The Bob Edwards Show, September 3-7, 2012
Monday, September 3, 2012: Bob talks with New York Times science writer John Tierney about his book titled Willpower: The Science Behind Decision Making and Self Control. It has just been released in paperback. Then, Bob talks with James Green about an important moment in the history of the labor movement. Green wrote Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. Finally, Bob talks with scholar Lauren Coodley about Upton Sinclair’s life and how he brought about reform that benefited both workers and consumers.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012: For the past few weeks, the Obama and Romney campaigns have been debating about the appropriate intersection between government and business, prompted by President Obama making this statement during a campaign speech: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Well, if you own a big box store specializing in fishing and hunting supplies, you most definitely didn’t build that. So argues Scott Reeder in a new article on the Atlantic Cities website. Reeder led an exhaustive investigation for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and found that Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s have together received or were promised more than $2.2 billion from American taxpayers over the past 15 years. Then, after the sudden death of her husband, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, award-winning journalist Kati Marton fled to Paris, the site of so many milestones in her life, to write, Paris: A Love Story. Marton writes about her life with Holbrooke, with whom she found lasting love and her second husband, journalist Peter Jennings, the man to whom she was married for fifteen years.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012: As the name suggests, “Carbon Nation” is more movement than movie. Documentarian Peter Byck unveiled his progressive solutions for climate change in 2011 when the film was released. However, he and the Carbon Nation crew are still gaining media attention for their initiative, appearing recently on Real Time With Bill Maher. Byck and Bob talk carbon, our nation, and the movement. Then, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For her new book, Exit, Lawrence-Lightfoot interviewed people in states of major change: a Catholic priest leaving the church, a gay man who recently came out, an Iranian teenager forced to leave his country. In their stories, she explores how endings and exits affect us.
Thursday, September 6, 2012: When he was last on The Bob Edwards Show, W.D. Wetherell discussed his book about an autumn of fishing in Yellowstone National Park. This time he brings us a novel titled The Writing On the Wall. It tells the story of Vera Savino, who, after stripping the wallpaper from her sister’s home, finds two previous female residents have shared their most intimate secrets in narratives written on the bare walls. It turns out that Vera has secrets of her own and adds her story to the wall of a third room. 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, September 7, 2012: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 at the age of 62 following a year and a half “struggle” with cancer. Hitchens wrote about his battle with cancer in his final book, Mortality. His widow Carol Blue sits with Bob to discuss those final months of Hitchens’s life. Then, in this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Chris Huntington. People become parents every day. Not all parents welcome their babies in hospital delivery rooms. Some see their new children for the first time in orphanages and foster homes, or in photographs sent overseas. Huntington and his wife desperately wanted a baby, but biology conspired against their desire. They decided to adopt a child, and Huntington says he now believe that becoming a parent is a gift you make to the universe and that the universe makes to you.
Doyle is OK but he, like most journalists these days are looking at the election from a standpoint of how good the illusionists of both parties are doing in the "game". Try to save the republic and expose lies and spin instead of this milktoast crap.