Books

Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall is an American legal legend for his role in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, and for later becoming the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. In Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice, University of Maryland law professor Larry S. Gibson delivers the definitive look at Marshall’s Maryland years.

In October 2002, the Capital Beltway region was gripped by fear from a series of random sniper shootings that left 10 people, including seven Marylanders, dead and four critically injured before the killers were captured. In 2009, John Allen Muhammad was put to death in Virginia. Lee Boyd Malvo, his young protégé, is serving six consecutive life sentences there.

With tens of thousands of Marylanders in foreclosure, today we'll hear about two remediation programs: the National Mortgage Settlement, which could bring principal reduction to distressed borrowers, and the Independent Foreclosure Review, which could put your mortgage in front of a neutral third party to look for the bank's mistakes and potentially get you some financial compensation from your servicer. Deadlines for both are looming.

Our guest, Ethan Chorin, longtime Middle East scholar and former U.S. diplomat, served in Tripoli from 2004 to 2006, part of the team that re-established a formal diplomatic presence there. An expert on Libya and adviser to the Obama administration, he details the struggle for democracy following the Arab Spring and the end of the 41-year reign of Muammar al-Gaddafi in “Exit the Colonel: The Hidden History of the Libyan Revolution.” 

She died eight years ago, but Julia Child's influence on American food and appetites lives on. French chef, public television pioneer, author and cult icon, Julia Child is the subject of a new, 500-page biography by Bob Spitz, our guest. Spitz is the author of “Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child.”

Michael Collier is the former poet laureate of Maryland. He teaches on the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, and he directs the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Vermont. He has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Web Extra: Michael Collier reads his poem "Six Lines for Louise Bogan"

In 2005, BWI Airport in Anne Arundel County was re-named BWI-Thurgood Marshall Airport, honoring our nation’s first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Among Marshall’s many accomplishments, in 1933, he sued the University of Maryland law school to admit its first African-American student.

With the number of Americans in poverty at its highest level since the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and cartoonist Joe Sacco chronicle poverty's advance in four areas of the country -- a native American reservation, an impoverished New Jersey city, a rural mining region, and the farms where migrant workers toil under harsh conditions. Hedge's vivid commentary and Sacco's trenchant illustrations are published in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Nation Books.

The University of Maryland is moving to the Big Ten Athletic Conference. Supporters say it will bring more revenue and perhaps save some sports teams that were slated to be discontinued. Critics say the decision was made too fast and too secretively. Tom Hall talks with sportswriter Mark Hyman about what the Big Ten move means for the Terps.