Talk Cocktail

The playwright Arthur Laurents, in his film The Way We Were, talks about his handsome hero, saying that “in a way he was like the country he lived in; everything came too easily to him." For decades we thought the same about Jack Kennedy. He had that cool, romantic, Gatsbyesque detachment and it somehow seemed to come easily to him, as to the manor born.

Today, as a result of a beautiful and insightful new biography Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews, we know a lot more about how that heroic Renaissance man detachment came to be. It came not from ease, but from pain, study and yes, even loneliness. The kind of pain that builds character and makes great leaders and great Presidents. In a way he was like the country we all used to live in, and less like the one we live in today. My conversation with Chris Matthews:

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The first rule of medicine is always "do no harm." It should also be the first rule of trying to do good in the world. However, when billions were committed to fighting AIDS in Africa, perhaps that rule was broken? Just maybe mistakes were made and over the long run more harm than good was accomplished? This is the focus of a revealing new book by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin,Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It My conversation with Craig Timberg:

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Few writers  move as easily between genres as Anne Rice.  My last conversation with her was about religion, faith and then about Angels.  Now she moves into the realm of werewolves. A field already very crowded, but she still brings her own quite unique perspective. During a time of all to real dangers that face us each day, she gives us a reason to escape into another world in her new work The Wolf Gift. My conversation with Anne Rice:

How's this for a resume: 

Joined Black Panther Party at age fifteen

Served eleven months in the infamous NY Rikers Island Jail

FBI fugitive

Member of Panther 21, one of the most emblematic criminal cases of the sixties

At sixteen, one of the youngest spokesman and leaders of the Panther's New York Chapter.  

Member of the Revolutionary Black Underground

Sentenced to twelve years in Leavenworth

Earned two college degrees while in Leavenworth and founded a prison theater

Released from Leavenworth

Becomes full professor and Chair of Columbia University's School of the Arts Film Program 

Nominated for 2008 Academy Award in Best Song category

Publishes memoir Panther Baby

My conversation with Jamal Joseph:

Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star said, when he first came to America, that "basketball, in America, is like a culture. For me it is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here." Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times foreign correspondent Jim Yardley proves the reverse is also true. That Chinese basketball has its own culture, its own landscape and its own unique language, just as difficult for Americans to learn.

Yardley, in his book Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing, take us inside the world of Chinese basketball. At a time when Linsanity is overtaking our game Yarldey gives us a whole new prospective on basketball inside a country that's been playing the game for as long as we have. My conversation with Jim Yardley:

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When we think of the French we certainly think of wine, cheese, fashion, culture and this years Academy Awards. What we don't necessarily think about is parenting. We certainly didn't think that French mothers would give Tiger Mom a run for her money. Yet children do seem to behave differently in France.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman found out first hand that French woman not only "don't get fat," they raise better behaved children. Druckerman reports from the front in her book Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting My conversation with Pam Druckerman:

It was once referred to as "the world’s greatest deliberative body."  A body who can claim as its members, Daniel Webster, Abe Lincoln, Everett Dirksen, Ted Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Robert LaFollette, Robett Taft and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, just to name a few. Where once great issues like civil rights and war and peace were debated, today it’s become the epicenter of partisan gridlock. What happened and were the halcyon days really as good as we remember?  This is the world into which Ira Shapiro takes us in his book The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis. My conversation with Ira Shapiro:

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Listening to the current crop of Republican candidates, you'd think the eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration had never happened. No embrace, not even an acknowledgement! No surprise really. Economic disaster, wiretapping, illegal war and torture are good reasons not to talk about it.

Former Watergate committee member, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and former Brooklyn prosecutor Elizabeth Holtzman argues in her new book Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution, and What We Can Do about It, that we still need to prosecute Bush and Cheney for violation of the rule of law. My conversation with Elizabeth Holtzman:

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We have come a long way since Vietnam. Today the American military and our returning soldiers are looked upon as heroes, who often do give the last full measure of their devotion to serve their country. Much of this change in attitude has come, not from what many still see as the misguided mission of Iraq, but by the way in which that mission was transformed by Gen. David Petraeus. Petraeus has come to symbolize the iconic soldier- scholar-warrior ethos that we seemed to have lost for a long time in the American military. But who is the General who initiated and pulled off such profound transformational change.

Paula Broadwell, who herself  has decades of military service and experience in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, takes us All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. My conversation with Paula Broadwell:

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It has long been observed that the four scariest words a husband can hear are, “we need to talk.” The only thing that might be scarier is “we need to talk about making our marriage better.” With that as the basis, writer and journalist Elizabeth Weil began a quest that would take her and her husband into the heart of darkness of their marriage. But unlike Kurtz, they would return better off for the journey.

Elizabeth and Dan's journey was first reported in one of the most talked about articles in The New York Times Magazine,  Now it is Elizabeth Weil's book No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried To Make It Better. My conversation with Elizabeth Weil: