In this interview, Dave Isay the founder of StoryCorps, talks to Claudia Cragg about 'Mom', the latest book to be published out of the project. This is a celebration in print of American mothers from all walks of life and experiences. Selected from StoryCorps’ extensive archive of interviews, Mom is, StoryCorps says, a presentation of collective wisdom that has been passed from mothers to their children in StoryCorps’ recording booths across the United States.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission, they say, is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, over 50,000 everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and the project's Listen Pages.

Isay is also the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including five Peabody Awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He is the author/editor of numerous books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, as well as the StoryCorps books. 

You can listen to StoryCorps stories and learn more about the oral history project here.

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people—farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs—who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history.

Country Driving begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center.

Peter Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls "one of the Western world's most thoughtful writers on modern China," deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.

Hessler, a native of Columbia, Missouri, studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford before going to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His two-year experience of teaching English in Fuling, a town on the Yangtze, inspired River Town, his critically acclaimed first book. After finishing his Peace Corps stint, Hessler wrote freelance pieces for Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times before returning to China in 1999 as a Beijing-based freelance writer. There he wrote for newspapers like the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the South China Morning Post before moving on to magazine work for National Geographic and the New Yorker.

This interview is with Lionel Shriver who lives in London and in the US. Few writers, fearing audience backlash, are as prepared to nail their political colors to the mast as she is.

The author of 10 novels, she stunned critics and readers alike with We Need To Talk About Kevin written in the voice of the mother of a Columbine type killer.

Now in her latest So Much For That' she gives readers a deeply honest look at the human cost of the American health care and insurance systems. Here she explains to  Claudia Cragg just why the topic was/is so important to her and no doubt now rejoices in the passage of President Obama's Healthcare bill.

The narrative is a searing, deeply humane novel about a crumbling marriage resurrected in the face of illness, and a family’s struggle to come to terms with disease, dying, and the obscene cost of medical care in modern America.

This interview is with the economist Joseph Stiglitz who has played a number of policy roles and discussion revolves mostly around his latest book, Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy.

Stiglitz has advised American President Barack Obama, but has also been sharply critical of the Obama Administration's financial-industry rescue plan. Stiglitz said that whoever designed the Obama administration's bank rescue plan is “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.

Professor Stiglitz (he teaches at Columbia) served in the Clinton Administration as the chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (1995 – 1997). At the World Bank, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist (1997 – 2000), in the time when unprecedented protest against international economic organizations started, most prominently with the Seattle WTO meeting of 1999. He was fired by the World Bank for expressing dissent with its policies. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He is a member of Collegium International, an organization of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just and an economically sustainable world.

He was born in Gary, Indiana, to Jewish parents, Charlotte and Nathaniel Stiglitz. From 1960 to 1963, he studied at Amherst College, where he was a highly active member of the debate team and President of the Student Government. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his fourth year as an undergraduate, where he later pursued graduate work. His undergraduate degree was awarded from Amherst College. From 1965 to 1966, he moved to the University of Chicago to do research under Hirofumi Uzawa who had received an NSF grant. He studied for his PhD from MIT from 1966 to 1967, during which time he also held an MIT assistant professorship. The particular style of MIT economics suited him well - simple and concrete models, directed at answering important and relevant questions. From 1969 to 1970, he was a Fulbright research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

In subsequent years, he held professorships at Yale University, Stanford University, Duke University, Oxford University and Princeton University. Stiglitz is now a Professor at Columbia University, with appointments at the Business School, the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and is editor of The Economists' Voice journal with J. Bradford DeLong and Aaron Edlin. He also gives classes for a double-degree program between Sciences Po Paris and Ecole Polytechnique in 'Economics and Public Policy'. As of 2005 he chairs The Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. Stiglitz is generally considered to be a New-Keynesian economist.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Audrey Niffenegger about her new novel  Her Fearful Symmetry, a haunting tale about the complications of love, identity, and sibling rivalry. The narrative opens with the death of Elspeth Noblin, who bequeaths her London flat and its contents to the twin daughters of her estranged twin sister back in Chicago. These 20-year-old dilettantes, Julie and Valentina, move to London, eager to try on a new experience like one of their obsessively matched outfits. Historic Highgate Cemetery, which borders Elspeth's home, serves as an inspired setting as the twins become entwined in the lives of their neighbors: Elspeth's former lover, Robert; Martin, an agoraphobic crossword-puzzle creator; and the ethereal Elspeth herself, struggling to adjust to the afterlife.

It was 13 years ago that Niffenegger first developed the idea for the book which was to become The Time Traveller's Wife. She originally imagined making it as a graphic novel, but eventually realized that it would be very difficult to represent sudden time shifts with still images. She began to work on the project as a novel and it was then published in 2003. It was an international best-seller and has recently been adapted for cinema screens. Interesting to note, however, Niffenegger has not yet seen the film and does not plan to do so.

Niffenegger is also a visual artist and lives in Chicago where she is a full -ime professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. She teaches writing, letterpress printing, and fine edition book production. She also pens a cartoon for The Guardian newspaper to be published some time next year. Her amusements include collecting taxidermy and reading comic books. Miss Niffenegger is recorded as saying that she “spent her youth hiding in her bedroom and painting her fingernails black while listening to Patti Smith and Gang of Four, but she is feeling better now, thanks”.   

Asma Jahangir is the Chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and a special 'rapporteur' for the UN on Freedom of Religion and Beliefs. She has denounced a Supreme Court Ruling in Pakistan with regard to the 'National Reconciliation Ordinance' there on the grounds that it threatens both the rule of law and the country's survival as a democracy.

For context, Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, has also accused those demanding his resignation of threatening the country's democratic system.

In a speech on Sunday 27th December marking the second anniversary of the assassination of his wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari said opponents working to bring down his government were "colluding" with anti-government fighters. Benazir Bhutto's killers are said to be still at large.

The speech was Zaidari's first public appearance since the supreme court struck down the amnesty which to that point had protected him and several other senior ruling PPP  party officials from corruption charges.

In the meantime, there are daily bombings around the country killing hundreds of Pakistani citizens. 

From The Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2009

"Democracy Is the Greatest Revenge:
Benazir Bhutto's assassination didn't derail Pakistan's development."

By Asif Ali Zardari

"Two years ago the world stopped for me and for my children. Pakistan was shaken to its core and all but came apart. Women everywhere lost one of their greatest symbols of equality. And Islam, our great religion, lost its modern face.

On Dec. 27, 2007, my wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. She was the bravest person I have ever known, and the second anniversary of her death is an appropriate occasion to reflect upon what she achieved for our country,and how her legacy must be preserved against those who would return Pakistan to darkness".

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Cyril Christo, a poet whose film 'A Stitch in Time' (an anti-nuclear documentary) was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988. His collections of poetry include 'The Twilight Language' (Canio's Editions) and 'Hiroshima, my love' (Edwin Mellen Press 1997). His wife, Marie Wilkinson, who is also featureds as a guest in the piece, is an architect, planner, photographer. The two live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Their new book is 'Walking Thunder' which follows on from their previous work 'Lost Africa'.

As Cyril Christo puts it, "Africa stands as the shadow of our beginnings, cradle to humanity, and great mirror to what we are in the process of becoming, a thirsting purgatory caught between origin and our common fate. Marie and I continue to document the disappearance of the essence of Africa". In the future survival or demise of the elephant, they believe, lies the future of mankind itself.

Indian state authorities have announced that, 25 years after the Union Carbide Bhopal tragedy that killed thousands, the (till now) sealed pesticide plant is to be opened for tours. In this interview, Dr Suroopa Mukherjee explains that the Bhopal victims' problems are still a very long way from being over.

The Bhopal disaster - or 'Bhopal gas tragedy' - took place at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal in the state of Madya Pradesh. At midnight on 3 December 1984, the plant accidentally released methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, exposing more than 500,000 people to MIC and other chemicals. The first official immediate death toll was 2,259. Others estimate 8,000-10,000 died within 72 hours and 25,000 have since died from gas-related diseases. The deaths go on.

Some 25 years after the gas leak, 390 tonnes of toxic chemicals abandoned at the Union Carbide plant continue to pollute the ground water in the region and affects thousands residents of Bhopal who depend on it.

There are currently civil and criminal cases related to the disaster ongoing in the United States District Court, Manhattan and the District Court of Bhopal, India against Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical Company, with arrest warrants pending against Warren Anderson who was CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster.

Dr Suroopa Mukherjee PhD is an academic and activist at The Hindu College of Delhi University who has worked closely with victims and has spearheaded the 'We for Bhopal' movement.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg talks for KGNU with T.R. Reid who was a bureau chief in Tokyo and London for The Washington Post. His new book, “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care,” is a systematic study of the health systems in seven countries that was inspired in part by his family’s experiences living overseas and receiving health care abroad. Mr. Reid also produced a 2008 documentary on the same topic for PBS called “Sick Around the World.”

I have been working on a New Media memoir about my late mother, an actress. Diane Hart lived an extraordinary life and so an extraordinary memoir is required.

You can find her Wikipedia entry HERE.

And then two different presentations (for New Media academic research) of the memoir HERE and HERE.

To my regular listeners, I apologize for using this space (not for my regular feature interviews) but for hosting the audio for the project. Frankly, there is nowhere else they can go.