Bob Edwards Weekend Highlights – October 2-3, 2010
HOUR ONE
Over the past year, the Tea Party has increased in both size and visibility, making it the wildcard in next month’s mid-term elections. Tea Party candidates have beaten establishment-backed Republicans in a number of recent primaries, but how will those candidates do in November? Kate Zernike is a New York Times reporter who has been covering the Tea Party and has recently written the first definitive account of what she says is a vastly misunderstood movement. It’s titled Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America.
Along with Ken Burns, Lynn Novick co-wrote and co-directed The Tenth Inning which picks up where their 1994 series Baseball left off. The Tenth Inning is a two-part, four-hour look at the national pastime from the early 1990s to the present day, including the players’ strike, steroid scandals, and Major League Baseball’s skyrocketing profits.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the contemporary essay of Hillary Salans Kambour. She grew up in San Francisco as a Giants fan, and now lives in Miami, where she also roots for the Florida Marlins.
HOUR TWO
Patrick Hennessey graduated from Oxford with a degree in English, and then joined the British Army in 2004. The Junior Officer’s Reading Club was formed by Hennessey and his friends to discuss books, music, and culture between battles. That’s also the title of his memoir in which he shares his stories as a member of the coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and reflects on the progress of those wars since he left the military.
Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s new film Howl follows the obscenity trial brought by California against poet, publisher, and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, portrayed by Andrew Rogers. Actor James Franco plays the young Allen Ginsberg who, along with Ferlinghetti, fights to defend his work that became the anthem of the Beat generation.