Q&A: MICHAEL LEWIS, Author – Home Game

Written on July 30th, 2009

 

Aired 07/28/09

MICHAEL LEWIS is one of my favorite popular writers. He writes about sports, business, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, political campaigns, now fatherhood - in bestselling books and for the New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, among others. He's smart and he has a sense of humor. Malcolm Gladwell says he's one of our best storytellers.

LEWIS was a trader at Salomon Brothers before he wrote his first best-seller, LIAR'S POKER about the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s. He continues to write about that world with a couple of books in 2008 -- Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity and The Real Price of Everything (editor) -- and a column for Bloomberg. His newest book, Home Game, is about fatherhood, so we'll talk about that, but even more we'll talk about Wall Street, madness, greed, the crash, and how we're dealing with it.

MICHAEL LEWIS received a BA in art history from Princeton University and an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics. He worked as an investment banker for Salomon Brothers before leaving to write LIAR'S POKER. Other books include MONEYBALL, on the Oakland A's, Billy Beane, and baseball's new wave of Ivy League general managers; PANIC: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity; and his newest, HOME GAME: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood.

Q&A: AZADEH MOAVENI, Author – HONEYMOON IN TEHRAN: TWO YEARS OF LOVE AND DANGER IN IRAN

Written on March 5th, 2009

 

Aired 03/03/09

AZADEH MOAVENI is a contributing writer on Iran and the Middle East for TIME magazine. She spent two years in Iran, from 2005 to 2007, and just returned from three weeks there at the first of the year. As one of the few American correspondents allowed to work continuously in Iran since 1999, she has reported widely on youth culture, women's rights, and Islamic reform for Time, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. She is author of LIPSTICK JIHAD and co-author, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, of IRAN AWAKENING. Her newest book is HONEYMOON IN TEHRAN: TWO YEARS OF LOVE AND DANGER IN IRAN

In his 2002 State of the Union address George W. Bush coined the term "axis of evil" to describe his vision of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. The US has a new president who has made a fairly big and controversial deal about his willingness to meet with Iran's leaders without preconditions. Iran's last presidential election in 2005 brought the world Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Another presidential election is coming soon to Iran.

AZADEH MOAVENI has spent a good deal of time in Iran since the year 2000 and written two books about Iranian society. I'll talk with her about life and politics behind the caricatures and rhetoric that so often clouds US perceptions of Iran.

http://www.azadeh.info/