The Bob Edwards Show, June 16-20, 2014
Monday, June 16, 2014: In his latest thriller, The Director, best-selling author and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius takes readers into the illusive world of contemporary cyber-espionage.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014: Paul Williams is a well-known actor from television shows and movies of the past three decades. He also written a range of hits for The Carpenters, Three Dog Night, Helen Reddy – and Kermit the Frog. Bob talks with Williams about those aspects of his career – as well as his job as the president of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Then, over a five year period beginning in 1968, airplane hijackings were astonishingly common. Commercial jets were seized once a week on average. One of the most famous occurred in 1972 when Army veteran Roger Holder and his beautiful girlfriend Cathy Kerkow commandeered Western Airlines flight 701 from Los Angeles to Seattle as a vague protest against the Vietnam War. Brendan Koerner chronicles the bizarre story in a book titled The Skies Belong to Us and it’s available in paperback. Finally, we hear a new commentary from children’s book writer and illustrator Daniel Pinkwater.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014: Matthew VanDyke was a timid young man who struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder. He earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Security Studies but hadn’t ever visited the region, so in 2007, VanDyke bought a motorcycle and set out to banish his sheltered life forever. Embarking on a journey to film—and find himself in the Arab World, VanDyke embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan before joining the Libyan Civil War. After his disastrous capture and 166-day-long detention, VanDyke escaped and rejoined the rebels in time for their victory. Using a vast cache of footage filmed by VanDyke and collaborator Daniel Britt, filmmaker Marshall Curry crafted a gripping documentary called Point and Shoot about VanDyke’s experiences and personal transformation. Point and Shoot is an official selection at this year’s AFI DOCS Festival.
Thursday, June 19, 2014: Famed director John Waters—the man behind Hairspray, Pecker, and many other films—made a cardboard sign that read “I’m Not Psycho” and hitchhiked from Baltimore to San Francisco. His book Carsick is his account of what happened during his unforgettable and unconventional “vacation.” Then, Bob talks with two Academy Award winners, actor Adrien Brody and director Paul Haggis, about their new film, Third Person, which opens tomorrow.
Friday, June 20, 2014: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Then, “If you smoked Colombian weed in the 1970s and 1980s,” writes NBC News writer Tony Dokoupil, “you paid for my swim lessons, bought me my first baseball glove and kept me in the best private school in south Florida, alongside President George H.W. Bush’s grandkids, at least for a little while.” Dokoupil’s “old man” smuggled tons of marijuana into the country before his eventual self-destruction. Bob talks to Dokoupil about his memoir, The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana. Finally, Bob talks to award-winning science journalist Rebecca Coffey about her latest literary endeavor — a novel that unravels the history of psychoanalysis, same-sex desire, and the Freud family. It’s called Hysterical: Anna Freud’s Story. Coffey is a regular contributor to Scientific American and Discover magazines.