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Moyers & Company

Rewriting The Story of America (#151)

The life and work of Junot Diaz contains many worlds -- and that makes him all the more worth listening to. His books, including National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her and Pulitzer Prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, journey between the old and the new, and between the America that was and the America we're becoming. Born in the Dominican Republic, but raised in New Jersey and American to the core, Junot Diaz is a spotter of the future, a curator of the past, a man of the here-and-now. Diaz joins Bill Moyers on the next Moyers & Company (check local listings) to discuss the evolution of the great American story. Along the way he offers funny and perceptive insights into his own work, as well Star Wars, Moby Dick, and America's inevitable shift to a majority minority country. "There is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself and projects itself, and the reality of this country," Diaz tells Bill. "Whether we're talking about the Latino community in North Carolina, a whole new progressive generation of Cuban Americans in Florida, a very out queer community across the United States, or an enormous body of young voters who are either ignored or pandered to, I think we're having a new country emerging that's been in the making for a long time, and that I think for the first time is revealing itself more fully to the entire country." [56 minutes] Closed Captioning

This episode has not aired in the past few months on Iowa Public Television.

Series Description: Bill Moyers returns on-air and online in January 2012 with MOYERS & COMPANY, a weekly hour of compelling and vital conversation about life and the state of American democracy, featuring some of the best thinkers of our time. A range of scholars, artists, activists, scientists, philosophers and newsmakers bring context, insight and meaning to important topics. The series occasionally includes Moyers' own timely and penetrating essays on society and government. In a multimedia marketplace saturated with shallow sound bites and partisan name-calling, MOYERS & COMPANY digs deeper. As the Los Angeles Times put it in 2010, "No one on television has centralized the discussion of ideas as much as Moyers... He not only gives a forum to unusual thinkers, he is truly interested in what they have to say and who they are because he believes their ideas really matter. "

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