What Matters Most In America Part Three – A Special Limited Series

This is the third episode in our ongoing series, What Matters Most in America.

It is Rodney Lawrence Hurst Sr. (read his book!) is a close personal friend and mentor. He is also a legendary civil rights activist and author. His personal eyewitness account, as President of the Jacksonville Florida Youth Council NAACP, of the events leading up to, and the fallout from, the bloody events of August 27, 1960. On that day, 200 ax handle and baseball bat wielding whites attacked members of the Jacksonville Youth Council NAACP, who were “sitting-in” at white lunch counters in downtown Jacksonville peacefully protesting segregation.

Robin Cook at WBUR to talk about his new novel, Pandemic. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
Robin Cook's literary career (read his latest book!) began with his first novel, The Year of the Intern, which he wrote underwater while on board the nuclear submarine Kamehameha. It was written to illustrate the less than salubrious psychological impact of graduate medical education on the psyche of young physicians. It was followed 5 years later in 1977 with Coma, which had been written at night while he was a senior ophthalmology resident and which was published while Dr. Cook was a student at the Kennedy School of Government. This novel created the genre of the medical thriller, and changed the public's perception as well as the media's portrayal of medicine. Prior to Coma, medicine was on the proverbial pedestal (e.g. Dr. Ben Casey and Marcus Welby, M.D.); post Coma, there were questions, meaning bad doctors and bad hospitals exist and should be avoided.
To date Robin Cook has written a total of thirty-three worldwide bestsellers, which have sold over one hundred million copies. Most all of Dr. Cook's books have been written to elucidate various medical/biotech ethical and public policy issues. From his first novel on, it had been Dr. Cook's intention to use entertainment as a method of doing this.
Laura Huang is a brilliant new voice with a fabulous new book out, ‘Edge, Turning Adversity Into Advantage.’ We touch on the importance of intuition, finding balance, what the Harvard Business School teaches, and so much more. Laura really opened up her heart here and had an insight that completely blew me away. What a gift to have her on the show.
Laura (read her new book!) is an associate professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit. Prior to joining HBS, she was an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Huang’s research examines early-stage entrepreneurship, and the role of interpersonal relationships and implicit factors in the investment decisions of financiers such as angel investors and VCs.
Her work studies the subtle signals and cues that often impact the behavioral perceptions of investors, which can lead to implicit bias in the investing process. Her research has been published in several academic journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has also been featured in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Nature. She has won a number of awards for her research, and was named one of the 40 Best Business School Pr...