Talk Cocktail

Many fear that technology is out of control. But perhaps, what’s really out of control is an imbalance of values. Over the last few centuries we humans have drastically valued technology as a solution to the problems of life. Consequently the emotional aspect of problem solving has often been left by the wayside. Few understand this dichotomy better than bestselling novelist Dr. Robin Cook. He has used this imbalance to scare the bejesus out of us in his books like Coma, Cure, and Fever. Now in his latest work, Nano, he once again walks us through the cost benefit analysis of medical technology falling into the wrong hands.

My conversation with Robin Cook:

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If we were talk about a time of bitter angry partisanship, flawed leaders lusting after women and power, worried perhaps more about their legacy than their constituents. Politicians who were accused of being pragmatic rather than idealistic. Who sometimes did care about ideas, but to the determent of good politics. We might easily be talking about current members of Congress, President Obama, President Clinton or Jack Kennedy. In fact, we’d also be talking about Thomas Jefferson. The man whose idealization has in many ways clouded how we should see and understand the better nature of politics...even today.

Pulitzer prize winning biographer and journalist Jon Meacham, in his new book Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

gets to the heart of who Thomas Jefferson really dined with, when he dined alone. My conversation with Jon Meacham:

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My conversation with Jon Meacham:

Forty-nine years ago last month JFK’s assassination brought the end of Camelot. Yet the Kennedy legacy and even the Kennedy Dynasty still continues. A political dynasty that was, at its core, the dream of one man. Joseph Patrick Kennedy the father of Jack, and Bobby and Teddy. Joseph Kennedy was a Zelig like character, whose impact was part of almost everything in the first half of the 20th century.

To the extent that the Kennedys have had a profound effect on this nation, then Joseph Kennedy was the progenitor of that impact. It’s worth taking a look at his remarkable, and complex life, as David Nasaw has done in The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

My conversation with David Nasaw:

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Faith today is a complicated business. There is organized religion, politics, irony and expectation. Yet, at its core it’s a simple idea. The notion that we don't have all the answers, that we should express gratitude for what we do have and that we can stop and smell the proverbial roses.

In these basic beliefs Anne Lamott has brought together in  Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers,what she knows and believes about prayer and its fundamentals. My conversation with Annie Lamott:

Once we were a nation defined by our sameness and by our homogenization. The Levittown like subdivisions, The Organization Man, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Today we are a nation defined by our differences; from each other and from any kind of an artificial norm.

Yet the one difference we can’t  ever seem to really grasp, is when our children are profoundly different from us. Where the apple does in fact, fall far from the tree.

We cling to the foundational idea that our children must do better than us. From 30k a year preschools, to endless driving to extra curricular activities. But what happens when this can’t be the case? When our children cannot live up to our ideal. When they have a physical or mental illness or a disability, or are just not the people we dreamt about. The answer is that we love them anyway! And this is the path that Andrew Solomon explores in Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

My conversation with Andrew Solomon:

If the debate about healthcare has taught us anything, it is the consequence and impact of unexpected disease. One illness can put us into poverty.  But it can also literally make us crazy. Imagine an illness, a medical mystery at first, that exhibits all the signs of demonic possession, that takes you over the line between sanity and insanity.

That's the story of Susannah Cahalan. She tell us her remarkable story in her memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

.My conversation with Susannah Cahalan:

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Why are there so few big name woman chefs? How are they different than men in the kitchen? Why have both Julia Child and The Food Network done a disservice to women in the kitchen? Powerhouse food journalist Charlotte Druckman takes us behind the kitchen doors of some of some of the leading female chefs in Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the KitchenMy conversation with Charlotte Druckman:

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One of the many, but essential things that separates America and France are their attitudes toward love and sex; or as Joni Mitchell said, “in France they kiss on Main street,”

The French love, love. It occupies a special place in their pantheon of fashion, food, wine and sex. But how did this come to be? How is it that French, culture has come to embrace love in ways that set it apart from so many other western cultures?

Marilyn Yalom, a former professor of French and presently a senior scholar at Stanford, explains How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance

My conversation with Marilyn Yalom:

It is, arguably, the civil rights issue of our times. Same sex marriage has also become one of the most politically volatile. It divides red and blue states, most profoundly divides generations and, perhaps more than any other single political issues, attitudes are changing as the recent elections in Maryland, Main and Washington showed us.

While polarized positions on issues like guns, death penalty, healthcare and immigration harden over time, in the case of gay marriage the public seems to be becoming more accepting.   While we still wait to see if the US Supreme Court is going to take up California’s Prop 8, it’s clear that it will hear one of many cases on the issue of gay marriage. Because more than anywhere else the battle is being fought in the courts as well as the political battlefield.

Michael J. Klarman, is a Civil Rights historian as well as  the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School. He takes us inside the legal battle in From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage My conversation with Michael J. Klarman:

On June 6th 1984, Ronald Reagan gave one of his most powerful speeches marking “the Boys of Pointe du Hoc,” who took on one of the toughest missions of D-Day. Now, acclaimed military historian Patrick O’Donnell takes us up close and personal with these men who led the way across Europe.

O’Donnell has collected oral histories and has woven them together as the spine of  his new work Dog Company.  It shall forever preserve the men and their mission.

My conversation with Patrick K. O’Donnell: