On this morning’s Leonard Lopate Show, the authors of America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise talk about nuclear arsenal in Pakistan and the Middle East. According to David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, although the issue is getting some attention now, “it’s a little bit too late. The time to be worry about this was 30 years ago, when the United States was condoning Pakistan’s development of these weapons.” Armstrong and Trento give a scary outlook on how far-reaching the problem is, and “that there are repercussions we have begun to faced, yet.”

Listen to this interview below.

On a less scary topic, Graham Robb, author of The Discovery of France, joins Lopate to talk about how “as recently as 1890, large parts of France were divided by tribal allegiances; pre-Christian beliefs remained widespread; and French was even a minority language.”

Listen to this interview below.

On this morning’s Diane Rehm Show, Rehm talks to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich about the phrase she coined, “well-behaved women seldom make history,” which is also the title of Ulrich’s new book. Rehm and Ulrich discuss “how different groups have tried to appropriate it, and why certain women make history and why some get left behind.”

“I felt like it just happened,” said Ulrich about where the phrase came from. “I was working on an article on Puritan funeral sermons, called Virtuous Women Found, and I was trying to give these virtuous women a history. I was thinking about women that fit the sterotypes of the 17th century… went to church even when it snowed, never spoke up, did the right things… the stereotypical kind of thing that were celebrated in those sermons, and what i say is when people who really hold up the world–literally–are celebrated they are idealized into anynomity. They have no history beacuse they have no individuality, they just become icons. And a lot of my work has been devoted to break through those stereotypes and find real women.”

Rehm also talks to Ulrich about changes at Harvard regarding the role women now play at the university. Ulrich is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning A Midwife’s Tale.

You can listen to the interview at WAMU’s Web site.

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.

In the latest of a series of books with hyper-literal titles, historian and journalist Dan Kurzman brings us Special Mission: Hitler’s Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius the XII, a fascinating look at one of the increasingly infirm dictator’s late-stage plots.

Fearing that Pius XII would speak out against the Nazi’s actions against the Jews, he ordered the SS leader in Italy, Gen. Karl Wolff, to carry out the deed. Kurzman, then writing for The Washington Post, was the first to interview Wolff after the war. Describing him as a successful opportunist, Kurzman explains Nazi/Vatican relations from the 1933 Concordat, the ultimate reason for Pius XII’s silence throughout the war to that point.

Kurzman was interviewed by NPR’s All Things Considered today, during which time he described Wolff’s daring betrayal of the Fürer and his hopes that the pope might be an instrument in negotiating peace and a subsequent Anglo-American-German offensive against the unruly Soviets.

Read an excerpt and listen to the full interview here.

With The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America, Allen Brandt, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, offers up the definitive history of the cigarette, from its inception in the late 19th century to its widespread ban in the late 20th. Thursday night, Brandt sat down with Jon Stewart and argued that cigarettes represent nearly every aspect of America: agriculture, business, pop culture, issues of gender and sexuality, advertising, public relations and so on.

In his book, Brandt documents the knowledge that cigarettes are harmful in great detail, but that there is no sense of shame or acknowledgment on the part of cigarette companies, who still go after what they call “replacement smokers,” kids that they lure in with newly reissued flavored cigarettes and tobacco.

Watch the whole interview, in which Brandt puts forth his theory on how cigarettes have remained popular for over a century.

Former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles was featured on NPR yesterday. The book is the latest of many to try and get into the head of the Princess to get “the real Diana.” To this end, Brown sifted through the extensive press coverage and interviewed friends, staff and the people closest to her, ultimately creating a portrait of the beloved Royal as a savvy, globe-trotting humanitarian — the predecessor of Bono and Angelina Jolie

The NPR interview with Brown, along with a brief excerpt of the book is available here.

Brown and her book were also featured on GMA last week, and you may read that here.

In his book, Are We Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Vanity Fair Editor Cullen Murphy asks, well, are we Rome?

The comparison of the U.S. and the fallen empire is a popular one in modern times, especially since the onset of the Iraq war, when the country began to experience many of the issues that Rome did during its demise. In an interview with Colbert, who was channeling Russel Crowe, Murphy pointed to “the hollowing out” of government, the imminent corruption that makes citizens lose faith in their central institution. He also discussed our military problems, which echo Rome’s in that our forces are too small to do the jobs we need done, but still too large for us to adequately maintain, which will inevitably lead to a break down abroad. And like Rome, the U.S. has exacerbated the issue, Murphy says, by inviting in outsiders, “barbarians,” to do our dirty work, the most well known of these being Halliburton.

The similarities go on, but Murphy ends the interview on a good note saying he feels it will be largely impossible for Bush to get himself elected Emperor.

Colbert: “So he’s totally going to get stabbed, huh?”

Watch the interview.

This is how life imitates art: During the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Catholic King James II was deposed, largely without blood, via an elaborate conspiracy that installed his protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William Henry of Orange.

As Jon Stewart points out, “That’s King Lear!”

That play was banned for several years after the revolution, and we know this because last night, Stewart sat down to talk to Michael Barone, author of Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Uprising That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. The book argues that the American Revolution took most of its cues from the Glorious Revolution, some ninety years before. In the interview, Barone discusses the climate from which the Glorious Revolution sprung forth, the parallels in the United States, and how our War for Independence wasn’t such a revolutionary move after all.

Watch the whole interview here.

Jill Jonnes, author and New York historian, tackles her biggest project yet: the New York train system. Her newest book, Conquering Gotham, details the efforts of the Pennsylvania Railroad to bring a train system to New York some 100 years ago. The company had to overcome insane financial, logistical and engineering challenges; spar with Tammany Hall, the de facto political power of the city; and perhaps the greatest problem of all: how to tunnel beneath the Hudson and East Rivers?

Listen as Jonnes sits down with Diane Rehm and discusses the finer points of railroad building.