Living in the USA

ELMORE LEONARD, the mystery writer whose books include Get Shorty, which was made into that great film with John Travolta as a mobster who wants to become a Hollywood producer, live in-studio, talks about his latest, Mr. Paradise.

Also: KATHA POLLITT, columnist for The Nation, talks about the Democrats after New Hampshire: Katha says “I still like Dean.” www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040202&s=pollitt

And: Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation is a gorgeous book that includes essays by Mike Davis, Viggo Mortensen of “Lord of the Rings,” and Jodie Evans of Code Pink. co-editor MARK LEVINE talks about the book — and what?s happening in Iraq today.

Web extra: Bush is down in the polls: Newsweek reports that “a 52-percent majority of registered voters says it would not like to see him re-elected to a second term. Only 44 percent say they would like to see him re-elected, a four-point drop from the last Newsweek Poll.” And “A Kerry-Bush match-up would have Kerry up by 49 percent to Bush’s 46 percent.”

7:00am: After Iowa: Can John Kerry beat George W. Bush in November? And is Howard Dean finished? Marc Cooper reports from Des Moines. (originally broadcast Jan. 21)

7:15: Nation film critic Stuart Klawans talks about two movies that indirectly illuminate the war in Iraq: “The Battle of Algiers” — Pontecorvo?s unforgettable 1966 epic of terrorism and counterterrorism — and “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris?s fascinating and controversial interview with Robert MacNamara. (originally broadcast Jan. 14)

7:30: war and masculinity — what does it mean to be a man? The answer to that question has changed over time, but it?s always involved warfare. — and it’s the subject of a new book by Leo Braudy of USC: From Chivalry to Terrorism. (originally broadcast Dec. 3.)

7:45: two days in October 1967: in Madison, Wisconsin, anti-war demonstrators were marching against Dow Chemical, maker of napalm; in Vietnam, the US army Black Lions battalion was about to lose 61 men in a V-C ambush; and in Washington, LBJ asked his advisers, “How are we ever going to win?” Pulitzer-prize winner David Maraniss tells the story in They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace: Vietnam and America: October 1967. Philip Caputo reviewed it for the New York Times. (originally broadcast Jan. 14).

Listen to this interview HERE
Joan Didion talks about her memoir Where I Was From.  It’s about California: Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, and explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons—and about her family and their place in California history.
interview conducted at KPFK in LA Oct. 29, 2003.