The Bob Edwards Show, January 27-31, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014: Bob talks to novelist Chang-Rae Lee about his newest book, On Such a Full Sea. Lee teaches writing at Princeton University. His earlier novel, The Surrendered was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Then, Patty Larkin joins Bob in the performance studio to play songs from her new album Still Green. Her 13th recording, much of the album was written in a primitive shack on the remote dunes of Cape Cod. You can hear Larkin playing no less than seven instruments on the album —- acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, bass, slide, keyboards and kalimba.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014: When mathematics PhD candidate Anjan Sundaram decided to leave Yale University for the Congo and journalism, it didn’t seem the best career move. But a stringer gig from the Associated Press gave him a job and the opportunity to immerse himself in this often overlooked society. Sundaram’s debut book is Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo. Then, John Wood left his job as an executive at Microsoft to start Room to Read, a nonprofit that builds libraries and schools in the developing world. The program is run on a business model as opposed to a traditional not-for-profit, and Wood joins Bob to explain why it works. Wood is the author of Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy and it’s now available in paperback.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014: Bob remembers legendary folk singer Pete Seeger, who died Monday at the age of 94. Seeger wrote or co-wrote many of our most iconic folk songs which include, “If I Had a Hammer,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and popularized the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.” They spoke in 2008 when Seeger was the subject of a documentary on PBS.
Thursday, January 30, 2014: Dennis Rodman called his controversial trip to North Korea “basketball diplomacy,” harkening back to the “ping pong diplomacy” that helped thaw relations between the US and China in the 1970s. But is it an apt comparison? We’ll ask Nicholas Griffin, author of the new book, Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World. Then, of the 28 Japanese men prosecuted as “Class A” war criminals in the aftermath of World War II, only one was set free. Shumei Okawa, the lone civilian, was ruled mentally insane and escaped prosecution. The man who made that ruling was Major Daniel Jaffe, a U.S. Army psychiatrist stationed in occupied Japan. More than 60 years later, Jaffe’s grandson, Eric Jaffe, takes a second look at the evidence and explores the story in a new book, A Curious Madness: An American Combat Psychiatrist, a Japanese War Crimes Suspect, and an Unsolved Mystery from World War II.
Friday, January 31, 2014: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Then, journalist and historian Nick Turse spent 10 years researching Pentagon archives and interviewing Vietnam War veterans and survivors for his book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Turse’s book is now out in paperback.