C-SPAN Bookshelf

"Can we say, 'In a crocodile accident?'" This and many other stories documenting not just how people died, but how they lived - in a book from New York Times obit writer Sam Roberts. He was interviewed by Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute Harold Holzer. 

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Eugene V. Debs ran for President of the United States as a socialist five times. The first in 1900, the last in 1920, when he received close to a million votes. Shawn Gude, a native of Iowa, a former editor of Jacobin, and a current resident of New York City, is the author of a Debs biography titled "American Socialist." In his introduction, Gude writes: "The story of Eugene V. Debs' life is the story of one man's radicalization, and of the country he helped radicalize in turn." Debs dropped out of school at age 14. His base of operations and his...

CNN Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash, co-author of "The Elections That Changed the World," looks at elections going back to ancient Rome that have had an outsized impact on humanity. She discusses the elections of Lincoln, Hitler, Churchill, Nelson Mandela, and others.

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Author and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (1995-99) joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his extensive career in Congress and writing more than 40 books on topics ranging from political commentary to alternative history.

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Harvard historian Jill Lepore explores how digital technology is re-shaping society. She was interviewed by WPVI-TV anchor Tamala Edwards at the Free Library of Philadelphia in September.

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Simon Sebag Montefiore has written nine nonfiction books and three novels. His latest is called "The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East." The time period covered is from 1900 to the present. In Mr. Montefiore's acknowledgements, he writes: "Family is an important theme in this book, and my own has a slight link to the dynasties that ruled the Middle East. My forebearer Moses Montefiore first met Muhammad Ali the Great, ruler of Egypt, when he visited the Levant in 1827." Author Montefiore focuses on 19 different countries and many more kings, rulers, prime ministers, emperors, and sultans in his...

Lawyer and activist Kerry Kennedy, author of "Ethel," discusses her mother Ethel Kennedy's early life, marriage to Robert Kennedy, and involvement in human rights causes both at home and abroad. Kerry Kennedy also talks about the Kennedy family's long involvement in American politics and the assassination of her father by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968.

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Bestselling authors Elliot Ackerman, a Marine Corps veteran, and retired U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis join David M. Rubenstein to discuss their military thrillers, including 2034: A Novel of the Next World War and 2054: A Novel. They explore the future of warfare, emerging technologies, global security threats, and how their military experiences influence their writing.

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Jon Else explored the lives of the scientists who worked on the atomic bombs, including the health impacts they experienced. He was interviewed by UC Berkeley Journalism Professor, Mark Danner at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September. 

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Only nine men have been convicted, through military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, out of roughly 780 total detainees held there for some time since 2002. However, only 15 prisoners are currently housed at Gitmo. One of those is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who allegedly said he was the mastermind of 9/11. Mohammed has spent the last 20 years incarcerated and is said to go on trial in June 2028. John Ryan, founder of Lawdragon, has spent the past decade detailing the day-to-day activities at Guantanamo. His book is "America's Trial: Torture and the 9/11 Case on Guantanamo Bay."

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Brad Ryan and his 96-year-old grandmother Joy recount their visits to all 63 U.S. National Parks. Completed over a 7-year period, the duo visited parks from Alaska to Florida, concluding with a visit to the National Park of American Samoa in 2023 when Joy Ryan was 93. In total they traveled over 100,000 miles together. Brad Ryan chronicled their adventures in real time on social media and now in a book titled "Grandma Joy and Me."

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Bestselling author Min Jin Lee joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss her literary career, early life in the United States, her award-winning novel "Pachinko," and meeting King Charles and Queen Camilla.

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Neuroscientist Darby Saxbe describes how men's brains change with fatherhood. She was interviewed by journalist, Matthew Yglesias at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., in June of 2026. 

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The name of the book is "Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit." The author, Sam Roberts, is a 50-year veteran of New York journalism. He says in his book: "I've buried 1,600 or so people during my improbable decade writing obituaries for the New York Times." Reporters who do his kind of reporting are called obituarists. Sam Roberts, in his book's prologue, says he "learned more on the job about accuracy, context, and the distinction between cynicism and skepticism than I would have in any journalism school."

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Purdue University President Mitch Daniels discusses his life in public service, including his time in Washington, DC, during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations and his two-term governorship of Indiana. He also talks about his upbringing, his early years in Indiana politics, and his years as an executive at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.

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National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist historian Nathaniel Philbrick joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his bestselling books about the Mayflower, George Washington, and the California gold rush, as well as life on Nantucket.

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The 21st century saga of San Francisco's rise and fall -- paralleled by the arrival of tech entrepreneurs who remade the city's culture, politics, and economy - as told by journalist Jonathan Weber. In 1990, he became the first "Silicon Valley" reporter for the Los Angeles Times and later coordinated Reuters' reporting on West Coast technology. He sat down with former New York Times Technology Reporter, John Markoff, at The Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California in San Francisco in June.

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On Saturday, August 8, on the front page of the Washington Post was this headline: "Some Vets Went Along with Scams of the G.I. Bill." Leading the team of Post reporters was Craig Whitlock. His co-author was Andrew Ba Tran. The dateline on the story was San Diego. The first paragraph of the story was: "At Blue Star Learning, a vocational school that defrauded taxpayers of $29 million in GI Bill funds, learning was not the point." Craig Whitlock, 28-year Washington Post veteran, was a gust on Booknotes+ in both 2021 and 2024, the first time for his book "The Afghanistan Papers"...

Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of "Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young," spent the first three years of his life on the run from the law with his fugitive parents, Weather Underground founders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once called his mother the "most dangerous woman in America." Zayd Ayers Dohrn talks about his parents' upbringing and revolutionary politics, the violence committed by the Weather Underground during the 1970s, and his life after his parents turned themselves in to federal authorities in 1980. His book has been nominated for the National Book Award this year.

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Bestselling author and attorney Scott Turow joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his career as a master of the legal thriller, his writing process, and the experiences that have inspired his novels. Turow also shares his concerns about artificial intelligence and its potential impact on writers, publishing, and the creative process.

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Andrew Burstein recently retired as a professor of history at Louisiana State University. "Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" is his 16th book about the early years of the United States. In the introduction, Prof. Burstein writes: "This book is about extraordinary drama that punctuated the life of a famous man who had an unusual need to control his environment." Andrew Burstein continues, noting that "as much as his creative imagination led to memorable achievements, the capaciousness of his intellect exacted a price. When enticed by nature's mysteries, his eyes were wide open to new possibilities. And when it...

NBC News Chief Washington and Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell talks about some of the big stories and important people – including U.S. presidents and world leaders – she has covered during her nearly 50 years with the network. Mitchell also talks about her upbringing, her early years in radio and TV in Philadelphia, and her marriage to the late Alan Greenspan, who served as chair of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.

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Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime Washington Post reporter David Maraniss joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, and Jim Thorpe.

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Chris Pope argued for policies that he believes would improve the current welfare system in the United States. The Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., hosted this event. 

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Jonathan Jordan devotes 544 pages and 57 chapters of his book "Ike and Winston" to telling the story of the friendship between Dwight David Eisenhower and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. President Eisenhower lived to be 78 and died in 1969. Sir Winston died four years before that, in 1965, at age 90. Author Jonathan Jordan says: "Churchill could have had his pick of friendship, but he wanted Ike's. In the beginning, he courted Ike for what Ike could do for Britain. The Kansan held the trust of men like Franklin Roosevelt and George C. Marshall. This influence gave Ike the power to destroy or...

Eleven days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Congress passed a law establishing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund to compensate families who lost loved ones on 9/11. Attorney Kenneth Feinberg, author of "What Is Life Worth?," was chosen to head up the taxpayer-funded effort and was solely responsible for determining how much each family would get paid. In all, 5,500 people received a combined total of $7.1 billion, with the average payout being $2 million.

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Best-selling author and USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss her book about Queen Elizabeth's relationships with 13 U.S. presidents and her biographies of Barbara Bush, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Walters.

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Longtime ABC News war correspondent Martha Raddatz profiled American military service members and their families who have served in the 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. She was interviewed by San Francisco ABC7 News Anchor, Dan Ashley, at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California in May of 2026. 

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In the beginning of Scott Greenberger's new book, "The Forsaken Founder," Dawn Davis, publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint 37 Ink, introduces us to this new history of a mostly unfamiliar name. Davis writes: "Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, Madison. These are names we know." However, she writes that "there was another man in the room at the founding, a prodigy whose contributions were just as essential, whose name has largely been forgotten: Gouverneur Morris. Morris, as the penman of the Constitution, wrote the words "We the people," which are his and his alone. The subtitle to Scott Greenberger's book is "Gouverneur...

To mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001, we present first-hand accounts of that day from first responders, journalists, political figures, and others. You'll hear from New York City firefighter Tim Brown, World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein, photographer Doug Mills, reporters Ann Compton and Andrea Mitchell, President Bush assistant Anita McBride, Rear Admiral David Thomas, Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), and F-16 pilot Major Heather Penny.

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Pulitzer Prize winner Kai Bird joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss his biography of Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus, which inspired the film Oppenheimer.

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Chris Smalls told his story of becoming the co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. He was interviewed by Journalist & Author Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. 

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Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, has been in prison for 32 years in France. He was captured in Sudan on August 14, 1994. In his book titled "The Jackal," Washington Post correspondent Joby Warrick reports on his 2025 meeting with the jailed terrorist in Paris. Carlos told him: "I killed 83 people with my own hand." Reporter Warrick writes that: "Carlos mattered. He was the human face of a dangerous new form of international terrorism that emerged in the 1970s and the 1980s, which became the template for later groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State." Th...

New York Times staff photographer Doug Mills has won 3 Pulitzer Prizes for his work covering the White House & Washington, Super Bowls, Olympics, and many other major events. He tells us that he's taken over one million photographs of President Trump alone. In our conversation, he talks about some of the events he's covered going back to the Reagan administration. He talks about being in the Oval Office and on Air Force One, photographing the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1992, accompanying President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, and taking the photograph of the attempted assassination of President Trump in 2024, which won...

Technology reporter Joanna Stern describes the year she spent using artificial intelligence and robots in all aspects of her life. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, provided this event.

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Paul Taylor tells his readers: "For the first 25 years, I was a newspaper reporter. For the next 25, a political reformer, a demographer, a pollster, an author, and a public speaker." He's now 77 and has written a memoir titled "This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk." Besides Paul Taylor, the other boomer in his book refers to his wife of 57 years, Stefanie. He asked his friend and agent Peter Bernstein (BERN-steen) to find a traditional publisher. His only reward, according to Taylor, "was a collection of lovely rejection notes." Not to be stopped, he would move...

From the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Neil Gorsuch discusses his children's book, "Heroes of 1776," about the signers of the Declaration of Independence and other, lesser known, revolutionaries who put their life, liberty, and property on the line to gain independence from the British.

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Historian Molly Beer took a woman's-eye view of the revolutionary era through the life of Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton's sister-in-law. Thomas Jefferson's Monticello hosted this event.

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In the political history of the United States, books have had a big impact on who the public follows in elections. In 1956, John F. Kennedy published "Profiles in Courage," which sold 2.8 million copies by his death in 1963. Jimmy Carter released his title "Why Not the Best?" in 1975, the year before he was elected president. When Barack Obama first released his life story in 1995, he only sold approximately 9,000 copies. When it was re-released in 2004, he sold 4.7 million copies. President Trump's "Art of the Deal," published in 1987, sold at least 1.5 million. JD Vance was unknown in 2016 when he appeared on C-SPAN's...

This week on Q&A, it's a rare interview with one of America's leading historians. We tour the New York City office and home library of Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling biographer Robert Caro, who is currently working on the final volume of his 5-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. During the tour, Mr. Caro talks about his research and writing process on the LBJ series, and the impact of "The Power Broker," his bestselling 1974 biography of NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.

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