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.

We live in an age where everything is fluid, most of all moral standards. They’re often the focal point of politicians’ stump speeches, but these past six years have seen some atrocious acts dismissed, talked around, justified and flat out ignored. In a country where our founding document, which guarantees us certain rights and protections, is being ignored as often as it is evoked, how are we supposed to interpret the term “civil liberties”?

American Civil Liberties Executive Director Anthony Romero sets out to answer that question in In Defense of Our America. He takes a look at several post-9/11 civil liberties cases — the Guantanamo Bay issue, the NSA spying program, the “American Taliban” — and examines their importance in the larger civil rights battle.

Romero appeared on Diane Rehm yesterday. Listen to 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”.

Connie Schultz and her husband, Sherrod Brown, were eating a restaurant with a local democratic chapter when Brown, for the seventh time in two days, announced his intentions to run for the senate, and in a state, Ohio, where no democrat had won statewide office in twelve years, no less. The party chairman introduced Brown from his podium, and, for the first time, introduced Schultz as “his lovely wife”. Now, a year later, that lovely wife, also a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, brings us this: His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man, her memoir of a year on the campaign trail. From her “lovely wife” position, she could see the workings of her husband’s campaign better than all most anyone else: the sacrifices, both personal and professional, the new-found responsibilities of being a political wife, the endless chin-wagging, and the day to rigors of political life (including those nasty bloggers!). Schultz captures all these details in a witty and intelligent tone, much the same tone she used in her NPR interview, which you may listen to here.

In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there is a prison there known as the Wire, where those suspected of terrorism are detained, oftentimes without formal charges brought against them. To pass the time, many of them have turned to writing poetry. Attorney Mark Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, discovered this and edited together a volume of detainee poetry entitled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.

“It wasn’t just the first poem I’ve written in captivity,” says Moazzam Begg, a poet who was detained in Guantanamo for 3 years. “It’s the first poem I’ve ever written in my life of any meaning at all. It has particular significance because it describes, demonstrates and is a message to people outside of Guantanamo Bay of what I feel and what is happening around my surroundings.”

The poems, Falkoff says, are not at all a security risk, despite the army’s suggestion that the detainees were not writing for “the sake of art”, but rather using poetry as “another weapon to attack the Western ideals against which they are at war”.

You can read excerpts and listen to the full interview here.

Rosco’s was a dark bar, smoky, lots of taxidermy on the walls, and the first place where Danielle Trussoni heard her father, Jim Trussoni’s war stories. Jim was a Vietnam vet, drafted from Wisconsin at the outset of the war, and immediately volunteered to be a “tunnel rat,” and plumb the labyrinthine and oftentimes booby-trapped Viet Cong tunnel systems. Jim now suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Danielle attributes it primarily to his time underground. This past year, Danielle went so far as to write a memoir, entitled Falling Through the Earth, which describes what it was like growing up beneath this man and how his PTSD effected her life as well.

Danielle sat down with NPR’s Weekend Edition to discuss the book. She begins as a 5 year old who just recently found dozens of photographs of Asian men in her basement, which she would later discover were of Viet Cong Jim had killed. “He really cherished them,” she says. This was her first encounter with her father’s PTSD, though they did not speak about the photos until 14 years later, when Danielle was doing a project for a history class at U. of Wisconsin. She interviewed Jim about his experience, and quickly realized that the stories she’d heard as a child had changed, sometimes for the better, other times not. “They were fraught, very emotional,” she says of the interviews. “Jim never felt remorse in the way I wanted him to feel remorse for those deaths, and I guess a solider can’t.”

In researching the memoir, Danielle actually went to Vietnam and retraced her father’s foot steps, even plunging down into preserved Viet Cong cave systems in hopes of understanding better Jim’s mindset. “It did [help me to understand. I could feel the heat, and I could feel the claustrophobia, and I could see nothing ahead but…nothingness”.

Listen to the full interview, in which Danielle further discusses her time in Vietnam, and the difficulties with the actual writing of the memoir.

The war in Iraq is the first in our nation’s history in which a majority of the tasks traditionally undertaken by the army have been outsourced, primarily by former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to KGB, a subsidiary of Halliburton. When KGB was first contracted to do logistical work, the sum agreed on was $6 million. Over the past four years, that amount has ballooned to $26 billion. What are the repercussions of such a thorough privatization of the war? That is the question asked by Dina Rasor in her book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War.

Rasor sat down with Diane Rehm, and discussed the fact that in Iraq right now, there are more than 100 private contractors and that cost will be more than $1 billion this year. “People gripe about the cost of Iraqi reconstruction,” says Rasor, “that’s nothing compared to the cost of outsourcing everything.” She points out that there is nearly a 1:1 ratio now of soldiers and private contractors, with each topping out at around 130,000. What does that mean on the ground? “Commanders have less control. They’re going into hostile areas now, and there are no regulations for that.” Perhaps more alarming though, is the fact that these contractors are responsible for the infamous gear shortages. “Logistically, they’ll supply to the main bases, but they won’t go any farther than that. It’s too dangerous for them to justify it, so soldiers get left without food, water and gear.”

Uhhh…

Listen to the full interview.

Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic political strategist, has been in his words, “at the center of progressive politcs…from Vietnam to Iraq.” He recently came out with a book, No Excuses: Confessions of a Serial Campaigner, in which he writes about his experiences in politics over the past 30 years, during which time he experienced a drastic change in campaigning.

He sat down with Jon Stewart and discussed how in the 70s each candidate had “their people, and if they lost, they went away.” Now, campaigners jump from candidate to candidate in sort of an interview process. “It’s sure easier to run with someone you believe in.” Campaigning, Shrum argues, is more a business now than ever, and that in order to win the candidate needs to go after the best, most experienced campaigners he can get, regardless of previous affiliation.

Watch the interview for an entertaining story about Julie Christie, Warren Beatty and some democrats.

In June 2005, a group of Navy SEALs embarked on a mission to the mountains of Afghanistan to scope out a rumored Taliban hideout. They were not supposed to engage any one, let alone a group of goat herders. Convinced that if the SEALs executed these herders the bodies would be found and their whereabouts would be compromised, they let them go. In what Marcus Luttrel writes is “the stupidest, most southern-fried, lame brained decision I ever made in my life to vote to let them go. I must have been out of my mind taking a vote that I knew would sign our death warrant.” Some 45 minutes later, a 100 plus Taliban fighters were on the four SEALs. Only Luttrel survived.

Matt Lauer conducted an interview with Luttrel on The Today Show about the ex-SEAL’s memoir, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team Ten. Luttrel and Lauer go through the whole harrowing episode in detail, including how Luttrel survived in the months following the tragedy.

You may watch the interview here and read the corresponding excerpt on the show’s Website.