Booknotes+

Booknotes+

Taking the concept from Brian Lamb's long running Booknotes TV program, the podcast offers listeners more books and authors. Booknotes+ features a mix of new interviews with authors and historians, along with some old favorites from the archives. The platform may be different, but the goal is the same – give listeners the opportunity to learn something new.

Episodes

October 13, 2026 • 101 mins
Only nine men have been convicted, through military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, out of roughly 780 total detainees held there for some time since 2002. However, only 15 prisoners are currently housed at Gitmo. One of those is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who allegedly said he was the mastermind of 9/11. Mohammed has spent the last 20 years incarcerated and is said to go on trial in June 2028. John Ryan, founder of Lawdragon, has spent...
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The name of the book is "Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit." The author, Sam Roberts, is a 50-year veteran of New York journalism. He says in his book: "I've buried 1,600 or so people during my improbable decade writing obituaries for the New York Times." Reporters who do his kind of reporting are called obituarists. Sam Roberts, in his book's prologue, says he "learned more on the job about accuracy, context, and the distinc...
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On Saturday, August 8, on the front page of the Washington Post was this headline: "Some Vets Went Along with Scams of the G.I. Bill." Leading the team of Post reporters was Craig Whitlock. His co-author was Andrew Ba Tran. The dateline on the story was San Diego. The first paragraph of the story was: "At Blue Star Learning, a vocational school that defrauded taxpayers of $29 million in GI Bill funds, learning was not the point." C...
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September 22, 2026 • 68 mins
Andrew Burstein recently retired as a professor of history at Louisiana State University. "Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" is his 16th book about the early years of the United States. In the introduction, Prof. Burstein writes: "This book is about extraordinary drama that punctuated the life of a famous man who had an unusual need to control his environment." Andrew Burstein continues, noting that "as much as his cre...
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September 15, 2026 • 72 mins
Jonathan Jordan devotes 544 pages and 57 chapters of his book "Ike and Winston" to telling the story of the friendship between Dwight David Eisenhower and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. President Eisenhower lived to be 78 and died in 1969. Sir Winston died four years before that, in 1965, at age 90. Author Jonathan Jordan says: "Churchill could have had his pick of friendship, but he wanted Ike's. In the beginning, he court...
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September 8, 2026 • 64 mins
In the beginning of Scott Greenberger's new book, "The Forsaken Founder," Dawn Davis, publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint 37 Ink, introduces us to this new history of a mostly unfamiliar name. Davis writes: "Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, Madison. These are names we know." However, she writes that "there was another man in the room at the founding, a prodigy whose contributions were just as essential, whose name has larg...
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September 1, 2026 • 64 mins
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, has been in prison for 32 years in France. He was captured in Sudan on August 14, 1994. In his book titled "The Jackal," Washington Post correspondent Joby Warrick reports on his 2025 meeting with the jailed terrorist in Paris. Carlos told him: "I killed 83 people with my own hand." Reporter Warrick writes that: "Carlos mattered. He was the human face of a dangerous new form...
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August 25, 2026 • 66 mins
Paul Taylor tells his readers: "For the first 25 years, I was a newspaper reporter. For the next 25, a political reformer, a demographer, a pollster, an author, and a public speaker." He's now 77 and has written a memoir titled "This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk." Besides Paul Taylor, the other boomer in his book refers to his wife of 57 years, Stefanie. He asked his friend and agent Peter Bernstein (BER...
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August 18, 2026 • 63 mins
In the political history of the United States, books have had a big impact on who the public follows in elections. In 1956, John F. Kennedy published "Profiles in Courage," which sold 2.8 million copies by his death in 1963. Jimmy Carter released his title "Why Not the Best?" in 1975, the year before he was elected president. When Barack Obama first released his life story in 1995, he only sold approximately 9,000 copies. When it ...
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August 11, 2026 • 69 mins
This is the second of a two-part interview with journalist John A. Jenkins. His book is "Summer of '71: Five Months That Changed America." Jenkins writes in the introduction: "[I]t is hard to overstate the importance of the events that defined the American experience during the fateful five months of May through September 1971." A good portion of the first part of the interview with John Jenkins focused on Daniel Ellsberg and the p...
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John A. Jenkins has been a journalist most of his life in the city of his birth, Washington, DC. He says he's never known another summer like the one 55 years ago. His book, "Summer of '71: Five Months That Changed America," focuses on well-known names from that era: Daniel Ellsberg, Neil Sheehan, Henry Kissinger, Sarah Weddington, and Angela Davis. John Jenkins writes that "each main character has an important back story that sets...
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July 28, 2026 • 66 mins
The author's name is Christine Kuehn. The book is titled "Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor." Christine Kuehn worked on her family's story for over 30 years. According to the publisher's note, it began with a letter from a screenwriter asking about a story. It was the first time she had ever heard about the secrets of the Kuehn family. Her father had never ...
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July 21, 2026 • 66 mins
The commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence has now gone beyond the Fourth of July. Many books have been published about the Declaration in the first half of 2026. The question for Americans is: "Have you read the Declaration in full?" A recent study says that only 3 in 10 U.S. citizens have read the Declaration in its entirety. Author Ted Widmer has published, through the Library of...
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July 14, 2026 • 73 mins
After 47 years of C-SPAN televising the Congress of United States, we feel there is no better place to hear accents and dialects of the American people 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In her book "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents," Valerie Fridland promises to unlock "the secrets of what linguistic science, psychology and history tell us about the evolution of human speech." Valerie Fridland teaches in the Gr...
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July 7, 2026 • 68 mins
Claudia Rowe is the author of "Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care." Rowe has been writing about the hallways and courtrooms, where kids and government clash, for 30 years. "Every person in this book," according to Claudia Rowe, "agreed to talk to me for one of two reasons, or both: They wanted to be seen, to be understood. And they wanted to change foster care." Rowe points out that about 400,000 kids in th...
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Richard Brookhiser is an American journalist, biographer, historian, and senior editor at National Review. He has appeared on C-SPAN for many years as the author of biographies of America's founders. His latest book features a Frenchman and is titled "The Hero Returns." His focus is on Lafayette (LAH-fee-et) and the legacy of revolution. Mr. Brookhiser's particular attention is on 1824, the year the former Revolutionary War hero re...
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In July of this year, 2026, the new, multi-million-dollar Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opens to the public in Medora, North Dakota, population 121. The senior historian for the T.R. Library is a man named Michael Patrick Cullinane, a professor of history at Dickinson State University in North Dakota, 36 miles from Medora. To coincide with the opening of T.R.'s Library, Professor Cullinane has written a book titled "Theod...
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David J. Garrow is a prize-winning historian. Since graduating from Wesleyan University in 1975 and completing his law degree at Duke in 1981, he has spent most of his time writing about civil rights. His best selling and most praised book is titled "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference," published in 1986. We last talked to David Garrow in May of 2017 about his book "Rising S...
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Dr. Lerone Bennett Jr. was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on October 17, 1928. He spent over 50 years with Johnson Publishing, ultimately became executive editor of its Ebony magazine. Bennett died at age 89 on February 14, 2018, in Chicago, his home base of many years. Dr. Bennett's mother worked as a maid, his father a chauffeur. Their son graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta. His Booknotes television appearance was on ...
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June 2, 2026 • 68 mins
Lois Romano, formerly of the Washington Post, re-examines the legacy of Mary Todd Lincoln. In the promotion of the book, Simon & Schuster, the publisher, claims that Mrs. Lincoln "was failed at nearly every turn in her widowhood by her family, by her government, by medical professionals ill-equipped to diagnose her mental illness, and finally failed by history." In her prologue, Lois Romano writes: "After Lincoln died in 1865, ...
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