The Inside Story of Cloning Man's Best Friend from KERA's Think Podcast

[2011-01-13 13:00:00] What would you pay to keep your favorite pet forever? We'll explore the possible future world of pet cloning this hour with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Woestendiek, author of the new book "Dog, Inc.: The Uncanny Inside Story of Cloning Man's Best Friend" (Avery, 2011). Listen to the podcast.

Rick Bragg: All over but the Shoutin'

The author, Rick Bragg, won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996, for his work with The New York Times. Rick Bragg recently spoke in front of Alabama's state legislature. The Gadsden Times reported this: “Remember My People,” was Bragg's topic and even though he spun yarns and told good natured tales, there was an edge to his voice several times as he defined just who his people are and how they can be taken advantage of by the powerful. “I know that lucky people, rich people, comfortable people don't need a lot of help,” said Bragg, whose best selling book “All Over But the Shoutin'” is partly the story of growing up dirt poor — “I come from several generations of poor white trash in northeast Alabama,” he said proudly — and his incredibly strong mother who raised him and his two brothers while married to an abusive, alcoholic father. “But I am not asking you to give my people, working people, anything they don't earn,” he said. “But I believe that every society, every great society really is judged by how it treats its working people and poor. See that Gadsden Time piece here. Rick Bragg also wrote these interesting books: The Most They Ever Had, The Prince of Frogtown (Vintage), Ava's Man, and Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg.

Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

ABC News recently invoked the author and his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, in this report on Wikileaks: Lawrence Wright is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Looming Tower," an investigation of the rise of Al-Qaida and the events leading to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He relied in part on internal State Department documents, the kind WikiLeaks has just released by the hundreds of thousands. "That was really helpful. I'd hate not to have such inside glimpses," Wright says of the documents he obtained, including how the State Department dealt with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He sees the short-term advantage to WikiLeaks, but wonders if books such as his will become harder to write. "I worry that there will be a backlash in terms of classification, so that more information that would be considered merely confidential will be termed top secret and kept from wider distribution, so that people on the ground who could put such knowledge to work, won't have access to it." See that ABC News report here.

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Pulitzer Prize winning author, Michael Chabon, was recently elected to fill the role as chairman of the board of directors of a prominent artist colony. The Associated Press reported this in December, 2010: Michael Chabon, the novelist, screenwriter and father of four, has a new responsibility. He has been elected chairman of the board of the directors of the MacDowell Colony, the century-old artist residency program based in Peterborough, N.H. Chabon, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," replaces Robert MacNeil, author and television newsman who is retiring after serving 17 years. MacNeil turns 80 in January. Chabon, 47, has been a resident nine times at MacDowell and told The Associated Press on Monday that he was eager to contribute to an institution that had done so much for him. See that AP story here.

Daniel Yergin: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

Recently, USA Today invoked the author in a story about the demand for gas in the United States: "A combination of demographic change and policy change means the heady days of gasoline growing in the U.S. are over," says Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry. This isn't the first time in U.S. history that gasoline demand has fallen, at least temporarily. Drivers typically cut back during recessions, then hit the road again when the economy picks up. Indeed, the Great Recession was the chief reason demand fell sharply in 2008. But this time looks different. Government and industry officials — including the CEO of ExxonMobil— say U.S. gasoline demand has peaked for good. It has declined four years in a row and will not reach the 2006 level again, even when the economy fully recovers. Read that USA Today report here.

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

T.J. Raphael of the White Plains Patch recently reported this about the Pulitzer Prize winning author: Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the fiction novel, "The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao," visited White Plains Highlands Middle School on Dec. 15. Students in Yakira Tejada's class had written the author letters who then felt inspired to visit the school. Diaz has also written the critically acclaimed novel "Drown." His work has appeared in the New Yorker, African Voices and in Best American Short Stories. See that webpage here. The author also wrote: Drown, Negocios, and La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition). Over the years, the author's spoken at popular venues, such as the Google corporate event series, "Authors at Google" and was also a guest on The Colbert Report.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Junot Diaz
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> March to Keep Fear Alive

Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

A writer for The Guardian recently wrote this about the book and author: One of 2010's most feted books has been The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, a powerful history of the 20th-century migration of African-American families from America's deeply segregated south. Epic in the scale of its hurt and hope, it tells the largely untold story of a people fleeing a society of segregation and lynchings to start more fulfilling lives in Chicago, New York and the west coast. In these anonymous sprawls, racial prejudice may have been alive and well in people's heads but the crucial difference was that it wasn't sanctioned by policy and pulpit. Read that Guardian article here.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Theodore Roosevelt, Post-Presidency from KERA's Think Podcast

[2010-12-14 12:00:00] Why was Theodore Roosevelt so influential and famous overseas even after his presidency? We'll discuss the last decade of his life this hour with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Edmund Morris, whose new book is "Colonel Roosevelt" (Random House, 2010)

Download the KERA radio podcast here. Consider this Salon.com review and tell us what you think. "Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt (and the author of a critically panned biography of Ronald Reagan), has returned with the third and final volume of his Roosevelt biography. "Colonel Roosevelt," with its descriptive and narrative power, its thorough exploitation of sources, and its interplay of man and nation, may be the best biography ever written about the life of an American president." We can't tell if the reviewer liked the book or not. Find that review here. "Colonel Roosevelt" is the third and final installment in the epic biography of the man, by Morris. The other two are: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex (Modern Library Paperbacks). Other books by Morris: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Ten Acres is Enough.

"'The Gun': How AK-47s Changed The Nature Of War" - from NPR News and the NPR program, All Things Considered

The image is iconic: the stubby barrel, the inverted arc of the banana clip. Osama bin Laden included one in his video after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Saddam Hussein had a pair with him when he was captured. It appears on the flag of Mozambique and Hezbollah. The AK-47 — or versions of it — can be found in every major conflict of the past 50 years. In his new book, The Gun, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter C.J. Chivers traces the history of the lethal firearm. Chivers, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, tells NPR's Audie Cornish the gun is one of the principle weapons of insurgents in Afghanistan, where he's been reporting.

Download the podcast here. Read the full NPR All Things Considered feature story, here. Newsday posted a few pages of the book, here. And The New York Times had this to say about the book, recently:

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

Find that Times piece, here. The Los Angeles Times also plugs the book:

If somebody were to tell you that the long tragedy of human warfare entered a new and deadly phase in the fourth decade of the 20th century, the historically literate mind almost certainly would jump to the invention of the atomic bomb, which ushered in an age of anxiety and the long balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. C.J. Chivers makes a convincing case in "The Gun" that a far more lethal and consequential weapon was devised at about that same time in a sprawling Soviet military design facility — the first Avtomat (Automatic) Kalashnikov assault rifle. "The Gun" is the author's exhaustive history of the rifle's origins, development and astonishing influence on global security. The banana-clipped Kalashnikov is by now a familiar sight to anyone who watches a few minutes of television news footage; it's the weapon clasped to the chests of Kim Jong Il's goose-stepping legions, waved high by Somali pirates, clutched by Africa's wretched child soldiers, leaning up against a mud-washed wall in Osama bin Laden's infamous videos.

You can find the Los Angeles Times mention, here (it's a few paragraphs; nothing meaty). And the New York Post had this to say about The Gun:

In his fascinating book, “The Gun” (Simon & Schuster), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers shows how the world was forever altered by the pursuit of automatic weapons and especially the invention of the Kalashnikov — an easy-to-use automatic rifle that allowed any one man to possess the firepower of an army.

Finally, for a little over a year now, Chivers has been maintaining this blog at The New York Times. The blog's central theme is war and small arms. And on that note, there's a pairing that we can do here, though not with another book; a 2005 film starring Nicholas Cage, "Lord of War." The movie's theme is closely aligned with the sentiments in Chivers' book, and it's hard to not think of the movie, while reading the book, and vice versa; mainly because of the weight of the AK-47, the credit and the responsibility that's placed on this sole item. IMDB carries this storyline description:

This film charts the rise and fall of Yuri Orlov, from his early days in the early 1980s in Little Odessa, selling guns to mobsters in his local neighbourhood, through to his ascension through the decade of excess and indulgence into the early 90s, where he forms a business partnership with an African warlord and his psychotic son. The film also charts his relationship through the years with his younger brother, his marriage to a famous model, his relentless pursuit by a determined federal agent and his inner demons that sway between his drive for success and the immorality of what he does.

Find the that IMDB profile here. Wikipedia has this to say, about the film's historical accuracy:

Plot details on the illegal arms market, particularly regarding purchases for Tropical Africa in early 1990s, are closely based on real stories and people originating from the former Soviet Union. The main protagonist's name, Yuri Orlov, corresponds to the last name of Oleg Orlov, a Russian businessman arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of smuggling missiles to Iran. The real Orlov was strangled in Kiev's Lukyanivska Prison in 2007 during the investigation.[7] The character Andre Baptiste, Sr. is partly based on Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia until 2003.[8] The character of Colonel Oliver Southern is evidently hinting of Oliver North, most famous for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, the scenes of direct shipping of weapons from Ukraine's army storages is fictional.[7] Portrayal of the Interpol as an acting security agency is also entirely fictional.

Amnesty International supported and endorsed the film. There's an internet movie firearms database, the IMFDB (sort of like the IMDB, no relation). The site lists all of the firearms, along with the AK-47, that were featured in the film.

"Teddy Roosevelt And The 'Burn' That Saved Forests" from WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air with Terry Gross [original posting, broadcast: Oct, 2009]

Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" was just released on paperback, and so, WHYY Radio, NPR Fresh Air rebroadcast last year's interview with the author.

In his new book The Big Burn, author Timothy Egan takes us back to 1910, to the scene of the largest forest fire in American history. Three million acres — an area the size of Connecticut — burned down in Idaho and Montana over the course of a single weekend. More than 70 people died. The Idaho Statesman has since remembered it as "a conflagration of biblical proportions," and Egan says the fire was of a singular kind, "a monster that takes on a life of its own." But in The Big Burn — subtitled Teddy Roosevelt and The Fire That Saved America — Egan argues that the fire actually saved the nation's forests, even as its flames charred the trees. The disaster served to strengthen the fledgling U.S. Forest Service, and rally public opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt's plan to protect national lands. Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of five books. He won the National Book Award for his critically acclaimed Dust Bowl chronicle The Worst Hard Time.

Download the NPR WHYY Fresh Air podcast here. Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and journalist. He maintains the New York Times blog, "The Opinionator," and recently wrote about two personalities, a "junkie" and an "atheist," Keith Richards and Christopher Hitchens respectively. His column, blog, whatever you want to call it, is usually enlightening in the sense that it doesn't get caught up in over opinions about current affairs, but rather sheds true opinions, unique and enlightening ideas, and in his recent posting, relationships; the relationship between a junkie and an atheist. In his latest post, Hitchens' bout cancer is evoked. It cuts to the materialism of our ideals, and it's the ideas in posts like this, that make a subscription to The New York Times on the Kindle worth it (even if you can get it at the desk or on the laptop for free). Check that latest entry out, here. See also: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Vintage Departures), Breaking Blue, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

Shifting Ground from WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Julie Nixon Eisenhower and David Eisenhower talk about the life and post-White-House years of David’s grandfather, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Also Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Powers discusses Crazy Horse and the controversy that still surrounds his death. Then, Lily Rabe and Oskar Eustis tell about moving the Public Theater’s production of “The Merchant of Venice” from Central Park, to Broadway! Plus, a look at how climate change is altering the Antarctic landscape through the lives of penguins.

View the webpage for this show, here. See also: The Killing of Crazy Horse, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda (New York Review Books Collections), The man who kept the secrets: Richard Helms & the CIA, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History Of The German Bomb

The Killing of Crazy Horse from WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Thomas Powers discusses Crazy Horse, the greatest Indian warrior of the nineteenth century whose victory over General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 was the worst defeat inflicted on the frontier Army. In The Killing of Crazy Horse, Powers pieces together his death, which has remained a controversy for more than a century.

View the webpage for this particular episode and show, here. See also: An Inside Passage (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize), Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Chef José Andrés vs. Jonathan Gold In A Molecular Gastronomy Battle Royale: Who's The Victor? from Huffington Post, The - Blog by The Huffington Post News Editors

Chef José Andrés, who has voiced his objection to the term before, has now confronted Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold over Twitter in a days-long back-and-forth. Jonathan Gold used the term "molecular gastronomy" five days ago on Twitter to describe what Scott Conant's well-regarded spaghetti and tomato sauce was not. The shot across the bow from Chef Andrés: "With all due respect, No one cooks molecular, writers and critics write molecular, Mr. Gold!" José Andrés has been needling Gold fairly aggressively since then to disabuse him and other food writers and critics from using this loaded culinary term, and Gold is standing firmly by the term.

Read the full HuffPo piece here. See also: Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles, EAT: Los Angeles: The Food Lover's Guide to Los Angeles (Eat Los Angeles: The Food Lovers Guide to Los Angeles), Investing in Gold: The Essential Safe Haven Investment for Every Portfolio

The 'Splintering' Of America's Black Population from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

"You can no longer talk about what black America thinks or feels," writes Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist, in a new book about the increasing disconnect between America's African-American communities. In Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, Robinson argues that America's African-American population can now be divided into four distinct groups: the abandoned poor; immigrants and people of mixed race; the mainstream middle class; and the small but powerful elite. He describes how each group has a different 'black experience' and largely remains detached from the others.

Download the podcast here. Check the webpage for the show out, here. See also: Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking, Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race

Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower from KERA's Think Podcast

[2010-11-30 13:00:00] What was retirement like for the great hero of World War II whose presidency marked the start of unprecedented prosperity for Americans? We'll spend this hour with David Eisenhower whose new book is "Going Home To Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969" (Simons & Schuster, 2010). Eisenhower will address the World Affairs Council of Dallas Fort Worth this evening.

Download the podcast here. See also: Going Home To Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969, Eisenhower Soldier and President, Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life

Your Brain on Computers from WAMU: The Kojo Nnamdi Show: Tech Tuesday Podcast

Every day Americans navigate a torrent of data. We field a barrage of work and personal emails. We update our status and check on our friends. We surf across dozens of websites. Most of us are now expert multitaskers, but some worry we're creating a generation unable to focus on specific tasks. We speak with a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who is exploring whether technology is rewiring our brains.

Download the podcast here. See also: Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions, Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder

Philip Roth on Nemesis from WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth discusses his latest novel, Nemesis. It’s about a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a Newark community. It explores the emotions such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, asks questions about the kind of accidental choices that fatally shape a life, and how an individual can withstand the onslaught of circumstance.

See the show's webpage here. The podcast isn't available yet. (Usually posts the day after.) See also: Nemesis, American Pastoral, The Humbling (Vintage International), Indignation (Vintage International), Portnoy's Complaint

Stacy Schiff on Cleopatra from Lopate - Underreported by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff discusses one of the most intriguing women in world history: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Cleopatra: A Life is an original reconstruction of a dazzling life that reshaped the ancient world. It talks about her marriages, conflicts, and her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

Download the podcast here. See also: Cleopatra: A Life, Saint-Exupery: A Biography, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, Saint Exupéry: A Biography

Adventures of an Observer from KERA's Think Podcast

[2010-11-09 12:00:00] What can the careful observer glean from simply watching society? If they have access to the presidents, pundits, music stars, activists and thinkers who shaped the 20th Century, then quite a bit. We'll talk this hour with Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, whose new book is "Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer" (Viking, 2010).

Download the podcast here. See also: What Jesus Meant, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (Simon & Schuster Lincoln Library), Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, Why I Am a Catholic

NYT: Book Review for 11/05/2010 from NYT Book Review

This week, Stacy Schiff discusses her new biography, "Cleopatra: A Life"; Julie Bosman has notes from the field; Julie Just looks back on her five years as the Times' children's books editor; and Jennifer Schuessler has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.

Listen to the full podcast here. Or you can download the full show here. See also: Cleopatra: A Life, Saint-Exupery: A Biography, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America