@KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here for #NursesWeek with Theresa Brown, RN.

Twitter: @TheresaBrown

Her book, The Shift, is as eye-opening as it is riveting. Brown is a practicing nurse and New York Times columnist and she invites readers to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day on a hospital’s cancer ward.

Theresa Brown is also a PhD in English Literature and, before she took up nursing, was a former professor at Tuft's University. 

In the span of just 12 hours, lives can be lost, life-altering medical treatment decisions made, and dreams fulfilled or irrevocably stolen. In Brown’s skilled hands--as both a dedicated nurse and an insightful chronicler of events--she offers an unprecedented view into the individual struggles as well as the larger truths about medicine in the US today, and by shift’s end, readers have witnessed something profound about hope and healing and humanity.

Every day, Theresa Brown holds patients' lives in her hands. On this day there are four. There is Mr. Hampton, a patient with lymphoma to whom Brown is charged with administering a powerful drug that could cure him--or kill him; Sheila, who may have been dangerously misdiagnosed; Candace, a returning patient who arrives (perhaps advisedly) with her own disinfectant wipes, cleansing rituals, and demands; and Dorothy, who after six weeks in the hospital may finally go home. Prioritizing and ministering to their needs takes the kind of skill, sensitivity, and, yes, humor that enable a nurse to be a patient’s most ardent advocate in a medical system marked by heartbreaking dysfunction as well as miraculous success.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Joseph Blasi, the J. Robert Beyster Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and the author of THE CITIZEN’S SHARE: Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century with Richard Freeman and Douglas Kruse.

Twitter:@JosephBlasi

Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya has announced that he is to give his workers a taste of capitalism by granting them a share in the value of the company. Ulukaya, who is also the CEO of the company, promised 2000 employees ten percent of the value of the entire corporation if the company goes public or is sold in the future. The potential value of this stake is quite significant since the media reported Chobani’s potential estimated value as high as $ 2-3 billion.

The Chobani story comes at a time when the economic plight of the middle class is fueling strong interest by voters according to primary exit polls. High passions and vigorous debates by both politicians and citizens characterize the rhetoric swirling through both the Republican and Democratic primaries. This issue has clearly scrambled the entire electorate in a way that is nothing short of historic and in every way volatile.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Catie Marron about her second book, 'City Squares: "City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World".

In this important collection, eighteen renowned writers, including David Remnick, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Skloot, Rory Stewart, and Adam Gopnik evoke the spirit and history of some of the world’s most recognized and significant city squares, accompanied by illustrations from equally distinguished photographers.

Over half of the world’s citizens now live in cities, and this number is rapidly growing. At the heart of these municipalities is the square—the defining urban public space since the dawn of democracy in Ancient Greece. Each square stands for a larger theme in history: cultural, geopolitical, anthropological, or architectural, and each of the eighteen luminary writers has contributed his or her own innate talent, prodigious research, and local knowledge.

Divided into three parts: Culture, Geopolitics, History, headlined by Michael Kimmelman, David Remnick, and George Packer, this significant anthology shows the city square in new light. Jehane Noujaim, award-winning filmmaker, takes the reader through her return to Tahrir Square during the 2011 protest; Rory Stewart, diplomat and author, chronicles a square in Kabul which has come and gone several times over five centuries; Ari Shavit describes the dramatic changes of central Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square; Rick Stengel, editor, author, and journalist, recounts the power of Mandela’s choice of the Grand Parade, Cape Town, a huge market square to speak to the world right after his release from twenty-seven years in prison; while award-winning journalist Gillian Tett explores the concept of the virtual square in the age of social media.

This collection is an important lesson in history, a portrait of the world we live in today, as well as an exercise in thinking about the future. Evocative and compelling, City Squares will change the way you walk through a city.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here for the radio show/podcast 'It's The Economy' with Susan Packard, the co-founder of HGTV and the only female founding member of Scripps Networks. (Twitter: @PackardSusan)

Women in the workforce have heard it all: Lean in, lean out, be bossy, be passive, separate work and home life…the conflicting guidance can be dizzying. So, Packard has simplified the rules. In NEW RULES OF THE GAME: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace (Prentice Hall Press/Penguin, February 2014).

In this, she uses her thirty years of experience - from 'secretary' to Executive VP - to give women an encouraging and achievable strategy for accomplishing workplace goals: gamesmanship.

Packard says that she has realized what’s really important in corporate America: to her, it is learning a man's rules for grit and gamesmanship and then outplaying them. It's not about platitudes or appearances, but rather utilizing the strategic thinking regularly found in sports and video games that men typically excel in to develop creativity, focus, optimism, teamwork and ultimately success.  

However, her advice applies NOT ONLY to women. Men, millennials and even children, have a lot to learn from what she has to say. 

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here for the 'It's The Economy' with AOL's "Steve" Case.

Case, whose full name is Stephen McConnell Case', is an American entrepreneur, investor, and businessman. He is best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL).

Twitter: @SteveCase @ThirdWaveBook

Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to invest in early and growth-stage startups through his Washington, D.C. based venture capital firm Revolution LLC.

Case serves as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) and was a member of Barack Obama'sCouncil on Jobs and Competitiveness. He also serves on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE). Case is also chairman of UP Global, a non-profit organization focused on fostering strong entrepreneurial communities, created in 2013 from the merger of Startup America Partnership and Startup Weekend.

Together with his wife, Joan, they run The Case Foundation. 

His new book is: The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Don Tapscott, a Canadian man whose name is profoundly associated with new technologies and business practice. He is the CEO of the Tapscott Group and one of the most influential living theorists about business and society. (Twitter: @dtapscott)

In November 2013, 'Thinkers 50' named him the 4th most important business thinker in the world.

A June 2013 Forbes.com analysis of social media identified him as the most influential management thinker in the world.

He is the author or co-author of 15 widely read books about new technologies and new media, 

Tapscott is the author of 15 books about the digital revolution in business and society, including Wikinomics and the landmark work, The Digital Economy, which has just been published in a 20th Anniversary edition. He is also chancellor of Trent University.

Alex Tapscott is the CEO of North West Passage Ventures, an advisory firm building early stage companies in the blockchain space. (Twitter: @alextapscott)

Together, they are authors of the new book, The Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Mark Schatzker about his new book, 'The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor'. 

Twitter: @MarkSchatzker

Schatzker believes that we are in the grip of a food crisis. Obesity has become a leading cause of preventable death, after only smoking. For nearly half a century we’ve been trying to pin the blame somewhere—fat, carbs, sugar, wheat, high-fructose corn syrup. But that search has been in vain, because the food problem that’s killing us is not a nutrient problem. It’s a behavioral problem, and it’s caused by the changing flavor of the food we eat.

Ever since the 1940s, with the rise of industrialized food production, we have been gradually leeching the taste out of what we grow. Simultaneously, we have taken great leaps forward in technology, creating a flavor industry, worth billions annually, in an attempt to put back the tastes we’ve engineered out of our food. The result is a national cuisine that increasingly resembles the paragon of flavor manipulation: Doritos. As food—all food—becomes increasingly bland, we dress it up with calories and flavor chemicals to make it delicious again. We have rewired our palates and our brains, and the results are making us sick and killing us.

With in-depth historical and scientific research, The Dorito Effect casts the food crisis in a fascinating new light, weaving an enthralling tale of how we got to this point and where we are headed. We’ve been telling ourselves that our addiction to flavor is the problem, but it is actually the solution. We are on the cusp of a new revolution in agriculture that will allow us to eat healthier and live longer by enjoying flavor the way nature intended.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Thomas A Kochan - @TomKochan - on Shaping the Future of Work. He lays out in discussion a comprehensive strategy for changing the course the American economy and employment system have been on for the past 30 years. The goal is to create more productive businesses that also provide good jobs and careers and by doing so build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. This will require workers to acquire new sources of bargaining power and for business, labor, government, and educators to work together to meet the challenges and opportunities facing the next generation workforce.

The book reviews what worked well for average workers, families, and the economy during the era of the post-World War II Social Contract, why that contract broke down, and how, working together, we can build a new social contract suitable to today s economy and workforce. The ideas presented here come from direct engagement with next generation workers who participated in an MIT online course devoted to the future of work and from the author's 40 years of research and active involvement with business, government, and labor leaders over how to foster innovations in workplace practices and policies.

Over 2 million of the United States' 11 million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the author of Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard University.

Twitter: @RGGonzales1

In this work, Gonzales introduces the reader  to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and those who make an early exit, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations.

Gonzales' vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here (click on 'pod' link next to title to listen to the interview) with Pamela Hodges of ipaintiwrite.com.

She is "Pamela, not Pam. The non-stick spray ruined the shortened version of (her) name.
She writes about art, creativity, and everyday life with cat barf and seven litter boxes."

This is the story of one woman's creativity from Canada, to Japan, to the US, via photography, graphic design and sheer determination.

You can for free get a PDF copy of her new coloring book, "COLOR THE CATS," simply by texting 

colorthecats

to 44222 and entering your email for the blog subscription.

KINDLY NOTE 10 percent of all proceeds from Color The Cat are contractually donated by Pamela Hodges to the Best Friends Animal Society. The biggest US 'no-kill' rescue organization. 

Ann Jones speaks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg, in a special edition of 'It's The Economy' for the 2016 KGNU Denver/Boulder Spring Fund Drive.

Please do kindly consider supporting independent journalism and keeping it alive by making a tax deductible donation to KGNU Denver/Boulder. 

She recently wrote a highly respected article for TomDispatch's TomGram on 'Social Democracy for Dummies', a discussion which is particularly pertinent for #Election2016.

She is also the author of many well-known books including 

They Were Soldiers

War Is Not Over When It's Over

Kabul in Winter

Women Who Kill

Next Time She'll Be Dead

Ms. Jones is an independent scholar, journalist, photographer, and the author of ten books of nonfiction. 

Her work focuses on women "and other underdogs" and on the historical/social/political structures which, she considers, do so much to perpetuate injustice.

She has written extensively about violence against women, reported from Afghanistan, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East on the impact of war upon civilians, and embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan to report on the damage done to America’s soldiers.

Widely published, her articles currently appear most often in The Nation and online at TomDispatch.com. She holds a PhD in English and history from the University of Wisconsin.

In recent years, her work has received generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation. She is now (2015-16) an associate of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University

@KGNUClaudia (Claudia Cragg) speaks here with Sari Wilson whose beautifully crafted, just published novel, Girl Through Glass, is causing a sensation.

Her story tells the tale of a young girl’s coming of age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet—a story of obsession and the quest for perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.

In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet.

Enduring the mess of her parent’s divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism.

Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory.

It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her mentor.

Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness.

As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.

In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a Midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsizes the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self.

When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.

Told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us.

Author Janice Y K Lee comes to Denver's 16th Street 'Tattered Cover' this coming Monday 25th January at 7:00 pm. For further details, please call: 1 303 436 1070

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Janice Y.K. Lee "whose New York Times bestselling debut was The Piano Teacher (called “immensely satisfying” by People, “intensely readable” by O, The Oprah Magazine, and “a rare and exquisite story” by Elizabeth Gilbert.)"

"Now, in her long-awaited new novel, 'The Expatriates', Lee explores with devastating poignancy the emotions, identities, and relationships of three very different American women living in the same small expat community in Hong Kong."

Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling.

In this KGNU interview, for 'It's The Economy, Claudia Cragg speaks with David Montgomery, a professor of earth and space sciences, and his wife, biologist and environmental planner Anne Biklé. In their recent book, 'The Hidden Half of Nature', they unravel the universe of microbes that make dirt fertile and allow us to digest food.

Both the lining of our colons and the ground beneath our feet, the authors explain, are "bio­logical bazaars where plants and people trade nutritional wares and form alliances." Combining lucid explication of emerging science with personal anecdotes, Montgomery and Biklé, who confronted a cancer diagnosis while writing the book, reveal that our immune defenses depend on protecting and nourishing these microscopic brigades.

According to USC's 'Center for Effective Organisations' Alec R. Levenson, 'Millennials' have been burdened with a reputation as spoiled, lazy, and entitled, but the reality behind the stereotype is far richer and more complex. But who are Millennials and what do they really want?

In this interview for KGNU's 'It's The Economy' Claudia Cragg speaks with Levenson who explains who Millennials really are, and offers practical advice to help those who manage, lead, and work with them to improve teamwork, increase productivity, strengthen organizational culture, and build a robust talent pipeline.

'What Millennials Want From Work', co-written and researched with Jennifer J. Deal, is based on fieldwork and survey data from global research on more than 25,000 Millennials and 29,000 older workers in 22 countries, this book paints a comprehensive, scientifically accurate picture of what really motivates Millennials around the world.

For KGNU Claudia Cragg speaks here with Sheila McCauley Keys, author of 'Our Auntie Rosa', who is the niece of Rosa Parks for the 60th Anniversary of her aunt's famous 'bus incident'. McCauley Keys shares the family's remembrances of the woman who was not only the mother of the civil rights movement, but a nurturing mother figure to them as well. Her brave act on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, was just one moment in a life lived with great humility and decency.

After the deaths of Rosa Parks's husband and brother, her nieces and nephews became her only family and the closest that she would ever experience to having biological sons and daughters. In this book, they share with readers what she shared with them about her experiences growing up in a racist South, her deep dedication to truth and justice, and the personal values she held closest to her heart.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the delightful Philip Weinstein about his latest work Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. This is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity.

As Weinstein relates, Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?

Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life. 

(To listen to the interview, please CLICK on the 'Pod' icon above left next to the title. Thank you.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with advertising maven, Linda Kaplan Thaler (@lindathaler2), on 'Grit to Great', co-written with Robin Koval. In this, they tackle a topic that is close to their hearts, one that they feel is the real secret to their own success in their careers--and in the careers of so many people they know and have met. And that is the incredible power of grit, perseverance, perspiration, determination, and sheer stick-to-it-tiveness. They say we are all dazzled by the notion that there are some people who get ahead, who reach the corner office because they are simply gifted, or well-connected, or both. In fact, research shows that we far overvalue talent and intellectual ability in our culture. So many people get ahead--even the gifted ones--because they worked incredibly hard, put in the thousands of hours of practice and extra sweat equity, and made their own luck. Linda and Robin should know--they are two girls from the Bronx who had no special advantages or privileges and rose up through their own hard work and relentless drive to succeed to the top of their highly competitive profession. 

In a book illustrated with a cornucopia of stories and the latest research on success, the authors reveal the strategies that helped them, and countless others, succeed at the highest levels in their careers and professions, and in their personal lives. They talk about the guts--the courage--necessary to take on tough challenges and not give up at the first sign of difficulty. They discuss the essential quality of resiliency. Everyone suffers setbacks in their careers and in life. The key, however, is to pick yourself up and bounce back. Drawing on the latest research in positive psychology, they discuss why optimists do better in school, work, and on the playing field--and how to reset that optimistic set point. They talk about industriousness, the notion that Malcolm Gladwell popularized with the 10,000-hour rule in his book Outliers. Creativity theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes it takes a minimum of 10 years for one's true creative potential to be realized. And the authors explore the concept of tenacity--the quality that allows us to remain focused and avoid distraction in order to get the job done--an increasingly difficult task in today's fragmented, cluttered, high-tech, connected world.

(To listen to the interview, please CLICK on the 'Pod' icon above left next to the title. Thank you.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here with Vicky Unwin on her latest book compiled from letters her mother, Sheila Mills. wrote during World War Two.

Vicky Unwin when writing it, had also faced the tragic and untimely loss of her daughter Louise, as well as a vicious diagnosis of a malignant sarcoma on her leg.

But with regard to Sheila Mills specifically, she came Unwin says "from a sheltered middle-class upbringing" before she joined the WRNS in 1940.

The working life of a women’s naval officer in World War II was a hard one. The discipline and trials of living and working as a "Wren" plunged her head first into a life of bed bugs, last minute travel, secrecy, and huge responsibility.

But while Sheila met with hard and exciting work during one of the world’s most dangerous conflicts, she also found love, friendship, fun, and the human spirit. Her fascinating encounters, assignments, events, and, of course, the many loves she found and lost, are all seen through her eyes in this lively collection of letters home.

The book itself, and this conversation with Vicky Unwin, both offer unique insight into the coming of age of a young girl in the 1940s, as well as into the intricacies of this mother-daughter relationship. Sheila’s letters have readers laughing—and crying—at the extraordinary life of a young girl who traveled all over the world and witnessed key events in the war. 

Vicky Unwin's Vicky Goes Travelling blog. 

Her Facebook page for Healthy Living with Cancer.

@VickyUnwin

To listen to this interview, kindly click on 'Pod' icon above left.

In this interview Claudia Cragg, KGNU Radio Denver/Boulder, discusses Barbarian Days, that is, The New Yorker's William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.

Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa.

A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.

An exploration of the nexus that are his joint passions for surfing and writing, 'Barbarian Days. is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and a tale of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.

Finnegan has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1984 and a staff writer since 1987. Reporting from Africa, Central America, South America, Europe, the Balkans, and Australia, as well as from the United States, he has twice received the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism and twice been a National Magazine Award finalist. His article “Deep East Texas” won the 1994 Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Media; his article “The Unwanted” the Sidney Hillman Prize for Magazine Reporting. His report from Sudan, “The Invisible War,” won a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club, and he received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for “Leasing the Rain.” His article “The Countertraffickers” won the Overseas Press Club’s Madeline Dane Ross Award for International Reporting, and his report from Mexico, “Silver or Lead,” won the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Spiers Benjamin Award. Finnegan is the author of five books: “Crossing the Line,” which was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best nonfiction books of the year;  “Dateline Soweto”;  “A  Complicated War”; “Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country,” which was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism; “Barbarian Days,” his latest.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with Nicole Aschoff, an Editor at Jacobin (@jacobinmag), on how severe environmental degradation, breathtaking inequality, and increasing alienation are pushing capitalism against its own contradictions. Myth making, says Aschoff, has become as central to sustaining our economy as profit-making. But, going forward, that need not necessarily be the case. 

As outlined in Aschoff's new book, there are 'The New Prophets of Capital': Sheryl Sandberg (c.f. Yahoo) touting the capitalist work ethic as the antidote to gender inequality; John Mackey (c.f. Whole Foods) promising that free markets will heal the planet; Oprah Winfrey urging us to find solutions to poverty and alienation within ourselves; and Bill and Melinda Gates offering the generosity of the 1 percent as the answer to a persistent, systemic inequality. The new prophets of capital buttress an exploitative system, even as the cracks grow more visible.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with professor and author, Rosemary Sullivan about her latest book, Svetlana Alliluyeva. As 'Stalin's Daughter', she spent her youth inside the Kremlin as her father's power soared along with that of the Soviet Union. Eighty-five years later, she died alone and penniless in rural Wisconsin as Lana Peters. Revealed here for the first time, the many lives of Joseph Stalin's daughter form a riveting portrait of a woman who fled halfway around the world to escape her birthright.

Svetlana was protected from the mass starvation and murder that her father inflicted upon Soviet citizens, but she was not immune to tragedy. She lost almost everyone she loved, including her mother, who committed suicide, and her father's merciless purges claimed the lives of aunts and uncles, and her lover, who was exiled to Siberia.

After her father's death, Svetlana discovered the extent of his cruelty. Balking at the control the Kremlin still exerted over her life, she shocked the world by defecting to the United States at the height of the Cold War—leaving behind two children. However, in America Svetlana found only more heartbreak. For a time, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin community, overseen by his controversial third wife, Olgivanna, formed a second family for her; Svetlana married Wesley Peters, a member of the inner circle, and they had a child. But Olgivanna manipulated their friendship for financial gain, and the marriage disintegrated. No matter how much distance she put between her past and her present, she could not undo the emotional and psychological damage her father had wrought.

With access to FBI, CIA, and Russian State Archives and with the close cooperation of Svetlana's daughter, Rosemary Sullivan has created a masterly biography that is epic in scope yet narrated with remarkable intimacy. 'Stalin's Daughter' deftly places Svetlana in a broader context of time and place, without losing sight of her powerfully human story. In the process, this multifaceted narrative reveals the heart of a brutal world and offers an unprecedented look at its mastermind.

(To listen to this interview, please click on the 'Pod' icon above to the left of the title.)

In this interview, KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks with Benjamin Hedin who set out to look for the Civil Rights movement. Hedin wanted to find the movement in its contemporary guise which, he says, which also meant answering the critical question of what happened to it after the 1960s. In his new book (In Search of the Movement: City Lights) he profiles legendary figures like John Lewis, Robert Moses, and Julian Bond, and also visits with contemporary leaders such as William Barber II and the staff of the Dream Defenders. But just as powerful—and instructional—are the stories of those whose work goes unrecorded, the organizers and teachers who make all the rest possible.

In March of 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands in an epic march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery, in what is often seen as the culminating moment of the Civil Rights movement. The Voting Rights Act was signed into law that year, and with Jim Crow eradicated, and schools being desegregated, the movement had supposedly come to an end. America would go on to record its story as an historic success.

Recently, however, the New York Times featured an article that described the reversion of Little Rock's schools to all-black or all-white. The next day, the paper printed a story about a small town in Alabama where African Americans were being denied access to the polls. Massive demonstrations in cities across the country protest the killing of black men by police, while we celebrate a series of 50th-anniversary commemorations of the signature events of the Civil Rights movement. In such a time it is important to ask: In the last fifty years, has America progressed on matters of race, or are we stalled—or even moving backward?

In the pages of Hedin's book, the movement is portrayed as never before, as a vibrant tradition of activism that remains in our midst. In Search of the Movement is a fascinating meditation on the patterns of history, as well as an indelible look at the meaning and limits of American freedom.

(Benjamin Hedin has written for The New Yorker, Slate, The Nation, and The Chicago Tribune. He's the editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, and the producer and author of a forthcoming documentary film, The Blues House.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Judy Foreman on her book 'A Nation in Pain. The workis the product of extensive research.  As Foreman writes in the book, “Over the last five years, I have interviewed nearly 200 scientists and physicians, as well as countless patients, a few lawyers, and a handful of government officials.  I have amassed a roomful of books on pain and hundreds upon hundreds of scientific papers.”  And with over 100 pages of references, Foreman’s research shows up on nearly every page.

But the book is also a product of personal struggle and perseverance. Foreman herself suffered from chronic pain, a fact which places her among 100 million other Americans, by our best estimates.  The difference between Foreman and most others living with chronic pain: she has the standing, the access, and the talent to write a definitive monograph on the subject.

 The book is organized by topic, with chapters dedicated in nearly-equal measure to both the phenomenon of pain and to pain’s treatment.  Foreman also addresses ‘The Opioid Wars,’ an issue which casts a forlorn shadow over chronic pain discussions in this country.  Some chapters, ‘The Genetics of Pain’ among them, lack general appeal.  But this is just as well – the book is intended for a wide audience and its organization allows the reader to set his or her own agenda.

Dan Barber, an award-winning chef, speaks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg as he moves beyond “farm-to-table” to offer a revolutionary new way of eating. After more than a decade spent investigating farming communities around the world in pursuit of singular flavor, Barber finally concluded that–for the sake of our food, our health and the future of the land—America’s cuisine required a radical transformation. He presents his findings in his new book, 'The Third Plate'.

Drawing on the wisdom and experience of chefs, farmers and seed breeders around the world, Barber proposes a new definition for ethical and delicious eating.

Barber charts a bright path forward for eaters and chefs alike, daring everyone to imagine a future for our national cuisine that is as sustainable as it is delicious. He is the Chef of Blue Hill, a restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located within the nonprofit farm and education center, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. His opinions on food and agricultural policy have appeared in the New York Times, along with many other publications. Barber has received multiple James Beard awards including Best Chef: New York City (2006) and the country's Outstanding Chef (2009). In 2009 he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Sometimes know as 'The Punctuation Lady' (for her book   Eats, Shoots & Leaves), Lynne Truss speaks in this interview with KGNU's Claudia Cragg.

She is a British writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked.

Also the author of three novels, the latest of which is Cat Out of Hell, Truss is now working on a sequel. 

She is the writer of numerous radio comedy dramas and spent six years as critic for The Times of London. This was followed by four (she says, rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper.

She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Women's Journal.

Lynne Truss also hosted Cutting a Dash, a popular BBC Radio series about punctuation. She is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4 and lives in Brighton, England.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Wayne Koestenbaum to celebrate the new edition of his work on Andy Warhol. Unique, bizarre, and often controversial, Warhol in life and in death bridged the gap between high art and the ordinary, creating works that explored almost every artistic genre. From screenprinting and 'supermarket' art to oil paintings and photography, Warhol rocked the established art world, perhaps more so than any of his contemporaries. During the 1960s inside a studio in New York known as The Factory the birth of Pop Art took place at the hands of Andy Warhol, 'the Pied Piper' of New York's underground. His representations of Campbell's Soup cans, dollar bills, Brillo boxes, Marilyn Monroe and car crashes, epitomized the American popular culture of his age and constituted one of the most significant revolutions in the art world.

Koestenbaum is also widely known as a cultural critic for his books on Jackie Kennedy and opera: Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (FSG, 1995) and The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (Poseidon Books, 1993), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books of criticism include My 1980s and Other Essays (FSG, 2013); The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012); Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics (Ballantine Books, 2000); and Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (Routledge, 1989). He has also published several novels, including Humiliation(Picador, 2011) and Hotel Theory (Soft Skull Press, 2007).

Born in 1958, Wayne Koestenbaum attended Harvard University and received an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from Princeton University. After being named co-winner of the 1989 Discovery/The Nation poetry contest, he published his first collection of poetry, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems (Persea, 1990), which was chosen as one of The Village Voice Literary Supplement’s “Favorite Books of 1990.”

His other books of poetry include Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background (Turtle Point Press, 2012); Best Selling Jewish Porn Films (Turtle Point Press, 2006); Model Homes (BOA Editions, 2004); The Milk of Inquiry (Persea, 1999); and Rhapsodies of A Repeat Offender (Persea, 1994).

Koestenbaum received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1994 and taught in Yale’s English department from 1988 to 1996. He has taught painting at the Yale School of Art since 2003 and lives in New York City where he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center

Poverty and inequality, says Scott Myers-Lipton, are at record levels. As he shows in his book, "Ending Extreme Inequality: an Economic Bill of Rights to Eliminate Poverty", there are today well over forty-seven million Americans live in poverty, while middle class incomes are in decline.

The top 20 percent now controls 89 percent of all wealth. These conditions have renewed demands for a new Economic Bill of Rights, an American idea proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Martin Luther King Jr. The new Economic Bill of Rights has a coherent plan and proclaims that all Americans have the right to a job, a living wage, a decent home, adequate medical care, a good education, and adequate protection from economic fears of unemployment, sickness, and old age.

Integrating the latest economic and social data, this new book explores each of these rights. Each chapter includes an analysis of the social problems surrounding each right, a historical overview of the attempts to implement these rights, and assessments of current solutions offered by citizens, community groups, and politicians. These contemporary, real-life solutions to inequality can inspire students and citizens to become involved and open pathways toward a more just society.

In this interview for KGNU Denver-Boulder's 'It's The Economy', former Congressman @BarneyFrank talks about his most recent book. "How did a disheveled, intellectually combative gay Jew with a thick accent become one of the most effective (and funniest) politicians of our time?"

Growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, the 14-year-old Barney Frank made two vital discoveries about himself: he was attracted to government, and to men. He resolved to make a career out of the first attraction and to keep the second a secret. Now, sixty years later, his sexual orientation is widely accepted, while his belief in government is embattled. 

Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage is one man's account of the country's transformation--and the tale of a truly momentous career. Many Americans recall Frank's lacerating wit, whether it was directed at the Clinton impeachment ("What did the president touch, and when did he touch it?") or the pro-life movement (some people believe "life begins at conception and ends at birth"). But the contours of his private and public lives are less well-known. For more than four decades, he was at the center of the struggle for personal freedom and economic fairness. From the battle over AIDS funding in the 1980s to the debates over "big government" during the Clinton years to the 2008 financial crisis, the congressman from Massachusetts played a key role. In 2010, he coauthored the most far-reaching and controversial Wall Street reform 'Dodd Frank' bill since the era of the Great Depression, and helped bring about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. 

In this feisty and often moving memoir, Frank candidly discusses the satisfactions, fears, and grudges that come with elected office. He recalls the emotional toll of living in the closet and how his public crusade against homophobia conflicted with his private accommodation of it. He discusses his painful quarrels with allies; his friendships with public figures, from Tip O'Neill to Sonny Bono; and how he found love with his husband, Jim Ready, becoming the first sitting member of Congress to enter a same-sex marriage. He also demonstrates how he used his rhetorical skills to expose his opponents' hypocrisies and delusions. Through it all, he expertly analyzes the gifts a successful politician must bring to the job, and how even Congress can be made to work. 

Frank is the story of an extraordinary political life, an original argument for how to rebuild trust in government, and a guide to how political change really happens--composed by a master of the art.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Harvard Professor, Robert D. Putnam, on his groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap in America. Putnam is the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility.

It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in—a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was. 

Robert Putnam—about whom The Economist said, “his scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny”—offers a personal but also authoritative look at this new American crisis. Putnam begins with his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. By and large the vast majority of those students—“our kids”—went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren have had harder lives amid diminishing prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable body of research done especially for this book. 

Our Kids is a rare combination of individual testimony and rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of the American dream that should initiate a deep examination of the future of our country.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with veteran journalist Steven Brill who has put together a comprehensive and, according to The New York Times, “...suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American health care circa 2014 — a tour de force inspection of both sausage and factory.

”“Mr. Brill began his muckraking early in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, with a comprehensive indictment of American health care costs that occupied an entire issue of Time magazine He continued to comment in the pages of Time on the disastrous debut of the act’s health insurance marketplaces that fall and the widespread repair work that still continues.”

 “All this reporting reappears in the book, sometimes verbatim, reframed by several new sections. At the beginning comes a long back story detailing the years of politicking that created the new legislation. At the end, Mr. Brill offers a series of personal insights provoked in large part by his recent, unexpected detour from reporter to patient, and suggestions for how it might all be fixed.”

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here wih Lee Trimble. Trimble had always known that his father, Captain Robert Trimble, was a WWII hero. Captain Trimble was a fighter bomber stationed in Britain and served with honor, flying 35 missions with the 493rd Bomb Group of the US Eighth Air Force. However, when Captain Trimble was eighty-six years old, he let slip to his son that there were things that happened in the war he never told his children about—incidents that happened while he was stationed in Russia. Lee then began questioning his father for details and was shocked to uncover a secret mission his father had been ordered to keep to himself for over sixty years.

In BEYOND THE CALL, the son of Robert Trimble finally shares his father’s legacy. Robert Trimble was finishing his final mission in England and was given an option by his superiors:  go home with the possibility of being called back to the front line or take a position on the Eastern Front in Poland to help ferry damaged planes to be repaired. Captain Trimble, in consultation with his wife, waiting for him back home in Pennsylvania, reluctantly agreed to the latter. However, there was more to this mission than what Robert was told.

Near the end of World War II, thousands of Allied ex-POWs were abandoned to wander the war-torn Eastern Front. In defiance of The Yalta Convention, which required that each Allied country take in and help shepherd POWs from all Allied nations to safety, the Russians viewed their own POWs as cowards and traitors, and saw captured soldiers from other countries as potential spies. The US repeatedly offered to help recover their own POWs, but were continuously refused by the Soviets. With relations between the tenuous allies strained, a plan was conceived for an undercover rescue mission.

In total secrecy, the Office of Strategic Service (the precursor to the CIA) chose an obscure American Air Force detachment stationed at a Ukrainian airfield; it would provide the base and the cover for the operation. Captain Robert Trimble began his mission to recover downed American planes in the Polish countryside, but was soon leading his covert mission by cover of night and during downtime. Dodging his Soviet escorts known as bird dogs, undercover agents of The NKVD (the Soviet secret police), Captain Trimble followed leads given to him in secret to search for stranded American POWs and get them to safety. Outfitted with state department credentials and a vest lined with money, Captain Trimble traveled through war-torn Poland, only to discover atrocities the likes had never been seen before.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Ai-Jen Poo. She is the activist who, through the National Domestic Workers' Alliance, spearheaded New York’s successful Bill of Rights for domestic workers shows how we can better care for our growing elderly population and provide millions of good jobs at the same time

By 2035, 11.5 million Americans will be over the age of 85—more than double today’s 5 million—and living longer than ever before. To enable all of us to age with dignity and security in the face of this coming Age Wave, our society must learn to value the care of our elders. The process of building a culture that supports care is a key component to restoring the American dream, and, as Ai-jen Poo convincingly argues in The Age of Dignity, will generate millions of new jobs and breathe new life into our national ideals of independence, justice, and dignity.

This groundbreaking new book from the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance offers bold solutions, such as long-term care insurance and cultural change to get all of us to value care, which are already at the heart of a movement transforming what it means to grow old in the United States. At the intersection of our aging population, the fraying safety net, and opportunities for women and immigrants in the workforce, The Age of Dignity maps out an integrated set of solutions to address America’s new demographic and economic realities.

You may well have noticed that there is now a growing chorus of prominent voices in Congress and elsewhere calling for the expansion of the US Social Security system— people who know that Social Security will not “go broke” and that, in truth, it does not add a penny to the national debt.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Nancy Altman, co-author of Social Security Works!. This book not only amplifies these voices but also offers a powerful antidote to the three-decade-long, billionaire-funded campaign to make us believe that this vital institution is destined to collapse. 

Nancy Altman, a lawyer, is the author of The Battle for Social Security and a co-author, with Eric Kingson, of this book published by The New Press. Altman and Kingson served as staff advisers to the 1982 (Greenspan) National Commission on Social Security Reform and were founding board members of the National Academy of Social Insurance. They founded Social Security Works.org in 2010 and co-chair the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. Altman is the board chair of the Pension Rights Center and lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

From the Silent Generation to Baby Boomers, from Generation X to Millennials and Generation Z, everyone in the US, says Altman, has a stake in understanding the real story about Social Security. Critical to addressing the looming retirement crisis that will affect two- thirds of today’s workers, Social Security is a powerful program that can help stop the collapse of the middle class, lessen the pressure squeezing families from all directions, and help end the upward redistribution of wealth that has resulted in perilous levels of inequality.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Thomas Page McBee, writer (Rumpus, Vice) and author of 'Man Alive'. In this, McBee attempts to answer what it is to be a man by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life: one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee is seeking to understand these examples of flawed manhood and explains how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

 'Man Alive' engages through an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one—how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with actor Ian Ruskin about his production 'To Begin the World: The Life of Thomas Paine'. This is staged in full 18th-century regalia with Ruskin, as actor director, addressing his way through a broad spectrum of key historical events including the French Revolution. In Ruskin's work, the essence of Paine emerges, peppered with quotes from "Common Sense" and other immortal writings from this most radical of pre-Revolutionary American colonists. "One must always speak the truth as one sees it, no matter the consequences."

To learn more about Ian Ruskin's IndieGogo efforts to raising funding for a cinematic or TV production of the play, visit To Begin the World Over Again, Thomas Paine for PBS. 

CLICK ON 'iPod' icon above left to listen.

In this interview, journalist Claudia Cragg speaks here with Linda Tirado about her thought-provoking and (to some) controversial Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. Unlike the sheltered, ivory-tower social scientists who usually write about poverty, Tirado is an actual poor person. Or at least, she was. Last fall she posted a lengthy response to someone in an online forum who asked why poor people make decisions that seem so self-destructive. Her essay went viral and before long the shrewd and politically savvy Tirado had crowdfunded more than $60,000 to write a book. No longer officially poor, Tirado has endured a backlash from those suggesting she’s a fraud — which only proves her point that it’s easier to dismiss poor people than to listen to them.

Christmas is a time of seasonal cheer, family get-togethers, holiday parties, and-gift giving. Lots and lots--and lots--of gift giving. And says Joel Waldvogel, in this interview, it's hard to imagine any Christmas without this time-honored custom. But let's stop to consider the gifts we receive--the rooster sweater from Grandma or the singing fish from Uncle Mike. How many of us get gifts we like? How many of us give gifts not knowing what recipients want? Did your cousin really look excited about that jumping alarm clock? Lively and informed, Scroogenomics illustrates how our consumer spending generates vast amounts of economic waste--to the shocking tune of eighty-five billion dollars each winter. Economist Joel Waldfogel provides solid explanations to show us why it's time to stop the madness and think twice before buying gifts for the holidays.

 When we buy for ourselves, every dollar we spend produces at least a dollar in satisfaction, because we shop carefully and purchase items that are worth more than they cost. Gift giving is different. We make less-informed choices, max out on credit to buy gifts worth less than the money spent, and leave recipients less than satisfied, creating what Waldfogel calls "deadweight loss." Waldfogel indicates that this waste isn't confined to Americans--most major economies share in this orgy of wealth destruction. While recognizing the difficulties of altering current trends, Waldfogel offers viable gift-giving alternatives.

 Waldvogel argues here, in an interview with Claudia Cragg for KGNU Denver/Boulder's 'It's The Economy', that by reprioritizing our gift-giving habits, Scroogenomics proves that we can still maintain the economy without gouging our wallets, and reclaim the true spirit of the holiday season.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with historian, Andrew Roberts about his work 'Napoleon The Great', the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last, says Roberts, we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.

Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, Roberts argues that Napoleon was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.

An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Many believe this to be a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by a foremost historian.

(To listen to the interview, CLICK 'ipod' icon above left)

Stephen Singular’s first book, Talked to Death, set the tone for his journalistic career. Published in 1987, it chronicled the assassination of a Denver Jewish talk show host, Alan Berg, by a group of neo-Nazis known as The Order. The book was nominated for a national award — the Edgar for true crime — and became the basis for the 1989 Oliver Stone film, Talk Radio. Talked to Death explored the timeless American themes of racism, class, violence, and religious intolerance, and the critics had been alerted to a new author and an important subject.

Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Singular together with his wife, Joyce Jacques Singular, an author in her own right as well as a co-author with her husband for many projects. 

The Singulars are in the midst of writing a book about James Holmes, who carried out the largest mass shooting in American history in July 2012 at the Aurora movie theater. This will examine the larger social issues involving gun control, mental health, video games, neuroscience, the death penalty, doctor/patient confidentiality, and will offer a variety of perspectives from the Twenty-Something generation that’s driven much of this violence.

Since 1991, Joyce Jacques Singular, has worked closely with her husband on many of the true crime books. They both have an intense interest in the psychological aspects of murder and have unconventional views of spirituality.  Over time, this combination filtered into their work together. They've been intrigued with the place where darkness meets the light — and with looking at certain crimes not just from a legal, forensic or sociological point of view but from a spiritual angle as well. This is especially true when killers have committed acts of violence in the name of religion.

Since 1987, Singular has published 19 more non-fiction books that reflect a wide range of interest and diversity of styles. Twice a New York Times best selling author, he’s written three books about sports, including collaborations with NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and controversial NFL superstar Terrell Owens, and biographies of Hollywood power players Michael Ovitz and David Geffen. True crime remained the focal point of his work, but he’d begun writing less about individual crimes and more about social crimes. His 1995 study of the O.J. Simpson case, Legacy of Deception, went beneath the media hysteria surrounding these murders and connected the violent bigotry of The Order with the racist corruption inside the Los Angeles Police Department. Singular’s 1999 book, Presumed Guilty: An Investigation into the JonBenet Ramsey Case, the Media, and the Culture of Pornography, performed a similar role for the infamous child killing in Boulder, Colorado. 

In 2001, Singular brought out The Uncivil War: The Rise of Hate, Violence, and Terrorism in America documenting the increasing dangers of the nation’s deepening cultural war. The book was published well before terrorism struck the United States on September 11, 2001, and the country had plunged into a bitterly divisive conflict in Iraq. The same themes the author had first uncovered in Talked to Death – Fundamentalist religion and intolerance, racism and violence – were re-examined in this book, but now the stakes were much higher and the stage was global. Singular was probing not just the violence itself, but its underlying emotional and spiritual causes. His 2006 book,Unholy Messenger: The Life & Crimes of the BTK Serial Killer, goes even deeper into the convergence of distorted religious beliefs and bloodshed.

In her work on the books, Joyce has attended legal proceedings, visited inmates in prison, interviewed witnesses, studied forensic data, and been involved in developing ideas for stories, photo selection, editing, creative suggestions, and re-writing. The use of both a male and female perspective has added a unique dimension to the true crimes books, three of which have been about women who committed murders. These include  A Killing in the Family which was an NBC-TV mini-series entitled Love, Lies, and Murder; Sweet Evil, about a young Colorado Springs wife and mother who killed another woman; and Charmed to Death, which became a FOX-TV movie titled “Legacy of Sin.”  In Anyone You Want Me to Be, the story of the Internet’s first known serial killer, Joyce was especially insightful in chronicling women who were drawn into online romances that ended with their deaths.

(KGNU Denver/Boulder Broadcast Link)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Naomi Klein who argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. As she points out in her latest book. 'This Changes Everything', it is as she sees it alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us. 

In Carbon Shock, veteran journalist Mark Schapiro, explains here to KGNU's Claudia Cragg, how in this book he takes readers on a journey into a world where the same chaotic forces reshaping our natural world are also transforming the economy, playing havoc with corporate calculations, shifting economic and political power, and upending our understanding of the real risks, costs, and possibilities of what lies ahead.

In this ever-changing world, carbon—the stand-in for all greenhouse gases—rules, and disrupts, and calls upon us to seek new ways to reduce it while factoring it into nearly every long-term financial plan we have. But how?

From the jungles of the Amazon to the farms in California’s Central Valley, from ‘greening’ cities like Pittsburgh to rising powerhouses like China, from the oil-splattered beaches of Spain to carbon-trading desks in London, Schapiro deftly explores the key axis points of change.

For almost two decades, global climate talks have focused on how to make polluters pay for the carbon they emit. It remains an unfolding financial mystery: What are the costs? Who will pay for them? Who do you pay? How do you pay? And what are the potential impacts? The answers to these questions, and more, are crucial to understanding, if not shaping, the coming decade.

Carbon Shock evokes a world in which the parameters of our understanding are shifting—on a scale even more monumental than how the digital revolution transformed financial decision-making—toward a slow but steady acknowledgement of the costs and consequences of climate change. It also offers a critical new perspective as global leaders gear up for the next round of climate talks in 2015.

It is clear that popular anger against the financial system has never been higher, yet the practical workings of the system remain opaque to many people. A new book by Brett Scott, The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance, aims to bridge the gap between protest slogans and practical proposals for reform. Here, KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Scott who is a campaigner and former derivatives broker who has a unique understanding of life inside and outside the financial sector. In this book, he builds up a framework for approaching it based on the three principles of 'Exploring', 'Jamming' and 'Building', offering a practical guide for those who wish to deepen their understanding of, and access to, the inner workings of financial institutions. Scott covers aspects frequently overlooked, such as the cultural dimensions of the financial system, and considers major issues such as agricultural speculation, carbon markets and tar-sands financing. Crucially, it also showcases the growing alternative finance movement, showing how everyday people can get involved in building a new, democratic, financial system.

For KGNU Denver/Boulder, Claudia Cragg learns more about Tibet's enduring myth, a story animated with Himalayan adventurers, British military expeditions, and the novel, Lost Horizon, remains an inspirational fantasy, a modern morality play about the failure of brutality to subdue the human spirit. Tibet also exercises immense "soft power" as one of the lenses through which the world views China. 

In their book, Stefan and Lezlee Brown Halper book trace the origins and manifestations of the Tibetan myth, as propagated by Younghusband, Madam Blavatsky, Himmler, Acheson and Roosevelt. The authors discuss how, after WW2, Tibet-- isolated, misunderstood and with a tiny elite unschooled in political-military realities --- misread the diplomacy between its two giant neighbours, India and China, forlornly hoping London or Washington might intervene. China's People's Liberation Army sought nothing less than to deconstruct traditional Tibet, unseat the Dalai Lama and "absorb" this vast region into the People's Republic, and Lhasa succumbed to China's invasion in 1950. 

Drawing on declassified CIA and Chinese documents, the authors reveal Mao's collusion with Stalin to subdue Tibet, double-dealing by Nehru, the brilliant diplomacy of Chou en Lai and how Washington see-sawed between the China lobby, who insisted there be no backing for an independent Tibet, and Presidents Truman and later Eisenhower, who initiated a covert CIA programme to support the Dalai Lama and resist Chinese occupation. It has been reviewed as 'an ignoble saga with few, if any, heroes, other than ordinary Tibetans'.

In this interview with Claudia Cragg for KGNU Denver/Boulder, Daniel Levitin explains how the information age is now drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.

But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.

With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Musicshowed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.

In this interview for KGNU's 'It's The Economy' Claudia Cragg speaks with Vann Alexandra Daly who is renowned as the “crowdsorceress” for her expertise in crowdfunding. Over the course of a year, Alex has raised millions of dollars for clients including Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmakers and Neil Young (for the 'Pono'). She has served on panels at distinguished film festivals, universities, and is now on a national tour with the Knight Foundation offering her expertise on the subject. In addition to her crowdfunding successes, Alex is a producer for the feature length documentary "Cocaine Prison", which has received support from the Macarthur Foundation, Cannes Film Festival’s Fonds Sud Cinema, the Tribeca Latin America Fund, Bertha BritDoc Journalism Award, and more. Her other films have been selected by the world’s most prestigious festivals including Sundance and Tribeca.

Before transitioning into film Alex was a journalist for numerous publications, including New York magazine and SPIN, as well as the sole researcher for WSJ. magazine. Alex graduated from Vanderbilt University, where she double majored in Spanish and Philosophy, minored in film, and earned her honors thesis on 'Existentialism in Contemporary Drug Cinema'.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Aidan White, Director of the Ethical Journalism Network. The network is a coalition of media professionals and support groups committed to building a global campaign in support of ethics, good governance and self-regulation in journalism and media. He is committed to new and innovative ways to support independent journalism and promotion of journalists' rights. He is an expert with deep understanding of issues related to media policy and journalism standards and has helped launch major international groups in support of press freedom and journalists' safety. Over a period of 30 years he has initiated programmes of support for journalists including professional training, association and union building and humanitarian support and raising awareness of the dangers facing media and journalists across the world. You can read his blog here and his Twitter handle is @aidanpwhite.

White is an inspiring communicator and speaker, writer, negotiator and presenter with experience in building coalitions and encouraging social dialogue between employers and unions.

He was the General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists from 1987 until April 2011. He previously worked for several newspapers in the United Kingdom. He was with The Guardian in London prior to joining the IFJ. He is a long-time campaigner for journalists' rights and is a former activist with the National Union of Journalists in Great Britain and Ireland.

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"Fool me once, shame on you Fool me twice, shame on you."

Orig: "He that deceives me once; shame fall him; if he deceives me twice, shame fall me". James Kelly, Scottish Proverbs (1720).

In May 2009, Claudia Cragg interviewed the FT's Gillian Tett for then KGNU News co-Director, Joel Edelstein, on the 'It's The Economy' show. This was shortly after publication of Tett's then brand new book, "Fool's Gold, the Inside Story of J P Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe."

The so-called 'never again' safeguards may or may not be in place to prevent a new worldwide even more serious catastrophe. By the time their efficacy is tested, it may be too late. And given the surfeit of new financial instruments and derivative games created since 2008, there is no sensible reason to presume it cannot or won't happen again and the fallout, while unimaginable, could be even worse than the prolonged 'Great Recession' that so many ordinary working lives have been subjected to.

Recently Gillian Tett has been calling attention to a relatively new problem, the 'Dark Pools' and their potential for causing global financial instability.

Relying on caveat emptor to keep the trading system from becoming too murky is naive

Few are taking heed.

Having ignored this proven financial Cassandra once before, are the Powers That Be so obdurate and greedy that they will wilfully ignore her once again?

When you listen to her analysis here of 2008, you will concur that as of July 1st 2014, very little indeed has changed. 

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To begin the 12 June 2014 of the "It's The Economy" show broadcast on KGNU Denver/Boulder, everyone makes career mistakes. For many, though, acknowledging them can feel tantamount to occupation suicide.

Here, Jessica Bacal, director of the Smith College Wurtele Center for Work and Life, speaks with Claudia Cragg about her book, Mistakes I Made At Work. For this, she has interviewed 25 women across a variety of career fields—from writers to doctors to engineers—who share their worst on-the-job moments.

This advice, useful to all, shares how mis-steps  can be used as learning experiences to build a successful career.

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For the second half of the 12 June 2014 of the "It's The Economy" broadcast on KGNU Denver/Boulder 'Money in Education' was the topic under discussion in the studio with Claudia Cragg. First of all, we speak with Ron Berler, author of Raising The Curve. This is followed by two highly informed, academic guests with more than a passing interest, Richard Murnane and Greg Duncan exploring the 'Inequality in, and potential for, 'Restoring Opportunity' in the US education system. In focus is the Common Core Curriculum. Watch related videos at RestoringOpportunity.com.

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#MayaAngelou RIP 

In May of 2013, KGNU News Director, Joel Edelstein, generously invited colleague Claudia Cragg to speak by phone with Dr. Maya Angelou for a one on one interview. It turned out to be one of the very last she ever gave to talk about her then latest book. Explored here is the influence the great woman has had on another Maya, Maya Carter. She is a 19 year old from Denver,(now just finishing her College freshman year) and, listening to the original KGNU interview, young Maya here tries to explain the effect that Dr.Angelou's life, work, poetry and thinking has had on her and in her initiation of the Motivate & Empower Movement she has founded in her honour. 

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department. He spent a year in Iraq, an experience that led to his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. As a result, the US Department of State began proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department with his full benefits of service.

The main point of discussion here though is Van Buren’s personal work experience (in the hiatus when suspended from the State Dept) working for a store he calls 'Bullseye' in the minimum wage Big Box economy. This led to his new book Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent based on his up close take on the drastic effects of social and economic changes in America between WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980’s right up to today.

Notes for the book (from Van Buren's Blog); Some Background from a Real Economist

Economist Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes clear there has been a significant increase in income inequality in America. Our inequality rate is higher than it ever has been in our own history, is growing, and is higher than in countries in Western Europe and Canada.

In the United States, the top one percent own 35 percent of all capital, and the top ten percent of wealth holders own roughly 70 percent. The bottom 50 percent have roughly five percent. Note also that until slavery was ended in the United States, human beings were also considered capital.

The inequality is driven by two complementary forces.

By owning more and more of every thing (capital), rich people have a mechanism to keep getting richer, because the rate of return on investment is a higher percentage than the rate of economic growth. This is expressed in Piketty’s now-famous equation R > G. The author claims the top of layer of wealth distribution is rising at 6-7 percent a year, more than three times faster than the size of the economy.

At the same time, wages for middle and lower income people are sinking, driven by factors largely in control of the wealthy, such as technology employed to eliminate human jobs, unions being crushed and decline in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage more and more Americans now depend on for their survival.

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In June 2011, KGNU's Claudia Cragg spoke with the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson about her then just published book, 'Reckless Endangerment'. More than 5 years on since the world financial catastrophe of 2008, nothing much has changed and many consider 'endangerment' not only persists but may now be even more prevalent. 

In Reckless Endangerment, Gretchen Morgenson exposes how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in the actions that finally blew up the American economy. Drawing on previously untapped sources and building on original research from coauthor Joshua Rosner—who himself raised early warnings with the public and investors, and kept detailed records—Morgenson connects the dots that led to this fiasco.

Morgenson and Rosner draw back the curtain on Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance giant that grew, with the support of the Clinton administration, through the 1990s, becoming a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. They expose the role played not only by Fannie Mae executives but also by enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, and the biggest players on Wall Street, to show how greed, aggression, and fear led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Ryan Carson about the 70 people who work at Treehouse, an online education company that teaches people about technology. They work only four days a week at the same full salary as other tech workers. Yet the company’s revenue has grown 120 percent, it generates more than $10 million a year in sales, and it responds to more than 70,000 customers, according to a post in Quartz by CEO Ryan Carson.

Carson has been working four-day weeks since 2006, when he founded his first company with his wife, he told ThinkProgress. He quit his job to start it, only to find that they both put in seven days a week. “I remember distinctly my wife and I were on the couch one evening,” he recalled, “and she said something like, ‘What are we doing? I thought that starting a company means you have more time and more control, but it seems like we have less time and less control and we’re more stressed out.’” They decided to cut back by not working Fridays, and after they hired their first employee, “we decided to officially enact [a four-day week] and we never looked back.”

Carson has since started three other companies at which he’s instituted this rule, Treehouse being the latest. While it’s hard to quantify, he believes his company benefits from better output and morale. “The quality of the work, I believe, is higher,” he said. “Thirty-two hours of higher quality work is better than 40 hours of lower quality work.” The impact on his employees’ outlook is also “massive,” he said. “I find I just can’t wait to get back to work” after the weekend, and he suspects the same is true for others. On Mondays, “everyone’s invigorated and excited.” He recounted a time when a developer told him that his hope was to work at the company for 20 years. In the Quartz article, he noted that a team member gets recruitment emails from Facebook, but that his response is always, “Do you work a four-day week yet?”

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Dee Williams (PAD, Portland Alternative Dwellings) to discover how she found a way to lower her monthly bills to only $8 dollars as outlined in her new memoir and 'how to' The Big Tiny.

After a heart condition diagnosis ten years ago, a new sense of clarity took hold for Dee Williams. As she looked around her overpriced, oversized house, Williams thought: What was all this stuff for? So she downsized, building a new life in 84 square feet. Now a pioneer in sustainable living and an accomplished teacher and lecturer on tiny house-building, Williams has achieved a happy balance and created a model for simple, sustainable, practical living.

Her book, as you will hear here, is a touching personal memoir of a woman rebuilding her life from scratch, as well as an account of the DIY tiny house movement. From suburban properties to city apartments, and from HGTV to local communities across the country, people are rethinking what it means to be a homeowner and how to build sustainable lives for themselves and their families.

But Williams also offers practical and philosophical guidance for aspiring tiny homeowners and for those just looking to de-clutter their lives (Williams can list all of her belongings on a single sheet of paper.) This is part how-to and part why-to and The Big Tiny is both a graceful and inspired meditation as well as an exploration of what it really means to build the good life and more importantly the right life.

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In April of 2014,  Elaine "Lainey" Lui fulfilled a lifelong dream when her first book, Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When a Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter to do? A Memoir (Sort Of) was published (by Random House in Canada and Penguin in the USA). 

Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks about the book, a paean to her mother aka 'The Squawking Chicken' and learns how Lainey co-founded LaineyGossip.com, an entertainment news and gossip blog and how she also became co-host of CTV's daytime talk show "The Social", and a reporter on CTV's "etalk", Canada's number one rated entertainment news show. She joined the show in 2006 as a special correspondent and has since covered the Red Carpet at the Oscars, SuperBowl XLII, Cannes and Toronto International Film Festivals, and other events worldwide. 

Her website in fact started as an email to small group of friends and colleagues in 2003 and spread by word of mouth to thousands of now loyal readers. It launched as a website in December 2004 and has since grown into an immensely popular entertainment destination visited by over 1.5 million monthly unique readers. Generating over 18 million monthly page views, it is now a leading international celebrity gossip source and a must read for well-read, educated females across North America. 

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(IMPORTANT NOTE: @KerryZuckus points out that Rusasebagina's is just one side of a complex story. Zuckus believes that in"INSIDE THE HOTEL RWANDA": a different 'truth' is perhaps exposed. wp.me/p3lmJ2-4g - cut & paste link - via @rwandaissues

Twenty years ago, beginning on April 6 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in a horrific genocide that spanned 100 days.  To mark the 20th anniversary of the horrendous events of that time, KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks where with Paul Rusesabagina, the part played by actor Don Cheadle in the film 'Hotel Rwanda'.

Genocide continues to be a tragic global issue. To raise awareness of and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, who saved thousands of lives during the horrific events of 1994 has been re-published. 

In his book, An Ordinary Man, Paul Rusesabagina provides an inside look into his life both before and after the horrendous mass murder in Rwanda. As the manager of the exclusive 'Hotel Les Milles Collines' he sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and Hutu moderates from the killings. The story brings the reader inside the hotel during those 100 days, relates the anguish of those who saw loved ones brutally murdered, and describe Rusesabagina's ambivalence at pouring scotch and lighting the cigars of killers in the Swimming Pool bar, even as he was trying to cram as many refugees as possible inside the guest rooms upstairs. Rusesabagina explores his inner turmoil as he discusses the racial complexity within his own life (he is a Hutu married to a Tutsi) and his complete estrangement from the madness that surrounded him during the genocide

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Francine Prose about her newest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. Emerging from the austerity and deprivation of the Great War, Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom.

It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club’s loyal patrons, including rising Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and caustic American writer Lionel Maine.

As the years pass, their fortunes-and the world itself-evolve. Lou falls desperately in love and finds success as a racecar driver.

Gabor builds his reputation with startlingly vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant 20s give way to the Depression of the 30s, Lou experiences another metamorphosis-sparked by tumultuous events-that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more sinister: collaboration with the Nazis.

Told in a kaleidoscope of voices that circle around the dark star of Lou Villars, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 evokes this incandescent city with brio, humor, and intimacy. Exploring a turbulent time defined by terror, bravery, and difficult moral choices, it raises critical questions about truth and memory and the nature of storytelling itself.

(There was an excellent Janet Maslin review of the novel also in the April 10 edition of The New York Times.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Kimberley Palmer who writes about money – how to have more of it and how to manage the money you have. Her new book, 'The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life' (January 2014, AMACOM), tells the stories of 100 successful side-giggers who built financial security by launching side-businesses. In addition, she writes about money as the senior money editor and Alpha Consumer blogger at US News & World Report. Palmer says she loves helping people make smarter money choices, especially when it comes to navigating big life milestones, from college graduation to parenthood to homeownership. In her first book, Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back, she covers many of those topics.

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For this week's KGNU programme, 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks with Tim Harford. His first book, the global bestseller The Undercover Economist was a sensation – and has gone on to sell well over a million copies worldwide. In it, Harford looked at the world through the eyes of a microeconomist, from the changing cost of a cappuccino to how supermarkets choose to display the products on their shelves. Now, in a world utterly transformed by the global downturn, Harford is back.

In The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, he turns to the wider picture – to macroeconomics – to help us unpick and understand the complexities of major economies – which, he says, putting you (the reader) in the driving seat.

With a word of advice now and then, the Undercover Economist encourages you to run the show. Along the way you’ll discover what happens to inflation when you burn a million pound notes, why even prison camps have recessions and why Coke didn’t change the price of a bottle for seventy years.

According to The New Statesman's Felix Salmon, 

“Tim Harford is perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world… his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics.”

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This interview for #KGNU and 'It's The Economy' (a show produced by a team of the station's reporters) is a weekly radio economics and all-things-business program with international reach. This week Claudia Cragg talks to Gayle Avery about 'Honeybees and Locusts' and discusses why all of us in business and the world at large should adopt as many of the traits of the former as possible to discourage the continuing plague of the latter.

In this interview, Avery, who is one of the founders of the instituteforsustainableleadership.com, points out that if only the 23 main principles of SL had been followed into the run up to the Great Crash of 2008, it more than likely could have been avoided or at least significantly minimized. Furthermore, many very successful companies, like BMW for example, purposefully follow SL principles to their very evident and consequent bottom-line corporate advantage. 

The idea is that the honey bee creators, makers and providers lend valuable things for others” to an environment while the locust “takers and predators” are those who, says Avery, “extract value from others without contributing much in return”. The distinction comes from a so-called founding work of modern capitalism, Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (which first appeared as a poem in 1705).

The implication for those who may still believe that capitalism, as we see it today, is viable in the long term, is that the adoption of these principles encourages bee-like virtues and so discourages the locusts.

But is that what we see today? The nasty little secret of much of C21st business may be that capitalism not only comes with moral hazards (as often required to meet sometimes greedy and ultimately unsustainable $$$ stockholder demands) but may actually depend on that climate for much of its success.  

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According to Gar Alperovitz, never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with the economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new movement demanding change are forming, he says, and it is this that he discusses here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg for 'It's The Economy.'

But just what is this thing called a new economy, and how might it take shape in America? In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about where we find ourselves in history, why the time is right for a new-economy movement to coalesce, what it means to build a new system to replace the crumbling one, and how we might begin. He also suggests what the next system might look like—and where we can see its outlines, like an image slowly emerging in the developing trays of a photographer’s darkroom, already taking shape.

He proposes a possible next system that is not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else entirely—and something entirely American.

Alperovitz calls for an evolution, not a revolution, out of the old system and into the new. That new system would democratize the ownership of wealth, strengthen communities in diverse ways, and be governed by policies and institutions sophisticated enough to manage a large-scale, powerful economy.

For the growing group of Americans pacing at the edge of confidence in the old system, or already among its detractors, What Then Must We Do?, Alperovitz believes, offers an elegant solution for moving from anger to strategy.

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In the week celebrating the 50th anniversary (January 8, 1964) since, in what many consider to be one of the most memorable ever State of the Union addresses, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his “War on Poverty” and introduced legislation that would expand the federal government’s role in poverty reduction efforts. This set in motion the creation of programs such as Head Start, food stamps (now SNAP), work study, Community Action Agencies, VISTA, Medicare and Medicaid. Our guest for this edition of KGNU's 'It's The Economy' is Jill Quadagno, author of The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. 

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Here novelist James Scott speaks with KGNU's Claudia Cragg about 'The Kept'.

"In the winter of 1897, Elspeth Howell treks across miles of snow and ice to the isolated farmstead in upstate New York where she and her husband have raised their five children. Her midwife's salary is tucked into the toes of her boots, and her pack is full of gifts for her family. But as she crests the final hill, and sees her darkened house and a smokeless chimney, immediately she knows that an unthinkable crime has destroyed the life she so carefully built."

"Her lone comfort is her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, who joins her in mourning the tragedy and planning its reprisal. Their long journey leads them to a rough-hewn lake town, defined by the violence both of its landscape and of its inhabitants. There Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood, as he slowly discovers truths about his family he never suspected, and Elspeth must confront the terrible urges and unceasing temptations that have haunted her for years. Throughout it all, the love between mother and son serves as the only shield against a merciless world."

"A scorching portrait of guilt and lost innocence, atonement and retribution, resilience and sacrifice, pregnant obsession and primal adolescence, The Kept is told with deep compassion and startling originality, and introduces James Scott as a major new literary voice."

More about James Scott at Grub St. 

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For KGNU's 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks here with MIT's Ofer Sharone about latest work. In this, he discussed that today 4.7 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months. In France more than ten percent of the working population is without work. In Israel it’s above seven percent. And in Greece and Spain, that number approaches thirty percent. Across the developed world, the experience of unemployment has become frighteningly common—and so are the seemingly endless tactics that job seekers employ in their quest for new work.

Flawed System/Flawed Self delves beneath these staggering numbers to explore the world of job searching and unemployment across class and nation. Through in-depth interviews and observations at job-search support organizations, Ofer Sharone reveals how different labor-market institutions give rise to job-search games like Israel’s résumé-based “spec games”—which are focused on presenting one’s skills to fit the job—and the “chemistry games” more common in the United States in which job seekers concentrate on presenting the person behind the résumé. By closely examining the specific day-to-day activities and strategies of searching for a job, Sharone develops a theory of the mechanisms that connect objective social structures and subjective experiences in this challenging environment and shows how these different structures can lead to very different experiences of unemployment.

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the delightfully husky-voiced Angelica Cheung, editor-in-chief of Vogue China and, before that, editorial director of the Chinese edition of Elle and the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire Hong Kong where she also co-published several other fashion magazines.

Cheung says that in the early days of fashion shoots for Vogue China, Westerners thought only of “'cheongsams, opium beds and 'In the Mood for Love'”, but she had to let them know that was very patronising. She is not interested, she says, in being told what Chinese women should or should not do or wear. Through her work, she is trying she says to create an energy among her readers and while she is not what she terms a 'fashion feminist', she does cares about how her Chinese readers feel about their lives and being happy because “life is short”.

Born in 1966 Cheung recently took part in the International New York Times S.E.A. Of Luxury conference, @INYTLuxury, hosted by Suzy Menkes, designed the organizers say to “bring South East Asia out of the shadows with an agenda that looked at Asia both as as a luxury goods supplier, as well as a powerful consumer base”.

The daughter of a Chinese diplomat, Cheung graduated from Peking University in 1990 where she obtained degrees in law and English language and literature. She subsequently received an MBA degree from University of South Australia and then in 1993 took a position as a writer at 'Eastern Express', an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, She covered all aspects of life there in the run-up to the handover to China in 1997 and then, in 2001, was named editor-in-chief of Marie Claire Hong Kong and, in 2003,editorial director at Elle China in Shanghai. When publisher Conde Nast wanted to launch Vogue in China, the company asked Cheung to take the lead and since 2005 she has been editorial director.

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Speaking to KGNU's Claudia Cragg in person @INYTLuxury held recently in Singapore Livia Firth (yes, Colin IS her husband) says that girls or young women should wear their clothes thoughtfully, each piece at least 30 times, in the name of 'Sustainability'.

Because of her work with the GCC, Livia Firth was awarded in November 2012 the title of UN Leader of Change Award.

Firth is the brains behind the 'Green Carpet Challenge, a fast moving, dynamic project working to unlock “Sustainable Style” in the fashion industry. Since its creation in 2009, she and the GCC have blazed a trail working with A-list designers pioneering sustainability in brands at the world’s most high profile events. From the Golden Globes and Academy Awards to the Met Ball and Cannes Film Festival, the GCC has collaborated with all the iconic design houses in the world winning widespread critical acclaim and international media attention.

Most recently, with Chopard – one of the world’s largest privately owned luxury jewellery and accessory companies – we launched its journey to sustainable luxury by forging a philanthropic relationship with South America’s most influential mining NGO: the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM). 

Previously in September 2012, the GCC created ‘The Green Cut’ – a unique exhibition pairing eight seminal fashion designers with eight iconic films to create a collection of striking gowns. The exhibition, which saw the British Fashion Council (BFC) and the British Film Institute (BFI) worked together for the first time, opened London Fashion Week and was celebrated at the London Film Festival, before being shown in Harrods. Read more here.

In March 2013, the GCC created the GCC Brand Mark and launched with Gucci a new frontier for sustainable style: the world’s first zero deforestation certified handbag collection from Amazon leather. Read more here.

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In this interview with Claudia Cragg for KGNU's 'It's The Economy' @INYTLuxury 2013 the focus is on China, with a review of the Plenum late last year, and the opportunities for US and others. Amidst a barrage of criticism and fiscal negativity directed towards that country, we talk with a native-born woman, US-educated Jing Ulrich, Managing Director and Vice Chairman of J P Morgan. She is in a unique position to discuss what to expect economically from the new leader Xi Jing Ping, from her ringside seat as a significant very high-level financial advisor both to China on the US and also to the US on China. 

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An interview with The International New York Times (formerly International Herald Tribune) Suzy Menkes, @INYTLuxury 2013. She is the woman who has long unearthed every new fashion trend for The International Herald Tribune (now the Intl. N Y Times) believes that not only are the Chinese coming (leaping forward where Japan once did) but that sustainability will be part of their, and all our, fashion futures.

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KGNU "It's The Economy' host, Claudia Cragg, speaks here with Sam Daley-Harris who has been called “one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades” by Ashoka founder Bill Drayton. Daley-Harris founded RESULTS  in 1980, the Microcredit summit in 1995, the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation in 2012, and mentored the founder of  Citizens Climate Lobby prior to its launch in 2007. For many years now, Sam has committed himself to bridging the gap between citizens and their government.

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Hustlers, strivers, dealers and call girls are the subject of discussion by KGNU's Claudia Cragg (for 'It's The Economy') with Sudhir Venkatesh about his latest book, 'Floating City. The work is a study both of a changing aspect of New York and its economy but also, some say, a changing aspect of the author (a Columubia sociologist) himself.

Here Venkatesh seems to propose that, unlike in other cities, immigrants wanting to make it big in New York – to transcend traditional barriers and improve their lot, licitly or otherwise – need to learn to “float”. The drug-dealer who wants to graduate to selling cocaine to wealthy upper-middle class clients needs to find a way to “float” into that milieu, via contacts, brokers, connections in new worlds. Those who cannot work their way through, past, over these barriers will fail; a would-be high class escort unable to “appreciate good food [or] discuss politics and the opera” with clients will never achieve her aim.

Venkatesh believes too, though, that there are lessons from New York's less orthodox financial world that others in cities around the States and elsewhere would also do well to learn. 

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks her with Alan Blinder about his book, whose title refers to an infamous remark made in July 2007 by Charles O. Prince III, then the chief executive of Citigroup. “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity,” he said, “things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” His book, he explains, relates, the sorry tale of fiscal irresponsibility and chaos as well as the ways the Bush and Obama administrations grappled with the unspooling crises,

Furthermore, Blinder believes that that the disaster was years in the making. Starting in the late 1990s and continuing through 2007, he says that, Americans had “built a fragile house of financial cards” that was just waiting to be toppled and that the the “intricate but precarious construction was based on asset-price bubbles, exaggerated by irresponsible leverage, encouraged by crazy compensation schemes and excessive complexity, and aided and abetted by embarrassingly bad underwriting standards, dismal performances by the statistical rating agencies and lax financial regulation.”

A Princeton professor, in 2009 Blinder was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "for his distinguished scholarship on fiscal policy, monetary policy and the distribution of income, and for consistently bringing that knowledge to bear on the public arena." He is a strong proponent of free trade and Blinder also has been critical of the public discussion of the US national debt, describing it as generally ranging from "ludicrous to horrific"

Blinder served as the Deputy Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office (1975), on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers (January 1993 - June 1994) and as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from June 1994 to January 1996. As Vice Chairman, he cautioned against raising interest rates too quickly to slow inflation because of the lags in earlier rises feeding through into the economy. He also warned against ignoring the short term costs in terms of unemployment that inflation-fighting could cause. Many have argued that Blinder's stint at the Fed was cut short because of his tendency to challenge chairman Alan Greenspan

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the celebrated scholar Carla Kaplan’s on her cultural biography, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance. The book focuses with vivid prose, extensive research, and period photographs on white women, collectively called “Miss Anne,” who became Harlem Renaissance insiders.

It is largely the story of unconventional, free-thinking women, some from Manhattan high society, many Jewish, who crossed race lines and defied social conventions to become a part of the culture and heartbeat of Harlem. New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: the story of a group of women collectively dubbed "Miss Anne."

Sexualized and sensationalized in the mainstream press—portrayed as monstrous or insane—Miss Anne was sometimes derided within her chosen community of Harlem as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for "exotic" dancers and "hot" jazz, white women who were enthralled by life on West 125th Street took chances. Miss Anne in Harlemintroduces these women—many from New York's wealthiest social echelons—who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. They include Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, British activist Nancy Cunard, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, educator Lillian E. Wood, and novelist Fannie Hurst—all women of accomplishment and renown in their day. Yet their contributions as hostesses, editors, activists, patrons, writers, friends, and lovers often went unacknowledged and have been lost to history until now.

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David Malone is a UK investigative financial reporter, the author of 'The Debt Generation' and and a BBC filmmaker.

In this interview for KGNU's 'It's The Economy', he discusses here with Claudia Cragg the always especially knotty subject of geopolitics. As in a super-fantastic War of the Worlds, in his opinion, Malone says the French are now teaming up with Qatar versus The House of Saud. This, he believes is to free themselves from the Russian dominance in natural gas. Furthermore, you'll hear him argue that powers outside Syria might even be content to have permanent multi-factional revolutionary foment in the region so nobody ever gets ultimate contol, leaving those with commercial interests free to roam.  It's not' all about NOT oil, he says, but gas gas gas. 

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Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Frederick Forsyth about his latest thriller, 'The Kill List'.

In interesting update (4 Oct 2013) on this interview, former NSA/CIA Chief speaking at a Washington Post Forum on 'Cyber Security, joked about "Putting Edward Snowden on Obama’s Kill List". This goes to show, perhaps, that the once journalist Forsyth's intinct for veritas amidst dissembling is far greater than even he knows. 

Frederick Forsyth is the author of fourteen novels and short story collections, from 1971's The Day of the Jackal to 2003's Avenger. A former pilot and print and television reporter, he has had five movies made from his works, and a television miniseries. He also writes a column for Britain's 'Daily Express' newspaper. This latest work, too, is shortly to be made into a movie directed by Rupert Sanders. 

From Penguin, “In Virginia, there is an agency bearing the bland name of Technical Operations Support Activity, or TOSA. Its one mission is to track, find, and kill those so dangerous to the United States that they are on a short document known as the Kill List. TOSA actually exists. So does The Kill List.

Added to it is a new name: a terrorist of frightening effectiveness called the Preacher, who radicalizes young Muslims abroad to carry out assassinations. Unfortunately for him, one of the kills is a retired Marine general, whose son is TOSA’s top hunter of men.

He has spent the last six years at his job. He knows nothing about his target’s name, face, or location. He realizes his search will take him to places where few could survive. But the Preacher has made it personal now. The hunt is on.”

This is a FIRST. First ever Google Hangout recorded interview with Myanmar award-winning film directors, Khin Khin Hsu, Shunn Lei Swe Yee, Hnin Ei Hlaing in conversation with KGNU's Claudia Cragg, together with the organizer of The Singapore Myanmar Film Festival, Dr Marlar Tun (herself a filmmaker, I Am Myanmar (YouTube).

What is lacks in audio quality (this is Myanmar, this is internet Google Hangouts not a fancy studio) is more than made up for by all the interviewees with their authenticity, veracity and bold spirit.

A polished, more orthodox, conventionally manicured journalistic piece will appear soon and air in the US and elsewhere over more old-fashioned airwaves.

(No apologies! The style of this piece is also orchestrated to make it as accessible here to those for whom English is not their first language).

From The Myanmar Times:

The first-ever Singapore Myanmar Film Festival has drawn rave reviews, both from Myanmar people living in Singapore and foreigners interested in learning more about Myanmar films.

“This year’s festival is dedicated to Myanmar filmmakers” at home or abroad, the festival’s director, Benoit Shaack, told The Myanmar Times. “We want to give Myanmar filmmakers a chance to shine outside of Myanmar.”

In June, a panel of judges announced five winners had been selected from over 30 films submitted for consideration. The winning films were shown July 7 at the Golden Village theatre in Singapore, with the filmmakers being honoured the night before at an evening welcoming party.

First prize at the festival went to The Bamboo Grove by Khin Khin Hsu; second prize went to My Grandfather’s House by Shunn Lei Swe Yee; third prize went to Bungkus by Lay Thida (sadly, not available for this interview; fourth prize went to Burmese Butterfly by Hnin Ei Hlaing; and fifth prize went to The Old Photographer by Thet Oo Maung (also not available for this interview).

The Bamboo Grove, which won the festival’s top award, follows a naïve young city doctor whose first posting after medical school is a rural Kayin community in the Delta. The film portrays the deep-seated feelings of the people living there.

“This film is the true story of the scriptwriter, Dr Aung Min,” said Khin Khin Su, the film’s director.

She said the biggest difficulty when shooting the film in 2010 was the use of actual Kayin residents as actors. Some of them did not speak Myanmar, making communication difficult. But it also lent the film an air of realism which struck a chord with festival-goers.

“This is my first competition film,” Khin Khin Su said. “I never thought I would go to Singapore for a film festival or that my film would win first prize. I can’t describe my happiness.”

It may have been her first trip to the film festival, but she’s already made two more feature films since The Bamboo Grove, so it likely won’t be her last.

Another winner, Hnin Ei Hlaing’s film Burmese Butterfly, is already a veteran of the international film festival circuit, having been showcased in 18 countries.

Burmese Butterfly features 21-year-old hairdresser Phyo Lay looking back on a turbulent childhood and adolescence. A rare glimpse into the emergent gay community in this hitherto-isolated country, it describes how difficult it is to come out in Myanmar.

“I’m happy to win the prize,” said Hnin Ei Hlaing, “But I am more happy that this festival was organised … and that I got a chance to show my film in Singapore. Singapore is very close to our country and a lot of Myanmar people live there.”

Burmese Butterfly started filming in 2009. Before the cameras rolled, however, Hnin Ei Hlaing spent about six months getting to know the film’s lead actor.

“I hung out with Phyo Lay wherever he went, even at his home,” she said. “When I started directing the film, his aunty was pregnant. When the film was finished, she had already delivered her child.”

The film was originally supposed to tell the story of two gay men in Myanmar, one more feminine and one more masculine. But the family of the latter man would not allow shooting, so the film’s script had to be changed, Hnin Ei Hlaing said.

Even though Burmese Butterfly has been given a permit for public showings by the Myanmar Censorship Board, audiences in Singapore have to be 18 or over to see it. Despite the age restriction, Hnin Ei Hlaing is grateful the festival is connecting audiences to her film – and allowing filmmakers to get to know each other.

“We got to know many filmmakers and other technicians through this festival,” she said. “We can connect to each other through our films.”

The Singapore-Myanmar Film Festival was organised and funded by the Singapore Myanmar Exchange Organisation. The theme for this year was “Behind closed doors”. The festival included categories for short films, full-length features, documentaries and more, all made by young independent filmmakers of Myanmar origin.

First and second prize winners were awarded HD professional camcorders, and all filmmakers were given top-end post-production software for use on future projects. The organisers also arranged workshops for the five winners with filmmakers from abroad.

“Next year, we will try to hold an even better festival,” said Daw Marlar Tun, director of the Singapore Myanmar Exchange Organisation and coordinator of the Singapore-Myanmar Film Festival. She added that next year’s festival will also be accepting international submissions.

Last week, a young woman asked me if, after graduating from university, she should become a journalist

I had no answer. I'm not a psychologist, a careers advisor, a seer or a phrenologist prepared to lay my hands on her wickedly bumpy skull for portents.

Then of course I started to think for myself, why in fact had I become a journalist.

Was there was some point at which I had decided that was to be my future. No. Never.

But to answer her question as succinctly as I can, I'd say to the young lady (because she is a 'lady') just listen to this (attached piece) and you'll perhaps see why.

In this sad age of Fox/Sky News, #HackGate and paparazzi this is why. This, the piece you can listen to by simply clicking the iPod icon to the left of the title.

If you don't understand, after little over five minutes of just one of so very many remarkable people's stories over 35 years, I don't think you ever will. 

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The Very Reverend James Jones, 64, till now The Bishop of Liverpool, is retiring imminently from the diocese but will continue his connection with the Hillsborough disaster aftermath. Jones chaired the Hillsborough Independent Panel, which cleared fans of blame for the tragedy in its report of September 2012.

Jones will continue to work in a different role, to be announced later this year and in the meantime will regularly be heard on the BBC. On Monday 22nd July at 8 p.m., there is a new broadcast series on BBC Radio 4 in a new series, 'The Bishop and The Bankers' in which, it is hoped, Jones will equally fearlessly and rigorously explore the morality, mindset and personal stories of individuals in banking and business.

Check the BBC iPlayer schedule for other broadcast times.

However, looking back, in this archive interview for KGNU with Claudia Cragg, the then Bishop of Liverpool discusses politics, politicians and science, the role of the individual, The Eden Project in Lancashire and his personal criticism of radical "end-timers" who allegedly consider global warming as an inevitable stage in a Biblical apocalyptic plan.

His visit at that time was a very brave attempt aimed at trying to enthuse naysaying US conservative evangelicals in Colorado Springs into becoming passionate about environmental concerns.

Rev. Jones has long been known as a champion of environmentalism in Britain and was the author of "Jesus and the Earth". 

Jones says it is appropriate, as many others are now doing, to liken the moral imperative presented by climate change (that he has seen for himself in Switzerland, Africa and India) to that of slavery because the poor are being oppressed by climate changes that are ruining harvests.

(Originally roadcast on KGNU on 12/14/06)

(Image from Operation Noah conference)

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Claudia Cragg talks here for a KGNU special programme with Michael Woodford, company president, whistleblower and crusader about his book, Exposure, the story of how he brought to light the dark heart of the Japanese corporation, Olympus.

When Michael Woodford was made President and CEO of that corporation, he became the first Westerner ever to climb the ranks of one of the country's corporate icons.

Then his dream job turned into a nightmare.

Exposure is a deeply personal memoir that reads like a thriller. As Woodford himself puts it, 'I thought I was going to run a health-care and consumer electronics company but found I had walked into a John Grisham novel.'

He learned about a series of bizarre mergers and acquisitions deals totalling $1.7 billion - a scandal which, if exposed, threatened to bring down the entire company. He turned to his fellow executives but was met with hostility and a cover-up. 

Within weeks he was fired in a boardroom coup that shocked the international business world. As rumours emerged of Yakuza (mafia) involvement in the scandal, Woodford fled Japan in fear of his life. 

He went straight to the press - becoming the first CEO of a multinational to blow the whistle on his own company.

Woodford grew up in Liverpool and joined Olympus as a medical equipment salesman. He rose through the ranks to run its UK, MEA and European businesses. 

The Ink Factory, with the support of Film4, has announced that it has optioned film rights to “Exposure”.

Simon Cornwell, producer and co-founder at The Ink Factory said today that they see the movie as "a rich character-driven drama about a man called to take extraordinary action. There are all the elements of a thriller: the constant shadow of the Yakuza, and the very real sense of physical threat. It is also a tale full of contemporary resonance and moral depth. We are very excited to be working with Michael Woodford in bringing his unbelievable experiences to the screen.”

Woodward was named Business Person of the Year 2011 by the Sunday Times, the Independent and the Sun, and won the Financial Times Arcelor-Mittal Award for Boldest Businessperson of the Year. 

SPECIAL NOTE comment from Michael Woodford, dated 3 July 2013. 

"I’ve written and spoken extensively about the Olympus scandal. The lessons of this sad tale should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention, and I do hope that people in Japan are paying attention.  I do not, however, feel that it would be dignified for me to make any comment in relation to the sentencing of my former board colleagues.  I have a great affection and fondness for Japan and want to see the country move forward as I do for myself and my family."

(This interview was recorded and produced for broadcast before the sentences were handed down by the Japanese court and the story contains NO comment from Mr. Woodford on same.)

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KGNU 'It's The Economy' host, Claudia Cragg speaks here with SteadyState.org's Rob Dietz. He brings a fresh perspective to the discussion of economics and environmental sustainability with a diverse background in economics, environmental science and engineering, and conservation biology (plus his work in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors). His expertise has given him an unusual ability to connect the dots when it comes to the topic of sustainability. 

Rob is the author, with Dan O’Neill, of Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources.

As the editor of the Daly News, Rob is a devoted advocate for revamping the economy to fit within biophysical limits.  He writes with humor, clarity, and a personal touch as he considers the complex set of institutions and activities that make up the economy.

Rob says he is attempting to align his personal life with the principles of a steady state economy.  He lives with his wife and daughter in a cohousing community striving for development rather than growth.

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Austerity and the Great Crash are affecting everyone at all levels, regardless of past career success or not.

Claudia Cragg speaks here for KGNU with ex TV honcho, Adrian Kulp.

He first learned that he was about to become a father, he says, when he was essentially a teenage boy trapped in the body of a thirty-two-year-old high-powered executive.

So he did what his wife asked him to do: grow up. He packed away his Phillies baseball memorabilia, hid his GI Joes, and converted their guest bedroom from his private man cave into a nursery.

Kulp now has a new book out in time for Father's Day based on his mercilessly funny and brutally honest blog. It is is the hilarious story of one man’s journey from being the one who brings home the bacon to the one who fries it—along with assembling the crib, learning how to “accessorize” his daughter, and flying with an infant for the first time. From numbing booze-free co-ed baby showers to navigating the Farmer's Market with a baby (and loaded diaper) strapped to his chest, to locking himself out of a childproofed toilet, this often-sweaty and exhausted SAHD (stay-at-home dad) gets down and dirty about surviving life as a new parent—dad or alive.

But behind the jocularity is a story that, these days, is all too startlingly and increasingly familiar. 

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Charles V. Bagli of The New York Times, talks here to KGNU's Claudia Cragg about the collapse of America's biggest ever real estate deal.

In 2006, the Middle Income Lower Manhattan housing projects, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper were sold at competitive auction for $5.4 billion, a deal that has since fallen apart leaving the first-, second- and even third-generation families that lived there in residential jeopardy.

Caught, as they have been, between a real estate rock and hard place, the tenants and the estates themselves have come to exemplify the excesses of the housing boom at its very worse. However, as Bagli explains here, the reverberations not only continue to be felt today, but also represent the squeezing out of affordable properties in key metros, not only in New York, but potentially also in other cities around the US.

Bagli is a New York Times reporter who covers the intersection of politics and real estate. He has written about the sale of high-profile buildings, political contributions of the real estate industry, the battle to build a $2 billion dollar stadium for the Jets, bid rigging in the construction industry, payoffs at the tax assessor's office, and a Sutton Place co-op that turned public land into a private park. He has worked for the New York Observer, the Daily Record of Morristown, New Jersey, the Tampa Tribune and the Brooklyn Phoenix.  

At the end of the interview, a 2010 documentary now on YouTube by filmmaker and Huffington Post contributor, Sandi Bachom, is featured with many Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper residents.

Sandi Bachom Contact Details:

Twitter: @SandiBachom

Website: SandiBachom.com

And reads the book. 

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here with Melvin Goodman, a 24-year veteran of the CIA, who according to his publishers, City Lights, brings peerless authority to his argument that U.S. military spending is indeed making Americans poorer and less secure, whil undermining its political standing in the world.

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here with former Microsoft executive, the brains behind the 'Room To Read' organization which, he says, all started with a case of job burnout. John Wood escaped to Nepal for a much-needed backpacking getaway and while hiking in the Himalayas, met a Nepalese “Education Resource Officer” who invited him to visit a school in a neighboring village. Little did John know that this short detour would change his life forever. At the school, John saw the harsh reality confronting not only this village, but millions of Nepalese children–a dilapidated schoolroom and a severe shortage of books. John was stunned to discover that the few books this school had had–a Danielle Steele romance, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, and a few other backpacker castoffs–were so precious that they were kept under lock and key...to protect them from the children.

As John left the village, the headmaster made a simple request: "Perhaps, Sir, you will someday come back with books." His request would not go unheard. John emailed friends asking for help collecting children's books, and within two months had collected over 3,000 books. The following year, John and his father, accompanied by a train of eight book-bearing donkeys, returned to the village in Nepal. Seeing the faces of the children with the books convinced John to leave the corporate world and devote himself to becoming the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world. In late 1999, John quit his executive position with Microsoft and started Room to Read. Beginning in Nepal, John and his Nepali co-founder, Dinesh Shrestha, started by working with rural communities to build schools (School Room) and to establish libraries (Reading Room). 

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KGNU’s Claudia Cragg talks with Blair Levin about the new book he has co-authored ‘The Politics of Abundance - How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream, and Establish Obama’s Legacy’

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EXCERPT - “Some will tell the President that the government should never have a growth strategy beyond being fiscally prudent and letting markets allocate capital. But a government that can land a thinking machine on Mars surely can develop an informed opinion about what sectors of the economy can grow rapidly and contribute to a high and rising standard of living for everyone. In any event, currently the knowledge and power markets cannot readily allocate capital appropriately because they are constricted by a web of law, externalities, and monopoly bottlenecks. Moreover, the government plays such a large role as a spender and regulator in these markets, that its conduct, whether or not coherently focused, enormously affects industry trends. Finally, if the United States economy does not rebuild the knowledge and power platform far faster, better, and cheaper than market forces are now doing, then Americans will suffer from inadequate educations, poor and expensive healthcare, and devastating climate change, for generations to come.

However, those who remain unconvinced of the merits of a growth strategy, and prefer single-minded focus on the debt-to-GDP ratio, should be mollified by the fact that our legislative proposals for the two platforms reduce the deficit by about $100 billion, without accounting for the additional tax revenues that will be derived from more rapid economic growth. In Chapter 4, we suggest ways to negotiate for these measures as part of avoiding the “fiscal cliff.” Taken as a whole, our proposals outline the politics of abundance.” -Reed Hundt and Blair Levin

Levin oversaw the creation of the National Broadband Plan as the executive director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the Federal Communications Commission in 2009 and 2010. He is now a fellow at the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the executive director of Gig.U, a coalition of research university communities working to accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks in the United States.

The book’s co-author Reed Hundt is the CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, a non-profit. He was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997, and he was on Barack Obama’s Presidential transition team.

He sits on the boards of directors of Intel Corporation, ASSIA, a communications software firm, and Kno Inc., the education software company. He also serves on boards or as an advisor at the United Negro College Fund; the Clean Energy Finance and Investment Authority of Connecticut; the Advanced Energy Economy Institute; Yale School of Management; Peek, Inc., a mobile technology company; and Mytonomy, a social network for college planning.

Hundt has written many articles and two books: In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship (Yale University Press, 2006) and You Say You Want A Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics (Yale University Press, 2000). He graduated from Yale College, and Yale Law School.

Surveys (this is just one) show that many today feel they are drowning in too much information, but find it’s often too much of the kind they DO NOT want and rarely approaches what they might be looking for.

With nifty Power Searching techniques, anyone can ‘drill down’ to unearth hidden facts, documents, file types in a variety of locations and languages. This a skill that is only becoming more important each day.

This information, together with the Blair Levin interview (‘The Politics of Abundance) made up a one hour programme for KGNU’s ‘It’s The Economy’ on The FCC and The Economics of The Internet and Connectivity.

Hear you will hear an excerpt (with kind permission) of a recent seminar at Newsplex Asia (at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University) in conjunction with Google, covering topics from the hot and newly-emerging field of data journalism and visualization to making the most of Google Tools to generate news stories. Speakers took part through Google+ Hangouts to share their experiences on how free online tools, such as Fusion Tables, can be used to gather and display data to readers in disasters such as the Fukushima-Daichi disaster after the Japanese quake and tsunami last year. In the full-length version, YouTube experts also convey how news organisations can make the most out of the video-sharing platform.

Sign up for Power Searching with Google course.

Dan Russell's home page and site.

YouTube video of Robin Moroney's and Anthony Baxter's (for reasons of length NOT incl. in this podcast) http://youtu.be/f4hIOsahz2A

Here KGNU’s Claudia Cragg speaks to Victor Chan about “The Wisdom of Compassion” written with His Holiness, The Dalai Lama. This book offers rare insights into the Dalai Lama's life as he interacts with remarkable people from all walks of life. In these deeply engaging behind-the-scenes stories we see not only the Dalai Lama at his most human, and most humane, but also the way he approaches the world with humour and optimism.

Enhanced by the Dalai Lama's seven decades of practice and illuminated through captivating anecdotes, The Wisdom of Compassion gives insight in to how to lead more fulfilling lives. The Dalai Lama also shows how "when we open our hearts and minds to others, we are on the surest path to true happiness." 

Chan has travelled extensively through his work, including numerous treks to Tibet. He wrote the 1,100-page Tibet Handbook: A Pilgrimage Guide, published by Moon Travel Handbooks in 1994. The book is recognized as the most comprehensive guide on the culture, art, sacred sites, and pilgrimage routes of Tibet.

Victor Chan has known the Dalai Lama for over 30 years and co-authored with him The Wisdom of Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys. The book was shortlisted for the Best Spiritual Book of 2005 (Nautilus Prize, New York) and translated into 14 languages. In 2005, Chan and the Dalai Lama co-founded the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education in Vancouver, Canada.

Chan was Chair of the Organizing Committee responsible for the visit of the Dalai Lama to Vancouver in 2004. He and Professor Pitman Potter, Director of the Institute of Asian Research, UBC convened the symposium on "How to Balance Educating the Mind with Educating the Heart" which featured the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Shirin Ebadi, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Professor Jo-Ann Archibald. With Potter, Chan was instrumental in establishing a Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program at UBC and was the first Executive Director of that program.

In response to Chan’s invitation, the Dalai Lama returned to Vancouver in September 2006 to attend the Vancouver Dialogues dedicated to promoting the Center’s key themes of compassion, peace and education. In September 2009, the Dalai Lama Center and Chan hosted the Vancouver Peace Summit, featuring five Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and many other visionaries from around the world.

TOBIAS ORLANDO Cragg recorded a follow-up conversation with Victor Chan at the 2013 Irawaddy Literary Festival in Yangon.

You may listen to this at this link

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KGNU’s Claudia Cragg speaks here with Jack Myers about his new book, 'Hooked Up: A New Generation’s Surprising Take on Sex, Politics and Saving the World'. Myers shares insights into the first generation to grow up with the Internet and what he considers to be the positive impact they are likely to have on business, culture and society.

Jack is a media ecologist and chairman of Media Advisory Group, which provides economic counsel to more than 250 media, advertising, marketing, entertainment and financial services companies who subscribe to the weekly Jack Myers Media Business Report.

He is an award-winning documentary film producer, author of four books and founder of the Women in Media Mentoring Initiative and Syracuse University Newhouse Network. Jack is the recipient of the George Foster Peabody Award, won the Crystal Heart Award from the Heartland Film Festival, and has been nominated for both an Academy and Emmy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream. His most recent production is the Focus Forward documentary series with Morgan Spurlock’sCinelan Group.

Jack’s career includes sales and management positions at CBS Television, ABC Radio and Metromedia Outdoor. While in college, he co-founded the Syracuse New Times. Jack is a Board Member Emeritus of the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. He served on the Advisory Board for the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University where he studied Media Ecology with Dr. Neil Postman.

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Gina Keating speaks here with KGNU’s Claudia Cragg about her new book, Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs(Portfolio, 2012). Accoring to Keating, the tale of Netflix is “a long struggle for greatness marked by multiple disasters, lucky breaks, personal betrayal, and broken hearts. It has more drama than most of the movies Netflix rents”

In 1997, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Marc Ran­dolph and Reed Hastings, decided to start an online DVD store before most people owned a DVD player. They were surprised and elated when launch-day traffic in April 1998 crashed their server and resulted in 150 sales. Today, Netflix has more than 25 million subscribers and annual revenues above $3 billion. Future success—or even survival—is still far from guaranteed.

First it engaged in a grueling war against video-store behemoth Blockbuster, transforming movie rental forever. Then it jumped into an even bigger battle for online video streaming against Google, Hulu, Amazon, and the big cable companies. Netflix ushered in such innovations as DVD rental by mail, a patented online queue of upcom­ing rentals, and a recommendation algorithm called Cinematch that proved crucial in its struggle against bigger rivals. Netflix also faces disgruntled customers after price increases and other stumbles that could tarnish the brand forever.

Keating is a freelance writer who has covered media, law and government as a staff writer for Reuters and United Press International in Los Angeles.

The Greater Los Angeles Press Club named her its Print Journalist of the Year in 2001. The same year, she won the Press Club’s award for investigative reporting and the California Teachers Association’s John Swett Award for excellence in education-related journalism for stories she wrote for the Los Angeles Daily Journal.

Prior to moving to Los Angeles, she covered the Texas Legislature, business and culture as a freelance writer for the Associated Press, UPI, the Austin American-Statesman, and Texas Monthly, Food and Wine, Southern Living and Forbes magazines. Her freelance work also has appeared in Daily Variety.

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Claudia Cragg talks here with Luigi Zingales, author  just last week of an important FT article about the need in the US - and indeed in all financial markets - for the return of Glass-Steagall act (1933, repealed 1999). Historically, this has separated commercial and investment banking activities. Born in Italy, University of Chicago economist Zingales witnessed firsthand the consequences of high inflation and unemployment—paired, he says, with rampant nepotism and cronyism—on a country’s economy. This experience profoundly shaped his professional interests, and in 1988 he arrived in the United States, armed with a political passion and the belief that economists should not merely interpret the world, but should change it for the better.

In A Capitalism for the People, Zingales makes a forceful, philosophical, and at times personal argument that the roots of American capitalism are dying, and that the result is a drift toward the more corrupt systems found throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world. American capitalism, according to Zingales, grew in a unique incubator that provided it with a distinct flavor of competitiveness, a meritocratic nature that fostered trust in markets and a faith in mobility. Lately, however, that trust has been eroded by a betrayal of our pro-business elites, whose lobbying has come to dictate the market rather than be subject to it, and this betrayal has taken place with the complicity of our intellectual class.

Because of this trend, much of the country is questioning—often with great anger—whether the system that has for so long buoyed their hopes has now betrayed them once and for all. What we are left with is either anti-market pitchfork populism or pro-business technocratic insularity. Neither of these options presents a way to preserve what the author calls “the lighthouse” of American capitalism. Zingales argues that the way forward is pro-market populism, a fostering of truly free and open competition for the good of the people—not for the good of big business.

Drawing on the historical record of American populism at the turn of the twentieth century, Zingales illustrates how our current circumstances aren’t all that different. People in the middle and at the bottom are getting squeezed, while people at the top are only growing richer. The solutions now, as then, are reforms to economic policy that level the playing field. Reforms that may be anti-business (specifically anti-big business), but are squarely pro-market. The question is whether we can once again muster the courage to confront the powers that be."

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here with Professor Edward D. Hess who spent more than 30 years in the business world. His latest book is 'The Physics of Business Growth'. He began his career at Atlantic Richfield Corporation and was a senior executive at Warburg Paribas Becker, Boettcher & Company, the Robert M. Bass Group and Arthur Andersen. He is the author of ten books, over 60 practitioner articles, and over 60 Darden cases, etc. dealing with growth systems, managing growth and growth strategies. His books include Hess and Liedtka, The Physics of Business Growth: Mindsets, System and Processes (Stanford University Press, 2012); Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Entrepreneurial Businesses (Stanford University Press, 2012);Growing an Entrepreneurial Business: Concepts & Cases (Stanford University Press, February, 2011);Smart Growth: Building Enduring Businesses by Managing the Risks of Growth (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2010);  Hess and Goetz, So You Want to Start A Business (FT Press, 2008);  The Road To Organic Growth (McGraw-Hill, 2007); Hess and Cameron, eds., Leading with Values: Virtue, Positivity & High Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Hess and Kazanjian, eds., The Search for Organic Growth (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Smart Growth was named a Top 25 2010 business book for business owners by Inc. Magazine and was awarded the Wachovia Award for Research Excellence.

His current research focuses on the Darden Growth/Innovation Model, the challenges of managing private company growth, growth systems and behaviors. Hess has taught in Executive Education programs for Harris Corporation, Cigna, Timken, United Technologies, Genworth Financial, Pitney Bowes, Unilever Russia, Westinghouse Nuclear, Alpha Natural Resources, Alegco-Scotsman,  FTI Consulting as well as IESE (Barcelona) and the Indian School of Business.

From Monday 16 July 2012, author Sadie Jones' newest work, 'The Uninvited Guests' is serialized in 5 parts on BBC Radio 4 Extra's Book at Beachtime at 2:30 pm BST (1:30 pm GMT).  

Sadie Jones, who lives in London, is the author of the novels The Outcast, winner of the Costa First Novel Award in the United Kingdom and a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. She also wrote Small Wars, a tale of love, war, and honour, which was published to critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Jones was born in London, the daughter of the Jamaican-born writer, Evan Jones, and Joanna Jones, a London-born actress. After leaving school, she travelled and taught English as a Foreign Language in Paris, before returning to London where she worked as a runner for a production company, as a temporary secretary and as a waitress, all the while for the next 15 years pursuing a professional career as a screenwriter.

Here in conversation with KGNU's Claudia Cragg, Jones discusses her latest novel, her third, The Uninvited Guests. A grand old manor house deep in the English countryside opens its doors to reveal the story of an unexpectedly dramatic day in the life of one eccentric, rather dysfunctional, and entirely unforgettable family. Set in the early years of the twentieth century, award-winning author Sadie Jones’s The Uninvited Guests is, according to Jacqueline Winspear, the New York Times bestselling author “a sinister tragi-comedy of errors, in which the dark underbelly of human nature is revealed in true Shakespearean fashion.”

From Harper Colllins, the publishers: “One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honour of Emerald Torrington’s 20^th birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savoury survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief.”

“In The Uninvited Guests, this prize-winning author triumphs in a frightening yet delicious drama of dark surprises where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.”

For World Holocaust Memorial Day, Claudia Cragg speaks with pianist and author Caroline Stoessinger about her new book on the life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the world’s oldest living Holocaust Survivor. At 108 years old, the pianist Herz-Sommer is an eyewitness to the entire last century and the first decade of this one. She has seen it all, surviving the Theresienstadt concentration camp, attending the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and along the way coming into contact with some of the most fascinating historical figures of our time. As a child in Prague, she spent weekends and holidays in the company of Franz Kafka (whom she knew as “Uncle Franz”), and Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, and Rainer Maria Rilke were friendly with her mother. When Alice moved to Israel after the war, Golda Meir attended her house concerts, as did Arthur Rubinstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Isaac Stern. Today Alice lives in London, where she still practices piano for hours every day.  
 
Despite her imprisonment in Theresienstadt and the murders of her mother, husband, and friends by the Nazis, and much later the premature death of her son, Alice has been victorious in her ability to live a life without bitterness. She credits music as the key to her survival, as well as her ability to acknowledge the humanity in each person, even her enemies. A Century of Wisdom is the remarkable and inspiring story of one woman’s lifelong determination—in the face of some of the worst evils known to man—to find goodness in life. It is a testament to the bonds of friendship, the power of music, and the importance of leading a life of material simplicity, intellectual curiosity, and never-ending optimism.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks for KGNU with author Lionel Shriver about her latest novel, 'The New Republic'. 

Ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. A disgruntled New York corporate lawyer, he's more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism. When he's offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about their beloved "Bear," who is no longer lighting up their work lives.

Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba—"The Daring Soldiers of Barba"—have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward, and windblown that you couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the "SOB" suddenly dry up?

A droll, playful novel, The New Republic addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What's their secret? And in the end, who has the better life—the admired, or the admirer?

Lionel Shriver Biography

Reading Guides:

• The Post-Birthday World
• We Need to Talk About Kevin

Claudia Cragg speaks here for KGNU with philosopher and author Alain de Botton about his latest book 'Religion for Atheists'. De Botton argues "What if religions are neither all true or all nonsense?' as the traditional debate between believers and their non-believing debaters contend. De Botton maintains that "this boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on" in his new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false and yet that religions still have some very important things to teach the secular world. "Even if religion isn't true," he says, "Can't we enjoy the best bits?" He explores the book in this convesation looking at amongst other ideas the potential of rituals in secular life and the need for modern day non-religious 'saints' or people to look up to as everyday heroes. One of De Botton's for example is Warren Buffett.

Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and now lives in London. He is a writer of essays that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.'  He’s written on love, travel, architecture and literature. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries. Alain also started and helps to run a school in London called The School of Life, dedicated to a new vision of education.

Alain started writing at a young age. His first book, Essays in Love [titled On Love in the US]was published when he was 23. In 1997 he published his best-selling first non-fiction book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, based on the life and works of Marcel Proust. This was followed by The Consolations of Philosophy in 2000. In this, de Botton attempts to demonstrate how the teachings of philosophers such as Epicurus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Seneca, and Socrates can be applied to modern everyday woes such as unpopularity, feelings of inadequacy, financial worries, broken hearts, and the general problem of suffering. The book has been both praised and criticized for its therapeutic approach to philosophy. His next work was The Art of Travel looking at themes in the psychology of travel: how we imagine places before we see them, how we remember beautiful things, what happens to us when we look at deserts, stay in hotels, and go to the countryside.

Then in Status Anxiety (2004), de Botton examines an almost universal anxiety that is rarely mentioned directly: what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. In The Architecture of Happiness (2006), he discusses the nature of beauty in architecture and how it is related to the well-being and general contentment of the individual and society. He describes how architecture affects people every day, though people rarely pay particular attention to it.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009) is a survey of ten different jobs, including accountancy, rocket science and biscuit manufacture, which includes two hundred original images and aims to unlock the beauty, interest and occasional horror of the modern world of work.In August 2009, de Botton replied to a competition advertised among British literary agents by BAA, the airport management company, for the post of "writer-in-residence" at Heathrow Airport. The post involved being seated at a desk in Terminal 5, and writing about the comings and goings of passengers over a week. De Botton was duly appointed to the position. The result was the book, A Week at the Airport, published by Profile Books in September 2009. The book features photographs by the documentary photographer Richard Baker, with whom de Botton also worked on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

Olaf J. Olafsson is the author of several novels, including Absolution (Pantheon, 1994), The Journey Home (Pantheon, 2000), and Walking Into The Night (Pantheon, 2003), as well as a collection of short stories, Valentines (Pantheon, 2007). He was born in Reykjavik, Iceland and studied as a Wien Scholar at Brandeis University, where he received his degree in physics.

He speaks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg on his most recent novel, 'Restoration'. 

When he is not writing novels, Olafsson is also Executive Vice President, International and Corporate Strategy of Time Warner, responsible for the company's corporate strategy and investments. Before this position, he was Vice Chairman of Time Warner Digital Media where he was responsible for developing strategic business plans for Time Warner's diverse digital media businesses and identifying emerging growth opportunities for the company in the digital realm. 

Previously, as founder, president and chief executive officer of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Inc., a unit of Sony Corporation established in 1991, Olafsson built and managed its businesses in the United States and Europe. During his six-year tenure, he directed the worldwide operations of Sony's entertainment software and hardware divisions and was responsible for the introduction of the acclaimed PlayStation. He held several other positions at Sony, having begun his career at the company in 1986.

In this interview, KGNU’s Claudia Cragg speaks with Thrity Umrigar about her latest novel, ‘The Space Between Us’. In this, “Umrigar illustrates India’s national identity crisis over the past 40 years through four friends who reconnect in this absorbing novel. Divorcée Armaiti is living in America with a daughter at Harvard when she’s given six months to live. Her last wish is to see her three best friends again—Laleh, Kavita, and Nishta, all in Bombay. In college, as idealistic Communists, they’d been inseparable, but now they’re barely in touch. Kavita is a successful architect, Laleh a wife and mother, and none of them have heard from Nishta in years. When they finally find her beneath a burkha in a strict Muslim neighborhood, it becomes clear that Nishta’s husband, Iqbal, a fellow university idealist turned fundamentalist, will be the biggest obstacle to fulfilling Armaiti’s final desire. Umrigar is never shy in her portrayal of a divided India, deftly pinpointing major issues facing the country today and tracing them through a legacy of cultural death and rebirth. Armaiti’s ruminations on unexpectedly encountering the end of one’s life and Kavita’s struggle to live openly as a lesbian despite supportive friends act as strong secondary narratives. Though none of the major story elements Umrigar employs are remotely fresh, her characters make this a rewarding novel.” – Publishers’ Weekly, Jan. 2012

Umrigar was born in Mumbai and emigrated to the US when she was 21. She is a journalist and novelist of, as well as the novel under discussion here, Bombay Time, and The Weight of Heaven. She has written for the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, among other newspapers, and regularly writes for The Boston Globe's book pages. She is currently assistant professor of English at Case Western Reserve University where she teaches creative writing and literature. She was a winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. in English and lives in Cleveland,Ohio.

Photo: copyright Jeannette Palsa (used with kind permission).

www.jpalsaphotography.com/

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(The TRAC research paper under discussion in this interview is 'Criminal Prosecutions for Financial Institution Fraud. Also mentioned is their recent Immigration Report, 'ICE Targets Fewer Criminals in Deportation Proceedings'). 

'David Burnham -- a writer, investigative reporter and researcher -- is the co-founder and co-director with Professor Susan A. Long of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). For the last three decades he has specialized in the critical examination of numerous government enforcement bureaucracies including the New York Police Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Environmental Enforcement Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department.

Among the stories Burnham developed while with The New York Times (1968 - 1986) was a police corruption series in the early 1970s that ultimately resulted in major governmental reforms and the movie Serpico. As a reporter in the paper's Washington bureau, he focused on privacy issues and the shortcomings of federal regulation, including those of the Atomic Energy/Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Karen Silkwood was on her way to give Burnham information about the manufacture of faulty fuel rods by the Kerr Mcgee Corporation when she died in a car crash.

Burnham has also written several books (The Rise of the Computer State (1983), A Law Unto Itself:Power, Politics and the IRS (1990) Above The Law (1996) and numerous magazine articles. In 1989, he became the Washington-based co-director of TRAC, a data-gathering, research and data-distribution organization associated with Syracuse University, as well as an associate research professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The goal of TRAC, where Burnham now works with his colleague and co-found Professor Susan B. Long, is to provide the public and members of the oversight community -- reporters, public interest groups, Congressional committees, scholars and others -- with the comprehensive performance data they need to hold federal investigative and regulatory agencies accountable. TRAC has been supported by Syracuse University, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Knight Foundation, the New York Times Company Foundation, the Open Society Institute and numerous news organizations, advocacy groups, scholars and lawyers.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) is a non-profit, non-partisan research data center at Syracuse University. Established in 1989, TRAC strives to improve the ability of the American people to independently assess the fairness and effectiveness of the federal government.

■ Methods. TRAC achieves its mission by: (1) using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain administrative data about the daily operations of government; (2) validating and analyzing this information; (3) building computerized knowledge bases; (4) publishing analytical reports, and (5) disseminating these resources through the web (http://trac.syr.edu).

■ Users. The information provided by TRAC, available nowhere else, has attracted an impressive range of users:

▪ Reporters writing about tax enforcement, the environment, terrorism, immigration, official corruption, corporate crime, federal staffing and spending, police brutality, computer fraud, and hundreds of other subjects have found TRAC data essential. Paid subscribers to our TRACFED services now range from The New York Times and the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, and from CNN to NPR and the AP.

▪ Numerous governmental bodies—including the U.S. Supreme Court, House and Senate committees such as the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, the House Government Operations Committee, the House Joint Committee on the Department of Homeland Security, the General Accountability Office, and Inspector General offices—have used TRAC data in their official oversight activities.

▪ Public advocacy groups with widely varied interests—Human Rights Watch, the National Rifle Association, Heritage Foundation, Center for Public Integrity, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Morality in Media and the Alliance For Justice—have strengthened their reports and studies with authoritative government data provided by TRAC.

▪ Millions of US citizens—concerned about how the government is meeting its essential responsibilities—have come to study TRAC’s special reports on protecting the nation against terrorism, priorities at the IRS and the FBI, Homeland Security staffing, and other subjects.

TRAC’s data and reports may be found at the preceding link.

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Historian Philip Eade talks here to Claudia Cragg about his gripping biography of the early life of Prince Philip, published to coincide with the 90th birthday of the Queen's husband. (To listen to the interview, click on the 'Pod' icon, above left).

Married for more than 60 years to Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip is the longest-serving royal consort in British history. However, while he is still one of the most recognisable figures in public life, his origins remain curiously shrouded in obscurity.

Eade explains here how in ‘Young Prince Philip’ (the first book written with a focus exclusively on his pre-coronation life) the Prince had an extraordinary upbringing in Greece, France, Nazi Germany and Britain. Although he inhabited what many would consider a colourful milieu (just read his extraordinary genealogy) he was beset by continual turbulence and a succession of family tragedies.

The book examines the formative psychological effects of having a mother who was born deaf and was committed to a psychiatric clinic when Philip was just nine, and a father who was so traumatised by his treatment at the hands of Greek revolutionaries that he later left his young son to be brought up by his wife’s family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens, just at the moment Philip needed him most.

Nevertheless, there emerged from this unsettled background a character of singular vitality and dash – self-confident, capable, famously opinionated and devastatingly handsome. Girls fell at his feet, and the princess who would become his wife was smitten from the age of 13. Yet together with considerable charm and intelligence, the young prince was also prone to volcanic outbursts and to putting his foot in it. Detractors perceived in his behaviour emotional shortcomings, a legacy of his traumatic childhood, which would have profound consequences for his family and the future of the monarchy.

The book is published to coincide with the Prince’s 90th birthday and contains new material from interviews, archives and film footage, ‘Young Prince Philip’.

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"A remarkable man on many levels, Sam Brower is the real deal. Readers are apt to find his firsthand account of bringing Warren Jeffs to justice both extremely disturbing and absolutely riveting."-Jon Krakauer, from the foreword to Brower's book 'Prophet's Prey'.

In this interview with Claudia Cragg, Brower discusses his book in which the private investigator who cracked open the case that led to the arrest of Warren Jeffs. He tells the tale of the maniacal prophet of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) in a horrifying story of how, Sam Brower says, "a rogue sect used sex, money, and power disguised under a facade of religion to further criminal activities and a madman's vision".

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According to Campaign Manager, Jesse Lava, of BraveNewFoundation.org’s campaign, ‘Who Are The One Percent?’inequality in the US has ballooned over the last three decades as some of the wealthiest Americans have enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else. Here KGNU’s Claudia Cragg talks to Lava to learn more.

If you go to their website, you can answer give your answer to the question ‘Who are the worst offenders?’

All submissions will then be compiled and a vote will be held to decide which will be exposed on the Brave New Foundation site. The campaign revolves around just two criteria: one, nominees have to come from the wealthiest 1 percent, meaning they must have a net worth of over US$9 million, and they have to be seen to be using their wealth and power to keep down the other 99%.

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Andrew Lam is the award-winning author of 'Perfume Dreams' and 'East Eats West', authoritative novels on life in the Vietnamese diaspora. He is also a long time NPR commentator as well as a passionate activist working to end the trafficking of women around the world. Here Claudia Cragg speaks with him, and also with Betsey Coleman (a well known Denver teacher), on the importance of Lam's work in America today

Lam was born in 1964 in South Vietnam to a family of wealthy landowning farmers. The author says he led a ‘privileged life’ as the son of (South Vietnamese) General Lâm Quang Thi  of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam The General, himself a prolific author, comes from a family of Cao Dai followers, while his grandmother was a Roman Catholic.

Before leaving Vietnam, Lam attended Lycée Yersin in Dalat but fled for Guam  with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975. He attended the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in biochemistry only to abandon plans for medical school and ente a creative writing program at San Francisco State University. While still in school, he began writing for the Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

An acclaimed PBS documentary, produced by WETA, told three stories of Americans returning to their ancestral homelands, including of Lam's return to Vietnam He is currently the web editor of New America Media. He is also a journalist and short story writer. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

My Father's Army Uniform by Andrew Lam

"Letter to a Vietnamese cousin: Should you come to America?", December 22, 2002

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Russell Banks is a prolific novelist who is never afraid to tackle tough, controversial issues in his writing. His 1985 novel Cloudsplitter was about the possibilities for anarchy and his Rule of the Bone featured drug dealing and paedophilia. Banks is president of the ‘Cities of Refuge North America’ and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into 20 languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards.

Banks says he became interested in the lives of convicted sex offenders after reading newspaper stories about their difficulties in finding a place to live once they leave prison. Offenders have to register with the authorities and neighbours have to be notified and they are usually banned within cities from living anywhere near children (a stipulation that, of course, drastically reduces their housing possibilities). In Miami, for example, where Banks’ latest novel is set, sex offenders are not allowed to live within 2,500 of anywhere that children may congregate. The result is that many end up under a Miami causeway, a place known to Banks and which serves as the backdrop of the novel.

Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Banks about this newest work, Lost Memory of Skin. 

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Claudia Cragg talks here with Professor Immanuel Wallerstein who first became interested in world affairs as a teenager in New York City when he was particularly interested in the anti-colonial movement in India at the time. He attended Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1951, an M.A. in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1959, and subsequently taught until 1971, when he became professor of sociology at McGill University. As of 1976, he served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY) until his retirement in 1999, and as head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations until 2005. Wallerstein held several positions as visiting professor at universities worldwide, was awarded multiple honorary degrees, intermittently served as Directeur d’études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998. During the 1990s, he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. The object of the commission was to indicate a direction for social scientific inquiry for the next 50 years. In 2000 he joined the Yale Sociology department as Senior Research Scholar. In 2003 he received the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association.

Apart from countless academic papers, Professor Wallerstein's published work includes:-

The Modern World System (with many updates) Academic Press 

The Capitalist World Economy (1979) Cambridge University Press

Historical Capitalism With Capitalist Civilization (1996) W. W. Norton & Co. 

Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World System (1991) Cambridge University Press

The Essential Wallerstein (2000) New Press

The End of the World as We Know It: Social Sciences for the 21st Century (1999) Univ of Minnesota Press

The Decline of American Power (2003) New Press

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Author Francine Prose talks with Claudia Cragg her latest novel set in the aftermath of  9/11. My New American Life offers a vivid, darkly humorous, bitingly real portrait of a particular moment in history, when a nation's dreams and ideals gave way to a culture of cynicism, lies, and fear. Beneath its high comic surface, the novel is a more serious consideration of immigration, of what it was like to live through the Bush-Cheney years, and of what it means to be an American.

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Tahmima Anam  (born 1975) is a Londoner and a Bangladeshi writer and novelist. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray in 2007 and was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Anam comes from an illustrious literary family in Bangladesh. Her father Mahfuz Anam is the editor and publisher of The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Bangladesh's most prominent English-language newspaper. Her grandfather Abul Mansur Ahmed was a renowned satirist and politician whose works in Bengali remain popular to this day

Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh but she grew up in Paris, New York City, and Bangkok, largely due to her father’s career with the Unicef. After studying for her undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College she turned to anthropology earning a PhD from Harvard.

She was inspired to write her first novel (2007) “A Golden Age”, she says, by her parents who were freedom fighters during the Bangladesh Liberation War. For that work, she stayed in Bangladesh for two years and interviewed hundreds of war fighters. She talks here with KGNU’s Claudia Cragg about her second novel ‘A Good Muslim’, the second in what Anam says is now to be a trilogy.

The framing narrative of Eric Poole’s memoir Where’s My Wand? One's Boy's Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting, is that of a young boy who hasn’t yet figured out that he’s gay. To survive, he becomes obsessed with TV pop culture (particularly with 'Bewitched's Endora' suffers from his parents’ neuroses, and believes he has magical powers that enable him to survive the traumas of growing up. KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with him here about his journey. 

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Here KGNU’s Claudia Cragg meets poet and legendary feminist author of the 1970s ‘Fear of Flying’ for a lunchtime interview in New York to discuss Jong’s opus as a whole and an anthology she has just edited ‘Sugar in My Bowl’. The lively ambience provided excellent cover for a frank discussion of, among other topics, Jong’s invention of the ‘Zipless “Banana' (well, they had to say that since the FCC does not of course allow ****.) The interview itself, though, is not explicit.

In "Sugar in My Bowl", Erica Jong and a host of prominent female voices answer the question, What do women want? in essays that explore our fascination with sex and the realm of female desire - what it is, what sparks it, and what satisfies it.

The revelations are as varied as the writers. Daphne Merkin celebrates beautiful male bodies. Jennifer Weiner explores sex and death. Min Jin Lee pairs sex and racism. And Gail Collins offers an amusing take on the anti-sexuality of a Catholic education. Here, too, are the voices of a younger generation who reveal attitudes far more reserved than their liberated mothers. From wild nights to the innocence of inexperienced youth, "Sugar in My Bowl" explores women's sexuality with daring and candor, challenging us to examine ourselves and our own desires.

As Jong writes, 'The truth is-sex is life-no more, no less. As many of these stories demonstrate. It is the life force. If we attempt to wall it off in a special category of its own, we make it dirty. By itself, it is far from obscene. It is just a part of life-the part that continues it and makes it bloom.

Contributors include: Karen Abbott; Anne Roiphe; Jessica Winter; Jann Turner; Julie Klam; Susan Kinsolving; Susie Bright; Fay Weldon; Linda Gray Sexton; Elisa Albert; Barbara Victor; Daphne Merkin; Marisa Marchetto; Min Jin Lee; Honor Moore; Jennifer Weiner; Gail Collins; Liz Smith; Naomi Wolf; Rebecca Walker; Jean Hanff Korelitz; Eve Ensler; Meghan O'Rourke, and Rosemary Daniell.

Erica Jong’s Personal Website.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Jim Geary who, in October 1981, formed the first support group in the world for people with AIDS and served as The Shanti Project’s executive director in San Francisco for seven years. He developed the agency into an internationally acclaimed model of AIDS services.

Now he has recently released his memoir Delicate Courage which tells the story of his revolutionizing AIDS care and his "poignant crossing from joy to grief" as his lover faces his own AIDS diagnosis. Geary’s memoir concludes with journal entries he kept following his lover’s passing which are interwoven with "after-death" communications he believes he has shared with his now deceased partner of 20 years. 

The conversation begins with Geary’s recollection of his early activism to protest The Briggs Initiative and the emotional onslaught of the assassinations in San Francisco of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone which coincided with the Jonestown "massacre" in which many San Francisco residents took their own lives. [See also, Sean Penn's 'Milk'].

You can read more about Geary at www.delicatecourage.com

Ann Patchett has dazzled readers with her award-winning books, including The Magician's Assistant and the New York Times bestselling Bel Canto. She speaks here with Claudia Cragg about her latest novel, State of Wonder, a provocative and ambitious narrative set deep in the Amazon jungle.

Patchett writes of Marina Singh who gave up a career as a doctor after botching an emergency delivery as an intern, opting instead for the more orderly world of research for a pharmaceutical company. When office colleague Anders Eckman, sent to the Amazon to check on the work of a field team, is reported dead, Marina is asked by her company's CEO to complete Anders' task and to locate his body. What Marina finds in the sweltering, insect-infested jungles of the Amazon shakes her to her core. The team is headed by esteemed scientist Annick Swenson, the woman who oversaw Marina's residency and who is now intent on keeping the team's progress on a miracle drug completely under wraps. 

Marina's jungle odyssey includes exotic encounters with cannibals and snakes, a knotty ethical dilemma about the basic tenets of scientific research, and joyous interactions with the exuberant people of the Lakashi tribe, who live on the compound. In fluid and remarkably atmospheric prose, Patchett captures not only the sights and sounds of the chaotic jungle environment but also the struggle and sacrifice of dedicated scientists. 

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Claudia Cragg speaks in this interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times’s chief mergers and acquisitions reporter and columnist whose book ‘Too Big To Fail” just aired in a televised version on Home Box Office.  Particularly topical here, is the discussion of Christine Lagarde (the French Minister of Economic Affairs, Finance and Indusry) who, following the scandalous demise of Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be in line to replace him as the IMF chief. 

Mr. Sorkin is also the editor of Deal Book, an online daily financial report he started in 2001. In addition, Sorkin is an assistant editor of business and finance news, helping guide and shape the paper’s coverage.

Sorkin, who has appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and on “Charlie Rose” on PBS, is a frequent guest host of CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” He won a Gerald Loeb Award, one of the highest honors in business journalism, in 2004 for breaking news. He also won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award for breaking news in 2005 and again in 2006. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. In 2008 and 2009, Vanity Fair named him to its “Next Establishment” list. He was also named to the Directorship 100, a list of the most influential people on the nation’s board of directors. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Friday, March 25th of this year was the 100th anniversary of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York that killed 146 young female workers.  This tragedy propelled reforms in the labor conditions of these sweatshops with laws enacted to protect workers. However, sweatshops even for legal immigrants are not necessarily a thing of the past as Jean Kwok relays in her memoir largely based on her life 'Girl In Translation' which has just come out in paperback.

Jean Kwok immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She won early admission to Harvard, where she worked as many as four jobs at a time, and graduated with honors in English and American literature, before going on to earn an MFA in fiction at Columbia.

Her debut novel Girl in Translation (Riverhead, 2010) became a New York Times bestseller. It has been published in 15 countries and chosen as the winner of an American Library Association Alex Award, a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, an Orange New Writers' title, an Indie Next Pick, a Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award nominee and the winner of Best Cultural Book in Book Bloggers Appreciation Week 2010. It was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. The novel was a Blue Ribbon Pick for numerous book clubs, including Book of the Month, Doubleday and Literary Guild. Jean lives in Leiden, in the Netherlands. with her husband and two sons. She talks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg.

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Ever a ready critic of what some call the 'US military industrial complex', Claudia Cragg was at first extremely hesitant to interview Rye Barcott on his memoir 'It Happened on the Way to War' (Bloomsbury). Before she read the book, it appeared as though it might possibly be just another warped US military propaganda message to justify the ever-burgeoning expansion of the US Armed Forces around the world in the guise of 'doing good'. 

CLICK POD BUTTON ABOVE TO LISTEN (RIGHT-CLICK TO SAVE)

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The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its second annual conference April 8-11, 2011 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. This was the same scene of the great conference that established a renewed global economic architecture as World War II drew to a close.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with INET's Robert A. Johnson who serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Global Finance Project for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in New York.

Johnson is an international investor and consultant to investment funds on issues of portfolio strategy. He recently served on the United Nations Commission of Experts on International Monetary Reform under the Chairmanship of Joseph Stiglitz.

Previously, Johnson was a Managing Director at Soros Fund Management where he managed a global currency, bond and equity portfolio specializing in emerging markets. Prior to working at Soros Fund Management, he was a Managing Director of Bankers Trust Company managing a global currency fund.

Johnson served as Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee under the leadership of Chairman William Proxmire (D. Wisconsin). Before this, he was Senior Economist of the US Senate Budget Committee under the leadership of Chairman Pete Domenici (R. New Mexico).

Johnson was an Executive Producer of the Oscar winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney, and is the former President of the National Scholastic Chess Foundation. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of both the Economic Policy Institute and the Campaign for America’s Future.

Johnson received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.S. in both Electrical Engineering and Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The program begins, however, with an introduction to INET by University of Colorado Denver's Professor Steven G. Medema. He is a recipient of a grant from the Institute to write an intellectual history of the Coase Theorem.

Exceptionally for a high level conference of this type, and at this level, an abundance of video material and documentation is freely available on INET's site. This radio interview includes only snippets from presentations by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Andrew Sheng (of the PRC's Regulatory Commission), and George Soros and Paul Volcker, moderated by The Financial Times' Gillian Tett. Viewing of the original longer form presentations is highly recommended.

KGNU Denver/Boulder's Spring Fund Drive fell slightly short in its goal to raise much-needed funds that keep the eclectic music and vital news (local, national and international) programming on air. If you feel that independent public radio deserves support (in this age of corporate, monolithic media), please consider a donation (however small) especially in the light of the potential slash and burn, politically motivated, cuts. Please visit: KGNU and give if you enjoy this podcast. Even a tiny donation to the station that makes this podcast possible is very gratefully received. Thank you.

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THIS IS AN UPDATE dated 1 April 2011 from Dr. Helen Caldicott, physician, paediatrician, and author of  'Nuclear Is Not The Answer' on the current situation in Japan.

The concerned citizens of Japan, through the auspices of some 160+ NGOs, are meeting with resistance from the Japanese government and, not surprisingly, with the operators of the stricken plant, The Tokyo Electric Power Company. 

To bolster citizen claims that their concerns must not only taken seriously but must be acted upon immediately, Caldicott spoke with Claudia Cragg to underscore the dire seriousness of the situation.

She points particularly to the futile measure of external gamma radiation using Geiger counters. It is, she says as an expert in the field, the internal emitters that cause concern, that is, even just one micro gram of radiation entering the lungs for example. This cannot be measured outside the body, she argues, only by a whole body measure using spectroscopy. There are some 200 such different isotopes which cannot be removed from the human body once it is engaged.

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Claudia Cragg speaks here with Leah McGrath Goodman about her new book 'The Asylum'.

"They were a band of outsiders unable to get jobs with New York's gilded financial establishment. They would go on to corner the world's multitrillion-dollar oil market, reaping unimaginable riches while bringing the economy to its knees.

Meet the self-anointed kings of the New York Mercantile Exchange. In some ways, they are everything you would expect them to be: a secretive, members-only club of men and women who live lavish lifestyles; cavort with politicians, strippers, and celebrities; and blissfully jacked up oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel while profiting off the misery of the working class. In other ways, they are nothing you can imagine: many come from working-class families themselves. The progeny of Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants who escaped war-torn Europe, they take pride in flagrantly spurning Wall Street.

Under the thumb of an all-powerful international oil cartel, the energy market had long eluded the grasp of America's hungry capitalists. Neither the oil royalty of Houston nor the titans of Wall Street had ever succeeded in fully wresting away control. But facing extinction, the rough-and-tumble traders of Nymex—led by the reluctant son of a produce merchant—went after this Goliath and won, creating the world's first free oil market and minting billions in the process. Their stunning journey from poverty to prosperity belies the brutal and violent history that is their legacy.

For the first time, The Asylum unmasks the oil market's self-described "inmates" in all their unscripted and dysfunctional glory: the happily married father from Long Island whose lust for money and power was exceeded only by his taste for cruel pranks; the Italian kung fu–fighting gasoline trader whose ferocity in the trading pits earned him countless millions; the cheerful Nazi hunter who traded quietly by day and ambushed Nazi sympathizers by night; and the Irish-born femme fatale who outsmarted all but one of the exchange's chairmen—the Hungarian emigre who, try as he might, could do nothing to rein in the oil market's unruly inhabitants.

From the treacherous boardroom schemes to the hookers and blow of the trading pits; from the repeat terrorist attacks and FBI stings to the grand alliances and outrageous fortunes that brought the global economy to the brink, The Asylum ventures deep into the belly of the beast, revealing how raw ambition and the endless quest for wealth can change the very nature of both man and market.

Showcasing seven years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Leah McGrath Goodman reveals what really happened behind the scenes as oil prices topped out and what choice the traders ultimately made when forced to choose between their longtime brotherhood and their precious oil monopoly".

Chang-rae Lee speaks here with Claudia Cragg about his latest novel 'The Surrendered'. [See below for an extract from the book]. The Korean-American author was born in Seoul, South Korea and emigrated to the US in 1968, aged two. He grew up in the New York City area and began his university education at Yale, before moving on to the University of Oregon, where he earned an MFA. His first novel, "Native Speaker" won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the American Book Award and the ALA Book of the Year Award.

Another much acclaimed work "A Gesture Life" grew out of four years work. It originally focused on the experience of a Korean comfort woman, and was told from her perspective. Chang-rae Lee went to Korea to interview surviving comfort women. He currently directs the creative writing program at Princeton University in the US. His 2004 novel Aloft features an isolated suburbanite forced to deal with his world.

Extract:

“It was June’s decision to climb atop the overcrowded train. Since that night she had often wondered if it would have been better to wait for the next one, or to have taken their chances on foot, or else steered the twins and herself far off the main road without any provisions and simply waited for the one merciful night that would lift them away forever. The twins would not have suffered and she would not be here now. For what had surviving all the days since gotten her, save a quelled belly? She had merely prolonged the march, and now that her hunger had an altogether different face, it was her heart that was deformed, twisting with an even homelier agony.”

It was three years ago that Claudia Cragg spoke with Dr Helen Caldicott about the inherent risks (or so it would now appear) in the Japanese nuclear industry. Now following a massive earthquake and the explosions that took place at the Fukushima plant Japan's nuclear crisis has become more complex than ever. The earthquake(s) is (are) tragic enough, but the proven record of incompetence with nuclear incidentis unforgiveable? This piece was part of Cragg's coverage of an 'incident' after a large earthquake at the world's largest nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Japan, and was first broadcast in July 2007. In this week's earthquake, no reports have (yet?) surfaced about damage at the K-K plant.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, physician and vocal anti-nuclear campaigner, comments in a phone interview from Australia with journalist Claudia Cragg on the recent 6.8 earthquake in Japan which hit the world's largest nuclear power plant at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. Caldicott believes the problems experienced in Japan recently also hold resonance for those in California living near the Diablo nuclear power plant. According to Japanese activisit Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action Japan, there is now concern in Kashiwazaki City and Kariwa Village that Tokyo Electric may be covering up evidence of extent of damage from the earthquake before a thorough investigation is undertaken. According to Mioko Smith, a Kashiwazaki legislator who has been inside the plant has said he is shocked at the extent of visible damage PLUS the rush Tokyo Electric is in to cover over/repair the damage before a fullinvestigation is undertaken.

In this program, Claudia Cragg speaks with prize-winning author David Vann about his work in general and about his novel 'Caribou Island'. The book was recently featured as the night-time serial on BBC Radio 4's 'Book at Bedtime'.

'Caribou Island' "is set in David Vann's native Alaska, amid the icy, glacier-fed lakes and the remote islands covered in alder and Sitka spruce. And it is on such island, far from any habitation, that Gary, a medievalist who fled to Alaska 30 years before with his young wife, Irene, in search of an unattainable idyll, is now determined to begin once again. He will build a simple cabin there and at last find peace. Irene joins him in his endeavour, understanding, unlike her husband, that there are costs." 

Caribou Island is the second major literary work from David Vann, whose ground-breaking first book, 'Legend of a Suicide' has become a best-seller around the world and has won numerous literary awards including the prestigious Prix Medicis Etranger for 2010.

KGNU Denver/Boulder is in the middle of the Spring Fund Drive to raise much-needed funds that keep the eclectic music and vital news (local, national and international) programming on air. If you feel that independent public radio deserves support (in this age of corporate, monolithic media), please consider a donation (however small) especially in the light of the potential slash and burn cuts in government subsidies. Please visit: KGNU and give if you enjoy this podcast. Even a tiny donation to the station that makes this podcast possible is very gratefully received. Thank you.

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The Homelessness Marathon is an annual 14-hour radio broadcast featuring the voices and stories of homeless people from around the United States. It features live call-ins all night long via a national toll-free number and the programming is made available for free to all non-commercial radio, and some TV stations around the USA, on the internet and even internationally. Jeremy Weir Alderson is both founder and prime mover of the Marathon.

On the Homelessness Marathon, the producers talk to many different kinds of people who hold any number of  different views about how to end homelessness. In so doing, a wide diversity of opinion is presented, as well as the stand of the organizers themselves.

Behind the effort is at core the idea that the elimination of poverty is a moral duty for society. They believe that fulfilling this duty makes for a better society and that there are many ways to fulfill this duty, but that all of them should be guided by these principles.

The archives of this year's event - and of all preceding years' events back to 1998 - can be found HERE. If you are unable to listen in real time, there is a wealth of downloadable audio available right there for when you are. 

The interview attached here in this podcast is only one very tiny part of this year's event, an interview with two guests at Denver's daytime residence for the homeless, The St. Francis' Center, and with that entity's Executive Director, Tom Luehrs.

It was back in 1981 that Claudia Cragg fell, by chance as the journalist that she had then been since 1975  (and at that point as a feature writer with the Hong Kong South China Morning Post) into the unbelievably happy position of interviewing interesting people as a profession. And, since that time, she says she has had to pinch herself repeatedly when sitting talking with someone fascinating one on one.

In all that time, though, few people stand out for her as much as the subect of this radio interview, the author Azar Nafisi.

This interview was conducted at the beginning of 2009 but still strikes a profound chord so it is now being shared here on this blogcast. Sadly since then, little has changed in Iran or in Iran-US relations.

Azar Nafisi is a best-selling author, an English Literature professor, and the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran (1961–1963) who was the youngest man ever appointed to the post up to that time. She was born in Iran in the late 1940s and speaks here with Claudia Cragg about her autobiography, 'Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (2008) which discusses her relationship with her parents intermingled with the decades of political upheaval in Iran, including her father's incarceration under the Shah on trumped-up charges of financial irregularities. 

After her education abroad, Nafisi returned to her home in Iran in 1979 where for a brief time she taught English Literature at the University of Tehran. But, in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi became increasingly restless with the stringent rules imposed upon women by her country's new rulers. She longed for the freedom that she believed women in some countries took for granted, which women in Iran had now lost as the Khomeini regime enacted laws curtailing women's rights.

So it was that, in 1995, that she found herself in Iran no longer able to teach English literature properly without attracting the scrutiny of the faculty authorities, so she gave up her post at the university, and instead invited seven of her female students to attend regular meetings at her house, every Thursday morning. They studied literary works including some considered controversial in post-revolutionary Iranian society such as Lolita alongside other works such as Madame Bovary. She also taught novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. But then, on June 24, 1997 Nafisi felt compelled to leave Iran, once again. She moved to the United States, where she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, (2003), a book where she describes her experiences as a secular woman living and working in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the book, she declares "I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me."

This book that came out of these teaching experiences in The Islamic Republic has been translated into 32 languages. It was on the New York Times Bestseller list for 117 weeks, and has won numerous literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, and the Europe based Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature.

For some time  now, Nafisi has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and serves on the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, a United States nongovernmental organization (NGO) which conducts research and advocacy on democracy.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Simon Winchester about his latest work of non-fiction, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. In this interview, he discusses those facets of the book that deal with climate change and global warming, ecology, the United States before Columbus, the parallels with space exploration and the Human Genome project, all as they relate to The Atlantic.

"Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Spanning the ocean's story, from its geological origins to the age of exploration, from World War II battles to today's struggles with pollution and overfishing, Winchester's narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring".

Winchester's book relates that, tilll a thousand years ago, few humans ventured into the Atlantic or imagined traversing its vast infinity. But once the first daring mariners successfully navigated to its far shores—whether they were Vikings, the Irish, the Basques, John Cabot, or Christopher Columbus in the north, or the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south—the Atlantic swiftly evolved in the world's growing consciousness of itself as an enclosed body of water. Soon it became the fulcrum of Western civilization. More than a mere history, Atlantic is an unforgettable journey of unprecedented scope by one of the most gifted writers in the English language.

It was in 1969 that Simon Winchester started his writing career when he joined The Guardian, for whom he was Northern Ireland Correspondent during The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror. He was then briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where he covered stories from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months. You might also like to listen to the 'Chatting Up a Storm' Claudia Cragg interview for KGNU with Simon Winchester on an earlier book 'Joseph Needham: The Man Who Loved China'. 

(Apart from being made universally available, free, in this podcast, many of these interviews are conducted for and are broadcast on KGNU Denver-Boulder. This is a public radio station, like all public radio stations in these hard economic times, in need of listener funding and support. Kindly consider making a donation to KGNU, however small, to the station (NOT to Claudia Cragg) to continue to make air broadcast  of this work possible).

His best known works prior to this include the best-selling Stalingrad and Berlin - The Downfall 1945 and recount the World War II battles between the Soviet Union and Germany. They have been praised for their vivid, compelling style, their treatment of the ordinary lives of combatants and civilians and the use of newly disclosed documents from Soviet archives.Beevor's works have been used as sources and credited as such in many recent documentary films about World War II. Another one of his best known works is Crete: The Battle and the Resistance for which he won the Runciman Prize, administered by the Anglo-Hellenic League for stimulating interest in Greek history and culture.

Beevor is a visiting professor at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. He is descended from a long line of women writers, being a son of "Kinta" Beevor (born Carinthia Jane Waterfield, 22 December 1911 – 29 August 1995), herself the daughter of Lina Waterfield, and a descendant of Lucie Duff-Gordon (author of a travelogue on Egypt). Kinta Beevor wrote A Tuscan Childhood. Antony Beevor is married to Hon. Artemis Cooper, daughter of Duff Cooper, granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper. He was educated at Winchester College and Sandhurst. He studied under the famous military historian John Keegan. Beevor is a former officer with the 11th Hussars who served in England and Germany for five years before resigning his commission. He has published several popular histories on World War II and the 20th century in general.

Professor Beevor has encountered criticism on his work in Russia. The Russian ambassador to the UK denounced the book as "lies" and "slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism". O.A. Rzheshevsky, a professor and President of the Russian Association of World War II Historians, has charged that Beevor is merely resurrecting the discredited and racist views of Neo-Nazi historians, who depicted Soviet troops as subhuman "Asiatic hordes"In an interview with BBC News Online, Rzheshevsky admitted that he had only read excerpts from Berlin: The Downfall 1945 and had not seen the book's source notes. He claimed that Beevor's use of phrases such as "Berliners remember" and "the experiences of the raped German women" were better suited "for pulp fiction, than scientific research." Rzheshevsky also defended Soviet reprisals against Germans, stating that the Germans could have expected an "avalanche of revenge".

Beevor responded to Russian criticism on his book Berlin: The Downfall 1945.  This criticism centres on the book's discussion of atrocities committed by the Red Army against German civilians – in particular, the extremely widespread rape of German women and female Russian forced labourers, both before and after the end of the war. Beevor stated however that German women were part of a society that supported Hitler and thus can't be seen as victims in the same way than Jews, Poles and Russians.

Beevor, though, stated that he was accused by the Russian media of being the "chief slanderer of the Red Army" for describing repeated and relentless rape by the Red Army of young women taken from the Soviet Union by the Nazis for slave labor. Beevor states that he used excerpts from the report of General Tsigankov, the chief of the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front, to cite the incident. He responded to Rzheshevsky by saying, "Professor O.A. Rzheshevsky even accused me of repeating Nazi propaganda, when in fact the bulk of the evidence on the subject came from Soviet sources, especially the NKVD reports in GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), and a wide range of reliable personal accounts." Beevor hopes Russian historians will take a more objective approach to material in their own archives which are at odds to the heroic myth of the Red Army as "liberators" in 1945.

"Other historians such as Richard Overy, (see here also an interview with Richard Overy on his latest book) a historian from King's College London, have criticised Russian "outrage" at the book and defended Beevor. Overy accused the Russians of refusing to acknowledge Soviet war crimes, "Partly this is because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Professor Richard Overy about his book '1939 - Countdown to War'. The Washington Post describes it as "an exceptionally lucid, concise and authoritative book which publishes tells the story of "the extraordinary ten days of drama that separated the conclusion of the German-Soviet [non-aggression] pact early in the morning of 24 August [1939] and the late afternoon of 3 September when France joined Britain in declaring war on Germany." On the day of the interview, the Professor had a very heavy cold but insisted most graciously in going ahead.

In the late 1980s, Overy was involved in a historical dispute with the Timothy Mason that mostly played out over the pages of Past and Present journal over the reasons for the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. Mason had contended that a "flight into war" had been imposed on Adolf Hitler by a structural economic crisis, which confronted Hitler with the choice of making difficult economic decisions or aggression. Overy argued against Mason's thesis, maintaining that though Germany was faced with economic problems in 1939, the extent of these problems cannot explain aggression against Poland and the reasons for the outbreak of war were due to the choices made by the Nazi leadership. For Overy, the problem with Mason's thesis was that it rested on the assumption that in a way not shown by records, information was passed on to Hitler about the Reich's economic problems. Overy argued that there was a difference between economic pressures induced by the problems of the Four Year Plan and economic motives to seize raw materials, industry and foreign reserves of neighboring states as a way of accelerating the Four Year Plan. Overy asserted that the repressive capacity of the German state as a way of dealing with domestic unhappiness was somewhat downplayed by Mason. Finally, Overy argued that there is considerable evidence that the German state felt they could master the economic problems of rearmament; as one civil servant put it in January 1940 "we have already mastered so many difficulties in the past, that here too, if one or other raw material became extremely scarce, ways and means will always yet be found to get out of a fix". 

Professor Richard Overy is a graduate of Caius College, Cambridge and was awarded a research fellowship at Churchill College, Overy taught history at Cambridge from 1972 to 1979, as a fellow of Queens' College and from 1976 as a university assistant lecturer. In 1980 he moved to King's College London, where he became professor of modern history in 1994. He was appointed to a professorship in Exeter University in 2004.

According to Bill Peschel, the world’s greatest authors are often canonized, raised up on pedestals and revered not only as artists, but people.  Certainly every true writing genius must have lived up to their great name, right?  

Peschel says that most of them did not. Writers Gone Wild, The Feuds, Frolics and Follies of Literature’s Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts and Misanthropes is a revealing book about some of the world’s greatest writers behaving badly, including such bizarre, but true tales as:

·       The night Dashiell Hammett hired a Chinese prostitute to break up S.J. Perelman’s marriage (and run off with his wife!)

·       The night a drunken Dylan Thomas dodged machine-gun bullets

·       Why Earnest Hemingway fought a book critic, a modernist poet, and Nazi subs (but not at the same time)

·       The near-fatal trip Katherine Anne Porter took while high on marijuana in Mexico

·       The day Virginia Woolf snuck onto a Royal Navy ship disguised as an Abyssinian prince

·       And much more!

10 March 2011 (Update) - Both Robert Scheer and the New York City-based magazine City Limits have been named the shared winners of the third annual Izzy Award for Special Achievement in Independent Media. The Izzy Award is named after legendary maverick journalist I.F. Stone, who launched I.F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and exposed government deception, McCarthyism and racial bigotry. The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College in New York cited Scheer for being "a beacon of journalistic independence who exposes both major parties on issues foreign and domestic, while giving voice to the disenfranchised," and City Limits for providing "a model of in-depth urban journalism that examines systemic problems, challenges assumptions and points toward solutions."

Robert Scheer speaks here with Claudia Cragg about his latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books), was released on September 7, 2010. Publishers Weekly wrote that the book "proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows.” 

Born in 1936, Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for, and is Editor in Chief of,  Truthdig, an online publication. His column is nationally syndicated throughout the US in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California.

While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.

During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.

After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.

Scheer has interviewed every president from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton. He conducted the noted 1976 Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter, in which the then-presidential candidate admitted to having "lusted" in his heart.^[2] In an interview with George H.W. Bush, the future president and then presidential candidate revealed that he believed nuclear war was "winnable." Scheer has profiled politicians from Californians Jerry Brown and Willie Brown to Washington insiders like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as entertainment figures like actor Tom Cruise.

Scheer has written eight other books, including a collection entitled Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals. In 2004, Scheer published The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq and made it to the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List. It was co-authored by his oldest son, Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor at Alternet.

In 2006 Scheer published Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton – and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush; in 2008 he published The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

(Apart from being made universally available, free, in this podcast, many of these interviews are conducted for and are broadcast on KGNU Denver-Boulder. This is a public radio station, like all public radio stations in these hard economic times, in need of listener funding and support. Kindly consider making a donation to KGNU, however small, to the station (NOT to Claudia Cragg) to continue to make air broadcast  of this work possible).

David Plouffe, author of 'Audacity To Win' (Penguin) is the American political strategist best known as the chief campaign manager for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign in the United States. A long-time Democratic Party campaign consultant, he is a partner with David Axelrod at the party-aligned campaign consulting firm AKP&D Message and Media, which he joined in 2000. "Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory, has recently come out in paperback and in this interview Plouffe discusses the management strategies that he used in the 2008 campaign. He initally issued a video challenge for Obama supporters to buy a copy of his book on December 8, 2009 in order to "Beat Sarah Palin" and her best-selling book for one day.

Plouffe, who talks here with Claudia Cragg, is credited with the campaign's successful overall strategy in the race (primarily against Senator Hillary Clinton) for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, to focus on the first caucus in Iowa and on maximizing the number of pledged delegates, as opposed to focusing on states with primaries and the overall popular vote. He is also credited by The New Republic for Obama's success in the Iowa caucus and for crafting an overall strategy to prolong the primary past Super Tuesday. The Chicago Tribune writes, "Plouffe was the mastermind behind a winning strategy that looked well past Super Tuesday's contests on Feb. 5 and placed value on large and small states.^" Plouffe also maintained discipline over communications in the campaign, including controlling leaks and releasing information about the campaign on its terms. Averse to publicity himself, Plouffe's control over the internal workings of the Obama campaign successfully avoided the publicly aired squabbles that frequently trouble other campaigns.

In May, 2008, David Axelrod praised Plouffe, stating he had "done the most magnificent job of managing a campaign that I've seen in my life of watching presidential politics. To start something like this from scratch and build what we have built was a truly remarkable thing." After winning the election on November 4, Obama credited Plouffe in his acceptance speech, calling him "the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the . . . best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.

Plouffe is currently working as an outside senior adviser to the Obama administration. He also signed with the Washington Speakers Bureau to give paid speeches and plans to engage in non-government consulting work. In May 2009, Plouffe delivered the Convocation address at Cornell University. In January, President Obama asked Plouffe to “give some extra time” to focus on the mid-term Congressional elections in November 2010.

(Apart from being made universally available, free, in this podcast, many of these interviews are conducted for and are broadcast on KGNU Denver-Boulder. This is a public radio station, like all public radio stations in these hard economic times, in need of listener funding and support. Kindly consider making a donation to KGNU, however small, to the station (NOT to Claudia Cragg) to continue to make air broadcast  of this work possible).

Scott Spencer is an author of many novels who has worked as a journalist publishing in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, GQ, O, The Oprah Magazine, and he is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Williams College and The Bard Prison Project. He is an alumnus of Roosevelt University and in 2004 was the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship. For the past twenty years, he has lived in a small town in the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York.

Spencer's best known novels are probably 'Endless Love' and 'A Ship Made of Paper. Both were nominated in the States for the National Book Award and the first sold more than two million copies and was made into a movie in 1981 by director Franco Zeffirelli. 'Waking The Dead' was also made into a film in 2000 produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon. *

Of 'A Ship Made of Paper', fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates gushed "Like Cheever, Spencer has imagined for his... infatuated lover melodramatic crises that verge on the surreal; like John Updike, Spencer is a poet-celebrant of Eros, lyrically precise in his descriptions of lovers' fantasies, lovers' lovemaking, lovers' bodies..."

The Wall Street Journal has written of Scott Spencer that "There are few novelists alive who use the English language as Spencer does... Every ache of feeling, every failed effort at restraint, every attempt at self-deception is captured in precise, beautifully cadenced prose."

* (n.b. Spencer's novel 'Men in Black' is not connected in any way with the Men in Black movies of that name).

(Coming soon, Claudia Cragg's interview - just recorded - with Barack Obama's Presidential Campaign Manager in 2008, David Plouffe, on his book The Audacity to Win - The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory).

In this radio interview with Claudia Cragg, Newsweek Senior Editor, Jonathan Alter, discusses his latest book which takes a close look at President Barack Obama's first year in office. He even goes so far as to grade the President's achievements, overall and specifically, on economic policy. Alter also answers questions as to perhaps why the President has not achieved all he set out to do, the stumbling blocks in his way, the tussle with General McChrystal and the question of the Afghan war, and the outcome, as Alter sees it, if disenchanted Democrats fail to turn out in this November's mid-term congressional elections.

Finally, the sale of Newsweek to new owners was being concluded, at almost exactly the time this interview took place. Some readers may wonder if a change of proprietor may lead to a change of tone and timbre in the content.

The following is an extract from the publisher of 'The Promise' on Simon & Schuster's website:

"Barack Obama's inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of "Change We Can Believe In" was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama's historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery." "What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and off-hours, using what his best friend called "a Rubik's Cube in his brain?" These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office." The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone—"feeling lucky"—who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who admitted that "I begged him not to do this."

Apart from being made universally available, free, in this podcast, many of these interviews are conducted for and are broadcast on KGNU Denver-Boulder. This is a public radio station, like all public radio stations in these hard economic times, in need of listener funding and support. Kindly consider making a donation to KGNU, however small, to the station (NOT to Claudia Cragg) to continue to make the broadcast of this work possible.

This is Part Two of a Kate Mosse interview special each half conducted two years apart (in Part One she discussed in detail with Claudia Cragg her first novel 'Labyrinth' in detail. In this interview, we hear Kate discussing her next novel with Claudia and, as she points out, several of the major characters in the first work make cameo appearances in the second. 

'Sepulchre' is set in 1891 and Léonie Vernier is a young girl living in Paris until an invitation from her uncle's widow Isolde prompts a journey to the Carcassonne region with her brother, Anatole. Unknown to her, her brother and Isolde have been carrying on an affair, and he is being pursued by Isolde's jealous former lover, Victor Constant. For a while, they live an idyllic lifestyle in the country. However, Constant discovers where they are staying and sets out to exact his revenge.

In the present day, an American, Meredith Martin, is in France to research the life of Claude Debussy for a biography she is writing. She is also trying to find out more about her biological mother. During the visit, she uncovers information that links her lineage to that of Léonie Vernier and discovers the truth about the events in Carcassonne during that period in history.

Most of the action takes place in the Domaine de la Cade, a stately home in Rennes-les-Bains, which in 1891 is owned by Léonie's deceased uncle Jules and his wife Isolde of whom Anatole later marries. The house in Meredith's timeline has been repurposed as an upmarket hotel. There are also parts of the book that are situated in Paris at the same time as well as neighbouring towns and villages in the Carcassonne and the City of Carcassonne.

The story features heavy reference to the occult and tarot readings, and the stories of Léonie and Meredith are brought together by a series of visions that are related to the tarot and a small church, known as a Sepulchre in the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade.

There are current talks with producers of making both Labyrinth and Sepulchre into films.

As of of September 2010, Kate Mosse is taking part on BBC1 in 'My Story, as a judge on a panel with other writers, Fergal Keane, Jenny Colgan, who have chosen 15 finalists from 7,500 entries. The winners will have their stories published.

This interview was conducted a few years ago with Kate Mosse not long after her first bestselling novel, Labyrinth was published. It became a New York Times bestseller and a popular and critical success on an international scale. It won the 'Best Read' category at the British Book Awards 2006, was #1 in UK paperback for six months — selling nearly two million copies — and was the biggest selling title of 2006. In 2007, it was named as one of the Top 25 books of the past 25 years by the bookselling chain Waterstone’s. It also hit the bestseller charts in various countries throughout the world, including the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Norway, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Translation rights to Labyrinth have been sold in thirty-eight languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew.

In this feature, Kate discusses how she became an author (having started her literary career on the other side, as a commissioning editor in a major UK publishing house), the establishment of the Orange Prize for Fiction and how and why she became a writer. She descries the dominance of old, white, males as author in the English canon. She discusses why she took lessons in fencing that she took to understand a 16 year old medieval Cathar girl, the female hero (sic.) of 'Labyrinth'. To those who would consider 'Labyrinth' a clone in Brown 'Grail' novel style, Mosse has a counter: the subject is as old as time and found in almost every post-Christian culture.

Be sure, also, to listen to Part II (sequetial to this in the podcast series) in which Kate discusses her second best selling novel, Sepulchre.

Tom Hayden, who columnist Dan Walters of The Sacramento Bee once called "the conscience of the Senate", is an American social and political activist, politician, and regular contributor to 'The Nation' who is perhaps most famous for his involvement in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s as well as in animal rights (The Hayden Act).

Hayden was elected to the California State Legislature in 1982, where he served for ten years in the Assembly before being elected to the State Senate in 1992, where he served eight years till the year 2000. He continues to serve as a member of the advisory board for the Progressive Democrats of America, an influential "grass roots" organization created to expand progressive political cooperation within the Democratic Party. With Medea Benjamin, he is also a co-founder of 'Code Pink'. 

Ahead of next week's primary elections in CA and with Colorado's own primaries now behind us, 'It's the Economy's' Claudia Cragg spoke with Hayden about the economy, the potential financial collapse of some states including California, Obama's stimulus package, small business and, importantly, why politicians on both sides continue stubbornly to refuse to debate the real 'elephant in the room', as Hayden puts it, the cost to the US and its people of its ongoing wars.

Hayden starts here by discussing that theme and the Pentagon's 'Long War' doctrine, "a 50 - 80 year war against Islamic terrorism" which he says comes at a huge cost to the economy and to the nation as a whole.

UPDATE - The following is reproduced here with the kind permission of Tom Hayden:

Published on Friday, November 12, 2010 by The Nation
When Will Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan Ever End?
by Tom Hayden

Persistent waffling on dates for American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan has eroded any remaining patience with the Obama White House among peace activists and voters, a majority of whom favors a timeline for US troop withdrawals.

Nancy Youssef of McClatchy reports that the White House has decided to de-emphasize its pledge to begin withdrawing US forces by next July, and adopt a new goal of withdrawing by 2014. The New York Times on Nov. 11 described the new policy as "effectively a victory for the military." Seeming to miss the point entirely, the White House immediately declared it was "crystal clear" that there will be no change to the July 2011 date for beginning the drawdown.

The credibility problem is that the White House has never defined the scale of its initial drawdown, lending credence to reports that the elusive pursuit of "success" will take years. Filling in the blanks is the only way the White House can repair this image crisis. For example, Obama could promise to withdraw 50,000 US troops between 2011-2012, a number that would dispel the aura of tokenism and weakness which now surrounds US policy. The moderate Afghanistan Study Group, whose members have ties to the White House, has proposed withdrawing 32,000 by next October and another 38,000 by the following July. The AFG has stated, "The U.S. cannot afford to continue waffling on its commitments, lest it lose what little credibility it has with Afghan people.  Reneging on the July deadline will also likely have adverse political effects given that war is already very unpopular .

The president is expected to clarify his goals at a NATO conference this week. America's leading military partner, the United Kingdom , with some 9,500 troops, has already floated 2014 as the deadline for its troop departure. Canada , France , Italy , Poland , Sweden and the Netherlands , whose combat troops total a combined 14,850, are all in the process of withdrawing by 2014 at the latest.

The projected costs of another three years are staggering and rarely reported. Assuming the current pattern of American casualties and costs through 2012, followed by a fifty percent reduction in those figures in 2013-14, Pentagon data reveals the following:

Oct. 2001-Nov. 2010: Americans killed, 1378; Americans wounded, 9,256; direct taxpayer costs, $364 billion.

2011 projection: 450 more Americans killed, bringing the cumulative total to 1,850; 5,000 more Americans wounded, bringing the cumulative total to 14,800; another $113 billion in direct taxpayer costs, bringing the cumulative total to $503 billion.

2012 projection: at present rates, the cumulative death toll will become 2,300, the cumulative wounded number will become 15,300; and the cumulative budget cost will become $616 billion.

2013-14 projections [assuming a fifty percent reduction]: another 450 killed over two years, bringing the total to 2,750; another 5,000 wounded over two years, bringing the total to 20,300; another $113 billion over two years, bringing the total to $728 billion.

In plainer terms, the projected American casualties and costs in Afghanistan alone will double in the next three years from present levels.

According to the current Foreign Affairs , the war in Afghanistan is now more than twice expensive as Iraq [Altman-Haass, "American Profligacy and American Power", Nov.-Dec. 2010, p. 31].

Those numbers do not include Pakistan, Yemen or tens of billions in the growing US intelligence budget. Nor do the tax dollar figures include rising indirect costs such as veterans' health care. Nor are the casualties civilians known or estimated.

Perhaps the greatest policy question is what the American troops are fighting for. According to the CIA, there are no more than 100 Al Qaeda militants lingering in Afghanistan. Their sanctuaries have moved to Pakistan and CIA officials have recently said, "the Yemeni cell posed an even more dangerous threat to the United States than the Qaeda headquarters in Pakistan." [NYT , Oct. 17, 2010]

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, American troops are fighting and dying to prop up an Afghanistan regime that is riddled with corruption, lacks a sufficient army to defend itself, and maintains power by fraudulent elections.

The cruel pathos of the American situation is summed up in two options sketched by Gideon Rose, the new editor of Foreign Affairs, the organ of the Council on Foreign Affairs:

First, "at best, Afghanistan could become another Iraq, with strong late innings gaining the United States the opportunity to draw down its forces gradually" or, second, "it could be a replay of Vietnam, with the White House deciding to pull the plug on a thankless struggle in a strategically marginal country." A third option is ignored, that of another massive terrorist attack on the US provoked by the drone attacks and night raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [NYT , Nov. 5, 2010]

There is another cost, too. The constant drain in blood and taxes for the long wars may soon become a terminal drain on any hopes for the Obama presidency.

Tom Hayden is a former state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice and environmental movements. He currently teaches at PitzerCollege in Los Angeles. His books include The Port Huron Statement [new edition], Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader .

20 April 2011 UPDATE: 

Tragically, leading British photojournalist Tim Hetherington (see story below) has been killed while covering the fighting in the Libyan city of Misurata, the UK Foreign Office has confirmed. His vitally important work will be greatly missed. 

Sebastian Junger is an author and war correspondent whose 1995 novel 'Perfect Storm' was made into a movie and prompted comparisons of his work to that of Ernest Hemingway.

Having been hailed as a great new literary voice, Junger then seemed to transition to war correspondent and that may be, as he discusses here, after an encounter between his achilles tendon and a chainsaw up a tree. He was working in earlier days as a high flying arborist.

Shortly after that incident when he came face to face with the ghastly grizzle of his exposed foot, Junger found himself in the middle of the Balkans covering the atrocities. Some say that Junger has since further metamorphosized both his work and persona, appearing recently as part of a national book tour on various 'Sunday talkies' with US Army Generals and war pundits. Here though Junger explains to Claudia Cragg what he considers to be the motivations for his work.

Junger's latest book 'War' is based on visits he made to eastern Afghanistan from June 2007 to June 2008. These despatches on assignment for Vanity Fair have also resulted in the film Restrepo (2010). Made with Brit. Tim Hetherington this documentary was produced from the time the two worked together in Afghanistan spending a year with one platoon in the Korangal Valley, billed as the deadliest valley in Afghanistan. The title of the film refers to the outpost where Junger was 'embedded', which was named after a combat medic, Pfc. Juan Restrepo, killed in action. To Junger, "It’s a completely apolitical film. We wanted to give viewers the experience of being in combat with soldiers, and so our cameras never leave their side. There are no interviews with generals; there is no moral or political analysis. It is a purely experiential film. 

Restrepo, which premiered on the opening night of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, won the grand jury prize for a domestic documentary.Junger self-financed the film, but then toward the end got National Geographic to fund the rest of the film.

(You may have noticed that recent interviews have been with predominantly male subjects. This reflects, not the interviewer's preference, but sadly the dirth of female subjects. Should you wish to hear an interview with a specific author or personality, please do email your suggestions to journalist@bigfoot.com).

In this interview, Dr. Matthew B. Crawford talks to Claudia Cragg about 'Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. This iconic book - bound to be as powerful as 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' was in its day - Crawford also explores why some jobs offer fulfilment while others leave us frustrated.

It answers the question as to why we so often think of our working selves as separate from our 'true' selves?

Over the course of the twentieth century, Dr. Crawford argues that we have separated mental work from manual labour, replacing the workshop with either the office cubicle or the factory line.

In this inspiring and persuasive book, he explores the dangers of this false distinction and presents instead the case for working with your hands. It will also force many a parent to question why today they are only pushing their kids hard towards academic (grade-based rote-learning, mulitple choice) success, turning them only into knowledge workers many of whom will be doomed to remain for an eternity on the very bottom of the pile.

The publishers believe that Dr Crawford "delivers a radical, timely and extremely enjoyable re-evaluation of our attitudes to work" and no doubt a great many listeners to this interview might well agree. 

Matthew B. Crawford majored in physics as an undergraduate, then turned to political philosophy (Ph.D. Chicago). His writings for The New Atlantis, A Journal of Technology and Society, bring the two concerns together, and consider how developments in the sciences influence our view of the human person. Currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, he also runs a small business in Richmond.

note: In the US, the book is known as 'Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work'.

.

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.

Fresh from the success of the 'Viva Palestina: Lifeline from Britain to Gaza' aid convoy - which took over 100 vehicles to Gaza from the UK, Member of Parliament, George Galloway has linked up on his US tour with the Vietnam veteran and peace campaigner, Ron Kovic, to launch a similar, but even larger venture from the States which will set off on its journey on the 4th July. And, as he explains in this interview to KGNU's Claudia Cragg, Galloway announced the initiative at a 1000-strong meeting in Anaheim, California, rounding off a packed-out, coast to coast speaking tour highlighting the Palestinian cause.

George Galloway is a Scottish politician and Member of Parliament for the Bethnal and Bow constituency. He started his political life in the Labour Party, but was expelled from it during the administration of then Prime Minster Tony Blair in October 2003 following controversial statements voicing his opposition to the war in Iraq. He is now a leading member of the Respect coalition (a group which he founded). He is an advocate of redistribution of wealth, greater spending on welfare benefits, and extensive nationalisation of large industries. He supports the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a practising Roman Catholic he is personally opposed to abortion, although he supports Respect's policy of promoting a woman's right to choose. He supported the equalisation of the age of consent for homosexuality. As a Labour MP he was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group.

Travel is, for a foreign correspondent as essential a tool as pen and paper, as well as these days a recording device and laptop. In order to work, we have to travel to a story and that involves a journey but that journey is rarely a pleasure. More often than not, we are spliced between holidaymakers also surviving economy on the way out, collapsing on the way home, and in between darting in and out of a cheap hotel to meet specific people only to find they may stubbornly refuse to talk.

For many years, the unorthodoxy of work of the writer, Sophie Calle, (b. 1953) has intrigued me especially on the issue of creativity and identity. In formal journalism, however, I have always been unequivocal that the artificial constructs she uses have no place. That is, unless like Calle you work for a open-minded, voyeuristic newspaper with a very progressive readership like 'Liberation' and I probably never will. The hallmark of her work, however, has been to impose an entirely arbitrary set of constraints to produce a work of creative non-fiction, the most famous being her Suite Venitienne (1979), The Hotel (1981, now in The Tate Collection) and Address Book (1983).

In the last of these works, she found a lost address book and constructed a narrative adopting the techniques more usually applied by a private investigator than by a journalist. The work caused enormous controversy for Liberation, and was saved only from a thorough damning because it is considered 'conceptual'. The consensus eventually concluded that the creative emphasis of this piece lies in the artistic idea itself, as opposed to just the finished artefact and its content. Calle is associated with the  Oulipo School (Mathews & Brotchie, 1998), the 'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle'. British poet, writer and academic Ian Monk is both an adherent and authority on the school. Classic Oulipo traits are clear in the work produced when Calle persuaded her mother to hire someone who would be invisible to her, yet photograph and note her every movement, she says, just 'to provide photographic evidence of (her) own existence'. .

In my personal opinion, Calle without fail always went too far for me but Intellectually and creatively, there was something worth emulating. The factor that has most influenced me here came from reading the 1988 essay of the late Jean Baudrillard (Leach, 2002, p 52). In this, he describes 'Suite Venitienne' in terms of a reciprocal loss of will on the part of both the pursued and the pursuer. This ruse would perhaps allow me to tease my non-fiction work into greater creativity and so I decided to apply this to a journey I was to take in October of last year. I would interview people entirely at random to produce a piece of creative non-fiction from a 10-day thousand-mile car trip that my husband and I took through the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (Should you wish to read the full Critical Commentary, it is available at this link)

Alberto Fujimori, the former Peruvian president who is now 70 years old, has finally been convicted of kidnapping and murder. He has been sentenced to 25 years in jail in what was described as a landmark ruling for human rights cases in Latin America.

A three-judge panel found the 70-year-old guilty of authorizing a military death squad during the state's "dirty war" against Maoist rebels in the 1990s.

Maria McFarland, a Human Rights Watch researcher who attended the trial said. "After years of evading justice, Fujimori is finally being held to account for some of his crimes,"

"With this ruling, and its exemplary performance during the trial, the Peruvian court has shown the world that even former heads of state cannot expect to get away with serious crimes."

Argentina, Chile and Colombia may also be watching this day as they come to terms with their own dark deeds of past history.

Fujimori during the trial repeatedly protested his innocence and said he deserved credit for saving Peru from anarchy.

He told the court, "I governed from hell, not the palace," and blamed his former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, for any counter-insurgency excesses.

Fujimori's daughter, Keiko, is a congresswoman and a leading contender for the 2011 presidential race and says that she plans to pardon her father just as soon as she can.

In this interview held at the beginning of Fujimori's trial more than 15 months ago, one of his victims - Gisela Ortiz who lost her brother, a student, as Fujimori waged the La Cantuta massacre - explained why she thought Fujimori should be brought to justice.

(N.B. this interview is with Gisela Ortiz, speaking in Spanish, with translation of her words by peace and human rights activist, Hayden Gore).

My younger son has just finished reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and commented that it was not only an extraordinary literary work but also, of course, a source for rare insight into the complications of mental illness. This reminded me  of a conversation (not so much a formal interview, you understand) I had a few years ago with the fabulous and extraordinary author, Joanne Greenberg, who as Hannah Green wrote I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

This work is a fictionalized depiction of Joanne Greenberg’s own treatment experience decades ago at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, during which she was in psychoanalytic treatment with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The book takes place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a time when Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson were establishing the basis for the interpersonal school of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, focusing specifically, though by no means exclusively, on the treatment of schizophrenia.

Greenberg has written that :-

"I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticisation that it underwent in the sixties and seventies when people were taking LSD to simulate what they thought was a liberating experience. During those days, people often confused creativity with insanity. There is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill."

(From the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy website)

At the time of recording, Joanne Greenberg's just published novel was 'Appearances'. In this conversation, she also discussed not just mental illness, but also creativity, the role of 'Underwood', how she creates her stories, how she writes 'sex', personal memories of a vicarious brush with Sylvia Plath, and a great deal more.

Claudia Cragg speaks here with 'Six-Word Memoirs' editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser who have once again brought readers a memorable collection that’s a diverse grab bag of writers—famous, obscure, gay, straight, single, married, divorced, and polyandrous, hailing from Mississippi to New York to California, Australia to Vietnam. This time, though, the subject is 'Love and Heartbreak'. One entry from sex-columnist Dan Savage sits alongside one by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hass. Supermodel Janice Dickinson dishes out six words in the brazen spirits she’s known for, while Chip Rowe—aka The Playboy Advisor—makes a surprising revelation to his millions of readers. The world's most famous divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, tells us, in six words, "Love almost always leads to heartbreak."

Since hitting the mainstream, the six-word form has been re-imagined countless times. From kindergarten through graduate school, teachers have brought the six-word storytelling exercise into their classrooms. A young girl in California ended her eulogy for her poker-loving grandma with a six-word summation of her life: “Look, I have a royal flush!” 

Six-word memoirs continue to pour into SMITH Magazine’s website every day and themes have emerged, from faith to hair to sex to food. By far the most common thread, however, is love. Passionate love, parental love, platonic love—it seems to be the most universally life-changing factor for storytellers of every age, background and worldview.

Josh Rushing is a former U.S. Marine captain and current Al-Jazeera English correspondent. He is familiar to many as the point man who helped sell the Iraq war to the American public as spokesman for United States Central Command (CENTCOM) during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He became famous for his appearance in the documentary Control Room, which documented his conversation with Al Jazeera correspondent Hassan Ibrahim.

In 2007, Palgrave Macmillan published Mission: Al-Jazeera, Rushing's memoir of his journey from a small town in Texas to the Marines to Al Jazeera English.

Nowadays, Rushing works as a correspondent and military analyst out of Al-Jazeera English's Washington, D.C., bureau. He covers a wide variety of international issues for Al-Jazeera English, but focuses primarily on U.S.-Middle Eastern relations about which he spoke with Claudia Cragg.

'Philanthrocapitalism', by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green is an examination of how today's leading philanthropists are revolutionizing the field, using, they believe,  new methods to have a vastly greater impact on the world.
In this book, you read that to philanthropists of the past, charity was often a matter of simply giving money away. For the philanthrocapitalists - the new generation of billionaires who are reshaping the way they give - it's like business. These "social investors", who are largely trained in the corporate world, are using big-business-style strategies and expecting results and accountability to match.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is leading the way: he has promised his entire fortune to finding a cure for the diseases that kill millions of children in the poorest countries in the world.

In this book, the authors examine this new movement and its implications. Proceeding from interviews with some of the most powerful people on the planet - including Gates, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, among others - they show how a web of wealthy, motivated donors has set out to change the world. Their results will have huge implications: In a climate resistant to government spending on social causes, their focused donations may be the greatest force for societal change in our world, and a source of political controversy.

Combining on-the-ground anecdotes, expert analysis, and up-close profiles of the wealthy and powerful, this is a fascinating look at a small group of people who will change an enormous number of lives.

I recently spoke with Matthew Bishop who, before joining 'The Economist', was on the faculty of London Business School, where he co-authored three books for Oxford University Press. He has served as a member of the Sykes Commission on the investment system in the 21st Century. He was also on the Advisors Group of the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005. He has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is a graduate of Oxford University.

More By Matthew
 
"I Want to Lose a Fortune"
 
"Fighting Global Poverty: Who'll be Relevant in 2020?"
 
"View from Davos: Bono Marketing His Red Badge of Virtue"
 

One privilege of being a journalist - and it IS a privilege - is the opportunity to ask questions when you meet really fascinating people. Recently we drove in convoy with a group of others from one end of Jordan to the other - from Aqaba, to The Red Sea, Jerash, The Dead Sea, Kerak, Bethany and Amman and more. It is a fabulous, hospitable country, full of warm lovely people with hugely interesting stories some of which will be brought to you here as well as broadcast over the air.

In the first of these, we came across a New Zealand-born woman, Marguerite van Geldermalsen, who was selling souvenirs among the lost boys and camels. She turned out to be a nurse who had travelled with a friend to Jordan in 1978 only to end up falling in love with a Bedouin and living in a cave, yes a cave, with him in Petra. She is now the author of a wildly successful book, 'Married to a Bedouin' and this is a taste of her story.

Marguerite's book is published by Virago Press and is widely available in paperback. Visit www.marriedtoabedouin.com for more info.

Diane Wilson is a 60-year old mother of five children, one of whom is autistic, as well as a fifth-generation shrimp fisher out of Seadrift, Texas. As an environmental activist, she has successfully taken on companies like Formosa Plastics and Alcoa, for their pollution of Lavaca Bay in the Gulf of Texas, as well as Union Carbide for its polluting plant in Bhopal, India. She is also a co-founder of 'Code Pink'.

In her first very successful memoir, 'An Unreasonable Woman', she explained how she was led into activism. Now she talks to KGNU's Claudia Cragg about her latest memoir, 'Holy Roller' published by Chelsea Green out of Vermont. This retells Wilson's life as a 9 year old child brought up in fundamental Evangelism, a religion which she then completely shunned, but which combined with her Grandfather's Cherokee mysticism made her, she says, the activist she is today.


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Poet and Activist Anne Waldman has been a vocal proponent for feminist, environmental, and human rights causes since the 1960s. She also established The Naropa School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, with the late Allen Ginsberg.

In the US Presidential Campaign, some of those who say they espouse feminism seem to now embrace the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate, Gov Sarah Palin from Alaska who is running alongside Senator John McCain. Claudia Cragg recently spoke with Ms Waldman about her new highly political CD, 'Matching Half' and a book to be published soon by Penguin, 'Manatee Humanity' and also on the meaning of feminism in US politics as she sees it (and whether or not Palin matches up to that standard). She also explores how she, as a feminist and activist, thinks people must contribute to the election and its successful outcome.

In this September 2009 interview, author Francine Prose talks with Claudia Cragg about 'Goldengrove', an emotionally powerful novel about adolescent love and loss. Focusing on a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister, this masterful coming-of-age work is radiant with the possibility of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life. At the center of Francine Prose's profoundly moving new novel is a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister. As her parents drift toward their own risky consolations, thirteen-year-old Nico is left alone to grope toward understanding and clarity, falling into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's enigmatic boyfriend.

Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them. She learns about the power of art, of time and place, the mystery of loss and recovery. But for all the darkness at the novel's heart, the narrative itself is radiant with the lightness of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life

The New York Times bestselling Prose is author also of a number of other works including Reading Like a Writer and A Changed Man. Prose was born April 1, 1947, Brooklyn, New York) and, since March 2007, she has been the president of PEN American Center. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991.

She sat on the board of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own Award. Her novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on collegecampuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

She is a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for the cinema by Nancy Savoca. Another, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.

8-8-88: Burma's Pro-Democratic Uprising and the Atrocities That Followed

Twenty years ago today the military dictatorship which continues to rule Burma brutally crushed a pro-democracy uprising known as "8-8-88" – killing an estimated 3,000 people in 6 weeks. Leaders of that 1988 student-led uprising have been imprisoned since last summer's widespread civic disturbances along with more than 1,000 other long term political prisoners including the opposition's National League for Democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate who remains under house arrest on the orders of leader General Than Shwe. On this anniversary of the Burmese Uprising, FSRN will travel to Thailand - where the largest number of Burmese refugees are located and hear from survivors of the massacre. Then we'll go to Berkeley, CA, home to many Burmese who also fled the violence. First, from Bangkok, Claudia Cragg reports.

Click here for newscast for Friday, August 8th, 2008 for the story which follows from Africa Jones in Berkeley, CA.

Today is the 20th anniversary of events that took place, with massive street demonstrations, on 8th August 1988 in Rangoon which was in the midst of a general strike.

Tens of thousands of protesters had turned out on to the streets, calling for democracy, human rights, the resignation of the government and an end to the centrally-run economic system. The demonstrations which had begun after a period known as 'The Rangoon Spring', began to spread to dozens of other places around the country.

The response from the authorities was brutal: thousands were arrested or killed by the police and army. The military established a new leadership body, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. The regime continues to this day led by General Than Shwe. The NLD (opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's independence leader Gen Aung San, continues under house arrest in Rangoon where she has mostly been held since July 1989.

Dr. Thein Lwin, (PhD), comes from a farming family in the Pegu area of Burma just 50 miles north of Rangoon, but he cannot return to Burma.

Like many other students who demonstrated against the military regime, he was thrown out of university in 1976, and was then arrested and imprisoned for his involvement with Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) from 1982-1984, and again in 1991. He eventually gained a degree and taught in a junior secondary school. But in 1993, under threat once more from the military regime, he escaped Burma and was granted political asylum in Germany, before studying education in the UK at Newcastle University's Centre for International Studies.

With Prospect Burma (www.prospectburma.org/) scholarship support, he gained an MEd in 1997 and a Doctorate in 2001 and started an initiative with the National Health and Education Committee of Burma (NHEC) - an exile organisation operating out of Chiang Mai. Now, though, he spends all his time  trying to improve the life of Burmese in refugee camps, and those internally displaced persons' coming in to Thailand from remote regions of Burma.

'A Prairie Home Companion' is Garrison Keillor's best known work, a very very long running radio series. In the autumn of 2007, Claudia interviewed him on his latest novel, 'Pontoon' and rather than leave it lying wasted on dusty audio shelves, it is posted here for you to share.

Joseph Needham and 'The Needham Question'. Well, the subject caused the most tremendous brouhaha in The New York Times last week (Simon Winchester, New York Times, Op Ed, May 15th, 2008). I can only think those who responded with such vitriol to Winchester knew absolutely nothing at all about Winchester and his work, nor anything about the subject of his new book. In this latest opus, the award-winning Foreign Correspondent, Simon Winchester returns with the remarkable story of the growth of a great nation, China, and the eccentric and adventurous scientist who defined its essence for the world in his multi-volume opus, 'Science and Civilization in China'.

In an interview with Claudia Cragg, Winchester relates how most of us know that the Chinese invented a great variety of objects and devices long before they were known of in the West. Not simply famous things like gunpowder and paper, but also harnesses for horses which had a huge effect on the West when they arrived.

Why, though, did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is the so-called 'Needham Question', after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it.

Needham was a British biochemist and was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy. In China, he is known mainly by his Chinese name Li Yuese He was also cited by the United States during the McCarthy era for his investigation into the use of illegal weapons by the US on the Koreans in the Korean War.

Winchester, The New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa is a writer and adventurer whose articles have appeared in such publications as the National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveler . He has now written well over a dozen books on travel and history.

Pulitzer Prizewinning American novelist, Russell Banks, is known for his portrayals of the interior lives of characters at odds with economic and social forces in novels such as Cloudsplitter, Affliction, and Continental Drift. He recently spoke with KGNU's Claudia Cragg about his latest novel 'The Reserve', as well as about his early life, about Hemingway's death, and about going to tea with Fidel Castro in Cuba.