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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