What’s missing in our country’s education system and what’s the best way to correct that shortcoming? We’ll examine current issues facing our schools this hour with Diane Ravitch, author of the new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” (Basic Books, 2010). Ravitch will address the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture this evening.
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What makes a performer truly great and should the more forgettable aspects of an artist’s output be dismissed when considering the whole? We’ll spend this hour with music writer and critic Greil Marcus who examines one such tumultuous musical career in his new book “When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison” (Public Affairs, 2010).
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What makes a story yearn to be told? We’ll spend this hour with Jake Silverstein, editor of Texas Monthly Magazine and author of the new collection “Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).
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How are nature, culture and art connected? We spent an hour last January with contemporary Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa whose work is on view through this weekend in the Nasher Sculpture Center’s exhibit “Jaume Plensa: Genus and Species.” We’ll revisit that conversation this hour.
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As world travel and shipping systems finally begin to recover from the recent volcano-caused snarl, we’ll remember America’s last major eruption with journalist McKenzie Funk. His article, “Mountain Transformed: Thirty years after the blast, Mount St. Helens is reborn again” is this month’s National Geographic Magazine cover story.
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What does the back of your car say about you? We’ll examine the phenomenon of the one-line manifesto this hour with Jack Bowen. His new book is “If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers” (Random House, paperback, 2010).
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This week on Think TV, we’ll discuss clinical depression and the risk of suicide among people who appear, from the outside, to have it all. Our guest is Julie Hersh, whose new book, “Struck by Living” (Brown Books, 2010), examines her own struggle with mental illness and her battle to turn back the devastating effects of depression.
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As we celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day today, what do we really know about how our impact on the ecosystem affects our own well-being? We’ll spend this hour with Sandra Steingraber, biologist, writer and author of “Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment” (Da Capo Press, 2010). Steingraber is also featured in the new documentary film “Living Downstream” (The People’s Picture Co., 2010).
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With the recent murder of a pregnant U.S. government employee and her husband, the rest of the country is waking up to the violence in Juarez. We’ll discuss the situation this hour with borderland expert and writer Charles Bowden, who’s just published his new book “Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields” (Nation Books, 2010).
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What kind of person does it take to search for survivors in the midst of a disaster? We’ll find out this hour with Susannah Charleson, a volunteer canine-search-and-rescue handler and author of the new book “Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).
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Who are the women behind America’s military success and why have their stories (until now) been largely overlooked? We’ll learn about a few of these remarkable women this hour with Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee, co-author of the new book “A Few Good Women: America’s Military Women from World War I to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Knopf, 2010).
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What actually started the controversy over the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and why has the debate become so widespread? We’ll talk this hour with Columbia University Bard expert James Shapiro, author of the new book “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
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