Booknotes+

Joe Madison has hosted a radio talk show for over 40 years. He's known to his audience as the "Black Eagle" and can be heard daily on SiriusXM radio. A native of Dayton, Ohio, and a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Mr. Madison started his professional life as an activist. One of his first jobs was working for the NAACP as political director under the leadership of Ben Hooks. Joe Madison angered both his allies and adversaries when he organized a boycott against Dearborn, Michigan, when that city prohibited nonresidents, including African-Americans in Detroit, from visiting its public parks. This story and many other are included in his memoir titled, "Radio Active."     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan McArdle has been a columnist for the Washington Post since 2018. She has described herself as a right-leaning libertarian. At the same time, she says she's actually a social liberal. Megan McArdle graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English literature in 1994 and worked for several start-ups before getting an MBA from the University of Chicago. She started her professional writing career as a blogger in November 2001. Since then, Ms. McArdle has written for the Economist, the Atlantic, Newsweek, and Bloomberg View. In a recent column in the Washington Post, writing about today's journalism, she said: "We are not trusted because we are not entirely trustworthy."     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The book is called "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War." The author is Deborah Cohen, a professor at Northwestern University. Prof. Cohen primarily focuses on four American journalists who traveled the world in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s: H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent "Jimmy" Sheean, Dorothy Thompson, and John Gunther. These reporters landed exclusive interviews with Hitler, Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi and helped shape what Americans at the time knew about the world.      Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the past twenty years, Dr. Thomas Fisher has worked in the emergency department at the University of Chicago Medical Center, serving the same South Side community in which he was raised. During the past two years of COVID-19, he decided to write about his experience in a large urban hospital emergency room. He says that at the end of a shift he was haunted by the confusion in the eyes of his patients. He asks a couple of questions that they probably are thinking: Who is this man treating them from behind a mask? Why do they have to wait so many hours to be treated? Dr. Fisher attempts to answer these and many other questions in his book "The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER."       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Jeffrey Frank's recent book titled "The Trials of Harry S. Truman," he reports that at his low point in his time as president, Truman's popularity rating was at 16 percent. However, seventy years later, according to the latest C-SPAN survey, he was ranked sixth most effective of 44 U.S. presidents. Jeffrey Frank, whose career includes professional years at the Washington Post and the New Yorker magazine, has written the first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly 30 years. The book's subtitle reflects the theme of the biography: "The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The book is titled "The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy." The author is Christopher Leonard, the current director of the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. On the dust jacket of the book it says: "If you ask most people what forces led to today's income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve." Christopher Leonard explains why so few people understand the language or inner workings of how American money is managed by a seven-member board in Washington, DC.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emma Camp is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, home of Thomas Jefferson. She calls herself a liberal and has written opinion pieces for the school newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. Back in October of 2020, Ms. Camp had some strong things to say about the First Amendment. She wrote that: "The first amendment does not exist to protect reasonable opinions — it exists to protect the unreasonable, the offensive, and the unpopular." In March of 2022, she moved her opinions to a national platform, the New York Times op-ed page. We asked her to tell us what is behind her statement: "I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity."  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The list is long and, to a lot of people, confusing. We're talking about the language of money. How would you do if you had to define the following: stocks, bonds, private equity, index funds, leveraged buyouts, venture capital, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds, just to name a few. We asked Jeffrey Hooke, author of "The Myth of Private Equity," to give us some help in understanding the world of investment and finance. Mr. Hooke is a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins Business School and has spent all of his adult life in and around money.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During his 40 years in the political science department at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer has not avoided controversy. His article and subsequent book about the Israel lobby, for example, written with Harvard University's Stephen Walt, caused a stir in 2006 and 2007. More recently, at the beginning of March 2022, the New Yorker ran a headline that read: "Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine." We asked Prof. Mearsheimer to explain that and talked to him about being a realist, his military service, and his time in academia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the dedication of his book, "The Heart of Caring," Dr. Mark Vonnegut tells his patients, teachers, and parents everywhere, "Thank you for letting me have such a good time when I go to work." Dr. Vonnegut is a pediatrician who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1979. This was after he had been diagnosed, at age 25, with severe schizophrenia. He's had four psychotic breakdowns in his life, but has managed to successfully practice pediatrics for close to forty years. Mark Vonnegut, in his newest book, writes about patients, parents, insurance companies, and his late father, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices