Bob Edwards Weekend – May 15-16, 2010
HOUR ONE
Journalist and author Judith Warner tackles the complicated debate about the overmedication of children in her book We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication. Warner interviewed doctors, parents, researchers and family experts to explain what drives the medication of children and what it’s doing to today’s younger generation.
Bob talks with Iqbal Quadir founder of the mobile phone company GrameenPhone in Bangladesh, a partnership with the Nobel Prize winning micro-loan pioneer Mohammed Yunus. GrameenPhone created a massive, decentralized communication system, affordable to the masses of poor Bangladeshis. Improved communications improved lives, reduced time wasted on simple tasks and created thousands of new businesses.
We dip into the archives of our ongoing series This I Believe. Bob talks with executive director Dan Gediman about the essay of James A. Michener. He wrote his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Tales of the South Pacific, during his naval service in World War II after winning a transfer from a desk job in Washington to the Pacific theater. Michener’s literary career spanned 50 years and 40 books.
HOUR TWO
It’s been four years since Isabel Allende published a novel. She returns to the world of historical fiction with Island Beneath the Sea, the story of a slave girl in 19th Century Haiti. Allende immersed herself in the complicated cultural history of Haiti, researching the period when slaves rebelled, overthrowing their French masters. Bob talks with Allende about the new novel, the history of Haiti, and the crippling legacy of governmental oppression.
Yisrael Campbell was born in Philadelphia and grew up in a Catholic household. He was known as Christopher back then. As a teenager, he got hooked on drugs, and recovery led him not just to sobriety, but also to Judaism. Campbell became an actor and stand-up comic, touring with the Israeli-Palestinian Comedy Tour, which seeks to reduce tensions in the Holy Land. Campbell currently has a one-man show off-Broadway titled Circumcise Me.