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

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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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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May 26, 2026 87 mins
Danny Funt is the author of the book "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling." In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in a 6-3 decision that legalized sports betting nationally by declaring the federal prohibition unconstitutional. According to Danny Funt, sports leagues oversight went from the position that "gambling carries a serious risk o...
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May 19, 2026 70 mins
Theo Baker will graduate from Stanford University on June 14th, 2026. About one month prior, his first book, "How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University," is being published by Penguin Press. Praise for his book, gathered by Penguin Press, is plentiful. Author William D. Cohen writes: "[Theo Baker's] astounding reporting as a Stanford freshman led to the downfall of the university's president." Mr. Baker's ...
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Harvey Mansfield arrived as an undergrad at Harvard in 1949, 77 years ago. He hardly left the university until he retired as research professor in 2023. Professor Mansfield, at age 94, is still writing. Encounter Books has just published a 136-page book by him titled "Where Harvard Went Wrong." Prof. Mansfield says he's one of the conservative faculty members of his university, one of three. His book contains speeches and essays, c...
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During his almost 40-year career in publishing, Bruce Nichols served as publisher of both Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Little Brown & Company. His book is titled "The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World." The focus of the book is on famous names, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. Author Nichols says "The Emerson Circle" is t...
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April 28, 2026 70 mins
Author Craig Fehrman has written a new history of the expedition of Lewis and Clark. It's called "This Vast Enterprise." In the prologue to his 515-page book, Fehrman writes: "After departing from near St. Louis on May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery traveled 8,000 miles to find 'the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purpose of commerce.'" The Corps was Jefferson's idea. Craig Fairman con...
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April 21, 2026 66 mins
Sir Antony Beevor, an historian based in London, has authored 13 books which have sold at least 8.5 million copies and been translated into 35 different languages. In his latest book, he focuses on Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs. The country is Russia and the timeframe is the early 1900s. Sir Antony Beevor, on his official website, sums up his findings this way: "Grigori Rasputin, a barely literate peasant from Siberia, ...
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April 14, 2026 61 mins
Bob Crawford plays upright bass, bass guitar, and violin with the Grammy nominated Americana band, the Avett Brothers. He's been with the band for 25 years. Since 2016, Mr. Crawford has had his own podcast called The Road to Now, along with Ben Sawyer. Their focus is about history. Six years ago, during his band's tour, Mr. Crawford received his master's degree online from Arizona State University. The focus again was history. Now ...
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April 7, 2026 65 mins
Giles Tremlett is a biographer, a narrative historian, and a journalist based in Madrid, Spain. He was born in Plymouth, England, in 1962, but since graduating from Oxford University has almost continuously lived in Spain. His latest book is titled "El Generalísimo," a biography of the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Supported by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Franco rose to power by defeating the loyalists in the Spani...
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