Joe Donahue

David Sedaris is the author of the books Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4.

The beloved author and humorist will be at Tanglewood on Sunday, August 20 at 8p.m. 

His new book is Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002).

Sidney Blumenthal is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post, Washington editor and staff writer for The New Yorker, senior writer for The New Republic, and contributed to numerous additional publications. His books include the bestselling The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment and The Permanent Campaign. Among his films, he was the executive producer of the Academy Award- and Emmy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side.

Volume II of Sidney Blumenthal’s acclaimed, landmark biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, reveals the future president’s genius during the most decisive period of his political life when he seizes the moment, finds his voice, and helps create a new political party. The title of the book is Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856.

In June, The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY celebrated the opening of its first gallery dedicated to Modern and Contemporary art, the Feibes & Schmitt Gallery, with forty works drawn from the collection donated by Werner Feibes and the late James Schmitt in 2016.

Coinciding with the opening of the new Feibes & Schmitt Gallery, The Hyde features two exhibitions devoted to the printed work of Ellsworth Kelly. Widely recognized as one of the most important American artists of the last fifty years, Ellsworth Kelly redefined abstract art through his bold paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawing.

Here to tell us more are The Hyde Collection’s Interim Director Anne Saile and Museum Educator Jenny Hutchinson. 

Prescription drug use in America has increased tenfold in the past 50 years, and over-the-counter drug use has risen just as dramatically. 

 In addition to the dozens of medications we take to treat serious illnesses, we take drugs to help us sleep, to keep us awake, to keep our noses from running, our backs from aching, and our minds from racing. Name a symptom, there's a pill to suppress it. In Mind over Meds, bestselling author Dr. Andrew Weil alerts readers to the problem of overmedication.

Susan Burton is the founder and executive director of A New Way of Life, a nonprofit that provides sober housing and other support to formerly incarcerated women. She is nationally known as an advocate for restoring basic civil and human rights to those who have served time. Burton was a winner of AARP’s prestigious Purpose Prize and has been a Starbucks® “Upstander,” a CNN Top 10 Hero, a Soros Justice Fellow, and a Women’s Policy Institute Fellow at the California Wellness Foundation.

She is the co-author, with Cari Lynn, of Becoming Ms. Burton. 

    The Roundtable Panel: a daily open discussion of issues in the news and beyond.

Today's panelists are WAMC’s Alan Chartock, Communications Consultant Theresa Bourgeois,  Associate Editor of The Times Union Mike Spain, and Professor of Law at Albany Law School, Donna Young.

Tom Perrotta’s new novel, Mrs. Fletcher, is a provocative and very funny look at parenthood, the empty nest, and sex in the suburbs.

Perrotta is the author of eight works of fiction including Election, Joe College and Little Children. His novel The Leftovers was adapted into an HBO series that just finished up a three-season run. 

Lauren Lipton is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Allure, Self, Town & Country, and Condé Nast Traveler, among other publications.

Her new book is Yoga Bodies: Real People, Real Stories, & the Power of Transformation.

The Dorset Theatre Festival production of The Legend of Georgia McBride runs through Saturday.

He’s young, he’s broke, his wife is having a baby. And now, Casey has lost his gig as an Elvis impersonator. When his club brings in a drag act led by Miss Tracy Mills, Casey is given the opportunity to trade one sequined outfit for another.

We are joined now by David Turner who plays Miss Tracy Mills and Vasthy Mompoint who plays Jo. 

    Today's Book Picks list comes from Mike Hare of The Northshire Bookstore.

List:
1777 by Dean Snow
The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins
Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic by Jason Turbow
The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City by Margaret Creighton
The Party by Robyn Harding
American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin
Here by Wistala Szymborska
Born on Third Base by Chuck Collins

Corey Dolgon is professor of sociology and director of community-based learning at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He is the author of three other books, including the award-winning The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America’s Paradise.

His new book, Kill It to Save It, lays bare the hypocrisy of contemporary US political discourse, documenting the historical and theoretical trajectory of capitalism’s triumph over democracy.

Maverick Concerts, America’s oldest continuous summer chamber music festival and winner of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, thrives on the love of great music and the spirit of its unique site in the unspoiled woods. The rustic 1916 concert hall is ideally suited to chamber music and the intimacy of live performance.

This is Maverick’s 102nd season and we will hear about the remainder of their season including next weekend’s Chamber Orchestra Concert featuring the Maverick Concert Players. We welcome Maverick Concerts Music Director and Conductor, Alexander Platt. 

     The Roundtable Panel: a daily open discussion of issues in the news and beyond.

Today's panelists are WAMC’s Alan Chartock, Associate Editor of The Times Union Mike Spain, and Publisher of Empire Report J.P. Miller.

Inventing America: Rockwell and Warhol is the first exhibition linking Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, two iconic visual communicators who embraced populism, shaped national identity, and opened new ways of seeing in twentieth century America.

Original iconic artworks; process materials and studies; archival photography, manuscripts, and documents; film/video footage; and props, costumes, and personal artifacts are all on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA.

And there is also the special compendium exhibition by Warhol’s nephew: James Warhola: Uncle Andy And Other Stories. Both exhibits are on display through October 29th. James Warhola is with us this morning along with curators Stephanie Plunkett and Jesse Kowalski.

During the course of his life, Malachy McCourt practically invented the single's bar; was a pioneer in talk radio, a soap opera star, a best-selling author; a gold smuggler, a political activist, and a candidate for governor of the state of New York. 

It seems that the only two things he hasn't done are stick his head into a lion's mouth and die. Since he is allergic to cats, he decided to write about the great hereafter and answer the question on most minds: What's so great about it anyhow? 

  The Roundtable Panel: a daily open discussion of issues in the news and beyond.

Today's panelists are WAMC’s Alan Chartock, Political Consultant Libby Post, Communications Consultant Theresa Bourgeois, and counter-terrorism expert, Malcolm Nance. 

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge; the #1 New York Times bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys, a New York Timesbestseller; Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick; and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine.

She joins us to discuss her latest novel, Anything is Possible.

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and author or co-author of several books on American politics.

The words “optimism” and “the left” do not seem to go together very well these days. The dominant view on the left--reinforced by the election of Donald Trump--is as follows: (1) progress in today’s world has largely stopped and in many ways reversed; (2) the left is weak and at the mercy of a rapacious capitalism and a marauding right; and (3) the outlook for the future is bleak, with ordinary citizens suffering even more deprivation and the planet itself sliding inexorably toward catastrophe.

Teixeira's new book, The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think, maintains that all these propositions are wrong. It is not the case that progress has stopped. Today, we live in a freer, more democratic, less violent and more prosperous world than we ever have before.

We re-ran a portion of this interview in memoriam on The Roundtable this morning. Barbara Cook died yesterday, she was 89.

Barbara Cook is performing with John Pizzarelli at The Mahaiwe this Saturday. We speak with the Broadway, concert, and recording star.

Music - "Till There Was You" and "Glitter And Be Gay"

Jeffrey Lent was born in Vermont and grew up there and in western New York State. He studied literature and psychology at Franconia College in New Hampshire and SUNY Purchase. His first novel, In the Fall, was a national bestseller. His other novels are Lost Nation, A Peculiar Grace, After You've Gone, and A Slant of Light, which was a finalist for the New England Book Award and a Washington Post Best Book of 2015.

In his new novel, Before We Sleep, Katey Snow, seventeen, slips the pickup into neutral and rolls silently out of the driveway of her Vermont home, her parents, Oliver and Ruth, still asleep. She isn't so much running away as on a journey of discovery. She carries with her a packet of letters addressed to her mother from an old army buddy of her father's. She has only recently been told that Oliver, who she adores more than anyone, isn't her biological father. She hopes the letter's sender will have answers to her many questions.

Max Décharné is a writer and musician. He writes about music regularly for Mojo magazine, where he is their chief authority on the subject of rockabilly music, which he has followed and played since the 1970s.

His new book, Vulgar Tongues, is a rollercoaster ride through the colorful history of slang -- from highwaymen to hip-hop. It presents a fresh and exciting take on the subject: entertaining and authoritative without being patronizing, out-of-touch or voyeuristic.

Robert Thurman is a recognized worldwide authority on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His new book - Man of Peace - presents the inside story of the Dalai Lama delving into his amazing life and vision, in the high tension of the military occupation of Tibet and the ongoing genocide of its people.

  Everybody knows -- or thinks they know -- Charles Darwin, the father of evolution and the man who altered the way we view our place in the world. But what most people do not know is that Darwin was on board the HMS Beagle as a geologist -- on a mission to examine the land, not flora and fauna.

Retracing Darwin’s footsteps in South America and beyond, geologist Rob Wesson treks across the Andes, cruises waters charted by the Beagle, hunts for fossils in Uruguay and Argentina, and explores sites of long vanished glaciers in Scotland and Wales. As he follows Darwin’s path, Wesson experiences the land as Darwin did, engages with his observations, and tackles the same questions Darwin had about our ever-changing Earth.

Wesson's book is Darwin's First Theory: Exploring Darwin's Quest for a Theory of Earth.

On Saturday, August 5 at Tanglewood, The Boston Symphony Orchestra presents one of the best-known musical works inspired by Shakespeare - Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream - in a specially designed production adapted by stage director Bill Barclay, first performed with the BSO at Symphony Hall in Boston in early 2016 as part of the BSO’s three-week Shakespeare celebration honoring the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death.

Bill Barclay joins us to tell us more.

In Arsenic & Old Lace, good-hearted drama critic, Mortimer Brewster appears to lead a normal, happy life. Recently engaged to be married, Mortimer plans a trip to visit his charming, spinster aunts, Abby and Martha Brewster. However, shortly after Mortimer’s arrival, he discovers that his innocent aunts have a deadly secret buried in the basement—about a dozen older gentlemen.

Berkshire Theatre Group presents the play, by Joseph Kesselring directed by Gregg Edelman, on the Fitzpatrick Mainstage through August 19th.

The production stars Harriet Harris as Abby, Mia Dillon as Martha, and Graham Rowat at Mortimer.