In her memoir, My Life So Far (Random House, 2005), Jane Fonda reveals how it wasn't until age 60, after many life lessons in what she calls her "third act," that she felt she discovered her voice. Now that she has it, she is determined to find meaningful ways to use it, through the many channels that she finds opening up to her. Ironically, Fonda was in the process of writing her next book on aging for Random House, when playwright Moises Kaufman sent her the script for a play called 33 Variations. Fonda had just been writing about how many renowned artists like Matisse and Beethoven did some of their best work later in life, and the part Kaufman was offering to her was an American musicologist who becomes obsessed with why Beethoven, in his later years, was driven to write 33 variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli. Fonda, who loved the script, took it as a sign, and returned to Broadway after 46 years to star in the play, currently performing to rave reviews and standing ovations.
Read the full HuffPo post here.
A conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund and author of "The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World"
Jacqueline Novogratz is here. “New York Times” columnist Nick Kristoff has
called her “one of the most interesting innovators in aid and development."
“Innovators” is the key word. She is in the Acumen Fund which invests
philanthropic money in enterprises that help the poor. The fund has helped
set up businesses in South Asia and Africa for everything from mosquito
nets to clean water. She writes about her experiences. It is in a book
called “The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an
Interconnected World.”
I am pleased to have her here at this table for the first time, welcome.
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Thank you.
CHARLIE ROSE: “The Blue Sweater.” Tell me the story because it’s a fun
story.
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Thank you. I’m really glad to be here. I was given
a sweater by my Uncle Ed when I was 10 years old. It was blue and it had
zebras running around the front and mountains across the chest. Wore it
all of the time and wore it all the way through high school until my
adolescent curves were changing the contours of the sweater itself and I
think there is a humiliating moment in every adolescent girl’s life.
Mine was when my high school nemesis yelled across the hall that the boys
no longer had to go to the mound tons to ski, they could use my sweater.
And feeling completely mortified, I marched home
See the full interview here.
On the award-winning The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Lewis Black exercises his quick wit and ability to highlight inconsistencies in politics and culture. In a new collection of essays, Me of Little Faith, Black has turned his critical eye towards religion. He talks in a way most of the rest of us can't -- about violence committed in the name of God and about his smart rants on Comedy Central. Bob talks to Keith Bellows, editor-in-chief of National Geographic Traveler magazine. Bellows and his fellow writers have traveled the globe to compile a list of the 500 greatest trips the world has to offer. The book is called âJourneys of a Lifetimeâ and encompasses every continent and every possible mode of transportation, including the world's top 10 elevator rides.
Download the podcast here. See also:
I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas
,
Lewis Black: Stark Raving Black
,
Surviving the Holidays with Lewis Black
Does the global economic crisis spell doom for China? Not according to James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic. Fallows joins us to discuss China's current economic situation, and how Chinese entrepreneurs are turning hard times into opportunities. Fallows wrote the cover story for the April 2009 issue of The Atlantic, an article entitled "China's Way Forward." His latest book is "Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China."
Listen to the podcast here.
And here comes Blake Bailey’s stunningly detailed biography, exploring step by stumbling step the crooked path that Cheever followed, disclosing the addicted urges and bawling self-pity (“What did I ever do to deserve this”) to which he submitted himself and those within his household. Following a prologue, Bailey’s account is chronological, beginning in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. To be descended from American settlers was not necessarily to be from a distinguished family, and by the time Cheever was born (to the manner but not to the manor) in 1912 on Boston’s South Shore in Quincy, the “accursed” Cheever history was already one of financial ruin, fecklessness, alcoholism, solitude, madness and suicide. John’s father, a traveling shoe salesman, liked to remind his sons to remember, “at all times, that I was a CHEEVAH.” Literary grandiosity was a family indulgence: Cheevah’s “despised” Uncle Hamlet was named in deference to Grandfather Aaron’s well-thumbed set of Shakespeare, with, Cheever said, “most of the speeches on human ingratitude . . . underscored.” Cheever’s grandfather died of “alcohol & opium” delirium tremens, alone in “squalid lodgings” in a Boston neighborhood of “shabby immigrant” tenements.
Read the full NYT piece here. See also:
The Stories of John Cheever
,
John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, No. 188)
,
Falconer
,
The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics)
Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, reflects on his own crisis of purpose in the wake of his book's wild success. He explains his belief that God's intention is for each of us to use our talents and influence to do good.
Listen to the podcast, TED Talk here.
CHARLIE ROSE: Felix Rohatyn is here. He is the legendary investment
banker who was pivotal in saving New York City from financial ruin more
than 30 years ago. These days, he’s focused on a much different problem --
revitalizing the nation’s once great infrastructure, which he says is
literally falling apart. He writes about that in “Bold Endeavors: How Our
Government Built America and Why It Must Rebuild Now.” In it, he reviews
10 great public investments and how they can be used as a model today. I’m
pleased to have Felix Rohatyn back at this table. Welcome.
FELIX ROHATYN: Thank you, Charlie.
CHARLIE ROSE: You know, I want to talk about what happened 30 years
ago. You know, let’s talk about it now.
FELIX ROHATYN: Sure.
CHARLIE ROSE: What was it and what are the lessons from the near
financial collapse of New York City that you and Hugh Carey, the governor,
were able to do that might be instructive about what government can do
today.
Read the full transcript here. And view the entire interview here. See also:
Dealings: A Political and Financial Life
,
Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now
,
Dealings
CHARLIE ROSE: Rashid Khalidi is here. He is the Edward Said professor of modern
Arab studies at Columbia University. No historian has explored the history
of Palestinian nationalism as deeply and passionately as he has. His new
book is called "Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the
Middle East." I’m pleased to have him back at this table.
We have much to do here, so let’s get with it. This book was informed
by your experience in Beirut in the ‘70s?
RASHID KHALIDI: That is correct.
CHARLIE ROSE: How so?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I was living in a capital that was one of the
cockpits of the Cold War in the Middle East. I was living in Beirut, and
the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in this fierce rivalry.
And people take it for granted. They think of the Cold War as
something that took place in Berlin or something that had to do with the
Korean War, but the Middle East was one of the major arenas of American-
Soviet competition, and it was getting hotter and hotter in the time I was
there. And I realized this as I was working on this book, that this was
the angle that I wanted to take.
Read the full transcript here. View the entire interview here. See also:
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
,
Charlie Rose - Rashid Khalidi & Martin Indyk / Ken Mehlman (January 16, 2008)
,
Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness
,
Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East
, 
, 
, 