Janny Scott & Joseph Lelyveld: The Couple Interviews Each Other About Research, Reporting and the Trials of Writing A Historic Book

Janny Scott & Joseph Lelyveld: The Couple Interviews Each Other About Research, Reporting and the Trials of Writing A Historic Book

Joseph Lelyveld was the Executive Editor of The New York Times from 1994 to 2001. He has written three books Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White which received a Pulitzer Prize, Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop and his most recent Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle With India.

In Great Soul: Mahatma Gandi and his Struggle with India, Lelyveld writes, that Gandi “struggled with self-doubt until his last days,” and “made the predicament of the millions his own, whatever the tensions among them, as no other leader of modern times has.”

Janny Scott was part of the team of reporters in 2001 that won the Pulitzer Prize for National reporting for the New York Times. She left the Times in 2009, to write “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother.

We heard little about Obama’s mother except that she was a single white woman from Wichita, Kansas until Scott’s book. Scott gives us a full and compelling picture of this bright, strong, disciplined character, and how she raised and strongly influenced her son, the 44th president of the United States.