program_id
large_stringlengths 6
8
| guest
large_stringlengths 7
29
| title
large_stringlengths 6
80
| description
large_stringlengths 98
4.17k
⌀ | air_date
timestamp[us]date 1988-10-17 00:00:00
2004-12-05 00:00:00
| book_isbn
large_stringlengths 9
13
⌀ | url
large_stringlengths 41
43
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4281-1
|
Neil Sheehan
|
A Bright Shining Lie (Part 2)
|
Neil Sheehan gave five 30-minute interviews about his book, “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.” The second interview was titled "America in Vietnam."
| 1988-10-18T00:00:00
|
0394484479
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/4281-1
|
167784-1
|
Peter Bergen
|
Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden
|
On September 11, 2001, the world in which we live was changed forever. The twin towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down, one side of the Pentagon burst into flame, and more than six thousand men, women, and children lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil. As shocking as it was, it had been long in the making: The assault was the most sophisticated and horrifying in a series of operations masterminded by Osama bin Laden and his Jihad group -- an organization that CNN's terrorism analyst Peter Bergen calls Holy War, Inc. One of only a handful of Western journalists to have interviewed the world's most wanted man face to face, Peter Bergen has produced the definitive book on the Jihadist network that operates globally and in secrecy. In the course of four years of investigative reporting, he has interviewed scores of insiders -- from bin Laden associates and family members to Taliban leaders to CIA officials -- and traveled to Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom to learn the truth about bin Laden's al Queda organization and his mission. Immense in scope and unnerving in its findings, Holy War, Inc. reveals: How bin Laden lives, travels, and communicates with his "cells." How his role in the crushing defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan made him a hero to Muslims all over the world -- and equipped him to endure a long and bloody siege. How the CIA ended up funding -- to the tune of three billion dollars -- radical, anti-American Afghan groups allied to bin Laden. How the attacks that foreshadowed the destruction of the World Trade Center -- among them the bombings of the American embassies in Africa and the warship USS Cole in Yemen -- were planned and executed. The dimensions of bin Laden's personal fortune, and why freezing his assets is both futile and nearly impossible. The ideology of bin Laden's number two, the man who has influenced him most profoundly in his holy war -- the Egyptian Ayman al Zawahiri. What we can expect from Islamist extremists in the future. Above all, Peter Bergen helps us to see bin Laden's organization in a radically new light: as a veritable corporation that has exploited twenty-first-century communications and weapons technologies in the service of a medieval reading of the Koran and holy war. Holy War, Inc. is essential reading for anyone trying to understand tomorrow's terrorist threats and the militant Islamist movements that could determine the fate of governments -- and human lives -- the world over. —from the publisher's website
| 2001-12-16T00:00:00
|
0743205022
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/167784-1
|
16032-1
|
Daniel Yergin
|
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
|
Daniel Yergin discussed his book, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," published by Touchstone Books. Mr. Yergin spoke about the history of the oil industry and its influence on world politics and economy. His research for the book included over sixty interviews with leading figures in the oil industry, oral histories, and governmental publications. Mr. Yergin named George Bissell as the father of the oil industry for first conceiving the idea of drilling for oil. Mr. Yergin also speculated on the future of U.S. oil reserves and the oil industry in general. He examined American oil production and consumption and predicted future oil dependence. He also related the Persian Gulf war to the oil power base of the Middle East.
| 1991-01-27T00:00:00
|
1439110123
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/16032-1
|
106581-1
|
Linda Simon
|
Genuine Reality: A Life of William James
|
This first full biography of William James in nearly a generation brings us the man alive in all his complexity. Intellectual rebel, romantic pragmatist, aristocratic pluralist, James was both a towering figure of the nineteenth century and a springboard into the twentieth. Constitutionally opposed to the rigidity and stability of the nineteenth century, James guided his generation toward the ambivalence, unpredictability, and indeterminacy of the times that followed. His explorations of pluralism and pragmatism nurtured ideas that continue to shape our society. He laid the groundwork for modern psychology and recognized the possibility of multiple perspectives long before Cubism. "The word 'or,'" he once wrote, "names a genuine reality." Profiting from a rich range of sources, among them 1,500 letters written between James and his wife, Alice, acclaimed biographer Linda Simon ( The Biography of Alice B. Toklas ) creates an intimate portrait of this multifaceted and contradictory man. Exploring James in the contest of his irrepressible family, his diverse and often quirky friends, and the cultural and political forces to which he so energetically responded, Simon weaves the many threads of William James's life into a genuine, and vibrant, reality. —from the publisher's website
| 1998-06-07T00:00:00
|
0151930988
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/106581-1
|
17114-1
|
Leonard Goldenson
|
Beating the Odds
|
Mr. Goldenson discussed his book, Beating the Odds: The Stars, Struggles, and Egos that Transformed Network Television. He said the book is meant to be an instructive history, mainly for ABC's affiliates, of the steps that were taken to build ABC Inc. The information comes from his personal memories as well as over 110 interviews conducted by Marvin Wolf of people closely involved with ABC. Mr. Goldenson is considered the father of ABC as well as a strong influence on the development of television as a mass communication medium. He chronicles each decade of his involvement with the network, and the types of programming and people which dominated each era.
| 1991-03-17T00:00:00
|
0684190559
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/17114-1
|
170335-1
|
Daniel Stashower
|
The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television
|
The world remembers Edison, Ford, and the Wright Brothers. But what about Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, an innovation that did as much as any other to shape the twentieth century? That question lies at the heart of The Boy Genius and the Mogul , Daniel Stashower's captivating chronicle of television's true inventor, the battle he faced to capitalize on his breakthrough, and the powerful forces that resulted in the collapse of his dreams. The son of a Mormon farmer, Farnsworth was born in 1906 in a single-room log cabin on an isolated homestead in Utah. The Farnsworth family farm had no radio, no telephone, and no electricity. Yet, motivated by the stories of scientists and inventors he read about in the science magazines of the day, young Philo set his sights on becoming an inventor. By his early teens, Farnsworth had become an inveterate tinkerer, able to repair broken farm equipment when no one else could. It was inevitable that when he read an article about a new idea -- for the transmission of pictures by radio waves--that he would want to attempt it himself. One day while he was walking through a hay field, Farnsworth took note of the straight, parallel lines of the furrows and envisioned a system of scanning a visual image line by line and transmitting it to a remote screen. He soon sketched a diagram for an early television camera tube. It was 1921 and Farnsworth was only fourteen years old. Farnsworth went on to college to pursue his studies of electrical engineering but was forced to quit after two years due to the death of his father. Even so, he soon managed to persuade a group of California investors to set him up in his own research lab where, in 1927, he produced the first all-electronic television image and later patented his invention. While Farnsworth's invention was a landmark, it was also the beginning of a struggle against an immense corporate power that would consume much of his life. That corporate power was embodied by a legendary media mogul, RCA President and NBC founder David Sarnoff, who claimed that his chief scientist had invented a mechanism for television prior to Farnsworth's. Thus the boy genius and the mogul were locked in a confrontation over who would control the future of television technology and the vast fortune it represented. Farnsworth was enormously outmatched by the media baron and his army of lawyers and public relations people, and, by the 1940s, Farnsworth would be virtually forgotten as television's actual inventor, while Sarnoff and his chief scientist would receive the credit. Restoring Farnsworth to his rightful place in history, The Boy Genius and the Mogul presents a vivid portrait of a self-taught scientist whose brilliance allowed him to "capture light in a bottle." A rich and dramatic story of one man’s perseverance and the remarkable events leading up to the launch of television as we know it, The Boy Genius and the Mogul shines new light on a major turning point in American history. —from the publisher's website
| 2002-07-21T00:00:00
|
0767907590
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/170335-1
|
107473-1
|
Roy Reed
|
Faubus: The Life and Times of An American Prodigal
|
This is the first full-length treatment of the life of Orval E. Faubus, thirty-sixth governor of the state of Arkansas, known most infamously from America's civil rights era as the governor who pitted his state against the dictates and forces of the federal government during the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis. In this close, personal history, the result of eight years of intensive reserach, Reed finds Faubus to be an opaque man, "an insoluable mixture of cynicism and compassion, guile and grace, wickedness and goodness," and, ultimately, "one of the last Americans to perceive politics as a grand game." —from the publisher's website
| 1998-08-09T00:00:00
|
1557284571
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/107473-1
|
63787-1
|
Gertrude Himmelfarb
|
The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values
|
Professor Himmelfarb discussed her book The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The book concerns the development of modern values from the Victorian virtues, and the differences between modern values and Victorian virtues. She lists four Victorian virtues: wisdom, justice, temperance and courage. The author asserts that the Victorian virtues of hard work and deferral of gratification are the tools to fix current social problems in America.
| 1995-04-02T00:00:00
|
0679764909
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/63787-1
|
11662-1
|
James Abourezk
|
Advise & Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota & the US Senate
|
Senator James Abourezk discussed his book “Advise and Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate.” Senator Abourezk, who is Arab-American, wrote his memoirs in part to present a role model to young Arab-Americans. He explained the Arab-American Anti- Discrimination Committee, of which he is the founder and chairman. He discussed the images of Palestinians and Lebanese and their treatment by Israel. He also discussed the effectiveness of the Israeli lobby.
| 1990-03-25T00:00:00
|
1556520662
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/11662-1
|
49975-1
|
Joseph Ellis
|
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams
|
Mr. Ellis discussed the research behind his book, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, published by W.W. Norton and Company. Joseph Ellis describes President John Adams as the most under appreciated man in American history. He spoke on his revelations about the nature of the nation's second president unearthed by his study of President Adams' writings and the writings of others, including Adams' interactions with other Founding Fathers in the later years, calling special attention to the retirement years of the former president.
| 1993-09-05T00:00:00
|
0393311333
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/49975-1
|
123098-1
|
Roger Mudd
|
Great Minds of History
|
American Heritage: Great Minds of History illuminates the historians responsible for some of our era's most acclaimed and successful books. Through interviews conducted by The History Channel's Roger Mudd, readers are treated to five absorbing conversations rich in fresh anecdotes and insights that, together, touch upon every major event in American history: Gordon Wood on the colonial era and the American Revolution; James McPherson on the Civil War and Reconstruction; Richard White on American westward expansion; David McCullough on the early twentieth century; and Stephen Ambrose on World War II and the post-war era. In a series of interviews that are as valuable as they are engrossing, today's best and brightest historians weigh in on the crucial moments in American history. In the book's casual forum, the legacies of history shine through with electric urgency as Roger Mudd's highly knowledgeable questions illuminate five truly first-rate minds: Stephen Ambrose, discussing the turbulent years between World War II and the world we inhabit today, eloquently underscores the immense achievement and consequence of D-day—"the pivot point of the twentieth century"—and candidly discusses history's complex assessments of Eisenhower and Nixon. David McCullough not only enlarges the traditional vision of the Industrial Era—that tumultuous epoch of brilliant lights and dark shadows that gave birth to the modern world—but goes beyond that to explain why he finds history intimate, compelling, and fresh: "There is no such thing as the past." James McPherson tells how his experience with the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to his career as a student of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and his examination of the ideology that drove the Confederacy enriches our understanding of how the bitter legacy of defeat has shaped events both North and South ever since. Richard White, discussing westward expansion, traces the evolution of how historians have viewed the American frontier, from a cherished national legend of intrepid pioneers taming an empty wilderness to a complex and often violent story of the melding of many different cultures. Gordon Wood takes our Revolution from its enshrinement as an inevitable civic event and shows what a chancy, desperate business it really was, along the way offering crisp, telling details about the very human Founding Fathers, and reminding us that, above all, the conflict was a sweeping social revolution whose consequences continue to remake the entire world. —from the publisher's website
| 1999-06-06T00:00:00
|
0471327158
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/123098-1
|
70322-1
|
Fox Butterfield
|
All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
|
Mr. Butterfield talked about his recent book, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, published by Alfred A Knopf. It focuses on Willie Bosket, who was convicted of murdering several people on a New York subway when he was fifteen years old. Mr. Butterfield examined the Bosket family history as a way to demonstrate the source of Mr. Bosket's violent behavior. In his book, he argues that the origins of violence in the United States are geographically located in the antebellum South.
| 1996-03-31T00:00:00
|
0380728621
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/70322-1
|
18201-1
|
Robert Kaiser
|
Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs & His Failure
|
Robert Kaiser, deputy managing editor of the Washington Post, discussed his book, "Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure." Formerly a world correspondent for the Post, Mr. Kaiser wrote on Soviet President Gorbachev's rise to power and the successes and failures of President Gorbachev's policies in the Soviet Union. In his analysis of President Gorbachev's political life, Mr. Kaiser mentioned three aspects that shaped the Soviet leader's rise to power: courage, intelligence, and endurance for stupefying boredom during his years in the conservative party apparatus. He went on to discuss his work in writing the book, his experiences in the Soviet Union, and his work on the Post.
| 1991-06-02T00:00:00
|
0671736922
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/18201-1
|
76471-1
|
Robert Bork
|
Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline
|
Judge Bork talked about his book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, published by Reganbooks. The book criticizes liberalism for leading society away from constraints for the individual without acknowledging that there must be some limits on behaviour. These limits have been set in the past by religion, law and common morality. He said the breakdown of morality was accelerated in the 1960s by student radicals and the failure of the establishment to control them
| 1996-12-04T00:00:00
|
0060987197
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/76471-1
|
74535-1
|
David Friedman
|
Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life
|
Mr. Friedman talked about his recent book, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, published by Harper Business. It elaborates on the fundamental notion that economics is about behavior and choice, not money. He talked about how economists have developed ways to predict behavior based on the idea that people will make rational choices. He also provides several concrete examples of this notion.
| 1996-10-20T00:00:00
|
0887308856
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/74535-1
|
62813-1
|
Marvin Olasky
|
The Tragedy of American Compassion
|
Marvin Olasky discussed his book, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," published by Regnery Publishing of Washington, D.C. The book describes how Americans successfully fought poverty before the government became involved in the 1930s and then further involved in the 1960s. He argues that while the system is generous with money, it needs to incorporate personal involvement for a more effective program.
| 1995-01-22T00:00:00
|
089526725X
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/62813-1
|
173040-1
|
Peter Krass
|
Carnegie
|
—from the publisher's website One of the major figures in American history, Andrew Carnegie was a ruthless businessman who made his fortune in the steel industry and ultimately gave most of it away. He used his wealth to ascend the world’s political stage, influencing the presidencies of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. In retirement, Carnegie became an avid promoter of world peace, only to be crushed emotionally by World War I. In this compelling biography, Peter Krass reconstructs the complicated life of this titan who came to power in America’s Gilded Age. He transports the reader to Carnegie’s Pittsburgh, where hundreds of smoking furnaces belched smoke into the sky and the air was filled with acrid fumes . . . and mill workers worked seven-day weeks while Carnegie spent months traveling across Europe. Carnegie explores the contradictions in the life of the man who rose from lowly bobbin boy to build the largest and most profitable steel company in the world. Krass examines how Carnegie became one of the greatest philanthropists ever known–and earned a notorious reputation that history has yet to fully reconcile with his remarkable accomplishments.
| 2002-11-24T00:00:00
|
0471386308
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/173040-1
|
160240-1
|
Murray Sperber
|
Beer and Circus: Big-Time College Sports
|
Murray Sperber turns common perceptions about big-time college athletics inside out. He shows, for instance, that contrary to popular belief the money coming in to universities from sports programs never makes it to academic departments and rarely even covers the expense of maintaining athletic programs. The bigger and more prominent the sports program, the more money it siphons away from academics. Sperber chronicles the growth of the university system, the development of undergraduate subcultures, and the rising importance of sports. He reveals television's ever more blatant corporate sponsorship conflicts and describes a peculiar phenomenon he calls the "Flutie Factor"—the surge in enrollments that always follows a school's appearance on national television, a response that has little to do with academic concerns. Sperber's profound re-evaluation of college sports comes straight out of today's headlines and opens our eyes to a generation of students caught in a web of greed and corruption, deprived of the education they deserve. Sperber presents a devastating critique, not only of higher education but of national culture and values. Beer and Circus is a must-read for all students and parents, educators and policy makers. —from the publisher's website
| 2000-11-26T00:00:00
|
0805038647
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/160240-1
|
61121-1
|
Doris Kearns Goodwin
|
No Ordinary Time
|
Ms. Goodwin talked about her recently published book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Home Front in World War II, published by Simon and Schuster, which focuses on the White House scene during Franklin Roosevelt's term, including the intimate circle of friends surrounding President and Mrs. Roosevelt.
| 1995-01-01T00:00:00
|
0684804484
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/61121-1
|
165909-1
|
Michael Eric Dyson
|
Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur
|
Acclaimed for his writings on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as his passionate defense of black youth culture, Michael Eric Dyson has emerged as the leading African American intellectual of his generation. Now Dyson turns his attention to one of the most enigmatic figures of the past decade: the slain hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. Five years after his murder, Tupac remains a widely celebrated, deeply loved, and profoundly controversial icon among black youth. Viewed by many as a "black James Dean," he has attained cult status partly due to the posthumous release of several albums, three movies, and a collection of poetry. But Tupac endures primarily because of the devotion of his loyal followers, who have immortalized him through tributes, letters, songs, and celebrations, many in cyberspace. Dyson helps us to understand why a twenty-five-year-old rapper, activist, poet, actor, and alleged sex offender looms even larger in death than he did in life. With his trademark skills of critical thinking and storytelling, Dyson examines Tupac's hold on black youth, assessing the ways in which different elements of his persona-thug, confused prophet, fatherless child-are both vital and destructive. At once deeply personal and sharply analytical, Dyson's book offers a wholly original way of looking at Tupac Shakur that will thrill those who already love the artist and enlighten those who want to understand him. —from the publisher's website
| 2001-11-04T00:00:00
|
046501755X
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/165909-1
|
87803-1
|
Frank McCourt
|
Angela's Ashes
|
" When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic. —from the publisher's website
| 1997-08-31T00:00:00
|
0684874350
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/87803-1
|
15457-1
|
John Wallach
|
Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder
|
The husband-and-wife team, Janet and John Wallach, discussed their book about the controversial leader of the Palestine Liberation Movement (PLO), Yasser Arafat. Entitled, "Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder," the work details the life and political struggles of this important political leader. The Wallachs were able to spend hundreds of hours with Mr. Arafat and his entourage at the PLO's headquarters, thus providing a balance between the less personable side of Mr. Arafat and his substantial influence over the tenuous relationships between Palestinian factions. The book also focuses on Mr. Arafat as discussed by Jordan's King Hussein, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Israel's Yitzhak Shamir, as well as important American, Syrian and Iraqi policymakers.
| 1990-12-23T00:00:00
|
155972403X
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/15457-1
|
64314-1
|
John Niven
|
Salmon P. Chase: A Biography
|
John Niven discussed his book, "Salmon P. Chase: A Biography," published by Oxford University Press. The book focuses on the life of Salmon P. Chase, 1808-1873, who served as Secretary of the Treasury during the Civil War and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1864 until his death, the critical period of Reconstruction.
| 1995-05-28T00:00:00
|
0195046536
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/64314-1
|
117773-1
|
Michael Ignatieff
|
Isaiah Berlin: A Life
|
Russian by birth, Jewish by descent, English by choice, Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) knit together three identities into a cosmopolitan sensibility that informed his contributions as one of the 20th century's most influential and important intellectuals. Based on his experiences as a child during the Russian Revolution and his friendships with such beleaguered writers as Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Berlin affirmed the superiority of individual freedom and judgment to Marxist totalitarianism. But he made fellow liberals uncomfortable with his unwelcome reminders that their ideals—liberty, equality, social justice—inevitably conflicted and required painful tradeoffs. London-based journalist Michael Ignatieff, who spent 10 years interviewing Berlin before his death, adeptly captures an appealing man: lighthearted, spontaneous, a brilliant conversationalist and lecturer (one of Oxford University's most popular professors), able to savor private happiness despite an essentially tragic view of political life. Ignatieff admires Berlin's views without accepting them uncritically; similarly, he acknowledges personal failings while appreciating the serenity Berlin achieved against considerable odds. This lucidly written, thoughtfully argued work is a model of the well-balanced biography, carefully evaluating the complex interplay of character and conviction in one remarkable individual. —Wendy Smith
| 1999-01-24T00:00:00
|
0805055207
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/117773-1
|
115429-1
|
Shelby Steele
|
A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America
|
Shelby Steele's first book, The Content of Our Character , sparked outrage over its indictment of liberal American policies and attitudes towards race. A Dream Deferred expands Steele's critique, comparing government interventions (like affirmative action) to the most damaging practices of slavery and segregation, Soviet Communism, and Nazi Germany. While Steele zealously praises civil rights victories, terming the movement that effected them "the greatest nonviolent revolution in American history (one of the greatest in all history)," he concludes that a simultaneous outcome—the stigmatization of whiteness—has led to disaster. Shamed whites try to prove their innocence through redemptive acts, according to Steele, and he has always disdained the "moral self-preoccupation" of post-'60s white liberals, which "made them dangerous to blacks--ready to give them over to an 'otherness' in which nothing is expected of them." Steele, a self-described black conservative, complains, "The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks." He contends that victimization is the greatest hindrance for black Americans: while white liberals see blacks as victims to assuage guilty consciences, blacks parlay their status as victims into a currency that turns out to have no long-term buying power. Steele's conclusion: the only way for blacks to stop buying into this zero-sum game is to adopt a culture of excellence and achievement untrammeled by set-asides and entitlements. —from the publisher's website
| 1998-12-06T00:00:00
|
0060931043
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/115429-1
|
157386-1
|
James Bradley
|
Flags of Our Fathers
|
In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island's highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag. Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever. —from the publisher's website
| 2000-07-09T00:00:00
|
0553111337
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/157386-1
|
113124-1
|
Eric Foner
|
The Story of American Freedom
|
A masterful history of the United States, focused on its animating impulse-freedom-and the continuing struggle to achieve it. Freedom: a promised land, a battleground, America's cultural bond and fault line. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind's inalienable rights; the Constitution was framed to secure liberty's blessings. The United States fought the Civil War to bring about a new birth of freedom, World War II for the Four Freedoms, and the Cold War to defend the Free World. In Eric Foner's stirring history, freedom's story unfolds through aspiration and sacrifice, its meaning shaped not only in congressional debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms. Its cast of characters ranges from Thomas Jefferson to Margaret Sanger to Franklin D. Roosevelt; from former slaves seeking to breathe real meaning into emancipation to the union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights advocates of our time. This landmark history shows the story of American freedom to be not a mythic saga but a vital, open-ended tale of accomplishment and failure, a record of a people forever contending over the crucial ideas of their political culture. Over the course of our history, freedom has been a living truth for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. In Eric Foner's stirring history, freedom's story is not the simple unfolding of a timeless truth, but an open-ended history of accomplishment and failure. Its impetus lies in the aspirations and sacrifice of millions of Americans, celebrated and anonymous, who have sought freedom's blessings. Its meaning is shaped not only in congressional debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms. Its cast of characters ranges from Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, from former slaves seeking to breathe real meaning into emancipation to the union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights advocates of our time. —from the publisher's website
| 1998-11-15T00:00:00
|
0393046656
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/113124-1
|
174980-1
|
Robert Kagan
|
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order
|
—from the publisher's website From a leading scholar of our country’s foreign policy, the brilliant essay about America and the world that has caused a storm in international circles now expanded into book form. European leaders, increasingly disturbed by U.S. policy and actions abroad, feel they are headed for what the New York Times (July 21, 2002) describes as a moment of truth. After years of mutual resentment and tension, there is a sudden recognition that the real interests of America and its allies are diverging sharply and that the trans-atlantic relationship itself has changed, possibly irreversibly. Europe sees the United States as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the United States sees Europe as spent, unserious, and weak. The anger and mistrust on both sides are hardening into incomprehension. This past summer, in Policy Review , Robert Kagan reached incisively into this impasse to force both sides to see themselves through the eyes of the other. Tracing the widely differing histories of Europe and America since the end of World War II, he makes clear how for one the need to escape a bloody past has led to a new set of transnational beliefs about power and threat, while the other has perforce evolved into the guarantor of that postmodern paradise by dint of its might and global reach. This remarkable analysis is being discussed from Washington to Paris to Tokyo. It is esssential reading.
| 2003-02-16T00:00:00
|
1400040930
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/174980-1
|
183682-1
|
Peter Charles Hoffer
|
Past Imperfect
|
—from the publisher's website Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of history: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the population in favor of a perspective that was predominantly white, male and Protestant. That flaw would become a fissure and eventually a schism. A new history arose which, written in part by radicals and liberals, had little use for the noble and the heroic, and that rankled many who wanted a celebratory rather than a critical history. To this combustible mixture of elements was added the flame of public debate. History in the 1990s was a minefield of competing passions, political views and prejudices. It was dangerous ground, and, at the end of the decade, four of the nation's most respected and popular historians were almost destroyed by it: Michael Bellesiles, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose and Joseph Ellis. This is their story, set against the wider narrative of the writing of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times." To which he could have added: falsify, plagiarize and politicize, because that's the other story of America's history.
| 2004-11-21T00:00:00
|
1586482440
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/183682-1
|
43516-1
|
Howard Kurtz
|
Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers
|
Howard Kurtz, author of "Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers," published by Time Books, discussed the book's criticism of the American newspaper industry. He talked about his career in journalism and media criticism, including the changes that have occurred in the newspaper industry during the rise of television and other electronic media. He also evaluated the major trends in contemporary journalism, and gave his impressions of current newspaper news coverage. He questioned the ethical standards exercised by several newspapers and argued that since Watergate there has been an emphasis on scandal in print media.
| 1993-06-20T00:00:00
|
0812963563
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/43516-1
|
56384-1
|
Mark Neely
|
The Last Best Hope of Earth
|
Professor Neely spoke about his biography "The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America," published by Harvard University Press. The title is taken from Lincoln's second Message to Congress dated December 1, 1862. This portrait of the life of Abraham Lincoln focuses particularly on the moral dilemmas and accomplishments of Lincoln during his presidency and years in public office. He discussed the former president's political decisions and family life.
| 1994-06-12T00:00:00
|
0674511255
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/56384-1
|
153957-1
|
Tom Wheeler
|
Leadership Lessons from the Civil War
|
Business veteran Wheeler profiles nine specific leadership lessons and illustrates them with in-depth stories of battlefield decisions and their results. —from the publisher's website
| 1999-12-26T00:00:00
|
0385495188
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/153957-1
|
24282-1
|
Francis Fukuyama
|
The End of History and the Last Man
|
Mr. Fukuyama discussed his book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which he contends that the shaping forces of history tend toward liberal democracy, a system in which both free elections and constitutional rights are guaranteed. He also explores the implications of this form of government and questions whether liberty and equality can yield a stable society. Mr. Fukuyama is a former director of the Office of Planning for the U.S. Department of State.
| 1992-02-09T00:00:00
|
0029109752
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/24282-1
|
24604-1
|
Richard Nixon
|
Seize the Moment, Part 1
|
Former President Richard Nixon discussed his book "Seize the Moment: America's Challenge in a One-Superpower World," published by Simon and Schuster. In his book, he assesses the challenges and opportunities facing the United States since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Mr. Nixon also shared his thoughts on domestic and foreign policy, and looked back on his own political career. This is the first of a two-part interview with Richard Nixon.
| 1992-02-23T00:00:00
|
0671743430
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/24604-1
|
22765-1
|
Suzanne Garment
|
Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics
|
Ms. Garment, author of Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics, discussed the way political scandals have reshaped U.S. history and influenced the way Americans vote and think about public policy. Her book cites over eighty cases of misconduct occurring within both political parties. She examines what she terms is the "criminalization of politics" and the roles played by the White House, Congress, the courts, and the press. A former Washington correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Garment believes that the increased coverage of scandals since Watergate has strengthened the influence of the media while reducing the power of government.
| 1991-11-17T00:00:00
|
0385425112
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/22765-1
|
40556-1
|
Charles Adams
|
For Good & Evil
|
Charles Adams discussed the research behind his book, “For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization,” published by Madison Books. The book examines the role of taxation in several historical events, including the fall of Rome, the American Revolution and the signing of the Magna Carta. Mr. Adams spoke on the history of tax policy throughout human civilization, as well as various aspects of taxation policies around the world and social policies' relationship with taxes.
| 1993-05-09T00:00:00
|
1568332351
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/40556-1
|
93523-1
|
Anita Hill
|
Speaking Truth to Power
|
After her astonishing testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings, Anita Hill ceased to be a private citizen and became a public figure at the white-hot center of an intense national debate on how men and women relate to each other in the workplace. That debate led to groundbreaking court decisions and major shifts in corporate policies that have had a profound effect on our lives—and on Anita Hill's life. Now, with remarkable insight and total candor, Anita Hill reflects on events before, during, and after the hearings, offering for the first time a complete account that sheds startling new light on this watershed event. Only after reading her moving recollection of her childhood on her family's Oklahoma farm can we fully appreciate the values that enabled her to withstand the harsh scrutiny she endured during the hearings and for years afterward. Only after reading her detailed narrative of the Senate Judiciary proceedings do we reach a new understanding of how Washington—and the media—rush to judgment. And only after discovering the personal toll of this wrenching ordeal, and how she copes, do we gain new respect for this extraordinary woman. Here is a vitally important work that allows us to understand why Anita Hill did what she did, and thereby brings resolution to one of the most controversial episodes in our nation's history. A graduate of Oklahoma State University and Yale Law School, Anita F. Hill served, until 1997, on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma College of Law in Norman, Oklahoma. She lectures widely on the subjects of civil rights and sexual harassment in the workplace. She is currently working on a book about sexual harassment.
| 1997-01-23T00:00:00
|
0385476256
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/93523-1
|
98565-1
|
William Gildea
|
Where the Game Matters Most
|
In Indiana, high school basketball is more than a game, it's a religion. Fifteen of the sixteen largest high school gymnasiums in the United States are located in Indiana, and each winter basketball fever grips the state as impassioned fans from hamlets to cities celebrate the sport. High school basketball known in Indiana simply as "The Game" is part of life's fabric. Its rich lore encompasses the epic triumph of tiny Milan High in 1954 (on which the film Hoosiers was based), the story of the legendary Larry Bird (now back home as coach of the NBA Pacers), and the dominating presence of Indiana University coach Bob Knight. In 1997 Indiana crowned its last all-state champion, marking the end of an eighty-seven-year-old Hoosier tradition. Despite public outcry, the statewide tournament has been replaced by four divisional tournaments based on school size. Small-school teams no longer will have the chance to compete against big-school Goliaths for the state title. Where the Game Matters Most captures the passion and the personalities, the triumphs and the heartbreak of this final all-comers season. Through the most intense basketball season in Indiana history, William Gildea follows four teams: the Anderson Indians, whose coach had just returned to the job after a liver transplant; a much-praised team from Batesville, a school of only 589 students; DeKalb, featuring the brilliant senior Luke Recker, recruited for Indiana U. while still a sophomore; and Merrillville, a perennial contender that was runner-up in the 1995 tournament. Bringing alive the extraordinary bonds forged among players, coaches, schools, families, and entire towns, Where the Game Matters Most is a compelling evocation of a truly historic championship season. —from the publisher's website
| 1998-02-22T00:00:00
|
0316519677
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/98565-1
|
168338-1
|
Sandra Day O’Connor
|
Lazy B: Growing Up On a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest
|
What was it in Sandra Day O'Connor's background and early life that helped make her the woman she is today-the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America? In this beautiful, illuminating, and unusual book, Sandra Day O'Connor, with her brother, Alan, tells the story of the Day family and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona. Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, about people, self-reliance, and survival, and the reader will learn how the values of the Lazy B shaped them and their lives. Sandra's grandfather first put some cattle on open grazing land in 1886, and the Lazy B developed and continued to prosper as Sandra's parents, who eloped and then lived on the Lazy B all their lives, carved out a frugal and happy life for themselves and their three children on the rugged frontier. As you read about the daily adventures, the cattle drives and roundups, the cowboys and horses, the continual praying for rain and fixing of windmills, the values instilled by a self-reliant way of life, you see how Sandra Day O'Connor grew up. This fascinating glimpse of life in the American Southwest in the last century recounts an interesting time in our history, and gives us an enduring portrait of an independent young woman on the brink of becoming one of the most prominent figures in America today. —from the publisher's website
| 2002-01-27T00:00:00
|
0375507248
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/168338-1
|
4283-1
|
Neil Sheehan
|
A Bright Shining Lie (Part 4)
|
Neil Sheehan gave five 30-minute interviews about his book, “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.” The fourth interview was titled "The Story of John Paul Vann."
| 1988-10-20T00:00:00
|
0394484479
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/4283-1
|
31627-1
|
Neil Postman
|
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
|
Neil Postman, author of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology published by Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, spoke on the theme of his book which noted the dependence of Americans on technological advances for their own security. He said Americans have come to expect technological innovations to solve the larger problems of mankind, and technology itself has become a national "religion" which people take by faith to solve their problems
| 1992-08-30T00:00:00
|
0679745408
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/31627-1
|
74506-1
|
Louise Barnett
|
Touched by Fire
|
Ms. Barnett talked about her book, Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer, published by Henry Holt and Company. She talked about the military and private life of General Custer and examined issues of class, race and gender. She depicts a man who never adjusted to life after his success in leading volunteers in the Civil War and examines how the Battle of the Little Bighorn created him as both a mythic hero and villain.
| 1996-10-13T00:00:00
|
080505359X
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/74506-1
|
89104-1
|
John Toland
|
Captured By History
|
In Captured By History, Toland offers new insights into the major events that shaped this tumultuous century, taking readers once again on an incredible historical and personal journey. —from the publisher's website
| 1997-09-14T00:00:00
|
0312154909
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/89104-1
|
71257-1
|
Michael Sandel
|
Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
|
Professor Sandel talked about his recent book, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, published by Harvard University Press. The book is about America's past and present political arguments. It also examines citizens' frustration with government and the unraveling of the moral fabric of community, which the government seems unable to stem. It also argues that neither the Republican nor the Democratic party can inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that self-government requires. Professor Sandel has been called a "republican-communitarian critic of rights-based liberalism."
| 1996-05-19T00:00:00
|
0674197453
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/71257-1
|
65105-1
|
Hanan Ashrawi
|
This Side of Peace: A Personal Account
|
Ms. Ashrawi talked about her memoir, “This Side of Peace: A Personal Account,” published by Simon and Schuster. The book talks about her life growing up as a Christian Arab woman in a Muslim-dominated section of the world and how she dealt with her differences in becoming an Arab leader. It focuses on her personal participation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. She also used the work to profile the Palestinian community from within. It talks about the PLO, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, the Oslo talks, and the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. She also talked about her experiences in the United States, including her confrontation with various forms of discrimination and dislike.
| 1995-06-04T00:00:00
|
0684802945
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/65105-1
|
31211-1
|
Martin Anderson
|
Impostors in the Temple
|
Mr. Anderson, author of the book “Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future,” published by Simon and Schuster, criticized the intellectual elite of American colleges and universities for failing the nation's students in higher education through poor teaching and failing to teach values. He discussed his work at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the current status of intellectual thought at colleges and universities in the U.S.
| 1992-08-16T00:00:00
|
0671709151
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/31211-1
|
7047-1
|
Zbigniew Brzezinski
|
The Grand Failure
|
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter and author of The Grand Failure, argues that due to massive economic, social, and moral failure the communist system has collapsed. The world is currently witnessing a disintegration of communism. Brzezinski asserts that this is a major historical development and that the West will soon be entering a post-communist world where the Soviet challenge will be military only. Mr. Brzezinski also discussed his experiences in government, including his tenure as National Security Adviser to President Carter.
| 1989-04-02T00:00:00
|
0684190346
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/7047-1
|
177962-1
|
Robert Darnton
|
George Washington’s False Teeth
|
—from the publisher's website An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century A master historian's excavations into the past unearth a world that is unexpected and compelling. The most famous character in eighteenth-century Paris, apart from the public hangman, was "Le Grand Thomas," a tooth puller who operated on the Pont-Neuf. A gigantic man seated high above the surrounding supplicants, he commanded instructions to his assistants and the "toothaches seemed to expire at his feet." George Washington was not so lucky. He was inaugurated as president in 1789 with one tooth in his mouth, a lower left bicuspid. The Father of His Country had sets of false teeth that were made of everything but wood, from elephant ivory and walrus tusk to the teeth of a fellow human. With characteristic learning and bracing insight, Robert Darnton shows us that the Enlightenment had false teeth too—that it was not the Father of Our Modern World, responsible for all its advances and transgressions. In restoring the Enlightenment to human scale, Darnton locates its real significance as a movement, a cause, a campaign to change minds and reform institutions. So too with the French Revolution, another icon of the eighteenth century: Darnton explores its origins in the gossip, songs, and broadsides that formed the political nervous system of Paris in the Old Regime. Figures that we think we know—Voltaire, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, Condorcet—emerge here afresh, their vitality (if not their teeth) intact. Was the leader of the Girondists, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a dedicated revolutionary or a police spy? Darnton shows the past to be an unruly place, sometimes confounding to the present, always unexpected, compelling, and rewarding.
| 2003-08-31T00:00:00
|
0393057607
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/177962-1
|
122691-1
|
Jean Strouse
|
Morgan: American Financier
|
A century ago, J. Pierpont Morgan bestrode the financial world like a colossus. The organizing force behind General Electric, U.S. Steel, and vast railroad empires, he served for decades as America's unofficial central banker: a few months after he died in 1913, the Federal Reserve replaced the private system he had devised. An early supporter of Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, the confidant (and rival) of Theodore Roosevelt, England's Edward VII, and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, and the companion of several fascinating women, Morgan shaped his world and ours in countless ways. Yet since his death he has remained a mysterious figure, celebrated as a hero of industrial progress and vilified as a rapacious robber baron. Here for the first time is the biography Morgan has long deserved—a magisterial, full-scale portrait of the man without whose dominating will American finance and culture would be very different from what they are today. In this beautifully crafted account, drawn from more than a decade's work in newly available archives, the award-winning biographer Jean Strouse animates Morgan's life and times to reveal the entirely human character behind the often terrifying visage. Morgan brings eye-opening perspectives to the role the banker played in the emerging U.S. economy as he raised capital in Europe, reorganized bankrupt railroads, stabilized markets in times of crisis, and set up many of the corporate and financial structures we take for granted. And surprising new stories introduce us in vivid detail to Morgan's childhood in Hartford and Boston, his schooling in Switzerland and Germany, the start of his career in New York—as well as to his relations with his esteemed and exacting father, with his adored first and difficult second wives, with his children, partners, business associates, female consorts, and friends. Morgan had a second major career as a collector of art, stocking America with visual and literary treasures of the past. Called by one contemporary expert "the greatest collector of our time," he spent much of his energy and more than half of his fortune on art. —from the publisher's website
| 1999-05-23T00:00:00
|
0375501665
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/122691-1
|
153154-1
|
Fred Maroon
|
The Nixon Years, 1969-1974, White House to Watergate
|
Published on the 25th anniversary of Nixon's resignation, this intimate and dramatic view of the presidency features 134 pictures by a prize-winning photographer who covered Washington for nearly 50 years. —from the publisher's website
| 1999-11-14T00:00:00
|
0789206102
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/153154-1
|
181736-1
|
Charles Ogletree
|
All Deliberate Speed
|
—from the publisher's website On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the doctrine of "separate but equal" was unconstitutional. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., was not even two at the time, and his family, farm workers in southern California, had scant knowledge of how keenly the ruling would affect them. In All Deliberate Speed Ogletree examines the personal ramifications of the decision for him and his family—his childhood in the wake of the Brown decision, his student days at Stanford and Harvard Law, his immersion in the Boston busing crisis—and its meaning for all Americans. Presenting a vivid pageant of historical characters including Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Earl Warren, Anita Hill, and Clarence Thomas, Ogletree discusses the ambivalence of our judicial system, the increasing legal challenges to affirmative action, and the issue of reparations. Informed throughout by brilliant legal insight, All Deliberate Speed compellingly traces the history of race and integration in American society, and will promote intense debate and reconsideration.
| 2004-05-09T00:00:00
|
0393058972
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/181736-1
|
57267-1
|
Stephen Ambrose
|
D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
|
They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought. They were soldiers of democracy. They were the men of D-Day. When Hitler declared war on the United States, he bet that the young men brought up in the Hitler Youth would outfight the youngsters brought up in the Boy Scouts. Now, in this magnificent retelling of the war's most climactic battle, acclaimed Eisenhower biographer and World War II historian Stephen E. Ambrose tells how wrong Hitler was. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories as well as never-before-available information from around the world, Ambrose tells the true story of how the Allies broke through Hitler's Atlantic Wall, revealing that the intricate plan for the invasion had to be abandoned before the first shot was fired. Focusing on the 24 hours of June 6, 1944, D-Day brings to life the stories of the men and women who made history -- from top Allied and Axis strategic commanders to the citizen soldiers whose heroic initiative saved the day. From high-level politics to hand-to-hand combat, from winner-take-all strategy to survival under fire, here is history more gripping than any thriller -- the epic story of democracy's victory over totalitarianism. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition. From the author of the definitive biography of Eisenhower comes the chronicle of the Allied invasion of Normandy, published on the 50th anniversary of the historic event. Eminent military historian Ambrose draws on previously unavailable government documents and more than 1,200 new interviews to tell the tale. Condensed in Readers Digest. 32 pages of photos; 8 maps. (Military History) —The interview was broadcast the night before the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
| 1994-06-05T00:00:00
|
068480137X
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/57267-1
|
181339-1
|
David Cay Johnston
|
Perfectly Legal
|
—from the publisher's website One of the country's top investigative reporters reveals how the richest people within the top 1 percent of the country has rigged the tax code and other laws in its favor. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has been breaking pieces of this story on the front page of The New York Times for nine years, work for which one business school professor calls him ìthe de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United Statesî. With Perfectly Legal, he puts the whole shocking narrative together in a way that will stir up media attention and make readers angry about the state of our country. And he has sound advice on what to do. Since the mid-1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in who benefits from the American economy and bears the burden of taxes. CEOs, big investors and business owners can delay paying their taxes for years and sometimes escape them almost entirely, while wage earners have their taken from each paycheck. Discreet lobbying by the political donor class has made tax policies and enforcement a disaster. Because of obligations to these donors Washington has been unable, or unwilling, to fix these problems. The news media have largely ignored official favors to those who are supposed to pay the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax. Millions of families expecting tax cuts are losing some or all of them to a stealth tax that was originally enacted only to apply to the tax-avoiding rich, but that now stings single mothers making as little as $28,000. But the cumulative results are remarkable: the 400 richest Americans pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than someone making $100,000. The 400 richest pay less and less of their income in taxes while the middle class pays more and more. And while the incomes of the very rich skyrocketed over three decades, the average income for the bottom 90 percent fell. Johnston exposes exactly how the middle class is being squeezed to create a widening income gap that threatens the stability of the country. By relating the compelling tales of real people across all areas of society, he reveals the truth behind: * "middle class" tax cuts and exactly whom they benefit * how workers are being cheated out of their retirement plans while disgraced CEOs walk away with hundreds of millions * how some corporations avoid paying any federal income tax * how CEOs fly on vacation in corporate jets for less than you pay for a middle seat in coach ñ and stick you with most of the cost * why the working poor are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS than everyone else * how the IRS became so weak that even when it was handed complete banking records detailing massive cheating by 1,600 people, it prosecuted only 4 percent of them
| 2004-04-18T00:00:00
|
1591840198
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/181339-1
|
160555-1
|
Kurt Eichenwald
|
The Informant: A True Story. Part 1
|
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
| 2001-02-04T00:00:00
|
0767903269
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/160555-1
|
102566-1
|
Molly Ivins
|
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You
|
It's been five years since Molly Ivins's last book, which is probably too long a time in the opinion of her many fans. But the intervening years have given the bestselling author and syndicated columnist some of the best raw material a political writer could ask for. The Republicans staged a revolution, Clinton was reelected, welfare "deform" swept the country, and the militia movement came out of the bunker: in short, it's been a banner time for Molly's brand of shoot-from-the-hip commentary and uproarious anecdotes. You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You brings together a first-class collection of smart, spirited, and fiercely funny writings. From the wild and woolly politics of her native Texas to the waffling in the Oval Office, Molly exposes the fatuous and hypocritical at all levels of public life. Whether she's writing about the 1996 presidential candidates ("Dole contributed perhaps the funniest line of the year with his immortal observation that tobacco is not addictive but that too much milk might be bad for us. The check from the dairy lobby must have been late that week"), conspiracy theorists ("Twenty-five years in the newspaper bidness have given me a fairly strong faith in the proposition that if you haven't read about it in The Daily Disappointment or seen it on the network news, it's probably not true"), or cultural trends ("I saw a restaurant in Seattle that specialized in latte and barbecue. Barbecue and latte. I came home immediately"), Molly takes on the issues of the day with her trademark good sense and inimitable wit. "I can think of few causes more important than keeping free voices alive in a world of corporate media," Molly writes. She is one of those voices and a national treasure; as the Los Angeles Times put it, she is "H. L. Mencken without the cruelty, Will Rogers with an agenda." Whatever your political persuasion, you're bound to agree that Molly Ivins is one of the sharpest and most original commentators on the American scene today. —from the publisher's website
| 1998-04-26T00:00:00
|
0679754873
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/102566-1
|
77953-1
|
Henry Grunwald
|
One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country
|
Mr. Grunwald talked about his new book, One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country, published by Doubleday. The book is a memoir about his life, from its beginnings in Austria in the 1930s to his retirement as editor of Time in 1987. He also talked about some of the famous media and political leaders he dealt with over the years, and his service as the U.S. ambassador to Austria after his retirement.
| 1997-02-02T00:00:00
|
0385493576
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/77953-1
|
175993-1
|
Anne Applebaum
|
Gulag: A History
|
—from the publisher's website The Gulag - the vast array of Soviet concentration camp —was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust. The Gulag entered the world’s historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago . Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. It is an epic feat of investigation and moral reckoning that places the Gulag where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of the troubled history of the twentieth century. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country’s barely habitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union’s time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned. But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West. Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.
| 2003-05-25T00:00:00
|
1400034094
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/175993-1
|
17362-1
|
Dayton Duncan
|
Grass Roots
|
Mr. Duncan talked about the importance of the New Hampshire primary as an accurate predictor of who will win the presidential election. He said it is "the closest thing we've got to amniocentesis." Since 1952, when New Hampshire's primary was changed, and became the first primary in each election cycle, no candidate from either party has won the nomination without first winning in New Hampshire. Mr. Duncan's book, Grass Roots: One Year in the Life of the New Hampshire Primary, details the lives of several campaign volunteers from the primary to Pres. Bush's presidential victory. He said his approach is different from past analyses of the process because he has taken a "bottom up" look at the campaign.
| 1991-03-31T00:00:00
|
0140103694
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/17362-1
|
151781-1
|
Richard Cohen
|
Rostenkowski: The Pursuit of Power and the End of the Old Politics
|
Until the 1994 election when Republicans took control of the United States Congress, Democrats had enjoyed immense legislative power for forty years. Most of them practiced old-school politics. Critics charged that they exploited corrupt powers of incumbency, but these Democrats also served their constituents in a time when the public still believed in their elected representatives. Dan Rostenkowski was among the half-dozen most influential members of Congress during the second half of the twentieth century, Richard E. Cohen writes in his biography, Rostenkowski: The Pursuit of Power and the End of the Old Politics. As chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the congressman from Illinois influenced the nation’s tax laws, international trade, Social Security, health care, welfare, and other areas policies that affected most Americans. Richard E. Cohen’s political biography of Rostenkowski follows his rise to power from modest origins in the Democratic ward politics of Chicago’s Polish northwest side, to his legislative triumphs, and ultimately to his criminal conviction and imprisonment for abuse of House practice. Because Rostenkowski served so many years in Congress (1959-1995), his career offers a prism into the changing nature of the institution and of the Democratic party, a change that gradually brought a new bitterness to Washington politics. The rise and fall of Dan Rostenkowski mirrors the rise and fall of the House Democrats. Richard E. Cohen has written a compelling, eye-opening story of American politics at work, portrayed through the career of one of its most fascinating practitioners. —from the publisher's website
| 1999-09-19T00:00:00
|
1566633109
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151781-1
|
72333-1
|
Glenn Simpson
|
Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics
|
Mr. Simpson talked about the book he co-authored by Larry Sabato, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistance of Corruption in American Politics, published by Times Books. In the book the authors analyzed why they believe Americans are cynical about the political system. Simpson described various forms of corruption in Congress such as "street money" or "walking around money," which is the practice of paying community leaders to get voters to the polls, and the purchase of legislative favors through large political contributions
| 1996-06-30T00:00:00
|
0812924991
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/72333-1
|
58251-1
|
Lani Guinier
|
The Tyranny of the Majority
|
Professor Guinier spoke about her new book The Tyranny of the Majority in which she outlines her views on race relations in the U.S. She was nominated to the post of Civil Rights attorney for the Justice Department. However, her nomination was withdrawn due to a "reaction" over her early writings on civil rights representation.
| 1994-06-26T00:00:00
|
0029131693
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/58251-1
|
95192-1
|
Susan Butler
|
East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart
|
Amelia Earhart's legacy has loomed large since her Lockheed Electra disappeared in 1938 and she has since emerged as one of the true heroines of the twentieth century. Now, Susan Butler offers the most comprehensive account to date of Earhart's remarkable life. From her childhood and her family's great financial hardships, to her successes as a social worker and aviation entrepreneur, to the unique relationship with her husband, the notorious publishing magnate George Palmer Putnam, readers experience Amelia in all her permutations: as fashion plate, as lecturer, as educator, and, of course, as flier. Butler also dispels much of the myth and speculation that has attached itself to Earhart's disappearance, offering in its place a less romantic but ultimately tragic scenario of a great pilot who died at sea. Ten years in the making, and using many newly available documents, East to the Dawn will prove the definitive life of Amelia Earhart for an entire new generation. —from the publisher's website
| 1997-12-14T00:00:00
|
0201311445
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/95192-1
|
166960-1
|
Vernon Jordan
|
Vernon Can Read! A Memoir
|
From the very beginning, I felt the tug of my mother's hope. It could not have been missed. I moved forward, propelled by her deep ambition and love for me-- two things I never had a moment's doubt about and which moved me to accept her guidance and to want to vindicate her faith in me. It's an almost irresistible challenge, when you have someone who thinks you are special and who works to see that you get the chance to shine. A bargain is struck, sometimes silent, sometimes spoken; their faith and commitment for your effort and success. If success is at all possible, you don't want to fail. You do everything you can not to fail. If there are times when things don't work out as you plan (and that often happens) a hard and honest effort fulfills the bargain. No matter what--you never break faith with those who support you. This is not to say that I don't have a will of my own, or my own preferences. It just happened (nature or nurture?) that my mother and I were of the same mind on the main point: that I was to go as far as I could as quickly as I could. All children rebel at some points, but for the most part, I believed my mother was right. If she had a plan for my advancement, then I was all for it. I was so confident in my knowledge that, at the end of the day, she wanted what was best for me that I followed her instructions about the important things in life. Until she died, I never made a major decision without consulting her. Sometimes I didn't even get the chance to consult. "Vernon, Jr., now wherever you go to college, you're going to join the ROTC." "I don't want to be in the ROTC." "It doesn't matter. Wherever you go to college, you're going to join the ROTC." "Mama, what do you know about the ROTC." "I don't know anything about the ROTC." "Well then, why are you so insistent that I should join it?" "All I can tell you is that all the white women I work for are sending their kids to the ROTC. There must be something to it." "There must be something to it." That was how my mother thought about things. She hadn't figured out exactly why the ROTC was so important to the "white women." I don't believe she knew it was the upper class's method of keeping their young men out of harm's way as they performed their military service. But considering how things were between whites and blacks, the details didn't matter much. It was a simple, straightforward calculation. Whether you were talking about the ROTC, schools, medical care, political power--all the basics of life--white people were hoarding the best of the world and had frozen black people out. It just made good sense to pay attention to where whites were going and how they were using the enormous amount of resources and opportunities they had rounded up for themselves. Whatever was going on that could be good for us; Mama wanted us to be a part of it. —from the publisher's website
| 2001-12-23T00:00:00
|
189162069X
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/166960-1
|
169779-1
|
Jennet Conant
|
Tuxedo Park
|
In the fall of 1940, as German bombers flew over London and with America not yet at war, a small team of British scientists on orders from Winston Churchill carried out a daring trans-atlantic mission. The British unveiled their most valuable military secret in a clandestine meeting with American nuclear physicists at the Tuxedo Park mansion of a mysterious Wall Street tycoon, Alfred Lee Loomis. Powerful, handsome, and enormously wealthy, Loomis had for years led a double life, spending his days brokering huge deals and his weekends working with the world's leading scientists in his deluxe private laboratory that was hidden in a massive stone castle. In this dramatic account of a hitherto unexplored but crucial story of the war, Jennet Conant traces one of the world's most extraordinary careers and scientific enterprises. She describes Loomis' phenomenal rise to become one of the Wall Street legends of the go-go twenties. He foresaw the stock market crash of 1929 in time to protect his vast holdings, making a fortune while other bankers were losing their shirts. He rode out the Depression years in high style, and indulged in the hobbies of the fabulously rich. He raced his own America's Cup yacht against the Vanderbilts and Astors, and purchased Hilton Head Island in South Carolina as his private game reserve. Conant writes about the glamour and privilege of his charmed circle as well as Loomis' marriage to a beautiful but depressive wife, whom he sent away for repeated hospitalizations while he pursued a covert affair with his protégé's young wife. His bitter divorce scandalized New York society and drove Loomis into near seclusion in East Hampton. At the height of his influence on Wall Street, Loomis abruptly retired and devoted himself purely to science. He turned his Tuxedo Park laboratory into the meeting place for the most visionary minds of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, James Franck, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. With England threatened by invasion, he joined Vannevar Bush, Karl Compton, and the author's grandfather, Harvard president James B. Conant, in mobilizing civilian scientists to defeat Nazi Germany, and personally bankrolled pioneering research into the radar detection systems that ultimately changed the course of World War II. Together with his friend Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning atom smasher, Loomis established a top-secret wartime laboratory at MIT and recruited the most famous names in physics. Through his close ties to his cousin Henry Stimson, who was secretary of war, Loomis was able to push FDR to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create the advanced radar systems that defeated the German Air Force and deadly U-boats, and then to build the first atomic bomb. One of the greatest scientific generals of World War II, Loomis' legacy exists not only in the development of radar but also in his critical role in speeding the day of victory. —from the publisher's website
| 2002-06-09T00:00:00
|
0684872870
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/169779-1
|
182785-1
|
Maureen Dowd
|
Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk
|
—from the publisher's website From Washington to Kennebunkport to Texas to old Europe and new Europe, during the past two decades Maureen Dowd has trained her binoculars on the Bush dynasty, putting them, as both 41 and 43 have complained to her, "on the couch." Here she wittily dissects the Oedipal loop-de-loop between father and son and the Orwellian logic of the rush to war in Iraq. It's a turbulent odyssey charting how a Shakespearean cast of regents, courtiers, and neo-con Cabalists-all with their own subterranean agendas-hijack King George II's war on terror and upend the senior Bush's cherished internationalist foreign policy and Persian Gulf coalition. As she's written about Bushworld, "It's their reality. We just live and die in it.'" For thirty years, Maureen Dowd has written about Washington-and America-in a voice that is acerbic, passionate, outraged, and incisive. But nothing has engaged her as powerfully as the extraordinary agendas, absurdities, and obsessions of George the Younger. Drawing upon her celebrated columns, with a new introductory essay, she probes the topsy-turvy alternative universe of a group she has made recognizable by their first names, middle initials, nicknames, or numbers-41, the Boy Emperor, Rummy, Condi, Wolfie, Uncle Dick of the Underworld, General Karl, Prince of Darkness (Richard Perle), and her own nickname from W., the Cobra-as they seek an extreme makeover of the country and the world. Bushworld is a book that any reader who cares about the real world won't want to miss.
| 2004-08-08T00:00:00
|
039915258X
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/182785-1
|
21853-1
|
Ken Auletta
|
Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way
|
Mr. Auletta talked about his book “Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way,” published by Knopf. His book looks at the effects of increased competition and advanced technology on U.S. network television. He explained how the television networks gained a monopoly over entertainment and news from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the current status of the networks in U.S. media.
| 1991-10-06T00:00:00
|
0307766330
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/21853-1
|
75246-1
|
Leon Dash
|
Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America
|
Mr. Dash talked about his new book, Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America, published by Basic Books. It focuses on a single-parent family of eight children in public housing in Washington, DC over the past fifty years. He also talked about the problems of the African-American underclass and what can be done to address them.
| 1996-11-10T00:00:00
|
0465070922
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/75246-1
|
65756-1
|
Marc Fisher
|
After the Wall: Germany, The Germans, and the Burdens of History
|
Marc Fisher discussed his book, After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History, published by Simon and Schuster. The book examines the relationship between East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Mr. Fisher, who served as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Bonn and Berlin from 1989 to 1994, draws on personal interviews to conclude that the country is sharply divided and that East Germans continue to see themselves as second-class citizens.
| 1995-08-06T00:00:00
|
0684802910
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/65756-1
|
156477-1
|
Stephanie Gutmann
|
The Kinder, Gentler Military
|
Gutmann charges into the armed forces to observe "the new military, " showing why the complete integration of women into the military is physically and sociologically impossible and how the pursuit of this unrealistic ideal is demoralizing to soldiers of both sexes and a sure set-up for battlefield disaster. —from the publisher's website
| 2000-05-14T00:00:00
|
0684852918
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/156477-1
|
58674-1
|
Peter Collier
|
The Roosevelts: An American Saga
|
Mr. Collier spoke about his new book The Roosevelts: An American Saga which highlights the life and times of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt. The discussion focused on the "loveless" family and the four children of the Roosevelts.
| 1994-08-07T00:00:00
|
0786107472
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/58674-1
|
110676-1
|
Balint Vazsonyi
|
America’s 30 Years War: Who Is Winning
|
Is America on a slow-motion trip toward socialism even as much of the rest of the world moves away from it? Hungarian-born historian and world-renowned concert pianist Balint Vazsonyi knows first-hand what it means to live under an authoritarian regime and makes a powerful case that America is going down the same road. Drawing on his personal experiences living under different versions of socialism, Vazsonyi describes how our hard-won freedoms are being gradually eroded. Vazsonyi traces the essence of what makes America unique back to the founders and exposes the dangerous trends that are undermining the founder's original intent. Vazsonyi documents how America's founding principles—rule of law, individual rights, the guarantee of property, and a common American identity—are being gradually replaced by government-mandated group rights, redistribution, and multiculturalism. The thirty years war is being fought between promoters of liberty, individual rights, moral guidance on one side; and believers in human reason as the supreme power, with government as its central authority, on the other. While the picture is not rosy, America has every chance of winning, if the intentions of the two sides are exposed, and the consequences weighted. This witty, simple-to-follow, and engagingly personal book will aid in the process. With unmistakable clarity, Vazsonyi shows how every time America moves away from its founding principles it moves in the direction of a system in which "social justice" is pursued through ever-greater government control. America's 30 Years War is inspiration to those who have lost touch with our founding principles and ammunition for those who believe that our freedoms must be defended every day. —from the publisher's website
| 1998-09-27T00:00:00
|
0895263548
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/110676-1
|
26799-1
|
David Savage
|
Turning Right
|
Mr. Savage, Supreme Court reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was interviewed about his book Turning Right: The Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, published by Wiley. Mr. Savage provides an analysis of the Court between 1986 and 1991 by examining the transition from liberal to conservative civil rights decisions during William Rehnquist's first five years as chief justice.
| 1992-06-28T00:00:00
|
0471595535
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/26799-1
|
118909-1
|
Robert Famighetti
|
World Almanac and Book of Facts 1999
|
The reference that millions of people turn to each year when they need quick, comprehensive, and authoritative information on a wealth of subjects, The World Almanac is now in its 131st year. Special features for 1999 include coverage of the 1998 Winter Olympics, complete election coverage, more of the "Countdown to the Millennium" feature begun in last year's edition, and an exclusive 16 page color-photo feature, "1999 in Pictures." —from the publisher's website
| 1999-02-28T00:00:00
|
0886878330
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/118909-1
|
170542-1
|
Samantha Power
|
A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
|
About this book: In 1993, as a 23-year-old correspondent covering the wars in the Balkans, I was initially comforted by the roar of NATO planes flying overhead. President Clinton and other western leaders had sent the planes to monitor the Bosnian war, which had killed almost 200,000 civilians. But it soon became clear that NATO was unwilling to target those engaged in brutal "ethnic cleansing." American statesmen described Bosnia as "a problem from hell," and for three and a half years refused to invest the diplomatic and military capital needed to stop the murder of innocents. In Rwanda, around the same time, some 800,000 Tutsi and opposition Hutu were exterminated in the swiftest killing spree of the twentieth century. Again, the United States failed to intervene. This time U.S. policy-makers avoided labeling events "genocide" and spearheaded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda who might have stopped the massacres underway. Whatever America's commitment to Holocaust remembrance (embodied in the presence of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.), the United States has never intervened to stop genocide. This book is an effort to understand why. While the history of America's response to genocide is not an uplifting one, "A Problem from Hell" tells the stories of countless Americans who took seriously the slogan of "never again" and tried to secure American intervention. Only by understanding the reasons for their small successes and colossal failures can we understand what we as a country, and we as citizens, could have done to stop the most savage crimes of the last century. -Samantha Power —from the publisher's website
| 2002-06-16T00:00:00
|
0465061508
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/170542-1
|
170207-1
|
Nguyen Cao Ky
|
Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam
|
Through America's bookstores run a river of books about Vietnam, everything from pulp-fiction heroes to historical revisionism to the mea culpa of aged war leaders. But there is precious little written by Vietnamese. Finally comes Nguyen Cao Ky, at 72 still trim and energetic, to fill that void, to explode America's hoary myths and to shatter the clay armies of false idols. In a memoir as audacious and charismatic as the disarmingly young pilot who led South Vietnam's first air strike against the North, Ky presents the inside story of Saigon's intrigues and tribulations. Sure to bruise American egos and to spark controversy with its blunt talk and shocking revelations, Buddha's Child is the first lengthy account by a top South Vietnamese leader of the pivotal events and major personalities of Vietnam's bloody, two-decade debacle. —from the publisher's website
| 2002-07-14T00:00:00
|
0312281153
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/170207-1
|
170126-1
|
James Srodes
|
Franklin: The Essential Founding Father
|
In His Lifetime, Benjamin Franklin was celebrated all over the Western world. And with good reason, says award-winning biographer James Srodes in his riveting, comprehensively researched portrait of a man he calls "the essential Founding Father." Having plumbed archives and other sources neglected by previous biographers, Srodes debunks numerous myths that have gatheres about Franklin - many if them spun by other Founding Fathers. Where John Adams - and his biographer David McCullough - had Franklin as indolent and careless, Srodes uses recently discovered documents to show that Franklin was keeping his colleague at arm's length in order to conduct covert activities to help the American cause. Srodes also looks closely at Franklin's reputation asa philanderer and challenges many long-held assumptions. Franklin is a fascinating study of a man of ceaseless energies and remarkable accomplishments: an apprentice printer from Boston who made his name and fortune in colonial Philadelphia before having the greatest adventures in Europe's leading capitals, London and Paris. Here we find the complete Franklin - scientist, diplomat, tradesman, author, inventor, celebrated wit, spymaster, propagandist, military leader, quartermaster. Srodes offers extraordinary insight into this complex man, showing us how Frankin's ability to divide his life into discrete compartments enabled him to accomplish so much in so many different areas. Of the many roles Franklin played, he is perhaps most familiar to us as the genius inventor and experimenter. After all, Frankin's electrical experiments earned him the Cpley Medal, the eighteenth-century equivalent (including bifocals, the lightning rod, and the Franklin stove) are still with us today. But as Srodes shows, Franklin's greatest invention was America, for "it is hard to see how we would be what we are today without the eighty-four-year progress of Benjamin Franklin." More than twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, Franklin was the first to put forward the plan to unite the colonies, and he took the lead in challenging King George's authority. One of only six men to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution, he secured the alliance with France that proved essential to America's success in the Revolution. Indeed, one could say that while George Washington won the battles, Benjamin Franklin won the war. —from the publisher's website
| 2002-05-19T00:00:00
|
0895261634
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/170126-1
|
174375-1
|
Amy Chua
|
World on Fire
|
—from the publisher's website Every few years, a book is published about America's role in the world and the changing contest of global affairs that gets everyone thinking in a new way. Amy Chua's WORLD ON FIRE will have exactly that kind of impact on the debate of how the world has changed in light of the events of last September. Apostles of globalization, such as Thomas Friedman, believe that exporting free markets and democracy to other countries will increase peace and prosperity throughout the developing world; Amy Chua is the anti-Thomas Friedman. Her book wil be a dash of cold water in the face of globalists, techno-utopians, and liberal triumphalists as she shows that just the opposite has happened: When global markets open, ethnic conflict worsens and politics turns ugly and violent. Drawing on examples from around the world--from Africa and Asia to Russia and Latin America--Chua examines how free markets do not spread wealth evenly throughout the whole of these societies. Instead they produce a new class of extremely wealthy plutocrats--individuals as rich as nations. Almost always members of a minority group--Chinese in the Philippines, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America, Indians in East Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia--these "market-dominant minorities" have become targets of violent hatred. Adding democracy to this volatile mix unleashes supressed ethnic hatreds and brings to power ethnonationalist governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge. Chua further shows how individual countries are often viewed as dominant minorities, explaining the phenomena of ethnic resentment in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world. This more than anything accounts for the visceral hatred of Americans that has been expressed in recent acts of terrorism. Bold and original, WORLD ON FIRE is a perceptive examination of the far-reaching effects of exporting capitalism with democracy and its potentially catastrophic results.
| 2003-02-09T00:00:00
|
0385503024
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/174375-1
|
110049-1
|
Robert Sobel
|
Coolidge: An America Enigma
|
In the first full-scale biography of Calvin Coolidge in a generation, Robert Sobel shatters the caricature of our thirtieth president as a silent, do-nothing leader. Sobel instead exposes the real Coolidge, whose legacy as the most Jeffersonian of all twentieth-century presidents still reverberates today. Sobel delves into the record to show how Coolidge cut taxes four times, had a budget surplus every year in office, and cut the national debt by a third in a period of unprecedented economic growth. Though his list of accomplishments is impressive, Calvin Coolidge was perhaps best known and most respected by his contemporaries for his character. Americans in the 1920’s embraced Coolidge for his upstanding character, which came as a breath of fresh air after the scandal-ridden administration of Warren G. Harding. The sleaze that characterizes much of American political life today was absent in his administration. In many respects Coolidge was of a bygone era. He was the last president who wrote his own speeches, who spent hours each day greeting White House visitors, who had only one secretary, and who didn’t even keep a telephone on his desk. Yet he remains as relevant today as he was three-quarters of a century ago. Little wonder, then, that Ronald Reagan so admired Coolidge, whose programs in the 1920’s presaged the recent movement toward smaller government and reduced taxes. (It was Reagan who ordered Coolidge’s portrait to be placed in the White House Cabinet Room, next to Lincoln’s and Jefferson’s.) Through research and analysis, Sobel reveals Coolidge’s clear record of political successes and delivers the message that Coolidge had for our time a message that speaks directly to our most important political debates. Coolidge remains an enigma to Americans because he was so unlike any other politician, past or present. Coolidge rose to the highest office in the land without the politician’s familiar trappings the glad-handing, the glib tongue, the empty promises, the negative campaigning. He lacked charisma, presence, charm, or any of the qualities that would make a politician attractive to today’s media. Coolidge’s legacy is his deeds, not his words which is exactly how he would have chosen to be remembered by history. Coolidge: An American Enigma dispels the myths that have gathered around this underappreciated president and gives him the serious consideration he merits. With this timely and important biography, Sobel has surely challenged historians to reassess Calvin Coolidge. —from the publisher's website
| 1998-08-30T00:00:00
|
0895264102
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/110049-1
|
169987-1
|
Raymond Strother
|
Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting
|
—from the publisher's website This brash and rollicking autobiography is a potent primer of the rough-and-tumble world of political consulting by one of its founding fathers and preeminent experts. Beneath the white-hot glare of the modern mediasphere where “ole pol,” shake-every-hand campaigns have given way to electronic image making and speed-of-light smear tactics, Ray Strother rolls cheerily along. A cross between a patriotic redneck raconteur and a TV-savvy renaissance man, Strother is unafraid to name names and refuses to mince words in tales of what he calls “the beauty and gore” of American politics. Strother begins with his blue-collar Democratic upbringing in the oil-refining small town of Port Arthur, Texas, in the forties and fifties. He follows with the crash course in Louisiana politics and corruption he received following graduate school. His vivid evocation of larger-than-life characters such as Jimmie Davis and Russell Long prefigures politics as an arena for the cult of personality that later bloomed — for better and worse — with the pervasion of TV. Strother’s mastery of the subtleties of political commercials counterpoints his compelling entry into the big-time senatorial and congressional races of the 1970s and early 1980s. The book reaches its dramatic climax in the story of Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. Strother’s gifts for incisive portraiture and media analysis crystallize an image of Hart as a brilliant, enigmatic, but ultimately self-destructive man and a democracy increasingly bedazzled by celebrity, blinded by breaches of privacy. The author’s adventures with the Clintons, Al Gore, and Louisiana notables, as well as famous consultants such as Dick Morris, Matt Reese, and James Carville, both tantalize and instruct. In a final set of reflections, Strother provides a disquieting picture of the devolution of candidates and consultants and the ascension of money and polling. Falling Up is a wildly entertaining, controversial, but finally optimistic political and media success story that will thrill and inspire a broad range of students, academics, journalists, and anyone spellbound by American politics.
| 2003-06-01T00:00:00
|
0807128562
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/169987-1
|
13424-1
|
Yossi Melman
|
Every Spy a Prince
|
Mr. Melman and Mr. Raviv discussed their book, Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israeli Intelligence. The book focused on the five branches of the Israeli intelligence community and the role of each branch. It also speculates on the future roles of the intelligence community in a potentially explosive area with the possibility of chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare.
| 1990-08-05T00:00:00
|
0395471028
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/13424-1
|
77043-1
|
Nell Irvin Painter
|
Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol
|
Nell Irvin Painter talked about her book "Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol," published by W.W. Norton. It chronicles the life of Sojourner Truth, a former slave, who became a spokeswoman and symbol for racial and gender equality.
| 1996-12-08T00:00:00
|
0393027392
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/77043-1
|
169138-1
|
Robert Skidelsky
|
John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937-1946
|
The first two volumes of Robert Skidelsky's definitive and consummate biography of John Maynard Keynes were hailed as publishing events on both sides of the Atlantic. Already published to acclaim in Britain, this third and final volume covers Keynes's later years from 1937 to his death in 1946. During this period, Keynes's outstanding contribution to the financing of Britain's war effort, to the building of the postwar economic order, and his role in Britain's struggle to preserve its independence within the Atlantic alliance solidified the economist's lasting importance in twentieth-century history. Skidelsky lucidly explains Keynes's economic theories and masterfully evokes the complexities of his personality. The book abounds in lively anecdotes and memorable portraits, notably that of his devoted wife, Lydia Lopokova, whose eccentric but utterly logical post-Keynesian existence is charted in a delightful epilogue. Insightful and intelligent, this is a work that tells the story of a passionate and determined visionary and provides an invaluable overview of issues that remain at the center of international political and economic debate. —from the publisher's website
| 2002-04-28T00:00:00
|
0670030228
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/169138-1
|
72755-1
|
Christopher Matthews
|
Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America
|
Mr. Matthews discussed his book, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America, published by Simon and Schuster. He described the casual friendship between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy which began when they were young members of Congress just after World War II. They admired each other and were casual friends until the rivalry of the 1960 presidential campaign.
| 1996-06-09T00:00:00
|
0684832461
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/72755-1
|
12232-1
|
Brian Duffy
|
The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation
|
The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation resulted from Duffy and Emerson's 15-month investigation into the December 21, 1988 airplane crash in Scotland. The explosion and crash killed 259 persons. The book describes the efforts of 10,000 law enforcement officials from the FBA, CIA, Scotland Yard, Scottish police, and West Germany's BKA. The authors said this comprised the largest international terrorism investigation ever undertaken.
| 1990-05-13T00:00:00
|
0399135219
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/12232-1
|
182510-1
|
Mario Cuomo
|
Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever
|
—from the publisher's website Abraham Lincoln, long the most resonant voice of American political values, was a founding member of the Republican Party. In today's charged political climate, he would be hard-pressed to recognize the issues in the contemporary GOP, argues Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York and a gifted political philosopher. Challenged by slavery, secession, and war, Lincoln was able to forcefully articulate the values and ideals that have sustained our country since its inception. His speeches, writings, and actions melded the Constitution, the Bible, and his own experience into an American scripture that inspires faith in the future Mario Cuomo shows how the big issues - equality, the role of government, war and peace, the responsibilities of the fortunate few - resonate in today's political climate as he brings to life the contemporary relevance of Lincoln's message for today's hot-button issues. Today's political discourse often lacks depth and wisdom, but Mario Cuomo's analysis of Abraham Lincoln will inspire readers to believe that government can still be a force for greater good in American society.
| 2004-07-25T00:00:00
|
0151009996
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/182510-1
|
151354-1
|
Jay Parini
|
Robert Frost: A Life
|
Robert Frost, the farmer-poet of New England, actually spent his formative early years in San Francisco. His mother moved the family east after the death of her husband—a hard-living journalist from whom Robert took his willful perversity. He attended Dartmouth and Harvard, leaving both prematurely, and after putative stabs at teaching and journalism became a poultry farmer in New Hampshire. It took a trip to England in 1912 (to live "under thatch") for his poetry finally to be published, and when he returned to America in 1915 his reputation had preceded him. Until his death in 1963, he worked assiduously at consolidating his position as America's premier voice; reading at Kennedy's inauguration and meeting Khrushchev were just two of the scenes he stole. So why does Jay Parini need to reclaim him? The answer lies with Lawrance Thompson. Thompson was one of Frost's most earnest disciples, and for years the poet, ever eager to shape his own image, allowed him a Boswellian intimacy. Unfortunately, Thompson came to despise his former mentor, and his exhaustively documented volumes portray Frost as a kind of solipsistic monster, in marked contrast to the awe with which he had previously been described. Parini, also a biographer of John Steinbeck, in a wave of perspective seeks a corrective to Thompson's bile. His writing is intelligent yet breathlessly generous, and he is at his best when considering the poems themselves. He rightly ascribes to Frost the innovation of the colloquial voice in serious verse—a legacy that appears immense today when so much contemporary poetry consists of little else. Frost's mastery lay in the freedom he found within which contribute to a melancholic spirituality beyond the rusticity for which he is popularly celebrated. While Thompson's egg is cracked and dry, Parini prefers a softer boil, and his elegantly reverential tone is imbued with a perception that reminds readers how great a poet Frost remains. The clergyman who advised him at an early age that his verse was "too close to speech," and thus gave him his voice, deserves eternal gratitude. —David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk
| 1999-09-12T00:00:00
|
0805031812
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/151354-1
|
122253-1
|
T.R. Reid
|
Confucius Lives Next Door
|
Those who've heard T. R. Reid's weekly commentary on National Public Radio or read his far-flung reporting in National Geographic or The Washington Post know him to be trenchant, funny, and cutting-edge, but also erudite and deeply grounded in whatever subject he's discussing. In Confucius Lives Next Door , he brings all these attributes to the fore as he examines why Japan, China, Taiwan, and other East Asian countries enjoy the low crime rates, stable families, excellent education, and civil harmony that remain so elusive in the West. Reid, who has spent twenty-five years studying Asia and was for five years The Washington Post's Tokyo bureau chief, uses his family's experience overseas, including mishaps and misapprehensions, to look at Asia's "social miracle" and its origin in the ethical values outlined by the Chinese sage Confucius 2,500 years ago. When Reid, his wife, and their three children moved from America to Japan, the family quickly became accustomed to the surface differences between the two countries. In Japan, streets don't have names, pizza comes with seaweed sprinkled on top, and businesswomen in designer suits and Ferragamo shoes go home to small concrete houses whose washing machines are outdoors because there's no room inside. But over time Reid came to appreciate the deep cultural differences, helped largely by his courtly white-haired neighbor Mr. Matsuda, who personified ancient Confucian values that are still dominant in Japan. Respect, responsibility, hard work--these and other principles are evident in Reid's witty, perfectly captured portraits, from that of the school his young daughters attend, in which the students maintain order and scrub the floors, to his depiction of the corporate ceremony that welcomes new employees and reinforces group unity. And Reid also examines the drawbacks of living in such a society, such as the ostracism of those who don't fit in and the acceptance of routine political bribery. Much Western ink has been spilled trying to figure out the East, but few journalists approach the subject with T. R. Reid's familiarity and insight. Not until we understand the differences between Eastern and Western perceptions of what constitutes success and personal happiness will we be able to engage successfully, politically and economically, with those whose moral center is governed by Confucian doctrine. Fascinating and immensely readable, Confucius Lives Next Door prods us to think about what lessons we might profitably take from the "Asian Way" , and what parts of it we want to avoid. —from the publisher's website
| 1999-05-16T00:00:00
|
0679456244
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/122253-1
|
183023-1
|
Jack Matlock, Jr.
|
Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended
|
—from the publisher's website In Reagan and Gorbachev , Jack F. Matlock, Jr., gives an eyewitness account of how the Cold War ended, with humankind declared the winner. As Reagan’s principal adviser on Soviet and European affairs, and later as the U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Matlock lived history: He was the point person for Reagan’s evolving policy of conciliation toward the Soviet Union. Working from his own papers, recent interviews with major figures, and archival sources both here and abroad, Matlock offers an insider’s perspective on a diplomatic campaign far more sophisticated than previously thought, led by two men of surpassing vision. Matlock details how, from the start of his term, Reagan privately pursued improved U.S.—U.S.S.R. relations, while rebuilding America’s military and fighting will in order to confront the Soviet Union while providing bargaining chips. When Gorbachev assumed leadership, however, Reagan and his advisers found a potential partner in the enterprise of peace. At first the two leaders sparred, agreeing on little. Gradually a form of trust emerged, with Gorbachev taking politically risky steps that bore long-term benefits, like the agreement to abolish intermediate-range nuclear missiles and the agreement to abolish intermediate-range nuclear missiles and the U.S.S.R.’s significant unilateral troop reductions in 1988. Through his recollections and unparalleled access to the best and latest sources, Matlock describes Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s initial views of each other. We learn how the two prepared for their meetings; we discover that Reagan occasionally wrote to Gorbachev in his own hand, both to personalize the correspondence and to prevent nit-picking by hard-liners in his administration. We also see how the two men were pushed closer together by the unlikeliest characters (Senator Ted Kennedy and François Mitterrand among them) and by the two leaders’ remarkable foreign ministers, George Shultz and Eduard Shevardnadze. The end of the Cold War is a key event in modern history, one that demanded bold individuals and decisive action. Both epic and intimate, Reagan and Gorbachev will be the standard reference, a work that is critical to our understanding of the present and the past.
| 2004-09-26T00:00:00
|
0679463232
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/183023-1
|
66211-1
|
Robert Timberg
|
The Nightingale's Song
|
Robert Timberg discussed his book, "The Nightingale's Song," published by Simon and Schuster. Timberg, also an Annapolis graduate and Vietnam veteran, researched the careers of Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, Admiral John Poindexter, Senator John McCain, and Navy Secretary James Webb. He spent seven years interviewing and writing in an attempt to answer such questions as, How did North, McFarlane and Poindexter become involved in the Iran-Contra controversy?
| 1995-08-27T00:00:00
|
0684826739
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/66211-1
|
163971-1
|
Alma Guillermoprieto
|
Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America
|
Since Alma Guillermoprieto became The New Yorker's Latin American correspondent a decade ago, she has emerged as the most informed and admired writer on her part of the world. In these superb pieces of reportage and analysis she anatomizes a region we are intimately linked with yet sadly ignorant of. She writes in depth about three countries that are in deep difficulty: Cuba, to which she returned after many years a place in an exhausting holding pattern, waiting for Castro's departure yet anxious about what may replace him. Colombia, in which she has spent several years and which is fatally splintered among the government, the left-wing guerrillas who control large sections of the country, thanks in part to money from the drug trade, and the right-wing paramilitaries. Mexico, where she lives, which is beset by the uprising in Chiapas (where she encounters the legendary masked leader, Marcos) and by the corruption of the government, yet emerging for the first time into some kind of real democracy. Finally, she gives us the stories of Eva Perón and so of Argentina; Che Guevara and so of the aborted Marxist revolution in Latin America; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian novelist who in 1990 lost the battle for the presidency to Alberto Fujimori. Looking for History is personal reportage that is infused with the author's unique understanding of a world that she is a part of, but that she can also stand apart from and sympathetically observe. —from the publisher
| 2001-06-24T00:00:00
|
0375420940
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/163971-1
|
159382-1
|
Karen Armstrong
|
Islam: A Short History
|
No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. Karen Armstrong's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest. Islam: A Short History begins with the flight of Muhammad and his family from Medina in the seventh century and the subsequent founding of the first mosques. It recounts the origins of the split between Shii and Sunni Muslims, and the emergence of Sufi mysticism; the spread of Islam throughout North Africa, the Levant, and Asia; the shattering effect on the Muslim world of the Crusades; the flowering of imperial Islam in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries into the world's greatest and most sophisticated power; and the origins and impact of revolutionary Islam. It concludes with an assessment of Islam today and its challenges. With this brilliant book, Karen Armstrong issues a forceful challenge to those who hold the view that the West and Islam are civilizations set on a collision course. It is also a model of authority, elegance, and economy. —from the publisher's website
| 2000-09-22T00:00:00
|
0307431312
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/159382-1
|
118999-1
|
Virginia Postrel
|
The Future and Its Enemies
|
Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history—the fruits of human ingenuity, curiosity, and perseverance. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians loudly laments our condition. Technology, they say, enslaves us. Economic change makes us insecure. Popular culture coarsens and brutalizes us. Consumerism despoils the environment. The future, they say, is dangerously out of control, and unless we rein in these forces of change and guide them closely, we risk disaster. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes these myths, embarking on a bold exploration of how progress really occurs. In areas of endeavor ranging from fashion to fisheries, from movies to medicine, from contact lenses to computers, she shows how and why unplanned, open-ended trial and error—not conformity to one central vision—is the key to human betterment. Thus, the true enemies of humanity's future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices. —from the publisher's website
| 1999-02-14T00:00:00
|
0684827603
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/118999-1
|
154123-1
|
William Least Heat-Moon
|
River-Horse: A Voyage Across America
|
The acclaimed, best-selling author of Blue Highways and Prairyerth chronicles his one-of-a-kind journey through America's waterways from Atlantic to Pacific. Brimming with history, drama, hilarity, and wisdom, River Horse ranks among the greatest American travelogues. In 1995, Heat-Moon set out on his most ambitious trip yet, from New York harbor to the breakwater of Astoria, Oregon, almost entirely by water. Aboard his little launch Nikawa ("river horse" in Osage), Heat-Moon logged more than five thousand miles, completing a trek no American had ever managed, yet following in the wake of our greatest explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark. En route, he encountered odder adventures, bigger and nastier cities, lonelier spaces, stranger people, and more turbulent waters than even he had expected. He and Nikawa braved record-shattering floods, foundered on hull-crushing sandbars, and overcame innumerable other travails great and small. The often uproarious, often terrifying narrative teems with high adventure and fascinating characters. Heat-Moon, a sage of the heatland, offers a singular arteriogram of our nation and its folk at the century's edge. —from the publisher's website
| 2000-01-16T00:00:00
|
0395636264
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/154123-1
|
179761-1
|
Jon Meacham
|
Franklin & Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship
|
—from the publisher's website The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children. Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister, who rallied his nation in its darkest hour, standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s affections—which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides—and Winston Churchill. Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families, two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history. Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint company—shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle. Hitler brought them together; later in the war, they drifted apart, but even in the autumn of their alliance, the pull of affection was always there. Charting the personal drama behind the discussions of strategy and statecraft, Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.
| 2004-02-15T00:00:00
|
0375505008
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/179761-1
|
169660-1
|
Richard John Neuhaus
|
As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning
|
Several years ago, a ruptured tumor almost killed Richard John Neuhaus. During a series of complicated operations, weeks in critical condition, and months in slow recovery, he was brought face to face with his own mortality. As he lay dying and, as it turned out, recovering, he found that despite his faith he had been quite unprepared for the experience. This book traces his efforts to understand his own reactions and those of his friends and family, and explores how we as a culture understand and deal with death. As I Lay Dying testifies that dying is--and is not--part of living. We can and should live our dying. Neuhaus interweaves his own story with thoughtful inquiry, circling through philosophy, psychology, literature, theology, and his own experiences to create provocative meditations that explore the many aspects of dying: the private and public experience, the separation of the soul from the body, grief, surrender, and mourning. The result is a book that shakes the foundations of our being--and yet is oddly and convincingly tranquil. —from the publisher's website
| 2002-05-26T00:00:00
|
0465049303
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/169660-1
|
74001-1
|
Michael Elliott
|
The Day Before Yesterday
|
Mr. Elliott talked about his recent book, The Day Before Yesterday: Reconsidering America's Past, Rediscovering the Present, published by Simon and Schuster. It focuses on why many citizens believe the 1940s and 1950s were a unique golden age in U.S. history and how this makes their expectations too high for the present which leads to a general cultural mood of misery. He also stressed that the economy is performing better than many people believe.
| 1996-09-22T00:00:00
|
0684809915
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/74001-1
|
11106-1
|
David Burnham
|
A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS
|
Author David Burnham called the Internal Revenue Service "the single, most powerful instrument of social control in the United States." He examined the organization in his book A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS. Burnham, a former journalist of the New York Times, compared the IRS to the New York Police Department, which he covered in the 1960s and 1970s. He compared the authority vested in a police officer to the authority of IRS agents. He stated that any organization with such authority delegated at low levels is subject to abuses and a prime candidate for poor management. A four-year project, Burnham's work was highly researched and documented. It covered the history of IRS from the Civil War era to the present.
| 1990-02-11T00:00:00
|
0394560973
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/11106-1
|
66860-1
|
Elsa Walsh
|
Divided Lives: The Public and Private Struggles of Three Accomplished Women
|
Elsa Walsh discussed her book, "Divided Lives: The Public and Private Struggles of Three Accomplished Women," published Simon and Schuster in 1995. The three women mentioned are: Meredith Viera, who was a television journalist for CBS, Rachel Worby, who was a classical music conductor and first lady of West Virginia, and Alison Estabrook, who was a surgeon in New York. She interviewed dozens of women but eventually settled on these three representatives. The book focuses on how difficult it was for these three women to lead "divided lives" between their careers and their families, even after the women's liberation movement.
| 1995-09-17T00:00:00
|
0684804018
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/66860-1
|
71389-1
|
David Broder
|
The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point
|
Mr. Broder talks about the book he wrote with Haynes Johnson, The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point, published by Little, Brown and Company. The book examines in detail how "the system" of congressional partisanship prevented a reform of the U.S. health care system by the Clinton administration in 1993-94. Both co-authors are Pulitzer Prize winners.
| 1996-05-05T00:00:00
|
0316111457
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/71389-1
|
13691-1
|
Christopher Wren
|
The End of the Line
|
Christopher Wren discussed his book, The End of the Line: The Failure of Communism in the Soviet Union and China. The book examines the similarities and differences in the two countries. M Wren argued that although the languages are different, the corruption, the mindless production of poor quality goods, the doctoring of photographs the outlook on the past and present are very similar. He also examined their societies, including education, health care, religion, and attitudes towards sex, children and courtship. Mr. Wren was The New York Times bureau chief in Moscow from 1973-1977 and 1981-1984. He is now the bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa.
| 1990-08-26T00:00:00
|
0671638645
|
https://booknotes.c-span.org/Watch/13691-1
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.