booknotes,anthologies by Brian Lamb

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Brian Lamb: Booknotes

Over the past twenty-five years, C-SPAN has established itself as a national treasure. And Booknotes, the flagship of its book programming, has become the premier place to see serious, thoughtful nonfiction get its television due. Over the past fifteen years, Brian Lamb, the CEO of C-SPAN and host of Booknotes, has interviewed 765 authors on the program, and these deep and wide-ranging interviews have been the basis for three bestselling Booknotes books. Now, in a new collection, Booknotes: On American Character, Lamb has selected seventy original pieces that reveal something about America: the nation's people, history, and character.

Here are biographies of artists, businessmen, politicians, and inventors; stories of events famous, infamous, and less well-known in the nation's history; a look at how politics works in America and how the nation responds to conflict. Our leading historians, journalists, and public figures draw from a diverse set of sources to examine what kind of nation and people we are. The result is a valuable addition to the Booknotes legacy and a welcome read for any fan of the program.

American history is shaped by great and small events, and in recent years a generation of writers has brought these events to life. They have shared these stories with the viewers of the long-running C-SPAN author-interview program Booknotes, and here some of the best have been collected for readers to savor. In this volume, more than eighty contemporary writers and historians examine seminal moments from American history, celebrated and uncelebrated alike.

Booknotes offers readers conversational essays edited from the interview show, providing an enticing selection of author-subject pairings. For anyone interested in America's rich history-and especially the devoted fans of C-SPAN's Booknotes-this is an engaging compendium of information, opinions, and new perspectives.

Conversations with the most admired biographers of our time on the people who have forged our contemporary landscape

C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb invites readers into a virtual conversation -- via the art of biography -- with the legends and luminaries who have helped define America. This informal dictionary of biography peers into the personalities who have left a mark on our world -- a Who's Who of American history, and the next best thing to chatting directly with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Elijah Muhammad, Amelia Earhart, Katharine Graham, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frank McCourt, Bill Clinton, and many others.

Based on C-SPAN's popular weekly Booknotes program, this absorbing collection of life stories presents illuminating profiles and often surprising details from our favorite biographers. Booknotes follows the evolution of American history chronologically, and covers the lives of writers and thinkers, inventors and scientists, politicians and soldiers. Lamb reacquaints us with the great figures of our times, in an engaging conversation about America.

For nearly a decade, Booknotes has been an oasis of book programming on television, the only place where Americans can regularly find in-depth, quality discussion of books. Now, in celebration of over eight years of Booknotes, Lamb has collected the program's most interesting, revealing, and memorable moments. In essays that let the authors speak for themselves, Booknotes includes David Halberstam, who explains how he readies himself to write by having "a very lazy cappuccino;" Doris Kearns Goodwin, on spending six years working on her Roosevelt book in a study filled with pictures of FDR and Eleanor; Civil War historian Shelby Foote, explaining why he has to sleep in the room he writes in; Stephen Ambrose, on why he became a historian instead of a doctor; Norman Mailer, on why he never gets writer's block. David McCullough tells us about meeting Harry Truman; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes the difference between memoir and autobiography; Paul Kennedy speaks about suddenly being a best-selling author; Tina Rosenberg tells us how she selected her book title; Martin Gilbert discusses Churchill's laundry list; Robert Caro considers the ways in which writers document the lives of the powerful; Howell Raines reveals all about fly-fishing. These are just a few of the authors that can be found in Booknotes. The result is a collection that any reader or writer will savor, a peek behind the curtain and into the minds of some of our finest contemporary authors

More on Brian Lamb

Brian Lamb Interview on reasononline

Brian Lamb on NPR

Brian Lamb article by Washington Post

Brian Lamb biography by the Truman Award Foundation