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
January 6, 2026 • 69 mins
After 15 books on Revolutionary America, John Ferling still has more to say about the early period in the life of the United States. Ferling is professor emeritus of history at the University of West Georgia. In the preface of his 2025 book, "Shots Heard Round the World," Prof. Ferling opens with this: "Now that America will be commemorating the 250th anniversary of its War of Independence, what pops into your mind as you hear or w...
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December 30, 2025 • 62 mins
Irish American writer Frank McCourt wrote a book in 1996 that was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 100 weeks. Over the next 20 years, "Angela's Ashes" sold close to 10 million copies worldwide. It was translated into 24 languages. McCourt was born in New York City, but moved with his family to Limerick, Ireland, for his childhood years. Frank McCourt died at age 78 in 2009 of melanoma cancer. He was a guest on the Boo...
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December 23, 2025 • 58 mins
This week's encore interview is from September 21, 1997. Twenty-eight years ago. Our guest was Peter J. Gomes, former minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard. His father was from Cape Verde, and his mother was African-American. In 1991, he identified himself as gay but says he remained celibate. Professor Gomes passed away in 2011 at age 69. During his lifetime, he received over 40 honorary degrees. Professor Gomes was a registe...
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December 16, 2025 • 65 mins
British historian Alexandra Churchill is no relation to the former prime minister. However, her new book is the history of the world at war in 1914, titled "Ring of Fire." Alex Churchill is quick to tell you she is not an academic but has a research master's degree in the Battle of the Somme. She's a self-starter who writes three times a week for Substack, co-hosts a podcast titled "History Hack," appears in many documentaries, and...
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December 9, 2025 • 72 mins
Most of the names are familiar to those who follow politics and government. Hunter Biden, Rudolph Giuliani, Tony Podesta, Paul Manafort, and many others. Kenneth Vogel has written a book about these figures. It's called "Devils' Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payroll of Corrupt Foreign Interests." In the publisher Morrow's liner notes on the book, they write: "The fore...
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December 2, 2025 • 64 mins
Boston-based writer Doug Most's new book is called "Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War." Most, who spent 15 years at the Boston Globe, writes: "In total, American shipyards produced 2,710 Liberty ships in essentially four years, peaking in the spring and summer of 1943, when almost 800 ships were built in seven months..." A lot of the credit is given to Henry Kaiser, who produced half of al...
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November 25, 2025 • 70 mins
Yale constitutional law professor Akhil Reed Amar's second book in a trilogy is titled "Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920." In Professor Amar's introduction, he writes: "Millions of Americans can recite by heart Lincoln's opening line at Gettysburg. But how many of us understand it?" "This sentence," Professor Amar continues, "sits at the very center of this book." Akhil Amar, born in 1958 in Ann Arbor, Michiga...
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November 18, 2025 • 61 mins
Kenneth Feinberg is a Washington-based attorney who served as a special master of the US government's 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. Mr. Feinberg worked for 33 months, pro bono, deciding who should be compensated as a result of the deaths and injuries from 9/11. Kenneth Feinberg, who today is 79, was interviewed on C-SPAN's Q&A program about his book, "What is Life Worth: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9-11....
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November 11, 2025 • 68 mins
William Arthur Galston has been a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution since 2006 and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal for the past 12 years. In the first paragraph of his latest 161-page book, he tells us what the book is about: "This book advances this proposition that what I call the dark passions - anger, hatred, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the drive for domination - fuels today's attacks on liberal democr...
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November 4, 2025 • 66 mins
Retired George Mason University history professor, Peter Henriques, starts off his author's note writing: "If anyone had told me in the summer of 2023 that I would be writing one more book on George Washington, I would have expressed extreme skepticism." In Episode 6 of this Booknotes+ podcast series in 2021, Professor Henriques told us the same thing. But at 88 years old, he's back with another book on our first president, titled ...
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October 28, 2025 • 66 mins
In September 1975, 17 days apart, two women, one in Sacramento and the other in San Francisco, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The first attempt on September the 5th came from Annette Squeaky Fromm. The Charles Manson follower spent over 30 years in prison, is out on parole, and is 76 years old. The other attempt came on the non-entrance side of St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September the 24th, 1975. The sho...
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October 21, 2025 • 64 mins
The book is called "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future." Author Dan Wang (WONG) was born in China in 1992. His parents moved to Canada when he was seven. In 2014, he graduated from the University of Rochester in New York. Then in 2018, Dan Wang went to live in China until he returned to the US in 2023. He then went to the offices of the Yale Law School and wrote about his comparison of China and the United States. He w...
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October 14, 2025 • 60 mins
The names are almost all known nationally: Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins, Al Sharpton, Larry Kramer, and Donald Trump. These are people who were first in the news in the 1980s. Their early public lives are now featured in Jonathan Mahler's book, "The Gods of New York." The book is divided into four large chapters titled 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989. Mr. Mahler, a feature writer for the New York Times Magazine, closes his book wit...
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October 7, 2025 • 69 mins
Philip Taubman and his brother William have written what the publisher Norton is calling "McNamara at War: A New History." It's a full life biography of former Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara. "It's a portrait of a man at war with himself," according to the authors. "It's riven with melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late." William Tau...
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September 30, 2025 • 71 mins
Daniel Flynn's book is titled, "The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer." Mr. Flynn points out in his introduction that "Meyer travels from communist to conservative, peace activist to soldier, Jew to Catholic, rhapsodist of Satan to cheerleader for Reagan, and free love enthusiast to family man." Flynn, who is a senior editor at the American Spectator and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, ...
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September 23, 2025 • 62 mins
In our last podcast, Ed Luce of the Financial Times told us about his book, "Zbig," for Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017) who he calls America's great power prophet. In this episode, we're going to feature a Booknotes interview from April 2, 1989, with Dr. Brzezinski. He was the first guest for the weekly Sunday evening program that ran until 2005. His book at the time was about his longtime prediction that there would be a failure o...
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September 16, 2025 • 62 mins
"I was initially very skeptical about embarking on a full life biography of anyone, let alone a figure as big as Zbig."Edward Luce is talking about President Carter's former national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Mr. Luce is the Financial Times' chief commentator and columnist. Luce is a native of Sussex, England, and has spent close to 20 years in the United States since the mid-90s. He is an Oxford grad. Zbigniew Brzezin...
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September 9, 2025 • 72 mins
Simon Ball is the author of the book "Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination." Professor Ball is British and is located at the University of Leeds. His publisher, Yale University Press, says: "Assassination, the murder of a specific individual by an organized conspiracy in pursuit of political ends has shaped the fate not only of the famous and infamous victims, but also of nations and empires." Simon Ball tells the stor...
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September 2, 2025 • 74 mins
Author Sam Tanenhaus opens the acknowledgement section in his latest book, "Buckley," this way: "I first met William F. Buckley in 1990, shortly after I had begun work on a biography of Whitaker Chambers…Bill Buckley had been Chambers' last patron and most eloquent champion." The biography of Chambers was published in 1997. Now 28 years later, Sam Tanenhaus finished his 1,018-page book on the life of William Buckley Jr. "Within mon...
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August 26, 2025 • 65 mins
Historian Jay Winik first appeared on the Booknotes television program 24 years ago to discuss his book, "April 1865." It became a #1 New York Times bestseller, reportedly read by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and many others. It's the narrative story of the Civil War. For his latest book, Winik stepped back four years in history to look at how the Civil War began. This time the book is titled "1861: The Lost Peace." ...
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