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.