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

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.
Listen Add to Playlist

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.
Listen Add to Playlist

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?
Listen Add to Playlist

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.

A student of mathematics
1937
Now an unpublished and frustrated young author, Solzhenitsyn reluctantly studies Mathematics at Rostov University in Russia.

Natalia Reshetovskaia
1940
In 1940, Solzhenitsyn marries Natalia Reshetovskaia. She would divorce him in 1950, they would marry again in 1957, and then the two would divorce finally in 1972.

Captain Solzhenitsyn
1942
For some 2 1/2 years, during World War II, Solzhenitsyn serves as an artillery captain.

Imprisonment
1945, February
Solzhenitsyn is arrested in February 1945, for "disrespectful remarks" written about Stalin in correspondences with a friend. He is soon taken to a labor
Listen Add to Playlist

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
Listen Add to Playlist

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.
Listen Add to Playlist

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.
Listen Add to Playlist

Listen Add to Playlist