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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com

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Everyone could use a refresher course in American history. And we’re not just talking about Dana Perino, the White House press secretary who didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was—and then admitted it publicly.

Last year two friends, David Kidder and Noah Oppenheim, wrote a book called "The Intellectual Devotional: Review Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class”—a collection of 365 cool facts, tidbits and anecdotes certain to make you a more well-rounded person (and get off the computer for a while). One entry per day. Entries such as The Atom, Whistler’s Mother, Hypnosis, Sodom and Gomorrah, Claude Monet, Idealism, Pragmatism. The book became a bestseller; they’ve got a great team of PhDs doing the research, the entries are fun to read, and now they’ve written another one: "The Intellectual Devotional, American History: Review Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation’s Past”.

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1. Noah, what’s your favorite entry?

My favorite is about Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to ever run for president. She was a colorful character. She was an advocate of free love. It’s one of those awesome little barroom trivia topics that form the rich tapestry of American history.

I support that, women running for president, and free love. Hey, don’t put that last answer in your 10 Questions.

2. But it’s a good answer, and we’re on the record. David, your favorite?

Central Park. I spent lots of time in New York City. The city built it because of all the immigration, because they felt public space and light was vital to the psychology of city dwellers. The park was designed with the intent to be classless, which is very American, very melting pot.

3. This is the age of Google and Wikipedia. Anyone with Internet access can get this information in an instant. Why the book?...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com

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Last week in New York the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) honored reporters from Pakistan, Russia, Mexico and China—journalists who have risked their lives investigating corruption, organized crime, arms smuggling, even the murder of three of their colleagues. When we called CPJ to hear more about the honorees, we learned that one, Gao Qinrong, from China, would not be attending because his government had denied him a passport.

Gao had uncovered a scam irrigation project in his home province—a striking example of local authorities’ self-aggrandizement and corruption. For writing that story, Gao spent eight years in prison; he was released last December. When CPJ asked us if we wanted to talk with him (through a translator), we of course leaped at the chance.

1. Mr. Gao, thanks so much for speaking with us, and let’s start, more or less, at the beginning. Tell us about the story you wrote that ultimately put you in prison.

It was about a fake irrigation project in Yuncheng, a city in Shanxi Province, which is southwest of Beijing. This project was costing the government about $38 million, and it was a scam.

It’s a region that doesn’t get much rain, so people are very dependent on the weather. In 1995, local leaders learned about a foreign irrigation technology that they thought might solve the region’s problems. It involved
building these large pools with pipes in the bottom to collect water. But the soil wasn’t the right quality. It was sandy and sticky, not suitable for this type of irrigation. Agriculture experts agreed from the start that it wouldn’t work, but the leader of the district, Huang Youquan, wanted personal glory, he wanted to enrich himself and enhance his reputation, so they began this huge building project.

2. Who were you working for at the time? Was this a story that your editors assigned?

I was working for the Xinhua News Agency, the state news agency. I found the story myself. One day I was traveling to Yuncheng from my home in Taiyuan, which is the provincial capital, and I overheard people on the train making jokes, in the form of a rhyme, or a proverb, about how whenever you walked down a road, there were these empty pools being built.

Of course I was very interested when I heard them talking, and I worked on the story for about a month...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com.

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With Thanksgiving coming up, food is on everyone’s mind. But it’s long been on the mind of Judith Jones, who’s just written a delightful book called “The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food.” Jones is now in her early 80s and continues to work as an editor at Knopf. She brought the diary of Anne Frank to the United States and edited such greats as John Updike, John Hersey (“Hiroshima”) and Anne Tyler.

And...she introduced us to Julia Child. When “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” wasn’t enough for Jones, she turned to finding talented cooks who could bring into our kitchens the secrets of Italian cooking (Marcella Hazan), Chinese cooking (Irene Kuo and Nina Simonds), Indian cooking (Madhur Jaffrey), good American cooking (James Beard and Edna Lewis), and more.

(By the way, the tenth muse is Gasterea, so summoned by Brillat-Savarin, a French politician and lawyer who lived during the French Revolution and loved food: “Tell me what you eat,” he wrote, “and I will tell you what you are.”)

So with palettes watering, we posed this week’s 10 Questions (well, OK, 11 since we felt like indulging ourselves) to Judith Jones.

1. The holidays are coming up. What are you making for Thanksgiving?

I always love a goose, not only because it’s delicious and rich, but you can put away all that good goose grease for the winter and use it for frying potatoes, all sorts of things. It’s pure fat, and now we’re learning it’s good for us! It’s not hydrogenated. And I’ll make stuffing with tart apples from Vermont, and chestnuts. Always chestnuts.

2. In “The Tenth Muse,” you talk about the food of your childhood—“unadulterated English-style food.” Your mother’s food shopping was “invariably done by phone, as though to keep a distance from the things of the earth,” and if you “indulged in appreciative sounds like ‘yum-yum,’” you could be sent from the table...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com

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This week the Evening News ran a two-part investigation of suicide among American war veterans. The war on terror continues Pakistan is in a state of emergency.

And we just celebrated Veterans Day. We thought it might be time to reach back into history for some perspective on today’s events, so we posed our 10 Questions to David Andelman, who’s written a book called “A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.” It’s set in Paris just after World War I (how ironic that it was once called “the war to end all wars”). Its major characters are the peacemakers who were present for the conference that would culminate in the Treaty of Versailles. But rather than building a lasting peace, Versailles helped set the stage for later conflicts and wars—World War II, Vietnam, Kosovo, the Middle East, Iraq.

Andelman is Executive Editor of Forbes.com, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and Paris correspondent for CBS News.

1. You’ve reported all around the world—Europe, Asia, Russia, the former Eastern bloc. When and where did you get the idea that Versailles more or less laid out the roadmap for the 20th century?

I’ve reported from more than 50 countries, and everywhere I’ve gone I’ve asked thoughtful people, people who care about and think seriously about their countries, “Where do you think your country went off the rails?” I thought they’d say the Cold War, the Second World War. But to a man, and a woman, the answer was, “After the treaty of Versailles.”

2. Rather than Versailles being a peace process, what you contend it did was to plant the seeds of all the conflicts and wars of the 20th century.

No question about it.

I didn’t go deeply into the Second World War because it’s such plowed territory, but there were economic demands on Germany that were catastrophic, which led to inflation, unemployment and misery in Germany in the 1920s—and the rise of Hitler.

But beyond that...take Vietnam. Nguyen Tat Thanh, who later changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, was working as a busboy at the Ritz. He had come to Paris to win independence for his homeland. He had set out from Saigon years before, traveling in the U.S., England and France to learn the languages and customs of the countries. And President Woodrow Wilson was in Paris talking about the self-determination of nations. Ho Chi Minh, who was a nationalist not a Communist at that point, presented demands to Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s adviser, and they were basically ignored. And so Ho Chi Minh went to Moscow...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com

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Any excuse to talk with Oliver Sacks is welcome, and now he has a new book, "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain."

Born in London in 1933, Dr. Sacks is a neurologist who trained at Oxford University and has lived and worked in New York since 1965. He’s taught at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and New York University. Just this past summer, he was appointed a professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University.

One of Dr. Sacks’s early books was "Awakenings," based on his experiences with a group of patients in the Bronx who contracted sleeping sickness after World War I and were frozen in sleep for decades. He treated them with L-DOPA, then a new drug, which, remarkably, “awakened” them. (The book was turned into an acclaimed film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.)

Other books include "Seeing Voices," about the world of the deaf, and the bestselling "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," a collection of case histories of patients with bizarre neurological conditions, told with Dr. Sack’s characteristic warmth and humanity. Eager to talk with Dr. Sacks, we posed our 10 Questions to him, and he asked us, in his charming British accent, if that was “rather like the 10 Commandments.”

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1. What’s your first memory of music?

Bach’s “Solfegietto.” I remember my brother Marcus, who was ten years my senior, learning it with our music teacher. No! No! No! the teacher, who was Italian, would say, pounding his fist. That piece of music was banged into my memory.

It’s a piano piece with a very Bach fugal structure. It’s formally intricate, but it also arouses an intense emotion that I can’t really describe. I think it was a rather jolly piece. But my brother died a couple years ago, and now it comes to me as if it were his signature tune, with an elegiac quality.

2. You open Musicophila with an anecdote from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. “Curiosity brings them down to the Earth’s surface to attend a concert,” you write, “they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his ‘great ingenuity’—while still finding the entire business unintelligible.” How would you describe the concept of music to one of those aliens?

I think one would have to say music is a form of expression and communication with no external reference like language or drawing but which can express and communicate emotions, moods, what human beings call the heart, as nothing else can. Music communicates being alive. The kinetic, quick aspect of music is very important.

I saw a little boy of three or four, who was dancing to whatever was going through his head. He wasn’t wearing an I-Pod. My immediate thought when I saw him was, No chimpanzee does this. Music and language is all rather human...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com

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Last month two critical milestones of this country’s civil rights movement had their 50th anniversaries: the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School and President Eisenhower’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The month also saw racial divisions and tensions coming to the fore in Jena, La., when the rural town drew demonstrators to its streets to protest the treatment of six black high school students, who were charged with beating a white student after a noose was hung from a tree in the school’s yard. Just yesterday House Democrats condemned the Department of Justice for not intervening.

For some perspective on the civil rights movement—its triumphs, its shortcomings, its current standing—we called Julian Bond. Now chairman of the NAACP and a professor of history at the University of Virginia, Bond has been on the forefront of civil rights all his life. As a college student in Atlanta in the late 1950s and early ’60s, he founded an organization to integrate the city’s theaters, lunch counters and parks. He went on to help found SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives—but it took Supreme Court intervention for him to be seated.

We posed our 10 Questions to him and found that he is still as provocative and challenging as he ever was.

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1. You were a very active participant in the civil rights movement. Looking back, what do you think the movement's greatest triumph was? And its failures?

The greatest triumphs were the passage of the '64 Civil Rights Act and the '65 Voting Rights Act. These two laws codified important demands of the then civil rights movement - access to public facilities and access to the franchise.

The movement's greatest failure – and it is immense - is its failure to convince our fellow Americans that racial discrimination remains a severe problem today. A majority of white Americans today by every poll believe black and white Americans have achieved equal status in the country - in fact, many believe equality was achieved by the time Martin Luther King died. And that complaints about inequality are from those who are just ingrates or discontents, who wouldn’t be satisfied with anything.

Despite ample evidence that there’s an enormous racial divide, people more and more think that if you live in a poor neighborhood, a place like the South Bronx, for example, it’s because you want to or because of some character flaw that makes it impossible for you to do any better. There’s nothing external about your situation, it’s all internal...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com.

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite. Five hundred miles above the Earth, it traveled at a speed of 18,000 miles an hour and circled the Earth every 96 minutes. Sent into space by the Russians, not the U.S., it rocked our assumptions about our place in the world and quickly became a pivotal moment in the history of U.S.-Soviet relations and the Cold War.

For some memories of Sputnik’s launch—and the impact it still continues to have on our society—we called Paul Dickson, who wrote Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. Published in 2001, it’s just been re-released; he’s also the co-writer on a new documentary, Sputnik Mania.

1. Your book is subtitled The Shock of the Century. Why “shock”?

Because the United States was by and large unprepared for the fact that the Soviet Union could do this. We didn’t think they had the technology.

We had thought we had two oceans to protect us, we realized that if the Russians could throw a satellite over the middle of America they could drop an ICBM on it.

The Russians had been saying they were going to do it, but nobody believed them. Everybody knew we’d be first. We’d come out of the Depression and World War II, we had the Salk vaccine, people were thriving. We saw the Russians as brutish people who couldn’t drive a tractor straight.

2. What was our initial reaction?

We immediately began to realize we were way behind in a lot of things. The Russians actually said, your color TVs, the tailfins on your cars, your Princess phone – they saw that Princess phone as the epitome of self-indulgence. You know there are serious people who have written that Sputnik killed the Edsel. It was a dreadful car with a dreadful name, people said at the time it looked like an Olds sucking a lemon. Sputnik had caught us in the middle of this materialistic fascination with toys.

And you can’t divorce Sputnik from what was going on here. President Eisenhower had sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock. Think of the contrast between what the Russians were doing, and here in this country you had white people spitting and cursing at black children just because they wanted to go to school...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor for CBSNews.com.

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With so much controversy swirling about the visit to the United Nations this week of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- and wild headlines galore -- we thought we needed some perspective.

So we called Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University, is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and is the author of “The Shia Revival” and “Democracy in Iran.”

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1. Many other world leaders came to New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly meeting, but we barely heard a word about them. Why is all the attention on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president?

His comments on wiping Israel off the map, his comments denying the Holocaust . . . he¹s a controversial fellow. He¹s in the crosshairs of the United States because not only have the two countries not had relations for the past 27 years, but Iran¹s profile has risen with its pursuit of nuclear technology. There¹s also the Iraq war. And Iran¹s been instrumental in supporting Hezbollah. They¹re a big player in Palestinian politics and in southern Iraq. So in the past two or three years, the Bush administration has viewed Iran as an impediment to the peace process.

So you have a president who¹s particularly bombastic, who presents the worst image of a country you¹re already having problems with. For the American public, Ahmadinejad captures the Bush administration’s demonization of Iran.

2. While the New York Daily News ran screaming headlines, ``Go to Hell`` and ``The Evil Weasel,” on Monday the New York Times ran a story headlined, ``U.S. Focus on Ahmadinejad Puzzles Iranians,” reporting that he has far less power than we tend to give him credit for. What’s the disconnect?

He doesn’ have that much power. The Iranian president is not the head of the Iranian state. The head of the state is the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Ahmadinejad, as head of the executive branch of the government, does have certain powers. He appoints ministers and governors. But he does not control the Parliament, the Judiciary. He does not appoint the commander of the military forces. And especially when we talk about the nuclear issue, he does not control the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council, the Assembly of Experts, all of these powerful councils that oversee elections and legislation. None of them are under his mandate. And the more powerful foundations that control most of the wealth of the country, those aren¹t under his command...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com.

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While Katie was in Damascus, interviewing Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, we hit the phones again.

Yesterday we posted our 10 Questions on Iraq with Reza Aslan, and we decided to pose another 10 Questions (well, OK, 11), on Syria, to Steven Cook.

He's a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, with expertise on Arab politics and U.S.-Middle East policy.

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1. In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Senator Joseph Lieberman
wrote that Syria has "an open door policy to terrorists" and that the regime is "playing travel agent for Al Qaeda in Iraq." Is this fair?

He's probably overstating the case when it comes to Al Qaeda. When he says Al Qaeda, it conjures up an image of Osama Bin Laden, of Ayman Zawahiri, of 9/11. After 9/11, based on everything I know, there was fairly good cooperation between the Bush administration and the administration of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. There is certainly reason for Syria to be concerned about Al Qaeda.

It is, however, well known that Syria hosts a variety of terrorist organizations. In the past Syria hosted the leadership of the PKK, or the Kurdistan Workers¹ Party, which targets Turkey. A variety of Palestinian terror organization, most notably Hamas, maintain a presence in Damascus.
It¹s also a transit point in the region and elsewhere for people who want to engage in jihad in Iraq.

Al Qaeda of Iraq, also known as Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, has links to, but they are not controlled by, the Al Qaeda whose leadership is suspected to be hiding out along the Afghan-Pakistan border. It remains unclear whether terrorists with direct links to bin Laden are transiting through Syria. The country has not been hospitable to them, so it seems less likely than Senator Lieberman suggests.

Nevertheless, he is correct in saying that Syria is a bad actor when it comes to terrorism...

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