HOUR ONE:
David Sanger is chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and the author of The Inheritance. Sanger talks with Bob about the foreign policy challenges and covert programs left behind by the Bush administration for Barack Obama.
Eugene Jarecki’s 2005 documentary Why We Fight was about the causes and inner-workings of what outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the military-industrial complex. Jarecki spent the next few years building on the ideas in the film and now has a book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril.
HOUR TWO:
Eighteenth-century scientist and philosopher Joseph Priestley was one of the world’s most prominent religious thinkers as well as one of The Enlightenment’s most gifted amateur scientists. Writer Steven Johnson’s book The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America uses Priestley’s life to look at how revolutionary ideas emerge and spread.
Bob talks with writer Mark Harris about his book, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, which compares and contrasts the five Oscar nominees for best picture of 1967. In the Heat of the Night beat out fellow nominees Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Doctor Dolittle.