Sunday, August 20, 2006

Enough


I just finished watching a terrific interview on CSPAN's BOOKTV with Juan Williams the author of a book called "Enough". First a little about cspan... I still have not fully made up my mind about this series called "afterwords". I have seen several of these "interviews" but I'm not sure if I like the overall format, in that, it's presented as an arguement. They find an author who has written a new book (usually of a political or social issue). Then they find an interviewer who has an opposing view to interview the author. But these interviews quickly turn into an arguement over personal issues and do not represent what is in the featured book. I give a real credit to Mr. William's approach to his interviewer Michael Eric Dyson, for (at times) stepping back from the arguement and trying to keep the interview on track about the book, and not so much on Mr. Dyson's views.
Here's a quote I pulled from the cspan website:

In his book, "Enough," author Juan Williams expands on the arguments made by Bill Cosby during his 2004 speech to the NAACP. The subtitle of the book is, "The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America-- and What We Can Do About It." He discusses the book with Michael Eric Dyson, author of the book, "Is Bill Crosby Right?"


I found this interview interesting because just prior to the show Cspan had another show on called "Success for Young Black Men" in which one of the panelists was Bill Cosby. I did miss the beginning of this show, but I watched a lot of it. Very interesting, and I was particularly surprised (and supporting) Cosby's "rant" against one of the other panel members who worked for a newspaper and was doing a "series" that talked about helping young black men, but then he said something... "We're taking the summer off and will start up in the fall". Well, Mr. Cosby tore into this decision (rightly so) and could not fathom why a subject that is so important to getting to the young audience (while they are out of school) would "take time off".
(I'm getting sidetracked... I wanted this post to be about the booktv interview sorry).

Anyway, If you can check out the interview with Juan Williams. You can go to the cspan website and watch it via "realplayer or windows media player" - or you can use itunes or ipodder to subscribe to the "afterwords" podcast. (The process is more than I can link to here. I wish they would simply post mp3 files on their website to make things easier.)

I'm going to go search the web to see if there is a way that I can find Mr. Cosby's speech online. If I find It I'll post a link in the comments area of this post.

2 comments:

cyen said...

I wasn't able to find the entire speech in mp3 format but I found the transcript, and a short excerpt of his speech at this website:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/billcosbypoundcakespeech.htm

cyen said...

Link didn't work...
Lets try this:
Bill Cosby Speech