A hundred years ago the finalists in the best books of the year game were “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum, “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser, “The Touchstone” by Edith Wharton and Sigmund Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams.” It’s hard to imagine which of the New York Times Notable Books of the year will stand the test of time. Beowulf ages well and Seamus Heaney’s translation this year might well become the standard. That phallocracy of late twentieth century American literary rock stars — Updike, Bellow and Roth — all published this year and you can imagine that trio slugging it out for another hundred years.

And don’t forget those new literary upstarts, the ironic Dave Eggers and the multi-cultural Zadie Smith, and the prolific J.K. Rowling, the creator of maybe the most beloved character in a hundred years, Harry Potter. Memorable books of 2000 are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Richard Eder, New York Times book critic

and M.J. Rose, journalist for Wired News

The Founding Wit Benjamin Franklin nailed our right-to-vote riddle early on, with a story. A man with a $50 jackass, he observed, was entitled to vote because he could meet the property requirement. By the time the jackass died, the man might have grown wise in public affairs. But the jackass was dead and the man could not vote. “Now gentlemen, pray inform me,” Franklin asked: “in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?” In Campaign 2000, whose right to vote was it? And did the presumed right to enter the booth and make your X encompass a right to have your vote counted?

Could you find that right in the US or your state Constitution, or in law? Where would you rank it among the rights that made our democracy–above or below, say, the right of free speech, against search or seizure, or the right to bear arms? And in a fight like Florida’s, where would you look for help to enforce it? The right to vote is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Heather Gerken, Professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School

It’s been said that “If you want to know a nation, listen to it’s satirists”. So if you want to know America a good place to start is Stan Freberg. Stan Freberg the grand satirist of radio and records and a legend in the world of marketing was born around the time the first commercial stations starting operating. Born the son of a Baptist minister in Pasadena, California his love for radio came early on, he say’s that when the other kids went outside to play ball, he went inside to play the radio. It was the daytime radio sitcoms like Vic and Sade, the brainy comedy of Fred Allen and the compelling drama and choruses of Norman Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph” that Stan Freberg sites as influences.

After work doing cartoon voices for Warner Brother’s, entertaining overseas during WWII, performing in nightclubs and landing several radio acting jobs, Stan Freberg finally landed a hit which he honed from his nightclubs act called “John and Marsha”.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Stan Freberg is our guest this hour, whose CD and Video box set is called “Tip of the Freberg: The Stan Freberg Collection 1951-1998.”

The best-kept media secret of our time is not who’ll win a million dollars on Survivor, but the identity (28 years later) of the shadowy Watergate tattle tale known as Deep Throat. The unnamed source — whispering to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in a dark garage — became an icon in the investigative journalism and crooked politics that toppled the Nixon presidency. Was Deep Throat a traitor, or a savior? And who among the President’s Men was he? In a gabby city with no long-term secrets, this one’s lasted for almost 30 years. Woodward, Bernstein, their editor Ben Bradlee and Deep Throat himself are all water-tight….

Woodward never told his wife, Nora Ephron. Was it Chuck Colson? John Dean, perhaps? Al Haig? Henry Kissinger? Some said it was Leonard Garment, the jazz saxophonist and Nixon lawyer. No, Garment says, but he’ll tell you who it was. Deep Throat is unmasked.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Pain, the writer and theologian C.S. Lewis said, is the divine megaphone through which God calls us to worship. The neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick isn’t sure he likes that version of God, but does agree that “as anyone who has ever passed a kidney stone well knows, pain does have a way of commanding your attention”. Pain is a biological necessity that protects us from bodily harm and teaches us our physical limits. But as humans, Vertosick says, we don’t simply experience pain; we embellish it, magnify it, and wallow in it. Pain rules the lives of most people who suffer from migraines, carpel tunnel syndrome, a ruptured disk, or a toothache….

But for those who somehow manage to transcend their suffering, pain can be a life-altering experience that deepens their notion of empathy and their understanding of what it means to be human. No pain no gain, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Frank Vertosick, neurosurgeon and author of “Why We Hurt: the Natural History of Pain.”

Before the band strikes up “Hail to the Chief,” before the political pressure peaks for Al Gore to concede, before the media and everyone around the water cooler decide election 2000 is truly over, could we wrap up the most spectacular loose ends in the Florida vote story: beginning with the drop out of three, five, eight, sometimes 10 plus percent of votes cast for President? Then there’s the separate matter of the gross difference in the ballot spoilage between black neighborhoods and white all over the state. It turns out as many as one in three ballots in black precincts of Jacksonville didn’t get to count….

And has anyone heard a good explanation yet as to why Miami Dade stopped hand recounting votes? Were they pressured by those thuggish right wing demonstrators rioters inside the county hall or by their Democratic mayor who it’s said might run for Congress as a republican? Before the inauguration and the muckraking books, how bad was it really? This hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mark Sibel, Asst. Managing Editor of Miami Herald

Dan Keating, Writer, Washington Post

Todd Gitlin, Writer for Salon.com

and Ron Rosenbaum, columnist NY Observer.

The sure sign of a sidetracked career in pop music nowadays is to be known as a cult figure. Rickie Lee Jones, the pop jazz singer/songwriter is conscious of having chosen a career path that excludes her from what she calls the great galvanizing forces of genres. The only genre she’s interested in is the Rickie Lee Jones genre…that high pitched, breathy voice and an ear tuned as much to Gershwin and Sinatra as to Dylan and Joni Mitchell. She won a Grammy in 1979 for her album that included the hit song “Chuck E’s in Love.” She followed that with another successful album called “Pirates” and then two decades of uneven music, side trips and some bad trips too….

As the years went by Rickie Lee Jones says she realized she was being written out of history. She’s back now touring with a new album on a new label and maybe with a new audience. Rickie Lee Jones is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Singer/Songwriter, musician Rickie Lee Jones

Say if you will that the Florida count of presidential votes was medieval, inconsistent, unfair, unbelievable, maybe even downright wrong in the result, Judge Sanders Sauls said yesterday it was not illegal, dishonest, grossly negligent, coerced or fraudulent. And so it is going to stand, strong enough to make George W. Bush president, barring a long shot reversal on appeal of the trial judge’s reading of the facts. Judge Sauls shocked both sides with the simplicity of his ruling that Al Gore had no case in contesting the election because he hadn’t shown the probability of winning the race through a recount of three Florida counties. So the judge’s ruling clears a legal path to a Republican presidency.

It also opens an extra-legal parlor game among Democrats in opposition: counting up the lost ballots, mis-read chads, thwarted voters, and bum machines that handed the prize to the wrong guy. The Bush win, and the asterisk with it, are this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Tony Lewis, New York Times columnist

Jasjeet Sekhon, Professor of Government at Harvard University

Larry Tribe, attorney for Al Gore

and Einer Elhague, attorney for George W. Bush

It’s been a long time now since Watergate gave journalists glamour and fame. There’ve been lots of good stories for sure since then but literary style may be harder to spot on the 24 hour cable TV networks and on the internet.

The craft of narrative journalism survives in the pages of the New Yorker magazine and in some newspapers around the country. And it survives in the old collections of columns by the likes of Murray Kempton and Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and Lillian Ross who wrote this in the introduction to her 1949 book of pieces called “Reporting:” “Write as clearly and simply and straightforwardly as possible….Hold on to the quietness in your life… Do not go on television to sell yourself or your books to as much of the public as you can reach. ..that’s a betrayal to the force that makes one want to write in the first place.” Celebrating the craft of journalism is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mitchell Zukoff, Chip Scanlan, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Adam Hochschild, Tom French, Ann Hull

John Updike’s Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, has been powdered ashes in a Bakelite box for more than ten years now. But the faithless old ne’er-do-well and charmer, downhill all the way from his high-school basketball days, has magic yet to conjure with, from the grave, in the fifth Rabbit novel about Updike’s American times. There’s no halo over the self-centered old showboat–who his son Nelson thought was “narcissistically impaired.” Yet there’s more than just the aura of memory around Harry: he’s a real ghost, clicking off practice chip shots under Nelson’s window in the gray-blue moonlight….

Rabbit’s still bugging Ronnie Harrison, whom he beat out in basketball and in the bedroom game-no matter that Ronnie has married Rabbit’s widow. In “Rabbit Remembered” he has dispatched from the grave a real daughter Annabelle that almost nobody new he had as an emissary and a balm for the world he left behind. Rabbit lives this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Author John Updike. His new book is entititled, “Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, ‘Rabbit Remembered.'”