C-SPAN Bookshelf

This week's encore interview is from September 21, 1997. Twenty-eight years ago. Our guest was Peter J. Gomes, former minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard. His father was from Cape Verde, and his mother was African-American. In 1991, he identified himself as gay but says he remained celibate. Professor Gomes passed away in 2011 at age 69. During his lifetime, he received over 40 honorary degrees. Professor Gomes was a registered Republican for most of his life and offered prayer at the inaugurations of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. However, in August of 2006, he changed his registration to the Democratic Party. His book is titled "The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taped on 12/15/25 Political scientist Charles Murray, author of "Taking Religion Seriously," discusses his decades-long evolution from "happy agnostic" to believing Christian. Mr. Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 bestseller "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," also talks about the foundations of human morality, the Big Bang, the authorship of the Gospels, and the writings of C.S. Lewis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss her upbringing and writing process and reads from her poem "Lady Freedom Among Us." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

British journalist Piers Morgan argued that there has been a global rejection of "wokeism" and discussed what he thinks a post-woke world will be like. He spoke at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

British historian Alexandra Churchill is no relation to the former prime minister. However, her new book is the history of the world at war in 1914, titled "Ring of Fire." Alex Churchill is quick to tell you she is not an academic but has a research master's degree in the Battle of the Somme. She's a self-starter who writes three times a week for Substack, co-hosts a podcast titled "History Hack," appears in many documentaries, and is a participant in a history touring company in Great Britain. Her book is the story of ordinary people, she says, not those stalking the corridors of power.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former Camp David Historian and Presidential Chaplain Charles Ferguson, author of "Presidential Seclusion: The Power of Camp David," talks about the history of the U.S. presidential retreat and its recreational and diplomatic uses. Located in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland, roughly 60 miles outside of Washington, DC, the 180-acre facility, with a dozen cabins and a Naval base, has, since 1942, hosted presidents from FDR to Trump, their families, and numerous foreign dignitaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author and Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss the science of happiness, his path to becoming an expert on happiness and how people can lead happier lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Michelle Young discussed the history of Rose Valland, a female spy working for the French Resistance at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris during World War II. This event was part of the 2025 History Book Festival in Lewes, Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of the names are familiar to those who follow politics and government. Hunter Biden, Rudolph Giuliani, Tony Podesta, Paul Manafort, and many others. Kenneth Vogel has written a book about these figures. It's called "Devils' Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payroll of Corrupt Foreign Interests." In the publisher Morrow's liner notes on the book, they write: "The foreign influence business comprised of shadowy operators who quietly shaped US foreign policy while producing massive paydays for themselves has existed for decades, often unnoticed by Americans." Ken Vogle is a reporter for the New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former NASA flight director Eugene "Gene" Kranz, author of "Tough and Competent," shares stories from his 34 years at NASA's Mission Control, beginning in 1960 with his work on Project Mercury, the first American human spaceflight program. He was later flight director for NASA's Gemini and Apollo programs, including the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that landed Americans on the moon and the 1970 Apollo 13 mission that almost ended in tragedy ("Houston, we've had a problem…" reported Commander Jim Lovell in route to the moon). Mr. Kranz, who turned 92 this year, also talks about his work on Skylab and the Space Shuttle Program, and weighs in on NASA's current plans to send humans back to the moon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bestselling writer Jodi Picoult, author of 29 novels, discusses her writing process, adapting her books for Hollywood and why one of her books has been banned across the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author David Gelles discussed how Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard built his business, made a fortune, and then gave it all away. Books Passage Bookstore in Corte Madera, California, hosted this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boston-based writer Doug Most's new book is called "Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War." Most, who spent 15 years at the Boston Globe, writes: "In total, American shipyards produced 2,710 Liberty ships in essentially four years, peaking in the spring and summer of 1943, when almost 800 ships were built in seven months..." A lot of the credit is given to Henry Kaiser, who produced half of all Liberty ships – 1,490. By 1943, average time per ship was down to 42 days, the fastest month recorded. Author Doug Most is currently working at Boston University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro went to prison in 2024 after being found guilty of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6th Committee. In his book, "I Went to Prison So You Won't Have To," Mr. Navarro describes the Justice Department's case against him, his arrest and trial, and what it was like for him prison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel talked about the secret world of foreign lobbying in Washington, D.C., and the Americans involved in it, including Rudy Giuliani and Hunter Biden. This event was hosted by the Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yale constitutional law professor Akhil Reed Amar's second book in a trilogy is titled "Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920." In Professor Amar's introduction, he writes: "Millions of Americans can recite by heart Lincoln's opening line at Gettysburg. But how many of us understand it?" "This sentence," Professor Amar continues, "sits at the very center of this book." Akhil Amar, born in 1958 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was raised in California. After law school at Yale, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and became a junior professor back at his alma mater at age 26. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, chosen third in the NBA draft in 2011, is the author of "In the Name of Freedom." In his book, he talks about advocating for human rights as a professional athlete. The Turkish American basketball player has been critical of the NBA and Nike for doing business with China and has called out LeBron James for staying silent on China's human rights abuses. He has also testified in front of Congress about the authoritarian rule of Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jose Andres joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his career, his global relief efforts with World Central Kitchen, his books, and his love of food. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former CNN Moscow bureau chief Jill Dougherty talked about her experiences covering Russia and Russian Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. She spoke at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kenneth Feinberg is a Washington-based attorney who served as a special master of the US government's 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. Mr. Feinberg worked for 33 months, pro bono, deciding who should be compensated as a result of the deaths and injuries from 9/11. Kenneth Feinberg, who today is 79, was interviewed on C-SPAN's Q&A program about his book, "What is Life Worth: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9-11." Here is an encore presentation of that July 1, 2005, interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) talks about eight Black representatives from South Carolina who served in Congress during the Reconstruction Era. The eight included Joseph Rainey, the first Black politician elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and Robert Smalls, a Civil War hero who fled the Confederacy to fight for the Union Army. Both were former slaves. Rep. Clyburn became the ninth Black congressman from South Carolina nearly a century later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walter Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane. He has been the editor of Time Magazine, the CEO and Chairman of CNN, and the CEO of the Aspen Institute. He is the author of Elon Musk (2023), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992). Isaacson is a graduate of Harvard College and Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He began his career at The Sunday Times in London and then New Orleans' Times-Picayune. He joined TIME in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor, and editor of digital media before becoming the magazine's 14th editor in 1996. He became chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

University of Georgia professor emeritus George Selgin argued that many of FDR's New Deal programs were counterproductive and impeded recovery during the Great Depression. He spoke at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Arthur Galston has been a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution since 2006 and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal for the past 12 years. In the first paragraph of his latest 161-page book, he tells us what the book is about: "This book advances this proposition that what I call the dark passions - anger, hatred, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the drive for domination - fuels today's attacks on liberal democracy." Galston also says, "persuasive public speech is the main way demagogues mobilize these passions to pursue power." The name of the book is "Anger, Fear, Domination." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

White House Historical Association president Stewart McLaurin, author of "The People's House Miscellany," talks about the history of the White House and White House-related trivia. He also discusses the changes that presidents and first ladies have made to the White House's interior and exterior going back to President Thomas Jefferson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on After Words — Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd discusses her new book, Notorious, with CNN Chief Political Analyst David Axelrod. In the book, Dowd profiles some of the most talked-about figures from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and American culture. Their conversation was recorded at the 2025 Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author David Grann joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his books including "Killers of the Flower Moon" and "The Wager" and visits the vault of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Retired George Mason University history professor, Peter Henriques, starts off his author's note writing: "If anyone had told me in the summer of 2023 that I would be writing one more book on George Washington, I would have expressed extreme skepticism." In Episode 6 of this Booknotes+ podcast series in 2021, Professor Henriques told us the same thing. But at 88 years old, he's back with another book on our first president, titled "George Washington: His Quest for Honor and Fame." In the afterward of the book, Peter Henriques puts a special emphasis on George Washington and slavery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Boyce Upholt talks about the history and geography of the Mississippi River and human attempts to control it going back to the Founding Era. He discusses how government-built levees, dikes, and dams have transformed the landscape and ecosystem along the 2,340-mile-long Mississippi and the impact that commerce, floods, and pollution have had on the population along its banks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss her biographies of Cleopatra, Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams before visiting the vault of the National Archives to view the Treaty of Paris and other priceless documents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, talked about growing up as a Trump and his family's involvement in business and politics. This event was held at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In September 1975, 17 days apart, two women, one in Sacramento and the other in San Francisco, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The first attempt on September the 5th came from Annette Squeaky Fromm. The Charles Manson follower spent over 30 years in prison, is out on parole, and is 76 years old. The other attempt came on the non-entrance side of St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September the 24th, 1975. The shooter, Sara Jane Moore, served 32 years in prison and died almost 50 years to the day on September the 24th, 2025. Author Jerry Spieler wrote the book "Housewife Assassin" in 2009. She talked to and exchanged letters with Sara Jane Moore on several occasions. Here's her up-to-date story about the woman who tried to kill President Ford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his memoir, "Who Knew," media mogul Barry Diller talks about his career in television and Hollywood, and about his personal life and longtime relationship with fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. Mr. Diller has been an executive at ABC and head of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox (where he created the Fox television network). While at ABC in the mid-1970s, Mr. Diller was responsible for creating the Movie of the Week and the television miniseries, including "Roots." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett joins host David M. Rubenstein to discuss her new book, her early life and her view of the Constitution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Karen Hao discussed her reporting on OpenAI under the leadership of Sam Altman. The Commonwealth Club of California hosted this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The book is called "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future." Author Dan Wang was born in China in 1992. His parents moved to Canada when he was seven. In 2014, he graduated from the University of Rochester in New York. Then in 2018, Dan Wang went to live in China until he returned to the US in 2023. He then went to the offices of the Yale Law School and wrote about his comparison of China and the United States. He writes in his introduction: "A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing variations of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness and overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty discusses her life-long interest in Russia, which she first visited in 1969 as an exchange student. A fluent Russian speaker, she spent 10 years covering Russia for Voice of America and CNN. Besides serving as Moscow Bureau Chief, Jill Dougherty was White House correspondent during the H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. While in Moscow, she covered the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, master of the legal thriller John Grisham joins host David M. Rubenstein to discuss his early life, writing process, latest novel and his work with wrongfully convicted prisoners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Washington Post's Christian Davenport reported on the private companies in space flight and the rivalry between Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., hosts this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The names are almost all known nationally: Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins, Al Sharpton, Larry Kramer, and Donald Trump. These are people who were first in the news in the 1980s. Their early public lives are now featured in Jonathan Mahler's book, "The Gods of New York." The book is divided into four large chapters titled 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989. Mr. Mahler, a feature writer for the New York Times Magazine, closes his book with this last paragraph: "The existential questions that New York faced as it entered 1986 were answered. The great working-class city was gone." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jane Goodall talked about her book Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink (Grand Central Publishing; September 2, 2009). In the book, she and her co-authors describe people and projects around the world that are rescuing species on the brink of extinction. The guest interviewer was John Nielsen. The interview was held at Georgetown University, prior to Ms. Goodall giving a special lecture. Primatologist Jane Goodall, famous for her work with chimpanzees, is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute. She is the author of many books, including In the Shadow of Man; Reason for Hope, and Chimpanzees I Love. John Nielsen, journalist in residence at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is the author of Condor: To the Brink and Back - The Life and Times of One Giant Bird and the producer of WWF's "The Wild Things," a bi-weekly podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Taubman and his brother William have written what the publisher Norton is calling "McNamara at War: A New History." It's a full life biography of former Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara. "It's a portrait of a man at war with himself," according to the authors. "It's riven with melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late." William Taubman, seven years older than his brother at 83, is an emeritus political science professor from Amherst College. Brother Phil spent 30 years with the New York Times and is an author of several books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices