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In this Interview

MICHAEL POLLAN

On what to avoid: Don’t eat any food that’s incapable of rotting.

On what surprised him the most while writing this book: That by making some simple decisions, such as spending more money for better food, there really is hope for the health of the American people.

On the biggest problem with Western food today: The Western diet isn’t food. It’s edible food-like substances.

In Defense of Food: Author, Journalist Michael Pollan on Nutrition, Food Science and the American Diet

Michael Pollan, Professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley. His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. His latest book, just published, is In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

AMY GOODMAN: “You are what to eat.” Or so the saying goes. In American culture, healthy food is a national preoccupation. But then why are Americans becoming less healthy and more overweight?

Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food, but edible food-like substances. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at University of California, Berkeley. His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and Washington Post. His latest book is called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

Michael Pollan recently joined me here in the firehouse studio for a wide-ranging conversation about nutrition, food science and the current American diet. I began by asking him why he feels he has to defend food.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Food’s under attack from two quarters. It’s under attack from the food industry, which is taking, you know, perfectly good whole foods and tricking them up into highly processed edible food-like substances, and from nutritional science, which has over the years convinced us that we shouldn’t be paying attention to food, it’s really the nutrients that matter. And they’re trying to replace foods with antioxidants, you know, cholesterol, saturated fat, omega-3s, and that whole way of looking at food as a collection of nutrients, I think, is very destructive.

AMY GOODMAN: Shouldn’t people be concerned, for example, about cholesterol?

MICHAEL POLLAN: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very mildly related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a—that was a scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we should really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically because cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that was linked to heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive focus on cholesterol. But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated. You know, the egg is very high in cholesterol, and now we’re told it’s actually a perfectly good, healthy food. So there’s only a very tangential relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the cholesterol levels in your blood.

AMY GOODMAN: How is it that the food we eat now, it takes time to read the ingredients?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You actually have to stop and spend time and perhaps put on glasses or figure out how to pronounce words you have never heard of.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it’s a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. It’s—for the food industry—see, to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for seventy-nine cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.

So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that seventy-nine cents—and actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyone’s ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now there’s cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It’s made out of the cereal material. It’s extruded.

So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to make—and because, you know, food really isn’t designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: I was a whole grain baker in Maine, and I would consider the coup to be to get our whole grain organic breads in the schools of Maine for the kids, but we just couldn’t compete with Wonder Bread—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —which could stay on the shelf—I don’t know if it was a year.

MICHAEL POLLAN: That’s amazing.

AMY GOODMAN: Ours, after a few days, of course, would get moldy, because it was alive.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Right. And, in fact, one of my tips is, don’t eat any food that’s incapable of rotting. If the food can’t rot eventually, there’s something wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: What is nutritionism?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the whole world of food. And it’s not a science. It is an ideology. And like most ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works that we’re totally unaware of. And nutritionism, there’s a few fundamental tenets to it. One is that food is a collection of nutrients, that basically the sum of—you know, food is the sum of the nutrients it contains. The other is that since the nutrient is the key unit and, as ordinary people, we can’t see or taste or feel nutrients, we need experts to help us design our foods and tell us how to eat.

Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these nutrients and you know what they’re doing, that we know what cholesterol is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant is. And that’s a dubious proposition.

And the last premise of nutritionism is that the whole point of eating is to advance your physical health and that that’s what we go to the store for, that’s what we’re buying. And that’s also a very dubious idea. If you go around the world, people eat for a great many reasons besides, you know, the medicinal reason. I mean, they eat for pleasure, they eat for community and family and identity and all these things. But we’ve put that aside with this obsession with nutrition.

And I basically think it’s a pernicious ideology. I mean, I don’t think it’s really helping us. If there was a trade-off, if looking at food this way made us so much healthier, great. But in fact, since we’ve been looking at food this way, our health has gotten worse and worse.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about the diseases of Western civilization.

MICHAEL POLLAN: The Western diseases, which—they were named that about a hundred years ago by a medical doctor named Denis Burkitt, an Englishman, who noted that there—after the Western diet comes to these countries where he had spent a lot of time in Africa and Asia, a series of Western diseases followed, very predictably: obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a specific set of cancers. And he said, well, they must have this common origin, because we keep seeing this pattern.

And we’ve known this for a hundred years, that if you eat this Western diet, which is defined basically as—I mean, we all know what the Western diet is, but to reiterate it, it’s lots of processed food, lots of refined grain and pure sugar, lots of red meat and processed meats, very little whole grains, very little fresh fruits and vegetables. That’s the Western diet—it’s the fast-food diet—that we know it leads to those diseases. About 80 percent of heart disease, at least as much Type II diabetes, 33 to 40 percent cancers all come out of eating that way, and we know this. And the odd thing is that it doesn’t seem to discomfort us that much.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about coming from another culture and coming here.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: When you specifically talk about sugar, refined wheat, what actually happens in the body?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that’s where you see it most directly. When populations that have not been exposed to this kind of food for a long time—we’ve seen it with Pacific Islanders, if you go to Hawaii, we’ve seen it with Mexican immigrants coming to America—these are the people who have the most trouble with this diet, and they get fat very quickly and get diabetes very quickly. You know, we hear about this epidemic of diabetes, but it’s very much of a class and ethnically based phenomenon, and Hispanics have much more trouble with it. And the reason or the hypothesis is that, culturally and physically, they haven’t been dealing with a lot of refined grain, whereas in Europe, we’ve been dealing with refined grain for a couple hundred years.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does refined wheat do?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, what happens is, when you—there was a key invention around the 1860s, which is we developed these steel rollers and porcelain rollers that could grind wheat and corn and other grains really fine and eliminate the germ and the bran. And the reason we wanted to do that was we loved it as white as possible. It would last longer. The rats had less interest in it, because it had less nutrients in it. And also you get a kind of a real strong hit of glucose. I mean, basically it digests much quicker, as soon as it hits the tongue. I mean, everyone has—you know, if you’ve ever tasted Wonder Bread, you know how sweet it is. The reason it’s sweet is it’s so highly refined that as soon as your saliva hits it, it turns to sugar.

Whole grains have a whole lot of other nutrients. You know, it once was possible to live by bread alone, because a whole grain loaf of bread has all sorts of other nutrients. It has omega-3s, it has, you know, lots of B vitamins. And we remove those when we refine grain. And it’s kind of odd and maladaptive that refined grain should be so prestigious, since it’s so unhealthy. But we’ve always liked it, and one of the reasons is it stores longer.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michael Pollan. His new book is In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Talk about the funding of nutrition science.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, nutrition science is very compromised by industry. Organizations like the American Dietetic Association take sponsorship from companies who are eager to find—you know, be able to make health claims. Not all nutrition science. And there are very large, important studies that are, you know, published—that are supported by the government and are as good as any other medical studies in terms of their cleanness. But there is a lot of corporate nutrition science that’s done for the express purpose of developing health claims. This science reliably finds health benefits for whatever is being studied. You take a pomegranate to one of these scientists, and they will tell you that it will cure cancer and erectile dysfunction. You take, you know, any kind of food that you want. And now, it’s not surprising, because food is good for you, and that all plants have antioxidants. And so, you know, you’re bound to find—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what an antioxidant is.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, an antioxidant is a chemical compound that plants produce, really to protect themselves from free radicals of oxygen that are generated during photosynthesis. They absorb these kind of mischievous oxygen radicals, molecules, atoms, and disarm them. And as we age, we produce a lot of these oxygen radicals, and they’re implicated in aging and cancer. So antioxidants are a way to kind of quiet that response, and they have health benefits. They also help you detoxify your body.

So—but my point is kind of, you don’t need to know what an antioxidant is to have the benefit of an antioxidant. You know, we’ve been benefiting from them for thousands of years without really having to worry what they are. They’re in whole foods, and it’s one of the reasons whole foods are good for you. And there are not that much in processed foods.

AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t it odd that the more you put into foods—so that’s processing fruits—the less expensive is? The simpler you keep it, getting whole foods in this day and age in this country, it’s extremely expensive.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, there are reasons of policy that that is the case. You’re absolutely right. Most processed foods are made from these very cheap raw ingredients. I mean, they’re basically corn, soy and wheat. And if you look at all those very-hard-to-pronounce ingredients on the back of that processed food, those are fractions of corn, and some petroleum, but a lot of corn, soy and wheat. And the industry’s preferred mode of doing business is to take the cheapest raw materials and create complicated foodstuffs from it.

The reason those raw ingredients are so cheap, though, is because these are precisely the ones that the government chooses to support, the subsidies—you know, the big $26 billion for corn and soy and wheat and rice. So it’s no accident that these should be the ones, you know, grown abundantly and cheap, and that’s one of the reasons the industry moved down this path. There was such a surfeit of cheap corn and soy that the food scientists got to work turning it into—

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, getting away totally from sugar to corn syrup.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, that’s right. And we don’t—yeah, there’s very little sugar in our processed food. It’s all high-fructose corn syrup, which, in effect, the government is subsidizing.

AMY GOODMAN: Cottonseed oil, is it regulated by the FDA? Is it considered a food, even though it’s in so many of the processed foods we eat?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Is it considered a food? Yeah, I think it’s probably—

AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering, because—to do with the pesticide that is in it—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —that if it’s considered—if it’s done for cotton, it doesn’t matter how much pesticide there is.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: But if it’s for food, it does matter. And it’s in so much to keep it right, stable for so long on the shelf.

MICHAEL POLLAN: That’s right. That’s right. And it’s a food I would avoid. I mean, you know, humans have not been eating cotton for most of their history. They’ve been wearing it. And now we’re eating it. And you’re right, it receives an enormous amount of pesticide as a crop. How many residues are in the oil? I don’t really know the answer, but it has been approved by the FDA as a foodstuff. And—but it’s one of these novel oils that I’m inclined to stay away with. I mean, my basic philosophy of eating is, you know, if your great-grandmother wasn’t familiar with it, you probably want to stay away from it.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan is our guest. Talk about—well, you started with a New York Times piece called “Unhappy Meals,” and in it—and you expand on this in In Defense of Food—you talk about the McGovern report, 1977, what, thirty years ago.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that’s really, I think, one of the red letter days in the rise of nutritionism as a way of thinking about food. It was a very interesting moment. McGovern convened this set of hearings to look at the American diet, and there was a great deal of concern about heart disease at the time. We had—we were having—you know, after a falloff during the war in heart disease, there was a big spike in the ’50s and ’60s, and scientists were busy trying to figure out what was going on and very worried about it. McGovern convened these hearings, took a lot of testimony, and then came out with a set of guidelines. And he said—he implicated red meat, basically, in this problem. And he said we’re getting—we’re eating too much red meat, and the advice of the government became—the official advice—eat less red meat. And he said as much. Now, that was a very controversial message. The meat industry, in fact the whole food industry, went crazy, and they came down on him like a ton of bricks. You can’t tell people to eat less of anything.

AMY GOODMAN: As Oprah learned when she said she won’t eat hamburgers.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Exactly. This is just a taboo topic in America. So McGovern had to beat this hasty retreat, and he rewrote the guidelines to say, choose meats that will lessen your saturated fat intake, something nobody understood at all and was much to the—and that was acceptable. But you see the transition. It’s very interesting. We’ve been talking about whole food—eat less red meat, which probably was good advice—to this very complicated construct—eat meats that have less of this nutrient. It’s still an affirmative message—eat more, which is fine with industry, just eat a little differently. And suddenly, the focus was on saturated fat, as if we knew that that was the nutrient in the red meat that was the problem. And in fact, it may not be. I mean, there are other things going on in red meat, we’re learning, that may be the problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, some people think it’s the protein in red meat. Some people think it’s the nitrosomines, these various compounds that are produced when you cook red meat. We see a correlation between high red meat consumption and higher rates of cancer and heart disease. But, again, we don’t know exactly what the cause is, but it may not be saturated fat.

AMY GOODMAN: And then the political economy of, for example, eating meat?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that—because of that—I mean, that’s why McGovern lost in 1980. I mean, the beef lobby went after him, and they tossed him out. And so—but from then on, anyone who would pronounce on the American diet understood you had to speak in this very obscure language of nutrients. You could talk about saturated fat, you could talk about antioxidants, but you cannot talk about whole foods. So that is the kind of official language in which we discuss nutrition.

Conveniently, it’s very confusing to the average consumer. Conveniently to the industry, they love talk about nutrients, because they can always—with processed foods, unlike whole foods, you can redesign it. You can just reduce the saturated fat, you know, up the antioxidants. You can jigger it in a way you can’t change broccoli. You know, broccoli is going to be broccoli. But a processed food can always have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So the industry loves nutritionism for that reason.

AMY GOODMAN: So, for people who don’t have much money, how do they eat? I mean, when you’re talking about whole foods, they have to be prepared, and if you don’t have much time, as well, processed foods are cheaper and they’re faster.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, processed foods—you know, fast food seems cheap. I mean, if you have the time and the inclination to cook, you can eat more cheaply. But you do—as you say, you do need the time, and you do need the skills to cook. There is no way around the fact that given the way our food policies are set up, such that whole foods are expensive and getting more expensive and processed foods tend to be cheaper—I mean, if you go into the supermarket, the cheapest calories are added fat and added sugar from processed food, and the more expensive calories are over in the produce section. And we have to change policy in order to adjust that.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you do that?

MICHAEL POLLAN: You need a farm bill that basically evens the playing field and is not driving down the price of high-fructose corn syrup, so that, you know, real fruit juice can compete with it. You need a farm bill that makes carrots competitive with Wonder Bread. And we don’t have that, and we didn’t get it this time around.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel like any candidates are addressing this issue?

MICHAEL POLLAN: No, because they all pass through Iowa, and they all bow down before conventional agricultural policy. In office, I think that, you know, there have been—Hillary Clinton has had some very positive food policies, basically because she has this big farm constituency upstate, and she’s very interested in school lunch and farm-to-school programs and things like that. John Edwards has said some progressive things about feedlot agriculture and what’s wrong with that, while he was in Iowa.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain feedlots.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Feedlots are where we grow our meat, in these huge factory farms that have become really the scourge of landscapes in places like Iowa and Missouri, I mean these giant pig confinement operations that basically collect manure in huge lagoons that leak when it rains and smell for miles around. I mean, they’re just, you know, miserable places. And they’re becoming a political issue in the Midwest. And I think they will become a political issue nationally, because people are very concerned about the status of the animals in these places. My worry is, though, that when we start regulating these feedlots, they’ll move to Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan’s latest book is In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. We’ll come back to him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with award-winning author and journalist Michael Pollan. His latest book is called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I asked him about his earlier book, the acclaimed bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

MICHAEL POLLAN: The Omnivore’s Dilemma is, if you’re a creature like us that can eat almost anything—I mean, unlike cows that only eat grass or koala bears that only eat eucalyptus leaves—we can eat a great many different things, and meat and vegetables, but it’s complicated. We don’t have instincts to tell us exactly what to eat, so we have—we need a lot of other cognitive equipment to navigate what is a very treacherous food landscape, because there—as there was in the jungle and in nature, there are poisons out there that could kill us. So we had to learn what was safe and what wasn’t, and we had this thing called culture that told us, like that mushroom there, somebody ate it last week and they died, so let’s call it the “death cap,” and that way we’ll remember that that’s one to stay away from. And, you know, so culture is how we navigate this.

We are once again in a treacherous food landscape, when there are many things in the supermarket that are not good for you. How do we learn now to navigate that landscape? And that’s what this book was an effort to do, was come up with some rules of thumb. And so, you know, I say eat food, which sounds really simple, but of course there’s a lot of edible food-like substances in the supermarket that aren’t really food. So how do you tell them apart?

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about shopping the periphery of the supermarket?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, that was one rule that I found really helpful. And if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven’t changed that much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you’re going to do a lot better.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the localvore movement?

MICHAEL POLLAN: The localvore movement is a real new emphasis on eating locally, eating food from what’s called your foodshed. It’s a metaphor based on a watershed. You know, a certain—draw a circle of a hundred miles around your community and try to eat everything from there. It’s an interesting movement, and I’m very supportive of local food. I think that it’s verging on the ridiculous right now—I mean, you know, because, frankly, there’s no wheat produced in a hundred miles of New York. You know, do you want to give up bread? I’m not willing to give up bread. So people get a little extremist about it.

But the basic idea of when products are available locally, eating them and eating food in season, is a very powerful and important idea. It supports a great many values. The fact is that food that’s produced locally is going to be fresher. It’s going to be more nutritious because it’s fresher. You’re going to support the farmers in your community. You’re going to check sprawl. I mean, you’ll keep that farmland in business. You are going to keep basically, you know, some autonomy in our food system. I mean, make no mistake: the basic trend of food in this country is to globalize it, and there will come a day when America doesn’t produce its own food. In California, the Central Valley is losing, you know, hundreds of acres of farmland every day, and the projections there are that we will no longer produce produce in California by the end of the century. I don’t want to live in that world. I—you know, we lost control over our energy destiny, and we don’t want to lose control over our food destiny.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the environmental effects of transporting food across the globe?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the biggest is energy. I mean, it’s a—people don’t really think about food in terms of climate change, but in fact the food system contributes about a fifth of greenhouse gases. It is as important as the transportation sector, in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas. It’s a very energy-intensive situation. What we did with the industrialization of food, essentially, is take food off of a solar system—it was basically based on photosynthesis and the sun—and put it on a fossil fuel system. We learned how to grow food with lots of synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas, pesticides made from petroleum, and then started moving it around the world. So now we take about ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy. Very unsustainable system.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the argument of efficiency, and if you want to feed the planet? You have sugar growing in Cuba. You have grapes and meat in Argentina and Uruguay and Chile.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, that’s the argument. There are a lot of problems with it. First, it does depend on cheap fossil fuel, and we are not going to have cheap fossil fuel, so that if Uruguay loses its ability to produce anything else, they’re going to be hungry. It’s very important that you have local self-sufficiency in food—some self-sufficiency, not complete—before you start exporting. If you put all your eggs in the basket of, say, coffee, when the international market shifts, as it inevitably does, because it will always go to whatever country is willing to produce it a little more cheaply, you will decimate your industry. And—

AMY GOODMAN: What if you only consume coffee and nothing else?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Oh, you have all sorts of problems we don’t even want to get into. You cannot live on coffee alone. It’s not like bread.

So globalizing food has certain advantages of efficiency, but it also has very high risks. And, you know, efficiency is an important value, but resilience is even more important, and we know this from biology, that the resilience of natural systems and economic systems is something we have to focus more on. This globalized food system is very brittle. When you have a breakdown anywhere, when the prices of fuel escalates, people lose the ability to feed themselves.

What’s happening with Mexico and NAFTA and corn, you know, they opened their borders to our corn, and it put one-and-a-half million farmers there out of business. They all came to the cities, where you would think, OK, now the price of tortillas should go down, but it didn’t go down, even with the cheap corn, because there was an oligopoly controlling tortillas. Tortilla prices didn’t go down. And so, a lot of these former Mexican farmers became serfs on California farms, and this was the effect of dumping lots of cheap corn.

AMY GOODMAN: And now they’re the target—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Now the price –

AMY GOODMAN: —of main politicians all over the country to—“We send our food down, and you send immigrants back who are coming here.”

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, “And we don’t want your immigrants.” And, you know, we don’t understand that these things are connected, that we make a decision in Washington and that this is what leads to an immigration problem. And—but the dumping of our corn on Mexico is a big part of the immigration problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know anything about cloned livestock? The Wall Street Journal says cloned livestock are poised to receive FDA clearance.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, well, the FDA has been looking at this. There are techniques now to clone livestock, usually for breeding purposes. If you have a really champion bull, the semen of that bull is very valuable. So, gee, if you could turn that bull into five bulls, wouldn’t that be great? Actually, it won’t be great. It’s the rareness that makes the semen so valuable. But—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, if you—you know, if you multiply your champion bull, the supply will go up and the demand will go down. So—but, anyway, so the FDA needs approval so that once they’re done using these animals for breeding purposes, they can just drop them into the food system as hamburger. And there is some controversy over whether we should be eating cloned livestock. I’m not, you know, familiar with the risks. I’m a skeptic on genetically modifying food. But the specific risk of cloning livestock, I don’t know. I don’t want to be eating them. But—

AMY GOODMAN: You have the French farmer, Jose Bove, who has just gone on a hunger strike to promote a ban on genetically modified crops in France.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I hadn’t known that. The Europeans have reacted much more strongly to genetically modified crops than we have.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think it’s so different?

MICHAEL POLLAN: A couple reasons. We have a misplaced faith in our FDA, that they’ve vetted everything and they’ve taken care of it and they know what’s in the food and that they know the genetically modified crops have been fully tested, which, in fact, they have not, whereas the Europeans, after mad cow disease, are very skeptical of their regulators. And when their regulators tell them, “Oh, this stuff is fine,” they’re like, “Oh, wait. You said that about the beef.” So they’re much more skeptical. They also perceive it as an American imposition, as part of a cultural imperialism. Even though a lot of the GMO companies are European, the perception is it’s Monsanto. And for some reason, the European countries have managed to get under the radar on this issue.

AMY GOODMAN: Does it also have something to do with our media sponsored by food companies?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it does. And we—and the fact that our—we have not labeled it, so nobody knows whether you’re eating it or not. I mean, that’s been a huge fight. You know, Dennis Kucinich has tried to get labeling. Very simple. You know, he’s not saying ban the stuff; he’s saying just tell us if we’re eating it, which seems like a very reasonable position.

AMY GOODMAN: And Monsanto fought this.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Viciously.

AMY GOODMAN: They said that if you say it does not have GMO—

MICHAEL POLLAN: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —genetically modified organisms, in it—

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, you can’t even say that.

AMY GOODMAN: —that that suggests there’s something wrong with it, so when Ben & Jerry’s tried to do that—

MICHAEL POLLAN: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —they weren’t allowed.

MICHAEL POLLAN: That’s right. There’s a lot of litigation over that still in Vermont and other states, in California, as well. Now, why is the industry so intent on not having this product regulated—labeled? Well, they think, rightly, that people wouldn’t buy it. And the reason they wouldn’t buy it is it offers the consumer nothing, no benefit. Now, if you could—Americans will eat all sorts of strange things, if there was a benefit. If you could say, well, this genetically modified soy oil will make you skinny, we would buy it, we would eat it. But so far, the traits that they’ve managed to get into these crops benefit farmers, arguably, and not consumers.

The other reason, I understand, that they resist labeling is that if there were labels, there would be ways to trace outbreaks of allergy. Any kind of health problems associated with GMOs you could tie to a particular food. Right now, if there are any allergies that are tied to a GMO food, you can’t prove it. And so, one of the reasons the industry has fought it is that they’re vulnerable to that.

When the GMO industry was starting transgenic crops, they made a decision not to seek any limits on liability from the Congress, as the nuclear industry did, and they decided that would not look good to ask for that, so they just took a chance. And this is, in the view of many activists, their great vulnerability, is product liability. And so, labeling is a way to help prevent that eventuality. So they fought it, you know, ferociously and successfully.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan, what were you most surprised by in writing this book, In Defense of Food?

MICHAEL POLLAN: I was most surprised by two things. One was that the science on nutrition that we all traffic in every day—we read these articles on the front page, we talk about antioxidants and cholesterol and all this kind of stuff—it’s really sketchy that nutritional science is still a very young science. And food is very complicated, as is the human digestive system. There’s a great mystery on both ends of the food chain, and science has not yet sorted it out. Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so. I don’t think we want to change our eating decisions based on nutritional science.

But what I also was surprised at is how many opportunities we now have. If we have—if we’re willing to put the money and the time into it to get off the Western diet and find another way of eating without actually having to leave civilization or, you know, grow all your own food or anything—although I do think we should grow whatever food we can—that it is such a hopeful time and that there’s some very simple things we can all do to eat well without being cowed by the scientists.

AMY GOODMAN: The healthiest cuisines, what do you feel they are?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the interesting thing is that most traditional cuisines are very healthy, that people—that the human body has done very well on the Mediterranean diet, on the Japanese diet, on the peasant South American diet. It’s really interesting how many different foods we can do well on. The one diet we seem poorly adapted to happens to be the one we’re eating, the Western diet. So whatever traditional diet suits you—you like eating that way—you know, follow it. And that—you know, that’s a good rule of thumb.

There’s an enormous amount of wisdom contained in a cuisine. And, you know, we privilege scientific information and authority in this country, but, of course, there’s cultural authority and information, too. And whoever figured out that olive oil and tomatoes was a really great combination was actually, we’re now learning, onto something scientifically. If you want to use that nutrient vocabulary, the lycopene in the tomato, which we think is the good thing, is basically made available to your body through the olive oil. So there was a wisdom in those combinations. And you see it throughout.

AMY GOODMAN: The whole push for hydrogenated oils? I grew up on margarine. “You should never eat butter! Only margarine!”

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, I know. I did, too. And that was a huge mistake. That was a mistake.

AMY GOODMAN: Can we go back in time?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, we can. Yeah, the butter, fortunately, is still here.

AMY GOODMAN: Re-eat?

MICHAEL POLLAN: We can’t re-eat, but we can switch to—one of the important—

AMY GOODMAN: Where did it come from?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, margarine was cheaper. Again, take a cheap raw material, which was to say they had developed these technologies for getting oil out of cottonseed and soy and all this kind of stuff, and there then was this health concern about saturated fat, the great evil. I mean, one of the—another hallmark of nutritionism is that there’s always the evil nutrient and the blessed nutrient, but it’s always changing. So the evil nutrient for a long time has been saturated fat, and the good nutrient was polyunsaturated fat. So people thought, well, let’s take the polyunsaturated fats, and we’ll figure out a way to make them hard at room temperature, which involved the hydrogenation process. You basically fire hydrogen at it. And then you had something that looked like butter.

It was very controversial, though. People—actually, in the late 1900s, several states passed laws saying you had to dye your butter pink so people wouldn’t be confused and would know that that’s an imitation food. And then the Supreme Court—the industry got the Supreme Court to throw this out. So butter was elevated as the more modern, more healthy food. And it turned out that we replaced this possibly mildly unhealthy fat called saturated fat with now a demonstrably lethal one called hydrogenated oil.

AMY GOODMAN: How is it demonstrably lethal?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, they have since proven to, you know, pretty high standard that trans fats are implicated both in heart disease and cancer.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan is a UC Berkeley professor. His latest book is called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Oh, and by the way, this interesting note: the New York City Board of Health voted to require restaurant chains operating in New York to prominently display calorie information on their menus and menu boards beginning on March 31st. It applies to any New York City chain restaurant that has fifteen or more outlets nationwide and includes posting calorie information about cocktails.

Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/13/in_defense_of_food_author_journalist

NYTBSL.org sums it up…

In this Interview

ERICH SEGAL

Learn more about the top bestselling author of Love Story (read a review here)

On his degrees: A master’s and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard.

On how his bestselling novel got started: When his literary agent suggested changing the screenplay into a novel.

On why he was successful: His extraordinary imagination.

Scroll Down to Watch Love Story snip

Erich W. Segal

Before Erich W. Segal ’58 penned the romantic novel “Love Story”—the iconic tale of a Harvard man and Radcliffe woman who fall for each other—he wrote notes for his roommates to express his creativity.

“Gordo,” begins a hurried letter to his freshman year roommate Marvin A. Gordon ’58, “as you know, we are running low on”—and here, he drew a picture of a toilet paper roll—“Unless you’d like to wipe your rectum with dollar bills, you might well let me know when the next 50 cents is coming, or buy the stuff yourself.”

Segal, who graduated from the College as both class poet (an elected Class Day speaker) and Latin salutatorian (a Commencement orator based on class ranking), went on to pursue a career that straddled the line between academia and popular culture.

In addition to writing “Love Story,” Segal is known for his collaboration on the Beatles’ 1968 film “Yellow Submarine.”

But Segal—who has also held various teaching positions at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Princeton, among other institutions—will be absent from this year’s reunion as he battles illness at his home in London.

“I no longer own the impregnable mind and body that used to overcome adversity in whatever form I had to face it,” Segal wrote in a concise passage in this year’s 50th anniversary report. “I am with you, classmates, and hope we will meet in person again.”

For those who have studied and worked with Segal, it is his imagination that has imbued him with the ability to inhabit the distinct roles of both Classics professor and famous writer.

BECOMING A WRITER

Despite his future prominence as a writer, Segal, who was a classics concentrator, was not particularly active in any literary pursuits while he was an undergraduate. He briefly attempted to gain a spot on The Crimson’s staff in the fall of 1955 but managed to have only two unsigned cartoons published.

In 1958, as a senior completing his studies, Segal wrote his first play, a Hasty Pudding show called “The Big Fizz.”

Although the show received lackluster reviews, when Segal was a graduate student in May 1961, his Homeric spoof “Sing. Muse!” was performed in Leverett House dining hall to considerably more success.

The play, which attracted an off-Broadway producer, became an unlikely hit and served as the springboard for Segal’s playwriting career.

In a 1972 interview with The Crimson, Segal said that the success of the play was unexpected.

“And I must emphasize, it began without my trying, you know. I wasn’t down there making the theatrical scene,” he said. “I was up here getting a Ph.D. And I wrote something for Leverett House ’cause they wanted it for spring weekend, see? But the professionals bought it and put it on. And then by God, I was a professional!”

But before he tried his hand at writing, roommates said Segal was dedicated to his academics and to the track team.

Gordon recalled Segal’s ostensible disappointment after receiving his first-semester grades. He said that Segal looked theatrically at his grades and expressed fear that he would “flunk out.”

Gordon added that he and his two other suitemates made their way to Segal’s academic adviser to express their concern.

“We said, ‘We’re very worried about Erich. Is there anything we can do to help him?’” Gordon said.

But it was all for naught.

Gordon remembered the adviser saying that he could not tell the boys what Segal’s grades were but that he was “at the top of the heap.”

Aside from his academic endeavors, for Segal, running was paramount. As a member of the track team, he ran his first Boston Marathon in 1955, and continued to run the marathon until 1975, according to the Boston Athletic Association.

A DUNSTER STORY

Following graduation, Segal received his masters and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard.

He then went on to teach at several Ivy League colleges and served as a fellow at Wolfson College at Oxford.

The fame that Segal acquired after writing “Sing. Muse!” resulted in his collaboration on the screenplay for the animated Beatles film “Yellow Submarine.” He continued to contribute to other screenplays throughout the 1960s, including “The Games” and “Downhill Racer.”

In the fall of 1968, while on leave from Yale, Segal returned to Harvard, where he wrote the screenplay for “Love Story.”

Click to Buy Love Story on Amazon

Written in Dunster J-39, “Love Story” was composed in the same room in which Segal completed half a monograph on Euripides and Meander.

After pitching the screenplay to several movie producers, his literary agent, Lois K. Wallace, who worked at the William Morris Agency at the time and who had first met Segal at Harvard summer school in 1959, suggested that he turn it into a novel.

This is how that “Love Story”—The New York Times number one bestseller and number one box office attraction in 1971—was born.

“I thought it was terrific,” Wallace recently said of the original screenplay. “He was driven, he was amazingly intelligent, and unbelievably energetic.”

INHABITING TWO WORLDS

For friends who knew Segal at Harvard, his spirited personality and propensity to eavesdrop can explain his ability to inhabit both the role of professor and writer.

“One of the reasons that I think he turned out to be prolific and extremely successful…was that he had a great imagination, no problem at all with making the narrative fit the story rather than fit the truth,” Gordon said.

Merging fiction with reality, Segal’s sixth novel, “The Class,” published in 1986, follows five fictitious members of the Harvard class of 1985, culminating in their 25th class reunion.

But according to Gordon, as he and his classmates gather for their 50th reunion, Segal’s inspiration for his most famous novel, “Love Story,” is also evident in their shared Harvard experience.

“If you read ‘Love Story,’” Gordon said, “I could pick out little parts of all kinds of roommates and friends we had that he sort of rolled into one character in the hero of ‘Love Story.’”

Source: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=523642

Love Story with Ali MacGraw & Ryan O’Neal

Scroll Down to Watch Francis Coppola and Mario Puzo Discuss the Making of “The Godfather” and More

NYTBSL.org sums it up…

In this Interview

MARIO PUZO

On why he’s an author: To pay the bills (often unfortunately large ones).

On what sells a book: If it’s good, people will read it.

On why people like Mafia books: Wishful thinking to be able to avoid the court system.

On someone who changed the course of his life: His counselor, Carol, who helped him with clinical depression.

Click here to read a review of “The Godfather.”

Mario Puzo on Larry King Live (CNN)

August 2, 1996

LARRY KING: The Godfather was the best selling novel in publishing history and one of the great movies, and had two other movies come out after it all of which were major factors – in fact, the trilogy may be the best thing ever done on film – the author of the screenplays, the author of The Godfather and now the author of The Last Don – there you see its cover, published by Random House, already way up on the best seller lists, I think number three and climbing, the hottest book in the country. Mario Puzo, a rare thing, Mario is doing interviews. You don’t do interviews.

MARIO PUZO: Well, I didn’t do them for 20 years.

LARRY KING: Why?

MARIO PUZO: I thought interviews don’t really help sell a book. If you write a good enough book people will read it.

LARRY KING: What changed your mind?

MARIO PUZO: Well, during that 20 years, marketing became more and more important in selling a book. So, I became convinced I had to do something so people would know the book was out.

LARRY KING: They know The Last Don is out.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah.

LARRY KING: Are you surprised at all by the way it’s climbing?

MARIO PUZO: A little, yeah. Yeah.

LARRY KING: Because, you know, the name Puzo hasn’t been around. I mean, you’ve written some books, but nothing like The Godfather, The Godfather was –

MARIO PUZO: Right.

LARRY KING: – a long time ago.

MARIO PUZO: Right. Yeah.

LARRY KING: What do you think has done it?

MARIO PUZO: Well –

LARRY KING: Aside from pretty good reviews.

MARIO PUZO: I think it’s because it’s the closest book to The Godfather that I’ve written since then. You know, I’ve written The Sicilian –

LARRY KING: The Fourth K –

MARIO PUZO: – and Fool’s Die, and you know, those were different books. I didn’t want to write the same book. This goes back to the family Mafia theme and I think people like that.

LARRY KING: Why do we like it so much?

MARIO PUZO: Well, because it’s wishful thinking. I think everybody would like to have somebody that they could go to for justice, without going through the law courts and the lawyers – you know.

LARRY KING: A kind king.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, a very kind king. You know, he commits a few murders, but –

LARRY KING: But basically he’s in the family.

MARIO PUZO: Right.

LARRY KING: Right. It is also about family, isn’t it?

MARIO PUZO: Right. The Godfather was really, to me, a family novel, more than a crime novel.

LARRY KING: Crime just happened to be their occupation, right?

MARIO PUZO: Right.

LARRY KING: Could have been suits?

MARIO PUZO: Anything.

LARRY KING: Is it true that you wrote it just for money. I remember that stories came out that Mario Puzo, a very serious writer, had written some wonderful books, fiction and non-fiction and someone came to you like on a bet to do like a Mafia novel?

MARIO PUZO: No, what happened – I’d published two novels for which I’d received very fine reviews – especially the second one, The Fortunate Pilgrim, and I didn’t make any money and –

LARRY KING: The Fortunate Pilgrim was a great book.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, I thought – I think it’s my best book. So, I didn’t make any money and I looked around and I said ‘Gee, I’ve got – ‘ you know, I was working as a government clerk, and then I was working on the magazines, the adventure magazines and I figured – I had five kids and I thought, ‘I’d better make some money.’

LARRY KING: So you did this as a ‘let’s write a book that’s going to appeal to people.’

MARIO PUZO: Yeah. Yeah. Right. I tried to write a good book, but I kept an eye on – actually, it helped me in that, I think, before I wanted to be Joyce and I really more a story teller, you know, than an artist of language like Joyce, though I – I think, you know, I write pretty well –

LARRY KING: So, The Godfather was not anything beneath your quality?

Watch The Godfather trailer

MARIO PUZO: Well –

LARRY KING: Or it was different.

MARIO PUZO: – I always wish I’d written it better, because I had – I went away to Europe and I left the manuscript with my publisher and I said, ‘I’ve got to do one more rewrite,’ but when I came back they had sold the book for $450,000 to a paperback publisher, I didn’t dare rewrite it. I figured they would take their money back, they wouldn’t like it.

LARRY KING: Did you – how did you get to do the screenplay? Most times guys who do novels don’t get to do screenplays.

MARIO PUZO: I didn’t want to do it and they asked me to do it and I said no. And then –

LARRY KING: Were you a friend of Francis Ford Coppola?

MARIO PUZO: I never knew him, until – I went out there to do the screenplay.

LARRY KING: Well, now, screenplays to novels are apples and oranges, aren’t they?

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, they are two different things.

LARRY KING: Why did you agree to do it?

MARIO PUZO: For the money. Well, I mean, it – and as I said before, you know, it’s – it’s – it – those screenwriters that are writing out there, they’ve got a tough job, you know, but they make a very good living. And to me, you know, if you are writing I think long novels that take four or five years – you sit down and write a screenplay and you do it in two or three months, and they give you enormous amounts of money and you can’t – you can’t say no.

LARRY KING: That was cast perfectly, too, wasn’t it?

MARIO PUZO: That was Francis Coppola more than anybody else.

LARRY KING: Brando turned out perfect.

MARIO PUZO: Right. But that was my suggestion. I had – I had read somewhere that – and it may be true that Danny Thomas wanted to play it, and no reflection on Danny Thomas but I got so scared that I wrote Brando a letter and he called me up. And he told me that no studio would take him, that I should wait until a director came on the film and he was right. I went back to Paramount and I said, ‘Brando’s the guy,’ and they all said no. And then when Francis came on the film, he finessed them into accepting his decision.

LARRY KING: You got to do both sequels, right?

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, yeah.

LARRY KING: Which is great. The whole trilogy is fantastic.

MARIO PUZO: They did well.

LARRY KING: You ought to be very proud.

MARIO PUZO: Oh, sure.

LARRY KING: How did you get to do Superman.

MARIO PUZO: They came to me, two young producers, and I said no.

LARRY KING: Then they told you how much they would give you.

MARIO PUZO: Well, what happened was that I got a letter from the IRS that I owed them $150,000 and that was so much money, so they paid me $300,000 up front for Superman I & II, which just fitted in nicely. I turned over the whole –

LARRY KING: You paid the Feds.

MARIO PUZO: – well, I paid the $150,000 I owed and I paid the $150,000 that was coming in that money.

LARRY KING: Mario’s new book is The Ultimate Capitalist.

We will talk about The Last Don in a moment. Our guest is Mario Puzo. He calls them as he sees ‘em. Don’t fool around with him.

We will be right back.

[Commercial break]

LARRY KING: Mario Puzo’s newest, a raging best seller is The Last Don. Is it a continuation of the Corleones?

MARIO PUZO: No, completely separate.

LARRY KING: New family?

MARIO PUZO: Completely separate.

LARRY KING: Hook of the story deals a lot with Hollywood, right?

MARIO PUZO: Right.

LARRY KING: And Vegas?

MARIO PUZO: Right.

LARRY KING: What is it? A family – two families or one?

MARIO PUZO: No, it’s the story of the Clericuzio’s you know, the –

LARRY KING: And rivalry within them, right?

MARIO PUZO: Right. And you know, it’s – I like to think of it as a Renaissance story, you know, because I had been doing research for a Borgia book and sort of a lot of the stuff got –

LARRY KING: Really?

MARIO PUZO: – the Borgia stuff came into The Last Don.

LARRY KING: How did you pick the name Clericuzio?

MARIO PUZO: Because there was – my – my mother married twice. The first time she married she married a man named Clericuzio, so my brothers and sister, my – their name was Clericuzio and I always loved that name. I mean, they’ve shortened it to –

LARRY KING: Great name.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, they’ve shortened it to Cleri now, but when we were kids they were Clericuzio and even as a kid it struck me as just a marvelous name.

LARRY KING: All this Mafia intrigue that you wrote about, was all out of your head?

MARIO PUZO: From research. I never – really, I never – people still think I am connected to the Mafia, but I swear –

LARRY KING: Was it true or not Sinatra was very upset that he thought you were patterning the singer after him?

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, I guess he was. I – I guess so. I mean –

LARRY KING: Were you not patterning it after him?

MARIO PUZO: Not really. I mean, the superficial aspect, but I was trying to catch what does a man as famous and who has done so much as Sinatra, what does he really feel, you know, like you try and imagine how a guy like that really feels inside and that – that’s what I was trying to do.

LARRY KING: In this book, there is a lot of rapping of Hollywood, is there not? You are not a great fan as I read the reviews.

MARIO PUZO: Well, it’s not true. I’ve had a good time in Hollywood, I’ve made a lot of money in Hollywood. I’ve been charmed by, you know, they are very charming people and the way they come out in this book, I guess they look like villains, but I – I don’t feel like they are villains.

LARRY KING: You doing the screenplay for this, too?

MARIO PUZO: No, it’s – it’s going to be a TV miniseries.

LARRY KING: But you are not going to do the script?

MARIO PUZO: No.

LARRY KING: Let’s take some calls for Mario Puzo. Los Angeles, hello?

7th CALLER, [Los Angeles, CA]: Good evening, Mr. Puzo. I was wondering why you sold the rights to your latest novel to CBS instead of making it into a feature motion picture?

Listen to The Godfather Theme

MARIO PUZO: Because they gave me a lot more money.

LARRY KING: Mario, so much deals in your life with money.

MARIO PUZO: Well, because I was very poor. Until I was 48 years old, I was very poor. I never took a vacation, I didn’t – you know, I just worked and so money became very important.

LARRY KING: So to quote the vernacular of my tribe: You are entitled.

MARIO PUZO: Right.

LARRY KING: Atlanta, hello?

8th CALLER, [Atlanta, GA]: Hello.

LARRY KING: Hi.

8th CALLER: Why didn’t the movie, Godfather III pick up right where Godfather II ended – I am speaking chronologically –

MARIO PUZO: Right.

LARRY KING: Why not?

MARIO PUZO: I don’t know.

LARRY KING: You wrote the screen play.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, but it got changed.

LARRY KING: Oh.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah.

LARRY KING: You had picked it up.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, because Francis wrote the screenplay with me. I wrote the first draft and then Francis rewrote and then I rewrote and so it evolved that way.

LARRY KING: Are you happy with the whole trilogy, though?

MARIO PUZO: Well, one and two, I am very, very – one, I think, especially, I think, is a classic. Godfather III, I think maybe we didn’t do as well. You know, sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you are not. And – on Godfather III, I don’t think it’s as good as the other two pictures, but still it got national – it got nominated for the academy. So – it couldn’t have been bad, you know?

LARRY KING: Nicholas Cage really wanted to be in it.

MARIO PUZO: Did he? I didn’t know that.

LARRY KING: Oh, yeah, he wanted the part that Garcia played.

MARIO PUZO: I didn’t know that.

LARRY KING: Yeah.

MARIO PUZO: And probably Francis didn’t take him because Nicholas is his nephew.

LARRY KING: I know.

MARIO PUZO: You know, it was really hard to get him to hire his sister in Godfather I.

LARRY KING: Because of nepotism.

MARIO PUZO: Yeah, and I remember, I thought her test was the best test and I told him, you know.

LARRY KING: Our guest is Mario Puzo, back at the top with The Last Don. We will be back with our remaining moments after this.

[Commercial break]

LARRY KING: In our remaining moments, Mario Puzo would like to tell us about his own counselor, Carol.

MARIO PUZO: Right. She was – my wife was terminally ill, this was 18 years ago and she was a nurse, and she was the best nurse I have ever seen, really a great nurse and then you know we got disease and we’ve been together for 17 years and she saved my life, we were in Los Angeles, gambling, New Year’s Eve –

LARRY KING: You mean, Las Vegas.

MARIO PUZO: – Las Vegas, and she noticed my fingers were blue and other signs, and she dragged me to LA and I immediately had heart surgery, a quadruple bypass, so she saved my life there and a couple of other things. But also the biggest thing was, I was very depressed after my heart operation, I couldn’t write. And she got me prozac and when I was writing the book, you know, when you are depressed – the toughest thing for a writer is to believe he is writing something good. And she kept encouraging me, you know, she said – I used to say ‘Gee, this is lousy, who wants to read it,’ and she’d say, ‘No, no, it’s good. It’s good.’ And then my editor, Jonathan Karp at Random House, he said the same thing, he cheered me up pretty much, too. But it was Carol that really brought me through.

LARRY KING: But you – you need that encouragement.

MARIO PUZO: Oh, absolutely do.

LARRY KING: Yeah. Lewiston, New York. Hello?

9th CALLER, [Lewiston, NY]: Hello. I enjoy Mr. Puzo’s writing very much and I was wondering when he wrote his first book and where did he get his journalistic experience, at what university?

LARRY KING: Did you go to – did you go to –

MARIO PUZO: I went to the New School for Social Research after the war and again money rears its head, because under the GI bill if you took a full course at night college, you got $120 a month, which was a lot of money in 1949.

LARRY KING: What was your first book?

MARIO PUZO: The Dark Arena, it was about World War II.

LARRY KING: Thank you Mario. Continued, long life, good luck.

MARIO PUZO: Thank you very much, Larry.

LARRY KING: The book is The Last Don. The author is Mario Puzo. He wrote The Godfather. Something tells me he is going to make it.

Thanks for joining us. Jerry Lee Lewis tomorrow night. From Los Angeles, good night.

© copyright 1996

Mario Puzo on “The Godfather”

Watch the Opening Scene of The Godfather

Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola

Click to View Obama Items on Amazon

Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon

Scroll down for another opinion on Barack…

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/books/17kaku.html

Read about John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: October 17, 2006

Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the Democratic Party’s new rock star, is that rare politician who can actually write — and write movingly and genuinely about himself.
Deborah Feingold

Barack Obama
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

By Barack Obama

375 pages. Crown Publishers. $25.
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews

His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” written before Mr. Obama entered politics, provided a revealing, introspective account of his efforts to trace his family’s tangled roots and his attempts to come to terms with his absent father, who left home when he was still a toddler. That book did an evocative job of conjuring the author’s multicultural childhood: his father was from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, and the young Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.

And it was equally candid about his youthful struggles: pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” he wrote, could “push questions of who I was out of my mind,” flatten “out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.” Most memorably, the book gave the reader a heartfelt sense of what it was like to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s, straddling America’s color lines: the sense of knowing two worlds and belonging to neither, the sense of having to forge an identity of his own.

Mr. Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope” — the phrase comes from his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, which made him the party’s rising young hope — is much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama’s policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.

But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.

He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”) And he recounts a trip he took through Illinois with an aide, who scolded him for asking for Dijon mustard at a T.G.I. Friday’s, worried the senator would come across as an elitist; the confused waitress, he adds, simply said: “We got Dijon if you want it.”

Click to View Barack Obama Cutout

In his 2004 keynote address Mr. Obama spoke of the common ground Americans share: “There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” And the same message — rooted in his own youthful efforts to grapple with racial stereotypes, racial loyalty and class resentments — threads its way through the pages of this book. Despite the red state-blue state divide, despite racial, religious and economic divisions, Mr. Obama writes, “we are becoming more, not less, alike” beneath the surface: “Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.”

Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.”

His thoughts on domestic and foreign policy try to hew to this consensus-building line. Some of his recommendations devolve into little more than fuzzy statements of the obvious: i.e., that America’s “addiction to oil” is affecting the economy and undermining national security, or that the education system needs to be revamped and improved. Others echo Bill Clinton’s “third way,” methodically triangulating between traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas.

Mr. Obama writes that “conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old A.F.D.C. program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect.”

He uses the Bush administration’s tough language to talk about national security in the age of terrorism (“if we have to go it alone, the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country”) but adds, crucially, that “once we get beyond matters of self-defense,” he is “convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world.”

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He assails President Bush for waging an unnecessary and misguided war in Iraq and for promoting an “Ownership Society” that “magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy.” Yet he also takes the Democrats to task for becoming “the party of reaction”: “In reaction to a war that is ill-conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.”

This volume does not possess the searching candor of the author’s first book. But Mr. Obama strives in these pages to ground his policy thinking in simple common sense — be it “growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules” or reining in spending and rethinking tax policy to bring down the nation’s huge deficit — while articulating these ideas in level-headed, nonpartisan prose. That, in itself, is something unusual, not only in these venomous pre-election days, but also in these increasingly polarized and polarizing times.

Glenn Beck: Strong case against Obama

September 18, 2008 – 4:10 ET

The Case Against Barack Obama

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GLENN: We have David Freddoso on. He is the author of a book, The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate. He is a reporter for the National Review Online. WGN in Chicago getting heat for having him on. The Obama campaign does not want this man on. There’s another guest that they had on that they also went through the roof and just did everything they could to scare WGN into not having these guests on. Why? What is it that the Obama campaign doesn’t want? They say smears. David Freddoso is somebody that, believe me, I have had on my program and on my program, to get it on CNN, it better be right. If you’re a conservative, it better be right. David Freddoso is somebody that we have checked out ourself to make sure what he’s saying is right, and let’s go to the abortion thing. I played the ad. It’s a 527 now against Barack Obama that says please, Barack Obama, please don’t allow babies to die from botched abortions. That’s a pretty outrageous claim.

David, where does that claim come from? What is this story?

FREDDOSO: Well, this is the story of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and it goes back to a hospital in the southwest suburbs of Chicago called Christ Hospital where they were performing on a regular basis induced labor abortions and these are late second, early third trimester abortions in which the drugs are given to the mother to induce violent labor and the baby is usually killed in the contractions and comes out. But about 15 to 20% of the time this produces a a live baby is born, I should say. And sometimes the babies will live just for a few minutes, sometimes for several hours. But this hospital was not giving any thought to medical treatment for them when they survived and could have potentially lived on and saved in incubator under whatever sort of medical technology we have to keep premature babies alive. They were simply shelving them and

GLENN: Hang on just a second. I just, I don’t care how you feel about abortion. If you think abortion is a right, you know, a woman’s right to choose, et cetera, et cetera, fine. I disagree with you. We’re going now to a step of partial birth abortion. Now people are not for partial birth abortion. The vast majority of people. They are pro choice but they are saying you can’t take the baby and have them birthed all the way except for the head and then suck the brains out while the head is still in the mother. That is a that is a step way beyond. And Republicans and Democrats agree on that. This is something further than that. This is a baby that survives an abortion and is living outside of the mother, is now just neglected and dies from neglect. Right or wrong, David?

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FREDDOSO: This is what yeah, that is exactly what was happening and, in fact, that fact isn’t even in dispute. What is in dispute is exactly what condition that they were being left to die in. According to the nurse, Jill Stanek whom I interviewed for the kids against Barack Obama, they were one of the places they would put these babies to die while they were struggling is the utility closet where medical waste goes. According to the hospital they were putting them into comfort rooms where they would just simply leave them to die with a blanket or something. So that was the practice. And the attorney general of Illinois told Jill Stanek, this nurse, that this was not violating the law, that they couldn’t do anything about it and, you know, all protestations to the contrary, there wasn’t any law protecting these babies because the attorney general of Illinois wasn’t you know, he absolutely said, you know, no, you would need a new law if you wanted to do this.

GLENN: David, why couldn’t you, why couldn’t the doctor just kill the baby once the baby was born?

FREDDOSO: Well, I mean, I would say that’s murder. I mean, I’m also pro life.

GLENN: Got it. No, I’m not talking about your opinion. I’m talking about the law. It would indeed be murder if they would have killed the baby once the baby was born.

FREDDOSO: Well, of course, and even this practice itself strikes me as murder because you don’t actually have to stab someone through the heart to commit murder.

GLENN: I understand that.

FREDDOSO: You can certainly leave them, there’s such a thing as negligent homicide as well. But in any case, there wasn’t a law protecting them and that was what they went to the Illinois legislature to do was to pass a law that would define anyone who is already born and alive as a person. And that would have made the laws of the State of Illinois apply to these premature babies.

GLENN: How did Barack Obama stop it?

FREDDOSO: Barack Obama was the only state senator to speak against this law and

GLENN: Sorry. Repeat that, please.

FREDDOSO: He was the only state senator to speak against this law on the floor of the Illinois Senate.

GLENN: Okay.

FREDDOSO: In all the times it came up, in fact, he was the only one to speak against it. And his speech that he gave is very interesting, and I’ve given it in full in Chapter 10 of The Case Against Barack Obama because the argument is basically this, that if we go and recognize premature babies born alive in what some people call a previable condition, although they were clearly living for a while, if we do this, then it might down the road affect the right to abortion. It might cause it might create some kind of

GLENN: Slippery slope that they always say doesn’t exist.

FREDDOSO: I’m sorry?

GLENN: A slippery slope that liberals always say doesn’t exist.

FREDDOSO: Exactly.

GLENN: He was using that argument.

FREDDOSO: And that was his argument was essentially a slippery slope argument. His argument on the floor, it had a few contradictions in it, didn’t quite make sense. I mean, he used the word “Fetus” to describe a premature baby for a moment and then corrected himself.

GLENN: All right.

FREDDOSO: But, you know, by his argument you could also say that a premature baby who wasn’t born in an abortion, who was just simply born premature. I have a friend who recently gave birth to a premature baby and by his argument you would have to question or deny their personhood as well, as though they are somehow less persons than babies carried nine months.

GLENN: So the first time did he sign the bill?

FREDDOSO: The first time he voted present on the bill, which is in the Illinois legislature is equivalent to no. And it was part of a strategy that he had devised with Planned Parenthood lobbyists.

GLENN: Stand by. Stand by. We’re going to come get the rest of the story in just a second.

(OUT 11:42)

GLENN: I can tell you why Barack Obama did not want David Freddoso on WGN, because these are the most powerful arguments I have ever heard against Barack Obama. Well stated, well documented and so unbelievably damning. David, we are quickly running out of time. May I invite you for another hour tomorrow?

FREDDOSO: I would love to do it again tomorrow, absolutely.

GLENN: Okay. So let’s finish the abortion story, please.

FREDDOSO: Yes. Senator Obama voted he voted present on that bill. It was part of a strategy that he devised, that he and some Planned Parenthood lobbyists had devised that basically everyone would vote present instead of voting no. And just to you know, it came up the following year; he did it again. The bill, by the way, it passed the state senate and died in the state house committee. In 2003, though, Democrats had taken over the state senate and Obama was now the chairman of the Senate health committee. And as chairman he presided as they made the reason that Obama has ever since said he voted against this bill in committee is that it didn’t contain the same language that the federal board of live infants protection act contained. Sort of redundant protection against this law ever effecting the right to abortion. What he didn’t realize, didn’t or was misleading people about is that, in fact, in 2003 the bill that he voted against in his committee did contain that language, was exactly the same as the bill that had gone to the U.S. Senate floor, that Barbara Boxer had stood up and said, “I support this bill, everyone should vote for this bill.” Obama voted against it and that puts him on the very fringes when it comes to issues of human life at its very beginning.

GLENN: So wait a minute. He is Barbara Boxer was on the other side of this issue?

FREDDOSO: Yes, that’s right. Hillary Clinton was also on the other side. The vote was 98 0 and the two guys who weren’t there to vote were pro life Republicans. So basically every abortion proponent in the United States Senate is more protective of human life in its early stages than Senator Obama.

GLENN: Say that again, please.

FREDDOSO: Every single abortion proponent in the United States Senate at the time they voted on this the roll call vote was in 2001 every single one is more protective of human life in its early stages and more respectful of human life in its early stages than is Senator Obama based on his voting record.

GLENN: Now, Barack Obama will say, no, that’s not true, I wasn’t I was of course for this. He seems to have an ever evolving but he does believe in evolution an ever evolving story on this.

FREDDOSO: Yes. Because at first his story for the next three years or actually four years was that it didn’t contain the language if it had just contained the federal bill language, then he would have voted for it. In fact, it did contain that language and he voted against it. This year when National Right to Life found the records this is just a few weeks ago, found the records of the committee hearing and they found the bill was exactly the same and Obama voted against it in a party line vote in his committee, changed his explanation to say now the thing was there was already a law protecting these babies. And there is an old abortion statute on the books in Illinois and it’s a bill that Obama has repeatedly argued that every element of it is unconstitutional. It was enjoined from in most of its aspects it was enjoined from enforcement precisely because of the Roe versus Wade decision. And the decision they clinged it to last as each part of it is being knocked down is a provision that would require a second doctor to be present when such an abortion is performed in order to save the baby that the first doctor is trying to kill. And that’s something Obama has specifically argued is unconstitutional because it creates an undue burden on the woman and so that is basically, Senator Obama is grasping at straws when it comes to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. He’s making arguments now that don’t make sense and arguments, by the way, that he was never making at the time when he voted against it.

GLENN: I would just like to point out to anybody who doesn’t understand the rhetoric of politicians, I’m a recovering alcoholic. So I speak bullcrap for most of my life. So I speak it fluently. I can translate political speak into English. When anybody says that they are worried about that they want the condition of the mother’s health, let’s make sure that we have an exception for the mother’s health, there has never once been a case where a doctor says, in the case of let’s say partial birth abortion or where they are performing the abortion late term and they would birth the child, that it is better for the mother if they kill the baby. What they’re talking about, there have been cases on mental health, yet her mental health matters if she has the baby, but they deny any kind of mental health stress if she has had the abortion. It doesn’t make any sense. It is a game that they play. You cannot tell me that mainstream America you know, I’m not even going to say that. You cannot tell me that 98% of America, pro choice, pro life believe that we should leave a baby to die through neglect. There is no way to make the mental hurdles in your own head to say that this child should die from neglect, this fetus should die from neglect. There is no person within the sound of my voice of 98% of the population of this country that thinks that that is reasonable. This is the kind of guy that you have to understand you’re dealing with. He’s not somebody who’s kind of on the left. He’s not somebody who’s kind of out of pace with the mainstream. This guy is as far left as you can get and this is just one example.

David, on tomorrow’s program can you give us more examples of how incredibly out of step with the mainstream he is?

FREDDOSO: Oh, absolutely. Just about every issue you can find Obama taking stands during his career that are, you know, whether it’s guns, babies, taxes and national security as well, stances that members of his own party think are completely wrong. He is the most liberal senator in the United States Senate for a reason, and I’m not the one saying it. That’s National Journal, which is a highly respected $2,000 a year publication here in Washington.

GLENN: Tomorrow, tomorrow I would like to go a little bit into and I don’t even know if you did this, David, but his mom, he always is saying “My mom from Kansas, my mom from Kansas, my mom.” It’s like I see Auntie Em every time he says “My mom from Kansas.” His mom from Kansas was leftist as well. He’s not coming from a background of people that are Auntie Em and, oh, quick, get into the root cellar. There is the roots of Barack Obama are from the left. Tomorrow can you go into a little bit of “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future” and just give me the absolutely best well documented cases that this guy’s judgment on friends, if you take him at his word that, “Well, these guys aren’t the people we know; well, I can’t really answer for my friends or my family or whatever,” that his judgment is off.

FREDDOSO: Oh, absolutely.

GLENN: And I don’t believe it’s his judgment. I believe he is choosing to surround himself with these people.

FREDDOSO: Well, right. And that’s just the thing. You know, I have spoken with many people about this question of guilt by association. This isn’t about guilt by association. This is about looking at the actual choices that Barack Obama has made in his life. And that’s the best sort of gauge we can have. And if you give it the most charitable interpretation and we look at some of these relationships and that’s the only conclusion you can come to is that his judgment in picking friends is rather suspect.

GLENN: Name of the book is The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate . The author is David Freddoso. He will join us again tomorrow and all of this will be available online at GlennBeck.com soon.

Obama discusses foreign policy with Bill O’Reilly:

I love when they start saying “Nononono” to each other at the same time.

Barack Obama on Making a Difference

Is Barack Obama Patriotic?

Click to Buy NYTBSL.org sums it up… In this Interview JULIE ANDREWS On why she’s an author: The influence of her dad, childhood books, and authors such as Dickens and Austen. On recommended books: The Wind in the Willows, The Little Grey Men, Alice in Wonderland On someone who changed the course of her life: Moss Hart, producer, who she credits keeping her on the path to where she is today. Scroll Down to Watch 12-year-old Julie Andrews on YouTube! It’s incredible! Julie Andrews Interview Legend of Stage and Screen June 10, 2004 Chicago, Illinois

Could you tell us about Walton-on-Thames? What was that like when you were growing up?

Julie Andrews: Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, which is where I was born, is about 20 miles south-southwest of London, and when I was very young it was just a country stop on the railway line and it is now part of Greater London and very much suburbia. And I know the ins and outs of it, but there are very few places that you recognize in terms of the way it used to be. But, it’s a very sweet place. It’s sort of the middle village between a very up-market village and a very low, poverty village, at least in the early days.

What did your parents do?

Julie Andrews: My real father was a school teacher. He taught practical crafts and English and Math.

My mother remarried when I was about four or five years old, so I then went to live with my mum and stepfather, and he was a fine tenor, he had a singing voice. He was from Canada, from Toronto. He joined forces in more ways than one with my mother in that she was a really wonderful pianist and probably should have been a performing concert pianist but, in fact, due to circumstances and the war and tremendous poverty and things like that, they became part of a vaudeville act. And consequently, I knew nothing else but that, and to their amazement, I think, they discovered when I was about eight years old — my stepfather, I think in an attempt to become a little closer to me, decided to give me some singing lessons because my school had closed down because of the escalation of the war. And, I think he thought it would just sort of “keep me quiet,” so to speak. And, they discovered that I had this four-octave soprano voice, which surprised them since it was my stepfather who sang, not my real dad at all. And so, I knew nothing but vaudeville — music hall — gradually began to appear with my mum and my stepdad and tour the halls, and made a fairly important, for me, debut when I was about 12 years old.

Before we get to the debut, is it true that you made an appearance on stage at age two?

Julie Andrews: You’ve done your homework! Yes, my mother was the pianist. My aunt was a dancer and they were two extraordinary ladies. I’d love to write about them one day. My aunt founded a dancing school, which she ran for almost 50 years in Walton-on-Thames. She would put on her local shows and that was when I think I made my real first debut. I think I was either Winken, Blinken or Nod, one of the three.

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No speaking role?

Julie Andrews: No speaking role but probably a lot of bouncing about in a baby suit of some kind.

So really there was never a time that you weren’t on stage?

Julie Andrews: Not really. I enjoyed it immensely.

You mentioned that the schools had shut down during the war. Does that mean there was really no school to go to?

Julie Andrews: Yes. There was a lot of evacuation going on at that time. All the children were being evacuated into the country. I was, too, for a while. The air raids towards the end of the war particularly were coming so fast and furiously — with the doodlebugs (buzz bombs) as we called them — that no housewife could get anything done and everything just ground to a halt for a while.

And then, were you eight when you met another voice teacher?

Julie Andrews: Yes.

My stepfather was very smart, in that he knew he didn’t have the ability to teach, and because it was such a very young voice, but such a sort of oddly powerful one, he knew that he had to put me in good hands if he could. And so, he took me to his teacher who was a very fine dramatic soprano, an English dramatic soprano. She’d done a lot of Handel. I can’t even think of the right word at this point. But, she was a very gentle woman and I was with her for most of my early life. Only when I went to Broadway did I kind of not work with her, and of course I prepared with her to go to Broadway, but she didn’t actually come with me. But, the foundation that she gave me and the technique — the technical foundation — was terrific.

What was her name? Did she have anything to do with the diction that you’re famous for?

Julie Andrews: Her name was Lillian Stiles-Allen and she had an extraordinary voice. A voice much like Kirsten Flagstad or Birgit Nilsson, that wonderful kind of fluted sound that comes out of those extraordinary dramatic sopranos. She firmly believed — and taught me — that your voice would hold up for you if you were true to your words. She said there could be people in the audience that needed to see what you were saying, because maybe they were hearing impaired in some way. But more than anything, she said if you relied on those words the voice would come through for you. In other words, be true to your vowels, be true to the consonants that were strong, and not in a kind of glottal way but just really use them as stepping stones to a good foundation for a voice. She was absolutely right.

What else did she teach you?

Julie Andrews: I sang in those days a lot of sort of opera and operetta. I felt that I knew, and I believe that I was right, that I really didn’t have the voice for it. My own voice was very white, very, very thin, and I was able to do these incredible sort of gymnastics with it, tremendous sort of calisthenics, but in a coloratura way, and it was so high that dogs for miles around would howl when I took some of the high notes on. But, she gave me the groundwork of opera and she always said, “Go beyond your reach. If you’re doing something light, practice something even more difficult. Practice it a tone up so that when the night comes and you have to sing it, it is so within your range.” And for many, many years I did that.
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That’s sounds like a baseball player who practices batting with two bats so when he’s holding one it’s very light.

Julie Andrews: Exactly. Yes, very similar.

ou mentioned that at 12 you had an important stage debut. That was a very successful show, wasn’t it?

Julie Andrews: Well,

it was a sophisticated London revue and it was at a theater which is no longer there. It was called the London Hippodrome, and it’s now just a sort of nightclub in Lester Square, London. But, it was a very beautiful theater and I was literally the smallest person on the bill. And because it was so sophisticated, the producers thought perhaps it wasn’t right that I would be singing in this show and the night before we opened they decided that they couldn’t use me. And, of course, my mom being somewhat of a stage mum, sort of said, “No, you can’t do this to this child. It’s her great debut,” and so on. And so, she and my stepfather and their agent descended on the poor producer and they said, “She’ll sing a much more difficult song and you’ll see.” And so, I auditioned for a much more difficult song and the end result was that I was in the show, stayed in the show, and on opening night the audience went crazy, and it was a complete standing ovation. The first thing I had ever really done. The first time I had ever really tried anything that important. And, the press followed me home. You know, the kind of thing when you’re a young fluke in a way, and that was the beginning of a very busy few years right through my teens of touring and radio and early, early television and so on.
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What was the name of that show?

Julie Andrews: The name of the show at the London Hippodrome was Starlight Roof. And it starred English performers: Vic Oliver, Fred Emney, Pat Kirkwood, all very talented. Patricia Kirkwood was a very glorious looking lady with wonderful long legs. She was the leading lady in every sense.

At this point were you still close to your real father?

Julie Andrews: Oh, yes.

What did he teach you?

Julie Andrews: My dad was a very special human being. He had an innate decency. It didn’t come from…he was very bright. He was a nature-loving man. He treated all of us in the family — including his first wife’s other children — he treated us all the same, and as beloved equals. And, we knew he was special. I mean, obviously any dad to a young girl is special if he does all the right things, and my dad certainly did, but he’s the one that instilled in me any true reality in my life because on the one side I had this mad upbringing of vaudeville and touring a great deal and very little schooling. My father was the one that took me on nature walks, took me to the swimming baths, taught me how to swim, took me down to the seaside in freezing cold weather and we dipped in the sea. We climbed the local hills, and he gave me a love of books.
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What books did he introduce you to?

Julie Andrews: When I went to see him he would read to me and he would pick what he thought would be appropriate. Alice in Wonderland and things like that when I was a child. He would buy books for me. I didn’t see him all that much, strangely enough. Occasionally, for a two-week period in the summer holiday maybe, or a visit over Christmas. Or he’d come for a weekend and take me and we’d get on our bicycles and ride for 15 miles to get to his place. But what he did give me was always exactly right. Just the memory of him sitting and reading to me was enough to make me love listening to books and the spoken and written word.

Other than Alice in Wonderland, are there any books that you truly remember loving as a kid?

Julie Andrews: There was a book that he gave me. It’s interesting that you ask that. Obviously Wind in the Willows, and all the classic children’s books, but there was a little book that we found and he leafed through it, and he said, “Here you are, darling. I think you’ll like this.” And, it was a very small children’s novel called The Little Grey Men, by an English author called “B.B.” And it was a very simple nature tale of the last four gnomes left on this earth in England. Very much like Watership Down, that kind of big nature study, and it was set in four seasons. It was a terrific adventure story. I swallowed it up and it went out of print. And, I subsequently have started my own imprint at Harper Collins and it’s coming out this fall. I’m bringing it back again and I’m absolutely delighted about it. It’s one of our mission statements is to bring back books that are worthy of a revisitation in a way, and this is the first one. And, I write about it as a little chapter before it begins.
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You’ve become an author yourself, so that must be the influence of your dad.

Julie Andrews: That book probably influenced me as much as anything, that and my dad. Yes, absolutely. And obviously Dickens and Goldsmith and oh gosh, so many. Jane Austen obviously and the Brontë sisters and so on.

I also loved to scribble as a kid. I loved to write and eventually, because I didn’t have a formal education, a governess was found for me who traveled with me wherever I went, because touring in vaudeville you’re a week in one place, a week in another, and you could not settle into any school. So, I had this wonderful lady who traveled with me who quickly recognized that if she wanted me to do anything, all she had to do was say, “Do this first and then you may write your story,” whatever story I was going to write because that was obviously what I loved to do most of all. She was a very gentle, very kind lady, and I loved her.
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What was her name?

Julie Andrews: Her name was Gladys Knight.

She didn’t go on to become a famous soul singer?

Julie Andrews: No, not that one!

It’s interesting that you had a governess and famously played governesses. Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp. You knew what it was like to be a governess.

Julie Andrews: She wasn’t that kind of a governess. She was a lot older. Sort of a retired teacher who then became a private tutor. Nevertheless, I guess I must have picked up a few things from her, yes.

Did you ever miss having a normal education and a normal childhood?

Julie Andrews: Yes, I did. I was too foolish in my teens and too busy to fight for it. My mother said, “I think we’ll probably quit school, you’re going to get a much bigger education out there,” and indeed I did, of a sort, but especially as I got older, I really regretted not having a college education. I would have loved that.

There’s also the socialization value of being with other kids.

Julie Andrews: Yes. I’m not complaining about it.

I have retained some very close friends from my home village, but actually I didn’t have many peers, not young friends in those days. It was all mostly adults because of the touring, because of the vaudeville. But, the kind of education I was getting was that strange one of standing in the wings and watching phenomenal performers performing every week, every night, watching everything from comedians, to jugglers, to animal acts and different kinds of comedians and dancers, and it was extraordinary. I didn’t think I was getting an education at the time. It’s only in retrospect that I realize that that stood me in very good stead in my later years.
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You also made a television debut in your teens too, didn’t you? Wasn’t there a show with Stanley Holloway in 1949?

Julie Andrews: On TV or radio? That’s a very good question. The Stanley Holloway one I don’t remember, not until My Fair Lady, when we worked together on Broadway. But I did quite a lot of radio shows, and I did do some very early TV shows but I can’t actually remember specifically what they were.

It was very early for the history of television as well.

Julie Andrews: It was.

Is it true that you supported your parents financially for a while after they retired?

Julie Andrews: Yes, I did. We all came from such humble beginnings. It’s amazing. It has always staggered me. I wish I could write about it one day. I’d like to try.

My mother made such a quantum leap from her extremely humble beginnings to being considered — certainly in our local village — fairly big-time for being on radio and touring as she did, and playing the piano so beautifully. And then the next leap that I made, and in like three generations. It’s hard to imagine that it’s possible, but it was because my mother really came from — her mother was just a “below-stairs” maid at the local big mansion, and I don’t think in her lifetime saw any wealth of any kind, and worked continuously and hard. Her father was a manager of one of the coal mines up in the north of England and he was a pit manager, albeit a talented man, somewhat of a poet and a musician. He played the piano very well also and taught my mother to play in the early years.
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Were there any singers?

Julie Andrews: No, that’s the extraordinary thing. I do not know where that came from, but I’m very glad it did.

We all are.

Julie Andrews: Yes, thank you.

Could you tell us about how you came to be cast in The Boy Friend and the impact that had on your career? You were performing in the pantomime Cinderella, weren’t you?

Julie Andrews: Yes. By now I had toured England, endlessly, and I had done a lot of Christmas shows, which in England are called pantomimes. I’m not sure how many Americans are aware of English pantomime. It’s a rip-roaring Christmas festival, usually based on one of the great fairy stories, like Cinderella, Jack in the Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood, all the great fairy stories. They throw in music and slapstick and every year they are reworked and revamped to accommodate whatever talent is brought into that particular show.

I had sort of gone as far as I could go and was playing in a very beautiful production of Cinderella at the London Palladium. That was it in those days. That was about as far as one could go, because although Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, and people like that had gone on to write and to perform in many things, other than another man called Ivor Novello, there wasn’t a lot going on in England in my teens. And suddenly…

I was recommended by a very kind woman called Hattie Jakes, who appeared in one of my radio series — recommended that the director of The Boy Friend come and see me in Cinderella. The Boy Friend was a hugely popular English show that had been running in London for about a year. It was sort of a little, light, frothy musical, a sort of pastiche of the 1920s. And they were going to take it to Broadway with a brand new company. They weren’t going to touch the original English company because they were doing too well and still selling to packed houses. So, the director of the English Boy Friend came to see me and subsequently brought the American producer, and I was asked if I would like to come to Broadway to be in The Boy Friend.
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This was Cy Feuer?

Julie Andrews: Cy Feuer, yes. And Ernie Martin was his partner.

Did they already have big names on the stage?

Julie Andrews: Oh yes, they did. They had done Guys and Dolls. They did Can-Can and Silk Stockings.

So this was a huge break for you?

Julie Andrews: It was a huge break. I didn’t truly recognize how big it was. I was more terrified at leaving my family. I had an awful separation anxiety about leaving home, because I always was leaving home and rushing back — if I could — weekends. And they were offering me a two-year contract at an incredibly small salary. There were a great many other English performers going as well, because other than one or two Americans it was an English company. All the company should have had English accents, and so it was necessary that they be English.

How old were you?

Julie Andrews: I was 18. I was 19 the day after we opened on Broadway. And, it’s the first time I had ever really been away from my family for that potential length of time, and suddenly I got so panicked about it, and I called my dad, my real dad. And, I said, “Oh god, daddy, they’re asking me to go for two years. What should I do? I don’t think I can be away from the family for that long.” And he said, “Well chick, it could run two weeks or two months. It might not be two years, and it would open up your head to such an extent, I think you should do it.” I asked him later in life whether that was a hard thing to do and he said it was one of the hardest things, to say, “Go,” to just throw me into the bigger pond, so to speak, and hope that I would swim. And of course, because dad said it, oh, he said a wonderful thing. When I said, “But how will I know what to do?” he said, “Your own good brain will tell you what to do when the time comes,” which was hugely flattering and kind of implied that he thought I could cope. So, I took my courage in both hands and said, “I would like to accept this contract but I will not go for longer than one year.” And lo and behold, Messrs, Feuer and Martin said, “Fine.” And, I was the only one of the company that had a one-year contract, so off I went to Broadway for a year of incredible learning and education. Doing The Boy Friend on Broadway led to other things of course. Is that what really made your name here in the U.S. too? Julie Andrews: My life has been so fortunate. I have had most extraordinary good fortune in my life. I sort of put it into three categories, the three major stepping stones. One being that opening night when I was 12, when it started my career. The second being going to Broadway. And the third going to Hollywood. Each one of those happened under the most extraordinary circumstances. What happened with The Boy Friend was that because I said I would only do it for one year, just before I was going to leave to go back to my family in England — and The Boy Friend was a huge success, and it did sort of begin to help my career tremendously, I mean I think people on Broadway certainly began to know my name a little bit — but I got a call about two weeks before I was due to leave. And, it was a man who said, “I’m the manager of two writers called Lerner and Loewe, who are doing a new musical of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and could you just answer me one question? How much longer are you in The Boy Friend?” And I said, “Oh, I’m going home in two weeks.” And, he said, “Oh my! I was convinced, as was everybody else, that you had a two-year contract and I said to the guys, ‘Well, let me make a phone call. It’ll only cost a dime.’ ” And because I only signed for one year, I was able to audition for My Fair Lady, and by the most extraordinary good fortune I was able to do My Fair Lady, and that’s really when I think my life just took off in all directions. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime Where and when did My Fair Lady open? Julie Andrews: Well, it opened out of town in New Haven on a stormy winter’s night. Great drama. Then it opened in 1956 at the Mark Hellinger Theater in New York City on Broadway. There were people that thought it was a folly to tamper with George Bernard Shaw’s work. Did you hear that? Julie Andrews: I was a little curious about it myself, but I only had to hear the songs to know that Alan Jay Lerner had really done Shaw justice. I believe to this day that these songs just took off where the text of the play finished. And he was a giant. Both Lerner and Loewe, and particularly Moss Hart, who was the director of My Fair Lady. They were giants, and I was lucky enough to be led by gentle giants in every respect in those days. How old were you? 20? Julie Andrews: Yes, I was. I was 21 not too long after My Fair Lady opened, yes. When you first looked at that script for your audition, did you know this was something extraordinary? Julie Andrews: No. Actually what happened was… I sang for Lerner and Loewe first and belted out my audition song and a couple of others, and then went in to start reading from the original Pygmalion because the script wasn’t quite finished. And, I knew that I was hopelessly out of my depth. You have to remember I was raised in vaudeville. I wasn’t even on the right side of the tracks. I wasn’t in legit theater at all. I had never done a play other than this very, very light piece called The Boy Friend. And so, I really knew from nothing. And, I knew that I understood Eliza in some way but I was hugely shy, hugely insecure and I wondered if anybody would know that there was something inside that they could use if they knew how to get it out for me. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime What was your audition like? Julie Andrews: Pretty awful, I would imagine. There I was, singing something like — if memory serves — it was something like the waltz song from Tom Jones or something, an excruciatingly high big note, which I belted out as loudly as I could, and a lot of coloratura. But I guess they figured I had the voice for it, now if only I could act. And that’s what Moss Hart gave me. It was extremely daring for them to take a risk that you could act and that Rex Harrison could get by without singing. Julie Andrews: Rex, I think, they were much more sure about. He couldn’t sing, but he had an innate musicality which enabled him to kind of do a sing-speak sound, which was great and exactly right because it blended straight out of dialogue into song. I think that probably Moss, of all people — I’ve read Moss’s wonderful biography, Act One, and if you read that you have to say what a generous sweet man he was. He came from extremely humble beginnings himself. And I think any other producer would have sent me home. I had a feeling that if I didn’t cut it that weekend that I probably would have been on a plane back to London. But Moss was a very kind man and covered it by wit and sophistication, and all of the things that he’d acquired. But basically, I think, he must have sensed and identified with my early pain and fear because he’d had it, too. And, he was kind. It’s as simple as that. He wanted to, and maybe he was perceptive enough to see — maybe I didn’t know, but there was something that they felt was there and I certainly didn’t — but he certainly seemed to feel that it was there. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime He sounds like a great man. Julie Andrews: Lovely man, and I credit him with all that I am today, because had it not been for Moss I probably would have gone back to England. I was absolutely atrocious at all the early readings and poor Rex Harrison wondered what on earth he had been landed with, this young girl that could sing and had not a clue how to get into the arc of a character. I had no idea how to develop a character at all. He intimidated me tremendously because he was so, so good. He was also very, very nervous and very, very demanding and selfish because he was scared to death because he had never sung before. So, I knew I could pull off all the singing stuff and he, for sure, knew he could pull off all the dialogue, but he wasn’t about to give anybody else any time and I know that Stanley Holloway, who played Doolittle, also had problems and was waiting for his sort of fleshing out of the character. And, Moss took me for a long weekend and dismissed the entire company and worked with me in the most brilliant way. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime [ Key to Success ] Perseverance What did Moss Hart get you to do in that weekend that you hadn’t been doing? Julie Andrews: Moss Hart really just helped me find Eliza and he demonstrated. He said, “No, no, no, you’re acting like a school girl,” or “That’s better, that’s better,” you know. It’s hard to say what he did. He created pictures in my head. He helped me understand some of Eliza’s dilemma. I don’t know which was the hardest part, the first half or the second half because they were both very hard. I was struggling with the Cockney accent. I’m not great at accents, believe it or not. Even though I have a good ear for things, I don’t have a great ear for accents. But I was struggling with that, too. He just helped me see what courage this young lady had. Eliza Doolittle that is. We rehearsed on the roof of the New Amsterdam Theater, which in those days was the scruffiest, dirtiest place. That’s the theater where all the Ziegfeld Follies had been, and there was this great nightclub up above that had gone into terrible disrepair. Anyway, I knew going down to the New Amsterdam that I was in for an awful time. It was a little bit like going to the dentist. You knew it was going to be very painful, but if you could stick it out, maybe with luck you’d come out feeling a heck of a lot better. And, that’s what Moss [Hart] did for me. It was painful. And, he said, “We have no time for embarrassment. We have no time for anything but the blunt truth.” And, he shaped, pushed, cajoled, wheedled, loved me, yelled at me, just helped me become Eliza Doolittle. And although by the following Monday, I’m sure I retreated 50 percent, I had gained 50 percent and it gave me the foundation from which to really start working on the role. And, I played My Fair Lady for three-and-a-half years. And, Alan Lerner once said that he felt that a long run in a very good role was more help to a performer than doing repertory with lots and lots of short roles. You might become very facile, but what I did was learn what did get a laugh, what didn’t get a laugh, and why I didn’t get it if I didn’t get it. What the difference was in terms of it raining outside or snowing or an audience that was coughing their hearts out or one that was too hot in the seasons, when your leading man has a headache or when you have a voice that’s hanging on by a thread. I think I learned in My Fair Lady everything that set me up in later years in good stead because I really learned how to preserve and take care of myself and I was learning on my feet every single performance. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime [ Key to Success ] Preparation It played havoc with me physically because three-and-a-half years is a very long time. It was like a long tunnel. I did get a break between England and America, but it wasn’t that long. What a discipline! Julie Andrews: It was a discipline. And when I finished it was like, “Well now, what to do with my life? I have no life.” Because it is in a way like becoming a nun or just disappearing into this long tunnel. Wednesdays always seemed very black to me. Black Wednesday was the day that you had two shows and got up feeling awful on Thursday and had to pull yourself up only to be slammed back into the Saturday matinee again, because they were exhausting. It is one of the hardest roles, My Fair Lady. I don’t think I know any of the Eliza Doolittles that truly survived vocally or physically. It took its toll on all of them. It’s hard to find an actress that can look the part and sing, and act this transformation Eliza goes through. Julie Andrews: And also that can sustain the yelling and screaming and the Cockney accent, and the rage that comes in the first two or three songs, and then pure, pure singing in things like “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Plus the big dramatic role, too, as you say. It’s a great role. Click to View Mary Poppins Memorabilia Julie Andrews: It is probably one of the best roles for a lady in musical theater. That and perhaps Gypsy. There’s a few others. Sweeney Todd is pretty heavy, I would imagine, for all the principals. But Eliza evolves so dramatically. Julie Andrews: It’s the best Cinderella story really, yes. You got married after doing My Fair Lady in London. How did you meet your first husband? Julie Andrews: I met my first husband, Tony Walton, long before I became anybody. I had just made that first debut at 12 years old, and he was 13 at the time, and he came to see me in one of those English pantomimes at Christmas. It was the first pantomime I ever did, and I played the egg in Humpty Dumpty, and he was sitting there in the front row. And lo and behold, got on the train going home and got off at the same station and said, “You’re from Walton? I’m from Walton.” And Tony Walton, which is his name, is not linked with the town but it just happened to be similar. And, he said, “Where do you live?” And I thought, “Oh, I will be very clever.” And I said, “Oh, the other side of the bridge.” So he then went and looked up all the Andrews that lived the other side of the bridge in this area and, lo and behold, about two days later there was a knock on my door and he arrived with his brothers and we became firm friends, and eventually Tony and I married. We have a beautiful daughter by that marriage called Emma. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime You were passed over for the film of My Fair Lady, and then made a fantastic screen debut in Mary Poppins. How did that all come about? Julie Andrews: Again, the good fortune in my life suddenly came along. After My Fair Lady I was very lucky to do Camelot for Lerner and Loewe with the wondrous Richard Burton. By now I was married to Tony and I did know my way around Broadway, and I knew a little bit more about performing, and everybody trusted me and I wasn’t quite so desperately shy. My Fair Lady was bought by Jack Warner to be made into a movie. I didn’t think I’d get it. Alan Jay Lerner and Moss Hart, I believe, hoped that I would. Rex [Harrison] certainly was going to make it. But, I understood very well when they cast Audrey Hepburn in the role because, although by then I was a fairly big name in the small pond that is Broadway, I certainly wasn’t known across America, and I certainly had never made a movie. So I didn’t get the role of My Fair Lady in the film and, lo and behold, I was in Camelot and Walt Disney came to see Camelot. He was advised to see it because he was putting together this movie of Mary Poppins. He came backstage afterwards. I thought he was just going to visit. And, he said would I like to come to Broadway — sorry, to Hollywood. I was on Broadway. Would I like to come to Hollywood to see the drawings, the designs, the art, hear the songs and the lyrics for this musical of an English book, Mary Poppins, that he was doing. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime And he turned to Tony Walton and said, “And what do you do, young man?” Tony was, and is, a designer of theater and film. A wonderful designer of sets and costumes, but he had done very, very little at that time and he explained this to Walt. And Walt said, “Well, then you better bring your portfolio with you when you both come.” Oh, and I was just a teeny pregnant, like about two to three months pregnant. And I said, “But I’m going to have a baby, Mr. Disney.” He said, “It’s okay. We’ll wait.” And so… Tony and I went to Hollywood and Walt showed us everything to do with Mary Poppins and also wined and dined us so sumptuously and so wonderfully. And, it was such an easy thing to do to say, “Yes, thank you, Mr. Disney. I would love to do that movie,” because everything seemed to come full circle, because all the stuff in Poppins had that rum-ti-tum quality of being vaudeville. And all of a sudden I thought, “Right, I’m home because this I can embrace and perhaps bring something to.” And again, in the kindest hands possible, I was taught how to make a movie and that was the beginning of that. How lucky can anybody get losing out on My Fair Lady and three months later being asked to do Mary Poppins? [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime To this day a lot of your fans are upset that you weren’t in that movie, but it sounds like you made your peace with it. Julie Andrews: I did make my peace with it. That isn’t to say that years later I didn’t wish that somewhere, somehow I had put down My Fair Lady definitively, just so that my children or my grandchildren could see it. But in the great scheme of things I ain’t complaining one bit. What was it like winning the Oscar? Julie Andrews: I honestly didn’t think I would. I really thought Anne Bancroft was going to get it that year for The Pumpkin Eater. She was superb in that movie. And Poppins was my first film. I never dreamed I would get it. Actually, when I did get that Oscar I really felt that it was more because I had missed out on My Fair Lady, that Hollywood was (a) saying welcome and (b) saying how sorry they were that I didn’t get it. In the speech that I gave I said, “I always knew Americans were generous but this is absolutely ridiculous,” and I really felt that it was generosity and their saying, “Welcome, welcome.” Your movie The Sound of Music has become a classic. Was it clear to you that this was going to be a great piece of work when you first encountered it? Julie Andrews: When I was first asked if I would like to do Sound of Music, I was very thrilled to be asked and very glad that I was going to do the movie, but was a little careful about certain aspects of it because it was tremendously saccharine, on Broadway particularly, and it seemed to me that if we weren’t careful with the real scenery and with everything else that was going into it, it could be horribly sugary. And, I certainly made every effort to make it more astringent and the great Christopher Plummer contributed so much in that respect. It was his performance that was the glue, the vinegar that held the film together. And, then Robert Wise, who was again an adorable man, our director, and he taught me a great deal about filmmaking because Mary Poppins was the first film I ever made, and then I made one called The Americanization of Emily, but by the time I got to Sound of Music I was probably getting full of a lot of little tricks and things that I didn’t know I was doing, and Bob said, “Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Do that.” And, I really learned a little bit more about filmmaking at that time. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime [ Key to Success ] Integrity it was an indelible performance. How did you meet your second husband, Blake Edwards? Julie Andrews: I met Blake in 1967. We both laugh at this. I passed his car and he passed mine on the middle island of Sunset Boulevard on Roxbury Drive. I thought, “That’s a very interesting looking gentleman,” and I presumed he must have thought the same about me in terms of being an interesting looking lady. And lo and behold, a couple of days later it happened again and again. And finally, we were waiting for the traffic to clear on either side of this intersection and he rolled down his window, and I cannot remember which one of us said it but it was sort of, “Are you going to where I just came from?” And we both realized that, being on Roxbury Drive, we had probably both been to see, or were going to see, an analyst. And one of us nodded. I don’t know which one asked the question. And not too long after, I received a phone call asking if he could talk to me about a film, which was a film that we both did together called Darling Lili. It was a huge flop and it was great fun to make, and shortly after Darling Lili we were married. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime We’re very interested in how people recover from career setbacks and failures like the one you mentioned. You must have been very well grounded, because there were a couple of failed movies in this period, but you kept going. Julie Andrews: I think it’s that early training, if anything, in vaudeville for me that gave me any kind of gumption. Touring endlessly around England, doing the second show on a Saturday night in places like Glasgow or Newcastle or Liverpool or Swansea or Cardiff, that’s pretty dicey. I was very, very young. There were days when they would have to turn all the house lights on in the theater because people were hurling beer bottles and things like that. And, there was this determination to get through. My mum was terrific. She would say, “Don’t you dare complain. Don’t you dare say you can’t sing in cigarette smoke,” because in those days you could see it spiraling down the great arcs on to the spotlights on to the stage. Nothing but cigarette smoke in those days. And she would say, “Don’t you dare get a swollen head,” accompanied by great love sometimes. But, all the good stuff that one needs, “Get up and do it. What are you complaining about? You’re so much luckier than most other people,” just absolutely true. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime [ Key to Success ] Perseverance So you never lost hope when some of those movies didn’t do so well? Julie Andrews: You never set out to make a bad movie. You always hope that you’re making a good one. We’re sad about them, inasmuch as they damage the career. In those days it was important, but not as important as it is today, to keep making success after success after success. It’s terrifying today. You can maybe have one so-so movie but you’ve got to come back with another that’s huge, if possible, and that must be very, very difficult for young talent. You and your husband, Blake Edwards, enjoyed a great success with Victor Victoria in the 1980s. Julie Andrews: Yes, particularly in all the great cities. Particularly in Chicago and New York, L.A., San Francisco, all the really sophisticated cities. I’m not sure if it was in the middle west. It’s theme was provocative, but actually the underpinning of the theme was about love and being happy with who you are. I had a wonderful time making the film. It was Blake, my lovely Blake, at the peak of his creative talent, and I knew I was in the safest hands possible. Actually it’s a little daunting to be married to your director because quite often he’ll assume that I know what he wants when I’m simply begging for some small morsel that will get me through. But he’d say, “Oh, that’s fine. Just keep doing it.” But we could talk about it, and we did when we needed to, but actually we’d mostly not talk about it when we went home. We had too many kids. We pooled all our children. He had two. I had my lovely Emma and we subsequently adopted two. At this point you’ve stopped singing because of a surgery that went awry and it’s a loss to all of us. Is there any chance of your singing again in the future? Julie Andrews: I remain optimistic but not tremendously so. If I am able to sing again it will be through some miracle operation. There’s a lot of work being done to help singers regain their voices, but in my case I actually lost vocal tissue so it’s very hard for my chords to rub together and I need to replace that tissue. I do have some notes in my voice. Click to Buy I certainly won’t be able to sing the way I used to, but probably at this vast age that I have now arrived at I couldn’t sing those songs anyway. And, that amazing thing of finding new directions at this time in my life when I never expected to, it was a setback. It was devastating. I miss the music unbelievably, but here am I with a publishing imprint, doing lectures, doing a lot of movies that don’t require singing, still working as hard as ever. In fact, I think I may be even more at work than I used to be, and I simply love it. I couldn’t be happier. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime You directed a new production of The Boy Friend recently. Julie Andrews: I directed my Emma, Tony’s and my daughter, with her husband and her partner, Sybil Burton, Sybil Burton Christopher, in a wonderful little not-for-profit theater in Long Island, and it’s a great theater and I directed there for them and had a ball. And, of course, it was The Boy Friend in which I had begun on Broadway and felt I might be able to contribute something to it and was stunned at the talent that I found and how easy and lovely it felt and Tony Walton did the sets and costumes for it. I was in Emma’s theater and when I said to Emma, “Emma, if I fail for the family, for you, what if it’s not a success? What if it…” She said, “Mom, what better place to try than our theater? You’re in the safest possible hands and we’ll surround you with people who know what they’re doing so that you just do what you do best.” And all of a sudden it turned out to be this wonderful success. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime Would you do it again? Julie Andrews: Oh, as they say, “In a New York minute!” Yes. So one door closes, another door opens. Julie Andrews: Exactly. To be really slightly corny about it, as Maria von Trapp says, “When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window.” And this window has just been busted wide open and I’m so busy. You’ve spoken several times today about the importance of family, staying close. Julie Andrews: Yes. I think family matters to me enormously. In fact, family is the first priority. If my family is good, I can do anything. If they’re not, I’m a basket case. There’s a lot of guilt associated with going out and doing a concert or speeches or whatever. In a way I’m kind of glad, now that I’m turning to the writing of children’s books because it allows me to stay home. I know all the family has grown up and they’re all functioning in their own way and in their lives. There are grandchildren now, and I still have Blake to go home to and he has been very patient with me. It’s an enduring marriage by Hollywood standards. Julie Andrews: It’s 35 years this year and that is enduring, yes. One last question we like to ask of our honorees. What is your conception of the American Dream? Does it mean something to you personally? Julie Andrews: It is America that gave me so much in my life. It wasn’t until I came to America that my life just exploded in so many ways. So for me, I think in a way, though I’m English, I’ve been living the American Dream and I’m eternally grateful to Americans for allowing me to do what I love doing the most. And, I feel an enormous responsibility to bridge the gap between England and America, and be a sort of very quiet ambassador for my country to try to sort of do a “hands across the water” thing where they understand England and English people understand Americans. I adore America. [ Video ] Low High [ Audio ] Quicktime [ Key to Success ] The American Dream Your performance as the Queen in the Princess Diaries has brought you a whole new audience, a whole new generation. Julie Andrews: I know. It’s phenomenal. There’s a whole new generation out there that says, “Do you remember Mary Poppins?” “Yeah.” “The Sound of Music?” “Yeah.” “Princess Diaries?” “Oh, cool!” And I just love it. It’s been wonderful. Julie Andrews: I thought that might be a good ending. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Source: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/and0int-1

The versatility in Julie Andrew’s 12-year-old voice is simply unmatched…

Click to Buy Iris Johansen Books

Iris Johansen

BIO

Iris Johansen, who has more than twenty-five million copies of her books in print, has won many awards for her achievements in writing. The bestselling author of BLIND ALLEY, FIRESTORM, FATAL TIDE, DEAD AIM, NO ONE TO TRUST, BODY OF LIES, THE SEARCH, FINAL TARGET, and many other novels, she lives near Atlanta, Georgia, where she is currently at work on a new novel.

May 27, 2005

Bookreporter.com’s Suspense/Thriller Author Spotlight Team (Carol Fitzgerald, Joe Hartlaub and Wiley Saichek) interviewed Iris Johansen, author of COUNTDOWN. Johansen talks about the inspiration for the character of Jane MacGuire and the decision to “age” her fiery protagonist, her disciplined writing schedule and details of her next novel, which will be released in December 2005.

Bookreporter.com: A great deal of COUNTDOWN is set in Scotland, in MacDuff’s Run, a castle that apparently has some ties, directly or otherwise, to Jane MacGuire. We were impressed with the description of this castle, and the way you brought it so sharply into relief. What inspired the book’s Scottish back story? Is MacDuff’s Run in COUNTDOWN modeled after a real castle? If so, did you actually visit it in preparation for your writing of the novel?

Iris Johansen: I’ve always loved Scotland and have visited there many times. I’ve toured all of the well-known castles and several of the less publicized ones. However, MacDuff’s Run is purely fictional and concocted from my imagination. By the time the story was finished, MacDuff’s Run was very real to me. I chose Scotland as the background when I was writing BLIND ALLEY and realized that there was going to be another book. Why? I suppose even then I knew where the plot was going and it had to be Scotland.

BRC: COUNTDOWN is an extremely ambitious work, with Jane MacGuire’s personality containing elements reminiscent of fictional characters ranging from Nancy Drew to Indiana Jones to Emma Peel, among others. Who, ultimately, inspired Jane’s fiery, and arguably controversial, persona?

IJ: Who inspired the character of Jane MacGuire? Not Indiana Jones or Emma Peel. It was Eve Duncan. If you’ll remember when they first got together in THE KILLING GAME, I stressed how alike they were. Jane is the person Eve probably would have become if she’d never had Bonnie and all the tragedy that followed. Jane also had a tough life but she’s still learning and growing and has had no real trauma to turn her from the path she’s set herself.

BRC: Do you see yourself in any of the characters you create? Do you share characteristics with Eve more than Jane, or vice versa/neither?

IJ: I don’t believe I’m like either Eve or Jane. If I bear any resemblance, it’s probably to Eve. I’m focused and something of a workaholic and I hope I deal with the world in a professional and mature manner.

BRC: Reincarnation is a theme that was hinted at throughout BLIND ALLEY and further explored in COUNTDOWN, with respect to the relationship between Jane MacGuire and Cira, a proud, beautiful and rebellious slave who apparently lived during the years of the Roman Empire. As you were writing BLIND ALLEY did you already anticipate continuing the Cira storyline in another novel? Do you plan to explore the apparent relationship between Jane and Cira in subsequent novels?

IJ: When I started BLIND ALLEY I had no idea there would be a sequel. But toward the end of the book I realized that I couldn’t wrap up the story in a neat little package. There was too much to say, too much development that had to happen in the Jane-Cira relationship. Now I could leave the relationship without too much regret but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Cira is as much alive to me as Jane. If there’s a Jane story, Cira probably will be featured in it.

BRC: One of the more interesting, and perhaps controversial, elements of BLIND ALLEY is the emotional and physical attraction between Jane MacGuire and Matt Trevor. While Jane was a minor in BLIND ALLEY she is fully of age in COUNTDOWN, which takes place four years subsequent to the events of BLIND ALLEY. COUNTDOWN resolves at least some aspects of their relationship. Do you plan to develop and explore their relationship in future novels?

IJ: I’ll most certainly have to explore the relationship between Trevor and Jane in a future book. At the end of COUNTDOWN I couldn’t have them ride off into the sunset together, though I believe the ending was satisfying on a romantic level. It wouldn’t have been true to the characters to tell you they were now set to live happily ever after. Jane is too wary and their relationship too turbulent and new. She’ll have to have a good many more of those silver mornings before she’ll give herself totally to any relationship.

BRC: Did reader/editorial feedback about Jane and Trevor’s relationship help you decide to “age” Jane in COUNTDOWN, or had you already planned on aging the character for the next book?

IJ: I was not influenced by either readers or editors to age Jane for the next book. I knew it was going to happen before I finished BLIND ALLEY. I was feeling a little frustrated and planned to put her on an even playing field with Trevor. Eve and Joe always will have an influence on Jane but I wanted to see her old enough to shape events to suit herself as an adult. I’d waited a long time for Jane to grow up and be counted.

BRC: Your characters frequently cross over into your other series. When you first introduced Jane MacGuire in THE KILLING GAME did you anticipate having her step to the forefront of a novel? Do you plan to have Jane MacGuire, Joe Quinn, or Eve Duncan appear in any of your other series as supporting characters?

IJ: I had no idea that Jane MacGuire would someday have a book of her own when I introduced her in THE KILLING GAME. She was a child of ten at that time and although I really liked her courage and toughness in the face of the odds, it was Eve Duncan who was the center of the story. I’m one of those authors who let the characters of a story often dictate the plot, and when Jane appeared I knew she and Eve would be close because they were so much alike. At the end of the book Eve could not let her go and neither could I. She had to stay in Eve’s life and therefore she had to stay in mine.

Will I bring Jane MacGuire, Eve Duncan or Joe Quinn in as secondary characters in other series? It’s entirely possible. It will probably not be a deliberate decision but it’s always easier and more pleasant to deal with old friends than strangers when writing a story. They usually just pop up out of the blue when I need a character to move the book.

BRC: COUNTDOWN introduced new supporting characters such as MacDuff and Jock while others such as Bartlett returned. How much time to you spend on fleshing out your supporting cast? Is there any chance we’ll see a novel with Bartlett at front and center?

IJ: I enjoyed the interaction between Jock and MacDuff enormously in COUNTDOWN. I’m sure they will be in other future books. Bartlett is a honey but he’d be harder to feature as a lead in a suspense. He doesn’t have an edge.

BRC: What is your writing schedule like? Do you have an assistant who helps with your research or do you do it all yourself?

IJ: My writing schedule is very disciplined. I try to be up in my office by nine every morning and I work until I’ve completed at least ten pages. Sometimes that takes four or five hours, sometimes ten or twelve. It depends on the flow, the research, and the pace at which the characters are moving the story. There are times when the story is streaking like a bullet. Then I just hang on and stay with it. I do have a research assistant, my daughter, Tamara Brooking. I wouldn’t know what to do without her. She’s invaluable in finding out both the small details and the big picture, though I do make her want to pull her hair out in frustration sometimes when I ask her if there isn’t a way we can make a certain plot point happen. But then she starts to dig and quite often comes up with a way that can be truthful and factual and still keep my story humming.

BRC: What are you working on now and when can readers expect to see it?

IJ: I’ve just completed ON THE RUN and I had great fun with it. It has entirely new characters and I really liked them, particularly Grace Archer’s daughter, Frankie. Grace is a horse trainer being pursued by a criminal who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. This was one of those stories that almost wrote itself. I was surprised when I realized I was almost finished with it. It will be on sale the last week of December 2005.

I’m working on an exciting new project now. I’m only at the beginning and everything is tentative but an old friend just came into my heroine’s apartment. I was glad to see him. I hope you will be too.


Watch a TV Spot on Iris Johansen’s Eve Duncan thriller:

Rhonda Byrne

The following introduction is by Jack Canfield, who happens to be an original author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.  Rhonda Byrne is a superb contributor to the growth of alternative medicine.

If you want to learn more about the Secret, read our review in Book Reviews.

I first met Rhonda Byrne in July 2005, when she asked if she could bring her film crew to a meeting of the Transformational Leadership Council and interview our members for a movie she was creating called The Secret. For four days she and her crew filmed during the day and socialized with us at night. I was struck by her energy. She seemed to be in a constant state of bliss, of childlike wonder.

As I got to know her, Byrne, 50, seemed to always be in that state. Even when she ran out of film, when the money to complete the next phase of the project hadn’t yet materialized or when her original TV distribution deal fell through, to her it was always “perfect.” She radiated a confidence and a trust that it was all being handled perfectly by the universe. Obstacles that would defeat most people didn’t seem to daunt her. She just kept moving forward in joyous faith that it would all work out. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the way she was living her life and approaching her work was teaching me even more about how to live in harmony with her Law of Attraction than her movie or book.

I am often asked why The Secret has been such a phenomenon—more than 2 million DVDs sold in a year and almost 4 million books in less than six months. It is primarily because Byrne’s love and joy permeate every frame and every page. Her intention was pure and simple—to uplift as much of humanity as she could reach, and so far she has reached millions. And I believe she has only just begun.

An interview with ‘Secret’ creator Rhonda Byrne

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Rhonda Byrne, the creator of “The Secret,” answered questions submitted by The Associated Press in e-mail. Excerpts from her answers:

___

On whether she is surprised by the book and DVD’s massive popularity:

I am not surprised with the success of “The Secret” because it couldn’t have happened without me first getting to a point within myself of knowing it was done. That is “The Secret.”

However, I stand in awe at the magnificent intelligence that is this universe, as I watch it fulfill the intention of joy for billions that I held deep within my heart. Every day, I experience the deepest gratitude for all the joy that “The Secret” is bringing to so many.

___

Regarding criticism that the principles behind “The Secret,” taken to their extreme, can lead to a “blame the victim” mentality:

I can see why this is a difficult concept to understand. However, when we shift our awareness or “frequency” from self-consciousness — where fear, impossibility or feelings of separation reside — to cosmic consciousness, which is in total harmony with the universe and where none of those feelings exist, then anything is possible.

“The Secret’s” message is to empower people. Its message releases people from feeling like victims and gives them the knowledge to intentionally create their lives the way they want. …

“The Secret’s” message is to let go of all blame because it only destroys you, and to move forward with hope, love, compassion, and kindness. Those are the emotions that will completely transform your life into joy. And so ultimately each one of us has a choice.

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On how “The Secret” applies to events in which massive numbers of people died, such as the Holocaust, and whether such tragedies fall under the law of attraction she espouses:

Tragedies on the scale of the Holocaust defy understanding for most people. …

In responding to the question about events where massive numbers of people are killed, there are a few important points to consider. First, there is no one to blame.

Secondly, the law of attraction is absolute; it is impersonal and it is precise and exact. This law governs this reciprocal universe that we live in. It is important to remember that we are energy.Einstein told us that. And energy cannot be created or destroyed, it just changes form.

The energy and life of each of us has always been and will always be.In a large-scale tragedy, like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc. we see that the law of attraction responds to people being at the wrong place at the wrong time because their dominant thoughts were on the same frequency of such events.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they thought of the same exact event, but if their dominant thoughts and feelings were in alignment with the energy of fear, separation, powerlessness and having no control over outside circumstances, then that is what they attracted.

Remember, while many people died in these tragic events, there were also many miraculous stories of survival, and the same can be said about those people whose thoughts were in alignment with the energy of unity, love, oneness and joy with the Universe. It is understanding how the law of attraction applies here that answers your question. …

Many factors came into play, including mass consciousness of the planet at the time. It is also important to remember that the Holocaust spanned some 6 years, and over that time the energy of the fear escalated, intensified, and spread, reaching many more people. Humanity learned a lot through the Holocaust, and as a race we went from separation and closer to the concept of unity.

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Responding to one of the most frequent criticisms of “The Secret,” that there is a lack of action outlined in the book and the DVD:

The law of attraction says that like attracts like, and when you think and feel what you want to attract on the inside, the law will use people, circumstances and events to magnetize what you want to you, and magnetize you to it.

The law doesn’t say, “Oh, he is not taking any action so we won’t deliver.” The law is the law. It is impersonal, exact, and precise.Become that which you want on the inside, and you shall receive it in the outside world.

The most important action to take is the work within you. When that is done, you will be moved in the outside world to receive what you asked for.

If anybody says that action is required to try it make it happen, then that person does not believe, and believing is essential.

Regarding the case of Cathy Goodman, a breast cancer patient who says in the book she was healed in three months without radiation or chemotherapy. Some have asked if Byrne is advocating that people not see doctors when they’re ill:

In terms of health, “The Secret” fully supports all forms of healing, and we clearly state that in both the film and the book. Medicine or healing methods are an individual choice, and Cathy Goodman made her choice. When you look at traditional medicine and all that it has accomplished for humankind, you can only feel enormous gratitude and wonder at the incredible breakthroughs and discoveries it has made. Whatever choice anyone makes, they can use “The Secret” within themselves at the same time.

The Secret, brought to you by YouTube

Scroll Down to Watch Gary Chapman Talk About His Bestselling Book on Youtube!

Click here to read a review of the bestselling book

Marriage Partnership, Fall 1997

The Love Doctor

Feeling unloved? Author and counselor Gary Chapman reveals a simple prescription that works wonders.

by Ron R. Lee

In fact, there’s a second similarity between Chapman and my old coach. During practice, when a player would complain about being hot, tired or thirsty, my coach would consel: “Suck it up!” Chapman uses nicer language, but he offers basically the same advice: Do whatever it takes to meet your mate’s needs, whether you feel like it or not.

In his book The Five Love Languages (Northfield), Chapman says you can learn to love someone, even if you feel like that person has stopped loving you. It boils down to one fundamental skill—using the language that best communicates love to your spouse.
People generally get married because they can’t bear the thought of not spending the rest of their lives together. If couples start out with so much passion, why does loving each other become such a challenge later on?
Part of it is that when these strong emotions begin to die down, couples mistakenly think they don’t love each other as much as they used to. They confuse emotions with love.

But isn’t love a pretty emotional thing?
Sure, but love isn’t dependent on emotions. Love is what you do and say, not what you feel.

Still, you have a problem if you no longer feel the same amount of love you used to. So what do you recommend?
We all need to do a better job of communicating love, which is a challenge since people usually marry their opposite. I’ve spoken to large groups of couples all around the country, and I’ve counseled hundreds of others. And in all the couples I’ve talked to, I have seldom run across a husband and wife who used and understood the same language of love.

What makes people so different in the way they express love?
I don’t know if it’s something we learn in childhood or a trait we’re born with. But we all have a primary love language that shows up early in life. By the time your kids are five or six, you can begin to see how they express love. If your son is coming up and saying, “Oh, Mommy, let’s sit down and read,” then he’s asking for quality time. Or if your daughter is always hugging you, her language is physical touch. It really doesn’t matter how or when we develop a love language, the important thing is to identify what works for those you love, and then to start doing it.

Why aren’t more of us dong what works?
Most people express love in the way that comes most naturally to them, and we assume our mate recognizes those actions as expressions of love. But if our mate speaks a different language, most of the things we’re doing just won’t communicate. You end up with both spouses expressing love and wondering why the other one doesn’t acknowledge it. At the same time, they’re both wondering why their mate isn’t doing any loving things for them.

What are the languages of love?
Based on case studies of the couples I have counseled over the years, certain themes are repeated. And those themes indicate that people give and receive love in five different ways: sharing quality time; physical touch; expressing words of affirmation; giving and receiving gifts; and performing acts of service.

Can you give an example of each of these languages?
Let’s start with words of affirmation. It simply means making statements—either spoken or written—that show you value your spouse. Statements such as “You look nice today.” “I love you.” “Thanks for taking the garbage out.” These are statements that focus on something your spouse has done or something he or she is.

The second language, giving and receiving gifts, is pretty self-explanatory. You know the old saying “It’s the thought that counts.” But it’s not the thought left in your head that counts, it’s the gift that comae out of the thought. It doesn’t have to be expensive; it can be anything that shows your spouse you had him or her in mind when you selected the gift.

What are examples of the other language?
Acts of service involve doing anything you know your spouse would like you to do. It could be cooking a meal, washing the dishes, vacuuming floors or putting gas in the car.

The fourth language is quality time, which means giving your spouse your undivided attention. It could be sitting on the couch together, talking; going out to eat together; or taking a walk.

The last one, physical touch, includes things like hugs, backrubs, holding hands and kissing. Some men jump to the conslusion that their love language is physical touch because they have such a strong sex drive. But I’m referring to nonsexual touch, like resting your hand on your spouse’s leg while you’re driving.

If a lot of guys wrongly assume their language is physical touch, does that mean it’s not all that easy to identify your own love language?
If you give it some thought, you can pin it down. First, ask yourself how you tend to express love. You may do all five from time to time. But if you think about it, you’ll find one that is predominant.

The second clue is to ask yourself, “What do I gripe about the most?” If you tend to complain “We don’t ever spend any time together,” then your love language probably is quality time.

The third question is: “What do I request most frequently from my husband or wife?” If you often say, “Honey, remember to bring me something back from your business trip,” you like to receive gifts. Put these three clues together and you’ll determing your love language.

Now to the hard part. How can we identify our spouses’ love language?
You use the three-step process. You ask, “How does my spouse express love to me most often?” Then, “What does my spouse request from me the most?” And finally, “What does my spouse complain about?” The answers will tell you your mate’s language.

If both spouses have been feeling unloved, how does your approach help them get back on track?
It depends on why they are feeling distant. If there has been infidelity, physical abuse, alcoholism or drug abuse, you need to do a lot more than just learn a new way to express love. Those problems call for professional counseling. But if your problems are less serious, learning to speak your mate’s language will create a climate that makes it easier to work on other issues. Expressing love is not the whole solution, but it’s a critical part of any solution.

If you’ve been feeling unloved, what would motivate you to learn a foreign language just so you can love someone you fell isn’t bothering to love you?
Motivation is important, but I never said this was easy. People have all kinds of reasons for not wanting to do this. They say “it’s just not me.” But there are a lot of things we don’t like to do; and there are plenty of things that don’t come naturally. But we learn to do them anyway.

One man told me he had been married 17 years and had never know how to show his wife he loved her. Then he realized her language was receiving gifts. But he didn’t hav the foggiest idea how to buy the right gifts. So he asked his sister to help him pick out some things for his wife. This guy realized he needed to learn a new behavior, so he went out and found the help he needed.

What do you suggest for people who have trouble putting their feelings into words?
When people tell me, “I didn’t grow up in a home where we did that sort of thing. I’m just not a verbal person,” I often respond, “So what?” I know it’s difficult, but you can learn to do it. Whenever you hear someone pay a compliment, for example, write it down. Or as you read books or magazie articles, pick out expressions of love and start making a list. Then stand in front of a mirror and read your list out loud. After a while, it will begin to feel more comforable.

Then, of course, you start saying these things to your wife or husband. Once you do it a few times it becomes much easier.

I can hear people saying, “Gary Chapman is one to talk. He’s a marriage expert. This stuff comes easily to him!”
The truth is, some of these things don’t come easily for me. My wife, Karolyn, and I had terrible struggles the first few years of our marriage. It’s terrible to be married for three or four years and lose all your feelings of love for one another.

How did you rekindle your love?
I started studying the life of Jesus, and I saw how much of a servant he was to his followers. That’s when the concept of a husband being a servant/leader began to dawn on me. I could see that when I failed to help Karolyn around the house, the climate wasn’t very good at home. But whenever I did some little thing to help her, it mad a positive impression. I didn’t have all the theories worked out back then, but I realized my wife’s love language was acts of service. After months of feeling totally unloved, she finally sensed that I did love her after all.

I’ll be honest. I don’t like running the vacuum. My mother made me do it when I was a boy, and I never have liked it. But I vacuum the floors about once a week now, and there’s only one reason why: I love Karolyn and I want her to know it. Every time I vacuum the floor, my wife realizes, “He cares. He’s helping me.”

Vacuuming the floors is one thing, but what if your mate’s language is meaningful time? In order for you to deliver on that one, you’re going to have to give something up.
You’ve hit on a key truth about love: It’s costly. But if you’re not willing to give something up, you’re saying the things that currently take up your time are more important than your marriage. It’s a matter of seeing marriage as a priority, and then deciding what you can give up. Actually, we make those decisions all the time. If we want to go to a ballgame, we give up the other things we could be doing with that time.

This stuff can feel pretty overwhelming. Is it okay to start off with something easy and then gradually work up to the bigger stuff?
Sure. Even a small step will begin to change the emotional climate of a relationship. I encourage couples to start with a specific assignment that is relatively easy: Each spouse determines one way he or she can express love during the coming week. Let’s say a woman’s language is acts of service. She could ask her husband: “How about taking out the garbage without being reminded?” He’d say, “Okay. How often would you like me to do it?” And she’d say, “How about every two days?” He would then set that as his goal for the week.

He starts taking out the garbage, and every time his wife sees the emptied waste basket she feels a little tingle inside. “Hey, he’s really taking this seriously.” She begins to feel better immediately.

What does she do for her husband?
Let’s say his language is physical touch, and she’s just not very expressive in that way. He would ask her to do something nonthreatening. “How about when you enter or leave a room, you touch me on the shoulder as you walk by?” And she’d say, “I can do that.” As the week goes by, every time she touches his shoulder, inside he feels, “She’s really trying. This is wonderful.” He begins to have positive feelings toward her after months of emotional distance.

Does this approach always produce such positive results?
Usually, but not always. I can’t guarantee that if you love your spouse, that he or she will reciprocate. But I can tell you that emotional love is a desperate need for all of us. So if you’ll speak your mate’s primary language over the long haul, there’s a high probability he or she will respond.

Most people want an intimate relationship. They want to have a sense that, as a couple, they are one. They just don’t know how to get it. That’s why I spend so much time helping people larn their mate’s love language. It’s one way you can both get what you need in marriage.

A video version of The Five Love Languages for group study is available by mail order. For information, contact LifeWay Press at 800-458-2772.

NYTBSL.org sums it up…

In this Interview

CORMAC MCCARTHY

On why he’s an author

On the source of inspiration for his bestseller

On something that changed the course of his life

Cormac McCarthy gives first-ever TV interview to Oprah

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By Hillel Italie/Associated Press
Friday, June 8, 2007

NEW YORK — Nothing is predictable about Oprah Winfrey’s book picks – except for their sales.

Once associated with inspirational narratives such as Jacqueline Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean,” Winfrey has been increasingly willing to take on the most challenging books and the most challenging writers.

In the past few years, she has recommended novels by Faulkner, Tolstoy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even as she advocates diet and self-help books, such as Rhonda Byrne’s million-selling “The Secret,” when not choosing works for her club.

On Tuesday, she announced her new club selection: Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel narrated by a hermaphrodite – someone with both male and female sexual organs – and aired a talk with her previous pick, Cormac McCarthy of Tesuque, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s first ever TV interview.

“I am proud to be in the same company as Tolstoy and Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy,” Eugenides said in an interview from his home in Chicago.

“The image Oprah Winfrey has had just isn’t true,” said Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which released Eugenides’ novel in 2002. “It seems that the club has been going more up market. I think she must have found that readers responded well to those kinds of books.”

The 73-year-old McCarthy has spoken with the press just twice before – both times for print publications – in the past 40 years, but he opened up for Winfrey. The author said he has nothing against the media; he just doesn’t like talking about what he does – a trait Winfrey illustrated with a story about how McCarthy, when he had no money years ago, refused a speaking engagement that would have paid him $2,000.

“You work your side of the street; I’ll work mine,” he said during the interview, which was taped at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

Dressed in a blue work shirt open at the collar and tan slacks, the author looked trim and much younger than his age. He sat slouched in an arm chair and spoke calmly, carefully, in a low, rumbling voice.

His answers were thoughtful, even when the questions seemed to make him a bit uncomfortable, as when Winfrey asked whether “The Road” was “a love story to your son.”

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“It was kind of refreshing how he didn’t seem to be aware of the camera, or play to the camera at all, as so-called professional authors do,” Eugenides said.

Known for his rural settings, biblical prose and affinity for bygone worlds, McCarthy said that while typically he doesn’t know where the ideas for his books originate, he can trace “The Road” to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, about four years ago.

There, standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night, his son asleep nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.

“I just had this image of these fires up on the hill . . . and I thought a lot about my little boy,” said McCarthy, whose previous books include “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses.”

He said he wrote some of his thoughts down and didn’t really think about it again until he was in Ireland a few years later and the novel came to him.

“There was a book, and it was about that man and that little boy,” he said.

“The Road,” this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is about a father and his son as they wander through a barren post-nuclear landscape. It is dedicated to McCarthy’s son, John Francis, and the author acknowledged he wouldn’t have written it had he not had a son.

Having a child as an older man also had its effect on McCarthy. “It wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things fresh,” he said. “It forces the world on you, and I think it’s a good thing.”

Winfrey was clearly fascinated with McCarthy’s life, particularly the time when he was so poor that he once was tossed out of a $40-a-month hotel because he couldn’t pay his bill.

He told a story of living in a “shack in Tennessee,” having so little money that he could not afford to buy toothpaste when he ran out, only to discover a free sample of toothpaste in his mailbox.

“Just when things were really, really bleak something would happen,” he said.

Many authors jump or weep for joy upon receiving the word from Winfrey, publishing’s swiftest and surest path to the top of best-seller lists. But McCarthy’s apparent indifference to having hundreds of thousands of new readers baffled and charmed the talk show host.

“You are a different kind of author, let me tell you,” she said, chuckling.

Click to read a review of The Road

Source:http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/06/06/oprah_names_new_book_pick_and_chats_with_a_reclusive_favorite/

Arguing With Stephen Colbert on BookTV

NYTBSL.org sums it up…

In this Interview

KHALED HOSSEINI

On why he’s an author: To generate dialogue.

On how to become an author: Become a chain smoker of reading and writing.

On something that changed the course of his life: Reading The Grapes of Wrath.

Scroll Down to Watch Khaled Hosseini on Youtube

- Khaled Hosseini

Returning to Afghanistan for the first time this year after 27 years in exile in America, Khaled Hosseini talks of Kabul in its heyday. His debut novel, The Kite Runner, explores the powerful relationship between a father and son during the Afghan monarchy and his hopes for a peaceful post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Click here to read a review of the book.

By Razeshta Sethna

Q: In The Kite Runner, do you create characters and events that are based on personal recollections or is the story purely fictional?

A: The story line of my novel is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined. However, there certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative. Probably the passages most resembling my own life are the ones in the US, with Amir and Baba trying to build a new life for themselves. I, too, came to the US as an immigrant and I recall vividly those first few years in California, the brief time we spent on welfare, and the difficult task of assimilating into a new culture. My father and I did work for a while at the flea market and there really are rows of Afghans working there, some of whom I am related to.

I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history. For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban. I wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity for decades, that the history of the Afghans in the twentieth century has been largely pacific and harmonious.

Q:What are your recollections of the last days of the Afghan monarchy and the subsequent invasion of the Soviet forces?

A: Kabul was a thriving cosmopolitan city with its vibrant artistic, intellectual and cultural life. There were poets, musicians, and writers. There was also an influx of western culture, art, and literature in the ’60s and ’70s. My family left Afghanistan in 1976, well before the Communist coup and the Soviet invasion. We certainly thought we would be going back. But when we saw those Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan, the prospect for return looked very dim. Few of us, I have to say, envisioned that nearly a quarter century of bloodletting would follow.

Q: Is Amir’s youth synonymous with your adolescence?

A:I experienced Kabul with my brother the way Amir and Hassan do: long school days in the summer, kite fighting in the winter time, westerns with John Wayne at Cinema Park, big parties at our house in Wazir Akbar Khan, picnics in Paghman. I have very fond memories of my childhood in Afghanistan, largely because my memories, unlike those of the current generation of Afghans, are untainted by the spectre of war, landmines, and famine.

Q: Can you shed light on the role of women at the time?

A: I came from an educated, upper middle-class family. My mother was a Persian and history teacher at a large high school for girls. Many of the women in my extended family and in our circle of friends were professionals. In those days, women were a vital part of the economy in Kabul. They worked as lawyers, physicians, college professors, etc., which makes the tragedy of how they were treated by the Taliban that much more painful.

Q: Your novel touches on internal strife before and during the Taliban government but lacks a strong focus on women.

With Katie Couric

A: My own background is fairly liberal and so this notion of ‘protecting women from outside intrusion’ is not in my nature, nor in my upbringing. The Kite Runner is a story of two boys and a father, and the strange love triangle that binds them. It so happens that the major relationships in the novel are between men, dictated not by any sort of prejudice or discomfort with female characters, but rather by the demands of the narrative. The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction. I have started a second novel set in Afghanistan, and so far all of the major characters are shaping up as women.

Q: Given the present state of politics and the American agenda in the region, how do you perceive the future of Afghanistan ?

A: I returned to Kabul this past March, after a 27-year absence. I came away with some optimism but not as much as I had hoped for. The two major issues in Afghanistan are a lack of security outside Kabul (particularly in the south and east) and the powerful warlords ruling over the provinces with little or no allegiance to the central government. The other rapidly rising concern is the narcotic trade which, if not dealt with, may turn Afghanistan into another Bolivia or Colombia.

Equally important is the lack of cultivable land for farmers, a profound problem when you take into account that Afghanistan has always largely been an agricultural country, and that even before the wars destroyed lands and irrigation canals, only 5 per cent of the land was cultivable. A great deal remains to be done in Afghanistan and the jury is out as to whether the international community has the commitment and the patience to see the rebuilding process through.

This last month, though, I have seen some cause for optimism. The Bush administration tripled its aid package to Afghanistan. Karzai finally (and courageously) announced that warlords will be forbidden from holding office in the future government. And finally, NATO agreed to expand the peacekeeping forces to troubled areas outside of Kabul.

Q: Why did you return after 27 years?

A: I returned to Afghanistan because I had a deep longing to see for myself how people lived, what they thought of their government, how optimistic they were about the future of their homeland. I was overwhelmed with the kindness of people and found that they had managed to retain their dignity, their pride, and their hospitality under unspeakably bleak conditions.

I did see plenty that reminded me of my childhood. I recognised my old neighbourhood, saw my old school, streets where I had played with my brother and cousins. And, like Amir, I found my father’s old house in Wazir Khan.

Q: Lastly, what were the reactions of Afghans in exile in the US after reading your novel?

A:I get daily e-mails from Afghans who thank me for writing this book, as they feel a slice of their story has been told by one of their own. So, for the most part, I have been overwhelmed with the kindness of my fellow Afghans. There are, however, those who have called the book divisive and objected to some of the issues raised in the book, namely racism, discrimination, ethnic inequality etc. If this book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community.

Q: Can you tell me about your second novel?

A:I am not sure how it will shape up, whether it will become one woman’s story or a family saga told from various women’s viewpoints.

But it will also be set in Afghanistan’s pre-Taliban days and, I suspect, in present-day America. I wish I could tell you more but I don’t know a whole lot more myself about it.

Buy The Kite Runner

Interview
In the spring of 2004, Khaled Hosseini took some time out to talk with us about some of his favorite books, authors, and interests.

What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?
I remember reading The Grapes of Wrath in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck’s book was the first book I read in English where I had an “Aha!” moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter. For some reason, I identified with the disenfranchised farm workers in that novel — I suppose in one sense, they reminded me of my own country’s traumatized people. And indeed, when I went back to Afghanistan in 2003, I met people with tremendous pride and dignity under some very bleak conditions; I suspect I met a few Ma Joads and Tom Joads in Kabul.

What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
In no particular order:

A note from NYTBSL.org: This author rates very high for promoting understanding among cultures as well as keeping interest through skilled writing. Read him! Click here to read a review of the book.

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