Alec Klein went to a high school better than yours. Every year, 28,000 kids apply to Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, and only 850 are accepted. Among those that do make it, there is a 25% acceptance rate to Ivy League schools. The alumni include Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, and business luminaries. Stuyvesant kids are far smarter, wittier, more successful and maybe even prettier than those that went to your high school.

But Alec Klein wants to know the reasons why? He graduated in the class of 1985, and now he has gone back to try and figure out what makes his school so special. His book, A Class Apart, follows several students — the ten-year-old prodigy, the captain of the football team, the jaded poet — and several faculty members through a year at “Sty High”, and finds in equal parts the fulfillment of the American dream and vicious educational elitism.

Klein was featured on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday. Check out the interview.

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.

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.

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.

Exempted from military service, violinist Gottfried Keller spent the waning days of World War II playing for wounded soldiers, a task he felt was demoralizing and a misuse of his talents. He dared not complain, though, and was rewarded with a trip to nearby labor camp. After meeting briefly with the commander of the camp, Keller begins playing anew, but this time for the inmates, for whom his violin, it is hoped, will inspire hope in otherwise despondent men. As Keller plays the greats, the author Eugene Drucker, unravels his character’s life, revealing the death of his best friend and the Jewish fiancé he fled from at the outset of the war.

Drucker is himself a professional violinist, and his mastery of the instrument informs The Savior, his first novel, all throughout. He appeared yesterday on The Diane Rehm Show. Listen to the full interview.

In her latest book, Otherwise Normal People, Aurelia C. Scott has found people that like to garden, but none of that “buy a couple of plants from the grocery store and throw them in the ground and then never look at them again because plants don’t deserve my time and attention” crap. These people garden the way Lance Armstrong rides bikes, and as Scott shows us, the results are amusing, frightening, and often times very enlightening.

The book centers around a group of competitors preparing for the American Rose Society’s spring show. They live anywhere from North Carolina to California, they are housewives and brain surgeons and sheet metal mechanics, and they all have their own tips and secrets for growing the perfect rose. Scott expertly chronicles the group’s passion, often getting swept up in the fervor herself, but never pokes fun at the somewhat esoteric nature of the competition.

Listen to rosarian anecdotes on the Diane Rehm Show.

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.

Quick, what’s the hip, new, rebellious thing amongst teenage girls today? Being good! What would Paris and Lindsey think?

Those two are actually major catalysts for the movement, which has been profiled by Wendy Shalit in her latest book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. Girls across the country are boycotting barely-there clothing from companies like Hollister and Icing. A girl in Philadelphia is upset by a profane book read in English class, so she takes her case to the school board. In a blog, another girl details a struggle she’s having with her mother, who she feels is pressuring her to lose her virginity. Shalit argues that these aren’t just isolated incidents, but rather a reaction to the hyper-sexualized teenagers on TV and in movies. She describes how the primarily the media, but also friends and, surprisingly, parents can derail a girl’s efforts to discover herself, and outlines specific cases in which teenage girls have resisted all of that and become who they want to be.

Shalit spoke with Diane Rehm yesterday. Listen to the full interview.

Some years ago, suburbanite mystery writer Jon Katz packed up and bought an upstate New York farm in hopes of giving his border collies the best life possible. Now, some five books later, Katz has discovered what that really entails. His sixth in the series, Dog Days, is series of dispatches from Bedlam farm, which now boasts the beloved dogs, as well as sheep, steers and cow, donkeys, a barn cat, a rooster and three hens. Katz, who writes about farm life for Slate and co-hosts “Dog Talk”, a public radio talk show, dropped in on Diane Rehm to discuss how hard it is to promote harmony between animals, why his donkeys like Willie Nelson best, and how his collies continually surprise him.

Listen to the full interview.