Books

In two days, 85 billion dollars is scheduled to be cut from federal spending, cuts known as ‘the sequester.’  In Maryland, that means lots of changes, from air traffic control towers shutting down,to thousands of defense employees being furloughed.  We talk about what to expect.

Some Maryland lawmakers want to expand the hours and number of sites for early voting in Maryland. Critics say Democratic-leaning areas get the most help. We’ll hear from both sides.

Conventional wisdom holds that it takes years of hard work and some luck to rise to the top of your chosen field. But is there more to it? Through conversations with an array of successful men and women, some of them celebrities, authors Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield strive to determine if there's a formula for success. They are co-authors of "The Art of Doing: How super achievers do what they do and how they do it so well."

February 26, 2013

In today’s technology driven world, most people have either tried online dating or know someone who has. According to the dating site Match.com, one in five relationships now begins on the Internet. Online dating is a $2 billion industry. But is it really making dating easier? And how is it destroying romance? Journalist Dan Slater looks into this brave new world of matchmaking in "Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating."

Author Charlie LeDuff examines the gritty past and present of his once-prosperous hometown in Detroit: An American Autopsy. LeDuff, a Pulitzer-winning former staff writer for The New York Times and former reporter for The Detroit News, is currently a television reporter for Detroit's Fox 2 News. 

Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland to become the most influential black American of the 19th century, lived the last two decades of his life in Washington, D.C., became active in local politics, continued to crusade for civil rights, and married a white woman. Journalist and author John Muller tackles this part of the legendary orator’s life in "Frederick Douglass In Washington, D.C. the Lion of Anacostia."

Do you know which U.S. president witnessed the decapitation of his 11-year-old son? Or what president was the source of the colloquialism “OK”? This hour, in honor of the President’s Day holiday, author Kenneth C. Davis tells us about some of the least-known presidents of all-time from James Polk, the only speaker of the House of Representatives ever to be elected president, to William McKinley, the third of four presidents to die at the hands of an assassin. Davis is the best-selling author of “Don’t Know Much About The American Presidents.”

This hour, we take a look at U.S. military leadership from WWII and Gen. George C. Marshall to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the leadership of Gen. David Petraeus. Leading us through this discussion is Thomas Ricks, a veteran journalist and former Washington Post Pentagon correspondent, who argues that today’s military leadership is far inferior to what it was in the past. Ricks is the author of the controversial new book “The Generals: American Military Command from WWII to Today.”

Karen Avrich tells about the life of activist and feminist Emma Goldman and her lover, Alexander Berkman, the anarchist Sasha said to have carried out the first terrorist act in the U.S. when he tried to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Avrich finished Sasha and Emma, the book her late father, scholar Paul Avrich, started. Original air date 01/17/13

Curious about Curiosity? We hear what the Mars rover has found, and how scientists discovered a former underground lake on the red planet.

Erskine Bowles,half the Simpson-Bowles deficit-cutting duo,says so far we’ve made the “easy, stupid” cuts.He explains what needs to be done.

We speaks with Poet Jehanne Dubrow, whose new book, "Red Army Red,” is based on her experience as a child of diplomats in Communist Eastern Europe.