Booknotes+

This week's program is an encore presentation featuring a C-SPAN interview with Eric Sevareid that was recorded in his Georgetown home 37 years ago in 1989. Sevareid was a war correspondent with CBS Radio starting in 1939. He spent a total of 38 years with the network. When CBS News with Walter Cronkite went to 30 minutes in 1963, Eric Sevaride would end each newscast with a two-minute analysis and commentary. Some refer to him as "The Grey Eminence." The Cronkite evening news audience in those days was close to 30 million viewers a night. Today the program is watched by around 4 million people. The American population has increased by 100 million people since 1989. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian Walter Stahr has written books on John Jay, William Henry Seward, Edwin Stanton, and Salmon Chase. Now comes his biography of America's 27th president, William Howard Taft, who subsequently also served as the 10th Chief Justice of the United States. Walter Stahr writes at the beginning of his book: "Taft was a modern conservative president, one who avoided foreign wars, worked closely with our allies, lowered tariff rates, and reduced the federal deficit." Stahr also writes that "Taft didn't agree with his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, that the president had some vague power to pursue the public good." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 GudeS, 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 hometown was Terre Haute, Indiana. Shawn Gude tells about his union activities, his presidential campaigns, and why he was sent to prison twice, once for six months and the second time for over two years, before his sentence was commuted by President Harding in the early 1920s.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices