This Weekend’s Program

Bob Edwards Weekend, January 12-13, 2013

HOUR ONE:

Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.

On January 12^th, 2010, an earthquake ripped through Haiti’s capital city and killed an estimated 300,000 people, making the world wonder if a country could withstand any more deprivation, of both the natural and manmade kind. Journalist Amy Wilentz was there when hated dictator Baby Doc Duvalier fled the country, and she was there decades later, just after the earthquake hit.  In her new book Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, Wilentz guides readers though the country’s long and tortured history. She returned from a reporting trip in December, and discusses what day-to-day life is like in Haiti now, three years after the devastation. 

Then, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.

HOUR TWO:

Pam Simon was one of the 13 people wounded in a Tucson, Arizona grocery store parking lot when a gunman open fired on a constituent meeting hosted by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Now two years since the rampage that claimed six lives, Simon is working with other survivors of mass shootings in an effort to get meaningful gun control legislation passed.

The National Institute for Civil Discourse, based in Tucson, Arizona, was established after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. The organization’s executive director, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, shares ideas for returning civility to American culture, politics and legislation.

Bob talks with brothers Jonathan and Tad Richards about their new book titled Nick & Jake.  In the epistolary novel, the two famous literary characters, Nick Carraway and Jake Barnes, refugees from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, strike up a correspondence and then friendship. The story charts their romp through 1950s America with a bizarre cast of fictional characters and actual historical figures.