WGTD's The Morning Show with Greg Berg

Journalist Mark Segal's came of age during the earliest days of the gay rights movement.   His illuminating and moving memoir is titled "And then I Danced:  Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality."   

Our guest, Josh Howard, is the director of a fascinating documentary that airs tomorrow (Tuesday) night on PBS called "The Lavender Scare."  The title refers to a troubling chapter in our history that was touched off by an executive order  by newly-elected president Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953  that called for the firing of all known gay men and women employed by the Federal government. (The rationale was that such persons might be vulnerable to blackmail by entities wishing ill on the United States.)  The few brave souls who dared to challenge this helped give birth to the gay rights movement.   

This 2011 interview is with Dan Gediman, who is well-known to many public radio listeners for the series This I Believe.   "This I Believe: On Fatherhood" features a wide array of first-person essays that reflect on many different facets of the experience of being a father. 

Barbara Risman's book "Where the Millennials will take us:  a New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure"  examines the way in which millennials regard the matters of gender and gender identity very differently from previous generations.     

Writer and journalist Jared Yates Sexton attracted an enormous amount of attention with the publication of a New York Times op-ed piece titled "Donald Trump's Toxic Masculinity."   His book "The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of our Own Making" is a follow-up to that piece.   Sexton believes that far too many American men (including himself) are caught in an ultimately self-destructive trap in which they try to live up to certain ideals of masculinity that are in fact unattainable and create stresses that can lead to abuse, addiction, violence, and mental and emotional disorders.  

This interview is with two remarkably gifted and successful writers,  Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, who also happen to be husband and wife. The occasion of this interview in 2009 was the publication of Chabon's memoir  "Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son."   We also talk about Waldman's book "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace."  

We hear from Richard Goldstein, an important music critic from the late 1960's and early 70's whose memoir is titled "Another Little Piece of my Heart:  My life of rock and revolution in the 60's."   He writes of his encounters with such legends as Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.

Nan Calvert (from Root Pike WIN) pays her monthly visit to the program.  She is joined by two representatives of Clean Wisconsin, who talk about their current project-  seeking the banning of PAH (a highly toxic substance that is found in some commonly used driveway sealants) in the state of Wisconsin.   

This interview was broadcast on Thursday, June 6th-  exactly 75 years after D-Day.   Jean Edward Smith's book is titled "Eisenhower in War and Peace."  It is a thoroughly researched biography of the full life and legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower,  who was arguably among the most influential men of the twentieth century.  It was under his leadership that Allied forces launched their D-Day attack on the beaches of Normandy. 

In celebration of the recent 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, we are rebroadcasting this Morning Show interview from the summer of 2018 in which a number of scholars from around the western hemisphere talk about the struggle for women's suffrage in both North and South America.   These scholars were gathered at Carthage College for a symposium titled "Women's Suffrage in the Americas" under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities.