J. Edgar Hoover, Author: The Nation

J. Edgar Hoover was FBI director for forty-eight years, and he was also an author–a bestselling author. His Masters of Deceit, published in 1958 by Henry Holt, spent thirty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 250,000 copies. In paperback it sold more than 2 million. But dealing with the director presented unique challenges for Holt. . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com

KPFK Wed. 5/21: Arianna on Obama’s Victory

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ARIANNA HUFFINGTON talks about Tuesday’s primaries, which finally gave Obama a majority of pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses. The big questions: Will Hillary’s white supporters vote for Obama in November? And how strong a candidate will John McCain be? Arianna of course is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post; her new book is Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness).

Plus: BARBARA EHRENREICH talks about the politics of joy – her book Dancing in the Streets is out now in paperback. (originally broadcast Jan. 10, 2007)

Also: In the last Gilded Age, people stood up to greed – why don’t we? STEVE FRASER talks about irrational exhuberance and market panic; dreams of wealth and hatred of the power of money. He wrote about “The Two Gilded Ages” for TomDispatch.com, and his new book is Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace.

More stuff to read: “Nixonland, Then and Now” — my interview at TheNation.com with Rick Perlstein.

Tibet in Exile: Pico Iyer Interview–Dissent

Born in Oxford, raised in California, a resident of Japan, Pico Iyer has captured his itinerant life with books and essays that document his journeys to Nepal, Cuba, and most recently, Tibet. His new book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Jon Wiener: There are six million Tibetans. But you write in your new book that Tibet today is “slipping ever closer to extinction.” Those are chilling words.

Pico Iyer: I wish they were overstated words, but they’re not. The Tibet autonomous region is more and more a Chinese province. Lhasa is now 65 percent Han Chinese, so Tibetans are a minority in their own country. The Chinese are practicing what the Dalai Lama has called “demographic aggression”—trying to wipe out Tibetan culture through force of numbers. Two years ago they set up that high speed train, which allows 6,000 more Han Chinese to come to Tibet every day. I first saw Lhasa in 1985 just when it opened up to the world. It was still a classic Tibetan settlement—two story traditional whitewashed buildings, and the Potala Palace, the great residence of the Dalai Lama. If you go there now, sadly, it’s like an eastern Las Vegas—huge shopping malls, blue-glassed department stores, high rise buildings. From most parts of Lhasa you can’t even see the Potala Palace.

. . . continued at Dissent Magazine online.

KPFK Wed. 5/14: Nixonland Then and Now

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After Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, all the pundits said the Republican right was dead. Eight years later, in 1972, Richard Nixon won 49 out of 50 states – exploiting the toxic resentments, cultural paranoia and racial hatreds of the era. Do we still live in Nixonland? RICK PERLSTEIN says “yes we do.” His new book is NIXONLAND: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
Rick will be reading Thursday, May 15, 7PM, at Pi on Sunset (next door to Book Soup), 8828 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood.

 

Plus: Politics and modern music: teenage Hitler went to the Strauss opera “Salome”; Stalin walked out on a Shostakovitch opera—a bad sign; and Joe McCarthy subpoenaed Aaron Copland (but missed the fact that in the 1930s he had spoken to communist farmers in Minnesota). ALEX ROSS will explain; he’s music critic for The New Yorker, his award-winning book is THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the 20th Century, and his famous website is www.TheRestIsNoise.com.

News update: The new campaign slogan chosen by House Republicans — “Change You Deserve” — turns out to also be the trademarked slogan of the antidepressant Effexor.

KPFK Wed. 5/7: Obama’s November Problem

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JOHN NICHOLS comments on Tuesday’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana – and talks about Obama’s problem with Democrats. Among Clinton backers in Indiana, 33 percent say they would vote for McCain and 17 percent say they would not vote. Among Clinton supporters in North Carolina, it’s even worse: 38 percent say they would vote for McCain, and 12 percent say they would not vote. Obama, Nichols writes, “clearly has a November problem on his hands.” John is Washington correspondent for The Nation and writes “The Beat” blog at TheNation.com.

Also: PICO IYER talks about the DALAI LAMA and TIBETAN PROTEST against Chinese repression of their culture and religion. Pico Iyer first met the Dalai Lama 33 years ago and has travelled with him extensively in the last few years, writing about his work as a politician, religious leader and celebrity — while “the country he was born to rule is slipping ever closer to extinction.” Meanwhile many Tibetans criticize the Dalai Lama for not supporting Tibetan independence or militant protest. Pico Iyer’s new book is THE OPEN ROAD: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Speech Patterns: An Interview with Richard Price – Dissent

After writing novels located primarily in the Bronx and New Jersey, New York-native Richard Price has written a new novel, Lush Life, that captures the vivacity of life and language in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Dissent’s Jon Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” spring 2007) interviewed him this month.

Jon Wiener: Lush Life involves several worlds that exist side by side on the Lower East Side today—tell us about them.

Richard Price: Right now it seems like the place belongs to young, white middle-class kids in their twenties. It’s become their Montparnasse. But there’s also a big housing project population. There are tenements that haven’t been caught up in the real estate rehabbing game, and they are filled with Hispanics and Chinese and old hippies. There are the orthodox Jews, who are in a world unto themselves down there. And there is this huge population of Fujianese immigrants, some of whom are undocumented. All these people are occupying the same sidewalks and not really aware of each others’ existence.

J.W.: What did you learn about the Fujianese immigrants?

R.P.: They’ve got it really tough. Historically, the Lower East Side had the highest population density in the world circa 1900. Forget Calcutta. And that was mostly Eastern European Jews. But the Fujianese are living just like that, cheek and jowl, while in the next building are yuppies with a floor-thru that cost two million bucks. The burden that these guys have, that nobody before them had down there, is that they have to pay somebody to smuggle them into the country. So the minute they step off the boat they are $70,000 in the hole to the snakehead who got them over. On top of everything else, working seven days a week, they’ve got to pay off a mammoth debt.

. . . continued at DissentMagazine.org

KPFK Wed. 4/29: Obama After the Rev. Wright

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Can Obama recover from the Rev. Wright’s latest statements? We’ll ask MICHAEL KINSLEY – he’s America’s leading liberal pundit – now a Time magazine columnist, he co-hosted “Crossfire,” wrote the TRB column for The New Republic, founded Slate.com, worked as Editorial Page Editor of the LA Times in 2004-2005, and had brain surgery for Parkinson’s Disease in 2006. His new collection is titled Please Don’t Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries. Kinsley is the one who said “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth”;  and “Ambition can never be naked in a political campaign; it must be clothed in deceit.”
Michael Kinsley will be in conversation with Mickey Kaus Wed. nite at Town H all/Writers’ Bloc at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, 7:30pm.

Also: it’s WILLIE NELSON’s 75th birthday. From “Crazy” to “Georgia on My Mind,” he’s been a glorious voice of America. He’s also the founder of Willie Nelson Bio-diesel (“Bio-Willie”), marketing bio-fuel to truck stops; he’s co-chair of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) advisory board; he supported Dennis Kucinich in the 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential primaries; and he’s called for the end of the war in Iraq. We’ll talk about his music and his life with JOE NICK PATOSKI, author of WILLIE NELSON: AN EPIC LIFE.
Playlist: “Crazy”; “Red-Headed Stranger”; “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies. . .”; “Georgia on My Mind”; “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Visit the official Willie Nelson website

McCain’s Medical Records: Why the Delay? – HuffPost

The mainstream media ask Obama why he doesn’t wear a flag pin, but they aren’t asking McCain why he doesn’t release his medical records. McCain, who would be the oldest man ever elected president, had surgery for melanoma, a potentially fatal skin cancer, eight years ago — the scar is still prominent on his face. He has promised several times to release the records, but each release has been postponed.

It makes you wonder: is there something in McCain’s medical records that he doesn’t want you to know?

The McCain campaign’s explanation: his doctors are too busy. “The reason for the delay is because they want to gather all his doctors for a press conference to answer reporters’ questions,” CNN reported, “and May is the soonest that can be done.” Three doctors are expected to answer questions, according to the Arizona Republic.

You’d think that it wouldn’t be that hard to get three doctors together to say that the Republican candidate for president was in good health.

. . . continued at the Huffington Post.

KPFK Wed. 4/23: Obama After Pennsylvania

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The Pennsylvania primary and the presidency: HAROLD MEYERSON will answer the question, “when will it be over?” – he’s executive editor of The American Prospect and an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

Also: RICHARD PRICE has a new novel out: LUSH LIFE, about intersecting worlds on the Lower East Side: yuppies, Chinese immigrants, kids from the projects, old Jews, and of course the cops. “Richard Price’s ear for dialogue, his ability to caputre and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and vocabulary of urban life, cannot be overpraised” – that’s what Michael Chabon writes in the New York Review. “with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best,” he says, “one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature.”
Richard Price will be speaking Saturday at 1030 at the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA, Fowler Museum Auditorium. Tickets free but required — at Ticketmaster.com.

Plus: GREIL MARCUS talks about Elvis. His classic 1975 book MYSTERY TRAIN: IMAGES OF AMERICA IN ROCK ‘N” ROLL MUSIC is out now in a fifth revised edition. Elvis, he writes, was “a great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor of shlock, a great heart throb, a great bore, a great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice person, and, yes, a great American.”

Also at the Bookfest at UCLA this weekend: I’ll be on a panel with Amy Goodman and Tom Hayden — Saturday at noon at Ackerman Ballroom — tickets free but required, at TicketMaster.com.

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, “McCain’s Medical Records: Why the Delay?”

KPFK Wed. 4/16: Steve Lopez: Homeless in L.A.

 

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Homeless in L.A: one man’s story: STEVE LOPEZ is the indispensable LA Times columnist who writes about life in the city. Now he tells the story of one homeless man on Skid Row who he discovered was a classical violinist, trained at Julliard. Now that story is not only a book but is soon to be a major motion picture: The Soloist.
Steve Lopez will be speaking Thursday, 4/17, 730pm: Town Hall Writer’s Bloc — Writer’s Guild Theatre, 135 S. Doheny Dr., Beverly Hills; Friday, 4/18, 8pm: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena; Sunday, 4/27, 1130am: LA Times BookFest, UCLA.

Plus: This weekend is the 50th anniversary of the Ash Grove, the legendary music club on Melrose that was burned in 1973 – Sandy Carter will explain–he wrote the music column “Slippin’ and Slidin'” for Z Magazine. This weekend will feature a series of glorious concerts at UCLA: Fri. night, 4/18, Royce Hall: Dave Alvin; Ramblin’ Jack Elliott; Mike Seeger, Roland White and Ry Cooder; plus Culture Clash; Sat. night, 4/19, Royce Hall: The Freedom Singers, John Hammond, Taj Mahal, The Watts Prophets; Sunday 4/20, 11AM, Schoenberg Hall: Gospel Concert, with The Eddie Kendricks Gospel Choir, Bernice Reagon and the Freedom Singers, Michelle Shocked.

Also: Osama Bin Laden is part of a generation of wealthy Saudis full of contradictions in their relationship to American popular culture—and American business. That story is told in The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by STEVE COLL – he won the Pulitzer Prize for his last book, the bestseller Ghost Wars, on the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden.
Steve Coll will be speaking at 7pm in the ALOUD Series at the downtown LA Public Library, 5th and Flower streets – the event is officially “Sold out—Standby Only.”