THE BOB EDWARDS SHOW HIGHLIGHTS – September 13-17, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Literary critic Jonathan Arac has written books on novelists like Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. But in his most recent work, Professor Arac has written that the “age of the novel” in the U.S. has passed. The special relationship that the novel once had with the national imagination, he argues, has passed to television and film. So what’s a literary critic to do? We’ll talk about this question with him, as well as his new book, Impure Worlds: the Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas French spent six years at the zoo, getting to know its cast of characters inside — and outside — of the cages. In his book Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives, French questions the morality of zoos through the stories that he tells of the animals and their keepers. Then, we finish with a word from cowboy poet and friend to the show, Baxter Black.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010:
We conclude our series No Place Like Home with a look at the future of the New Orleans region. Bob talks with Tim Williamson, co-founder and CEO of The Idea Village about their mission to help local entrepreneurs like Kenneth Purcell and Jennifer Schnidman. Then we visit with Paul Baricos of the Hollygrove Market and Farm and meet two of the farmers working there to help rebuild the roots of their neighborhood. Ronald Terry is a mentor farmer specializing in miniature fruit trees and Michael Beauchamp is a community gardener who grows his own vegetables and flowers in plots at the urban farm.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
A Grand and Bold Thing author Ann Finkbeiner talks about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a massive map of the sky that brought us into today’s era of supercharged astronomical discovery and might reveal the history of the universe. Then, Michael Stuhlbarg plays the gangster Arnold Rothstein in the new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. The show is set in Atlantic City during the Prohibition Era. The pilot episode, directed by Martin Scorsese, premiers this weekend.
Friday, September 17, 2010:
David Broder of The Washington Post joins Bob to talk politics. Next, Garret Keizer opens his book with the admission that “noise is not the most important problem in the world.” But by examining noise in history, in culture, in our own backyards, Keizer argues that we can find answers to some of the big questions. His book is titled The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise. Then, in this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear an essay from Andrew Brodsky. He is a policy analyst for an educational consulting firm in Denver. Brodsky and his wife also run two websites selling handmade wedding invitations. They now have a daughter, Nina, who they plan to raise in both the Christian and Jewish faith traditions.