Talk Cocktail

One of the overwhelming ideas of the 20th Century has been the struggle of people throughout the world, to achieve a middle class life. The Horatio Alger mythology of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps has informed most of the American experience, but not necessarily for Cesar Chavez.
When we think of Chavez, we think of farm workers, the fields of Delano, or the organization of the UFW.  The grape boycott of the late 60’s, the secondary boycott, which would give the farm workers their greatest success and  the Chicano movement of which he would become a part. In fact, Chaves’ life and his legacy was far more complex.
More than a union organizer, he saw himself as a community organizer. Perhaps a community organizer on steroids.  He sought not just to lift up people, but to solve there problems.  Where many wanted to move farm workers to the middle class, Chavez saw a kind of nobility in poverty which actually may have limited his success.
Miriam Pawel has written the first full throated biography about The Crusades of Cesar Chavez:
My conversation with Miriam Pawel:

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When we think about building today, almost anywhere on the planet, be it a house or a gleaming glass, steel and concrete office building, we almost reflexively think about how the building was build and how green is that building?
Market forces have made green building a premium to be desired and paid for.  But this didn’t happen by magic.  It happened primarily because one man saw the need to make this his life's work. He is David Gottfried.
David Gottfried is the founder of the World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the CEO of Regenerative Ventures. His latest work is Explosion Green: One Man's Journey To Green The World's Largest Industry.
My conversation with David Gottfried

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Few products are more American than Bourbon.  In fact some argue that the Kentucky spirit IS the American experience, distilled and sealed in a bottle.
While the English have their Scotch, the Irish their Whisky, Latin America their rum, and Mexico it's cervezas, Kentucky Bourbon is our defining spirit.  So what does this drink say about our character as a nation and how does that history apply to today's America?
Dane Huckelbridge sought to find out and he shares it with us in Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit.
My conversation with Dane Huckelbridge:

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Imagine one of the strongest fibers on the planet, a potential energy sources, and something used by our founders, that is now illegal. That is the story of hemp. Sometime comic/journalist Doug Fine tells me how we all may be  Hemp Bound: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Next Agricultural Revolution.
My conversation with Doug Fine:

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If you are a Californian and especially if you went to school in California, its history and the remarkable life of Junipero Serra were an important part of that education. 
In the mid 1700’s Junipero Serra would leave Spain for the New World.  The Catholic Church, Christianity and California would never be the same. Now in Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra's Dream and the Founding of California, Gregory Orfalea gives us a fascinating narrative of the remarkable life of Junípero Serra.
My conversation with Gregory Orfalea:

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Think about the movies we remember.  They are a little like old songs, or great books, or great meals.  They are purveyors of a kind of double imagery, instantly making yesterdays events todays reality.  
But with movies there is something more, in the way they stay with us.  The way the images play around in our heads and the memories, words and images become embodied in who we are.  
If you grew up watching and loving  movies, like esteemed film critic Kenneth Turan, they take on an even more powerful meaning.
Now Turan has taken a look in the rear view mirror at a a lifetime of film and chosen his fifty-four favorites,  detailed in his new book  Not to be Missed: Fifty-four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film.
My conversation with Kenneth Turan:

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If I said we were going to talk about a story that involved grand homes, yachts, priceless painting, messy romances, private investigators and armored limousines, you probably wouldn’t  think it was the story of a family and a group of men who have been painted as the greatest political villains of the 21st Century.
In fact it is.  It is the story of the Koch brothers.  Fred and Bill and David and Charles and their father Fred, who was one of the founders of the John Birch Society.

The question is not just how this political and economic dynasty has become so powerful, its how they have created such fear in their opponents, out of all proportion to their relatively limited political success.
Also the membrane between the Koch’s libertarian ideas and the GOP’s and Tea Party's social agenda may be a sometime marriage of convenience, but one that may not be destined for the long haul. Like so many businessmen who think politics will bend to their will and money, they are often surprised.
The first full scale look at the elusive Koch family is Daniel Schulman's  Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.
My conversation with Daniel Schulman:  (We apologize for some static in the first five minutes)

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Long before Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were battling it out on retail shelves, a small but nimble competitor very nearly unseated Nintendo as the top game maker of the 90’s.
This history of that battle for video game market supremacy between Sega’s Genesis gaming system and Nintendo’s SNES console is the background of a new book by Blake Harris, Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation.  It is also a history of how gaming become the huge business that it is today.
My conversation with Blake Harris:

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We mark the the 70th anniversary of D Day.  Not only one of the most significant events of the 20th Century, but one of the most significant decisions ever made by a President to send men into harms way. 
In a world in which decision making has become an expertise on to itself, when Presidential leadership is reexamined almost every day, it serves us well from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, to understand what really went into making that fateful decision, 70 years ago.  How it changed the war, how it changed our history and what it might teach us about navigating a dangerous world today.Nigel Hamilton examines all of this as he looks at FDR in The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942.
My conversation with Nigel Hamilton:

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In the 1960’s anger was a powerful motivator in civic discourse, as we protested, marched, fought and found new ways to understand relationships. In 1976 Howard Beale told us we had to get up, and get angry!  
in 1985, Dr. Harriet Lerner explained  how anger was a signal, an early warning system about issues in our relationships, among woman, and arguably writ large.
Today, anger is even more complex.  Anger globally, domestically and still, anger intimately.   
As such, the solutions are also more difficult to achieve.  Harriet Lerner who has since 1985 written extensively about fear, and intimacy and connection, now talks again about the issue of anger,The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships.with the reissue of her iconic book 
My conversation with Harriet Lerner:

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