Reviving National Conversation Through Books and Ideas

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning. Mother’s Day was today? Is former Congressman Steve Israel? I hate the word former to me. He’s always Congressman. Steve is real and he he’s an author, and he is a book commentator, and uh he does everything. Well, Steve, we haven’t seen each other for a while. Give me an update on your new book.

0:24 Speaker 2 Well, boy, I miss you, John, And I have to say these days, being a former congressman is a better bet than being a current one. People seem to love the formers more than they do the current.

0:32 Speaker 1 Well, let me tell you, Washington right now is uh uh what did they what did they used to say? I brat Brussels. Something is rotten in Brussels. I think they’re going to be saying.

0:45 Speaker 2 That about him in Belgium.

0:47 Speaker 1 Yeah, something is rotten in Washington.

0:52 Speaker 2 It’s it’s dysfunctional, it’s broken. You know. The extremes on both sides, you know, are just so loud and for those of us who are common sense centrists are just getting drowned out. And we’ve got to find a way out of this. I’ve been spending my time. I own a bookstore, Theater’s Books, in Oyster Bay, and I just

1:09 completed my most recent novel, So I’ve been on book tour. I’ll be in the Hampton’s at Bookhampton on May twenty ninth talking about my book, which is a.

1:20 Speaker 1 So your believer, you’re believer in education and educating people.

1:26 Speaker 2 Yeah, but you know what, I’m also a believer that if you’re going to be educated, you have to leave a little bit of room for the fact that you may not be right about everything. And I think that’s the problem we have, is that, you know, we’re in our silos and we’re too heavily influenced by social media,

1:42 and we need to stay curious about things and engage with people that we may not agree with because guess what, they may have a point. And the way to get to that is to, you know, to read more and get off social media, read books.

1:57 Speaker 1 And I just I am very, very concerned because there was big conflicts in the nineteen eighties between Tip O’Neil and Reagan, big conflicts in the seventies with I guess Neuke Gingridge and Bill Clinton. That’s an eight eighties, nineties whatever, and we always sat around the table and did what’s best for America, and we’re not doing that anymore.

2:29 Speaker 2 There’s a great book. You know Chris Matthews who used to be on MSNBC. He did a book called Tip and the Gipper. And you know this, John, because you know you were friends with those guys. Reagan and Tip O’Neil may have disagreed, but at the end of the day, they literally got together at the White House that have

2:46 a beer and they’d work it out. These days, nobody’s willing to do that. Nobody’s willing to try and compromise. And that’s why we’re in Then, I think, why, you know, we’ve become so polarized in our politics.

3:00 Speaker 1 Your new book, what do you talk about?

3:03 Speaker 2 So my new book is a historic spy thriller based on facts that you know. Check this out. Albert Einstein actually lived on Long Island in nineteen thirty nine, and while he was there, he in truth wrote a letter to FDR telling him that Adolf Hitler was going to develop and going to have an Adam Baum that could

3:25 incinerate the world. And he tells Roosevelt, you’ve got to develop one, and we can’t allow Hitler to get one before us. And so it’s a spy thriller about Albert Einstein and these Nazis who are after Einstein tried to kill him. I put it all together in a book called The Einstein Conspiracy, and I’ve been doing book tour.

3:46 On May twenty ninth, I’ll be at Bookhampton in Easthampton talking about the book with a guy named Chris Pavoni who’s a New York City author who wrote an amazing criminal thriller called The Doorman. So we’ll be together at Bookhampton on twenty ninth.

4:00 Speaker 1 Well, I look forward to seeing you, and whether it’s Southampton or East Hampton, I’m looking forward to you seeing you in Suffolk County and talking about the book, and you promoting other people’s books too.

4:13 Speaker 2 Yeah. We have this amazing book fair next weekend. It’s called the Gold Coast Forum. It’s next Saturday and Sunday. We’ve got one hundred and fifty authors that satisfy every interest. So I’ve got my boyhood hero, Mookie Wilson, the hero of the nineteen eighty six mess is going to be with us on Sunday and he’s hosting a barbecue. We’ve

4:32 got Susan Lucci and Joan London on Saturday. A Republican Congresswoman Alista Fannik has written a very provocative book about growing anti Semitism on college campuses. She’s going to be with us in HW Brands, who has a new biography about George Washington. So one hundred and fifty authors right in downtown Oyster Bay at the Gold Coast Book Fair.

4:54 Speaker 1 Well. Thank you so much, and I look forward to seeing you, and.

4:58 Speaker 2 I can’t wait.

4:58 Speaker 1 Let’s let look, let’s put all Americans back together again so we could have a peaceful and a glorious United States of America. Thank you so much.

5:09 Speaker 2 I’m with you. Thanks John