The Bob Edwards Show, May 27-31, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013: It’s been more than forty years since thousands of American troops died fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. For this Memorial Day, we pay tribute to our service men and women with an encore presentation of our award-winning show Stories from Third Med: Surviving a Jungle ER. The documentary includes stories of the Navy’s Third Medical Battalion, which served alongside the Third Marine Division. They were based near the DMZ, closest to the enemy in North Vietnam. Four decades later, the doctors and corpsmen recount the horror (and humor) they can never forget, and reflect on the forces that drive men to war in the first place.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013: Writer and World War II specialist Robert Edsel’s new book is Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis. Edsel is the founder and current president of the Monuments Men Foundation.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013: Bob talks with guitarist Ben Harper and harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite about their new CD titled Get Up! The two musicians and occasional collaborators have wanted to record a full album together for over a decade and finally found the time after first clicking musically at a 1997 recording session with John Lee Hooker. Then, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Igor Stravinksy’s modernist classic The Rite of Spring, Symphony Hall host Martin Goldsmith walks Bob through what happened that fateful night and why 100 years later, this piece still packs an impressive musical punch.
Thursday, May 30, 2013: Laurence Leamer’s book, The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption, tells the story of two lawyers’ attempt to hold Don Blankenship, the most powerful coal baron in American history, accountable for the death and destruction he has caused. Blankenship was head of Massey Energy, a company that provided nearly half of America’s electric power, since the early 1990s. Then, Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America’s most prized writers. In 2009, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave a copy of Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent to President Barack Obama. Now, Uruguayan author and journalist joins Bob to discuss his most recent work, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History.
Friday, May 31, 2013: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for The Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, Bob talks with prolific documentarian Alex Gibney about his latest film. We Steal Secrets is a study of transparency and privacy in the information age. Gibney focuses the story on Julian Assange, the controversial founder of the website WikiLeaks and on the once anonymous source behind the largest security breach in US history. That source turned out to be a young Army Intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning, currently awaiting court martial in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Both he and Assange have been lauded as heroes of free speech…they’ve also been called a traitor and a terrorist. Finally, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.