Book Talks on Demand

Okay, this prob­a­bly won’t be our high­est rat­ed post ever. We’ll con­cede that. There’s noth­ing chic
and hip about C‑SPAN. But there’s some good sub­stance here, and sub­stance is what we’re about first and fore­most. So give us the ben­e­fit of the doubt for a moment.

C‑SPAN’s Book-TV lets you stream videos of talks, long and sub­stan­tive ones, giv­en by most­ly seri­ous authors. You can catch Pres­i­dent Jim­my Carter talk­ing about his new con­tro­ver­sial book, Pales­tine Peace Not Apartheid (plus Alan Der­show­itz’s response); Niall Fer­gu­son, the Har­vard his­to­ri­an, speak­ing on his recent work, The War of the World: Twen­ti­eth-Cen­tu­ry Con­flict and the Descent of the West; Howard Zinn, anoth­er his­to­ri­an, dis­cussing his col­lec­tion of essays, A Pow­er Gov­ern­ments Can­not Sup­press; and Adri­an Goldswor­thy giv­ing a talk on his new biog­ra­phy, Cae­sar: Life of a Colos­sus. For a com­plete list of book talks, click here.

In many ways, C‑SPAN’s offer­ing is no dif­fer­ent in qual­i­ty or sub­stance from the video ser­vices offered by FORA.TV and Prince­ton’s Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel — two oth­er high-qual­i­ty ser­vices that we like and have pre­viewed here before. If you can set aside your gen­er­al impres­sion of C‑SPAN — your mem­o­ries of the unedit­ed, end­less talks from the Sen­ate floor that lead to nowhere — you’ll find enlight­ened video here that’s well worth your lim­it­ed time.