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35197-1 | Charles Sykes | A Nation of Victims | Charles Sykes discussed the ideas behind his book, "A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character," published by St. Martin's Press. He said the main concept of his book involves the increasing decline of personal responsibility and the use of alibis and blame for personal advancement in American society. He also discussed his research for the book, and the implications of his main premise concerning "victim groups." | 1992-11-29T00:00:00 | 0312098820 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/35197-1 |
78480-1 | Sarah Gordon | Passage to Union | Sarah Gordon was interviewed about her book, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929, published by Ivan R. Dee. The book chronicles the history of the first 100 years of the American railroad system. Ms. Gordon detailed the effect train travel had on the rural economy and the lives of ordinary citizens. Ms. Gordon, a high school history teacher, discussed her lifelong love of railroads, which led to the writing of the book. She said that the burgeoning of the railroads, especially passenger travel, was symbolic of the change to a mass American culture from a more individualistic one. | 1997-03-09T00:00:00 | 1566631386 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/78480-1 |
156370-1 | David Wise | Cassidy's Run: The Street Spy War Over Nerve Gas | More than a cloak-and-dagger tale, Cassidy's Run is the heartwarming story of one ordinary man, Sergeant Joe Cassidy, not trained as a spy but who suddenly found himself the FBI's secret weapon in a dangerous secret war of photos. —from the publisher's website | 2000-05-07T00:00:00 | 0375501533 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/156370-1 |
60458-1 | Harry Jaffe | Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. | The authors discussed their book, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of DC, published by Simon and Schuster. They focused on former Washington, DC Mayor Marion Barry, his rise to political power, his arrest by the black chief of police, and his current campaign to recover the mayorship. They also described Washington's legacy of racism, white guilt, and current African American politics. | 1994-10-02T00:00:00 | 0671768468 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/60458-1 |
55946-1 | James McPherson | What They Fought For, 1861-1865 | James McPherson discussed his book "What They Fought For, 1861-1865," an examination of the people who fought in the U.S. Civil War. He wrote the book after years of teaching U.S. History at Princeton University. | 1994-05-22T00:00:00 | 0385476345 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/55946-1 |
69336-1 | Johanna Neuman | Lights, Camera, War: Is Media Technology Driving International Politics? | Johanna Neuman discussed her book, "Lights, Camera, War: Is Media Technology Driving International Politics?," published by St. Martin's Press. She concluded that new forms of media do not drive diplomacy. She covers the history of new media technology such as the telegraph, which always causes the diplomatic corps to fear losing their best weapons of time and patience. President Carter is cited as the first president to be affected by "live" satellite television in the Iran hostage crisis. She also analyzed media coverage of the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War. | 1996-03-10T00:00:00 | 0312140045 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/69336-1 |
15191-1 | Cpt. Carol Barkalow | In the Men's House | Captain Barkalow, one of the first women accepted into the U.S. Military Academy, described her experiences in In the Men's House: An Inside Account of Life in the Army by One of West Point's First Female Graduates. Captain Barkalow also includes in her book information from over 60 interviews of both male and female classmates at West Point. She focused on the demanding physical training at the academy and the emotional and mental hazing female cadets underwent because of their gender. | 1990-12-02T00:00:00 | 0425132692 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/15191-1 |
163925-1 | Edward Said | Reflections on Exile and Other Essays | With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms what no one can doubt—that Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time—and offers further evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and our culture. As in the title essay, the widely admired Reflections on Exile, the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and the force of intimacy to the questions Said has pursued. Taken together, these essays—from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers—afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. Said's topics are many and diverse, from the movie heroics of Tarzan to the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. He offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Invigorating, edifying, acutely attentive to the vying pressures of personal and historical experience, his book is a source of immeasurable intellectual delight. —from the publisher | 2001-06-17T00:00:00 | 0674003020 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/163925-1 |
181421-1 | John McCaslin | Inside the Beltway | —from the publisher's website Washington Times columnist, John McCaslin, brings his unique and successful column to a full-length format in this collection of Washington’s funniest, strangest, and most touching stories. For more than a decade, John McCaslin has covered the Beltway beat for the Washington Times , in his extremely popular, widely quoted, award-winning column. Now, in his new book, McCaslin explores a vast array of little-known political tidbits, using humor, touching stories, and exclusive inside details to show readers exactly how the political game is played, revealing the humanity (for better or worse) of today’s biggest politicos. With his characteristic blend of humor and warmth, McCaslin relates exclusive stories that will make readers laugh, leave them outraged, and touch their hearts about politicians on both sides of party lines and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. | 2004-10-17T00:00:00 | 0785261915 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/181421-1 |
160555-2 | Kurt Eichenwald | The Informant: A True Story. Part 2 | From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy—which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man . . . It was one of the FBI's biggest secrets: a senior executive with America's most politically powerful corporation, Archer Daniels Midland, had become a confidential government witness, secretly recording a vast criminal conspiracy spanning five continents. Mark Whitacre, the promising golden boy of ADM, had put his career and family at risk to wear a wire and deceive his friends and colleagues. Using Whitacre and a small team of agents to tap into the secrets at ADM, the FBI discovered the company's scheme to steal millions of dollars from its own customers. But as the FBI and federal prosecutors closed in on ADM, using stakeouts, wiretaps, and secret recordings of illegal meetings around the world, they suddenly found that everything was not all that it appeared. At the same time Whitacre was cooperating with the Feds while playing the role of loyal company man, he had his own agenda he kept hidden from everyone around him—his wife, his lawyer, even the FBI agents who had come to trust him with the case they had put their careers on the line for. Whitacre became sucked into his own world of James Bond antics, imperiling the criminal case and creating a web of deceit that left the FBI and prosecutors uncertain where the lies stopped and the truth began. In this gripping account unfolds one of the most captivating and bizarre tales in the history of the FBI and corporate America. Meticulously researched and richly told by New York Times senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, The Informant re-creates the drama of the story, beginning with the secret recordings, stakeouts, and interviews with suspects and witnesses to the power struggles within ADM and its board—including the high-profile chairman Dwayne Andreas, F. Ross Johnson, and Brian Mulroney—to the big-gun Washington lawyers hired by ADM and on up through the ranks of the Justice Department to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno. A page-turning real-life thriller that features deadpan FBI agents, crooked executives, idealistic lawyers, and shady witnesses with an addiction to intrigue, The Informant tells an important and compelling story of power and betrayal in America. —from the publisher | 2001-02-11T00:00:00 | 0767903269 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/160555-2 |
169169-1 | Michael Novak | On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding | "The leaders of the American Revolution were not, like the leaders of the French revolution, secularists. They did not set out to erase religion. Quite the opposite." Michael Novak points out in this brilliant book about the birth of the American idea that the very first act of the Continental Congress in September, 1774, was to pray to Divine Providence for insight on how to respond to news of the British bombardment of Boston. In setting a course for republican self-government, the founders not only believed that they were acting reasonably but that they were carrying out God's commandment. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God." Of course there had been religious peoples before in history-including Jews and Christians-who did not see in faith the beacon of civil liberty. Novak points out that the American eagle could not have risen without the empirical turn of mind embodied in John Locke's teaching on the ends of government and the consent of the governed. Yet as he also shows, the founders believed that liberty depended on certain habits of the heart-and that these in turn depended on faith as well as reason. Novak probes the innermost convictions of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the others who helped the American eagle to take wing. He shows how they were able to find common ground by appealing to the God of the Hebrews. He traces what happened to this "Hebrew metaphysics" as the world of the founders became the world of modernity. In the course of his career, Michael Novak has written several prize-winning books on theology and philosophy. Now, in "On Two Wings," he has written a profound work on American history and on human nature and destiny as well. —from the publisher's website | 2002-03-17T00:00:00 | 1893554341 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/169169-1 |
158908-1 | Michael Paterniti | Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain | Albert Einstein's brain floats in formaldehyde in a Tupperware® bowl in a gray duffel bag in the trunk of a Buick Skylark barreling across America. Driving the car is Michael Paterniti, a young journalist from Maine. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955—and simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years. On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars. Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature. With the brain as both cargo and talisman, Paterniti perceives every motel, truck-stop diner, and roadside attraction as a weigh station for the American dream in the wake of the scientist's mind-blowing legacy. Finally, inspired by the man who gave a skeptical world a glimpse of its cosmic origins, this extraordinary writer weaves his own unified field theory of time, love, and the power to believe, once again, in eternity. —from the publisher's website | 2000-09-24T00:00:00 | 0385333005 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/158908-1 |
179914-1 | Kenneth Silverman | Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse | —from the publisher's website In this brilliantly conceived and written biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning Kenneth Silverman gives us the long and amazing life of the man eulogized by the New York Herald in 1872 as “perhaps the most illustrious American of his age.” Silverman presents Samuel Morse in all his complexity. There is the gifted and prolific painter (more than three hundred portraits and larger historical canvases) and pioneer photographer, who gave the first lectures on art in America, became the first Professor of Fine Arts at an American college (New York University), and founded the National Academy of Design. There is the republican idealist, prominent in antebellum politics, who ran for Congress and for mayor of New York. But most important, there is the inventor of the American electromagnetic telegraph, which earned Morse the name Lightning Man and brought him the fame he sought. In these pages, we witness the evolution of the great invention from its inception as an idea to its introduction to the world—an event that astonished Morse’s contemporaries and was considered the supreme expression of the country’s inventive genius. We see how it transformed commerce, journalism, transportation, military affairs, diplomacy, and the very shape of daily life, ushering in the modern era of communication. But we discover as well that Morse viewed his existence as accursed rather than illustrious, his every achievement seeming to end in loss and defeat: his most ambitious canvases went unsold; his beloved republic imploded into civil war, making it unlivable for him; and the commercial success of the telegraph engulfed him in lawsuits challenging the originality and ownership of his invention. Lightning Man is the first biography of Samuel F. B. Morse in sixty years. It is a revelation of the life of a fascinating and profoundly troubled American genius. | 2004-02-22T00:00:00 | 0375401288 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/179914-1 |
151353-1 | Leslie Chang | Beyond the Narrow Gate | An epic of four Chinese women and their journey from East to West. When the Communists took over mainland China, among the many that were forced to flee their homeland were four remarkable women. Arriving in Taiwan in 1948, Dolores, Suzanne, Margaret, and Mary met at the elite First Girls School, the "narrow gate" where a lucky few could become eligible for U.S. visas. In this refuge, their characters were built, their friendships were formed, and their eyes were focused on the future—a life in America, where their paths would diverge dramatically. But this group portrait does not end once the women reach America. Beyond the Narrow Gate chronicles the struggles and hardships the women faced in their new country and breaks new ground by taking readers outside of Chinatown into diverse communities and families, effectively re-drawing the map of Asian America. The daughter of one of her subjects, journalist Leslie Chang weaves her own personal story as a second-generation Chinese American into her narrative, illuminating generational differences and conflicts. She unflinchingly examines the experience of feeling like a stranger in both the white and Chinese communities, the constraints of parental expectations, and the complexity of interracial relationships. Impeccably researched, beautifully written, Beyond the Narrow Gate is an unforgettable epic of American immigration, a true story as riveting as any novel. —from the publisher's website | 1999-09-05T00:00:00 | 0525942572 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151353-1 |
69707-1 | H.W. Brands | The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s | Mr. Brands talked about his book, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s, published by St. Martin's Press . He characterized the decade as dealing with the end of the U.S. frontier West and looking forward to a new century, and in which populism was in conflict with political elitism. He described individuals such as Teddy Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan and William Jennings Bryant. | 1996-02-25T00:00:00 | 0312135947 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/69707-1 |
112659-1 | Charles Lewis | The Buying of the Congress | A startling and groundbreaking expose, The Buying of the Congress details the ways in which special interests worm themselves into the lives of Capitol Hill lawmakers—who in turn protect polluters, cigarette manufacturers, food producers, the airline industry, the insurance industry, corporate tax cheats, and other big-money interests. What does all this have to do with you? You cannot shop at the local supermarket or drugstore, visit a hospital emergency room, watch television, pay your taxes, or even breathe the air outside your home without being directly affected by the decisions that Congress makes—decisions that, increasingly, favor special interests at your expense. Now, Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity—the watchdog organization that brought us the explosive The Buying of the President and broke the story of how the Clinton Administration "rented out" the Lincoln Bedroom—reveal just how and why Congress has been so unresponsive to the basic concerns of ordinary citizens. Based on the work of an investigative team of more than three dozen people, the conclusions they reach are simple—and simply frightening. Deftly exposing the Byzantine channels through which unprecedented sums of money flow into Washington, The Buying of the Congress reveals facts like these: Although thousands of Americans dies each year from poisoned foods and millions more become ill, Congress has consistently protected the food industry from tougher safety standards. In the past decade, the food industry has fed Members of Congress more that $40 million in campaign contributions. Fortune 500 firms gave more than $180 million to Capitol Hill lawmakers from 1987 to 1996. In return, Congress has cut their taxes dramatically. Today, corporate income taxes account for just 10 percent of all federal revenue—down from 28 percent in 1956. Every year, hundreds of teenagers are killed on the job and tens of thousands more are injured. Yet Congress has toed the line of the fast-food industry and other well-heeled groups in weakening child-labor laws. In addition, the authors offer lists of the top career patrons—from realtors to petroleum conglomerates to Japanese auto lobbyists to gun-advocacy groups—of congressional leaders such as Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, Tom Daschle, and Richard Gephardt. Exhaustively researched and documented, chilling in its portrait of systematic corruption, The Buying of the Congress reveals that too many of our nation's lawmakers have betrayed not only the American people but the principles on which this country was founded. This book is a clarion call to action, a spur to all of us to demand accountability and reform from those who call themselves our servants. —from the publisher's website | 1998-11-01T00:00:00 | 0380975963 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/112659-1 |
170827-1 | Sandra Mackey | The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein | Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein is high on America's enemies list but does an Iraq without him hold the seeds of the next Yugoslavia? To the dismay of many in the West, the Gulf War ended with Saddam Hussein still in control, still defiant, and more determined to use any means of striking back. How far did he go? And now that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban has been vanquished and the al Quaeda network scattered, how far should the United States go in pursuit of its war on terrorism? The central question posed in this book is whether a future Iraq without Saddam Hussein will be even more unstable and more problematical to the security of the United States. The Reckoning is an account of the forces historical, religious, ethnic, and political that produced Saddam's dictatorship. Forged after World War I from the Mesopotamian provinces of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, Iraq has never had a national identity or a sense of common purpose. Hussein, ruling by terror rather than by persuasion, pitted the various ethnic groups, religious interests, and tribes against one another and in so doing achieved the destruction of Iraq's middle class and civilized society. After he goes, however he goes, the country could be the site of conflict even more vicious than the Balkan wars. Now more than ever, the future of Iraq is of critical importance to America's dealings with the Muslim world, and Sandra Mackey's informed narrative gives us a new understanding of the politics and national character of the country. —from the publisher's website | 2002-07-07T00:00:00 | 0393051412 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/170827-1 |
72745-1 | Ted Sorensen | Why I Am a Democrat | Ted Soreson discussed his book, "Why I Am a Democrat," published by Henry Holt and Company. The book focuses on the Democratic Party's basic principles on several public policy issues and how these differ with Republican principles. He also talked about why people should still be proud to be true Democrats in an age seemingly dominated by Republicans. | 1996-07-14T00:00:00 | 0805044140 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/72745-1 |
166458-1 | Midge Decter | An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War | "What has happened to me over the course of the past seven decades has in one way or another happened to many if not all present-day American women—from the almost dizzyingly rapid ringing of changes to the discover of that in our lives which is never changing." This beautifully written book offers a memorable chronicle of American life since the 1940s that is hard to match in sweep, unconventional thought, and hard-won wisdom on subjects ranging from the relations between the sexes to the relations between America and the world. One of the nation's most renowned female conservatives, Midge Decter is known for her frequently controversial stands on modern social issues. An Old Wife's Tale is her thoughtful examination of the lives of American women and men over the last sixty years, as viewed through the lens of her own life. From stories of her youth during World War II—when Decter and her friends learned that "only the class beauty and the class tramp had no difficulty with the dating system"—to a surprising and often hilarious picture of what the 1950s were really like to an account of her later roles as a single mother, publishing executive, happily married woman, political iconoclast, and doting grandmother, Decter paints a singular portrait of a life lived on the front lines of American culture. By turns serious, wry, and deeply personal, An Old Wife's Tale brings us an important new perspective on twentieth-century American life. —from jacket of the book | 2001-10-07T00:00:00 | 0060394285 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/166458-1 |
60408-1 | Nicholas Kristof | China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power | The authors discussed their book, "China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power," published by Times Books. The husband-and-wife team were formerly based in Beijing, China, and this book is a result of their experiences there. The book details Ms. WuDunn's visit to the village of her immigrant grandfather and her shock at the extreme poverty of its citizens, some of whom are her distant cousins. The authors described the "brutal" birth control policies of present-day China, but also noted some progress in democratic practices, such as the rise of radio "talk shows." | 1994-10-16T00:00:00 | 1857881583 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/60408-1 |
163061-1 | Don Hewitt | Tell Me A Story: 50 years and 60 Minutes in Television | One of the towering figures of television recounts his adventures in broadcast journalism, from TV's earliest days through the controversies and challenges that face the news business today. Don Hewitt is the most successful producer in the history of television news. In more than a half century with CBS News, he has been responsible for many of the greatest moments in television history, including the first broadcasts of political conventions in 1948; the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960; and, most spectacularly, for the past thirty-two years, 60 Minutes, the news program that has redefined television journalism, for which he has been the creator, executive producer, and driving force. In Tell Me a Story , Hewitt presents his own remarkable life story, from his time as a reporter for Stars & Stripes during World War II, to the heady exhilaration of the early days of television, to the triumphs and controversies of 60 Minutes. Hewitt has been at the center of events, and his book is populated by the leading cultural and political figures of our century-Charles Lindbergh, Frank Sinatra, William S. Paley, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and many others-as well as the all-star roster of journalists with whom he has worked. Hewitt also speaks bluntly, with affection and humor, about the promise and the shortcomings of television news, and offers surprising perspectives on its continued power and potential, as we move into a new media environment. "I may not know a lot," Hewitt is fond of saying, "but I think I know how to tell a story." Never has his storytelling talent been on better display than in the pages of this extraordinary book. —from the publisher | 2001-04-01T00:00:00 | 1586480170 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/163061-1 |
14257-1 | Tim Weiner | Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget | Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize winning Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer, discussed his book, "Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget." The work is an historical review and critique of the nation's skyrocketing military spending through the Pentagon's "black" or secret budget. In 1990, this budget reached $10.3 billion; nine years earlier, it was $626 million. Mr. Weiner said the secrecy of the military's spending "is primarily to avert criticism and evaluation-- and that is profoundly antidemocratic." He traced the roots and public ignorance of these covert activities back to the Manhattan Project, the World War II crash program to build the atomic bomb. Much of the book's research is drawn from interviews with Richard Garwin, who was involved with developing the hydrogen bomb in the 1950's and served as a presidential adviser and defense consultant for over four decades. | 1990-10-21T00:00:00 | 0446392758 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/14257-1 |
95193-1 | Jim Hightower | There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos | With his unique progressive populism, Jim Hightower addresses the problems of the disenfranchised and working-class as they are pitted against the interests of the corporate elite. Consistent in his assessments of the American political structure and society, Hightower's views are certain to spark a national debate regarding the country's most complex issues. —from the publisher's website | 1997-12-21T00:00:00 | 0060187662 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/95193-1 |
63955-1 | Alvin Toffler | Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave | The authors discussed their book, "Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave," published by Turner Publishing. The husband-and-wife team have written many books together that focus on the changes in a society. The book focuses on the political elites and the change from a second wave to a third wave. They feel political elites are the decision makers and need to be flexible in order for a society to change. | 1995-04-16T00:00:00 | 1570362238 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/63955-1 |
7302-1 | Henry Brandon | Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent's Memoirs | The Chief Washington correpondent of the London Sunday Times and author of Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent's Memoirs, Henry Brandon, recounts his 34 year experience in the city. Highlighted are recollections of Presidents ranging from Roosevelt to Reagan and a detailed analysis of the Cuban missile crisis. Mr. Brandon also ponders the U.S. rise to super- power status and the "special relationship" that exists between the United States and Great Britain. | 1989-04-30T00:00:00 | 0689115881 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/7302-1 |
19109-1 | Michael Beschloss | The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 | Mr. Beschloss provided a history of the relations between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and its impact on the Cold War. Beschloss, a Chicago native, did his undergraduate work at Williams College and received his graduate degree from Harvard University. He was allowed to obtain new information about the years 1960-1963 due to the reforms in the Soviet Union as well as the Freedom of Information Act. Beschloss explained the parallels in the Kennedy and Khruschev administrations, particularly in the roles of Robert F. Kennedy and the son-in-law of Khruschev. Beschloss stated that his most valuable sources of information came from interviews conducted in the Soviet Union. He also mentioned the importance of his new findings about the Bay of Pigs and the Berlin Wall operations of the early 1960s. | 1991-07-14T00:00:00 | 0060164549 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/19109-1 |
68744-1 | Lance Banning | The Sacred Fire of Liberty | Professor Banning discussed his book, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic, published by Cornell University Press. The book is a biography of President James Madison from 1780, when he entered the federation Congress at age 29, through the end of 1792. | 1996-02-11T00:00:00 | 0801431522 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/68744-1 |
161211-1 | Dinesh D'Souza | The Virtue of Prosperity | We live in an era of unprecedented prosperity. The United States has created the first mass affluent class in world history, and most of us are more successful than we ever dreamed we could be. New technologies have given us extraordinary abilities to communicate and share information, and also godlike power over nature and ourselves. Yet, individually and collectively, we are divided about the new economy. Its champions embrace the power of technological capitalism and the wealth it creates—they believe it will feed and heal and liberate the world. Its detractors warn that techno-capitalism creates enormous inequalities, undermines families and communities, and destroys our most cherished values. How can we heal this division that runs deep in our society, and in our hearts? How can we learn to be happy with our success? —from the publisher | 2001-01-14T00:00:00 | 0684868148 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/161211-1 |
52741-1 | Margaret Thatcher | The Downing Street Years | Margaret Thatcher discussed her book, "The Downing Street Years," published by Harper Collins. This first volume of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs encompasses the whole of her time as Prime Minister - the formation of her goals in the early 1980s, the Falklands, the General Election victories of 1983 and 1987 and, eventually, the circumstances of her fall from political power. She also gives frank accounts of her dealings with foreign statesmen and her own ministers. —from the publisher's website | 1993-12-05T00:00:00 | 0340258977 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/52741-1 |
79680-1 | Leonard Garment | Crazy Rhythm | Mr. Garment talked about his book, Crazy Rhythm: My Journey from Brooklyn, Jazz, and Wall Street to Nixon's White House, Watergate and Beyond, published by Times Books. He reminisced about his 30-year friendship with Richard Nixon. His book is a memoir of his unusual life, from his early years as saxophonist for Billie Holiday to his later career as the only liberal and Jew in President Nixon's inner circle. | 1997-04-20T00:00:00 | 0812928873 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/79680-1 |
17444-1 | Tom Wicker | One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream | Tom Wicker discussed his book, "One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream." He wrote the book in an attempt to explain how other presidents have faced more serious problems than Nixon did, but were still more accepted by the public. For instance, he compares Nixon's Watergate scandal to Reagan's Iran-Contra affair, and points out the Reagan's situation may have been more serious but his never had a serious threat of impeachment. In his book, he examines the people and events which shaped the 37th president's life and aspirations. He explained his motivation to write the book as a desire "to understand this strange, elusive, even bizarre man. He also talked about the effect Nixon's presidency had on politics at the time of his resignation, and how the effect has continued through the present day. | 1991-04-07T00:00:00 | 0394550668 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/17444-1 |
44365-1 | Joel Krieger | The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World | Joel Krieger discussed his book, "The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World," which is "an effort to put into one volume a whole host of interpretations and information about an area of on-going concern ..." The book deals with domestic and international affairs throughout the world, and attempts to reconcile world politics with national politics. The book contains articles by over 500 authors from over 40 countries, including National Security Advisor Anthony Lake on the Vietnam War. | 1993-07-04T00:00:00 | 0195117395 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/44365-1 |
58661-1 | Colman McCarthy | All of One Peace: Essays on Nonviolence | Mr. McCarthy spoke about his new book All of One Peace: Essays on Non-Violence which outlines his views on being a pacifist in a military society. The book includes several "massacres" including the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and the U.S. bombing of Tripoli, Lebanon. He began his political criticism during the war in Vietnam. Mr. McCarthy's collection of essays addresses how peace education might counter our society's violent impulses, and other topics including the death penalty, animal rights, abortion rights and the benefits of bicycle riding. He presented a gourd and a tomato to the interviewer and chided him not to eat them with meat. A vegetarian, Mr. McCarthy referred to meats as corpses and stated a general rule of not eating "anything that has a mother." | 1994-07-31T00:00:00 | 0813520975 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/58661-1 |
55778-1 | Andrew Young | A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young | Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young discussed his book "A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young," published by Thomas Nelson. It is an autobiographical work that highlights his time as a civil rights leader and his religious feelings. The author discussed what led him to the ministry, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. through the streets of Birmingham and Selma, and what happened on the day King was assassinated. Mr. Young explains how his work as a leader in the civil rights movement has enabled him to serve as a U.S. congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta. Mr. Young talked about the police beating of his son and the similar beating that happened to him thirty years ago. | 1994-04-03T00:00:00 | 0840769989 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/55778-1 |
52323-1 | Herbert Block | Herblock: A Cartoonist's Life | Mr. Block discussed his book Herblock: A Cartoonist's Life published by Macmillan Publishing Co. He has been a political cartoonist since the Roosevelt administration and has enjoyed drawing caricatures since grade school. | 1993-11-14T00:00:00 | 0812930541 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/52323-1 |
165360-1 | Hampton Sides | Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission | A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POWs who had spent three years in a surreally hellish camp near the city of Cabanatuan. The prisoners included the last survivors of the Bataan Death March left in the camp, and their extraordinary will to live might soon count for nothing-elsewhere in the Philippines, the Japanese Army had already executed American prisoners as it retreated from the advancing U.S. Army. As the Rangers stealthily moved through enemy-occupied territory, they learned that Cabanatuan had become a major transshipment point for the Japanese retreat, and instead of facing the few dozen prison guards, they could possibly confront as many as 8,000 battle-hardened enemy troops. Hampton Sides's vivid minute-by-minute narration of the raid and his chronicle of the prisoners' wrenching experiences are masterful. But Ghost Soldiers is far more than a thrilling battle saga. Hampton Sides explores the mystery of human behavior under extreme duress-the resilience of the prisoners, who defied the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and unspeakable tortures; the violent cultural clashes with Japanese guards and soldiers steeped in the warrior ethic of Bushido; the remarkable heroism of the Rangers and Filipino guerrillas; the complex motivations of the U.S. high command, some of whom could justly be charged with abandoning the men of Bataan in 1942; and the nearly suicidal bravado of several spies, including priests and a cabaret owner, who risked their lives to help the prisoners during their long ordeal. At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark books as Flags of Our Fathers, The Greatest Generation, The Rape of Nanking, and D-Day in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations. —from the publisher | 2001-09-30T00:00:00 | 0385495641 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/165360-1 |
183137-1 | John Ferling | Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 | —from the publisher's website It was a contest of titans: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two heroes of the Revolutionary era, once intimate friends, now icy antagonists locked in a fierce battle for the future of the United States. The election of 1800 was a thunderous clash of a campaign that climaxed in a deadlock in the Electoral College and led to a crisis in which the young republic teetered on the edge of collapse. Adams vs. Jefferson is a gripping account of a true turning point in American history, a dramatic struggle between two parties with profoundly different visions of how the nation should be governed. Adams led the Federalists, conservatives who favored a strong central government, and Jefferson led the Republicans, egalitarians who felt the Federalists had betrayed the Revolution of 1776 and were backsliding toward monarchy. The campaign itself was a barroom brawl every bit as ruthless as any modern contest, with mud-slinging--Federalists called Jefferson "a howling atheist"--scare tactics, and backstabbing. The low point came when Alexander Hamilton printed a devastating attack on Adams, the head of his own party, in "fifty-four pages of unremitting vilification." The election ended in a stalemate in the Electoral College that dragged on for days and nights and through dozens of ballots. Tensions ran so high that the Republicans threatened civil war if the Federalists denied Jefferson the presidency. Finally a secret deal that changed a single vote gave Jefferson the White House. A devastated Adams left Washington before dawn on Inauguration Day, too embittered even to shake his rival's hand. Jefferson's election, John Ferling concludes, consummated the American Revolution, assuring the democratization of the United States and its true separation from Britain. With magisterial command, Ferling brings to life both the outsize personalities and the hotly contested political questions at stake. He shows not just why this moment was a milestone in U.S. history, but how strongly the issues--and the passions--of 1800 resonate with our own time. | 2004-10-03T00:00:00 | 0195167716 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/183137-1 |
18135-1 | Robert Reich | The Work of Nations: 21st Century Capitalism | Professor Reich, former staff member of the Ford and Carter administrations, discussed his book The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. He discussed recent changes in national economic and industrial systems around the world and the effects of increasing industrial globalization of industry on national economies. His book examines the process through which the huge pyramidal structures of American industries in the 1950's are giving way to more flexible and geographically diverse international industries as technologies improve communication around the world. Professor Reich also discussed his experiences working as an intern in the office of Robert Kennedy, in the office of solicitor general Robert Bork, and as Director of Policy Planning for the Federal Trade Commission in the Ford and Carter administrations. | 1991-05-26T00:00:00 | 0679736158 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/18135-1 |
177827-1 | Eric Rauchway | Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America | —from the publisher's website How an assassin, a dead President, and Theodore Roosevelt defined the Progressive Era. When President McKinley was murdered at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901, Americans were bereaved and frightened. Rumor ran rampant: A wild-eyed foreign anarchist with an unpronounceable name had killed the Commander-in-Chief. Eric Rauchway's brilliant Murdering McKinley re-creates Leon Czolgosz's hastily conducted trial and then traverses America as Dr. Vernon Briggs, a Boston alienist, sets out to discover why Czolgosz rose up to kill his President. While uncovering the answer that eluded Briggs and setting the historical record straight about Czolgosz, Rauchway also provides the finest portrait yet of Theodore Roosevelt at the moment of his sudden ascension to the White House. For Czolgosz was neither a foreigner nor much of an anarchist. Born in Detroit, he was an American-made assassin of such inchoate political beliefs that Emma Goldman dismissed him as a police informant. Indeed, Brigg's search for answers---in the records of the Auburn New York State penitentiary where Czolgosz was electrocuted, in Cleveland where Leon's remaining family lived---only increased the mystery. Roosevelt, however, cared most for the meanings he could fix to this "crime against free government all over the world." For Roosevelt was every inch the calculating politician, his supposed boyish impulsiveness more feint than fact. At one moment encouraging the belief that Czolgosz's was a political crime, at the next that it was a deranged one, Roosevelt used the specter of McKinley's death to usher in Progressive Era America. So why did Czolgosz do it? Only Rauchway's careful sifting of long-ignored evidence provides an answer: heart-broken, recently radicalized, and thinking he had only months to live, Leon decided to take the most powerful man in America with him. | 2003-09-21T00:00:00 | 0809071703 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/177827-1 |
163566-1 | John Farrell | Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century | The definitive biography of Thomas Philip Tip O'Neill, the greatest post-War Speaker of the House, and the rise and decline of Democratic politics from an award-winning political reporter. To read John A. Farrell's account of Tip O'Neill is to take a walk through the greatest moments of post-World War II American politics. O'Neill's career began with the start of the New Deal, and his final foe was Newt Gingrich. From the Melting Pot to Watergate, Tip saw it all, and was no mere bystander to the turmoil of his times. No governor, member of congress, president, or any Democratic leader witnessed so many of his party's historic triumphs and failures. —from the publisher | 2001-05-20T00:00:00 | 0316260495 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/163566-1 |
61059-1 | Liz Carpenter | Unplanned Parenthood | The author discussed her book Unplanned Parenthood: The Confessions of a Seventysomething Surrogate Mother, published by Random House. The book focuses on Ms. Carpenter's experiences raising her three teenage nieces and nephews at age seventy-nine. She also discussed her years in the White House working as press secretary for Lady Bird Johnson. | 1994-10-23T00:00:00 | 0679427988 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/61059-1 |
123099-1 | Joseph Stevens | 1863: Rebirth of a Nation | American history has never seen a more tumultuous or more significant year than 1863. During this crucial time the tide of the Civil War turned inexorably from the Confederacy to the Union, with momentous consequences that are still being felt today. It was a year of upheaval unparalleled in our national experience: twelve months of searing brutality and ennobling sacrifice, 365 stirring, dramatic days that changed our country forever. Integrating the events of this epochal year into a panoramic narrative, Joseph E. Stevens presents a grand portrait of the Union and Confederacy at war. He captures two nations struggling to define the American experiment and create a new understanding of freedom on the bloody battlefields of Stones River, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. He also traces the astonishing political, economic, and social transformations that marked 1863 as a watershed. 1863 features a remarkable cast of characters: larger-than-life leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; charismatic and controversial military commanders like Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, Joseph Hooker, Stonewall Jackson, George Armstrong Custer, and Nathan Bedford Forrest; avaricious young capitalists like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan; war-haunted writers like Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman; war-inspired painters like Winslow Homer and Conrad Wise Chapman. Here, too, is a host of less well known but no less fascinating personalities: soldiers and civilians, slaves and slave owners, farmers and city dwellers, politicians and profiteers, artistocrats and refugees. Their stories—humorous and harrowing, inspiring and appalling—make 1863 not just a sweeping re-creation of events but a gripping human tale as well. 1863 is popular history at its best—vivid, vibrant, and immensely readable. Written with dramatic intensity and impassioned humanity, it is a thrilling account of the pivotal year of the war that remains the central historical event in the life of our nation. —from the publisher's website | 1999-06-13T00:00:00 | 0553103148 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/123099-1 |
161212-1 | Robert Scigliano | The Federalist Papers | The series of essays that comprise The Federalist constitutes one of the key texts of the American Revolution and the democratic system created in the wake of independence. Written in 1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to promote the ratification of the proposed Constitution, these papers stand as perhaps the most eloquent testimonial to democracy that exists. They describe the ideas behind the American system of government: the separation of powers; the organization of Congress; the respective positions of the executive, legislative, and judiciary; and much more. The Federalist remains essential reading for anyone interested in politics and government, and indeed for anyone seeking a foundational statement about democracy and America. This new edition of The Federalist is edited by Robert Scigliano, a professor in the political science department at Boston College. His substantive Introduction sheds clarifying new light on the historical context and meaning of The Federalist. Scigliano also provides a fresh and definitive analysis of the disputed authorship of several sections of this crucial work. —from the publisher | 2001-01-21T00:00:00 | 0679603255 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/161212-1 |
182064-1 | Thomas Barnett | The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century | —from the publisher's website A groundbreaking reexamination of U.S. and global security, certain to be one of the most talked about books of the year. Since the end of the Cold War, America's national security establishment has been searching for a new operating theory to explain how this seemingly "chaotic" world actually works. Gone is the clash of blocs, but replaced by what? Thomas Barnett has the answers. A senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, he has given a constant stream of briefings over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policymakers-and now he gives it to you. The Pentagon's New Map is a cutting-edge approach to globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to do no less than predict and explain the nature of war and peace in the twenty-first century. Building on the works of Friedman, Huntington, and Fukuyama, and then taking a leap beyond, Barnett crystallizes recent American military history and strategy, sets the parameters for where our forces will likely be headed in the future, outlines the unique role that America can and will play in establishing international stability-and provides much-needed hope at a crucial yet uncertain time in world history. For anyone seeking to understand the Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Liberias of the present and future, the intimate new links between foreign policy and national security, and the operational realities of the world as it exists today, The Pentagon's New Map is a template, a Rosetta stone. Agree with it, disagree with it, argue with it-there is no book more essential for 2004 and beyond. | 2004-05-30T00:00:00 | 0399151753 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/182064-1 |
76689-1 | David Denby | David Denby "Great Books" | Mr. Denby discussed his book, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, published by Simon and Schuster. Mr. Denby attended courses on Western civilization at Columbia University in 1991, thirty years after he first studied there, in preparation for the book. Mr. Denby outlines the curriculum of the course and recounts how the literature covered in the class has shaped both his personal and professional life. He talked about his experiences during this time as well as the role of such works in higher education. | 1996-12-22T00:00:00 | 0684809753 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/76689-1 |
25368-1 | Robert Remini | Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union | Professor Remini talked about his published book, "Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union," published by W.W. Norton. The book focuses on the life and career of Henry Clay, the famous orator from Kentucky, who served as Speaker of the House for ten years in the early nineteenth century. He made the Speaker's office one of the most powerful in the nation second only to the president's. | 1992-05-05T00:00:00 | 0393310884 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/25368-1 |
151209-1 | Mark Pendergrast | Uncommon Grounds | From its discovery on an ancient Ethiopian hillside to its role as millennial elixir in the Age of Starbucks, coffee has dominated and molded the economies, politics, and social structures of entire countries. The second most valuable exported legal commodity on earth, coffee delivers the largest jolt of the world's most widely taken psychoactive drug. Revolutions have been planned, romanced sparked, business deals seals, novels written and friendships cemented over this potent brew. By the author of For God, Country and Coca-Cola , Uncommon Grounds unfolds a panoramic story of epic proportions, a tale of how coffee trees came to girdle the globe between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Grown on tropical mountainsides by poor laborers, coffee beans travel half-way around the world to the coffee bars of the United States, Europe and Japan, where cosmopolitan consumers pay half a day's Third World wages for a good cup of coffee. Coffee has been banned as a creator of revolutionary sedition, vilified as the worst health-destroyer on earth and praised as the book of mankind. Its history provides a window through which to view broader themes of colonialism and culture clash, the rise of mass production, modern-day media and marketing, women's issues and international commodity schemes. It also illustrates how an entire industry can lose focus, allowing upstart micro-roasters to reclaim quality and profits. Mark Pendergrast enlivens his scrupulously researched history with anecdotes, eccentric characters and period commentary that will give readers stories to share-over good cups of coffee-for years to come. An uncommon brew, Uncommon Grounds offers a coffee-flavored history of the modern world. —from the publisher's website | 1999-08-29T00:00:00 | 0465036317 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151209-1 |
67215-1 | Nicholas Basbanes | A Gentle Madness | Mr. Basbanes talked about his recent book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books, published by Henry Holt and Company. The book focuses on the history of book collecting and preserving over the past 2500 years. It also covers the book collecting culture, including rare book buying and selling, through interviews with various book collectors. | 1995-10-15T00:00:00 | 0805036539 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/67215-1 |
81017-1 | Walter McDougall | Promised Land, Crusader State | From The Federalist Papers and Alexis de Toqueville to Freud and Clint Eastwood, there has been a connection between U.S. foreign policy and American attitudes, principles, and language. In PROMISED LAND, CRUSADER STATE: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall meditates on the underlying themes and principles that have informed those foreign policies since the American Revolution, with an eye toward formulating what ought to be the guidelines of American foreign policy in the post Cold War era. "Americans, habitually given either to isolationism or crusades, find themselves in the novel position of being unable either to escape or remake a nettlesome world," McDougall says. Taking up the torch of George Kennan, McDougall offers guidelines for post-Cold War American foreign policy. He discusses which American traditions we ought to preserve (or rediscover) and apply to diplomacy today, and which traditions we may safely discard as irrelevant or even repugnant. He combines a healthy dose of skepticism with common sense to explore and argue in favor of non-intervention. PROMISED LAND, CRUSADER STATE looks back over two centuries and draws a striking contrast between America as a Promised Land, a vision that inspired the "Old Testament" of our diplomatic wisdom through the nineteenth century, and the contrary vision of America as a Crusader State, which inspired the "New Testament" of our foreign policy beginning at the time of the Spanish-American War and reaching its fulfillment in Vietnam. McDougall's survey of American foreign policy identifies eight traditions from which to reshape foreign policy: Liberty (or Exceptionalism), Unilateralism (or Isolationism), the American System (or Monroe Doctrine), Expansionism (or Manifest Destiny), Progressive Imperialism, Liberal Internationalism (or Wilsonianism), Containment, and Global Meliorism. Entertaining, fast-paced, and learned, PROMISED LAND, CRUSADER STATE is an iconoclastic reinterpretation of the traditions that have shaped U.S. foreign policy from 1776 to the present. —from the publisher's website | 1997-06-15T00:00:00 | 0395830850 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/81017-1 |
61995-1 | Robert Wright | The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are | Robert Wright discussed his book, "The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology." The book focuses on a new way of understanding the evolution of human nature by looking at how animals evolved through natural selection. | 1995-01-08T00:00:00 | 0679763996 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/61995-1 |
11450-1 | Frederick Kempe | Divorcing the Dictator | In Kempe's book, "Divorcing the Dictator: America's Bungled Affairs with Noriega," his theme is that the U.S. started the relationship in 1960 without thinking of the consequences. "The United States created the problem that we later had to correct with an invasion." He discussed researching Noriega's early childhood and getting access to the Panamanian dictator's inner circle. Kempe compared his book to the book "Our Man In Panama," written by John Dinges, that was published at the same time. Both were published shortly after the December 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. | 1990-03-11T00:00:00 | 0399135170 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/11450-1 |
55945-1 | Forrest McDonald | The American Presidency: An Intellectual History | Forrest McDonald is widely recognized as one of our most respected and challenging commentators on the Constitution and the American founding. Writing at the height of his powers as an intellectual historian, he now applies his considerable talents to a study of another venerable institution--the American presidency. McDonald explores how and why the presidency has evolved into such a complex and powerful institution, unlike any other in the world. He chronicles the presidency's creation, implementation, and evolution and explains why it's still working today despite its many perceived afflictions. Along the way, he provides trenchant commentary on the Constitutional Convention, ratification debates, presidencies of Washington and Jefferson, presidential administration and leadership, presidential--congressional conflicts, the president as chief architect of foreign policy, and the president as myth and symbol. He also analyzes the enormous gap between what we've come to expect of presidents and what they can reasonably hope to accomplish. Ambitious, comprehensive, and engaging, this is the best single-volume study of an institution that has become troubled and somewhat troublesome yet, in McDonald's words, "has been responsible for less harm and more good than perhaps any other secular institution in history." It will make a fine and necessary companion for understanding the presidency as it moves into its third century. —from the publisher's website | 1994-05-15T00:00:00 | 0700606521 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/55945-1 |
80193-1 | Richard Bernstein | The Coming Conflict with China | Mr. Bernstein talked about the book which he co-authored with Ross Munro titled The Coming Conflict with China, published by Knopf. It examines the increasing frictions between the U.S. and China on a broad variety of issues, including security, trade and human rights, and the likelihood that China will be the next major U.S. rival. He also talked about his experiences while visiting and working in China as a foreign journalist. | 1997-05-11T00:00:00 | 0679454632 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/80193-1 |
176665-1 | Paul Berman | Terror and Liberalism | —from the publisher's website A manifesto for an aggressive liberal response to terrorist attacks. Paul Berman is one of our most brilliant writers on the impassioned and unpredictable life of ideas especially the doctrines that lead masses of people to try to change the world. The Terror War is nothing new or unprecedented. It is the same battle that tore apart Europe during most of the twentieth century—the battle between liberalism and its totalitarian enemies. Islam is not the cause of this war. Islam is the arena in which the war is presently being fought. Berman shows how a genuine spiritual inspiration can be twisted into a fanatical demand for murder. He offers remarkable insights into the trends and conflicts influencing Islamic radicalism. He illuminates the surprising connections between very different political movements, and he reveals the several ways in which Islamic extremism resembles some all-too-familiar episodes in American and European experience. He is the historian of good intentions gone awry. Berman draws on sources that range from Albert Camus's The Rebel to the Book of Revelations; from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb's magisterial In the Shade of the Koran . Berman condemns the foreign policy "realism" of the political right, and he diagnoses the naïveté of the political left. He calls for a "new radicalism" and a "liberal American interventionism" to promote democratic values throughout the world—a vigorous new politics of American liberalism. Berman's ability to shine a spotlight of history and philosophy on the present era makes him a peerless interpreter of today's events. This short book of original argument and dazzling prose will remain a guidepost for discussion for years to come. | 2003-06-22T00:00:00 | 0393057755 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/176665-1 |
174388-1 | Margaret MacMillan | Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World | —from the publisher's website Between January and July 1919, after the war to end all wars, men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel whose troubles haunt us still. | 2002-12-29T00:00:00 | 0375508260 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/174388-1 |
92609-1 | David Gelernter | Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber | For many of us, an appreciation for life—a commitment to drawing it in our own image—does not begin until we are confronted with loss or, as David Gelernter was, our own death. Gelernter is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale, well-known for his skepticism about computers and his anti-technology musings. A writer, an artist, and a family man, he also has been the recipient of two mailings from the Unabomber. The mailbomb that almost killed Gelernter m June of 1993 changed his life forever. Beyond its permanent physical markings, the experience infused Gelernter with a sense of both moral outrage and obligation. Thus, DRAWING LIFE is more than a memoir. Gelernter offers what is at once a meditation on contemporary cultural values that priviledge "victims" and "tolerance" and an argument that posits that we have lost our ability to make moral judgments and, worse, have abandoned the concept of evil. Gelernter was especially enraged by the way in which the media sought to get his story, to make him the newest tragedy in the headlines. "Those of us who hate today's victim culture," Gelernter writes, "don't hate it because we are Teddy Roosevelts aiming to build character and toughen people up (not that there is anything wrong with that program); we hate it because it inflicts harm. When you encourage a man to see himself as a victim of anything—crime, poverty, bigotry, bad luck—you are piling bricks on his chest." Further, when the Unabomber was discovered, a major news magazine's cover story about the Unabomber labeled him a "Mad Genius." To this Gelernter responds, "In the end, this is an argument for eliminating the very idea of guilt, and I can only guess that the attraction in calling a criminal 'mad' is that it gets you off the hook and you don't have to be judgmental. But a society too squeamish to call evil by its right name has destroyed its first, best defense against cutthroats." Our moral compass is gone. he argues. and it is time we decide to reestablish our bearings. In DRAWING LIFE, David Gelernter shares his moving journey to recovery with us as a metaphor for hope: As he heals his wounds and makes new the pieces of his past, he urges that our nation do the same. —from the publisher's website | 1997-11-16T00:00:00 | 0684839121 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/92609-1 |
62271-1 | Peter Robinson | Snapshots From Hell: The Making of an MBA | Mr. Robinson discussed his recent book Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an M.B.A., published by Warner Books. The book deals with the author's experiences during his first year at the Stanford School of Business. He described himself as a "poet," or a business student with little quantitative background. He also discussed his experiences as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan prior to attending Stanford. | 1994-12-18T00:00:00 | 9780446517867 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/62271-1 |
80382-1 | Anne Matthews | Bright College Years: Inside the American Campus Today | Ms. Matthews talked about her new book, Bright College Years: Inside the American Campus Today, published by Simon and Schuster. In the book, she attempts to answer some basic questions the public has about college campuses today such as what college is for and what is going on inside U.S. colleges and universities, including fraternity life, college administration and classroom teaching. She spent four years on one hundred campuses to research the book. | 1997-05-18T00:00:00 | 0226510921 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/80382-1 |
68953-1 | Colin Powell | My American Journey | Colin Powell talked about his book, "My American Journey," published by Random House, which chronicles his life, including his military service in Vietnam and the Gulf War and the rebuilding effort between the two conflicts. He also talked about the process of writing, including his cooperation with Joseph E. Persico, who collaborated with him on the book, and his tour around the U.S. to promote the book. He also commented on his political views and future plans. | 1996-01-07T00:00:00 | 0679432965 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/68953-1 |
10427-1 | Marvin Kitman | The Making of the President 1789 | George Washington was said to be "First in War, First in Peace." In The Making of the President 1789 , humorist Marvin Kitman argues that our first president was also the first American leader to ride his personal foibles to political greatness. Kitman lampoons the modern "campaign insider" books, asking: "How is it possible that a man with no military experience becomes a general? He loses more battles than he wins and becomes a war hero? He has absolutely no political opinions in the most sophisticated intellectual period of our history? He has no ambitions, and he wins?" Through careful research, Kitman exposes Washington's weaknesses for social climbing and high-stakes whist and his relationships with the Founding Girlfriends. —from the publisher's website | 1989-12-11T00:00:00 | 0802137350 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/10427-1 |
174896-1 | Bernard Bailyn | To Begin the World Anew | —from the publisher's website With these character sketches of key figures of the American Revolution and illuminating probes of its circumstances, Bernard Bailyn reveals the ambiguities, complexities, and uncertainties of the founding generation as well as their achievements. Using visual documentation portraits, architecture, allegorical engravings as well as written sources, Bailyn, one of our most esteemed historians, paints a complex picture of that distant but still remarkably relevant world. He explores the powerfully creative effects of the Founders’ provincialism and lays out in fine detail the mingling of gleaming utopianism and tough political pragmatism in Thomas Jefferson’s public career, and the effect that ambiguity had on his politics, political thought, and present reputation. And Benjamin Franklin emerges as a figure as cunning in his management of foreign affairs and of his visual image as he was amiable, relaxed, and amusing in his social life. Bailyn shows, too, why it is that the Federalist papers polemical documents thrown together frantically, helter-skelter, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in a fierce political battle two hundred years ago have attained canonical status, not only as a penetrating analysis of the American Constitution but as a timeless commentary on the nature of politics and constitutionalism. Professor Bailyn concludes, in a wider perspective, with an effort to locate the effect of the Founders’ imaginative thought on political reformers throughout the Atlantic world. Precisely how their principles were received abroad, Bailyn writes, is as ambiguous as the personalities of the remarkably creative pro- vincials who founded the American nation. | 2003-03-23T00:00:00 | 0375713085 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/174896-1 |
157020-1 | Zachary Karabell | The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election | Zachary Karabell tells the fascinating story of all four campaigns. We see how Truman's staff developed a superb reelection plan that ignored the South and concentrated on the farm vote—a scheme that would give birth to Truman's historic "whistle-stop" tour of the nation's heartland. We learn how Dewey nearly lost the GOP nomination to Harold Stassen and how, in the last weeks, his gentlemanly campaign fell victim to complacency, owing to the candidate's wide lead in the polls. We meet Wallace, the naive, disaffected former vice president who—preaching racial equality, economic justice, and accommodation with the Soviet Union—took a tour through the South accompanied by black aides, and was pelted with fruit for his pains. And we witness how Thurmond led the white supremacist Dixiecrats in a walkout of the Democratic convention and contested the election throughout the South. In 1948, the United States was on the cusp of changes that would transform the political landscape forever. Television was still an infant technology, a newfangled toy that many predicted would be a passing fad, unable to compete with radio. Karabell argues that 1948 was the last time a presidential race would be dominated by radio and print media, and the last time progressive and far-Left viewpoints were openly debated and covered in the mainstream press, before the Cold War consensus placed an entire spectrum of political views beyond the pale. Finally, Karabell shows why the polls were totally wrong, and how in the end Truman indulged in questionable political tactics to win the presidency. And he explains why this victory came at great cost to Truman's second term and to the country, paving the way for a Republican backlash and the virulent anti-Communist crusades of the 1950s. —from the publisher's website | 2000-06-04T00:00:00 | 0375400869 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/157020-1 |
68174-1 | James Baker | The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989-1992 | Former Secretary James Baker talked about his book, “The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989-1992,” published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. It's an account of Mr. Baker's time as the 61st Secretary of State from January 1989 to August 1992 under President George H.W. Bush. During that time, the world saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Panama, end of apartheid in South Africa, collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War, and Middle East peace talks. Mr. Baker offers behind-the-scenes information about the period of time leading up to many of these events, as well as the new challenges that these changes created. The former Secretary also writes about his encounters with world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterand, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Hosni Mubarak. | 1995-12-03T00:00:00 | 0399140875 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/68174-1 |
169045-1 | Richard Lingeman | Sinclair Lewis: Rebel From Mainstreet | The critic Edmund Wilson called Sinclair Lewis one of the national poets. In the 1920s, Lewis fired off a fusillade of sensational novels, exploding American shibboleths with a volatile mixture of caricature and photographic realism. With an unerring eye for the American scene and an omnivorous ear for American talk, he mocked such sacrosanct institutions as the small town ( Main Street ), business ( Babbitt ), medicine ( Arrowsmith ), and religion ( Elmer Gantry ). His shrewdly observed characters became part of the American gallery, and his titles became part of the language. Despite his books’ innate subversiveness, they were bestsellers and widely discussed and almost as widely damned. They had small-towners worried about being called Main Streeters, preachers fearful of being branded Elmer Gantrys, and Babbitts defiant of being labeled Babbitts. Lewis touched a nerve among Americans who secretly yearned for something more from life than hustling, making money, and buying new cars. Lewis danced along the fault line between the old, small-town, frugal, conservative, fundamentalist America and the modernist, big-business-dominated, youth-obsessed, advertising-powered consumer society that was reshaping the American character in the iconoclastic 1920s. For all his use of humor and satire, Lewis probed serious themes: feminism ( The Job, Main Street, Ann Vickers ), commercial pressures on science ( Arrowsmith ), racial prejudice ( Kingsblood Royal ), and native fascism ( It Can’t Happen Here ). In 1930, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he feared he could never live up to it. In his heart, he was a scold with a conscience, a harsh truth-teller who laughed out loud. His novels, born out of a passionate conviction that America could be better, are thus as alive today as when they were written. Bringing to bear newly uncovered correspondence, diaries, and criticism, Richard Lingeman, distinguished biographer of Theodore Dreiser, paints a sympathetic portrait in all its multihued contradictions of a seminal American writer who could be inwardly the loneliest of men and outwardly as gregarious as George Follansbee Babbitt himself. Lingeman writes with sympathy and understanding about Lewis’s losing struggle with alcoholism; his stormy marriages, including one to the superwoman Dorothy Thompson, whose fame as a newspaper columnist in the 1930s outshone Lewis’s fading star as a novelist; and his wistful, autumnal love for an actress more than thirty years younger than he. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street evokes with color and verve the gaudy life and times of this prairie Mercutio out of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. "As a sequel to his magisterial biography of Theodore Dreiser, Richard Lingeman has put forth, at long last, the definitive life of Sinclair Lewis, the other genius-curmudgeon of our literature. It's a touch of fate, I think, that Lingeman, out of midwestern provincial Crawfordsville, is just the boy to celebrate the scourges of our sacrosanct, who came from equally endowed American towns, Terre Haute and Sauk Centre. No New Yorker could possibly have written these books. Lingeman's biography of Lewis, as well as the other, has that unique tribute - "the feeling tone." - Studs Terkel —from the publisher's website | 2002-03-10T00:00:00 | 0679438238 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/169045-1 |
158187-1 | Lerone Bennett | Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream | Mr. Bennett discussed his book, "Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream," published by Johnson Publishing. The author argued that President Lincoln was a racist whose political mentor was Senator Henry Clay, a Kentucky slave owner. He also showed that Lincoln always supported the fugitive slave laws, among other lines of reasoning. He also talked about his long career in African-American journalism. | 2000-09-10T00:00:00 | 0874850851 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/158187-1 |
38742-1 | Paul Kennedy | Preparing for the 21st Century | Paul Kennedy, author of "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," discussed his research behind his book, "Preparing for the 21st Century" published by Random House. The book covers trends in the economic, cultural, and political sphere for countries around the world entering the next century. | 1993-03-13T00:00:00 | 0679747052 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/38742-1 |
59638-1 | John Leo | Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police | John Leo talked about his book, "Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police." This book, a collection of his columns from U.S. News and World Report, deals with the origins and agenda of so-called "political correctness," its aspects of racism, censorship, and its detrimental effects, including repression and division, especially on college campuses. | 1994-08-28T00:00:00 | 076580400X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/59638-1 |
37209-1 | P.F. Bentley | Clinton: Portrait of Victory | Photographer P.F. Bentley discussed his book, Clinton: Portrait of Victory, published by Warner Books, a photographic essay of the Clinton presidential campaign and ultimate victory. He discussed his access to candidate Clinton and his personal experiences accompanying the campaign and showed many of his photographs from the book. | 1993-01-17T00:00:00 | 0446517585 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/37209-1 |
63298-1 | Philip Howard | The Death of Common Sense | Mr. Howard discussed his recent book, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America, published by Random House, which describes a plethora of nonsensical laws and regulations that are overwhelming American society. He emphasized that the idea of "rights" as we define it today, in reference to such groups as the physically challenged, makes no sense in a democracy as a way of harmonizing competing interests and that such notions of "rights" were nonexistent until very recently in U.S. history. | 1995-02-12T00:00:00 | 0446672289 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/63298-1 |
63449-1 | Neil Baldwin | Edison: Inventing the Century | Neil Baldwin discussed his book, “Edison: Inventing the Century,” published by Hyperion. The book focuses on the life of inventor Thomas Alva Edison and reveals how Edison raised doubts about the nature and value of technology that remain with us today. | 1995-03-19T00:00:00 | 0786881194 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/63449-1 |
173967-1 | Hugh Price | Achievement Matters: Getting Your Child the Best Education Possible | —from the publisher's website There's a crisis in our classrooms. In virtually every school district across America, African American children achieve at lower levels, earn lousier test scores, are placed more frequently into special education or remedial and less challenging classes, and are discouraged from striving to excel academically, or demanding excellence from themselves. The perception is that they are intellectually inferior, which is tragically reinforced by a vocal and destructive segment within our own culture that seeks to portray academic achievement as a sell-out to a white society. Experts say that perception is wrong as a matter of scientific fact. But we cannot allow those attitudes to continue. Indifference toward academic achievement will doom our children to a future far beneath their capabilities. And that has to change. As President of the National Urban League, Hugh B. Price understands the challenges that await our children as they enter the mainstream of American society. In Achievement Matters , he tells us to reject the self-destructive mindset that teaches our children to accept academic mediocrity. A highly respected writer and public speaker, Mr. Price gives practical tips on improving children's literacy and achievement levels, while instilling a lifelong enthusiasm for education as a reward in itself. He provides a framework for change, offering practical tips for parents to help their youngsters become good readers and high achievers, describing the benchmark skills required of students in each grade, and explaining how to make sure your child isn't being steered away from courses essential for future success. He recommends proven techniques for cutting through the educational bureaucracy to create an environment conducive to learning, and where teachers and the school systems themselves are held accountable. You will also discover the keys to becoming an effective, informed advocate in the educational community, as well as strategies for communicating with teachers and administrators for the maximum benefit of your child, and African American children in general. From getting the latest technology into your child's classrooms, to providing after-school and summer programs to give our youth direction and keep them away from the drugs and violence that have claimed so many, this book offers real help for making a powerful, positive impact. This vital resource for parents and caregivers ties into the National Urban League's ongoing Campaign for African American Achievement, a broad based public awareness and community mobilization movement designed to close the academic gap between black students and their counterparts. Filled with insightful personal stories, fascinating anecdotes from successful students, and valuable contact information for parents and caregivers, Achievement Matters is a critical tool for guiding your child to improved academic performance, and their brightest possible future. | 2003-01-05T00:00:00 | 0758201192 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/173967-1 |
55948-1 | Sam Roberts | Who We Are: A Portrait of America | Sam Roberts discussed his book, "Who We Are: A Portrait of America," an examination of commonly-held myths about America. The book offers a view of America--where and how we live, income levels, how we're aging--based on the statistics of the 1990 census. According to Mr. Roberts, the numbers reveal that America has undergone a transformation with profound social, economic, and political consequences. He also spoke about his work on the New York Times and the impetus for this work. | 1994-06-19T00:00:00 | 0812921925 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/55948-1 |
114805-1 | William Greider | Fortress America: The American Military & the Consequences of Peace | "The U.S. military-industrial complex, as we have known it, is in the process of devouring itself, literally and tangibly. The awesome interlocking structure of armed forces, industrial interests, and political alliances that has sprawled across American public life and purpose for two generations cannot endure for long," writes Rolling Stone correspondent William Greider in the introduction to Fortress America . Although shorter than his previous books on the Federal Reserve and the global economy, Fortress America is vintage Greider: strong reporting and sharp analysis on a topic of current and compelling interest. Greider doesn't address U.S. defense strategy so much as the perverse economics underlying the American military establishment. Costs and commitments forever escalate as basic military readiness deteriorates. The Pentagon continues to request next-generation fighter aircraft and Congress agrees to fund them even as fundamental training exercises go wanting. The problem isn't that the United States will lose its next war, but that massive waste and incredible redundancy make national defense a pricey behemoth. Greider calls for a fundamental reordering of priorities; this is an argument Washington—and, increasingly, the public—cannot ignore. —from the publisher's website | 1998-12-13T00:00:00 | 1891620096 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/114805-1 |
59241-1 | Hugh Pearson | The Shadow of the Panther | Hugh Pearson talked about his book "The Shadow of the Panther," a history of the Black Panther movement founded by Huey Newton. He described the impact of the movement on current African-American political movements. | 1994-08-21T00:00:00 | 0201483416 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/59241-1 |
64863-1 | Norman Mailer | Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery | Mr. Mailer discussed his book, "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery," published by Random House. It examines the life of Lee Harvey Oswald after he defected to the Soviet Union at the age of nineteen. It provides a wider view on the absurdity of the Cold War through the eyes of this man who became disillusioned with both countries, but it is not focused on whether or not Mr. Oswald was the sole assassin of President Kennedy. Mr. Mailer uses FBI transcripts and recorded dialogues to argue that the murder occurred in order to promote a new kind of society superior to American capitalism. | 1995-06-25T00:00:00 | 0345404378 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/64863-1 |
179807-1 | John Dean | Warren G. Harding | —from the publisher's website President Nixon’s former counsel illuminates another presidency marked by scandal Warren G. Harding may be best known as America’s worst president. Scandals plagued him: the Teapot Dome affair, corruption in the Veterans Bureau and the Justice Department, and the posthumous revelation of an extramarital affair. Raised in Marion, Ohio, Harding took hold of the small town’s newspaper and turned it into a success. Showing a talent for local politics, he rose quickly to the U.S. Senate. His presidential campaign slogan, “America’s present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy,” gave voice to a public exhausted by the intense politics following World War I. Once elected, he pushed for legislation limiting the number of immigrants; set high tariffs to relieve the farm crisis after the war; persuaded Congress to adopt unified federal budget creation; and reduced income taxes and the national debt, before dying unexpectedly in 1923. In this wise and compelling biography, John W. Dean—no stranger to controversy himself—recovers the truths and explodes the myths surrounding our twenty-ninth president’s tarnished legacy. | 2004-03-14T00:00:00 | 0805069569 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/179807-1 |
12729-1 | Judith Miller | One, By One, By One: Facing the Holocaust | In "One, By One, By One," Judith Miller examines how people preserve or distort the memories of the Holocaust. Ms. Miller examines contemporary attitudes about the Holocaust in six countries- the United States, Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union. | 1990-06-17T00:00:00 | 0671644726 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/12729-1 |
64668-1 | Linn Washington | Black Judges on Justice | Linn Washington, former assistant to Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Nix, discussed his book, "Black Judges on Justice," published by The New Press. A journalist, he described his book as a look at 14 determined, intellectual black people who worked their way up to judicial positions. He point out that this sort of history of African Americans in the U.S. is hard to find. | 1995-05-21T00:00:00 | 1565844378 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/64668-1 |
68514-1 | Dennis Prager | Think a Second Time | Dennis Prager talked about his book, "Think a Second Time," published by Harper Collins. The book is a collection of 43 essays from his quarterly journal entitled Ultimate Issues over the past ten years. He also talked about his Jewish heritage and his perspectives on various issues. He also talked about his career as a radio and television talk show host. He also expressed his strong support for C-SPAN. | 1996-02-04T00:00:00 | 069451604X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/68514-1 |
122027-1 | Mary Soames | Winston & Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills | On the 125th anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth, his only surviving child brings us a rich and intimate portrait of a great leader, a heroic partnership, and a turbulent century. Winston and Clementine Churchill wrote to each other constantly throughout the fifty-seven years of their life together, from the passionate and charming exchanges of their courtship and early marriage until the year before Winston's death in 1965. Written solely for each other's eyes, spontaneously and with great candor, their letters provide rare and revealing insights into both the great political and social events of the century and the intimate world of an extraordinary partnership. Here are Winston's and Clementine's vividly expressed reactions to the social reforms of the era, the harrowing experience in the trenches of the western front, the personalities of world leaders, the early defeats and the long-awaited victories of the Second World War. In moving detail we hear of the triumphs of Churchill's dramatic career and his final, deeply felt reflections on the fading of his enormous powers. Here also are domestic minutiae, society gossip, financial anxieties and minor quarrels, private jokes, and endearments. To read these letters is to view the grand sweep of history reflected in the daily triumphs and tragedies of two allies in love, politics, and life. Mary Soames, the only surviving child of this remarkable couple, has brought her parents to life as no biography could. By collecting these letters for the first time, she has given us an important and powerful document of one of the world's titanic figures and of a century now coming to a close. —from the publisher's website | 1999-05-02T00:00:00 | 0395963192 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/122027-1 |
89415-1 | John Berendt | Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story | In this balmy hothouse of eccentrics and characters, John Berendt is as prominent as a live oak, a celebrated muse of the South often pointed out by tour guides as they inch by the best-selling author in horse-drawn carriages and air-conditioned minibuses. Tourists wave. Mr. Berendt smiles. And the buses and canopied carriages drift languidly away, like jasmine blossoms or sand gnats- depending on the local view of the enduring popularity of Mr. Berendt's book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, published by Random House almost three years ago. The Savannah shorthand for Mr. Berendt's first literary effort is simply "The Book." It is a story of an actual murder that is almost incidental to its spicy gumbo of real characters who are stirred together, in some instances, in fictional scenes invented by the author. The cast includes a gentleman-bachelor, an antiques dealer with a bisexual lover and a pristine collection of Nazi memorabillia; a tarttongued black drag queen who calls herself The Lady Chablis; the gloved members of the exclusive Married Woman's Card Club, and the author himself, transplanted temporarily from the Upper West Side to Savannah's gossipy historic quarter. Mr. Berendt, whose manuscript was once scorned by a prominent New York agent as too regional, has sold more than 1.25 million copies of "The Book" and made him $4 million richer. Hardcover sales have been so steady over the last three years that Random House executives sometimes joke about issuing a paperback version in 2002. And the book's popularity shows no sign of waning. It has increased Savannah's tourism, spawned a cottage industry of memorabilia and inspired an autobiography by The Lady Chablis. Then there are the "midnight" Key lime cookies and, of course, the movie, now being filmed in Savannah. Clint Eastwood is reciting, and Kevin Spacey stars as the antiques dealer, John Cusack as Mr. Berendt and The Lady Chablis as herself. Still no one, least of all the puzzled author, can fully explain why "The Book" is still selling like pecan pies. "It's sort of battling to me," Mr. Berendt said. "But what I'm told is that there is a word of mouth phenomenon. It's nothing that I'm doing." But despite his modesty, Mr. Berendt has been known to sign as many as 29 books a minute. On one rainy morning in late April at a Books-a-Million store in a Savannah strip mall he bolted out of a car without waiting for the driver to find a parking space so that be could Increase his signature output. Since its publication, Midnight has burrowed into the middle ranks of the New York Times best-seller list On Sunday, it will be ranked No. 12, marking its 149th week in the nonfiction category. —from the publisher's website | 1997-08-28T00:00:00 | 0679429220 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/89415-1 |
14015-1 | M. A. Farber | Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax | After Tawana Brawley, a fifteen-year-old girl, was found alive in a plastic garbage bag near Wappingers Falls, N.Y., and thought to be the victim of a vicious racial crime, six New York Times reporters decided to look more closely at the circumstances of the alleged crime. M.A. Farber, co-author, discussed the findings of the book, which is based on over 1,000 personal interviews, including Reverend Al Sharpton who became a key supporter of Ms. Brawley's story. The authors contend that the entire "hoax" was contrived by the teenager and her mother to cover up a long absence by the girl, and thus avoid possible domestic violence as punishment. The other five authors not interviewed are: Robert McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, E.R. Shipp, Charles Strum, and Craig Wolff. | 1990-09-16T00:00:00 | 0553057561 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/14015-1 |
162636-1 | Roy Morris, Jr. | Fraud of the Century | —from the publisher's website In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr., tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes's being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable -- and largely forgotten -- election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America's industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation's heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective "bloody shirt" campaign to tar the Demo-crats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, "Devil Dan" Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read. | 2003-04-06T00:00:00 | 0743223861 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/162636-1 |
10710-1 | Fitzhugh Green | George Bush: An Intimate Portrait | Fitzhugh Green discussed his recent biography George Bush: An Intimate Portrait. Mr. Green talked of the president's upbringing: his parents, his prep school days, and his college experience at Yale. He described Bush's naval career, where he was the youngest pilot in the U.S. Navy, and his business career in Texas. He examined Bush's experience as a freshman congressman, his service as U.N. ambassador and ambassador to China, as well as his tenure as head of the CIA. Also, Mr. Green discussed the life of First Lady Barbara Bush, whom Green knew as a youth, and the hard working characteristics that both the president and Mrs. Bush share. | 1990-01-21T00:00:00 | 0870527835 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/10710-1 |
68490-1 | Carlo D'Este | Patton: A Genius for War | Professor D'Este discussed his book, Patton: A Genius for War, published by Harper Collins. He said he was attempting to show how Patton's early life affected his career as an Army general in World War II. | 1996-01-28T00:00:00 | 0060927623 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/68490-1 |
79419-1 | Keith Richburg | Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa | Mr. Richburg talked about his new book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, published by Basic Books. It focuses on his experiences during trips to Africa over the years and his futile search for African-American roots. Mr. Richburg was the Washington Post's Africa bureau chief. | 1997-04-06T00:00:00 | 0156005832 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/79419-1 |
11944-1 | Helmut Schmidt | Men and Powers: A political Retrospective | The former Chancellor of West Germany discussed his book concerning his years as a German politician, and now European leader. | 1990-04-15T00:00:00 | 0394569946 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/11944-1 |
168865-2 | William Taubman | Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Part 2) | —from the publisher's website The definitive biography of the mercurial Soviet leader who succeeded and denounced Stalin. Remembered by many as the Soviet leader who banged his shoe at the United Nations, Nikita Khrushchev was in fact one of the most complex and important political figures of the twentieth century. Complicit in terrible Stalinist crimes, he managed to retain his humanity. His daring attempt to reform Communism by denouncing Stalin and releasing and rehabilitating millions of his victims prepared the ground for its eventual collapse. His awkward efforts to ease the Cold War triggered its most dangerous crises in Berlin and Cuba. The ruler of the Soviet Union during the first decade after Stalin's death, Khrushchev left his contradictory stamp on his country and the world. More than that, his life and career hold up a mirror to the Soviet age as a whole: revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, cold war, Stalinism, post-Stalinism. The first full and comprehensive biography of Khrushchev, and the first of any Soviet leader to reflect the full range of sources that have become available since the USSR collapsed, this book weaves together Khrushchev's personal triumphs and tragedy with those of his country. It draws on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, the author's visits to places where Khrushchev lived and work, plus extensive interviews with Khrushchev family members, friends, colleagues, subordinates, and diplomats who jousted with him. William Taubman chronicles Khrushchev's life from his humble beginnings in a poor peasant village to his improbable rise into Stalin's inner circle; his stunning, unexpected victory in the deadly duel to succeed Stalin; and the startling reversals of fortune that led to his sudden, ignominious ouster in 1964. Combining a page-turning historical narrative with penetrating political and psychological analysis, this account brims with the life and excitement of a man whose story personifies his era. "A brilliant, stunning, magnificent book. One of the most important figures of the twentieth century, who had a lot to do with setting the stage for the twenty-first, Khrushchev finally has the biography he deserves deep and detailed yet fast-paced, scholarly yet not stuffy, historical yet intensely human. Taubman brings Khrushchev alive in all his complexity, capturing both the humanity that somehow survived in him and became the bedrock for his political decency, and the cynicism that made him part of the brutality of the Soviet system. The book has the sweep of a Big Book about a Big Figure, yet its style is no-frills, no-nonsense, straight-from-the-shoulder, with judgments proferred judiciously. Taubman does a superb job of portraying the rogue's gallery of Soviet leaders while providing a colorful canvas of the country and its history. Having spent several years of my own life in Khrushchev's shadow, I couldn't be more admiring of what Taubman has accomplished." Strobe Talbott, former U.S. deputy secretary of state, editor and translator of Khrushchev's memoirs "Monumental, definitive, rich in detail. Taubman pulls aside the curtain and shows us both a fascinating man and new facts about Soviet decision making during the most dangerous days of the Cold War. A highly readable, compelling story." Anthony Lake, former U.S. national security adviser "The definitive account of Khrushchev's career and personality, this is also a wonderful page-turner about the deadly duel for power in the Kremlin. Altogether it is one of the best books ever written about the Soviet Union." Constantine Pleshakov, coauthor, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War "Few books in the field of Cold War history have been as eagerly awaited as William Taubman's biography of Nikita Khrushchev. Reflecting years of research as well as a keen sensitivity to culture, context, and personality, this extraordinary book more than matches the extraordinary character of its subject. It is a superb portrayal of one of the most attractive but also dangerous leaders of the twentieth century." John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history, Yale University | 2003-04-27T00:00:00 | 0393051447 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/168865-2 |
20863-1 | E.J. Dionne, Jr | Why Americans Hate Politics | Mr. Dionne was raised in Fall River, Mass. and attended Harvard University. He did his doctorate study at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He worked for The New York Times, and later, for The Washington Post. His book Why Americans Hate Politics deals with apathy among the American electorate due to dissatisfaction with the political process. In the interview, he describes the origins of post-World War II conservatism from libertarianism and traditionalism, and he discusses the problems of both conservatism and liberalism. | 1991-08-25T00:00:00 | 0671778773 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/20863-1 |
10319-1 | James Reston Jr | The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally | Author James Reston takes a look at the life of Texas businessman and politician John Connally in The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally. As part of the interview he discusses his controversial theory of the Kennedy assassination being motivated by a grudge against John Connally by Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Connally was a passenger in President Kennedy's convertible and was wounded when the president was assassinated. Also discussed are the later events in Connally's life from the milk price support allegations in the 1970's through his bankruptcy in 1987. "At the center of three presidencies, he came as close to becoming a president himself as he did to being a lesser martyr when Kennedy was assassinated. His life has drama of epic proportions." | 1989-12-17T00:00:00 | 0060161965 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/10319-1 |
19482-1 | Alan Ehrenhalt | The United State of Ambition | Mr. Ehrenhalt discussed the changes in electoral politics in the previous thirty years. He said a new breed of professional politician has sprung up during the previous decades to replace the part-time politician or businessman who formerly occupied seats in local or state governments. The replacement for these people is the person who makes political office their career, without pursuing an alternative skill or trade. The effect of the new breed of politician is representation by "politics addicts," who show little loyalty to any political machine or mentor, and frequently do not reflect the ideology of their constituents. Mr. Ehrenhalt expressed concern about elected officials who lack ties or political associations with other groups on the state and local levels. Mr. Ehrenhalt discussed his research for the book, and told anecdotes on political changes in state and local politics he learned during his travels gathering information for the book. | 1991-07-21T00:00:00 | 0812918940 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/19482-1 |
13918-1 | Robert Dole | Historical Almanac of the United States Senate | Senator Dole (R-Kan.) discussed his book, Historical Almanac of the United States Senate, which is a compilation of speeches he made on the Senate floor during the 100th Congress. Over the two-year period, Dole gave hundreds of "Senate Bicentennial Minutes" describing the first 200 years of the Senate. This collection of stories provides insight into the people, politics, customs, and memorable events of the Senate. Dole points out the historical significance of what are often seen as "minor blips" in the Senate's workings. The book is printed by the Government Printing Office. | 1990-09-09T00:00:00 | 0160064066 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/13918-1 |
39579-1 | Blanche Wiesen Cook | Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 1, 1884-1933 | Ms. Cook discussed her recent book Eleanor Roosevelt and the research she conducted. She described Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a politically active woman in a time when men were considered the only dominant forces for change. | 1993-04-11T00:00:00 | 0003658759 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/39579-1 |
54179-1 | William Chafe | Never Stop Running | Professor Chafe discussed his book f2Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American LiberalismfR, published by Basic Books, and the process he went through to get the book published. The book examines the life of Allard Lowenstein who was an influential liberal in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. He was eventually ostracized by fellow radicalized liberals and was assassinated in 1980 by a mentally ill former protege named Dennis Sweeney. | 1994-01-30T00:00:00 | 0465049850 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/54179-1 |
37981-1 | Nathan Miller | Theodore Roosevelt: A Life | Mr. Miller discussed his biography of President Theodore Roosevelt entitled, "Theodore Roosevelt: A Life," published by William Morrow and Company. He spoke on his research into the former president, and recounted anecdotes on the colorful president's political career. | 1993-02-14T00:00:00 | 0688132200 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/37981-1 |
40065-1 | Lisa Belkin | First, Do No Harm | Ms. Belkin discussed her book, First Do No Harm, published by Simon and Schuster, which focuses on the procedures of hospitals in dealing with ethical issues such as allowing patients to die. Ms. Belkin spoke on her research for the book, which involved exploring the policy procedures of a modern hospital and the decision processes of contemporary physicians. | 1993-04-25T00:00:00 | 044922290X | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/40065-1 |
25989-1 | David Moore | The Superpollsters | Professor David Moore discussed the evolution and process of political polling in "The Superpollsters: How They Measure and Manipulate Public Opinion in America." He described how the public opinion polls are manipulated by political candidates and public opinion pollsters themselves to shape the progress of political campaigns. | 1992-05-10T00:00:00 | 1568580231 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/25989-1 |
174516-1 | Warren Zimmermann | First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power | —from the publisher's website Americans like to think they have no imperial past. In fact, the United States became an imperial nation within five short years a century ago (1898-1903), exploding onto the international scene with the conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and (indirectly) Panama. How did the nation become a player in world politics so suddenly—and what inspired the move toward imperialism in the first place? The renowned diplomat and writer Warren Zimmermann seeks answers in the lives and relationships of five remarkable figures: the hyper-energetic Theodore Roosevelt, the ascetic naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan, the bigoted and wily Henry Cabot Lodge, the self-doubting moderate Secretary of State John Hay, and the hard-edged corporate lawyer turned colonial administrator Elihu Root. Faced with difficult choices, these extraordinary men, all close friends, instituted new political and diplomatic policies with intermittent audacity, arrogance, generosity, paternalism, and vision. Zimmermann's discerning account of these five men also examines the ways they exploited the readiness of the American people to support a surge of expansion overseas. He makes it clear why no discussion of America's international responsibilities today can be complete without understanding how the United States claimed its global powers a century ago. | 2003-01-19T00:00:00 | 0374179395 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/174516-1 |
157755-1 | Jane Alexander | Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics | Full of amusing anecdotes and profiles of celebrities, this charming, opinionated, and wise memoir of Jane Alexander's tenure at the National Endowment of the Arts brings humor and human dimension to the politics of art and the art of politics. —from the publisher's website | 2000-08-13T00:00:00 | 1891620061 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/157755-1 |
157728-1 | Brooks Simpson | Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity | Simpson brings Grant's strange story to life in a biography that is readable, compelling, and definitive. —from the publisher's website | 2000-07-16T00:00:00 | 0395659949 | https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/157728-1 |
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