Authors on the Air: Chick Lit with Martha; Vampires in Love; Dead Fathers Club

Compiled by Diane Patrick, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 2/14/2007

This morning, Martha celebrated Valentine’s Day with chick lit author Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes, Washington Square, $14; S&S Audio abridged CD, $30) and Jane Green, author of  Swapping Lives (Viking, $24.95; S&S Audio unabridged CD, $39.95).

The Diane Rehm Show interviewed Sharon Moalem, coauthor of Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease (Morrow, $25.95; HarperAudio unabridged CD, $29.95).

Authors on The Leonard Lopate Show:

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes introduced Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul (Ecco, $25.95).

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff discussed The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Knopf, $30).

In honor of the National Park Service’s reopening of the Frederick Douglass home in Washington, D.C., today, Bob Edwards interviewed historian James Oakes, author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (Norton, $26.95), which PW deemed an “engaging account of two Civil War Era icons.... Oakes vividly conveys both the immense distance America traveled to arrive at a more enlightened place and the fraught politics that brought it there.”

On The Book Report:

Christopher Moore declared You Suck: A Love Story (Morrow, $21.95; unabridged HarperAudio, $39.95), which PW’s starred review referred to as “a cheerfully perverse, gut-busting tale of young vampires in love. Moore writes with the jittery energy of a brilliant, charming class clown, mixing sex and gore and a potty mouth with a goofy-sweet sensibility to deliver laughs on nearly every page.”

Matt Haig, author of The Dead Fathers Club (Viking, $23.95; Highbridge Audio unabridged CD, $32.95). PW starred its review, saying, “Haig does an enviable job of leavening a sad premise through the words and actions of a charming, resilient young man.”

This evening, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart talks to Ishmael Beah about A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier (FSG, $22). From PW’s starred review: “This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide.”

Tavis Smiley confers with Michael Oren, senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center and author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (Norton, $35).

Programming is subject to change. For more detailed information about author appearances on these shows and others as well as listings of book mentions and book reviews, see TitleSmart.

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