Bob Edwards Weekend
May 14-15, 2011
HOUR ONE
Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Wichita, Kansas, yet married a man from Kenya and ultimately raised a future President of the United States. New York Times reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly 200 people to complete A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. Bob chats with Scott about the President’s mother and how she didn’t live to see her son’s political success.
Maya Soetoro-Ng was inspired to write her first children’s book, Ladder to the Moon, by her daughter’s questions about her mother, cultural anthropologist Ann Dunham. Soetoro-Ng is the half-sister of President Barack Obama and a writer and educator.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Scott Shackelford. For fans of science fiction, stories that take place beyond the stars, with a cast of droids and aliens, are so compelling that they sometimes intrude into their actual lives. Shackelford and his father share a devotion to the science fiction genre, which he says has strengthened their relationship over the years.
HOUR TWO
Few sculptors can claim the renown and success that Richard Serra has achieved in his forty year career. But a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City titled Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective focuses on Serra’s skills on paper, a segment of his work often overlooked by the public. This is the first retrospective of Serra’s drawings and shows the varied abilities of this visionary artist.
Director Mark Goffman’s documentary Dumbstruck takes viewers to the annual Vent Haven Convention in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky—the ventriloquism capital of the world—and inside the lives of five passionate ventriloquists. Full of eccentric characters, Dumbstruck reveals the human side of this world of dummies.