The Sperber Book Prize Podcast

Host David Escobar sits down with Sperber Book Prize finalist Mary Llewellyn McNeil to discuss her book Century's Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll .

Host David Escobar sits down with Sperber Book Prize finalist and Northwestern University history professor Deborah Cohen to discuss her book Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War.

Host David Escobar sits down with Sperber Book Prize winner and UC Davis professor Kathryn Olmsted to discuss her book The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler .

Cokie Roberts was a glass ceiling-breaking role model for countless women, whether it was her pioneering 40-year broadcast television and radio career or authorship of five bestselling books centered around the role of women in American history. But behind the public image, her husband, Steven V. Roberts, says Cokie had a greater devotion: helping others. Rina Lokaj sits down with Roberts to discu...

Margaret Sullivan began her career at the Buffalo News, where she rose from summer intern to editor-in-chief. She was later appointed public editor at The New York Times – the first woman to ever hold the position – where she navigated the paper's controversies, including Hillary Clinton's emails. She later left for The Washington Post , where she observed the rise of Donald Trump in the American...

Laurie Segall, who served as the senior tech correspondent at CNN for more than a decade, had a front-row seat to the rise of tech entrepreneurs like Meta's Mark Zuckerburg and Twitter's Zach Dorsey. She sits down with Rina Lokaj to discuss her memoir Special Characters: My Adventures with Tech's Titans and Misfits , including the stories of the humans behind the world's biggest tech companies tha...

Vincent Kiernan is Dean of the Metropolitan School of Professional Studies at The Catholic University of America. His book, Atomic Bill: A Journalist's Dangerous Ambition in the Shadow of the Bomb , examines the fraught career of New York Times journalist William L. Laurence, the man recruited by the government to write their press materials to be distributed on that day that the nuclear bomb leve...

Elizabeth Becker began her career as a war correspondent for the Washington Post in Cambodia. She's served as the Senior Foreign Editor for National Public Radio and has won numerous accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of the New York Times team that covered 9/11. And Becker's most recent book You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War was the reci...

Alan Sperber, MD, is the representative of the Sperber family on the Sperber Prize Jury, being the son of the donor of the prize, Liselotte Sperber, and the brother of the late Ann M. Sperber. For the final episode of Season 1, Alan came on the podcast to talk about his sister, her work on Murrow: His Life and Times, and the lasting legacy of the Sperber Prize.

Kerri K. Greenidge is an author and historian specializing in African-American history, American political history, and African-American and African diasporic literature in the post-emancipation and early modern era. Her book Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter is a biography of Boston Guardian editor and activist, William Monroe Trotter. Black Radical explores the history...

Marvin Kalb, one of the original "Murrow Boys," was tasked with reopening CBS's Moscow Bureau during the outset of the Cold War. His book Assignment Russia recounts his journey through some of the darkest moments of the cold war and the early days of television news. Kalb spent years traveling across the Russian countryside, learning the intricacies of Russian nationalist ideology and news.

Lucy Rose Fischer is a Minnesota author, artist, and social scientist. Her book The Journalist, Life and Loss in America's Secret War tells the story of her brother, Jerry Rose, and his career as a young journalist in Vietnam during the outset of the Vietnam War. The book carefully takes readers through Jerry's life, starting as a teacher in Vietnam and eventually working his way into a position a...

For nearly twenty-five years, Ira Rosen produced some of the most memorable, important, and groundbreaking stories for 60 Minutes . Rosen has won 24 National Emmys, four duPont Awards, two RFK Awards, and two Peabodys for his work. His book Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes tells the story of Ira's career as he grew into one of 60 Minutes' top producers. He discusses the tumultuous re...

Kevin Dineen's conversation with Sperber Prize Winner Lesley MM Blume about her book Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. It tells the story of John Hersey's report on the Hiroshima nuclear attack. His reports told the grisly details of what it was like at ground zero. The story changed how the world viewed nuclear weapons and is still relevant today.