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"Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America"

By Rich Fisher

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kwgs/local-kwgs-978645.mp3

Tulsa, Oklahoma – On today's show, we chat with the Michigan-based English professor and author Thomas Foster, whose new book is called "Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America: How White Whales, Green Lights, and Restless Spirits Forged Our National Identity." Did you know that the conceptual basis for the "Leathal Weapon" movies goes all the way back to the work of James Fenimore Cooper? Or that Ben Franklin had planned to publish a sequel to his famous "Autobiography" --- but never got it finished? Foster shares many a lively literary anecdote with us on today's program, and in doing so both explains and defends his own (admittedly personal) Greatest Books of the American Canon selection. Foster --- whose previous books include the popular "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" --- is, as Publishers Weekly once noted, "a witty, quirkily provocative, and perceptive literary critic."