Billy Graham, arguably the world’s most famous evangelist, was a close confidant of eleven presidents. No man has had such unfettered access to the White House for such an extended period of time. They called him in for comfort, for advice and guidance, and he considered each one of them a close personal friend. Three of those friends, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush, were on hand for the dedication of the Billy Graham Library, in Graham’s hometown of North Carolina, which opened shortly before Graham’s wife, Ruth, slipped into a coma and died. In the wake of all this, there comes a book: The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House, co-authored by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, which examines the unique intersection of faith and politics that Billy Graham personified.

The book was featured on Friday on Good Morning America. Read the article here.

A political book entitled Prince of Darkness could be about so many things. I’m not sure why veteran reporter Robert Novak chose that name for his memoirs, but it certainly does pique your interest. Novak, who has been reporting in Washington for fifty years now, was most recently embroiled in the Valerie Plame outing, and before that, his 2005 dismissal from CNN, but it goes so much deeper than that. He has covered every president since Truman, and broken some of the biggest stories of the century. During the late 60s and 70s, his columns on Vietnam and Watergate were closely read for inside information, as they were in the 80s, when he wrote the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most interesting, though, are the candid stories throughout, stories about the Kennedys, a drunk LBJ, Deng Xiaoping, Ezra Pound, Reagan and his first meeting with President Bush that, before now, Novak had kept close to his chest.

Maybe you’ll hear one of those zany stories during his interview with Diane Rehm, which you may listen to here.

From the NPR website: ” Some years ago, acclaimed novelist Mary Gordon wrote a memoir about her father, revealing how the man she had loved as a Catholic intellectual was actually a converted Jew, a rabid anti-Semite and an academic fraud.”

I tried to rewrite that, but could think of no other way to put it. Now, in Circling My Mother Gordon tackles the other half, and casts mom Anna Gagliano Gordon in a more favorable light. Spurred by Anna’s death in 2002 at the age of 94, Gordon began tracing the major events of mom’s life, from contracting polio at age three, enduring both World War II and immigration to the United States, and successfully bringing up Mary on her own (Dad died early on) while holding down a steady job. The result is this memoir, a loving testament to the woman. “I write about her,” says Gordon, “because I am a writer and it’s the only way that I can mourn her.”

Gordon appeared yesterday on NPR to discuss the project. Listen to the full interview.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden is late. John Edwards has three books out. Obama has two. Hillary has at least one and dozens more written about her. Even Mitt Romney got a book out before Biden did. But slow and steady does win the race, I suppose. Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, the Delaware Senator’s first memoir has just recently been released, and was featured on Today yesterday. Having been in the Senate since 1973, Biden has seen his fair share of congressional combat, and lovingly renders every moment of it, from the tail-end of Vietnam through the fall of the Soviet Union up to the current conflict.

Watch the interview and read the excerpt.

As many of you perhaps know, Prime Minister Tony Blair was voted out of Parliament just a few weeks ago after a ten year stint at No. 10 Downing Street. The timing, as you may also know, is ripe for a rash of Blair critiques and retrospectives, the first major one being The Blair Years: The Alistair Campbell Diaries.

Campbell, Blair’s Press Secretary and strategist from 1994-2003, kept exhaustive diaries of his time in with the former Prime Minister, and touched on many major events as he and Blair saw them: the rise of the Labour party, the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, the death of Princess Diana, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror. Most valuable, though, are the moments at which Campbell captures the man behind the nation, defying relentless and crushing pressure to govern in what he hoped were the people’s best interests.

During the time he was in Parliament, Campbell was called Blair’s right hand man and the second most powerful figure in Britain. If he doesn’t know what went on behind closed doors, then maybe we were just never meant to know. But he does dish on Diane Rehm:
Listen to the full interview.

“Life is not a fairy tale, and even the most perfect spouse can not be your all-in-all,” says Denise Jackson, wife of country singer Alan Jackson. “We all have our faults, and every adult alive has regrets.”

(Cue Je Ne Regrette Rien.)

Denise’s latest tome It’s All About Him: Finding the Love of My Life touches elaborately details how the pressures of fame contributed to the slow disintegration of her marriage with the country star. He was unfaithful, she was too controlling and neither would give in, so they separated. Some three months later, she had an epiphany: “I just remember driving home and just crying out to Him, and saying I can’t take this anymore,” she told Today’s Ann Curry. “‘I can’t believe You want my family to be apart. But if You do, I just give it all to You. I know You’ll take care of me.’ It wasn’t that things changed immediately. But I had just this sense of peace.”

But things did change, and now the high school sweethearts are together again and closer than ever!

Denise did note warily some moments later, “I’m not saying every marriage should be saved.”

Watch the full interview, in which she reveals who the “Him” in the title really is. And don’t miss Alan performing his newest song, “It’s All About Him”, which he wrote to honor his wife’s book. Aw.

Do you remember Poppa Neutrino? I suspect very few people do, but for god’s sake they should! His accomplishment(s) are definitely for the history books. In 1998, Neutrino — who changed his name from David Pearlman after a brush with death some years earlier — built a raft from trash he found on the streets of New York. Pushing off from there, Neutrino sailed across the North Atlantic on his homemade raft, and actually succeeded.

And not only that, he also invented the Neutrino Clock Offense, a nearly unstoppable football play that a former New York Jets coach called “as innovative as the forward pass”.

He’s just that kind of guy.

Now, ten years after his historic voyage, Neutrino, seventy-four, is preparing to take another, similar one across the Pacific. It is around the preparation for this voyage that Alec Wilkinson has based his book, The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino, which serves both as a biography and an in depth explanation of Neutrino’s philosophical base, a concept called Triads. He believes that that in order for a person to be truly happy, he or she must define their three deepest desires and pursue them without end.

The fun doesn’t end there: Wilkinson appeared on NPR just yesterday. Listen to the full interview.

The Clash, which for a number of years enjoyed the title of “the only band that mattered”, has emerged as a lasting symbol of the politics and noise of 1970s punk, and is one of the few bands from that era that still enjoys any sort of cultural relevance. They were the first band to take punk beyond its three chord boundaries, mixing together elements of reggae, rockabilly and R&B into a wholly unique sound that served as an elegant platform for front man Joe Strummer’s highly politicized lyrics. Unfortunately, after dozens of London Calling reissues and hundreds of Rolling Stone and NME retrospectives, many of the details of the band and Strummer’s life have been glossed over or lost. Thank god for Chris Salewicz, a feature writer for NME during the band’s heyday. Some thirty years after the fact, he brings us Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, a biography that spans the first raucous days of punk to Strummer’s tumultuous, conflicted post-Clash years. Salewicz sat down with NPR recently and discussed one of the central themes of the book: how does a figurehead in an anarchist movement, one that shuns material wealth, deal with commercial success?

Listen to the full interview here.

Günther Grass served in the Waffen-SS. He was rejected from the submarine corps at age fifteen, and so two years later, he volunteer for, and was accepted, into Hitler’s elite forces. Grass had kept this secret for sixty odd years, during which time he was racked with impossible guilt over his Nazi affiliations. In his newest memoir, Peeling Back the Onion, Grass claims he never fired a shot and spent a majority of his time fleeing military police, but still dutifully bears responsibility for his party’s savagery throughout the war.

The book, and the admission contained therein, have thrown the Nobel Prize-winning writer into the middle of a vicious critical cycle of attack and defense. He discussed the issues surrounding his memoir with Charlie Rose on Tuesday. Watch the full interview.

When tasked by the National Endowment for the Arts to put together a book of solider’s writings, editor Andrew Carroll didn’t expect to find “The Cat”, a poem written by then newly-deployed Marine Ryan Alexander about a relationship he fostered with a pregnant cat. “You have this very stoic culture in the armed forces, where they’re not encouraged to and there isn’t a lot of expressing oneself,” Carroll says. “You do what you’re told, essentially, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to say, ‘Here’s how I feel about that.’”

Operation Homecoming is the culmination of the NEA’s project. The organization drafted the help of Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, and Marilyn Nelson, who encouraged U.S. Military Personnel to start writing about what they were experiencing, what they felt. Carroll came in and edited together the volume, which contains pieces from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as writing from the families they left behind.

Carroll was interview on NPR recently. Listen to the full interview, and read an excerpt of work, including “The Cat”.