Bob Edwards Weekend, November 5-6, 2011
HOUR ONE:
Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times joins Bob to talk about the country’s looming budget battles and how that will affect politics in this election year.
Journalist Bill Vlasic is the Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times and author of Once Upon a Car: The Fall and Resurrection of America’s Big Three Auto Makers – GM, Ford, and Chrysler. In his new book, Vlasic chronicles the behind the scenes drama that began in 2005, culminating with the bailout of 2008.
In this week’s installment of our series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Erin Blakemore. When Blakemore joined the local roller derby league, she was an inhibited and buttoned-up woman, but full-contact skating gave her confidence and strength. She heard a similar story from her fellow skaters, who meet four times a week to beat each other up, and build each other up.
HOUR TWO:
Scholar, literary critic and best-selling writer Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern examines the ancient Roman document that helped inspire the Renaissance. But that two thousand year old poem by Lucretius – On the Nature of Things – was lost for hundreds of years, then found and copied by an Italian scholar in the 15th century. Greenblatt contends that the ideas it introduced have since inspired countless artists, statesmen and scientists.
In modern society, the idea of privacy is rapidly becoming extinct. The feelings and actions we share online – intentionally or otherwise – are unthinkable to previous generations. In his second novel, The Visible Man, Chuck Klosterman explores the titillation of peeping into private lives through the story of a therapist and one of her patients, a man who uses secret government technology to make himself invisible. Klosterman is the author of Downtown Owl, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and Eating the Dinosaur.
Bob Edwards Weekend is heard on Sirius XM Public Radio (XM 121, Sirius 205) on Saturdays from 8-10 AM EST.
Visit Bob Edwards Weekend on PRI’s website to find local stations that air the program.
I have to take issue with a comment that Bill Vlasic made in his interview today:
He stated that when GM downsized by 35,000 people, that the buy outs cost the company billions of dollars and that this just doesn't happen in the corporate world.
It most certainly does, the difference is the billions are being paid to a few CEO's who screw up and are still paid billions in the form of golden parachutes, rather than to thousands of workers who's only crime was to do their job.