Booknotes

Background and production

Booknotes first aired on April 2, 1989, with former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski talking about his book on the rise and fall of communism. For its fifth anniversary on April 10, 1994, the show ran a two-hour special that brought together more than 50 of the 300 authors who had appeared so far. In 1999, to mark ten years, host Brian Lamb put together an anthology called Booknotes: Life Stories, featuring essays by well-known biographers on 78 figures who shaped American history from the 1700s through 1999.

The series ended on December 5, 2004, after 801 interviews. The final guest was Mark Edmundson, a University of Virginia English professor and Harper's contributing editor, who discussed his book Why Read?

The plan was to stop at episode 800, but a counting error made the last one number 801. Reruns of Booknotes segments still air on C-SPAN 2 during Saturday Book TV and on C-SPAN 3 every weeknight at 11 p.m. Pacific.

All 801 transcripts and episodes are available online. Lamb’s personal copies of the featured books, many with his handwritten notes in the margins, are kept in George Mason University’s rare books collection. The show grew out of a one-off interview with Neil Sheehan in September 1988, after Lamb saw a short TV interview with Sheehan and wanted a longer conversation. Strong viewer interest turned that into a weekly series.

Each episode ran a full hour with an author of a recent nonfiction book. To keep things fresh, no author appeared twice, which allowed more than 800 different writers to be featured over fifteen years. The interviews dug into how authors worked, what they thought, and whether their books achieved what they set out to do.

Guests

Notable guests included Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan, Colin Powell, Frank McCourt, Dixy Lee Ray, and David Crosby. Former presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton appeared, as did former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Exceptions to the usual history, politics, or public policy subjects included violinist Isaac Stern, who discussed his memoir My First 79 Years on January 23, 2000.

Books

Four books have been drawn from the series. Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing and the Power of Ideas (1998) is a compilation of short monologues from interview transcripts. Booknotes: Life Stories (2000) is an anthology of stories on 78 influential Americans. Booknotes: Stories from American History (2002) and Booknotes: On American Character (2005) are the other two volumes.