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THE BOB EDWARDS SHOW SCHEDULE
September 6-10, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
The manufacturing industry in the United States has long been in decline, but the loss of factory jobs has been especially brutal during the recession, with nearly two million disappearing since December 2007. Scott Paul is the Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing and he’ll explain how U.S. policies have undermined the manufacturing industry. Then, FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) funded four arts program. One of those, the Federal Writer’s Project, employed thousands of writers and started the careers of some of America’s most famous authors like Studs Terkel, Ralph Ellison, Richard Writer, Saul Bellow, and Zora Neale Hurston. Bob talks with writer David Bradley about the documentary titled Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Lawrence Wright earned the Pulitzer Prize for his historical account of Al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, which, in part, traces the roots of the anti-American jihad to the 1940s. Afterwards, the author wrote a one-man show about his experience with Islamic fundamentalists and award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney has produced a documentary based on that show. Wright discusses My Trip to Al-Qaeda and U.S. relations with Muslims nine years after the attack on the World Trade Center. Wright also is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Then, In 1981, newly graduated American civ major Mary Chapin Carpenter applied for a number of jobs that didn’t pan out. After a series of closed doors, Carpenter finally turned to music, her favorite hobby, to try to pay the bills. Five Grammys and three Platinum albums later, Carpenter is one of America’s most successful female singer/songwriters. Her latest album is titled The Age of Miracles.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
This week in our series No Place Like Home, we examine the struggles of two different families as they return to their homes in hard-hit St. Bernard Parish. First we visit Errol Perez. He evacuated to northern Louisiana before Katrina, and it’s taken him almost five years to move back to St. Bernard Parish. Next, Bob talks with cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Kate Browne about what she learned by following the journey of an extended Creole family for the past five years. The documentary is titled, Still Waiting. Finally, a conversation with Dr. Ben Springgate about the psychological toll of successive disasters in the past five years and the limited healthcare options in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
In this week’s issue of The New Yorker magazine, Terry McDermott investigates the life of the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA, told a Senate committee that Mohammed “did not even appear in our chart of key Al Qaeda members and associates” until a detainee identified him as the planner of the 9/11 attacks, in the spring of 2002. McDermott writes that whenever Mohammed goes on trial, “the answers he provides to the enduring questions about 9/11 will be deeply unsatisfying…The mastermind of 9/11 seems to have had no grand strategy, or, really, any strategy at all.” Then, sports writer Frank Deford turned to fiction in his latest book “Bliss, Remembered,” about an American swimmer who falls in love with a young German man during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When politics intervene, the young swimmer returns home to sort out the difficulties of mixing personal affairs with world events.
Friday, September 10, 2010
David Broder of The Washington Post joins Bob to talk politics. Next, The Colorado River is a crucial source of water and electricity for the American West, but it’s under severe stress from factors like population growth, pollution and climate change. In his book “Running Dry,” Jonathan Waterman recounts his journey along the Colorado River and profiles some of the people who depend on this once-mighty waterway. Then, in this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with curator Dan Gediman about the essay of Karin Round. She is the office manager for her family’s hardware store in Stoneham, Massachusetts and she has studied non-fiction writing in a post-graduate program at Goucher College. Round continues to help travelers stranded on her doorstep.