Jocelyn Crowley | Fathers’ Rights Activist

April 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Jocelyn Crowley | Author of Defiant Dads [18:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Fascinating speaking with Jocelyn about father’s rights, and about her newest book: Defiant Dads. She not only inspired thought and great conversation, she started a flurry of comments on Twitter during the show! More about Jocelyn from her website:

Jocelyn Elise Crowley is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, a member of the Graduate Faculty in the Department of Political Science, and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. She has written extensively on the topic of family policy, including her book The Politics of Child Support in America (2003). Professor Crowley has also written on the subject of voluntary associations in the United States, and has recently finished a book related to the fathers’ rights movement in America that was published by Cornell University Press in 2008. In addition to contributing to an edited volume on international fathers’ rights movements, she has published numerous articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Social Science Quarterly, Health Education and Behavior, Legislative Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Marriage and Family Review, Justice System Journal, Perspectives on Politics, Social Service Review, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Sociological Inquiry, and the Eastern Economic Journal. During the 2005-2006 academic year, she was chosen to be a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. She spent the 2006-2007 academic year at the Department of Politics, New York University and the Social Indicators Survey Center, Columbia University School of Social Work.

Posted by admin | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, History, Motivation, PODCAST, Politics

Sharon Waxman | Loot & Hollywood

April 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Sharon Waxman | Author of LOOT [22:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sharon is an incredible author, researcher, and gossip columnist! What a pleasure to chat with her about her diverse skills and interests, and most importantly about the amazing book LOOT! This is one of my favorite titles of the year, and I truly enjoyed chatting with Sharon. More about her from her website:

Sharon Waxman is an author and award-winning journalist, currently working on a book about stolen antiquities. “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World,” will be published by Times Books in November 2008.

Who ought to own the trophies of history, Western museums, or the countries that were plundered over 200 years? “Loot” takes readers on a journey to the countries where ancient civilizations began and to the great museums where their treasures now reside in a quest to understand the tug-of-war between East and West.

Waxman was a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times until January 2008. Before joining the Times, she was a correspondent for the Washington Post based in Los Angeles, from 1995 until 2003.

As a long-time observer of the entertainment industry, Waxman’s is an influential and independent voice. She has covered studio sales and corporate mergers, the Oscars, the film festivals and the unusual personalities that make up Hollywood. She has taken readers deep inside the filmmaking and deal-making process, getting to know the key players and artists who make the movies. She is the author of the best-selling book, “Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors And How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System” (HarperCollins, 2005), about the emergence of a new generation of writers and directors in the 1990s, making landmark films in a corporate-run Hollywood.

Waxman began covering Hollywood for The Washington Post’s Style section in 1995, becoming the paper’s first correspondent to cover the industry from Los Angeles. She began her career as a foreign correspondent, and was sent on reporting stints to the Middle East during her years at the Post.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Waxman attended Barnard College, where she studied English literature, then earned a Masters of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East Studies from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University.

Having learned both Hebrew and Arabic during her studies, Waxman got her first real journalism job with the Reuters news agency in Jerusalem, covering the first Palestinian intifada in 1988 and 1989. At the end of 1989 she moved to Paris. While there, she covered the economic unification of Europe and the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed. For six years she covered the culture, politics and economy of France and other parts of Western Europe as a freelance and contract writer, with frequent forays into Eastern Europe and North Africa. She wrote for a variety of U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other outlets, eventually landing a contract with The Washington Post. The Post then offered her a full-time position in a place she never expected to land: Los Angeles.

During her years in Hollywood, Waxman has become a frequent commentator on matters of movie and media culture. In 2000, she won the prestigious feature writing award for Arts & Entertainment writing from the University of Missouri. While at the Post, she returned to the Middle East on several occasions to write a series about Islamic culture, to cover the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Waxman lives with her family in southern California.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Art, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, History, Hollywood, PODCAST, Politics, Religion, Travel

James Reams | Troubled Times Music

April 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with James Reams | Troubled Times [20:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I had a great conversation with James Reams about New York city and old time music. I can’t wait to have him on the show again. More about James from his website:

James Reams & The Barnstormers plays
old-school bluegrass music.

James Reams formed James Reams & The Barnstormers in 1993. Originally from southeastern Kentucky, James migrated north in his mid-teens when his family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where he stayed until he moved to Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1980s. James has played both old-time and bluegrass music since he was a child. There were traditional singers on both sides of his family, and his father played in a string band. His hometown of London, Kentucky, honored him in 2004 for his contributions to the arts and sciences at its annual Laurel County Homecoming.

James is deeply involved in a thriving bluegrass and old-time music community in NYC. He has made several old-time and bluegrass recordings. His original songs (alone and co-written with Tina Aridas) are important additions to the bluegrass repertoire. His guitar playing was highlighted in Flatpicking Guitar Magazine’s Masters of Rhythm Guitar column. In addition to leading James Reams & The Barnstormers, he is the organizer of the annual Park Slope Bluegrass/Old-Time Jamboree, an annual music festival he started in 1998 that attracts 700 musicians and fans of traditional music to its workshops, jamming and concerts and is the only event of its kind in or around New York City.

In addition, James is working on a documentary film, Pioneers of Bluegrass Music, in which he interviews some of the first generation of bluegrass musicians about life on the road in the early days of the music. The project is still in production (a 20-minute preview was released on DVD as part of the Troubled Times CD).

Mark Farrell, like James, is no stranger to bluegrass and old-time country music, having played and recorded for many years with a number of bluegrass and old-time string bands, including Major Contay & The Canebrake Rattlers. He also contributes his great arranging talent to many of the band’s recordings. His great hoedown fiddling and edgy mandolin playing (as well as his sometimes unpredictable humor) earns him friends wherever he goes. Doug Nicolaisen has been playing banjo with bluegrass bands in the NY tri-state area for the past 17 years. His music incorporates many of the best elements of all the major banjo players yet his style reflects an individuality of its own and adds to the hard-driving energy of the band. The newest member of the Barnstormers, Nick Sullivan, has been playing bass since he was a tot. In the northern woods of Wisconsin he started playing 1950s rock and roll when he was 12 and has covered lots of musical terrain since that time, from ragtime jazz and West African traditional music to early country music and bluegrass. He adds rock-solid bass and great singing to the Barnstormers’ sound.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Bluegrass, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Alphie McCourt | Ireland & New York Memoir

April 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Alphie McCourt | Brother of Frank McCourt and Malachy McCourt [27:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What a pleasure to interview McCourt brother Alphie! He spoke about his brothers, well-known authors Frank McCourt and Malachy McCourt, and about his spectacular new memoir A Long Stone’s Throw. More reviews from Amazon.com:

“This book is a nomadic adventure worthy of Ulysses. Sensitive, lyrical, funny, stubborn, impetuous, McCourt writes with a steady hand, a joyful heart, and an Irishman’s sense of life’s absurdities.”
- “Publishers Weekly”

“This book stands utterly and uniquely on its own. Beautifully written, with gentle wit, penetrating honesty and forgiving insight, it is a moving and poetic account of one man’s long day’s journey into light. I was entranced from first page to last. You will be too.”
- Peter Quinn, author of “Banished Children of Eve,” “Hour of the Cat” and “Looking for Jimmy”

“Fans of “Angela’s Ashes” will be fascinated by this alternate account of the McCourt family history. Alphie McCourt is a gentle, charming, philosophical narrator.”
- Brooke Allen, literary critic and author of “The Moral Minority”

“When the history of Ireland is written–the story of the ordinary and the extraordinary combined–the readers will thank the heavens for what the McCourt family have brought us. “A Long Stone’s Throw” is humble, humorous and honest. Alphie McCourt moves fluidly through time and geography, to bring us a brand new story, one that is necessary and real, one filled with tenderness and redemption.
- Colum McCann, author of “Zoli” and “Dancer”

“Life can be terrifying–or it can be amusing. Alphie McCourt has captured the rhythm of life as he has lived it, first in Limerick City, then in New York City. Nothing escapes his attention, be it the little mouse scraping among the poor McCourts for food in Ireland, the inanity of being a #10 can food inspector in the U.S. Army, the workings of New York’s saloon societies, or the search for the ultimate mortalsin–sex. “A Long Stone’s Throw” is marvelously and sensitively written. It will make you laugh, cry and thank God you were lucky enough to find this book. Alphie McCourt is a uniquely talented memoirist.”
- Dermot McEvoy, author of “Our Lady of Greenwich Village” and “Terrible Angel”
“In this time of anxiety about immigration, here is evidence of how essential to our sanity and our sense of the absurd, is a frequent transfusion of Ireland. This book is like an evening with a wonderful storyteller who describes scenes and people and events so vividly, and with such sly wit, that he transports you along with him on his journey. Here is a great immigrant tale, told with such charming modesty that it goes down like a smooth draught of ale.”
- Samuel Gibbon, Emmy-winning producer of “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company”

“The world, courtesy of Alphie McCourt’s fertile prism of seems once again full of the promise of tomorrow. A memoir, yes, but so wickedly sly and witty–no self-pity here–in the talented hands of Mr. McCourt, the very word memoir seems inadequate.”
- John Mulholland, writer/director of “The True Gen”

“My brother Alphie is a writer, and always has been, but it’s public now. He has written a memoir where his unique voice, great style and literary talents shine through. It’s a funny, sometimes sad saga, but you will be delighted you read it.”
- Malachy McCourt, author of “Singing My Him Song” and “A Monk Swimming”