BRIAN HAS LEFT THE BUILDING:

After Many Million Pages, 'Booknotes' Ends Its Run (FRANK J. PRIAL, 12/04/04, NY Times)

The book that Mark Edmundson, a University of Virginia professor who is tomorrow night's guest on C-Span's best-known program, "Booknotes," will discuss is "Why Read?" More than just a touch of paradox is involved. That question is what the program's host, Brian Lamb, has been addressing weekly for 15 years.

But he won't anymore. Tomorrow's program will be the 801st and last "Booknotes," ending a string that began when Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared on April 2, 1989, to discuss his "Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century."

"It was time," Mr. Lamb, 63, said the other day over breakfast in New York. "Now I won't have to read a book a week just for the show." [...]

"Booknotes" traces its beginnings in the literary side of public affairs to 1988 and a three-hour conversation Mr. Lamb had with the author Neil Sheehan about his book "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam."

"Everyone was waiting for that book," Mr. Lamb recalled. "Long after the Vietnam War ended, it was still discussed in Congress, which was and is still our bread-and-butter programming fare." The Sheehan interview was turned into a special series that ran in weekly half-hour segments beginning on Sept. 14, 1988. "The viewer response was such that it became clear that there was an audience for a long-form author interview program."

In the main, "Booknotes" books have been devoted to history, politics and public policy, but a few others have slipped through. For instance, on Jan. 23, 2000, the violinist Isaac Stern discussed his memoir, "My First 79 Years." Mr. Stern could be said to qualify for "Booknotes" if only because his successful campaign to save Carnegie Hall from the wrecking ball was considered by many to be a triumph of well-managed public policy.

"Booknotes" has always broadcast at 8 p.m. on Sundays, so as not to conflict with C-Span's live coverage of the House of Representatives, which Mr. Lamb calls the channel's "core programming commitment."

C-Span was created in 1979 as a collective effort by the cable television industry. The cable companies have never asked for ratings, so C-Span has never taken them. "We have no idea how many people watch 'Booknotes,' " Mr. Lamb said. However, in 1994, to celebrate the program's fifth anniversary, viewers were told that the first 500 to send in self-addressed envelopes would get commemorative bookmarks. More than 10,000 people wrote. They all got bookmarks. [...]

"Our biggest problem is balance," Mr. Lamb said. "Lots of liberals write books, and lots of publishers put them out. There are only a handful of conservative houses like Regnery and Free Press, but I think that's changing now. I hope so."

He confesses to no political orientation and has never been a member of a political party, although he did work for two months on a Nixon presidential campaign. "I am a card-carrying generalist," he said, "and I am not an intellectual."

A native of Indiana, a graduate of Purdue and a Navy officer during the Vietnam War, Mr. Lamb has lived in Washington most of his life. For a time in the 1970's he worked in the White House telecommunications office, then spent four years at a trade publication called Cablevision Magazine. "That's where I first pitched the idea of C-Span," he said.

"Booknotes" has had other spinoffs. Mr. Lamb noticed that many of his guests brought up Alexis de Tocqueville in their conversations, so he did a special series on that author, who wrote "Democracy in America." Before they were finished retracing Tocqueville's journey in the United States, they also visited his ancestral home in Tocqueville, France. The result was a nine-month series on Tocqueville's 1831 travels through the new nation.

BOOKNOTES: Why Read? by Mark Edmundson (C-SPAN, December 5, 2004
, 8 & 11 pm)

We've few enough civic institutions that the passing of such a one is ineffably sad.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 5, 2004 7:21 PM