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.

Think the U.S. Constitution needs a rewrite to reflect modern times? So does Larry Sabato. The author of A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country, sat down with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show this morning on an election day. Sabato is the founder and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. You can listen to the interview below, where he talks about topics such as amending the electoral college to reflect the popular vote and eliminate electors.

You can listen to the interview below.

Now that her cover has been blown and her mug is all over the place, former CIA spy Valerie Plame Wilson went on The Daily Show last night to talk about her book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Plame and Jon Stewart discuss Robert Novak, the White House, Niger, and parts of the book the CIA redacted, including a piece about breast feeding.Find out more about the book at Simon & Schuster.

Bad leadership in Washington made retired four-star General Wesley Clark write a book called A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor And Country and though he claims it’s not a candidate’s memoir, it sounds like it sure reads like one. Stephen Colbert recently had Clark on to discuss the book, hence the video clip above. Unfortunately, Clark doesn’t get a lot of time to talk about the book, but at least he’s got a good sense of humor. Many more in-depth interviews about the book and Clark’s ideas are available online at Clark’s Web site, SecuringAmerica.com.

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.

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.

Jed Babbin. With a name like that, how could you forget him? He was the George H.W. Bush’s Undersecretary of Defense, and now he’s joined the ranks of people that insist we knew about 9/11 years before it happened, and still failed to take any preventative action. But that’s not even the important part: in his newest book, In the Words of Our Enemies Babbin says we’re still being warned by Iran, North Korea, and terrorist factions across the world. The inside flap informs us that the book tackles such topics as, “What the Islamists themselves are saying about their plans for America–mass murder followed by imposition of Islamic sharia law?”, “How Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is leading a radical anti-American revolution that aims to organize the world’s oil supplies against America”, and “How many countries have threatened to use nuclear weapons against America (it’s more than you think)”.

So conspiracy theorists rejoice. This will give you fodder for years.

Babbin appeared on the Daily Show several days ago. Watch the full interview here.

ps. Foreword by Newt Gingrich!

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.