Tagged: Books

The natural world quiets down in December, both visually and audibly. Fall's riot of colors is long gone, and the bird song chorus is a distant memory. Not everyone embraces winter, but there is a positive way to view the impending season of cold, ice and snow. Without the overload of spring, summer and fall distractions, we're freed up to notice and appreciate the subtle winter world.

What began a half century ago as an organization for insurance purposes has grown into much more.  The AARP has become an influential lobbying group with forty million members.   We’ll talk with the author of a new book which examines this and the AARP’s role in current debates over Medicare and Social Security.  

• Frederick Lynch - An Associate Professor of  Government at Claremont McKenna College, and author of Invisible Victims and the Diversity Machine

Who doesn’t love an underdog? A Rocky in the ring? With the audience for boxing eroding, the new ring is an octagonal cage. In popularity and profits, mixed martial arts, or MMA, has knocked out boxing in the past decade.  The Ultimate Fighting Championship, MMA’s flagship event, was sold for two million dollars in 2001. Today, it’s worth an estimated one billion. Our guest today is a definitive UFC underdog.  He’s a writer who dove George Plimpton-style into the grueling world of MMA and landed in the octagon. 

Author Stephen King has written more than 50 worldwide best-sellers. More than 80 feature and television film adaptations have extended King’s reach far beyond the bestsellers list, earning him the title of “Master of Horror,” and establishing him as one of the most influential writers of our age.

Why would a gun-wielding, tattoo-bearing "homie" trade in la vida loca for a Bible and the buttoned-down lifestyle of an evangelical hermano (brother in Christ)? To answer this question, Robert Brenneman interviewed sixty-three former gang members from the "Northern Triangle" of Central America--Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras--most of whom left their gang for evangelicalism.

Jay Wexler's new book and blog focus on the odd Constitutional clauses we should, maybe, focus on a little less...and those we should, perhaps, turn into awesome t-shirts.

As of early 2010, more than 2 million US troops have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Larry Minear, a researcher on international and internal armed conflicts, has spent a lot of time talking to more than 175 of these veterans, many of whom came from New Hampshire and Vermont. He talked to them about what motivated them to go to war, what they did once they went over, and how they rejoined society upon their return.