When comedian Andy Borowitz read that Bernard Madoff’s relatives were looking for a guide to help Bernie survive life in prison, he jumped at the chance to help the disgraced billionaire. He wrote a book called “Who Moved My Soap: The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison.” Borowitz joins The Takeaway with a few helpful hints for Madoff’s time on the inside.

The election of Barack Obama may have had what we'll call The Urkel Effect. Takeaway Contributor and Senior Editor at Essence Magazine, Patrik Henry Bass says the rise of the bookish President may clear a path for people once maligned as nerds and bookworms. And he says that may have a particularly strong impact in the black community, especially in conjunction with the rise of authors such as Colson Whitehead and Trey Ellis.

Which books were on Patrik's list?

• Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
• John Ridley, What Fire Cannot Burn
• Trey Ellis, Platitudes
• Mat Johnson, Drop
• Victor LaValle, Big Machine
• David Anthony Durham, The Other Lands
• Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

Barack Obama may be President, but will he get his own breakfast cereal like Urkel?

The winning line-up of this year's Pulitzer Prizes for literature was a far more diverse group than in years past. Two African American women were winners: Playwright Lynn Nottage won for Ruined, a searing play about rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Annette Gordon-Reed won the award for non-fiction with, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which traces the family of Sally Hemings and their lives at Thomas Jefferson's estate. To discuss these winners and their works, The Takeaway is joined by Patrik Henry Bass, a Takeaway contributor and literary editor at Essence Magazine.

Last week, the U.S. lost a seminal historian of the African-American experience when John Hope Franklin passed away. His books, includingFrom Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, and Reconstruction after the Civil War (The Chicago History of American Civilization), have sold millions of copies and have been required reading at colleges and universities for decades. The Takeaway talks to contributor and Senior Editor at Essence Magazine, Patrik Henry Bass, about John Hope Franklin's life, work and legacy.

The National Visionary Leadership Project has several interviews with John Hope Franklin available on Youtube. Here he is speaking about the importance of history:

For those of you looking for hope in times of economic woe, look no further than the man who brought you Oliver Twist. University of Oxford English professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst says no other author can encapsulate the anxiety of our current economy better than Charles Dickens.

There is science and there is cooking. Then there is the area where the two intersect. New York Times writer Julia Moskin joins The Takeaway to talk about the culinary and scientific as heavy machinery, geometry and electrical engineering enter the kitchen.

If the NSA is listening to your phone calls and reading your emails, would you want to know about it?

The 2008 Nobel Prize in literature was announced this morning. The winner is French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

Thomas Friedman argues "that we are going from a world of a billion Americans to a world of 2 or 3 billion." And "in a world that is hot, flat and crowded, clean technology is the next great global industry." Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman explains the challenges and possibilities facing America and the need for a green revolution.

In the world of blockbuster books, Agatha Christie was way ahead of her time — not only in spinning unpredictable tales but also introducing the world to her distinctive characters. Now, newly discovered audio tapes give us a window into what she thought about her legendary detectives. Christie's grandson Mathew Prichard stumbled upon 27 of the half-hour long tapes; in a dusty cardboard box — undisturbed for 40 years &mdash as he cleaned out a storeroom in Greenway, the Georgian property overlooking the Dart estuary in Devon that Christie called "the loveliest place in the world.” In the tapes, she explained why the fastidious Hercule Poirot and the indomitable Miss Marple should never meet.

The annual Bulwer-Lytton writing contest features the best of the worst opening lines for novels that never were, and never will be.

Guest: Lee Israel, biographer, copy editor, author of “Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger”

The book “Generation Kill” is based on the experiences of journalist Evan Wright as he rode from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003. The marines in HBO's version are played by actors, but their stories are real.

Evan Wright turned the articles he wrote as an embedded journalist in Iraq for Rolling Stone into the award winning book “Generation Kill." Wright sold the rights to HBO, who promised to re-create the book with the same grittiness and harsh realism that Wright captured in his book. The result is “Generation Kill,” the miniseries.

In the wake of violent protests involving the Olympic torch and the murder of 16 policemen in Xinjiang province, Olympics organizers and participants fear more civic disturbances. Ironically, author Charles Cumming's new book "Typhoon" is a thriller about terrorist attacks on the eve of the Olympics, launched by citizens from Xinjiang. Is the work of fiction that far-fetched?

Guest: Archie Barron, producer and director of the documentary "The Solzhenitsyns Take a Long Way Home"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn timeline:

Birth
1918, December 11
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn is born in Kislovodsk, Russia on December 11, 1918, as World War I was ending. His father dies six months before his birth.

Guests: Susan Pfeffer, author of post-apocalyptic childrens books, "Life as We Knew It" (2006) and "The Dead and the Gone" (2008), and Dr. Frank Gaskil, child psychologist

In "The Dark Side," author Jane Mayer weaves a seven-year narrative detailing what we know and don't know about the decisions made while pursuing terrorists after the coordinated terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Mayer focuses on roles of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief-of-staff since 2005, David Addington, and infers details from a secret 2007 Red Cross report that says the prisoner abuses at U.S. facilities constitute war crimes.

When it comes to the issues, Barack Obama and John McCain couldn’t be more different. But when it comes to literature, the two are remarkably the same. Each cites Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” as a favorite read. The Takeaway looks at what this book says about the presidential hopefuls and the power of great literature to reach across the aisle.