Sundays at Eight: 25 Years of Stories from C-SPAN'S Q&A and Booknotes

by Brian Lamb

For the last 25 years, Sunday nights at 8pm on C-SPAN has been appointment television for many Americans. During that time, host Brian Lamb has invited people to his Capitol Hill studio for hour-long conversations about contemporary society and history. In today's soundbite culture that hour remains one of television's last vestiges of in-depth, civil conversation. First came C-SPAN's Booknotes in 1989, which by the time it ended in December 2004, was the longest-running author-interview program in American broadcast history. Many of the most notable nonfiction authors of its era were featured over the course of 800 episodes, and the conversations became a defining hour for the network and for nonfiction writers. In January 2005, C-SPAN embarked on a new chapter with the launch of Q and A. Again one hour of uninterrupted conversation but the focus was expanded to include documentary film makers, entrepreneurs, social workers, political leaders and just about anyone with a story to tell. To mark this anniversary Lamb and his team at C-SPAN have assembled Sundays at Eight, a collection of the best unpublished interviews and stories from the last 25 years. Featured in this collection are historians like David McCullough, Ron Chernow and Robert Caro, reporters including April Witt, John Burns and Michael Weisskopf, and numerous others, including Christopher Hitchens, Brit Hume and Kenneth Feinberg. In a March 2001 Booknotes interview 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt described the show's success this "All you have to do is tell me a story." This collection attests to the success of that principle, which has guided Lamb for decades. And his guests have not disappointed, from the dramatic escape of a lifelong resident of a North Korean prison camp, to the heavy price paid by one successful West Virginia businessman when he won 314 million in the lottery, or the heroic stories of recovery from the most horrific injuries in modern-day warfare. Told in the series' signature conversational manner, these stories come to life again on the page. Sundays at Eight is not merely a token for fans of C-SPAN's interview programs, but a collection of significant stories that have helped us understand the world for a quarter-century.

498 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 29, 2014

Reviews

[Barry Cunningham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the day my wife and I were longtime fans of Booknotes and Q&A on C-SPAN on those mythical Sunday evenings at 8. So this book of essays distilled from some of those interviews brought back some of that enjoyment.
That being said, the selections in this anthology perhaps were not what would have been my first choices among the over 1300 episodes aired. But there are more books by Brian Lamb drawing on other interviews. I won't mind reading more.
The one thing that I truly missed was Brian Lamb's back and forth in his interviews with the authors. He was a really good interviewer. But a book is a different medium. You can't bottle that lightning. The interviews are still available online. They can still be mined for the delight they brought on those Sunday evenings and they are accessible any time.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always enjoyed watching the show on tv. I liked the book very much