Fresh Air's book critic reviews Away, an extraordinary novel of immigration and epic adventure from Amy Bloom, the author of Come to Me and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You.
Fresh Air's TV critic previews a new series, a new special and a season premiere — all on HBO this weekend. They are, respectively:
Tell Me You Love Me, about a therapist and the couples she counsels
Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, in which Sopranos star James Gandolfini (the special's executive producer) interviews 10 injured war vets
Curb Your Enthusiasm, which begins its sixth season.
As head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith led the team of lawyers that advises the presidency on the limits of executive power. During his tenure, he battled the Bush White House on the now-infamous "torture memos," as well as on issues of surveillance and the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. Goldsmith resigned his post after nine months.
Executive producer and actor Jeff Garlin and actress Susie Essman discuss the upcoming season of the HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Garlin plays Larry David's affable best friend and agent. Essman plays Garlin's wife and as such is known for her vitriol, no-nonsense attitude and foul mouth.
The evangelist minister and broadcaster played a critical role in the rise of conservative Christianity. Kennedy founded the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida, which now has 10,000 members. His radio and TV shows were broadcast around the world. Kennedy stated that one of his goals was to "reclaim America for Christ," closing the gap between church and state.
We listen back to an interview with Kennedy from May, 2005.
Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for a series detailing how often President Bush used "signing statements" — controversial assertions of a chief executive's right to bypass provisions of new laws.
Now Savage has written a book describing how the Bush-Cheney administration has expanded executive power. It's called Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.
Fresh Air's jazz critic reviews two new CD reissues originally recorded in the fall of 1958.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans, featuring the legendary jazz pianist, includes a track left off the original issue of the recording.
We Three, featuring the Tennessee-born pianist Phineas Newborn, showcases his phenomenal technique alongside the contributions of drummer Roy Haynes and bassman Paul Chambers.
The well-known beer expert Michael Jackson died Aug. 30 after a heart attack; he was 65 years old. Jackson wrote The Pocket Guide to Beer, The Great Beers of Belgium and The World Guide to Beer, and starred in the documentary series The Beer Hunter. He spoke to Terry Gross in 1991.
In The Israel Lobby, which grew out of a controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Walt and co-author John Mearsheimer examine the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. They argue that American support for Israel cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds.
Walt teaches international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
In The Deadliest Lies, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responds to The Israel Lobby, arguing that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's work "serves merely as an attractive new package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs" about Jews and Israel.
During his heyday in the early 1970s, shock-rock icon Alice Cooper dressed like a ghoul with a gaunt face and mascara-streaked eyes. His hits included "I'm Eighteen," "School's Out" and "Welcome to My Nightmare." In a memoir — Alice Cooper: Golf Monster, he recounts how he used his obsession with golf to overcome his addiction to alcohol.
This interview was originally broadcast on May 17, 2007.
With the rise of the TV-series box set, more shows are earning fans who devour episodes one after another. Fresh Air TV critic David Bianculli reviews two newly released sets: the debut seasons of Heroes and Friday Night Lights. The former is a seven-disc set packed with deleted scenes and the unaired original pilot; the Friday Night Lights set includes deleted episodes and a making-of featurette.
On his third album, Up Front & Down Low, singer-songwriter Teddy Thompson covers classic country songs including "She Thinks I Still Care," "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers," and "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone." On his earlier discs, including his self-titled 2000 debut and 2006's Separate Ways, Thompson performed more of his own songs. He's also appeared on various recordings with his parents, the British folk-rock legends Richard and Linda Thompson.
Novelist Bill Flanagan wrote the comedy A&R about the smooth operators and the scatty artists who make the music business so entertaining. Now he's lampooning the cable-TV industry in his novel New Bedlam. The source for his send-ups? His day job as an MTV networks exec.
Canadian journalist Paul Watson won the 1994 Pulitizer Prize for his photograph of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu,Somalia. His war-zone work leaves him suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress, and he says the Mogadishu photo still haunts him. Watson has also reported from Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq; he earned three National Newspaper Awards for foreign reporting and photography while at the Toronto Star, and was recently posted to head The Los Angeles Times' Southeast Asia bureau in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Grace Paley, an iconic and idiosyncratic American literary voice, died Wednesday. She was 84, and had battled breast cancer. Paley wrote short stories and poems, and much of her writing was inspired by the people she knew growing up in New York, the daughter of Russian Jews. Her first collection of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love, was published in 1959. Her other collections included Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later in the Same Day.
NPR's Baghdad bureau chief, Jamie Tarabay, has been living in and covering Iraq since December 2005. She spoke to Terry Gross in Fresh Air's Philadelphia studios, during a two-week break from her reporting duties. Australian by birth and Lebanese by heritage, Tarabay speaks fluent Arabic and French. She lived for three years as a child in Beirut during the bombings there. Before joining NPR she was a correspondent for the Associated Press, reporting from Southeast Asia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.
Journalist Connie Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2005 for her work as a columnist for The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland. The judges praised her for writing "pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged." "Pungent" is a good word, too, for the tone of Schultz's new memoir, about being the wife of a political candidate. Her husband, Sherrod Brown, was an Ohio congressman when he decided to run for the U.S. Senate; Schultz took a sabbatical from her job to help him campaign. Her book is . . .
