The Bob Edwards Show, June 25-29, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012: Nashville singer-songwriter Kate Campbell took piano lessons as a child and switched to the guitar as a teenager. Since then, over the course of thirteen albums, she has written, recorded and performed almost exclusively on the acoustic guitar. On 1000 Pound Machine, Campbell returns to the instrument of her childhood and enlists Will Kimbrough to produce the eleven-song disc. Campbell joins Bob in our performance studio to talk about her new album and play a few of her songs.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012: Assignment To Hell: The War Against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle chronicles the stories of those five newspapermen who risked their lives on the frontlines to bring Americans the headlines. Bob speaks with the book’s author, Timothy Gay. Then, on June 5th, Venus passed directly between the sun and the earth. 243 years ago, this same astronomical event changed the history of navigation techniques. Science writer Mark Anderson charts this remarkable story in his new book The Day the World Discovered the Sun: An Extraordinary Story of Scientific Adventure and the Race to Track the Transit of Venus.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012: When Barack Obama was campaigning for president, he pledged to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and to follow the rule of law in fighting terror groups. Nearing the end of his first term, there are still prisoners at Gitmo, and covert drone air strikes, in which the U.S. military and the CIA act as judge, jury, and executioner, are at an all-time high. Daniel Klaidman, a reporter for Newsweek, examines Obama’s foreign policy decisions in the new book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency.
Thursday, June 28, 2012: In a special report, the online journalism outlet GlobalPost compares the battle against HIV/AIDS in two places – Washington DC and southern Africa. Although the rate of HIV infection is effectively being lowered in many African countries, the same is not true in our capital city where rates still are persistently high. Their series, “AIDS: A Turning Point,” is now online and will continue through July, when Washington, DC hosts the upcoming International AIDS Conference. Bob talks with GlobalPost correspondent John Donnelly about the website’s series. Next, Bob talks to editors Sarah Moon and James Lecesne who have compiled an anthology of letters written by 64 award-winning lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered authors. Each wrote a letter to his or her younger self offering advice, insight, and wisdom. The book is called The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves. Then, Bob talks sports with John Feinstein, Washington Post columnist and co-host of SiriusXM’s “Beyond the Brink” (Mad Dog Radio, channel 86).
Friday, June 29, 2012: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, Jeff Himmelman has gotten a lot of flak recently for his authorized biography about Washington Post legend Ben Bradlee, Yours in Truth. Since the release of the book, Bob Woodward – Himmelman’s former boss and co-author — has made the accusation that the young writer “betrayed” his former mentor to write a cheap “tell-all.” Himmelman joins Bob to talk about the dangers in writing about people who are still alive. Then, in this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Juliet Frerking. Children are told they can be anything when they grow up, and many take that to mean that they can be anything extraordinary. The “Guinness Book of World Records” fascinated Frerking when she was a child. But beyond the unusual accomplishments it listed, the book inspired Frerking to attempt the extraordinary in her own life – things she otherwise might have thought impossible.