C-SPAN Bookshelf

Walter Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane. He has been the editor of Time Magazine, the CEO and Chairman of CNN, and the CEO of the Aspen Institute. He is the author of Elon Musk (2023), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992). Isaacson is a graduate of Harvard Colle...

University of Georgia professor emeritus George Selgin argued that many of FDR's New Deal programs were counterproductive and impeded recovery during the Great Depression. He spoke at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Arthur Galston has been a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution since 2006 and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal for the past 12 years. In the first paragraph of his latest 161-page book, he tells us what the book is about: "This book advances this proposition that what I call the dark passions - anger, hatred, humiliation, resentment, fear, and the drive for domination - fuel...

White House Historical Association president Stewart McLaurin, author of "The People's House Miscellany," talks about the history of the White House and White House-related trivia. He also discusses the changes that presidents and first ladies have made to the White House's interior and exterior going back to President Thomas Jefferson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...

Author David Grann joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his books including "Killers of the Flower Moon" and "The Wager" and visits the vault of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on After Words — Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd discusses her new book, Notorious, with CNN Chief Political Analyst David Axelrod. In the book, Dowd profiles some of the most talked-about figures from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and American culture. Their conversation was recorded at the 2025 Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices...

Retired George Mason University history professor, Peter Henriques, starts off his author's note writing: "If anyone had told me in the summer of 2023 that I would be writing one more book on George Washington, I would have expressed extreme skepticism." In Episode 6 of this Booknotes+ podcast series in 2021, Professor Henriques told us the same thing. But at 88 years old, he's back with another b...

Journalist Boyce Upholt talks about the history and geography of the Mississippi River and human attempts to control it going back to the Founding Era. He discusses how government-built levees, dikes, and dams have transformed the landscape and ecosystem along the 2,340-mile-long Mississippi and the impact that commerce, floods, and pollution have had on the population along its banks. Learn more...

Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss her biographies of Cleopatra, Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams before visiting the vault of the National Archives to view the Treaty of Paris and other priceless documents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, talked about growing up as a Trump and his family's involvement in business and politics. This event was held at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In September 1975, 17 days apart, two women, one in Sacramento and the other in San Francisco, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The first attempt on September the 5th came from Annette Squeaky Fromm. The Charles Manson follower spent over 30 years in prison, is out on parole, and is 76 years old. The other attempt came on the non-entrance side of St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco o...

In his memoir, "Who Knew," media mogul Barry Diller talks about his career in television and Hollywood, and about his personal life and longtime relationship with fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. Mr. Diller has been an executive at ABC and head of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox (where he created the Fox television network). While at ABC in the mid-1970s, Mr. Diller was responsible...

Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett joins host David M. Rubenstein to discuss her new book, her early life and her view of the Constitution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Karen Hao discussed her reporting on OpenAI under the leadership of Sam Altman. The Commonwealth Club of California hosted this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The book is called "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future." Author Dan Wang was born in China in 1992. His parents moved to Canada when he was seven. In 2014, he graduated from the University of Rochester in New York. Then in 2018, Dan Wang went to live in China until he returned to the US in 2023. He then went to the offices of the Yale Law School and wrote about his comparison of China...

Former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty discusses her life-long interest in Russia, which she first visited in 1969 as an exchange student. A fluent Russian speaker, she spent 10 years covering Russia for Voice of America and CNN. Besides serving as Moscow Bureau Chief, Jill Dougherty was White House correspondent during the H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. While in Moscow, she covered...

From the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, master of the legal thriller John Grisham joins host David M. Rubenstein to discuss his early life, writing process, latest novel and his work with wrongfully convicted prisoners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Washington Post's Christian Davenport reported on the private companies in space flight and the rivalry between Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., hosts this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The names are almost all known nationally: Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins, Al Sharpton, Larry Kramer, and Donald Trump. These are people who were first in the news in the 1980s. Their early public lives are now featured in Jonathan Mahler's book, "The Gods of New York." The book is divided into four large chapters titled 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989. Mr. Mahler, a feature writer for the New York...

Jane Goodall talked about her book Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink (Grand Central Publishing; September 2, 2009). In the book, she and her co-authors describe people and projects around the world that are rescuing species on the brink of extinction. The guest interviewer was John Nielsen. The interview was held at Georgetown University, pri...

Philip Taubman and his brother William have written what the publisher Norton is calling "McNamara at War: A New History." It's a full life biography of former Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara. "It's a portrait of a man at war with himself," according to the authors. "It's riven with melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam b...

Critic and opinion writer Christopher Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, recommends 13 novels with conservative themes that, he says, aren’t widely known by conservatives. In his book "13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven't Read," the former English professor discusses books by Walter Scott, George Eliot, P.D. James, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. Learn more about yo...

Fox News contributor Joe Concha gave his take on President Donald Trump's return to the White House for a second, non-consecutive term. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute in Simi Valley, California, hosted this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Flynn's book is titled, "The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer." Mr. Flynn points out in his introduction that "Meyer travels from communist to conservative, peace activist to soldier, Jew to Catholic, rhapsodist of Satan to cheerleader for Reagan, and free love enthusiast to family man." Flynn, who is a senior editor at the American Spectator and a visiting...

Last week, President Trump announced that a deal had been reached between the U.S. government and China regarding the control of the widely popular social media platform, TikTok. In April 2024, Congress passed, and President Biden signed, a law that required TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok within a year or face a ban in the United States. Forbes technology reporter Emily...