The Bob Edwards Show, September 9-13, 2013
Monday, September 9, 2013: More than 400,000 children are in foster care in the United States. It’s a patchwork system. Each state has different rules, and each city contracts with many different child welfare agencies to place children in foster care. The result is that thousands of foster children live in many different homes during their most formative years, and they’re often unprepared to live on their own once they age out of the system. In the new book, To the End of June, Cris Beam writes about the experiences of several foster parents and the children they try to raise. Then, new music enthusiast Paul Schomer joins us again with another batch of artists you’ve probably never heard of. Schomer runs the new music discovery blog called RadioCrowdfund.com and shares new songs by Jack Wilson, Lo Fine, Huxlee and Northern Hustle. He’s also here to spread the word about the fundraising campaign to commission a memorial gravestone for deceased blues singer Mamie Smith.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013: Inspired by her own experiences caring for her parents at the end of their lives, science writer Katy Butler’s new book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, is an in-depth look at our medical community’s end-of-life care. Then, activist and entrepreneur Ben Foss founded Headstrong Nation, a non-profit that helps the dyslexic community. Dyslexia is a brain-based genetic trait that affects over 30 million Americans. His book is The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013: Andrew Bacevich returns to the program to discuss a book that was intended to be a conventional narrative history of U.S. civil-military relations since World War II. Instead, he was steered onto a different course by his conviction that our military system is broken and no amount of patriotic sentimentality can disguise it. Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country is Bacevich’s seventh book. For twenty-three years Bacevich served as an officer in the U.S. Army and his son was killed by an IED while serving in Iraq in 2007. Bacevich is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
Thursday, September 12, 2013: A few years ago, this program aired a documentary about “The Human Terrain System,” an audacious military social science experiment that operates on the premise that soldiers need to understand the enemy and its culture. But it’s proven brutally difficult to implement in Afghanistan as Vanessa Gezari documents in her new book, The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice.
Friday, September 13, 2013: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, tenor Alfie Boe shot to stardom after director Baz Luhrmann cast him as the lead in his 2003 Broadway production of La Boheme. The role earned Boe a Tony and he’s been a mainstay in the classical crossover world ever since. His new album Storyteller features Boe with a four-piece band performing classics from American and British folk music. Finally, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.