Book Lovers Alert

One of TV's great offerings is C-SPAN2's Book TV (www.booktv.org), a weekend potpourri of interviews, seminars, and panels with non-fiction authors. Books run the gamut from  history to linguistics to politics.

From book fair to bookstore appearances, authors read from, talk about, and answer questions about their books. I always find myself jotting down titles that I would like to read:

• Pox: An American History by Brandeis University historian Michael Willrich
• The Jersey Sting, A True Story of  Crooked Pols, Money Laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and The Informant Who Brought It All Down by New Jersey Star-Ledger investigative reporters Josh Margolin and Ted Sherman
• What Language Is (And What It Isn't and What It Could Be) by linguist John McWhorter
• Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President by Eli Saslow

"In-Depth" is a three-hour interview program with viewer call-in and e-mails; few television programs devote that much time to serious discussion. Recent guests have included documentary producer, Michael Moore; novelist, poet, and essayist Ishmael Reed, and Ann Coulter, Fox News commentator and Dems-basher.

This week's schedule (December 17-18) features Tulane University political science professor Melissa Harris-Perry speaking at Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem about her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (Sunday, December 18, 10:45 AM, EST)

Book TV keeps me in touch with major themes in U.S. and world history, politics, media, criminal justice as well as countless other issues and events.

I'm addicted; I hope you will be too.

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