The Bob Edwards Show, September 23-27, 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013: Dr. Ike Padnos an anesthesiologist and record collector who started a festival in New Orleans called the Ponderosa Stomp. Part music, film, history, record show, DJ party and public service, the mission of Stomp is to expose the “unsung heroes of Americana music.” It runs October 3rd to 5th. Then, Lawrence Powellis a professor emeritus in Tulane University’s Department of History – so who better to write about the first 100 years of New Orleans? His latest book is titled The Accidental City and it covers the period from the first hunters, trappers and explorers in the region through the end of The War of 1812. It’s now available in paperback.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013: From its early days in the 1920s, hardboiled crime fiction has been dominated by male writers. But throughout the 20th century, female writers like Shirley Jackson, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Joyce Harrington put their distinctive stamp on fiction’s seamy underbelly. Editor Sarah Weinman talks with Bob about these writers and her new anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. Then, Bob sits down with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dave Barry to discuss his latest novel Insane City, which is now out in paperback.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013: Sena Jeter Naslund has written a novel-within-a-novel, The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, and it tells the tales of two women—-one a fictional contemporary writer, the other, a renowned historic painter. The book explores the transformative power of art, history and love in the lives of creative women. Then, Wadjda is the first-ever feature film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. That’s a feat in of itself but the fact that the writer and director is a woman is even more significant. The story Haifaa al-Mansour tells is about a gregarious Saudi girl who enters a Koran-memorization contest at her school with plans to use the prize money to buy a green bicycle. Biking was, until very recently, a banned activity for women, but Wadjda is determined to go faster than she can on foot.
Thursday, September 26, 2013: Fifty years ago, in his book The Other America, Michael Harrington predicted that unless attention was paid to the widespread problem of poverty in the United States, another journalist decades later would end up writing about the exact same conditions that he had chronicled. And now, fifty years later, Sasha Abramsky has done just that. His book The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives tells the stories of real people around the country who are struggling to make it. Then, once they were called robber barons; today it’s job creators. In her book, Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland writes about the rise of the new global super-rich, exploring the economics and psychology of the society that created them. It’s now out in paperback.
Friday, September 27, 2013: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Next, David Von Drehle has pinpointed 1862 as “the most eventful year in American History.” He writes about it in his book Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year and it’s now out in paperback. Finally, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.