We Are Not Descended From Fearful Men: David Maraniss and "A Good American Family"

Mark Twain is reported to have said that history does not really repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Today we live in a climate, not unlike the late ’40s and early ’50s, where fear is weaponized,  and where suspicion of the other is exploited as a salve for change.

Yet there always seem to be brave men and women trying to rise above. As Ed Murrow said in his takedown of Senator Joe McCarthy,” we were not descended from fearful men. They were not men who feared to write or to speak,” who, again in Murrow’s words, “did not confuse dissent with disloyalty.”

But fear is personal, visceral, and chilling when exploited by the government. It undermines the very foundation of a democratic republic, and sometimes of families. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss makes it as personal as it can be in A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father. The story of his father and his family caught in the maelstrom of the red scare in the 1950s.

My conversation with David Maraniss:

Detroit once symbolized America

Every great city has it’s defining era. Not always good, but certainly one that shapes its fortunes and reinforces its place in the urban pantheon. For New York it was perhaps the 50s, for Paris the mid 1920s, for San Francisco the ‘60s and for Hollywood, certainly the 1930s.

For Detroit, the eighteen months from the fall of 1962, through the spring 1964 marked perhaps the apogee and the beginning of the downward arc of that once great city.

A city that came to personify the American experience in the second half of the 20th century. Detroit at the time was the epicenter of music, racial strife, labor and of a middle class that now seems a bygone dream.

Capturing that moment is Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist, and Washington Post Associate Editor David Maraniss. He captures the essence of this period in Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story.

My conversation with David Maraniss:

Barack Obama: The Story

George Bernard Shaw once observed “that life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." For many people that is undoubtedly true. Bill Clinton might be the penultimate example of that. But for Barack Obama, it has always been about both. About understanding the world that created him, and then using that raw material to reassemble the pieces, to create himself anew. This journey is at the core of David Maraniss's sweeping historical biography,  Barack Obama: The Story.

My conversation with David Maraniss:

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Tell Me A Story

Few journalists have been as good at capturing the personalities and zeitgeist of their time as David Maraniss. A multiple Pulitzer Prize winner and award winning biographer of Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi, and Roberto Clemente, he has also taken us to modern day Vietnam and to the 1960 Rome Olympics. His work focuses on those important moments in the human condition, when we reveal who we really are. His new book Into the Story: A Writer's Journey through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss, is a kind of sampler of his work that, taken together, accentuates his love of politics, sports and the importance of timeless narrative non-fiction.

My conversation with David Maraniss: