Showing posts with label Notable People. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Notable People. Show all posts

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown: A Memoir

Based on the product description, provided for by the publisher: With the same directness that defined his career in public service, Donald Rumsfeld's memoir is filled with never before disclosed or otherwise revealed details and insights about the Bush administration, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as September 11. It also features Donald Rumsfeld's singularly surprising observations on over 80 years of history: his experiences growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, Rumsfeld's time as a Naval aviator as well; his service in Congress starting at the relatively young age of 30; his cabinet level positions in the Nixon and Ford White Houses; his assignments in the Reagan administration; and his years as a successful business executive in the private sector. Donald Rumsfeld addresses the challenges and controversies of his career, from the unseating of the entrenched House Republican leader in 1965, to helping the Ford administration steer the country away from Watergate and Vietnam, to bruising battles over transforming the military for the 21st century, to the war in Iraq, to confronting abuse at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture at Guantanamo Bay. Along the way, he offers his plainspoken, first-hand views and often humorous and surprising anecdotes about some of the world's best known figures, from Margaret Thatcher to Saddam Hussein, from Henry Kissinger to Colin Powell, from Elvis Presley to Dick Cheney, and each American president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush. Rumsfeld relies not only on his memory but also on previously unreleased and recently declassified documents. Thousands of pages of documents not yet seen by the public will be made available on an accompanying website. Known and Unknown delivers both a fascinating narrative for today's readers and an unprecedented resource for tomorrow's historians. Proceeds from the sales of Known and Unknown will go to the veterans charities supported by the Rumsfeld Foundation.





Regarding the "Unknown" statement: The "there are known knowns..." statement was made at a press briefing given by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on February 12, 2002. Rumsfeld's statement relating to the absence of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups was criticised as an abuse of language, but defended as reflecting a profound, almost philosophical truth. Rumsfeld's defenders have included Canadian columnist Mark Steyn, who called it "in fact a brilliant distillation of quite a complex matter", and Australian economist and blogger John Quiggin, who wrote, "Although the language may be tortured, the basic point is both valid and important ... Having defended Rumsfeld, I’d point out that the considerations he refers to provide the case for being very cautious in going to war."
"[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know." - United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld





In January of 2011, Michael Rubin at the National Review Online, posted "Debunking the Crudest Iranian Propaganda," in which he said this: Not only in Najaf, but throughout Iraq, there was an outraged buzz about rumors that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had met with — and bribed — Grand Ayatollah Sistani. These reports — which originated on Iranian-backed Arabic news sites — are flatly untrue and are meant to discredit Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The Iranians know that it is the independent Shiites in Iraq which pose the greatest threat to the Iranian regime, since independent Shiite scholarship undercuts the theological legitimacy which the Iranian leadership seeks to claim.

In response to the rumor, Donald Rumsfeld’s office released this statement:
“The rumors currently making the rounds in some Arabic press outlets that allege Mr. Rumsfeld’s forthcoming memoir contains information about meeting with and bribing Grand Ayatollah Sistani are as laughable and inaccurate as they are disprovable. People will be able to see for themselves exactly what is in Known and Unknown when it becomes public on February 8.

Suffice it to say that Rumsfeld did not offer to pay for any of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s opinions, nor would he have even entertained the thought. Furthermore, Rumsfeld never met with Sistani. Suggestions to the contrary are flat untrue.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani was and remains a courageous but distinctly independent voice in Iraq. It’s worth noting that the misinformation campaign began in Iranian-backed press outlets and looks to be nothing more than a not so clever attempt to mislead and sow mistrust among Iraqis.”

Meanwhile, Michael Crowley over at Time Magazine had this to say on the issue: NRO's Michael Rubin delivers the strange report that Iraq is abuzz with a rumor that Donald Rumsfeld met secretly with that country's powerful Shiite Grand Ayatollah Sistani before the U.S. invasion and offered him a massive bribe, purportedly so Sistani would tell his followers not to resist the Americans. It is a reminder, though, that Rummy's much-anticipated book--one that some people expect to hit hard and settle multiple scores--will be landing quite soon.



Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Tom Payne: Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity

From Publishers Weekly: Payne (former deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph) offers an erudite and vastly entertaining look at how the Western cultural obsession with and "shared human responses" to celebrity haven't really changed in the last few millennia. He finds analogies between the Trojan War and Nascar, St. Augustine's Confessions and Dollywood. Juxtaposing Britney Spears's shaving of her head with "tonsures of the past"--Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt or Joan of Arc--and using Emile Durkheim to interpret her apparent irrational behavior reveals surprising conclusions: in that desperate moment, perhaps Spears was fumbling to communicate something to her ogling and voracious public. And here is the delightful paradox of Payne's thesis: in revisiting ancient sagas and modern sex tapes, analyzing Heath Ledger's death in the light of Goethe's Faust--he reveals more about us than any of our icons--past or present. He reveals our own prodigious appetite for erecting, cherishing, and destroying heroes, for casting out the deficient, for voyeurism as total knowledge and control. A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be "something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works."



The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart: Accounts of celebrities are usually either sneering or gushing — or both simultaneously, those attitudes being two sides of the same coin. Tom Payne’s wonderfully witty and erudite study of modern fame in the light of ancient myths and rituals is markedly kinder and more balanced, and yet also more unsettling. Drawing on tales of classical heroes such as Hercules and Achilles, as well as Jewish wedding customs, stories of human sacrifice in ancient Mexico and apposite quotes from Homer and Hesiod, Payne shows that the modern ascendancy of ­Jordan and Britney does not presage the end of civilisation. Celebrity worship, it turns out, is neither new nor lamentable. It bonds us together, and “expresses something about how our civilisation works”. Yet Fame paints a far more disturbing picture. It’s not that celebrity worship is dumb and trashy, but that it’s so manifestly a throwback to the cruellest forms of human behaviour and belief. By guiding us through the fate of some of their mythical predecessors — the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the martyrdom of St Perpetua, the execution of Marie Antoinette — Payne shows us how the lives of our modern chosen ones, both priviliged and anguished, provide us with an outlet for our most violent instincts, ­neuroses and jealousies.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Ronald Reagan: An American Life: The Autobiography

An American Life is the 1990 autobiography authored by former American President Ronald Reagan. Released almost two years after President Reagan left office, the book reached number eight on The New York Times' bestsellers list. The book is composed of 748 pages, describing Reagan's life from his birth in Tampico, Illinois, to his acting career, marriages, entrance into politics, years as Governor of California, loss in the 1976 Republican primary, and finally his years as President of the United States. Reviewer John O'Sullivan says of Reagan, "[H]e shows a tendency, where other people's feelings are concerned, to gloss over unpleasantness in a way which does him credit as a Christian, but detracts somewhat from his value as a historian." He revealed the events that led to his reluctant 1976 candidacy, as well as his relationships with members of Congress and his views on the world and the Cold War.



Reagan was married twice: the first to actress Jane Wyman (1917–2007) from 1940 to 1948. Reagan only mentions her in one paragraph in the book, saying "it didn't work out" but that the marriage "produced two wonderful children." He married Nancy Davis in 1952, saying in the biography "Sometimes, I think my life really began when I met Nancy."

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Jay-Z: Decoded

Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper and businessperson. He is one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America having had a net worth of over $450 million in 2010. He has sold approximately 50 million albums worldwide, while receiving ten Grammy Awards for his musical work, and numerous additional nominations. Jay-Z co-owns The 40/40 Club, is part owner of the NBA's New Jersey Nets and is the creator of the clothing line Rocawear. He is the former CEO of Def Jam Recordings, one of the three founders of Roc-A-Fella Records, and the founder of Roc Nation. As an artist, he holds the record for most number one albums by a solo artist on the Billboard 200. Jay-Z also has had four number ones on the Billboard Hot 100, one as lead artist. Along with his financial and musical success, Jay-Z is known for quarreling with other artists in the rap industry, the most famous feud being between him and fellow New York rapper Nas, which was eventually settled in 2005. He married American R&B superstar Beyoncé Knowles on April 4, 2008. On December 11, 2009, Jay-Z was ranked as the 10th most successful artist of the 2000–2009 decade by Billboard Magazine and ranking as the 5th top solo male artist and as the 4th top rapper behind Eminem, Nelly, and 50 Cent. Source: Wikipedia.



Excerpt (Jay-Z on Bono): The writer had asked me about the U2 record that was about to be released and I said something about the kind of pressure a group like that must be under just to meet their own standard. Bono told me that my quote had really gotten to him. In fact, he said it got him a little anxious. He decided to go back to the studio even though the album was already done and keep reworking it till he thought it was as good as it could possibly be.



Excerpt (Jay-Z on assault charges): People kept giving me the same name as the source of the bootlegging. It was someone I knew, someone I never would have suspected. One night I went to Q-Tip's solo album release party and at some point in the night, I ran into the guy everyone's been telling me is behind the bootleg. So I approached him. When I told him what I suspected, to my surprise, he got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club. It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar. I was sitting there like, 'No the f--- this n---a did not ... " I was talking to people, but I was really talking to myself out loud, just in a state of shock. Before I even realized what I was doing, I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger. The next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose in the club. That night the guy went straight to the police and I was charged with assault.

NPR program Fresh Air with Terry Gross featured the author and book on its program in November, 2010. This is what was said on the feature story's webpage:
Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day. "It was a very intense and stressful situation," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike." Now 40, Jay-Z hasn't forgotten his past — or the lyrics he's written over the years about his childhood in the projects. In his new book, Decoded, he unpacks the detailed riffs and lyrics that make up 36 of his songs — while examining both his own life and the growth of hip-hop over the last two decades.






Keith Richards, James Fox: Life

From The New York Times: For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war. Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade. “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.” By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. [...] One of this galvanic book’s many achievements is that Mr. Richards has found a way to channel to the reader his own avidity, his own deep soul hunger for music and to make us feel the connections that bind one generation of musicians to another. Along the way he even manages to communicate something of that magic, electromagnetic experience of playing on stage with his mates, be it in a little club or a huge stadium.
"There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you[...] You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings[...] flying without a license."



From The Guardian: The survivor's story is one of the predominant narratives of our time. It usually traces a familiar arc from excess through despair to redemption, and, as such, allows us to enjoy the vicarious thrill of voyeurism within the framework of a cautionary or salutary tale. Life by Keith Richards, the most famous survivor of them all, breaks with this tradition insofar as it contains excess aplenty but hardly any despair and very little redemption. Keith did it all, had a hell of a good time, and survived to brag about it. Life has the macho swagger that rock'n'roll in general – and the Rolling Stones in particular – once possessed. This is both its strength and its weakness. It often reads like a historical document of another time: a lost world in which women were always "chicks" or "bitches", an inflatable giant penis was a non-ironic stage prop, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's was the de rigueur rock'n'roll accessory. The Keith Richards book is a drug memoir of sorts, albeit without the hardcore confessional descriptiveness of the genre. Instead, it is almost casual in its cataloguing of excess: heroin, cocaine, Tuinal, Nembutal, STP, LSD, speedballs, Moroccan hashish, Jamaican ganja, and, inevitably, methadone, are just some of the substances mentioned – often in passing. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the book, which describes his daily breakfast routine during the 70s: "I would take a barbiturate to wake up … a Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or a Quaalude… And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you're feeling mellow, you've had a bit of breakfast and you're ready for work."
"People love that image[...] They imagined me, they made me[...] Bless their hearts. And I'll do the best I can to fulfill their needs. They're wishing me to do things that they can't. They've got to do this job, they've got this life, they're an insurance salesman[...] but, inside them, there's a raging Keith Richards."



Keith Richards's upbringing: Keith Richards was the only child of Bert Richards and Doris Dupree Richards. He was born in Dartford, Kent. His father was a factory laborer, who was injured during World War II. Their flat on Chastilian Road was hit by a Nazi V-1 flying bomb on July 5, 1944, while he and his mother were at the hospital, visiting with Bert Richards, who'd been wounded in the Normandy invasion. Keith Richards's paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders. His maternal grandfather (Augustus Theodore Dupree), who toured the U.K. in a jazz big band called "Gus Dupree and His Boys," was an early influence on Richards's musical ambitions; it's this grandfather that got Richards interested in the guitar. Richards's mother introduced him to the music of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and bought him his first guitar, a Rosetti acoustic. His father was less encouraging, telling his son to "Stop that bloody noise!" Richards's first guitar hero was Scotty Moore. Richards attended Wentworth Primary School, as did Mick Jagger. The two knew each other as schoolboys, and lived in the same neighborhood until 1954. That year, the family moved to what Keith Richards has described as "a fucking soul-destroying council estate at completely the other end of town" that looked like "a disgusting concrete jungle". The move was disorienting for the young Richards, as was his transfer a year later to Dartford Technical School (now and split into two schools named Wilmington Grammar School for Boys and Wilmington Enterprise College), which he attended from 1955 to 1959. The Dartford Tech choirmaster Jake Clair noticed Richards's singing voice and recruited him into the school choir. In a trio of boy sopranos Richards sang (amongst other performances) at Westminster Abbey in front of Queen Elizabeth II.



In 1959, Keith Richards was expelled from Dartford Technical School for truancy, and the headmaster suggested he would be more at home at the art college in the neighboring town of Sidcup. At Sidcup Art College, Richards devoted his time to playing guitar after he heard American blues artists like Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy. He swapped a pile of records for his first electric guitar, a hollow-body Höfner cutaway.
"There was a lot of music being played at Sidcup, and we'd go into the empty classrooms and fool around with our guitars. ... Even in those days Keith could play most of [Chuck Berry's] solos. In order to stay up late with our music and still get to Sidcup in the morning, Keith and I were on a pretty steady diet of pep pills, which not only kept us awake but gave us a lift. We took all kinds of things – pills that girls took for menstruation, inhalers like Nostrilene, and other stuff. Opposite the college there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored we'd go and give another upper to Cocky." - Dick Taylor
One morning in 1961, on the train journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Richards happened to get into the same carriage as Mick Jagger, who was then a student at the London School of Economics. They recognized each other and began talking about the LPs Jagger had with him (blues as well as R&B albums he had acquired by mail-order from America). Keith Richards was surprised and impressed that Mick Jagger not only shared his enthusiasm for Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters but also that he owned such LPs, as these were extremely rare in Britain at the time. The two discovered that they had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor, with whom Jagger was singing in an amateur band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Jagger invited Richards to a rehearsal, and soon after, Richards also joined the line-up. The group disbanded after Jagger, Richards and Taylor met Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, with whom they went on to form The Rolling Stones (Taylor left the band in November 1962 to return to art school). By mid-1962 Richards had left Sidcup Art College in favor of pursuing his fledgling musical career and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. His parents divorced at about the same time; Keith Richards maintained close ties with his mother, who was very supportive of his musical activities, but became estranged from his father and did not resume contact with him until 1982. In 1963 Richards dropped the "s" from his surname and began using the professional name "Keith Richard", because Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham felt it "looked more pop". (He used the s-less version as his pen name and stage name until the late 1970s.)

Laura Hillenbrand: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a 2010 non-fiction novel by Laura Hillenbrand, author of the best-selling book "Seabiscuit: An American Legend". Unbroken is a biography of World War II hero Louis Zamperini. Source: Wikipedia. The New York Times said this about the book: Zamperini joked to Hillenbrand that he’d be an easier subject for her than Seabiscuit because he could talk. But that also presents perils. Though his wartime experiences faded with time, talking about them was pretty much all Zamperini did for years. From more than a thousand retellings, in newspaper and radio interviews and in inspirational speeches — “This Is Your Life” even devoted an episode to him — his story had been sanded down, and while Hillenbrand ably assembles its component parts, she rarely gets beneath the surface. That Zamperini does not seem especially introspective and may have forgotten or repressed certain memories only compounds the problem.



The Statesman had this to say about the author and book: Hillenbrand is careful not to demonize all of the Japanese guards; parts of her account of Zamperini's time as a POW are based on interviews with former Japanese soldiers at the camps who were clearly disturbed at the time by the goings-on. Yet it's hard to sugarcoat some of the incidents she relates. Zamperini was made to clean out a pig's sty with his hands. (He was so hungry that he shoved some of the pig's befouled feed in his mouth.) He was lined up with other officers and hit in the face by the enlisted men at the orders of guards, who finished off the beatings with a kendo stick after two hours of hitting. Like many of the other prisoners, he suffered from dysentery, at one point visiting the latrine as many as 20 times a day.





George W. Bush: Decision Points

Decision Points is a memoir by former U.S. President George W. Bush. It was released on November 9, 2010, and the release is being accompanied by national television appearances and a national tour. The book surpassed sales of two million copies less than two months after its release, nearly matching sales of Bill Clinton's memoir, which took six years to achieve. Bush's 481-page memoir is broken up into 14 chapters. The first two chapters are about his life before the presidency. The first chapter is about notable events in his earlier life such as his decision to quit drinking in 1986. The second chapter is about his decision to run for Governor of Texas, and then President of the United States. The remaining twelve chapters are about events during his presidency: the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, aid to developing countries, the "surge" (a decision to deploy more U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007), domestic issues (including Medicare Part D, Social Security reform, No Child Left Behind, and Immigration reform), the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, stem-cell research, and the financial crisis of 2008. He wrote with the research assistance of former White House Deputy Director of Speechwriting Christopher Michel. Source: Wikipedia.



In November of 2010, Spiegel Online reported this about George W. Bush's Decision Points: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has said that ex-US President George W. Bush is not telling the truth in his memoirs, released on Tuesday. Schröder said he never offered his unconditional support for Bush's aggressive policy against Iraq. Both ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and former United States President George W. Bush have been out of office for some time. But the enmity which they developed for each other while they were in office seems to have survived.



Also in November of 2010, Ryan Grim through the Huffington Post, reported this:
Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir. Bush, on his book tour, makes much of the fact that he largely wrote the book himself, guffawing that critics who suspected he didn't know how to read are now getting a comeuppance. Not only does Bush know how to read, it turns out, he knows how to Google, too. Or his assistant does. Bush notes in his acknowledgments that "[m]uch of the research for this book was conducted by the brilliant and tireless Peter Rough. Peter spent the past 18 months digging through archives, searching the internet[s], and sifting through reams of paper." Bush also collaborated on the book with his former speechwriter, Christopher Michel.





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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin & John Wilkes Booth from KERA's Think Podcast

[2010-12-16 12:00:00] How did family jealousy culminate in the assassination of one of America's greatest presidents? We'll find out this hour with historian Nora Titone, whose new book is "My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy" (Free Press, 2010).
Download that KERA Radio podcast here. The San Jose Mercury News had this to say about the author and book:

[If] it seems that the acting profession has never been filled with more vile representations of the human race, one particularly atrocious case has generally escaped popular memory. Because 145 years ago, an actor who was the Steven Segal of his day shot the president of the United States in the back of the head and killed him, for no greater reason, author Nora Titone posits in her recently released first book "My Thoughts Be Bloody," than that he was jealous of an older brother. Even before Abraham Lincoln's assassination at the hands of hack actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, writes Titone (who attended Castilleja School in Palo Alto from 1986 to 1990), actors were considered to be of the same class as prostitutes and thieves. Patrons flocked to theaters to forget the brutality of the ongoing Civil War for a short time, but when, for example, it was discovered that Lincoln's head had rested in actress Laura Keene's lap as a doctor removed bullet fragments, she was called a jezebel, was shunned for the rest of her acting career and, deeply in debt, died from a tubercular hemorrhage.
See that Mercury review here.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The Fresh Air Interview: Jay-Z 'Decoded' from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day. "It was a very intense and stressful situation," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike."
Download the podcast here. See the full NPR Fresh Air feature here. See also: The Hits Collection, Vol. 1, Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office

Friday, October 22, 2010

Charlie Rose's Thursday, October 21, 2010 Conversation with Robert Gottlieb - author of “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt” -

CHARLIE ROSE: Robert Gottlieb is back. His publishing career spans
50 years. During that time has been editor in chief of Simon and Schuster,
Alfred A. Knopf, and "The New Yorker" magazine. He is, as you know, a
writer. His new book "Sarah -- the Life of Sarah Bernhardt" is the first
in Yale’s Jewish Lives series.

Bernhardt, also known as "The Divine Sarah," was once the most famous
actress in the world. I’m pleased to have Robert Gottlieb back at this
table. Welcome.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Charlie, thanks.

CHARLIE ROSE: What is this series about?

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: It is about Jewish lives, which is why it’s called
"Jewish Lives."

CHARLIE ROSE: But Yale initiated it?

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Yes. A very benign person gave him a considerable
amount of money to launch this series and pay for it generously so that
they could hire sign on the writers it they wanted.

CHARLIE ROSE: And they signed on you to do this?

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: They did.

See: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11255. See also: Food Justice (Food, Health, and the Environment), Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, Charlie Rose with Peter Whybrow; Robert Gottlieb; Terence Ward (March 18, 2005)