclass life have caused him to be considered not a serious artist but a “mere illustrator”–a disparagement only reinforced by the hundreds of memorable covers he drew for The Sunday Evening Post. Symptomatic of critics’ neglect is the fact that Rockwell has never before been the subject of a serious critical biography. Based on private family archives and interviews and publishes to coincide with a major two-year travelling retrospective of his work, this book reveals for the first time the driven workaholic who had three complicated marriages and was a distant father —so different from the loving, all-American-dad image widely held to this day. Critically acclaimed author Laura Claridge also breaks new ground with her reappraisal of Rockwell’s art, arguing that despite his popular sentimental style, his artistry was masterful, complex, and far more manipulative than people realize. —from the publisher's website | 2001-12-02T00:00:00 | 1588360644 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/166642-1 |
58456-1 | Murray Kempton | Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events | Murray Kempton discussed his book, "Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events," which deals with several lesser-known African-American leaders in U.S. history. This is the best of Murray Kempton's columns, essays, reviews, and reportage. In the words of David Remnick, author of Lenin's Tomb, "(this book is) like watching an endless parade of the great characters of American life . . . as rich as a great novel." —from the publisher's website | 1994-07-03T00:00:00 | 9780812922943 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/58456-1 |
177169-1 | Dorothy Height | Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir | —from the publisher's website Dorothy Height marched at civil rights rallies, sat through tense White House meetings, and witnessed every major victory in the struggle for racial equality. Yet as the sole woman among powerful, charismatic men, someone whose personal ambition was secondary to her passion for her cause, she has received little mainstream recognition--until now. In her memoir, Dr. Height, now ninety-one, reflects on a life of service and leadership. We witness her childhood encounters with racism and the thrill of New York college life during the Harlem Renaissance. We see her protest against lynchings. We sit with her onstage as Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech. We meet people she knew intimately throughout the decades: W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Langston Hughes, and many others. And we watch as she leads the National Council of Negro Women for forty-one years, her diplomatic counsel sought by U.S. Presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton. After the fierce battles of the 1960s, Dr. Height concentrates on troubled black communities, on issues like rural poverty, teen pregnancy and black family values. In 1994, her efforts are officially recognized. Along with Rosa Parks, she receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. | 2003-08-03T00:00:00 | 1586481576 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/177169-1 |
166924-1 | Jeffrey Hart | Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe | Although the essential books of Western civilization are no longer central in our courses or in our thoughts, they retain their ability to energize us intellectually, says Jeffrey Hart in this powerful book. He now presents a guide to some of these literary works, tracing the main currents of Western culture for all who wish to understand the roots of their civilization and the basis for its achievements. Hart focuses on the productive tension between the classical and biblical strains in our civilization—between a life based on cognition and one based on faith and piety. He begins with the Iliad and Exodus, linking Achilles and Moses as Bronze Age heroic figures. Closely analyzing texts and illuminating them in unexpected ways, he moves on to Socrates and Jesus, who "internalized the heroic," continues with Paul and Augustine and their Christian synthesis, addresses Dante, Shakespeare (Hamlet), Molière, and Voltaire, and concludes with the novel as represented by Crime and Punishment and The Great Gatsby. Hart maintains that the dialectical tensions suggested by this survey account for the restlessness and singular achievements of the West and that the essential books can provide the substance and energy currently missed by both students and educated readers. —from the publisher's website | 2002-01-13T00:00:00 | 0300087047 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/166924-1 |
61965-1 | Charles Murray | The Bell Curve | Charles Murray discussed the book he co-authored, "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life." The book focuses on human intelligence and the way social problems are affected by it. The other co-author, Richard J. Herrnstein, died shortly before the publication of the book. | 1994-12-04T00:00:00 | 0029146739 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/61965-1 |
7854-1 | James MacGregor Burns | The Crosswinds of Freedom | James MacGregor Burns, author of "Crosswinds of Freedom," analyzed the past half-century of American history, beginning with Roosevelt's New Deal and concluding with the last days of the Reagan presidency. He also described personal experiences with presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Burns concluded by commenting on the uniqueness of the American experience and its "grand experiment" in freedom. | 1989-06-04T00:00:00 | 0679728198 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/7854-1 |
172771-1 | Eliot Cohen | Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime | —from the publisher's website The relationship between military leaders and political leaders has always been a complicated one, especially in times of war. When the chips are down, who should run the show -- the politicians or the generals? In Supreme Command , Eliot Cohen examines four great democratic war statesmen -- Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion -- to reveal the surprising answer: the politicians. Great states-men do not turn their wars over to their generals, and then stay out of their way. Great statesmen make better generals of their generals. They question and drive their military men, and at key times they overrule their advice. The generals may think they know how to win, but the statesmen are the ones who see the big picture. Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion led four very different kinds of democracy, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. They came from four very different backgrounds -- backwoods lawyer, dueling French doctor, rogue aristocrat, and impoverished Jewish socialist.Yet they faced similar challenges, not least the possibility that their conduct of the war could bring about their fall from power. Each exhibited mastery of detail and fascination with technology. All four were great learners, who studied war as if it were their own profession, and in many ways mastered it as well as did their generals. All found themselves locked in conflict with military men. All four triumphed. Military men often dismiss politicians as meddlers, doves, or naifs. Yet military men make mistakes. The art of a great leader is to push his subordinates to achieve great things. The lessons of the book apply not just to President Bush and other world leaders in the war on terrorism, but to anyone who faces extreme adversity at the head of a free organization -- including leaders and managers throughout the corporate world. The lessons of Supreme Command will be immediately apparent to all managers and leaders, as well as students of history. | 2002-09-22T00:00:00 | 0743230493 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/172771-1 |
159499-1 | Robert Putnam | Bowling Alone | Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified and describes in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone. Drawing on vast new data from the Roper Social and Political Trends and the DDB Needham Life Style—surveys that report in detail on Americans' changing behavior over the past twenty-five years—Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether the PTA, church, recreation clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. Our shrinking access to the "social capital" that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing is a serious threat to our civic and personal health. Putnam's groundbreaking work shows how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction. For example, he reports that getting married is the equivalent of quadrupling your income and attending a club meeting regularly is the equivalent of doubling your income. The loss of social capital is felt in critical ways: Communities with less social capital have lower educational performance and more teen pregnancy, child suicide, low birth weight, and prenatal mortality. Social capital is also a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, as it is of our health: In quantitative terms, if you both smoke and belong to no groups, it's a close call as to which is the riskier behavior. A hundred years ago, at the turn of the last century, America's stock of social capital was at an ebb, reduced by urbanization, industrialization, and vast immigration that uprooted Americans from their friends, social institutions, and families, a situation similar to today's. Faced with this challenge, the country righted itself. Within a few decades, a range of organizations was created, from the Red Cross, Boy Scouts, and YWCA to Hadassah and the Knights of Columbus and the Urban League. With these and many more cooperative societies we rebuilt our social capital. We can learn from the experience of those decades, Putnam writes, as we work to rebuild our eroded social capital. It won't happen without the concerted creativity and energy of Americans nationwide. Like defining works from the past that have endured—such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society —and like C. Wright Mills, Richard Hofstadter, Betty Friedan, David Riesman, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Theodore Roszak, Putnam has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do. —from the publisher's website | 2000-12-24T00:00:00 | 0684832836 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/159499-1 |
52150-1 | Charles Mee | Playing God | Charles Mee talked about his book, "Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World," published by Simon and Schuster. Seven examples of summit diplomacy, from Attila the Hun to a G7 meeting in London in 1991, were described. Mr. Mee called his book a group of essays rather than the results of research. | 1993-11-07T00:00:00 | 0671678884 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/52150-1 |
77139-1 | Edward Jay Epstein | Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer | Mr. Epstein talked about his new book, Dossier: The Secret Life of Armand Hammer, published by Random House. He talked about the public and private lives of Mr. Hammer, the chairman of Occidental Petroleum. He also revealed some of the more negative aspects of his life, including his ties to the KGB and and his philandering. The book is based on several new sources, including Soviet archives and the FBI file on Mr. Hammer. | 1997-01-05T00:00:00 | 0679448020 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/77139-1 |
99247-1 | John Marszalek | The Petticoat Affair | THE PETTICOAT AFFAIR, by award-winning historian John F. Marszalek, is the definitive account of the greatest political sex scandal in American history. It tells the fascinating story of Margaret O'Neale Eaton, the brash and unconventional wife of Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War, who was branded a "loose woman" and snubbed by Washington society. President Jackson, who had frequently dueled and brawled in defense of his own wife’s reputation, set out to protect Eaton's honor, and he did so with a vengeance. By the time the scandal that ensued was over, the entire cabinet resigned, duels were threatened, assassinations were attempted, John Calhoun's hopes for the White House were dashed, and Jackson's first term as nearly a failure. Washington's society ladies, Margaret Eaton's fiercest enemies, were the only bloody victors. Marszalek systematically tracks the escalation of events in a story that teems with conspiracy, slander, and paranoia. Reaching deep into the social context of the Jacksonian age, he shows how even the most powerful politicians ceded to an honor code that could not be broken. Both a riveting read and a fascinating window into our present-day politics of scandal, THE PETTICOAT AFFAIR is a deft exploration of the mores of another era and the timeless forces of ambition, conspiracy, and political intrigue. —from the publisher's website | 1998-03-08T00:00:00 | 0684828014 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/99247-1 |
176128-1 | Paul Theroux | Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town | —from the publisher's website In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux’s reputation, Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Going by train, dugout canoe, chicken bus, and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful and often life-threatening landscapes on earth. This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it, he writes, hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can’t tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation. Seeing firsthand what is happening across Africa, Theroux is as obsessively curious and wittily observant as always, and his readers will find themselves on an epic and enlightening journey. Dark Star Safari is one of his bravest and best books. | 2003-05-18T00:00:00 | 0618134247 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/176128-1 |
155602-1 | Allen Guelzo | Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President | A unique "intellectual biography" of America's most celebrated president. Despite tremendous interest in Abraham Lincoln and his place in one of America's most tumultuous historical periods, little has been written about his religious life. This truly fresh look at the nation's sixteenth president relates the outward events of Lincoln's life to his inner spiritual struggles and sets them both against the intellectual backdrop of his age. Allen Guelzo's unique intellectual biography explores the role of ideas in Lincoln's life, treating him as a serious thinker deeply involved in the nineteenth-century debates over politics, religion, and culture. Lincoln emerges here as a creative yet profoundly paradoxical man#151;a man possessed of deep moral and religious character yet without adherence to organized religion. More than a masterful biography of a great American figure, this volume also provides important insights into the ideas that have shaped the American landscape. Based on new materials recovered from the papers of Lincoln's early biographers, Guelzo's work sheds light on the intellectual conflicts that once led to civil war—and that still influence today's "culture wars." —from the publisher's website | 2000-04-16T00:00:00 | 0802838723 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/155602-1 |
151983-1 | Michael Kammen | American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change & the 20th Century | Intellectuals are often accused of viewing mass entertainment with contempt, fear, or condescension. The rise of cultural-studies programs in prestigious universities, however, reveals that this perception couldn't be further from the truth. In "American Culture, American Tastes," Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael G. Kammen explores the origins and implications of this new way that academics and critics celebrate, rather than condemn, popular tastes. In principle, Kammen supports recent scholarly forays into the effects of mass production and consumerism on Americans' leisure time. He is concerned, however, that the audience's relationship to contemporary media is greatly underappreciated. In attempting to distinguish "popular" from "mass" culture, Kammen argues that with films, music, radio, and popular fiction, certain "highbrow middlebrow, and lowbrow" levels emerged, targeting specific social classes or communities. These levels were quite permeable, however, and certain works, such as Shakespeare's plays and Charlie Chaplin's slapstick comedies, allowed audiences to transcend rigid categories of taste. In the television era, Kammen believes, leisure has become more passive and homogenized, however, and the era of democratic consumption that many modern intellectuals champion may be near an end. To combat this trend, Kammen, like Russell Jacoby, longs to resurrect "public intellectuals," such as H.L. Mencken and Dwight Macdonald, who pointedly combined a learned appreciation of popular culture with a genuine concern for preserving the vivacity of public life. In a field dominated by Marxists and feminists, this call for liberal cultural "authority" will raise some hackles in academe, but praise among general audiences. —John M. Anderson | 1999-10-24T00:00:00 | 0679427406 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151983-1 |
68638-1 | David Herbert Donald | Lincoln | Professor Donald talked about his recent book, Lincoln, published by Simon and Schuster . The book emphasizes four aspects of President Lincoln's life: his ambition, his law practice, his married life and his several electoral defeats. Parts of the audio cassette abridgement were also played. Professor Donald's first book was about President Lincoln's law partner. | 1995-12-24T00:00:00 | 068482535X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/68638-1 |
151784-1 | Stuart Rochester | Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973 | Among the many horrors of the Vietnam War, some of the most brutal and, until now, least documented were the experiences of the American prisoners of war, many of whom endured the longest wartime captivity of any POWs in U.S. history. With this book, two respected scholars in the field offer a comprehensive, balanced, and authoritative account of what happened to the nearly eight hundred Americans captured in Southeast Asia. The authors were granted unprecedented access to previously unreleased materials and interviewed more than one hundred former POWs, enabling them to meticulously reconstruct the captivity record as well as produce an evocative narrative of a once sketchy and misunderstood yet key chapter of the war. Powerful and moving in its portrayal of how the prisoners sought to cope with physical and psychological ordeals under the most adverse conditions, this landmark study separates fact from fiction. Its analysis of the shifting tactics and temperaments of captive and captor as the war evolved skillfully weaves domestic political developments and battlefield action with prison scenes that alternate between Hanoi's concrete cells, South Vietnam's jungle stockades, and mountain camps in Laos. Giving due praise but never shirking from criticism, the authors describe in gripping detail dozens of cases of individual courage and resistance, from celebrated heroes like Jim Stockdale, Robinson Risner, Jeremiah Denton, Bud Day, and Nick Rowe to lesser-known legends like Ray Schrump and Medal of Honor recipient Donald Cook. Along with epic accounts of endurance under torture, breathtaking escape attempts, and remarkable prisoner communication efforts, they also reveal Code of Conduct lapses and instances of outright collaboration with the enemy. Published twenty-five years after Operation Homecoming, which brought home 591 POWs from Vietnam, this tour-de-force history is a compelling and important work that serves as a testament to the courage, faith, and will of Americans in captivity, as well as a reminder of the sometimes impossible demands made on U.S. servicemen under the Code of Conduct in prisoner of war situations. It is vividly illustrated with maps, prisoners' renderings of camps and torture techniques, and dozens of photographs, many never before published. First published by the Government Printing Office in late 1998, the study has since been amended in response to additional information provided by former POWs for this Naval Institute Press edition. —from the publisher's website | 1999-10-10T00:00:00 | 1557506949 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151784-1 |
48693-1 | Lewis Lapham | The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay | Lewis Lapham discussed the research behind his book, "The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay," published by Grove Press, which examines the federal government in terms of the private idiosyncracies of high officials in recent presidential administrations. He detailed anecdotes in his book which cite the opulent lifestyles and actions taken by government officials in recent years. | 1993-08-15T00:00:00 | 0802114466 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/48693-1 |
95782-1 | Allan Metcalf | America In So Many Words | America in So Many Words presents a unique and fascinating historical view of this country's language. It chronicles, year by year, the contributions we have made to the vocabulary of English and the words we have embraced as the nation has evolved. From canoe (1555) and corn (1608) to newbie (1993) and Ebonics (1997), a prominent word for nearly every year in the history of our nation is analyzed and discussed in its historical context. The result is an engaging survey of American linguistic culture through the centuries. The authors—both lifelong students of American English—bring a great depth of understanding to the key words that have made the nation and the language what they are today. —from the publisher's website | 1998-01-18T00:00:00 | 0395860202 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/95782-1 |
55075-1 | Nathan McCall | Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America | Mr. McCall discussed his book, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, published by Random House. Mr. McCall's memoir discusses his childhood in Portsmouth, Virginia, his time in prison and rehabilitation, and his eventual employment with the Washington Post. The book describes his life and his coming to terms with the increase in crime and violence in cities and how it has affected him personally. He focuses primarily on his anger, his "blind rage" as a teenager, and the constructive uses of his anger as a journalist. | 1994-03-06T00:00:00 | 0679740708 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/55075-1 |
8143-1 | Elizabeth Colton | The Jackson Phenomenon | Elizabeth Colton, author of The Jackson Phenomenon and former press secretary to the Jackson campaign, explores the private as well as public persona of Jesse Jackson. Colton analyzes the impact of the Jackson campaign on America politics and says that while Jackson might never become president, he has opened the door for a black president. The author also discusses the private Jesse Jackson and the way he handles his closest advisors and friends. Colton concludes by predicting what Jackson will do in the next four years. | 1989-06-25T00:00:00 | 5551371905 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/8143-1 |
56058-1 | Howell Raines | Fly Fishing Through the Mid Life Crisis | Howell Raines spoke about the history of fly fishing and the hobby helped him through his midlife crisis. He authored a book about his experience called "Fly Fishing Through the Mid Life Crisis," published by William Morrow and Company. | 1994-05-01T00:00:00 | 9780688103460 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/56058-1 |
60989-1 | Bill Thomas | Club Fed: Power, Money, Sex and Violence on Capitol Hill | In ClubFed Bill Thomas, former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, uncovers in uproarious fashion exactly how and why the work of Congress - barely - gets done. He laces his knowing dissection of the Hill with invaluable insights into the legislative business of Congress: how bills get written - and how lobbyists, it seems, write most of them; how a bill is passed - and who gets the favors; how a congressman campaigns for reelection - from day one, and with money controlled by more powerful congressmen; and how Capitol Hill reporters carefully avoid the real news." "Since Washington, D.C., was founded in 1800, Capitol Hill has always been the worst possible neighborhood, both inside and outside the Capitol itself. It is still a dangerous area, where the murder rate rivals the South Bronx and the only people exempt from passing through metal detectors upon entering the Capitol are the members themselves. —from the publisher's website | 1994-11-06T00:00:00 | 0684196352 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/60989-1 |
17736-1 | Caroline Kennedy | In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action | The two attorneys discussed their book, "In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action." They said the book was written to show a such a short document written 200 years ago for a very different society has evolved to still be able to accommodate and protect today's America. The book is written by using stories of people and how disparate types of people have all used the Bill of Rights in their defense. The authors want to show how rights are really found in the human nature, not a document. Recent cases are also discussed in the book to show the judicial system in action as it shapes the meaning of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. These cases include topics such as freedom of speech, defendants' rights, and the right to keep and bear arms. | 1991-04-28T00:00:00 | 0833587544 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/17736-1 |
171603-1 | Pete Davies | American Road | —from the publisher's website A fascinating account of the greatest road trip in American history. On July 7, 1919, an extraordinary cavalcade of sixty-nine military motor vehicles set off from the White House on an epic journey. Their goal was California, and ahead of them lay 3,250 miles of dirt, mud, rock, and sand. Sixty-two days later they arrived in San Francisco, having averaged just five miles an hour. Known as the First Transcontinental Motor Train, this trip was an adventure, a circus, a public relations coup, and a war game all rolled into one. As road conditions worsened, it also became a daily battle of sweat and labor, of guts and determination. American Road is the story of this incredible journey. Pete Davies takes us from east to west, bringing to life the men on the trip, their trials with uncooperative equipment and weather, and the punishing landscape they encountered. Ironically one of the participants was a young soldier named Dwight Eisenhower, who, four decades later, as President, launched the building of the interstate highway system. Davies also provides a colorful history of transcontinental car travel in this country, including the first cross-country trips and the building of the Lincoln Highway. This richly detailed book offers a slice of Americana, a piece of history unknown to many, and a celebration of our love affair with the road. | 2002-09-29T00:00:00 | 080506883X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/171603-1 |
162197-1 | John McWhorter | Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority | —from the publisher's website Picking up where the bestselling Losing the Race left off, this penetrating and profound collection of essays by the controversial thinker and passionate advocate for racial enlightenment and achievement explores what it means to be black in America today. According to the author, nearly forty years after the Civil Rights Act, African-Americans in this country still remain "a race apart." He feels that modern black Americans have internalized a tacit message: "authentically black" people stress initiative in private but cloak the race in victimhood in public in order to protect black people from an ever-looming white backlash. He terms this the "New Double Consciousness" in homage to W.E.B. DuBois' description of a different kind of double consciousness in blacks a century ago. Within this context McWhorter takes the reader on a guided tour through the race issues dominant in our moment: racial profiling, getting past race, the reparations movement, black stereotypes in film and television, hip-hop, diversity, affirmative action, the word nigger , and Cornel West's resignation from Harvard. With his fierce intelligence and fervent eloquence, McWhorter makes a powerful case for the advancement of true racial equality. A timely and important work about issues that must be addressed by blacks and whites alike, Authentically Black is a book for Americans of every racial, social, political, and economic persuasion. | 2003-03-02T00:00:00 | 1592400019 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/162197-1 |
181230-1 | Nicholas Capaldi | John Stuart Mill: A Biography | —from the publisher's website Nicholas Capaldi’s biography of John Stuart Mill traces the ways in which Mill’s many endeavours are related and explores the significance of Mill’s contribution to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. He shows how Mill was groomed for his life by both his father James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, the two most prominent philosophical radicals of the early nineteenth century. Yet Mill revolted against this education and developed friendships with both Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who introduced him to Romanticism and political conservatism. A special feature of this biography is the attention devoted to his relationship with Harriet Taylor. No one exerted a greater influence than the woman he was eventually to marry. Nicholas Capaldi reveals just how deep her impact was on Mill’s thinking about the emancipation of women. | 2004-04-04T00:00:00 | 0521620244 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/181230-1 |
14122-1 | Janette Dates | Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media | Dean Dates discussed race relations in America and the coverage of racial issues in the media. She is co-editor of the book, Split Image: African Americans in the Media, published by Howard University Press. Dean Dates spearheaded the compilation of this book to provide a more balanced historical view of the African American contribution to media. She spoke of the dominant European culture which has established images and structures that impede the development and recognition of the subordinate African American culture, spanning from minstrel shows through today's hi-tech mass media. The editors chose to view the media as a split image, thus providing a "mechanism for grabbing hold of history and looking at it." The book points out the racial tug-of-war which makes young African Americans feel as if they do not have a stake in society. The other co-editor of the book is Dr. William Barlow, also of Howard University. | 1990-09-23T00:00:00 | 0882581791 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/14122-1 |
114491-1 | Melissa Muller | Anne Frank: The Biography | One of this book's great strengths is writer Melissa Müller's ability to situate Anne Frank's famous diary within a larger historical and biographical context—more than half of it covers the years before the Franks went into hiding. Equally important is her discovery of the existence of five pages Otto Frank removed from his daughter's original diary and entrusted shortly before his death to Cor Sujik, international director of New York's Anne Frank Center. Sujik showed these pages to Müller, who accurately notes in the biography that they "enhance our understanding of the diary's author." Until now, readers have known the eight people sequestered in the secret annex through Anne's eyes only. Müller reveals everyone's correct names (they were changed for the diary's publication) and tactfully corrects a teenager's skewed perceptions when necessary, always reminding us of the claustrophobic closeness and material deprivation that sometimes fueled Anne's uncharitable comments about, for example, the middle-aged dentist with whom she was forced to share a room. Müller also plausibly identifies the Dutch informant who betrayed the secret annex's inhabitants to the Gestapo. Horror suffuses Müller's grim recap of the Franks' ordeal at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, though there is some comfort in survivors' reports that Anne, her mother, and her older sister formed "an inseparable trio," all former quarrels forgotten in their fierce struggle to save each other. They failed, and Müller does not gloss over that tragedy. But she reminds us that, "In the end, the Nazi terror could not silence Anne's voice, which still rings out for all of us." —from the publisher's website | 1998-11-29T00:00:00 | 0805059970 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/114491-1 |
164644-1 | Jay Winik | April 1865: The Month That Saved America | April 1865 was a month that could have unraveled the nation. Instead, it saved it. Here Jay Winik offers a brilliant new look at the Civil War's final days that will forever change the way we see the war's end and the nation's new beginning. Uniquely set within the larger sweep of history, filled with rich profiles of outsize figures, fresh iconoclastic scholarship, and a gripping narrative, this is a masterful account of the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United States. It was not inevitable that the Civil War would end as it did, or that it would end at all well. Indeed, it almost didn't. Time and again, critical moments could have plunged the nation back into war or fashioned a far harsher, more violent, and volatile peace. Now, in a superbly told story, Winik captures the epic images and extraordinary history as never before. This one month witnessed the frenzied fall of Richmond; a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare; Lee's harrowing retreat; and then Appomattox. It saw Lincoln's assassination just five days later, and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation. In the end, April 1865 emerges as not just the tale of the war's denouement, but the story of the making of our nation. Provocative, bold, exquisitely rendered, and stunningly original, April 1865 is the first major reassessment of the Civil War's close and is destined to become one of the great stories of American history. —from jacket of the book | 2001-07-29T00:00:00 | 0060187239 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/164644-1 |
98739-1 | John Lukacs | The Hitler of History | In this brilliant, strikingly original book, historian John Lukacs delves to the core of Adolf Hitler's life and mind by examining him through the lenses of his surprisingly diverse biographers. Since 1945 there have been more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, and countless other books on him and the Third Reich. What happens when so many people reinterpret the life of a single individual? Dangerously, the cumulative portrait that begins to emerge can suggest the face of a mythic antihero whose crimes and errors blur behind an aura of power and conquest. By reversing the process, by making Hitler's biographers—rather than Hitler himself—the subject of inquiry, Lukacs reveals the contradictions that take us back to the true Hitler of history. Like an attorney, Lukacs puts the biographies on trial. He gives a masterly account of all the major works and of the personalities, methods, and careers of the biographers (one cannot separate the historian from his history, particularly in this arena); he looks at what is still not known (and probably never will be) about Hitler; he considers various crucial aspects of the real Hitler; and he shows how different biographers have either advanced our understanding or gone off track. By singling out those who have been involved in, or co-opted into, an implicit "rehabilitation of Hitler," Lukacs draws powerful conclusions about Hitler's essential differences from other monsters of history, such as Napoleon, Mussolini, and Stalin, and—equally important—about Hitler's place in the history of this century and of the world. —from the publisher's website | 1998-03-01T00:00:00 | 0375701133 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/98739-1 |
172900-1 | Frank Williams | Judging Lincoln | —from the publisher's website Judging Lincoln collects nine of the most insightful essays on the topic of the sixteenth president as written over the past twenty years by Frank J. Williams, chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and one of the nation’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln. For Judge Williams, Lincoln remains the central figure of the American experience past, present, and future. With this collection, he boldly reassesses Lincoln’s legacy as we enter the twenty-first century. Williams begins with a survey of the interest in and influence of Lincoln both at home and abroad and then moves into an analysis of Lincoln’s personal character with respect to his ability to foster relationships of equality among his intimates. Collectively, these first two sections demonstrate that the president’s international legacy as the Great Emancipator is well deserved. The third section addresses Lincoln’s leadership abilities during the span of his career, with particular emphasis on the Civil War. Classifying Lincoln’s leadership has been difficult, as he could at times adopt the stance of autocrat or democrat, conservative or liberal, idealist or Machiavellian. Williams defends the value of each stance within its historical context. Next, Williams enters into a qualitative comparison between Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill to explain why Lincoln not only ranks as America’s greatest leader but also holds that same position among the pantheon of all the world’s democratic leaders. Williams concludes this volume with an essay (written with Mark E. Neely Jr.) on collecting Lincoln artifacts as another means of preserving and fostering the Lincoln legacy. The quality of Williams’s own extensive collection is evidenced by the forty-nine illustrations included in this book from the Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana. | 2002-11-10T00:00:00 | 0809323915 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/172900-1 |
177888-1 | David Von Drehle | Triangle: The Fire That Changed America | —from the publisher's website On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village. Within minutes it had spread to consume the building's upper three stories. Firemen who arrived at the scene were unable to rescue those trapped inside: their ladders simply weren't tall enough. People on the street watched in horror as desperate workers jumped to their death. The final toll was 146 people -- 123 of them women. It was the worst disaster in New York City history. This harrowing yet compulsively readable book is both a chronicle of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and a vibrant portrait of an entire age. It follows the waves of Jewish and Italian immigration that inundated New York in the early years of the century, filling its slums and supplying its garment factories with cheap, mostly female labor. It portrays the Dickensian work conditions that led to a massive waist-worker's strike in which an unlikely coalition of socialists, socialites, and suffragettes took on bosses, police, and magistrates. Von Drehle shows how popular revulsion at the Triangle catastrophe led to an unprecedented alliance between idealistic labor reformers and the supremely pragmatic politicians of the Tammany machine. | 2003-10-05T00:00:00 | 0871138743 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/177888-1 |
183797-1 | Winslow Wheeler | The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security | —from the publisher's website In this damning exposé, a veteran senate defense advisor argues that since Sept. 11, 2001, the conduct of the U.S. Congress has sunk to new depths and endangered the nation’s security. Winslow Wheeler draws on three decades of work with four prominent senators to tell in lively detail how members of Congress divert money from essential warfighting accounts to pay for pork in their home states, cook the budget books to pursue personal agendas, and run for cover when confronted with tough defense issues. With meticulous documentation to support his claims, he contends that this behavior is not confined to one party or one political philosophy. He further contends that senators who sell themselves as reformers and journalists covering Capitol Hill are simply not doing their jobs. Pork is far from a new phenomenon in Washington, yet most Americans fail to understand its serious consequences. Wheeler knows the harm it does and challenges citizens to take action against lawmakers pretending to serve the public trust while sending home the bacon. Dubbed a “Hill Deep Throat” who participated in the game he now criticizes, he fills his book with evidence of Congressional wrongdoing, naming names and citing specific examples. Pointing to the extremes that have become routine in the legislative process, he focuses on defense appropriations and Congress’s willingness to load down defense bills with pork, in some cases with the Pentagon’s help. On the question of deciding war, he accuses today’s members of Congress of lacking the character of their predecessors, often positioning themselves on both sides of the question of war against Iraq without probing the administration’s justifications. Wheeler concludes with a model for reform that he calls twelve not-so-easy steps to a sober Congress. | 2004-11-07T00:00:00 | 159114938X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/183797-1 |
59608-1 | Irving Bartlett | John C. Calhoun: A Biography | Professor Bartlett talked about his book, John C. Calhoun: A Biography, which focuses on the life of this controversial politician from South Carolina, who also served as vice president during Andrew Jackson's administration. His particular area of study is how ideas influence American political culture. | 1994-09-18T00:00:00 | 0393034763 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/59608-1 |
159435-1 | Rick Bragg | Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg | In this collection of more than 60 of his published articles from the New York Times and elsewhere, Bragg relates stories that made headlines everywhere, such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the Susan Smith murder/kidnapping scandal, but he also tells stories of people who live beneath the media's radar, such a graveyard worker in charge of keeping the plots of the poor in shape, and a poor woman faced with a dilemma when the land her house sits on suddenly becomes worth a lot of money. —from the publisher's website | 2000-10-15T00:00:00 | 0817310274 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/159435-1 |
182450-1 | John McCain | Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life | —from the publisher's website “Courage,” Winston Churchill explained, is “the ?rst of human qualities . . . because it guarantees all the others.” As a naval officer, P.O.W., and one of America’s most admired political leaders, John McCain has seen countless acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Now, in this inspiring meditation on courage, he shares his most cherished stories of ordinary individuals who have risked everything to defend the people and principles they hold most dear. “We are taught to understand, correctly, that courage is not the absence of fear but the capacity for action despite our fears,” McCain reminds us, as a way of introducing the stories of ?gures both famous and obscure that he ?nds most compelling—from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to Sgt. Roy Benavidez, who ignored his own well-being to rescue eight of his men from an ambush in the Vietnam jungle; from 1960s civil rights leader John Lewis, who wrote, “When I care about something, I’m prepared to take the long, hard road,” to Hannah Senesh, who, in protecting her comrades in the Hungarian resistance against Hitler’s SS, chose a martyr’s death over a despot’s mercy. These are some of the examples McCain turns to for inspiration and offers to others to help them summon the resolve to be both good and great. He explains the value of courage in both everyday actions and extraordinary feats. We learn why moral principles and physical courage are often not distinct quantities but two sides of the same coin. Most of all, readers discover how sometimes simply setting the right example can be the ultimate act of courage. Written by one of our most respected public ?gures, Why Courage Matters is that rare book with a message both timely and timeless. This is a work for anyone seeking to understand how the mystery and gift of courage can empower us and change our lives. | 2004-08-01T00:00:00 | 1400060303 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/182450-1 |
159445-1 | Gretchen Rubin | Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life | —from the publisher's website Warrior and writer, genius and crank, rider in the British cavalry’s last great charge and inventor of the tank Winston Churchill led Britain to fight alone against Nazi Germany in the fateful year of 1940 and set the standard for leading a democracy at war. Like no other portrait of its famous subject, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is a dazzling display of facts more improbable than fiction, and an investigation of the contradictions and complexities that haunt biography. Gretchen Craft Rubin gives readers, in a single volume, the kind of rounded view usually gained only by reading dozens of conventional biographies. With penetrating insight and vivid anecdotes, Rubin makes Churchill accessible and meaningful to twenty-first-century readers with forty contrasting views of the man: he was an alcoholic, he was not; he was an anachronism, he was a visionary; he was a racist, he was a humanitarian; he was the most quotable man in the history of the English language, he was a bore. In crisp, energetic language, Rubin creates a new form for presenting a great figure of history—and brings to full realization the depiction of a man too fabulous for any novelist to construct, too complicated for even the longest narrative to describe, and too valuable ever to be forgotten. | 2003-08-10T00:00:00 | 0345450477 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/159445-1 |
152830-1 | Winston Churchill | The Great Republic: A History of America | The Great Republic is Sir Winston Churchill's personal vision of American history, from the arrival of the first European settlers to the dawn of the Cold War, edited by his grandson, the historian and journalist Winston S. Churchill. The book is a magnificent retelling of the American story, including some of the best short histories of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War ever written. The bulk of this book, America's history up to the twentieth century, has until now been found only within Churchill's much longer four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. The chapters on America from that larger work have been knit together into a whole, and to them Winston S. Churchill has added essays and speeches of his grandfather's, many never before published in book form, to bring the book up to the mid-twentieth century. Sir Winston Churchill's renown as a statesman has tended to overshadow his great gifts as a historian. History was the work of his heart's delight, and few subjects were dearer to him than America. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was American, and all of his life Churchill harbored a deep warmth of feeling for this country and a sense of its special destiny. With fondness, he called America "the Great Republic," and in his later years he trained all of his powers on the history this book contains. The Great Republic is stirring in its sweep and breathtaking in the flash and vigor of its insights. Only an author with Sir Winston Churchill's special perspective on America, his experience as a leader and strategist, his intimacy with the responsibilities of guiding a nation, and his great gifts as a narrative historian could have written a book that lays out America's history, character, and destiny with this book's special brilliance. —from the publisher's website | 1999-11-28T00:00:00 | 0375754407 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/152830-1 |
157235-1 | Joyce Appleby | Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans | Appleby presents a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who were born after the Revolution—the first generation to inherit a truly new world. —from the publisher's website | 2000-06-18T00:00:00 | 0674006631 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/157235-1 |
117774-1 | Frances FitzGerald | Reporting Vietnam | In the last few years, with the publication of such books as Jacques Leslie's The Mark and William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War , historians and former correspondents have been examining closely the role of journalism in the conduct of the Vietnam War. The two volumes of Reporting Vietnam offer a trove of material for such studies. Part One contains combat-front writing by journalists who are well known to students of Vietnam War history—Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam, Frances FitzGerald, Bernard Fall, Neil Sheehan, Ward Just, and Zalin Grant among them. The hefty volume—which runs the gamut of journalistic genres, including hard news, analysis, profiles, think pieces, and interviews—covers the home front as well, from which the likes of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe have their say. The collection opens with a fairly dispassionate account from Time magazine reporting the deaths of the first U.S. military advisors in 1959; it ends with the complete text of Daniel Lang's long New Yorker piece, "Casualties of War," the basis for Brian De Palma's controversial movie of the same name. In between are accounts of battles on the streets of Chicago and the Central Highlands, studies of the rise of black-power militancy on the ever-changing front lines, and perceptive portraits of ordinary soldiers on both sides of the war. Among the book's many highlights is Neil Sheehan's memoir of his change from hawk to dove as the war progressed. "I have sometimes thought," he writes, "when a street urchin with sores covering his legs stopped me and begged for a few cents' worth of Vietnamese piastres, that he might be better off growing up as a political commissar. He would then, at least, have some self-respect." Such changing views, we can now clearly see, helped shift public opinion in the United States against the war. —from the publisher's website | 1999-01-31T00:00:00 | 1883011582 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/117774-1 |
165238-1 | Ted Yeatman | Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend | To some he was a Robin Hood, a mythic figure of righteous retribution. To others he was the devil incarnate, a bloodthirsty hooligan and cold-blooded killer. The disparity between these views of the outlaw Jesse James is often attributed to an almost invisible link between marauding Missouri guerrilla bands of the Civil War and the general lawlessness that plagued the Old West. The beginning of the legend of the James brothers, which began in 1866—the first successful peacetime daylight bank robbery—is somewhat murky. But once their careers in crime commenced, the James brothers eluded capture for sixteen years, until Jesse was killed in 1882 by Bob and Charlie Ford while the three of them planned the robbery of the Platte City Bank. Frank was never apprehended but surrendered voluntarily to the governor of Missouri. Since then the exploits of the James gang have become legendary. Ted Yeatman began researching this book twenty-five years ago, reviewing materials in Missouri, Tennessee, Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Minnesota, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. He discovered items that had never been published, particularly a cache of Pinkerton letters concerning the firebombing of the James farm in 1875 (somewhat analogous to the FBI's role in the Branch Davidian crisis near Waco, Texas, in 1993) and heretofore overlooked papers in the National Archives regarding the Civil war activities and later banditry of the James brothers. Yeatman also assisted in the 1995 exhumation and forensic examination of the remains of Jesse. The result is a complete recount of the James brothers during the Civil War, the following sixteen years of notoriety, and the lives of those who outlived Jesse. Yeatman has created a thoroughly documented popular narrative that will be satisfying both to readers who know little or nothing about the James brothers and those who have read everything. Also included are dozens of heretofore unpublished illustrations and photographs of the people, places, and artifacts associated with the notorious brothers. —from the publisher's website | 2001-10-28T00:00:00 | 1581820801 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/165238-1 |
167904-1 | R. Kent Newmyer | John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court | John Marshall (1755-1835) was arguably the most important judicial figure in American history. As the fourth chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1801 to1835, he helped move the Court from the fringes of power to the epicenter of constitutional government. His great opinions in cases like Marbury v. Madison and McCulloch v. Maryland are still part of the working discourse of constitutional law in America. Drawing on a new and definitive edition of Marshall’s papers, R. Kent Newmyer combines engaging narrative with new historiographical insights in a fresh interpretation of John Marshall’s life in the law. Newmyer vividly unfolds Marshall’s early Virginia years his Americanization in Fauquier County before the Revolution, his decision to fight for independence as a principled soldier, and his emergence as a constitutional nationalist in the 1780s. Marshall’s experience as a Federalist politician and a leading Virginia lawyer during the 1790s, Newmyer argues, defined his ideas about judicial review and the role of the Supreme Court as a curb on party-based, states’-rights radicalism. Perhaps best known for consolidating the authority of the Supreme Court, Marshall is revealed here to have been equally skilled at crafting law that supported the emerging American market economy. He waged a lifelong struggle against champions of states’-rights constitutional theory, a struggle embodied in his personal and ideological rivalry with Thomas Jefferson. More than the summation of Marshall’s legal and institutional accomplishments, Newmyer’s impressive study captures the nuanced texture of the justice’s reasoning, the complexity of his mature jurisprudence, and the affinities and tensions between his system of law and the transformative age in which he lived. It substantiates Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s view of Marshall as the most representative figure in American law. —from the publisher's website | 2002-02-24T00:00:00 | 0807127019 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/167904-1 |
75273-1 | Paul Hendrickson | The Living and the Dead | In his book, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Mr. Hendrickson examines the impact of U.S. government actions on the lives of five people, particularly that of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. In this biography of McNamara, Hendrickson asks how McNamara got the job of Defense secretary, when he lost faith in the war and other issues. | 1996-10-27T00:00:00 | 0679427619 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/75273-1 |
75932-1 | Conor Cruise O'Brien | The Long Affair | Mr. O'Brien talked about his book, "The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800," published by the University of Chicago Press. He talked about Jefferson's strong commitment to democracy at any price as evidenced by his unflinching support of the excesses of the French Revolution and his stance on race relations. He argued that Jefferson was not as reserved and controlled in his defense of liberty as most people who cite his legacy believe. | 1996-11-17T00:00:00 | 0226616533 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/75932-1 |
73706-1 | Drew Gilpin Faust | Mothers of Invention | Ms. Gilpin talked about her new book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, published by University of North Carolina Press. It examines how Southern white women's roles changed as the men were away at the front and how these new roles permanently altered these women's views of their place in society. | 1996-09-01T00:00:00 | 0807822558 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/73706-1 |
7277-1 | Susan Moeller | Shooting War | Susan Moeller discusses the impact of photojournalism on the coverage of war in her book, "Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat." The Spanish-American War is presented as the first case in which photographs brought the reality of war home to Americans. Subsequent conflicts involving America are analyzed and the experience of wartime photographers is considered. | 1989-04-23T00:00:00 | 0465077773 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/7277-1 |
47389-1 | Molly Moore | A Woman at War: Storming Kuwait with the U.S. Marines | Molly Moore discussed her novel, "A Woman at War," which describes her experiences during the Persian Gulf War. She was a Washington Post war correspondent present in the Gulf. Topics included the events of the war, military censorship of news reports, and public perception of the war. | 1993-07-18T00:00:00 | 068419418X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/47389-1 |
8481-1 | Bruce Murray | Journey Into Space | Bruce Murray's book, "Journey Into Space: The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration," follows the history of the space program. He talked about the impact of politicians and famous space scientists on space exploration. He also explained the relationship of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) with Cal Tech, where he currently teaches and does research. In addition, Murray assessed the current status of the U.S. space program and expressed his optimism over the promises of the Bush administration concerning space exploration. | 1989-08-20T00:00:00 | 0393307034 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/8481-1 |
168797-1 | Leonard Downie Jr., Co-Author | The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril | From two of America’s most prominent and accomplished journalists, an impassioned investigation of an endangered species, good journalism. Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser both reporters and editors at the Washington Post for nearly four decades take us inside the American news media to reveal why the journalism we watch and read is so often so bad, and to explain what can be done about it. They demonstrate how the media’s preoccupation with celebrities, entertainment, sensationalism and profits can make a mockery of news. They remind us of the value of serious journalism with inside accounts of how great stories were reported and written a New York Times investigation of Scientology and the IRS, and a Washington Post exposé of police excesses. They recount a tense debate inside their own newsroom about whether to publicize a presidential candidate’s long-ago love affair. They also provide surprisingly candid interviews with Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw. The authors explain why local television news is so uninformative. They evaluate news on the Internet, noting how unreliable it can be, and why it is so important to the future of the news business. Coverage of the terrorist attacks on America in the fall of 2001 demonstrated that the news media can still do outstanding work, Downie and Kaiser write, but that does not guarantee a bright future for news. Their book makes exceedingly clear why serious, incorruptible, revelatory reporting is crucial to the health of American society if we are to be informed, equipped to make decisions and protected from the abuse of power. And it allows all of us to feel like insiders in one of America’s most powerful institutions, the media. "Drawing on their rich experience as top editors of the Washington Post , Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser have written a timely, thorough report on the future of news. They cite the pressures in journalism today, but reject easy gloom-and-doom conclusions-rather, they see the continuing value of good journalism, whatever its form, as crucial to our society." -David Laventhol, Editorial Director, Columbia Journalism Review "Rarely have such prominent, powerful editors broken with the gentlemen's club of journalism to take their colleagues to task so candidly. Reporting methodically from inside their profession, Downie and Kaiser skewer the profit-hungry miscreants and extol the solid, serious practitioners of a vital craft." -David K. Shipler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former New York Times reporter —from the publisher's website | 2002-04-07T00:00:00 | 0375408746 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/168797-1 |
181639-1 | Eric Lax | The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle | —from the publisher's website The untold story of the discovery of the first wonder drug, the men who led the way, and how it changed the modern world The discovery of penicillin in 1928 ushered in a new age in medicine. But it took a team of Oxford scientists headed by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain four more years to develop it as the first antibiotic, and the most important family of drugs in the twentieth century. At once the world was transformed—major bacterial scourges such as blood poisoning and pneumonia, scarlet fever and diphtheria, gonorrhea and syphilis were defeated as penicillin helped to foster not only a medical revolution but a sexual one as well. In his wonderfully engaging book, acclaimed author Eric Lax tells the real story behind the discovery and why it took so long to develop the drug. He reveals the reasons why credit for penicillin was misplaced, and why this astonishing achievement garnered a Nobel Prize but no financial rewards for Alexander Fleming, Florey, and his team. The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat is the compelling story of the passage of medicine from one era to the next and of the eccentric individuals whose participation in this extraordinary accomplishment has, until now, remained largely unknown. | 2004-05-02T00:00:00 | 0805077782 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/181639-1 |
181244-1 | Martin Marty | Martin Luther | —from the publisher's website Martin Marty—professor, author, pastor, historian, and journalist—is, in Bill Moyers’s words, “the most influential interpreter of American religion.” In Martin Luther this man of unswerving faith, rooted in his own Lutheran tradition yet deeply committed to helping enrich a pluralist society, brings to powerful life the devout Reformation figure whose despair for a perilous world, felt anew in our own times, drove him to a ceaseless search for assurance of God’s love. It was one that led him steadily to a fresh interpretation of human interaction with God—as born solely from God’s grace and not the Church’s mediation—and to the famous theses he posted at Wittenberg in 1517. Luther’s persistence in this belief, and in his long battle with Church leaders—embellished by rich historical background—make Marty’s biography riveting reading. Luther’s obdurate yet receptive stance, so different from the travestied image of “fundamentalism” we currently face, restored the balance between religion and the individual. Martin Luther is at once a fascinating history, a story of immense spiritual passion and amazing grace, and a superb intellectual biography. | 2004-04-11T00:00:00 | 0670032727 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/181244-1 |
56059-1 | Pete Hamill | A Drinking Life: A Memoir | Mr. Hamill talked about his book, A Drinking Life: A Memoir, published by Little Brown, which documents his life and his journey to sobriety. He also talked about the death of several friends as a result of self-destructive lifestyles. | 1994-05-29T00:00:00 | 0316341029 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/56059-1 |
72899-1 | Albert Murray | Blue Devils of Nada | Albert Murray talked about his book, "The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement," published by Pantheon. It is a collection of essays on the creative process through which various forms of art are created. He also described the milieu which gives American culture its distinctively open and inventive flavor. He highlighted jazz as the paramount example of American artistic endeavor. The title comes from the emptiness, in Spanish, "nada," of having the blues. | 1996-06-16T00:00:00 | 0679442138 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/72899-1 |
151235-1 | Richard Gephardt | An Even Better Place: America in the 21st Century | Considering his thirty-year career in public life, Representative Richard Gephardt, a leader of the Democrats and a possible presidential contender, is little known. This book will change that. In the spirit of Al Gore's Earth in the Balance and Bill Bradley's Time Present, Time Past , Gephardt's book is intended to provoke national debate. But the book also reveals a surprising portrait of a private man who rose to the highest ranks of Washington from the blue-collar streets of St. Louis. An Even Better Place arrives at the perfect moment. Gephardt's political message—that the new economy isn't fundamentally improving the quality of our lives, that we are neglecting our children, and that we need to rethink our relationship to our own government—will strike a chord with many Americans. And Gephardt, with his fundamental middle-American decency and his honest, down-to-earth style, will appeal to an America hungry for honorable leadership and sensible, sensitive policies on the issues that really concern them. Among the topics covered: · the collapse of civil discourse in American politics and its threat to mainaining our democracy—why Republicans and Democrats in Congress no longer speak to each other, let alone truly debate the issues · what the "New Economy" really means for most of us—and how our workplaces can be reformed to make them more democratic, fair, and profitable · the health care problem and the way we can make sure all of us can get coverage—and keep it · the impeachment mess—the first comment, from the the inside, on the Clinton scandal, the divisive attempt to drive the president from office and what it means in the long-term · why American schools are failing our children—and how they can be turned around · how to renew our sense of citizenship and participation in our communities and the political process · why we need to "think like owners" in our workplaces and our communities Congressman Gephardt will donate his proceeds from this book to charity. —from the publisher's website | 1999-08-01T00:00:00 | 1891620169 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151235-1 |
12086-1 | Robert Caro | Means of Ascent | Mr. Caro discussed his book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, published by Knopf. He described his research into the life of Lyndon Johnson and noted that he examined approximately 629,000 pages of documents from the Johnson Presidential Library. He spoke about his work, discussing his experience as a newspaper reporter as well as his early interest in writing biography. He talked about Lyndon Johnson's early life in Texas, his complicated relationship with Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn, Lady Bird Johnson's evolution as a public persona, and the attitudes of former Johnson intimates about the book. | 1990-04-29T00:00:00 | 0394528352 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/12086-1 |
179312-1 | Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) | Like No Other Time | —from the publisher's website Tom Daschle, the Majority Leader of the historic 107th Senate, presents a candid insider’s account of the workings of the U.S. government during two of the most tumultuous years in the nation’s history. The 107th Congress faced a time like no other in the life of the nation. This was the era of the first presidential election to be decided by the United States Supreme Court, the fifty-fifty Senate, the horror of September 11, the anthrax attacks on media and the government (including Daschle’s own office), the war on terrorism, corporate scandals that shook the economy, the inexorable move toward war with Iraq, and other dramatic events, all leading up to the historic midterm elections of 2002. Through it all, Senator Tom Daschle had, with the exception of the President, the most privileged view of these unfolding developments, both in front of and behind the closed doors of government. In Like No Other Time , Daschle offers a riveting account of his singular perspective on a time when the nation faced deadly and elusive external enemies and a level of domestic political contention rarely seen in American history. Senator Daschle is un-flinching in his impressions of the key political figures of our time from both parties. The result is an acutely perceptive assessment of how our government met—and sometimes did not meet—the challenges of a remarkable era. As it was during the years of the 107th Congress, the United States is once again at a critical and historic crossroads. Our choices, based on what we have learned from our recent past, will affect our future in profound ways. For Senator Daschle, the first and perhaps most important choice lies with what kind of representation and leadership we want in government. It is a choice between a political party with a core philosophical belief in the power of our collective will to confront these challenges through our government, and one dominated by a group of people who don’t like and don’t believe in government. | 2003-11-30T00:00:00 | 1400049555 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/179312-1 |
159434-1 | Diane Ravitch | Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms | For the past one hundred years, Americans have argued and worried about the quality of their schools. Some have charged that students were not learning enough, while others have complained that the schools were not in the forefront of social progress. In this authoritative history of education in the twentieth century, historian Diane Ravitch describes this ongoing battle of ideas and explains why school reform has so often failed. Left Back recounts grandiose efforts by education reformers to use the schools to promote social and political goals, even when they diminished the schools' ability to educate children. It shows how generations of reformers have engaged in social engineering, advocating such innovations as industrial education, intelligence testing, curricular differentiation, and life-adjustment education. These reformers, she demonstrates, simultaneously mounted vigorous campaigns against academic studies. Left Back charges that American schools have been damaged by three misconceptions. The first is the belief that the schools can solve any social or political problem. The second is the belief that only a portion of youngsters are capable of benefiting from a high-quality education. The third is that imparting knowledge is relatively unimportant, compared to engaging students in activities and experiences. These grave errors, Ravitch contends, have unnecessarily restricted equality of educational opportunity. They have dumbed down the schools by encouraging a general lowering of academic expectations. They have produced a diluted and bloated curriculum and pressure to enlarge individual schools so that they can offer multiple tracks to children with different occupational goals. As a result, the typical American high school is too big, too anonymous, and lacks intellectual coherence. Ravitch identifies several heroic educators—such as William T. Harris, William C. Bagley, and Isaac Kandel—who challenged these dominant and wrong-headed ideas. These men, dissidents in their own times, are usually left out of standard histories of education or treated derisively because they believed that all children deserved the opportunity to meet high standards of learning. In describing the wars between competing traditions of education, Ravitch points the way to reviving American education. She argues that all students have the capacity to learn and that all are equally deserving of a solid liberal arts education. Left Back addresses issues of the utmost importance and urgency. It is a large work of history that by recovering the past illuminates a future. —from the publisher's website | 2000-10-08T00:00:00 | 0684844176 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/159434-1 |
37708-1 | Robert Gilbert | The Mortal Presidency | Mr. Gilbert talked about his new book The Mortal Presidency, which looks at five U. S. presidents and their medical histories. He described various types of illnesses that afflicted these former presidents. He also proposed the idea that many of these illnesses were caused by the rigors of the office of president. | 1993-01-24T00:00:00 | 0823218376 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/37708-1 |
30839-1 | Robert Donovan | Unsilent Revolution: Television News & American Life | Mr. Donovan and Mr. Scherer discussed their book, Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life, published by Cambridge University Press, and its main themes. They each commented on their personal experiences with the media. They also described the impact television has had on the American public. They said that events such as the civil rights movement, the famine in Africa, the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, and the space program were influenced greatly by television coverage. | 1992-08-09T00:00:00 | 0521428629 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/30839-1 |
26896-1 | William Rehnquist | Grand Inquests | Chief Justice Rehnquist described a little history of the U.S. Supreme Court in his book, "Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson," published by William Morrow and Company. The book details the impeachment hearings of Justice Samuel Chase of the United States Supreme Court in 1805 and of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Justice Rehnquist said that both of these trials in the first half of the nineteenth century helped define the separation of powers of the United States government. | 1992-07-05T00:00:00 | 0306706202 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/26896-1 |
181452-1 | Christopher Benson | Death of Innocence | —from the publisher's website There are many heroes of the civil rights movement—men and women we can look to for inspiration. Each has a unique story, a path that led to a role as leader or activist. Death of Innocence is the heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring story of one such hero: Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till—an innocent fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who paid for it with his life. His outraged mother’s actions galvanized the civil rights movement, leaving an indelible mark on American racial consciousness. Mamie Carthan was an ordinary African-American woman growing up in 1930s Chicago, living under the strong, steady influence of her mother’s care. She fell in love with and married Louis Till, and while the marriage didn’t last, they did have a beautiful baby boy, Emmett. In August 1955, Emmett was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped from his bed in the middle of the night by two white men and brutally murdered. His crime: allegedly whistling at a white woman in a convenience store. His mother began her career of activism when she insisted on an open-casket viewing of her son’s gruesomely disfigured body. More than a hundred thousand people attended the service. The trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, accused of kidnapping and murdering Emmett (the two were eventually acquitted of the crime), was considered the first full-scale media event of the civil rights movement. What followed altered the course of this country’s history, and it was all set in motion by the sheer will, determination, and courage of Mamie Till-Mobley—a woman who would pull herself back from the brink of suicide to become a teacher and inspire hundreds of black children throughout the country. Mamie Till-Mobley, who died in 2003 just as she completed this memoir, has honored us with her full testimony: “I focused on my son while I considered this book. . . . The result is in your hands. . . . I am experienced, but not cynical. . . . I am hopeful that we all can be better than we are. I’ve been brokenhearted, but I still maintain an oversized capacity for love.” Death of Innocence is an essential document in the annals of American civil rights history, and a painful yet beautiful account of a mother’s ability to transform tragedy into boundless courage and hope. | 2004-04-25T00:00:00 | 0812970470 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/181452-1 |
61272-1 | Milton Friedman | 50th Anniversary Edition of F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom | Milton Friedman discussed F.A. Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom. Professor Friedman, who wrote the introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition of the book, described its effect on the ever-changing political and social climates of the twentieth century. He discussed the book's influence on the rise of socialism after World War II, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the 1980s, and the shift in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in the 1990s. Professor Friedman is author many books, including Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom. | 1994-11-20T00:00:00 | 0226320596 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/61272-1 |
8950-1 | Walter Laqueur | The Long Road to Freedom: Russia & Glasnost | null | 1989-09-03T00:00:00 | 0684190303 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/8950-1 |
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