The John Batchelor Show

Wednesday 29 December 2021

Air Date: 
December 29, 2021

CBS EYE ON THE WORLD WITH JOHN BATCHELOR

FIRST HOUR

9-915  
1/8  The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
New York Times Book Review ― Editors’ Choice   •   Chicago Tribune ― "60 Best Reads for Right Now"   •    St. Louis Post-Dispatch ― "50 Fall Books You Should Consider Reading"
A culminating work on the American Founding by one of its leading historians, The Cause rethinks the American Revolution as we have known it.
In one of the most “exciting and engaging” (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War.
For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis―one of our most celebrated scholars of American history―throughout his entire career. With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with “surprising relevance” (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding BrothersThe Cause returns us to the very heart of the American founding, telling the military and political story of the war for independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black.
Taking us from the end of the Seven Years’ War to 1783, and drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, The Cause interweaves action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with parlor-room intrigues back in England, creating a thrilling narrative that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters. Here Ellis recovers the stories of Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, the sister among the “band of brothers”; Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief known to the colonists as Joseph Brant, who led the Iroquois Confederation against the Patriots; and Harry Washington, the enslaved namesake of George Washington, who escaped Mount Vernon to join the British Army and fight against his former master.
Countering popular histories that romanticize the “Spirit of ’76,” Ellis demonstrates that the rebels fought under the mantle of “The Cause,” a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle that afforded an umbrella under which different, and often conflicting, convictions and goals could coexist. Neither an American nation nor a viable government existed at the end of the war. In fact, one revolutionary legacy regarded the creation of such a nation, or any robust expression of government power, as the ultimate betrayal of The Cause. This legacy alone rendered any effective response to the twin tragedies of the founding―slavery and the Native American dilemma―problematic at best.
Written with the vivid and muscular prose for which Ellis is known, and with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause marks the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era. A landmark work of narrative history, it challenges the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people, and as a nation.
6 illustrations; 7 maps
 
 
915-930 
2/8 
2/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
 

930-945 
3/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by  Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
 

945-1000 
4/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by  Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
 
 
 

SECOND HOUR

10-1015 
5/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by  Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
 

1015-1030  
6/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by  Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
 

1030-1045 
7/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by  Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
 
 
1045-1100 
8/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by  Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.  Hardcover – September 21, 2021 
 
 

THIRD HOUR   

1100-1115   
1/4 Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation,
by  Sophie Pedder.  Hardcover – August 14, 2018 
 

He emerged from nowhere to seize the presidency, defeat populism and upend French party politics. Who is Emmanuel Macron? How far can he really change France?

In Revolution Française, Sophie Pedder examines the first year in office of France's youngest and most exciting president in modern times, with unique perspective from her time as head of The Economist's Paris bureau. President Emmanuel Macron's vision for France is far more radical than many realize. His remarkable ascent from obscurity to the presidency is both a dramatic story of personal ambition and the tale of a wounded once-proud country in deep need of renewal. What shaped this enigmatic character, the precociously bright student and talented networker from northern France; the philosophy graduate and Rothschild banker who married his school drama teacher? How did a political outsider manage to defy the unwritten rules of the Fifth Republic and secure the presidency at his first attempt? And what are the underlying ideas behind his vision? 
This book chronicles Macron's remarkable rise from independent outsider to the Élysée Palace, situating the achievement in a broader context: France's slide into self-doubt, political gridlock and a seeming reluctance to embrace change; the roots of populism and discontent; the fractures caused by globalization and the Le Pen factor. Looking back on the young president's dramatic first year in power, with analysis of his key reforms and lofty ambitions, it asks how far it is possible for Macron to reinvent a conservative nation uneasy about embracing the future. Can the man nicknamed 'Jupiter' really return France to its former greatness, or will he, by the time his mandate expires, end up as just another side note in political history? Punctuated with first-hand conversations and reporting, this book takes on all of these questions, concluding with a fascinating and exclusive interview with Macron recorded in early 2018. Pedder's riveting, and essential, book will be one of the most captivating political books of this year.
 
 

1115-1130 
2/4  Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation,  
by  Sophie Pedder.  Hardcover – August 14, 2018 
 
 
1130-1145 
3/4  Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation,  
by  Sophie Pedder.  Hardcover – August 14, 2018 
 

1145-1200 
4/4 Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation,  
by  Sophie Pedder.  Hardcover – August 14, 2018 
 
 

FOURTH HOUR   

12-1215 
1/4  Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market, by  Nicholas Wapshott.  Hardcover – August 3, 2021 
 
Financial Times Best Economics Book of 2021

From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics.
In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed “monetarism” and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy.
 
In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles.
 
Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws―or crafts its advanced treatises―if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today.
 
In Wapshott’s nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman’s decades-long argument over how―or whether―to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.
 
 

1215-1230 
2/4 Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market, by  Nicholas Wapshott.  Hardcover – August 3, 2021 
 

1230-1245 
3/4 Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market, by  Nicholas Wapshott.  Hardcover – August 3, 2021 
 
 

1245-100 AM 
4/4 Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market, by  Nicholas Wapshott.  Hardcover – August 3, 2021