Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation
Original airdate: May 16, 2008
People keep asking me about meeting Cokie Roberts. What does one say? She was lovely, had immaculate skin and was very concerned about my needs and desires for a drink. If there is one physical detail to mention it’s that she was much shorter than I expected. She’s probably 5’5”, maybe 5’6”.
The rest of the details are in the interview below.
Thanks again, for tuning in.
Liz
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I feel guilty. I conducted four interviews last week with the surprisingly stellar cast of the Junior League’s Book and Author Dinner. Despite reading all of the books, I was so entrenched in finishing the novels that I had little time to study the authors.
This is a copy and paste from Wikipedia…
“Rick Bragg (born July 26, 1959 in Piedmont, Alabama) won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1996 for his work at The New York Times. He credits his writing ability to the oral storytelling of family and friends in his childhood in the foothills of Appalachian Alabama. He has written two memoirs.”
I knew this part when I was speaking with him, what I didn’t know was this second part.
“On May 29, 2003, after serving a two-week suspension during an investigation that found Bragg passed off the research of stringers and interns as his own, Bragg resigned from the Times. The story which sparked the investigation was a story Bragg wrote about Florida Gulf Coast oystermen. He wrote a narrative first person story of how he experienced oystermen culture… Yet Bragg only spent one day in Apalachicola and totally relied on the research and interviews of other reporters which he passed off as his own.”
I am ashamed. I have failed you as a host and should have done more homework.
Rick was remarkably demure during our talk, you can hear it in the conversation. At the time, I was confounded by his demeanor- shy, very likable, charming in a sad-wet-dog type of way and not at all the overly confident charismatic man portrayed on the book jacket. He said he was extremely tired. Maybe he was waiting for me to throw the punch of, “What were you thinking?”
We all make mistakes, or take things like jobs for granted (see my apology above). I wonder if his long ode to his father in the third and final book of his series on his life in rural Alabama called “The Prince of Frogtown” is a side effect of the embarrassment he faced during the controversy he caused.
His father was a drunk and dastardly guy who left Rick’s mother with three young boys to pursue a full-time career of alcoholic debauchery, only to retire to an early grave at age 31. Rick wrote this book searching for the good in the man who had left them with nothing but a legacy of pain. He said to me, “I used his life as a blunt instrument to illustrate my mother’s suffering,” referring to the book, “All Over But the Shouting” in which he told the story of his mother’s life. The point of “Frogtown” was to throw a positive light on the shadow of a man he portrayed in his earlier works. In other words, a man’s life is more than a few grim acts illuminated as a good story.
Unfortunately, the beautiful prose and worthwhile read of “The Prince of Frogtown,” still couldn’t erase the heartbreak caused by his father and the pervasive residue left on the life of Mr. Bragg.
Thanks for tuning in.
Liz
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James Collins is extremely tall and extremely masculine and this is his first novel after resigning as a former senior editor at Time. Why are his height and looks relevant? Because he chose romance as his subject in “Beginner’s Greek.”
Yes, men can write romance but the book is drippingly sweet, almost cavity inducing. The good guy gets the girl in the tied-up-nicely-in-the-end novel. I loved the book, by the way.
Before you overlook this one because you think you’re too smart for the subject, Mr. Collins has some unique insights into the human experience, more than a few clever scenes and an idea about the tenacity and necessity of manners that is quite unusual. It’s a perfect book for just hanging out and reading.
Throughout this interview the show takes an interesting and unintended detour into a discussion of legacy, meritocracy and achievement. All of which, Mr. Collins implies isn’t his “due” since he was born into a family that went to Harvard and everyone from Harvard gets jobs like his (good stuff to think about and stuff that will become interview fodder for many unexpecting and overly educated authors to come).
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This is the book WRIR gave away during its Spring Pledge Drive. We were searching for something to fit our environmental Earth Day theme, when this book appeared for free out of the barren soil from courteous donors at the Environmental Defense Fund. We thank them for the harvest.
Truthfully, it was tough to read, and I had to plough through it (yes, more punning). What I did like was that it clearly explained emerging technologies and offered places to plant your extra greenbacks, if you’re looking to grow rich through climate change. In the end, the book was worth the trees shorn.
This interview was discussed with me more than any other show I’ve done in the past year and from what “they” say, the show is a very good listen.
Here is the product description from Amazon.com…
“How to harness the great forces of capitalism to save the world from catastrophe.
The forecasts are grim and time is running out, but that’s not the end of the story. In this book, Fred Krupp, longtime president of Environmental Defense Fund, brings a stirring and hopeful call to arms: We can solve global warming. And in doing so we will build the new industries, jobs, and fortunes of the twenty-first century.
In these pages the reader will encounter the bold innovators and investors who are reinventing energy and the ways we use it. Among them: a frontier impresario who keeps his ice hotel frozen all summer long with the energy of hot springs; a utility engineer who feeds smokestack gases from coal-fired plants to voracious algae, then turns them into fuel; and a tribe of Native Americans, for two thousand years fishermen in the roughest Pacific waters, who are now harvesting the fierce power of the waves themselves.
These entrepreneurs are poised to remake the world’s biggest business and save the planet—if America’s political leaders give them a fair chance to compete.”
Hope you’re well.
Liz Humes
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