Thomas Childers | Soldier from the War Returning

October 24, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Thomas Childers [14:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Thomas Childers was born and raised in East Tennessee. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tennessee, and earned his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1976.

Since 1976, Professor Childers has taught in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. In addition to teaching at University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Childers has held visiting professorships at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, Smith College, and Swarthmore College, and he has lectured in London, Oxford, Berlin, Munich, and other universities in the United States and Europe.

Professor Childers is the author and editor of several books on modern German history and the Second World War. These include ‘The Nazi Voter’ (Chapel Hill, 1983), ‘The Formation of the Nazi Constituency,’ (London, 1987) and ‘Reevaluating the Third Reich: New Controversies, New Interpretations’ (New York, 1993). ‘Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II’ (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1995), was praised by Jonathan Yardley in ‘The Washington Post’ as “a powerful and unselfconsciously beautiful book.” ‘We’ll Meet Again’ (New York: Henry Holt and Company) was published in 1999 and is set in wartime Germany, France, Britain and the United States. ‘Soldier from the War Returning,’ examines the difficulties of veterans returning home from the Second World War.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under History, Politics, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Ian Buruma | The China Lover

October 5, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is an exciting day on Sound Authors. We’ve got three guests on the show instead of the usual four. At the end of the show there’s a musician, Johnny Helm who’s going to join us, and he’s got some amazing tunes that we’re going to listen to. And of course, he’s an author of sound. And before that we’re going to listen to a couple of Sound Authors. I’ve got Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States and the poet laureate of New York. We’re going to talk to him later on in the show. And at the beginning, without further ado, I’m excited to speak to author Ian Buruma, who’s the author of The China Lover. Welcome to the show.

Ian Buruma: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Well, tell me a little bit about The China Lover.

Ian Buruma: Well, it’s a novel, but based on the real life of a movie star who’s still alive, although now I think in her 90’s living in Tokyo, and she was born in China, northeast China, in Manchuria, and grew up speaking both Chinese and Japanese. So she came in very usefully during the war when the Japanese wanted to convince the Asians that the Japanese Empire was there to liberate Asia from the West, and unite Asians and so on. She was always cast in Japanese movies, propaganda movies, as the Chinese girl who was in love with Japanese soldiers, or brave pioneers. I first came across her as a film student in Tokyo when I actually saw some of these films in the film archives. The most famous of these films was actually, was recently well known in the United States, too, because it was used during the war for American Intelligence soldiers to learn Japanese.

Dr. Kent: Now you’ve gotten several awards recently. One for this book, and it was published last fall, and it was named one of Asia’s best books. What makes this book different from the many books you’ve written in the past?

Ian Buruma: Well, I’m not known as a fiction writer, so that’s different. I’ve written one novel before and there’s a very different kind of writing in that you’re not arguing any kind of case, or you’re not simply presenting a history or a section of history, or trying to breathe life into characters. That’s a different entity.

Dr. Kent: Well, and your most recent book before this was about Theo van Gogh, and fascinating story, the whole world was watching from Amsterdam. What is the difference between putting a book like that together, which is criticism and history and that, and then writing a fiction story that kind of gets at the same issues in a way, but it’s fiction?

Ian Buruma: Well actually, in the text of that book, the difference is not all that large, because that was a story with different characters, all of whom were very colorful. And in a way I used, didn’t make anything up, but I used sort of a novelistic form to describe what happened in Amsterdam. So I did take the various characters who ended up being involved in this terrible murder in a kind of fictional way. But again, without making anything up, which of course you do do in a true work of fiction.

Dr. Kent: And where did your interest in all of these subjects derive? Especially for the latest book, your interest in Asia? Where did that all start?

Ian Buruma: Well, my interest in Asia came fairly late, I didn’t grow up in it, there’s no colonial background in my family, or anything of that sort. Like most people who grew up in the 1960’s, I had a sort of vague attraction to the exotic East. And when I studied at university I thought I might combine that attraction to something that might be useful. So I studied Chinese, which now of course is quite useful. In those days that wasn’t really apparent yet. And I ended up finding, being more drawn to Japan than China, I thought maybe because when China was still on the (inaudible) and was not very accessible, nor very attractive, at least not to me, I wanted to make films. And so I got a scholarship to study film in Tokyo at a film school. And one thing sort of led to anther, it turns out I wasn’t really made for filmmaking, I didn’t have the patience, and I started writing. And so film and Japan, the Far East, China and film, all these things really came together in this novel.

Dr. Kent: And it’s really a fascinating thing, you know, the New York Times talked about how your novel is put together in several different ways, and of course it’s based on the real life character. How did you come across this character, and how do you go about fictionalizing an interesting character like her?

Ian Buruma: Well that’s always a tricky problem, especially when people are still alive. You don’t want to make some silly things up about them. And I have met, in fact for many years when I, I always wanted to write her story, and I never quite figured out how to do it. And I thought in between I might do it as a (inaudible), and I did talk to her, she was very forthcoming. Her life in Japan is a legend, literally the stuff of legends, I mean there are comic strips, and there’s a musical about her life there. There is at least one movie, there’s a TV soap opera, and so on. And so the last thing she wants to do is sit down with somebody with a recorder and depart from the legend. So I never got much out of her, and I decided that to really get inside the story that I wanted to tell, it was better to use my own imagination. Now in her case everything in the novel is pretty much recorded. It’s true. And where I’ve made things up are the people around her, and the narrators, of course, are made up, even though there are three in the book. People who knew her, based loosely on many different people. And they’re fictional.

Dr. Kent: And what got you into writing in the first place? Way back when, what inspired you to write your first book?

Ian Buruma: Well this was in Japan when I was there, as I said, first as a film student, and then I started making some films, and then worked as a photographer. But to make money I also wrote movie reviews for an English language newspaper called The Japan Times. And it turns out I was quite good at it, or so people told me. And I began to write more and make films less. And I sort of, I slipped into writing. But in my late 20’s, so unlike many writers I didn’t start on the school magazine and that kind of thing.

Dr. Kent: And what are you working on these days?

Ian Buruma: I’m now writing various essays, one of which is going to come out in the spring next year on religion and democracy.

Dr. Kent: And will those go into a book at some point?

Ian Buruma: Yes, and it’s coming out in, it is coming out in a book, by Princeton University Press in the spring.

Dr. Kent: Well, wonderful. And so, The China Lover, of course, was published by Penguin USA. Was this one of your most enjoyable projects? Was it sort of, did it take over your life and you’re happy to get it out? What was it like?

Ian Buruma: No, well, I find writing, especially fiction writing too hard for it to be entirely enjoyable. It’s enjoyable to have done it, more than the actual process. But no it, well, it takes over your life sometimes. I didn’t write it in one sort of fell swoop, I did it in various stages, and so I don’t know. I try to take it in stride.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor talking with you. And the book is fascinating, and your career is also fascinating. People can find out more about Ian Buruma at his website, ianburuma.com. There’s a whole bunch of great stuff on there, as well as links to The China Lover. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Ian Buruma: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is Billy Collins, who was once the poet laureate of the United States. Comes on back and we’re going to talk to him.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Fiction, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Hollywood, PODCAST

Adrian Goldsworthy | How Rome Fell

October 5, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to the show. It’s Sound Authors with me, Dr. Kent, and I’m excited about the four guests that I’ve got on today. As always, three authors and one musician. At the end of the show, musician Victoria Vox is going to be on with me. She’s got an incredible sound, and I actually first saw her music on Twitter, believe it or not. I’m an avid Twitterer, and she was one of the folks that I discovered there, great musician. And three authors on the show today, Michelle Karen, and I’m excited about all of them. Michelle Karen wrote the book Astrology for Enlightenment. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily be in on that, but she sent a copy of the book, and it’s fascinating, I think. And before that, I have on the show Lynne Serafinn, and she’s the author of a wonderful book, and it’s called The Garden of the Soul: Lessons From Four Flowers That Unearth the Self. And that’s, she’s a bestseller in the UK with that book. And without further ado, my first guest on the show is Adrian Goldsworthy, an incredible book that he’s written called How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. And it’s such a fascinating thing, to think about Rome and the long reign of that empire. Welcome to the show, Adrian Goldsworthy.

Adrian Goldsworthy: Thank you, it’s nice to be invited.

Dr. Kent: Well, tell me, you’ve written several books that are all these long, sort of, epic stories of the fall of the West, and In the Name of Rome. What’s you’re newest book, How Rome Fell, what’s it all about?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Well, it’s really about the, perhaps the biggest question of Roman history because you can look (inaudible) the Empire that conquered this vast area, last for several centuries, but in the end it folds. And when it folds, the world gets a lot more primitive, a lot more basic, a lot more violent than it had been in the Roman period. So it’s explaining how you can have an advanced civilization, you know, it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty sophisticated, and that (inaudible). So it’s trying to understand that, but what caused that.

Dr. Kent: And tell me a little about the Roman Empire. For folks that sort of say, “Well, you know, I know what that was, but I’m not sure exactly, you know, I don’t know all the specifics of it.” Personally, I’ve been, I’ve seen some of the ruins, and I’ve read some of the history, but what is the Roman Empire?

Adrian Goldsworthy: It’s, I mean, it’s a cultural thing as well as a political thing. When you think the basis for the law systems of a large part of the planet are based upon Roman law, which, and certainly all of the European systems, not necessarily England or America, are those that are influenced by it. So you’ve got that basis, you’ve got a lot of cultural ideas. Physically it was this huge empire that stretched from the north of Britain to the Sahara, out to the Euphrates, to the Atlantic. It’s a very big area in a time when communications was much slower. You know, this is before anyone couldn’t move any faster than a horse could gallop or a ship could sail. So distance has become bigger. So it’s not just huge, it’s important culturally, but it’s there for a very long time, for centuries Rome dominated the known world, and modified Greek culture, you know, Greek and Roman culture along with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Those are really the two main pillars of Western culture. So it’s got a profound influence on us even up to today.

Dr. Kent: Well this book is called The Fall of the West in Britain, and it’s called How Rome Fell Here. How do you go about navigating a book with two different titles?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Well, blame my publisher is all I can say. (laughter) I wanted it to be called the same thing in both, but once they get an idea, and once they printed the cover, you can’t really do anything. Everyone tends to do a parallel, can we learn something for the modern world. The question you asked, time and time again it’s, you know, America with the one dominant super power in the world, if you (inaudible) you get the same in Rome. So I thought well, I know people ask those questions, and while, as a historian, I think it’s vital that you understand the history first before you try and draw any lessons from it, so talking about the fall of the west, talking about super powers, we then need modern parallels. The other thing is that if you’re looking at the fall of the empire, it really is two questions. Because although the western half of the empire falls, so Italy, Spain, France, North Africa, all of that goes, the eastern half, the empire that’s based on Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, survives for another thousand years, up until the 15th Century. So in a sense it’s two questions. It’s why did a large part of the empire fall, but also why did one bit of it stay on with basically the same culture, basically the same political system, military system. So it’s kind of put a lot into the title, both the modern relevance (inaudible), the problems actually begin in the past.

Dr. Kent: And one thing I’ve never really understood about Rome, now, they wanted to acquire more land. Explain that. I mean, that is one thing I feel like the United States does sort of have an empire mentality, but are we still doing the same thing with acquiring countries and expanding our reach?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Not in the same way. You’ve got to remember that in Latin imperium, the word we get empire from, literally means “power.” It wasn’t at it roots about physically occupying and having a province, although the Romans do end up conquering this huge empire. But what they always thought they were expanding was their power. And it wasn’t so much an active thing, it wasn’t really that you wanted other people to do what you wanted, it was more that you didn’t want them to do anything you didn’t want. So in that sense there’s a similarity in that, you know, you can see, obviously you can look at the whole problem of rogue states, and listen to their (inaudible) proliferation, that sort of thing. So in a sense the Romans would have (inaudible) in that you’re not, you don’t want to physically go and occupy North Korea, but you don’t want North Korea to go and do anything really stupid. So there’s another mental, not just having power, but being able to use it and stop things from happening as much as make them happen. So there’s similarities, but the Romans absorbed people. And you have Roman citizens from all over the world. You know, if you look at the New Testament, you’ve got say Paul, who’s a Jew from Tarsus in modern day Turkey, as far as we can tell doesn’t speak a word of Latin, but is a Roman citizen, and his family are Roman citizens who get all the legal rights. So the Romans, they don’t just conquer but they turn the world Roman. They make the people who live in the provinces Romans like themselves, at least some of them. So that’s a very different thing. And almost no state in history has done that quite so well as the Romans. I mean, most empires very much have the rulers under the conquered people, and the two don’t mix so much. The Romans just absorbed everybody.

Dr. Kent: And what got you interested in the beginning in doing, in studying Roman history and digging into the past, and you’ve been doing this for quite a while now. What started you off on that?

Adrian Goldsworthy: I’ve always found history fascinating, and I find almost any period, if I visit anywhere, I can get interested in the local history of a small village and 50 years ago as well as anything of hundreds or thousands of years past. I think it helped growing up in the western Britain, about 20 miles from where I lived there’s a Roman amphitheater, or its remains, there’s a Roman legionary fortress, so as a child I could imagine my parents, when they took me to these things and I crawled all over these monuments, it made it very much my history. You know, these were real people who’d been to where I lived. It wasn’t like the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks who’d stayed a long, long, long way away. There was something very immediate, very personal about it, and I think that stayed with me until the present day.

Dr. Kent: And when I spent some time in the Middle East I was just fascinated by things like the water systems, and such expansive structures that the Romans put in place in so many places in the world, what have you found most fascinating about the Romans through the years?

Adrian Goldsworthy: It’s often the most basic of human details, and there’s something about the Romans that tells you the level of the communism in their society, but they devoted so much effort to things like bath houses, you know, in which you have under floor heating, you have flues in the walls so you’ve got central heating actually into the walls of the building itself. And it’s one of the most advanced pieces of engineering, advanced piece of technology the Romans came out with, but it is essentially there to make life more pleasant and comfortable. You know, it isn’t an essential. It’s not about producing food or anything in it. It tells you about a society that’s got to that stage, where they’re able to devote some of their best and brightest minds to making life more pleasant. Which again makes it very modern. So there’s an element of that that you, you know, you see things about Roman society that does seem familiar, very human, but they are also then the startling differences. It’s that mixture of how people could (inaudible). It’s just a normal thing, but nobody ever really challenged. For a century this just goes on, it’s normal. That’s so very alien to us. So it’s that odd mixture of the very immediate, the very natural, the things that, you know, you could read a private lesson written by (inaudible) in the first century, or discovered on a bit of papyrus Egypt. And you can identify with the emotions, say look, this is a real human being talking. And yet there’s these other things that are very strange. So it’s trying to understand both sides of that, I think it’s still just fascinating.

Dr. Kent: And Rome was geographically really huge. Were they simply not able to, tell us how, I guess, let the cat out of the bag. How did Rome fall?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Well, in the end it drops from the top. The problem is that from about 218 A.D. onward right the way until the end of the 5th Century when the Western empire falls, there are only three decades in that two and a half centuries where they don’t fight a civil war. So generation after generation you keep (inaudible). So more Roman soldiers get killed fighting over Roman soldiers than they do foreign enemies. Nearly all emperors die violently, and almost all those at the hands of other rogue men. So you end up with a system of government that’s all about survival. It’s all about emperors trying to stay alive and in power, and it filters all the way down. If you’re a general, if you’re a civil servant, a bureaucrat, you can’t trust anybody. Because the best way to prove your loyalty to the emperor is to rat on somebody else, to report them for disloyalty, whether true or false. So you end up, it’s a system that, it doesn’t encourage anybody to do anything well. It doesn’t encourage the emperor to rule well, his servants to be efficient, because if you’re a general and you’re too good, then you’re immediately popular, which means you’re a rival, which means they have to probably treat you with suspicion and have you killed. So it’s a system that is so huge, it’s so successful, so wealthy that it can’t fall quickly. And it can afford these generations of instability, of in-fighting. It steadily rots and decays from the top and from the very center, and in the end it sort of (inaudible). Somebody comes along and attacks them, there’s a crisis, a bit of the empire goes, and they lurch along again for another few decades. But it’s quite a depressing story of just how human beings can mess things up really.

Dr. Kent: And what I find, I always discuss with friends that live elsewhere how different the American democracy is than say the British democracy or the German democracy. And we do have this sitting head of state, even though he has checked powers, he has a whole lot of powers and we see that in the Bush administration. What is the parallel you draw with modern history in Rome?

Adrian Goldsworthy: I think the dangers, I mean the reassuring thing is that all this, the whole problem, this fascination and civil roaring is not one yet that has come back to haunt democracy in the same way it did with the Romans. So that you know, Presidential candidate leaves with an election. He doesn’t go and raise an army and march on Washington. By the third century A.D., (inaudible). It is different. I mean, with any system that, there’s always the crisis where it’ll be that the tension between centralizing power, the idea that the man in the center if you give supreme authority to someone they can solve any problem. And the danger of that actually making things worse and making them more distant from where the problem is. But the striking lesson with the Romans in that in about the second century A.D. when you had emperors like Adrian, like Marcus Aurelius, you had the good emperor at the start of the movie Gladiator, you have maybe a thousand bureaucrat in the entire empire, and that’s a very generous estimate. By the end of the third century you’ve got over thirty, thirty-five thousand of them. And that’s a very low estimate. Central government gets more and more power and played more and more people, but it becomes less efficient at the same time because very different government departments forget why they’re there. And I think this is a danger where we can see a parallel with Rome, and you can end up with, whether it’s Washington, whether it’s Parliament in London, an isolated group where you simply have (inaudible) lobby groups, increasingly large bureaucracies that see their own interests and their own needs and their own budget as a priority rather than actually achieving anything because they, what they see is such a distant, hard to measure thing. It makes it harder and harder to get things done. And I think that’s the danger, that’s where we could follow the Roman experience, but I hope we don’t go too far down that path.

Dr. Kent: Wow. Well, and we don’t refer to one another as barbarians these days very often. What does that term mean, just for my pure curiosity?

Adrian Goldsworthy: It’s originally from the Greek. It’s the Greek term for everybody who wasn’t a Greek and didn’t speak the Greek language, and it’s the simple root, is that the words of these people just sounded like the noises sheep made. So it was baa, baa, baa, that was very plain for them, and the Romans took the world on, but some, they never quite had the same level of arrogance as they Greeks. The Greeks basically assumed they were at the top of the pyramid, that everyone else was inferior. (inaudible) like Persia, but in many ways were more sophisticated than Greece. But the Greeks produced better ideas, better philosophers, and who affected our culture far more. So the word has stayed. With the Romans, I believe it’s the difference that they felt they could turn that word into Romans, which at least means you feel somebody can become like you. It’s still rather a patronizing view, but nevertheless it’s a possibility. But no, it was originally a Greek term, but the Romans took over, and it just stayed within the language.

Dr. Kent: So what do you think about the Iran conflict? Is that a little more like what was happening in Rome, in modern times? When I look at this President’s being the puppet of the religious leader, and you know, it seems like quite a drama over there.

Adrian Goldsworthy: Yes, I mean, by the time you get to the Roman Empire, well, the Romans were battling beating the pretensive electrons, so you know, it’s blatantly another dictatorship from the start. (inaudible) is much, much weaker. I mean, with the Iranian situation you’ve got this façade of the free and fair election, and yet everybody seems to know that it hasn’t been, but you do have that problem when somebody controls all that power, when the religious leaders in the end half of the Iranian is done at the public, if they want to support the government, they want to support the President. It is extremely difficult choice of violence to do anything about that, unless you can pull (inaudible) back down. So there is the danger of the Roman situation, but the establishment is much more powerful, and as long as it keeps significant forces at its control, which seems to be the case, there doesn’t seem to be that much weakening, although some of the protests have come from people inside the system. So you know, you can see the grim side of the sort of internal problems that plagued the Romans time and again. So it’s very grim to watch. And there’s a big difference, I’m sorry.

Dr. Kent: And now you’re working on your next book, which is a little less, well, in some ways a little bit less massive and less national. It’s the story of Antony and Cleopatra, is that right?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Yes, that’s right, because before I came to this one I did a biography of Julius Caesar, so it seemed the logical thing to go on to them. Again, it’s a remarkable story, it’s one of those things that tells itself. And the advantage with Antony and Cleopatra is because they killed themselves relatively young, the book doesn’t have to be quite so long. But it’s interesting because Cleopatra in particular still fascinates. But I think we misunderstand her a lot, and we always want to make her Egyptian when she wasn’t really in any meaningful way. She still is essentially a Greek and particular Macedonian, that’s the family, that’s the language, that’s the culture. And her family had controlled Egypt for 300 years, but they are still very much a foreign entity that has come in and seized power and remains (inaudible). In fact, she was the first member of her family in all that time to learn to speak Egyptian. So you know, we misunderstand that because of the glamour, the romance of ancient Egypt and the pyramids, but if you think about it, the great pyramids at Giza, Cleopatra’s actually closer to us in time than she was to the building of the pyramids. You know, our image of an ancient Egypt is of a much, much older, much earlier Egypt that had very little to do with her. And yet, it’s what Hollywood tends to give us because it is such a rich-minded, iconic set of images that played in all of this. You know, it screams out for something different, and there’s been a fascination with it really since the late 18th century. But it’s, if you want to understand the real Cleopatra you have to get past that.

Dr. Kent: Well it sounds fascinating, as is the present book. I only cracked it open and I’m excited to keep reading. There’s many books that you’ve worked on, and I think people eagerly anticipate every new one that you write. I’ve been speaking to Adrian Goldsworthy, and his book is called How Rome Fell, that’s in the United States, of course, from Yale University Press, just came out in May. And then of course the British edition is The Fall of the West. Thank you so much for talking with me, I could talk all day.

Adrian Goldsworthy: Thanks very much for inviting me. It’s been fun.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is going to be a very interesting guest, she’s the author of Garden of the Soul: Lessons From Four Flowers That Unearth the Self. And she is a best seller in the UK as well, and I’m excited to talk to her in a minute. Come on back for that.

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Posted by jamie | Filed Under History, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Raymond Benson | James Bond Novelist

September 18, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Raymond Benson [14:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From Wikipedia:

In 1996, John Gardner resigned from writing Bond books. Glidrose Publications promptly chose Benson to replace him. As a James Bond novelist, Raymond Benson was initially controversial for being American, and for ignoring much of the continuity established by Gardner. Benson had previously written The James Bond Bedside Companion, a book dedicated to Ian Fleming, the official novels, and the films. The book was initially released in 1984 and later updated in 1988. It was nominated for an Edgar Award by Mystery Writers of America in the Best Biographical/Critical Work category. Benson also contributed to the creation of a module in the popular James Bond 007 role-playing game in the 1980s. In total, Benson wrote six James Bond novels, three novelizations, and three short stories. He was the first Bond author since Ian Fleming to write short stories, although Benson’s stories are uncollected, unlike Fleming who had two anthology books published.

Since authoring Bond novels, Benson has had a number of books published, including original suspense novels Face Blind (2003), Evil Hours (2004), and Sweetie’s Diamonds (2006) as well as the non-fiction work The Pocket Essential Guide to Jethro Tull (Jethro Tull biography) (2002). In 2004, Benson began writing the first of two books based on the acclaimed video game series, Splinter Cell, although both are credited to the pseudonym, David Michaels. Further titles in the Splinter Cell series have also been credited to David Michaels, but were not authored by Benson. The first book, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was published in 2004 followed by Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Operation Barracuda in 2005. In 2008 Benson wrote A Hard Day’s Death about a private investigator who looks into the death of a rock star. The book spawned a series with the second novel due out in 2009 called Dark Side of the Morgue. Benson also wrote the novelization to the video game Metal Gear Solid in 2008^[1] and will follow that up in 2009 with a novelization of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Raymond Benson continues to write a series of classic film reviews for the publication “Cinema Retro“.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Fiction, History, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Paul E. Doyle | Hot Shots and Heavy Hits

September 15, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Paul E. Doyle [17:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Paul E. Doyle served as a Special Agent in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Doyle was a member of the US Army 10th Special Forces Airborne detachment and 2nd Infantry division. A former NEAAU Diamond Belt Heavyweight boxing champion, Doyle has boxed both nationally and abroad. Doyle is a Certified Critical Incident and Crisis Intervention Peer Counselor and a member of a Critical Incident Response Team. Doyle is Chairman of the New England Chapter of the Association of Former Federal Narcotics Agents. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and family.

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

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