In The Israel Lobby, which grew out of a controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Walt and co-author John Mearsheimer examine the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. They argue that American support for Israel cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds.
Walt teaches international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
In The Deadliest Lies, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responds to The Israel Lobby, arguing that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's work "serves merely as an attractive new package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs" about Jews and Israel.
During his heyday in the early 1970s, shock-rock icon Alice Cooper dressed like a ghoul with a gaunt face and mascara-streaked eyes. His hits included "I'm Eighteen," "School's Out" and "Welcome to My Nightmare." In a memoir — Alice Cooper: Golf Monster, he recounts how he used his obsession with golf to overcome his addiction to alcohol.
This interview was originally broadcast on May 17, 2007.
With the rise of the TV-series box set, more shows are earning fans who devour episodes one after another. Fresh Air TV critic David Bianculli reviews two newly released sets: the debut seasons of Heroes and Friday Night Lights. The former is a seven-disc set packed with deleted scenes and the unaired original pilot; the Friday Night Lights set includes deleted episodes and a making-of featurette.
On his third album, Up Front & Down Low, singer-songwriter Teddy Thompson covers classic country songs including "She Thinks I Still Care," "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers," and "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone." On his earlier discs, including his self-titled 2000 debut and 2006's Separate Ways, Thompson performed more of his own songs. He's also appeared on various recordings with his parents, the British folk-rock legends Richard and Linda Thompson.
Novelist Bill Flanagan wrote the comedy A&R about the smooth operators and the scatty artists who make the music business so entertaining. Now he's lampooning the cable-TV industry in his novel New Bedlam. The source for his send-ups? His day job as an MTV networks exec.
Canadian journalist Paul Watson won the 1994 Pulitizer Prize for his photograph of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu,Somalia. His war-zone work leaves him suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress, and he says the Mogadishu photo still haunts him. Watson has also reported from Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq; he earned three National Newspaper Awards for foreign reporting and photography while at the Toronto Star, and was recently posted to head The Los Angeles Times' Southeast Asia bureau in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Grace Paley, an iconic and idiosyncratic American literary voice, died Wednesday. She was 84, and had battled breast cancer. Paley wrote short stories and poems, and much of her writing was inspired by the people she knew growing up in New York, the daughter of Russian Jews. Her first collection of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love, was published in 1959. Her other collections included Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later in the Same Day.
NPR's Baghdad bureau chief, Jamie Tarabay, has been living in and covering Iraq since December 2005. She spoke to Terry Gross in Fresh Air's Philadelphia studios, during a two-week break from her reporting duties. Australian by birth and Lebanese by heritage, Tarabay speaks fluent Arabic and French. She lived for three years as a child in Beirut during the bombings there. Before joining NPR she was a correspondent for the Associated Press, reporting from Southeast Asia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.
Journalist Connie Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2005 for her work as a columnist for The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland. The judges praised her for writing "pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged." "Pungent" is a good word, too, for the tone of Schultz's new memoir, about being the wife of a political candidate. Her husband, Sherrod Brown, was an Ohio congressman when he decided to run for the U.S. Senate; Schultz took a sabbatical from her job to help him campaign. Her book is . . .
Fresh Air's resident linguist has had some thoughts lately on the language of the recent string of debates among the various presidential hopefuls. On today's show, he talks to Terry Gross about the signifiers he sees encoded in political language. Geoff Nunberg's most recent book is Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. His primary reaction to the debates?
Sinatra, Streisand, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett — even Fred Astaire — have all recorded their songs: The husband-and-wife team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman has been writing irresistible tunes together for 50 years.
Fresh Air's book critic reviews Circling My Mother, the new memoir by novelist Mary Gordon; the book chronicles Anne Gordon's battles with polio, alcoholism, and eventually with senile dementia, and details the author's acceptance of both "the burdens and blessings of caring for her mother in old age."
David Steinberg was big on the stand-up circuit back in the 1960s and '70s; he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson over a hundred times. Now he's host of TV Land's Sit Down Comedy with David Steinberg, on which he interviews other comedians. Steinberg went on to a career in TV production, directing episodes of Seinfeld, Mad About You and Friends. His new memoir is called The Book of David.
Saxophonist Harry Allen and singer-instrumentalist Eddie Erickson are just two of the performers on a new CD, The Harry Allen-Joe Cohn Quartet Perform Music From 'Guys and Dolls'. Erickson, who's best known as a guitarist, is featured on the disc as a vocalist, singing Frank Loesser's tunes alongside Rebecca Kilgore.
Our TV critic reviews High School Musical 2, the sequel to the wildly popular teen musical. It stars Zac Efron and premieres on the Disney Channel tonight.
Max Roach, the pioneering jazz drummer and bebop innovator, died this week at age 83. Roach was considered the greatest drummer of all time by his peers. He played with Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis. "Max was one of the founders and original members of the A-Team of bebop," said musician Quincy Jones. "Outside of losing a giant and an innovator, I've lost a great, great friend. Thank God he left a piece of his soul on his recordings so that we'll always have a part of him with us." Roach spoke to Terry Gross on June 25, 1987.
Superbad might be the most provocative teen sex-comedy ever made. I hedge because it's just opening, and the only ones provoked so far are nerdy male film critics. We love it! Its heroes are graduating high-school buddies swimming in hormones and uncertainty. Seth, played by Jonah Hill, is blobby and loud. Evan, played by Michael Sera, is skinny and hysterical. Seth is a virgin and likely to remain so for some time but talks of nothing but sex — a nonstop stream of naughty words that would make David Mamet sit up and salute.
