HOUR ONE
History is bound to repeat itself, and the world’s financial history is no different. In False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World, author Alan Beattie explains how history can teach us to address our current economic woes.
Beginning this weekend, we’re airing classic audio essays from Edward R. Murrow’s 1950s This I Believe series. Each week, Bob will talk with This I Believe, Inc. executive producer Dan Gediman about a featured essayist and play the essay as originally broadcast more than 50 years ago. In addition to Edward R. Murrow’s personal essay, you’ll hear in weeks to come essays by baseball legend Jackie Robinson; writer and activist Helen Keller; and Walter White, the long-time executive secretary of the NAACP.
HOUR TWO:
No one in American culture has been immune from Joe Queenan’s scathing observations. Now the satirist and critic has set his sights on the life of a poor young man, the son of an alcoholic high school dropout, who grew up in a Philadelphia housing project: himself. Queenan explains his life in a memoir, called Closing Time.
In the mid-1920s, thousands of Jewish immigrant garment workers moved out of Manhattan ghettos by pooling their resources to build four cooperative apartment complexes in the Bronx. Even though most were first generation and Communist, the strength of that community helped propel them socially and economically. Producer Michal Goldman discusses the families and the challenges they faced, which are featured in her documentary, At Home in Utopia. It’s airing this weekend on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series.