Bob Edwards Weekend Highlights – October 23-24, 2010
HOUR ONE
We continue our new series by focusing on that dwindling but important institution, the school library. Although many studies show that students with access to a full-time, fully-staffed school library perform much better academically, school librarians across the country are getting the axe. We’ll visit a middle school in Laurel, MD where the librarian is pulling out all the stops to get students reading. Gwenyth Jones has turned her library into the coolest place in school by using technology and even television to get kids interested in reading and learning. Then, Keith Curry Lance studies the impact school libraries and librarians have on student achievement. Lance is the founder and director of the Library Research Service of the Colorado State Library and the University of Denver.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the contemporary essay of Carol Besse. She is the co-owner of Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, which was named Publisher’s Weekly bookseller of the year in 2009. Besse believes in revolution and finds it hard to understand why more Americans aren’t marching in the streets to protest a variety of wrongs being committed in our name.
HOUR TWO
Filmmaker Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job gets behind the scenes of the economic crisis of 2008. Through interviews with politicians, journalists, and the movers and shakers of the financial world, Ferguson pieced together what caused the global financial meltdown.
David Rakoff is a freelance journalist, a regular contributor to PRI’s This American Life and a successful writer. His latest book of essays is titled Half Empty which Rakoff says looks at “the positive side of pessimism.”