April 14, 2000 - Tonight the Minnesota Book Awards will honor a St. Paul woman in recogntion of her lifelong love of reading. Jeanne Fischer will receive the Kay Sexton Award. At 90 years of age, Fischer still reads almost a book day. She gives book talks at clubs and churches, reviews books, writes poetry, reads to children and participates in her own book club. Fischer says her love of books began at an early age.
April 20, 2000 - Wyman Spano and Virginia Gray will be in the MPR studios to talk about the "political culture" of Minnesota and their new book, Minnesota Government and Politics.
April 21, 2000 - Authors and scientists Jill Schneiderman of Vassar College and Ed Buchwald of Carleton College will discuss their new book The Earth Around Us. The 30th anniversary of Earth Day is Saturday.
April 26, 2000 - Eugene McCarthy, former Minnesota senator and former presidential candidate, visits MPR studios to talk with Gary Eichten about politics, journalism, and 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War. McCarthy also answers listener call-in questions.
April 26, 2000 - MPR’s Bob Potter talks with Lee Pao Xiong, member of the Metropolitan Council, about what has changed in the past 25 years for the Hmong community. Xiong is the first Hmong appointed by the governor to a state policy-making body.
April 27, 2000 - An American Radioworks documentary, "Vietnam - A Nation, Not a War." MPR’s Daniel Zwerdling and Deborah George traveled to Vietnam to report on how the country and its people have fared in the past 25 years. Program contains three segments: History and Reconciliation Americans continue to brood about the purpose and the toll of the war. In Vietnam, it's called "The American War," and the anniversary is a time for victory celebrations. Still, many Vietnamese are eager to accept Americans as friends - and business partners. And many Vietnamese who sided with the U.S. during the war continue to suffer. The Legacy of Agent Orange Thousands of Americans who served in Vietnam suffer from diseases they say were caused by exposure to the defoliant called Agent Orange. In Vietnam, the health and environmental damage caused by the chemical is easy to see. But scientists say the impact of Agent Orange in Vietnam has not been sufficiently studied, so the extent of harm is difficult to judge. Vietnam's MIA's While U.S. officials continue to search for the remains of some 1,500 American soldiers who never came home from the Vietnam war, the number of missing Vietnamese soldiers may be 300,000 or more. Some Vietnamese have employed psychics to search for their missing relatives - with surprising results.
May 2, 2000 - In John Lanchester's new novel "Mr Phillips" the title character wakes to begin his first day in the ranks of the unemployed. He's been laid off, "downsized", and can't bring himself to tell his family. The book chronicles the first 12 hours of an experience which Lanchester told Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr many people go through, but few talk about.
May 8, 2000 - Celice and Joseph are lying on a beach: both are dead. From its opening scene, "Being Dead" the new novel from English writer Jim Crace, sets the idea of the biographical novel on its head. What seems at first to be a study in describing the process of decay becomes a compeling story of Joseph and Celice's rather ordinary lives. Crace juggles the story of their past and the story of their daughter discovering that her parents are dead Crace told Minnesota Public Radio's Stephanie Curtis the death of his own father 20 years ago inspired the novel .
May 12, 2000 - First there was the fish-cam, then the bear-cam…now visitors to the World Wide Web can see "Lake Superior Cam." A team of inventors have dropped a gadget into 30-feet of Lake Superior water just off Duluth. It will show anyone who's interested what's happening down there, 24 hours a day.
May 12, 2000 - A discussion about why people kill, and what pushes people over the edge to violence against strangers. Guests include Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes, author of Why They Kill: Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.