Booknotes+

Glenn C. Loury is a professor of economics. He teaches at Brown University and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He calls his new book "Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative." His publisher, W.W. Norton, describes Prof. Loury on the flap of the cover: "[He] grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics program, and became the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of 33. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian, a Black Reaganite who has swung from the right to the left and back again." In his book, Prof. Loury attempts to explain all of this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is only one of 5 history writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize twice. His 11 books focus mostly on the early years of the creation of the United States. His latest book is titled "American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873." During these 23 years, North America's 3 largest countries – Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. – all transformed themselves into nations. Professor Taylor includes stories of Black soldiers fighting for the Union, Native Americans struggling to preserve their homelands in the United States and the West, women fortifying the homeland, and newly arrived immigrants thrust into the maelstrom of the Civil War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For over 10 years, Washington Post investigative reporter Craig Whitlock has tracked the story of Malaysian shakedown man Leonard Francis, aka "Fat Leonard," and his collusion with hundreds of U.S. Navy officers, several of whom have spent time in prison. Now comes the book titled "Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy." Craig Whitlock writes: "On the surface, with his flawless American accent, Fat Leonard seemed like a true friend of the Navy. What the brass didn't realize, until far too late, was that Francis had seduced them by exploiting their entitlement and hubris." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duke Ellington was the grandson of slaves. Louis Armstrong was born in a News Orleans slum so tough that it was called "The Battlefield." William James "Count" Basie grew up in a world unfamiliar to his white fans, the son of a coachman and a laundress. Author Larry Tye says the Duke, the Count, and Satchmo transformed America. The book is called "The Jazzmen" and Mr. Tye writes: "How better to bring alive the history of African America in the early to mid-1900s than through the singular lens of America's most gifted, engaging, and enduring African American musicians." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The book "Fire and Rain" is a narrative, according to author Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, about the way national security decisions, formed at the highest level of government, affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. Her primary focus is on the way the Nixon administration fought and ended the Vietnam War. Early in the book, Hofstra University professor Eisenberg quotes President Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, during his 1964 election campaign: "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." However, the U.S. left Vietnam permanently in 1975 and, at the end, the number of U.S. military personnel killed in the war was 58,098. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Early in his newest of over 30 books, Joseph Epstein, our guest this week, writes: "I feel extremely lucky in all these realms in which I had no real choice: parents, epoch, country, and throw in religion, city, and social class." The 87-year-old Epstein, a longtime essayist for the Wall Street Journal, has written his autobiography called "Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life." He has spent 20 years as editor of The American Scholar and 30 years teaching in the English department at Northwestern University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matt Drudge started his website called "The Drudge Report" in 1995. In those early days, he had just 1,000 e-mail subscribers. Within a short time, that number jumped to hundreds of thousands. Until the mid-2000s, Mr. Drudge was very visible, appearing on television and hosting his own radio show. After that, without notice, he disappeared from public view. Chris Moody, our guest this week, just finished hosting an 8-part podcast series called "Finding Matt Drudge." We asked him to tell us what he found. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The book is called "The Real Hoosiers". The author is Pennsylvania-based Jack McCallum. He was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 30 years. "The Real Hoosiers" is a book about parts of Indiana, race, and basketball. To tell the story, McCallum focuses on the life of "The Big O," well-known basketball success Oscar Robertson, who is now 85 years old. Oscar Robertson started his career at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis. Author McCallum says his is a story of a city, a state, and a country struggling to come to terms with race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was a United States Senator for 23 years. He lived to be 63, from January of 1811 to March of 1874. Stephen Puleo has written the first major, full biography of Sumner since 1960. It's titled "The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union." Mr. Puleo writes: "His positions cost him dearly. Southerners despised him, sometimes feared him, and celebrated gleefully when Sumner was beaten unconscious in the Senate chamber in May of 1856." Stephen Puleo first published the full story of the caning of Charles Sumner in 2012. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Pettegree is a British historian at St. Andrews University in Scotland. His specialty is the history of the book and media transformations. He has written a great deal about the written word with an emphasis on libraries. His latest book is titled "The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading." In his introduction, Prof. Pettegree writes: "In all nations, once war broke out, writers and libraries were expected to play a full role in forging victory….after the Second World War the Allies would face the problems of how to sanitize, or exploit, the collections of the defeated." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices