Coming Up This Weekend

Bob Edwards Weekend Highlights – July 31-August 1, 2010

HOUR ONE

50 years ago, Alabama native Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird hit bookstores across America, becoming an immediate bestseller and an American literary classic.  In celebration of the book’s anniversary, writer and filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy compiled interviews with over two dozen contemporary writers, historians, journalists and artists for her book Scout, Atticus, & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with curator Dan Gediman about the essay of journalist Lucy Freeman.  She covered mental health and social welfare subjects for The New York Times. Her first book Fight Against Fears detailed her own psychoanalytic treatment for social fears and insomnia. Freeman went on to write more than 70 books ranging from psychology topics to mystery novels.      

HOUR TWO

We conclude our series of interviews recorded at this year’s New Orleans Jazz Fest with a musical import. Jon Cleary was born and raised into a musical family in a sleepy English town, but thanks to a traveling uncle he was introduced at an early age to the music and culture of New Orleans. Now Cleary has been living there for most of his life, made the switch from guitar to piano and possesses an amazing grasp of the secret ingredients of New Orleans music. Cleary shares the recipe with Bob on one of the four pianos in his home studio in the Bywater neighborhood.  Then, as our summer music series ends, we bring you a preview of our new series from southern Louisiana reporting on the endangered wetlands, the oil spill and how New Orleans is doing five years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. That series is titled No Place Like Home: The Vanishing Culture of Coastal Louisiana.