Can history really be known? Where are the clues to the truth about the past? According to our guest this hour, University of Georgia Professor Peter Charles Hoffer, history is all around us. We’ll speak with him this hour about his new book “The Historian’s Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time” (NYU Press, 2008).
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Should the Bush Administration be held accountable for miscarriages of justice including war crimes? Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and New York attorney Scott Horton thinks so. He makes this case in this month’s cover story “Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration.”
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What do Texas scientists think about the idea of teaching the weaknesses of the theory of evolution in Texas classrooms? UTA Professor Raymond A. Eve had just released a survey of 464 university science teachers. He’ll join us this hour to discuss the findings published in “Evolution, Creationism and Public Schools: Surveying What Texas Scientists Think about Educating Our Kids in the 21st Century.”
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How has the ubiquitous private security contractor changed America’s approach to war in Iraq and elsewhere? We’ll spend this hour with 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Fainaru, author of the new book “Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq” (Da Capo Press, 2008).
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Is today’s economic crisis simply a reverberation of the double-digit inflationary period of the 1960s and 70s? We’ll spend this hour with Robert J. Samuelson, columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post and author of the new book “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence” (Random House, 2008).
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Thirty years ago, the Reverend Jim Jones led 900 of his followers to their deaths. Why did it happen and could a tragedy of this magnitude happen again? We’ll talk with journalist Tim Reiterman who covered Jonestown for the San Francisco Examiner. His book “RAVEN: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People” (Tarcher Penguin, Paperback, 2008) has just been reissued.
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How do journalists who were there view the JFK assassination 45 years later? We’ll talk this evening with Bill Mercer and Bob Huffaker, co-authors of “When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963” (Taylor Trade Publishing). Ann Williams, founder and artistic director of the Dallas Black Dance Theatre will join us for the Scene segment.
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What really goes on in the halls of the United Nations? We’ll explore those halls this hour with journalist Michael Soussan who worked for the (now known to be corrupt) U.N. Oil-for-Food program in the late 1990s. His new book about the experience is “Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy” (Nation Books, 2008).
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What constitutes news? How has the definition changed over the last century or so? We’ll take a look back at a time when “news” meant something different with Matthew Goodman, author of the new book “The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth Century New York” (Basic Books, 2008).
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What must America do to regain its leadership role in the world’s political and economic systems? According to our guest this hour, Duke University Professor Bruce W. Jentleson, it may be an uphill climb. He’ll join us this hour to discuss his current Foreign Policy Magazine cover story “America’s Hard Sell: How American Values Lost Their Luster.”
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How important is dirt? Try as we may to avoid it, according to our guest this hour – University of Washington Professor David R. Montgomery, lowly dirt may be a more powerful shaper of human history than we think. Montgomery’s new book is “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations” (University of California Press, 2008).
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What’s it like to serve one’s country and then have that service rebuked for political gain? We’ll find out this hour with Valerie Plame Wilson, the former covert CIA operative whose name was leaked by the Bush Administration.
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