Keen On

To celebrate over two thousand episodes of the show, we are launching KEEN ON AMERICA - a special series of personal conversations with prominent Americans about their now almost 250 year-old Republic. First up is Adam Hochschild, the co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, author of American Midnight and many other important books about the modern world. As Hochschild told me when I sat down with him in his Berkeley home, his life has been fused by activism: at first, the rebellious activism of a son and young citizen in the early Sixties; and now the more cerebral activism of father, grandfather and acclaimed writer. Such activism, I think, make Adam’s story very much of an American story and an ideal first chapter in the KEEN ON AMERICA series. Adam Hochschild is the author of eleven books. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis is his most recent. His preceding book, the biography Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor St