The Bob Edwards Show, May 13-17, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013: Life After Life is Jill McCorkle’s first novel in seventeen years. It deals with the daily life of the residents and staff of Pine Haven Estates, a retirement facility that many of Fulton, North Carolina’s elderly now call home. In the book, we meet Sadie Randolph, a third-grade teacher who has taught every kid in town; Stanley Tone, a prominent lawyer now fighting dementia; and Marge Walker, the town gossip who keeps a scrapbook of every crime that has been committed in town. McCorkle calls her story “a love song to memory and life.” Then, as a songwriter, Kim Richey has co-written two number one hits: the Grammy-nominated ‘Believe Me Baby (I Lied)’ for Trisha Yearwood, and ‘Nobody Wins’ for Radney Foster. But as a performer in her own right, it took a long time for Richey to get her due. She got her first record deal at 37 and is now releasing her seventh album, Thorn In My Heart.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013: Yellowstone National Park turned 140 years old last year, and thousands of people visit every summer. But what those tourists may not realize is that America’s first national park has a very dark past. George Black tells the story in his book Empire of Shadows and it was just released in paperback. Then, for nearly fifty years, Frank Deford has been dissecting American and international sports. He has covered just about every sport, in every medium, and he has written about it all in his memoir, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter and it’s now available in paperback.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013: Erica Grieder, who covered Texas for 7 years as a correspondent for The Economist and now is at Texas Monthly, argues that the rest of the country needs to pay attention to Texas. She makes her argument in a new book titled Big, Hot, Cheap and Right. Then, Paul Theroux has made a career of going on the road. He travels light, and frequently, and he’s written scores of books about the places he’s visited. His latest is about a continent that first received him as a 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer: Africa. The Last Train to Zona Verde details the people and places Theroux encountered from South Africa to Angola.
Thursday, May 16, 2013: The civil rights struggle made great strides in many sectors of American society, but the movement did little to help Southern black farmers. The number of African-American farmers dropped by 93% between 1940 and 1974, predominately because they were forced from their land by discrimination, lack of information, and intimidation by the Department of Agriculture. Pete Danielwrites about this little-known chapter of American history in Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Then, Christopher Buckley’s fictional novel They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? is about U.S.-China relations. In the book, a Washington lobbyist teams up with a neocon to turn the American public against the Chinese. Buckley will discuss the novel, and how you determine fact from fiction in our capitol city. His book is now out in paperback.
Friday, May 17, 2013: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for The Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, Molly Melching has lived and worked in Senegal, West Africa since 1974. She is the founder and executive director of Tostan, a nongovernmental organization that has developed an innovative model for development in which communities are leading large scale social movements for positive change. Finally, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.