The Bob Edwards Show, December 26-30, 2011
Monday, December 26, 2011: All week we’re welcoming new Sirius XM subscribers to our show with some of Bob’s best 2011 interviews. We start with Bob’s favorite poetry interviews. First, Caroline Kennedy is best-known as the only daughter of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but she is also a well respected author and book editor. In her poetry collection titled She Walks in Beauty, Kennedy focused on poems that celebrate and honor womanhood. Then, Rita Dove is one of the greatest living American poets. She is a former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner. Most recently she edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dove joins Bob to talk about what she feels is the most important poetry of the previous hundred years.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011: Today we replay some of Bob’s best interviews about art. Few sculptors can claim the renown and success that Richard Serra has achieved in his forty year career. But an exhibit recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City titled Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective focused 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. Then, artist and children’s book illustrator Allen Say won the Caldecott medal for The Boy of the Three-Year Nap (1987) and Grandfather’s Journey (1994). The latter is about his grandfather’s voyage from Japan to the U.S. and back again. Say’s latest book is Drawing from Memory, an autobiographical account of his own journey as an artist.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011: We continue to welcome our new Sirius XM subscribers with some of Bob’s best interviews of 2011. Today’s focus is on the foreign affairs. Africa has a new country: the Republic of South Sudan. After decades of fighting for independence, southern Sudan seceded on July 9th. Co-founder of The Enough Project, John Prendergast, was in the country to observe the volatile split, where the predominantly Muslim north still disagrees with the predominantly Christian south on how to divide their oil-rich border. Prendergast will describe what he saw, discussions with local leaders, and why war crimes are feared. Then, the conflict in the Eastern Congo is one of the worst in history, where more than 5.5 million people have perished and it’s the most dangerous place in the world for women and children. While “blood diamonds” were infamous in other parts of Africa, in the eastern Congo, it’s “conflict minerals” which are mined for use in cell phones and laptops. Actress Robin Wright is an advocate for the victims in the region and she joins Fidel Bafilemba of the Enough Project to discuss their trip.
Thursday, December 29, 2011: We welcome new subscribers today with two of Bob’s favorite music interviews from this year. First, actor, comedian, writer and musician Steve Martin talks with Bob about his second album Rare Bird Alert, a follow-up to 2009’s Grammy-winning The Crow. Martin is joined on the album by his backing band The Steep Canyon Rangers, with special guests The Dixie Chicks and Paul McCartney singing a couple of Martin’s original tunes. Then, Ben Sollee is a “folk-pop” cellist from Lexington, Kentucky who’s played with Bela Fleck, My Morning Jacket and Justin Townes Earle. Sollee chats with Bob about his second album Inclusions, bicycling cross-country (with cello attached), and his passion to end mountain top removal coal mining.
Friday, December 30, 2011: Our week-long welcome to new subscribers concludes today with our regular news analyst. Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, Sally Wade, George Carlin’s “spouse without papers” for the last ten years of his life, discusses her book about their life together. It’s called The George Carlin Letters: The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade. A comedy writer and performer, Wade’s humorous account of their love story shows the softer side of George Carlin and features notes and letters that the two wrote to each other daily over the course of their relationship. Then, in this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Michelle Lee. Like conversation, the act of writing thank you notes is a lost art. Anyone who expects more than a text message reading “thx” in response to a kindness is setting themselves up for disappointment. Which might be why Lee is so popular with friends and family. She says good manners are the cornerstone of a quality community, and she puts her belief into practice by writing thank you notes every Monday.