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SUNDAYS AT EIGHT

Name: SUNDAYS AT EIGHT
Author: Brian Lamb
ISBN: 978-1-61039-348-5

25 YEARS OF STORIES FROM C-SPAN’S Q&A AND BOOKNOTES

edited by Brian Lamb ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 29, 2014

These richly detailed and forthright interviews offer unique perspectives on the inspirations and creativity of writers.

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Notable writers talk candidly about their lives and work.

Lamb (co-editor: The Supreme Court: A C-SPAN Book Featuring the Justices in their Own Words, 2010, etc.) and his C-SPAN staff have selected interviews from the past 25 years of Q&A and Booknotes, two long-running shows featuring conversations with authors of nonfiction. Edited into the form of cogent essays, these conversations reveal writers’ motivations for choosing their subjects, challenges in doing research and their own surprising discoveries. Readers are likely to recognize some of the more famous writers—e.g., historian David McCullough, who discusses 19th-century American artists who moved to Paris at a time when Europeans were flocking to the United States; British writer Simon Winchester, who talks about his first visit to America in 1963 and the “amazingly hospitable and generous” people he met; and journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who recalls the quiet, circumscribed childhood in southwest Ontario that fueled his insatiable curiosity. “When I got to college,” he says, “I realized that there was a virtually limitless amount of cool things to learn about the world.” Christopher Hitchens, in his final interview before his death, talks movingly about having esophageal cancer, the disease that killed his father, and his hope for bold new treatments. Several writers—Michael Lewis, Bethany McLean and Gretchen Morgenson—reflect on the financial crisis of 2007. Journalists Roger Mudd and Ken Auletta are among the writers who discuss the responsibilities of the media in contemporary society. In a section on post-9/11 America, Kenneth Feinberg, who worked to mediate claims from veterans exposed to Agent Orange, talks about his similar role as “Special Master” with authority to delegate funds to victims’ families. The experience, he says, changed him dramatically: “I’m much more fatalistic after 9/11. I don’t think I’ll ever plan more than two weeks ahead.”

These richly detailed and forthright interviews offer unique perspectives on the inspirations and creativity of writers.

Pub Date: April 29, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61039-348-5

Page Count: 496

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PRESIDENTS
by Brian Lamb & Susan Swain

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SUPREME COURT
edited by Brian Lamb ; Susan Swain ; Mark Farkas

- BOOK REVIEW
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
edited by Brian Lamb and Susan Swain

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.