C-SPAN 1 & 2 (times e.t.)

This Sunday Q&A (8:00 p.m. and again 11:00) on C-SPAN 1 features Mel Watt, Chair of the Black Caucus and representative from N. Carolina.

On CSPAN 2 BookTV goes to a 3-day week-end, celebrating President’s Day. Appropriately, on After Words

Doug Wead, former special assistant to President George H.W. Bush discusses his book: The Raising of a President: The Mothers and Fathers of our Nation’s Leaders. He is interviewed by historian & author Harold Gullan.

Saturday night at midnight last week’s After Words, an interview of Natan Sharansky by Tom Gjelten will be rerun. While it does not have Buchanan providing a foil (as Jonathan pointed out in his post), this hour, too, is both interesting and inspiring. Following is Jared Diamond, who is a good deal less optimistic about the human spirit in his Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Paired last week, this time they are separated; still, Michael Crichton offers a counter argument Sunday morning (10:45) with his State of Fear.

BookTV schedule.

This weekend History on Book TV will be Jeffrey Kluger’s Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio (Monday 12:00 a.m.); Public Lives is Lindsay Moran’s Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy (Sat 11:00 p.m. and Sunday 11:15 p.m.) and Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Saturday 10:30 p.m.). Encore Booknotes is George Soros: The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (Saturday 7 pm.).

Issues (other than history) of possible interest to readers of this blog:

Privacy in the electronic age: Robert O’Harrow, Jr. No Place to Hide.

Outsourcing and problems with our educational system: Todd Buchholz’s Bringing the Jobs Home: How the Left Created the Outsourcing Crisis — and How We Can Fix It , Sunday 12:45 pm.

A book about software pioneers – Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts–The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution, by Steve Lohr will air at 2:45 a.m. Monday morning.

This week-end includes biographies of presidents from Joseph Ellis’s Washington to panels with John Dean giving his take on the current Bush presidency.