The Bob Edwards Show, August 25-29, 2014
Monday, August 25, 2014: Journalist Helen Thorpe takes us inside the minds of three women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan for twelve years. Thorpe talks with Bob about these women and her book Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women At Home And At War. Then, Wall Street Journal music critic Will Friedwald calls French vocalist Cyrille Aimée “one of the most promising jazz singers of her generation.” The inventive songstress joins Bob to discuss her latest album It’s A Good Day.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014: Best-selling author and master storyteller Ben Macintyre (Operation Mincemeat) focuses his most recent book on Britain’s, and possibly the world’s, most notorious spy. Charming and brilliant, MI6 agent Kim Philby rose to the top of Britain’s counterintelligence agency all the while passing information on to Russia. Macintyre’s book is A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Greatest Betrayal.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014: Three-quarters of Americans’ eyes never switch to night vision because most of us never experience true darkness. In fact, there are only a handful of places in the United States where total darkness can exist. In his new book, The End of Night, Paul Bogard explores the deleterious effect of dark deprivation upon our world. Then, with the Cold War long over, there seems little threat of an all-out nuclear war. But, as investigative journalist Eric Schlosser points out in his book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, most of those weapons are not only still out there, they are on hair-trigger alert. Drawing recently declassified government documents and his own interviews with military personnel and nuclear scientists, Schlosser illuminates our illusion of nuclear safety. Command and Control is now available in paperback.
Thursday, August 28, 2014: In the new film, Love Is Strange, award-winning actor Alfred Molina plays George, a Catholic school teacher, who, after 39 years, marries his partner Ben, played by John Lithgow. When George’s employer learns of his marriage, they fire him, sending the newlyweds on a difficult journey. Love Is Strange opens wide August 29th. Then, over fifty years ago, writer Michael Harrington’s book, The Other America, predicted that unless American society addressed it’s widespread poverty problem, another journalist decades later would write about the exact same conditions that he had chronicled. Journalist Sasha Abramsky has done just that. His book, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, tells the stories of people around the country who are struggling to make it. The American Way of Poverty is available in paperback.
Friday, August 29, 2014: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news. Then, in 2000, DJ John Peel called country singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell’s debut album, Not the Tremblin’ Kind, “my favorite record of the last ten years and possibly my life.” Cantrell joins Bob in our performance studio to talk about her work and play a few tunes off her new album No Way There From Here. And finally, we hear a new commentary from children’s book writer and illustrator Daniel Pinkwater.
Sasha Abramsky's analysis of poverty in America runs concurrent with Robert Reich's assessment of the economic meltdown – decades of wage disparity, lack of political will to reform, and an overall demonizing of poverty leading to an ebbing of empathy. Perhaps we need a left-leaning Frank Lutz type to provide the language that will begin our societal narrative in a healing direction.