Enjoy Labor Day weekend with an encore broadcast at noon PT on Conversations Live with Vicki St. Clair. NPR correspondent, award-winning journalist, and self-professed grump, Eric Weiner, set out on a personal odyssey across the globe. His journey culminated in The Geography of Bliss; One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Place in the World. We also feature award-winning journalist and NYT bestselling author, Susan Jane Gilman on her memoir, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.
Weiner spent two of the best years of his life reporting for NPR from New Delhi, covering everything from an outbreak of bubonic plague to India’s economic reforms. Over the past decade, he’s reported from more than 30 countries—most of which, he says, “were profoundly unhappy”. He traveled to Iraq several times during the reign of Saddam Hussein. Was in Afghanistan in 2001, when the Taliban regime fell. And served as a correspondent for NPR in New York, Miami and Washington, D.C. Weiner is a former reporter for The New York Times and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He was part of a team of NPR reporters that won a 1994 Peabody award for a series of investigative reports about the U.S. tobacco industry. More about Eric Weiner and his work.
We’ll also talk with bestselling author, Susan Jane Gilman. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, is her new memoir … a hilarious but harrowing journey, a modern heart of darkness full of Communist operatives, backpackers, and pancakes. As a writer, Gilman specializes politics, women’s issues, cultural criticism, arts, satire. She’s appeared on The Today Show, ABC World News, NBC affiliates in Portland, OR and New Haven and more. And has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Real Simple and other publications. Gilman lives in Geneva, Switzerland. See more at www.susanjanegilman.com. First broadcast in May 2009.
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