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).
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.
