All Things Considered gave a review of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip during yesterday’s show. The novel, which ATC calls a “brilliant and compelling work of fiction,” was on the short list for this year’s Booker Prize for Fiction. “Set on a remote South Pacific island called Bougainvill, it’s narrated by an eloquent 13-year-old island native named Matilda. As civil war breaks out, she tells of how a local copper-mining enterprise arranges for the evacuation of nearly all the white residents, leaving the islanders to the mercy of indigenous rebels and the ravages of soldiers flown in by helicopter from nearby Port Moresby.” The one white resident who stayed behind takes it upon himself to educate the children by reading to them each day from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Also on the show, Robert Siegel speaks to Cathy Wilkerson, a former member of the Weatherman, a faction of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society. She is also the author of the memoir, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman. “In her book, Wilkerson is apologetic for Weatherman’s tactics, but not for her radical politics: She is still a radical, but one who prizes the right to vote, which she regained several years ago. In March 1970, Wilkerson and four others were using her father’s townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village as a bomb factory. Wilkerson was cleaning up when a box of dynamite sticks downstairs accidentally went off. One of two survivors of the explosion, Wilkerson went underground for 10 years. Eventually she served a prison sentence, got out and now trains math teachers.”

Listen to both segments here.

Ed Sikov talked with guest host Susan Page on the Diane Rehm Show about his biography, Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis. In addition to chronicling her rise in Hollywood, the book explores her upbringing, relationships, and studio battles.

From Sikov’s Web site: “Dark Victory is a twenty-first-century rethinking of this titanic actress, whose centenary will be in 2008. Treating her films at least as acutely as she herself did–and often more admiringly–Dark Victory traces Davis’s rise to stardom at Warner Bros., her powerful drive to wrangle and oppose, her bitter disappointments and sporadic moments of public triumph, her four failed marriages, and her strategies for continuing her career in the face of age and changing popular tastes. It covers Davis’s films on an equal footing with her personal life because she believed in her work and her work was terrific. Dark Victory takes that belief as a starting point. She wasn’t just a star but a gifted artist who changed the face of acting. This book respects her talent.”

You can listen to the interview here.

Jung Chang, author of the bestselling Wild Swans, talks with BBC Radio 4’s Today show about media censorship and the lack of freedom of the press in her native China, despite the country’s economic growth and opening of its society. Chang’s biography of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, is still banned in China, but Chang is best known around the world for Wild Swans, a story about Chang, her mother, and her grandmother detailing their lives in 20th-century China.

Check out Chang’s BBC interview here (Real Player required).

Imagine living life as one person, and then being told you aren’t exactly who you think you are. That’s what Bliss Broyard endured, and she discusses the experience and her book One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. Before he passed away from cancer, the author’s father, Anatole, revealed to his children of his true racial identity, that he is black. (Anatole Broyard, as many may know, was a book critic at the New York Times and a columnist at the New York Times Book Review.) In the book Broyard writes about what came after her relevation, and “chronicles her own evolution from privileged WASP to a woman of mixed-race ancestry.”

You can listen to the interview above, and read a chapter of the book here.

I suppose its been around four years or so since Johnny Cash died. There have been a few books out, countless articles, a big-name movie that got an Oscar nod or two, all of them claiming to have the inside scoop, the real story on the real Man in Black. None, I repeat, none of them are as surprising as I Walked the Line.

The name on the cover reads Vivian Cash — Johnny’s first wife — but the book is comprised almost entirely of love letters to her, from him. The book traces the rise of their romance, when they met at an ice rink in 1951; his letters while overseas in Germany, during which time he promised her “oceans and oceans of love and devotion,” and encountered alcohol seriously for the first time; and their inevitable downfall, their relationship a victim of Johnny’s increasing fame and substance abuse.

This is a part of Johnny’s life that is routinely glossed over, and as The New York Times points out, the 2005 Cash movie Walk the Line ” presented [Vivian] as a nagging, ever-pregnant obstacle to his storybook romance with June Carter.” Vivian went on record saying once “[there are] people of the Nashville mind-set, who prefer that I be written out of Johnny’s history altogether.” The similarities between that story and this extend only to the names, and the side of Johnny shown here is a fiercely romantic one that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.

Read The New York Times review of the book here.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned at college, its that you should always heed titles with more than one colon in them. Why? They have a lot of things to say. Important things. Things you need to hear. Like Tom Stanton’s Ty and the Babe: The Incredible Saga of Baseball’s Fiercest Rivals: A Surprising Friendship and the 1941 Has-Beens Golf Championship. Isn’t that second colon especially captivating?

Stanton’s book follows the fierce rivalry between two baseballs greats, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. The legends met early on in their careers when rookie Ruth, “a platter-faced, gray flanneled 20-year-old” went up to pitch against Cobb for the first time. Opposites in every way, the men competed from that day forward for fourteen seasons. Insults and taunts were slung from both sides, and the exchanges almost came to blows on numerous occasions. The book culminates in a charity golf match several years after each had retired, stoking the competitive fires one last time. The press loved it.

Stanton beautifully details the rivalry, and the larger atmosphere of baseball in the time period. He goes beyond the stereotypes - Cobb as a racist, Ruth as a womanizing blockhead - and builds three-dimensional, flawed, and exceptionally talented men. He appeared on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the project.

Listen to the full interview

Endurance seems to be the theme today here at Media Buzz. Our latest installment follows renowned journalist Mike O’Connor as he attempts to uncover the reasons why, every so often, his comfortable small-town life in Texas would be violently uprooted, and his family would flee across the border into Mexico. They would leave with only a few hours’ notice, and would jump from suburbia to extreme poverty, oftentimes within a span of two or three days. The O’Connors never knew what lay ahead of them, only that they must remain anonymous. Despite their parents’ insistence otherwise, the children knew something was up.

Now, some thirty years later, the O’Connor parents are dead, and Mike has attempted to unfurl the mysteries and secrets that surrounded his childhood. What he finds is a bizarre mix of schemes, petty crime and McCarthyism that might garner him a Most Unusual Childhood Award. O’Connor sat down with Diane Rehm to discuss said childhood and how he began unraveling the family story. Listen to the full interview here.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Presidential Candidate John, is unfortunately best known for her perseverance in the face of terrible challenges. She first lost a sixteen year old son in a freak car accident. She was then diagnosed with breast cancer on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. Now, at the onset of the 2008 campaign, she discovered that cancer had moved to her bones, and was now classified as incurable. The doctors gave her about five years to live.

Now, if that woman chose to offer some advice about determination, you would listen, yes? Of course you would, which is why you’ll read the excerpt of her memoir Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, which was recently released in paperback. In it, you’ll find heart-wrenching descriptions of love, grief, and the value of people coming together.

Lovely.

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has a new book, Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them, in which he examines the most difficult aspect of being a Decider: making decisions. Written with Mark Salter, the book is largely anecdotal and offers numerous examples of good and bad decisions. During an interview with NPR, McCain drew heavily on history, citing stories from Vietnam and former presidents in an effort to explain how he came to make some of his hardest decisions, most notably his choice to support the Iraq war at its outset.

Of the current state of the war, which he also touches on in the book, he had this to say: “Every bit of knowledge and instinct, awareness and confidence that I have makes me believe absolutely that setting a date for withdrawal will result in chaos and genocide in the region, and we will then have to call on young Americans to make even greater sacrifices.”

Listen to the interview and read an excerpt.

By now, every candidate in the 2008 election has published at least one book, from Obama on down to Biden. The former has, in fact, written two memoirs — The Audacity of Hope and Dreams of My Father — both of which were runaway best sellers. Why? Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, argues that the senator’s compelling life story has made them so popular.

Says Meacham, “One of the most ancient devices in presidential politics is to sell one’s life journey as the qualification for high office, whether it’s Lincoln in the log cabin or Andrew Jackson standing up as a 14-year-old to the British and having the British officer hit him in the head with a sword, and it was, I think, very astute of Obama to use his own life in that way.”

Books as a campaign tool began in earnest with Jimmy Carter during the 1976 election, when he published Why Not the Best? “It’s a way of getting his vision of the country out,” Meacham told NPR. “And since then, it’s become a kind of course requirement for a presidential candidate to publish something. How many people read them I think is a very open question.”

Read the article and listen to the full interview.