HOUR ONE:

Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.

Linguist and senior writer for the New York Times, Margalit Fox’s new book The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells the fascinating tale of Linear B, a previously-unknown script discovered at the turn-of-the 19^th century in the ruins of Knossos.   The clay tablets date from 1400 BC, the Bronze Age in Greece.

Then, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.

HOUR TWO:

Saul Bellow was a self-taught writer.  His prose remade American fiction in his own image and created many literary “sons” who were influenced by him. Now Bellow’s oldest biological son, Greg, has written a memoir titled, Saul Bellow’s Heart, which seeks to enlighten the world about his father’s inner life.  Bob talks with Greg Bellow about family stories, literary legacies and the man he loved and still misses today.

Monday, June 17, 2013:  After a lone eagle was shot on a firing range in Afghanistan, former Army Ranger Scott Hickman and Navy SEAL Greg Wright rescued him and gave him a name: Eagle Mitch. They cared for him for months, but after it was clear he’d never fly again, the two worked to find a safer place than the war zone they were in.  Barbara Chepaitis was instrumental in coordinating the bird’s rescue and she recounts the story in her book Saving Eagle Mitch.  Then, imagine yourself floating along a slowly moving, comfortably heated river.  Now imagine that you’ve got a term paper due at the end of the week — because you’re not on vacation or at a water park, you’re at the University of Missouri’s student recreation center.  The center, which has been named by Sports Illustrated as the best in the country, also features a 35-foot climbing wall, more than 100 cardio machines, and dozens of flat-screen televisions. And Missouri isn’t alone.  As Jeffrey Selingo reports in his recent book, College (Un)Bound, these student “perks” are part of the complicated landscape of contemporary higher education, where costs are rising, changes are coming, and outcomes are increasingly questioned.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013:  As an ex-felon, writer Jack Gantos might have seemed like an odd choice to win last year’s Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature.   But Gantos has been writing acclaimed books for young people for years, including his popular Joey Pigza series.  He talks with Bob about his novel Dead End in Norvelt. It’s now out in paperback.  Then, if you listened to music in the 1960s and 70s then you heard the Wrecking Crew, the uncredited studio musicians who performed on one hit record after another, for everyone from the Beach Boys to the Byrds to Simon & Garfunkel to the Mamas & the Papas.  Kent Hartman tells the story of these largely unnamed session musicians in his book The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret, which is now available in paperback.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013:  Walter Cronkite IV, grandson of the late CBS newsman, and historian Maurice Isserman have written a new book.  It’s a collection of letters that Cronkite sent his wife Betsy during their three year separation while he worked abroad as a reporter during World War II.  The book is titled Cronkite’s War: His World War II Letters Home. Then, in his glowing review of her new novel, Flora, John Irving describes Gail Godwin as “a present-day George Eliot — our keenest observer of lifelong, tragically unwitting decisions.” The narrator of Godwin’s book is 10-year-old Helen Anstruther, who has just lost Nonie, the grandmother who raised her after her mother, Lisbeth, died when she was 3.  The setting is the summer of 1945, Helen’s father has just left town to do “more secret work for World War II” in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and she is left in the care of her mother’s 22-year-old cousin, Flora. What happens to Helen and Flora that summer will make Helen the woman (and writer) she becomes.

Thursday, June 20, 2013:  While myriad products on grocery store shelves lend an impression of diversity, the vast majority of food in the United States is produced by a small group of corporations like Cargill, Tyson, Kraft and ConAgra. In the book, Foodopoly, Wenonah Hauter writes: “The food system is in a crisis because of the way that food is produced and the consolidation and organization of the industry itself.” Hauter comes to this issue honestly; she grew up on a small farm that her husband operates today as a CSA (community supported agriculture) program. Wenonah Hauter is executive director of Food & Water Watch, an independent public interest organization in Washington DC.

Friday, June 21, 2013:  Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.  Next, Bob talks with Charlie Schroeder, who spent two years reenacting his way through 2,000 years of Western civilization.  He wrote a book about the experience called Man of War and it’s now available in paperback.  Finally, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.

Aoife O’Donovan is much beloved in the newgrass-folk-Americana music scene.  The genre must be hyphenated these days.  Or, you can create your own sub-genre.  Aoife’s (pronounced “ee-fah”) first band, Crooked Still, has been called a “progressive bluegrass string band.”  Her other band, Sometymes Why, is considered “folk noir.”  Aoife helped define those terms in her interview with Bob when she stopped by the Sirius XM performance studio to discuss her new album, Fossils.

“They take a very long time in the making, and it’s not an entirely intentional process.”  The album has been forming (simmering) in her mind for more than a decade.

But that’s not all she’s been doing. The singer-songwriter has been busy the last couple of years.  You heard Aoife on The Bob Edwards Show about a year and a half ago when she joined Noam Pikelny on their version of Tom Waits’s “Fish and Bird.” 

Several years back, Alison Krauss recorded “Lay My Burden Down,” a beautiful song written by Aoife, which is also the lead track on her own new album. 

And you may have seen Aoife with the up and coming band, The Goat Rodeo Sessions.  It’s an experimental string quartet…featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile.  Aoife co-wrote the song “Here and Heaven” with Chris Thile, and she says that they recorded it just as you see in this video, all in a circle around open microphones and with no room for error.

No matter where you’ve heard her voice, you’re not likely to forget it.  You also won’t soon forget this naughty little tune she wrote with Sometymes Why.  Beware of the very graphic lyrics.

You can purchase his book Beautiful Whale here.

If you are lucky enough to be in the area, California’s Musuem of Monterey is hosting an exhibition of Austin’s work through September 2nd of this year.  Learn more about the show here. 

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria “Masha” Alyokhina, and Yekaterina “Katia” Samutsevich were arrested last year for performing forty seconds of a political song at the altar of a Russian Orthodox church. Who are these cultural vigilantes? They’re Pussy Riot: a Russian feminist punk rock art collective whose members received two years hard labor for their brief, yet anti-Putin, lyrics. Documentarians Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin profile these artists and political prisoners in their latest documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer. The film airs tonight at 9pm (est) on HBO.

President Barack Obama came into office with a pledge to restore America’s integrity.  He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and as Jeremy Scahill points out, the message has been that the United States is winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan.  But when Scahill went out into the countryside without military minders, that’s not what he found.  What he found are horrific stories of civilians who have been killed by American forces, either through night raids or drone or missile strikes. The practices that President Obama had promised to end have actually expanded under his watch. 

Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield is Scahill’s book which is the basis for the documentary film being released this weekend.

Most people have probably heard about the increased use of drones and even targeted attacks in counties other than Iraq or Afghanistan, but what makes Scahill’s book and film unique (and so compelling) is that he goes to the villages where these attacks have occurred to talk to the families and witnesses.  He humanizes those victims in distant lands.  Furthermore, we’re shown how poor (or “unreliable” in diplomatic-speak) our military intelligence can be.  Innocent men, women and children are being killed and maimed in gruesome ways for all the wrong reasons. 

Scahill points out that if the US were carrying out these covert attacks and killing true enemies, folks probably wouldn’t mind so much.  But the more we kill innocent civilians and disregard it as “collateral damage,” then the United States is breeding a new round of enemies.  One man told Scahill after witnessing the deaths of his family members, that he wanted to become a suicide bomber and kill Americans as retaliation.

And this isn’t an occasional occurrence: in one week in Afghanistan, there were 1,700 nighttime raids. 

AND THEN there’s the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye who was imprisoned and tortured for reporting on these types of incidents.  When President Obama got wind that Shaye was about to be released, Obama personally called Yemen’s leader to ask (demand?) that they keep the reporter in prison, which is where he remains to this day.  In a recent letter written from prison, Shaye says “the only person responsible for kidnapping and detaining me is Obama.”

These are all pretty serious accusations against a man who won his seat at the White House on a wave of peace and transparency.  It has to make you wonder… ”what happened?”

Couch Surfing

AirBnB

Gross’s new book is The Turk Who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World.

HOUR ONE:

Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.

Bob talks with prolific documentarian Alex Gibney about his latest film. We Steal Secrets is a study of transparency and privacy in the digital information age.  Gibney focuses the story on Julian Assange, the controversial founder of the website Wiki Leaks and on the once anonymous source behind the largest security breach in US history.  That source turned out to be a young Army Intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning. He was arrested in 2010 and his court martial is set to begin on Monday. Both Manning and Assange have been lauded as heroes of free speech…they’ve also been called a traitor and a terrorist.

Then, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.

HOUR TWO:

In honor of the 100^th anniversary of the premiere of Igor Stravinksy’s modernist classic The Rite of Spring, Sirius XM’s classical music host Martin Goldsmith walks Bob through what happened that fateful night and why 100 years later, this piece still packs an impressive musical punch.

Bob talks with guitarist Ben Harper and harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite about their new CD titled Get Up! The two musicians and occasional collaborators have wanted to record a full album together for over a decade and finally found the time after first clicking musically at a 1997 recording session with John Lee Hooker.

Monday, June 3, 2013: Jim Wallis is the best-selling author and evangelical preacher who founded Sojourners, a nationwide network of progressive Christians working for justice and peace.  His latest book is On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned about Serving the Common Good.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013: Journalist Emma Brockes grew up with a larger-than-life mother with a mysterious past.  It wasn’t until after her mother passed away that Brockes traveled to her mother’s South African homeland to uncover why she not only left, but rarely spoke of those years.  Brockes book is She Left Me The Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me.  Then, Grammy-nominated jazz singer Jane Monheit looked to great songwriters and singers from all musical genres for her latest album The Heart of the Matter.  With selections from The Beatles to Buffy St. Marie, the album’s title track is Monheit’s first totally original composition.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013: Mystery writer Martha Grimes is best-known for her prolific Richard Jury mystery series and was the recipient of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award.  But her new book, Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism is not a mystery novel but her true story of alcoholism and its effects.  Written by Grimes and her son Ken, Double Double is personal look at a disease that affects nearly 45 million Americans each year.  Then, for four years, travel writer Matt Gross was The New York Times’ “Frugal Traveler,” giving readers tips on budget travel and sharing with them his adventures and misadventures on the road.  He writes about his global experiences in his new book The Turk Who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World.

Thursday, June 6, 2013: Deepak Chopra and his brother Sanjiv have co-written a memoir called Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream. The brothers’ lives took different paths after they left for the United States in the 1970s to study medicine. Deepak has been instrumental in bringing Indian spirituality to the West, while Sanjiv has focused on Western medicine and is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Then, soul singer Latasha Lee Robinson joins Bob to discuss her band and debut album Latasha Lee Robinson & The Black Ties.

Friday, June 7, 2013: Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.  Next, Bob talks with Charlie Schroeder, who spent two years reenacting his way through 2,000 years of Western civilization.  He wrote a book about the experience called Man of Warand it’s now available in paperback.  Finally, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe.

The Peabody and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker is back, though with so many different projects always in various stages of development, he never really goes away. Alex Gibney’s latst finished product is called We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.

Here is the trailer.

The movie studies the notion of secrecy and privacy in the digital information age and through archival footage, it paints portraits of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and of former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning. Manning’s court martial is scheduled to begin on June 3rd, where he faces espionage charges that could result in the death penalty. In 2010, Manning used Assange’s WikiLeaks website to share thousands of classified military documents and video, including this video, which WikiLeaks titled Collateral Murder. It shows US helicopter gunships in Iraq engaging a group that troops believed to be insurgents. Instead the men were unarmed civilians and journalists from Reuters.

We Steal Secrets is in select theaters this weekend in New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC and a few other cities - then it will be available on-demand starting June 7th.