Interview with Jon Pessah and David Talbot

Jon Pessah, author of "The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball's Power Brokers"

Jon Pessah's Website

Jon Pessah was a founding editor of ESPN the Magazine. He has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, managed the sports departments for Newsday and the Hartford Courant, and edited, wrote, and ran the investigative team for ESPN the Magazine.

The incredible inside story of power, money, and baseball’s last twenty years

In the fall of 1992, America’s National Pastime is in crisis and already on the path to the unthinkable: cancelling a World Series for the first time in history. The owners are at war with each other, their decades-long battle with the players has turned America against both sides, and the players’ growing addiction to steroids will threaten the game’s very foundation.

It is a tipping point for baseball, a crucial moment in the game’s history that catalyzes a struggle for power by three strong-willed men: Commissioner Bud Selig, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and union leader Don Fehr. It’s their uneasy alliance at the end of decades of struggle that pulls the game back from the brink and turns it into a money-making powerhouse that enriches them all.

This is the real story of baseball, played out against a tableau of stunning athletic feats, high-stakes public battles, and backroom political deals–with a supporting cast that includes Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, Joe Torre and Derek Jeter, George Bush and George Mitchell, and many more.

Drawing from hundreds of extensive, exclusive interviews throughout baseball, The Game is a stunning achievement: a rigorously reported book and the must-read, fly-on-the-wall, definitive account of how an enormous struggle for power turns disaster into baseball’s Golden Age.

David Talbot, author of "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government"

David Talbot's Website

David Talbot (born September 22, 1951) is an American progressive journalist, author and media entrepreneur. He is the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief[ of one of the first web magazines, Salon.com. Talbot founded Salon in 1995, when the web was still in its infancy, and is considered one of the pioneers of online journalism. Under Talbot’s leadership, the magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. It was described by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Net’s “few genuine must-reads”. Since leaving Salon, Talbot has established a reputation as a historian, working on the Kennedy assassination and other areas of “hidden history.” Talbot has worked as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine and a features editor for The San Francisco Examiner, and has written for Time magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and other publications. Talbot was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He attended Harvard Boys School, but did not graduate after falling afoul of the school’s headmaster and ROTC program during the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz, he returned to Los Angeles, where he wrote a history of the Hollywood Left, “Creative Differences”, and freelanced for Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. He later was hired by Environmental Action Foundation in Washington, D.C. to write “Power and Light,” a book about the politics of energy. After he returned to California, he was hired as an editor at Mother Jones magazine, and later, by San Francisco Examiner publisher Will Hearst to edit the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, Image. It was at the Examiner where Talbot developed the idea for Salon, convincing several of his newspaper colleagues to join him and jump ship into the brave new world of web publishing. Talbot is from a prominent media and entertainment family. He’s the son of longtime character actor and founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, Lyle Talbot. He is also the brother of documentary producer and former child actor Stephen Talbot, doctor Cynthia Talbot of Portland, Oregon, and journalist Margaret Talbot, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Talbot is married to writer Camille Peri, co-editor of the national bestseller Mothers Who Think, with whom he has two children. His eldest son, Joe Talbot, is an aspiring musician and filmmaker. His youngest son, Nathaniel, is a recent graduate of the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, a San Francisco public high school devoted to arts education. Talbot lives with his family in San Francisco.

An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful—and secretive—colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers.

America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials—including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials—Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.

Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA—which he used to further his public and private agendas—were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

An exposé of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state—and the battle for America’s soul.

Steve Murphy, Executive Producer & Host