Out of many....One

Day after day we see further evidence of what appears to be America's economic decline.  European economies seem mired in a kind of economic quicksand. But suppose instead of seeking individual isolationist solutions, that the U.S. and Europe could create a kind of transatlantic economic union?

Clausewitz said that diplomacy was simply war by other means. Today it might be fair to say the same of international trade. As both America and Europe asses their roles in the 21st century, it's important that we access every aspect of of power, including as both a marketplace for and a purveyor of goods.

Imagine if at America s birth, the 13 colonies had decided to go it alone. For all the criticism of the EU and NAFTA today, arguably the world is a better place because of them.

These are a few of the ideas that spring from Richard Rosecrance in The Resurgence of the West: How a Transatlantic Union Can Prevent War and Restore the United States and Europe.

Richard Rosecrance is senior fellow, adjunct professor, and director of the U.S.-China Relations Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA, where he was the former director of the Burkle Center for International Relations.

My conversation with Richard Rosecrance

Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Who Took America to War

As we once again debate America's role in the world, this time in the Middle East, it’s worth noting that there is most assuredly a deep strain of isolationism that courses throughout American history. Perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in the run up to the Second World War.

Even as Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, only one in forty Americans thought America should get involved. This was the world that FDR faced as he tried to reshape America's vision and it’s place in the world.  He reminded the country that it had a “rendezvous with destiny.”

He would succeed in persuading America.  How he did it, is the the subject of Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World by Michael Fullilove.

My conversation with Michael Fullilove:

Revolutionary Conservatives

Imagine a nation at war, a financial crisis, congress divided, bitter partisanship, battles over taxation and the role of banks and corporations. Members of government who believed in trickle down economics and who thought that business interests should be preeminent and that we had to show America’s strength. You’d think we were talking about America today. In fact it was also the America of its birth. A time when the quest for independence ran headlong into political reality.

This is the reality that David Lefer takes us into in  The Founding Conservatives: How a Group of Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution.

My conversation with David Lefer:

Jeannette Walls

Seven years ago Jeannette Walls reminded us of the resiliency and precociousness of youth, as she took us through her own troubled upbringing in THE GLASS CASTLE. Now she turns to fiction and is able to share with us and show us once again how young people can make their way in the world; but more importantly, the raw innocence with which they view their surroundings. In The Silver Star we get to see how these raw edges get knocked off and how, for better or worse,  fully formed adults emerge.

My conversation with Jeannette Walls:

There really was a golden age of hijacking...

It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a golden age of hijacking.  Over a five-year period, starting in 1968, commercial jets we hijacked nearly once a week, using guns, bombs, and jars of acid. Some hijackers wished to escape to Cuba, or Saigon.  Many, imagined being hailed as heroes; others aimed to swap hostages for sacks of cash. Their exploits mesmerized the country.

But perhaps the the story that captures the nation's attention on many levels was the the young lovers at the heart of Brendan I. Koerner’s story of this period told in his his book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking.

My conversation with Brendan Koerner:

A cancer on the Church..that didn't have to happen

Just recently we heard about tens of millions of dollars in cash being laundered in the Vatican. Clearly the Vatican and the Catholic Church are still imperial institutions, very much disconnected from the real world. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the almost twenty year history of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

We often think about these stories on a very human, very tragic case by case basis. But from thirty thousand feet, the numbers are staggering. 500+ priests sent to prison, over 3 billion paid in settlements, single priests that have abused more than 200 individual children and these are just a few of the statistics.

How did this happen? How did horror and human degradation become so institutionalized, covered up and almost accepted from the Pope on down?

This is the story that Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Michael D’Antonio tells in his new book Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal.

My conversation with Michael D'Antonio:

Gettysburg at 150

Today we mark the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. One of the great battles of any war and one of the most significant in US history.

Yet, even a century and half since the Civil War, we are still learning new historical facts, new insights and developing new understandings of what really happened and why.

Two recent books, highlight this:

In A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, historian Thomas Fleming reminds us that we need appreciate that we might have avoided the war altogether, had not the rhetoric and passions and hatreds of the times lead to what he calls “a collective and incurable disease in the public mind.”

Civil War historian and Gettysburg College history professor Allen Guelzo, in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, takes a look, for the first time, at the raw politics of the war. How political and sometimes petty decisions, that were little noted at the time, will be long remembered for their impact on the war, the lives of men and their families and the course of history.

My conversation with Thomas Flemming:

My conversation with Allen Guelzo:

The environment...now!

There are always those people who seem to be on the cutting edge of whatever the public meme might be. Psychologist Mary Pipher is one of those. Before anyone else, she saw the need to empower our daughters and changed the landscape of girls around the world.

She later anticipated the “sandwich generation” that would cause so many baby boomers to take care of their aging parents, and she long ago was prescient about the trials and tribulation of immigrants in America.

Now she turns her attention to our environment. And while the issues have been around awhile, you get that sense that Mary’s decision to take it on, means we’ve reached some kind of tipping point in our public consciousness.

Mary Piper is the best selling author of Reviving Ophelia, The Middle of Everywhere and Another Country, now she takes us on the journey of The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture.

My conversation with Mary Pipher:

Paris

There are but a few places on the planet that conjure up whole images, thoughts and emotions. Regardless of whether you’ve been there or not. London, New York, Ireland and Paris, to name a few.

All are the subjects of sweeping novels by internationally bestselling author Edward Rutherfurd.

He was last on this program to talk about his novel, New York, now he turns his talents to Paris: The Novel and gives us a dazzling historical portrait of the City of Light.

My conversation with Edward Rutherfurd:

The patients point of view

Ours is an age which we consciously pursues health, and yet often only believe in the reality of sickness.

Susan Sontag, understood this when she said in Illness as a Metaphor that "any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. Often because it overwhelms us." Because in an age in which we are all focused on health, it is often the reality of sickness that changes our world and our world view.

This was the experience of journalist and author Nora Gallagher, as she traveled into the nation of helath care, only to hit landfall at the Mayo Clinic. She tells her story in The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic.

My conversation with Nora Gallagher:

What Doctors Feel

Medicine and hospitals have long been a great source of drama. From Marcus Welby and Dr. Kildare to General Hospital and Grey’s Anatomy and House, medical drama has kept us riveted. Perhaps never better than in Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital. There, the Chief of Medicine's wife has left him, his children don’t talk him, he fears he suffers from impotence and his hospital is falling apart. Yet..he soldiers on treating patients.

Ironically in spite of all of this, we somehow think that Doctors are above allowing emotions to impact their work, that somehow they all took that class in medical school in Detachment 101. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Now Dr. Danielle Ofri, Associate Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine and long time doctor at New York's Bellevue Hospital, takes a look at the connection between how doctors treat patients and how they feel.

My conversation with Dr. Danielle Ofri about What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.

Mexico and the United States, and the Road Ahead

The Mexico / U.S. relationship  is front and center today in the US Congress. But how much do you think members of Congress know about what’s really happening in Mexico?

If you were to think about a country that has made remarkable economic progress; a nation whose once closed economy has become one of the most open in the world; a country that has a growing middle class, a thriving multi party, competitive democracy and a growing skilled workforce that is helping to restore manufacturing; most likely you would not think of Mexico.

Rather, when we think of Mexico we often think of one of the most dangerous nations. A place were over 70,000 people have been killed in criminal violence and whose law enforcement and judicial system has broken down. The fact is that all of these things are true of Mexico.

It’s complexity and it’s future are open questions for the 21st century.  Few understand this better than Shannon K. O’Neil.  She is a senior fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has degrees from Yale and Harvard and is the author of Two Nations Indivisible: Mexico, the United States, and the Road Ahead.

My conversation with Shannon K. O'Neil:

I Spy

Certainly the subject of spying and secrets is front and center today.  For Scott Johnson it almost always was.

It has been written that the sins of the father shall be visited upon their sons.  In a broader sense it's clear that often, as we try to reach escape velocity from our fathers, we end up becoming just like them.

Journalist and long time Newsweek foreign correspondent Scott Johnson, tells such a story in his memoir The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA.

My conversation with Scott Johnson: