Alex Prud'homme

Julia Child is widely credited with single handedly teaching America about the pleasures of good cooking with her groundbreaking cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef. She would have turned 100 years old on August 15, and to celebrate her contributions to cooking and culture, the Leonard Lopate Show Book Club selection for August-September is her memoir, My Life in France, written with her grand-nephew Alex Prud’homme. He joins us to talk about her life, how she learned to cook in France, and how she became a brilliant teacher and writer. When she passed away in 2004, she and Alex were working on the book, about what Julia Child described as the best years of her life, and Alex finished it and published it in 2006.

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Alex Prud'homme tells the evolving story of freshwater—as the climate warms and the world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-first Century investigates the state of our water infrastructure, the supply and quality of water, how secure our water supply is, new sources of water, and discusses whether the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.

Randy Newman captured a moment of national anger in "Burn On," a song about the polluted Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969. That environmental disaster pushed Congress and the Nixon administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency and pass laws like the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. But today's guest warns that these laws are woefully outdated, and that clean water is becoming increasingly scarce. Access to freshwater, he argues, is the most urgent problem we face in the twenty-first century.