Bob Edwards Weekend Highlights – November 28-29, 2009
HOUR ONE
As Americans start shopping for the holidays, the investigative journalism website globalpost.com is taking a closer look at conditions for workers in some of the factories that make the components for the hottest electronic gadgets this season. Bob talks with Managing Editor Thomas Mucha about their special series, Silicon Sweatshops.
Werner Herzog’s film career began in the mid-1960s and includes more than fifty films. His newest is a drama titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. It shares a title with a 1992 movie, but Herzog insists that his film is NOT a remake or a sequel of that Bad Lieutenant. Herzog’s movie stars Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes and Val Kilmer and is set in the Crescent City soon after Hurricane Katrina.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with executive director Dan Gediman about the essay from Charles Henry Parrish. As a professor of sociology at the University of Louisville, Parrish was the first African-American to be appointed to the faculty of a southern university. In addition to his teaching, Parrish was a part-time public relations consultant for the Domestic Life Insurance Company.
HOUR TWO
Perhaps no one in the history of American entertainment is more influential and tragic than Orson Welles, the young auteur who created shocking dramas on stage, on the air, and on screen. Welles struggled to live up to his early successes, and at the end of his life was seen as a caricature, lending his famous voice to TV commercials, and releasing few films in this country. Bob talks with Chris Welles Feder about her father – his devotion to his art, and his distance from his family. Welles Feder is the author of the new book, In My Father’s Shadow.
Tom Russell is a visual artist, an author and an accomplished musician. He’s also a songwriter whose tunes have been covered by the likes of Johnny Cash, Guy Clark and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. But Russell isn’t just an artist: he holds a masters degree in Criminology, he taught in Nigeria during a civil war, and while working as a cab driver in Queens, a chance encounter with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead kick-started his return to the music business. Tom Russell joins Bob to discuss his life and to play some tunes from his new album Blood and Candle Smoke.