Brian Lair on WNYC, Jonathan Alter is with a columnist, documentary filmmaker, author of best-selling books about presidents Obama, FDR, and Jimmy Carter.

Some of you will remember we just recently had Jonathan here on the occasion of Carter's 100th birthday in our 100-year series.

And now he has a new book that's partly about another former president and partly about himself.

It's called American Reckoning, Inside Trump's Trial and My Own. Jonathan,

always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC. Great to be here, Brian. So the centerpiece of the book

I'll tell everybody is your 23 days as a journalist covering the Trump hush money cover-up trial

in person in the courtroom in New York. but you start the book with some autobiography.

So let's start there now.

You describe your mother as the Jackie Robinson of gender politics in Chicago when you

were growing up.

Really?

How was she that?

So I was born in 1957 and about 10 years earlier, my mother was a student at Mount Holyoke College,

and she gave Eleanor Roosevelt, the most famous woman in the world, a tour of Mount Holyoke. And Eleanor said,

Now, where do you live, Joanne? And she said, oh, on the other side of campus, I want to see your

dormitory. And Eleanor got there and plopped down on my mother's bed. My mother was from a non-political

Jewish family in Chicago. and she says to her,

now, Joanne, you tell me all about yourself.

Where are you from?

What are you interested in?

How do you want to make a better world?

And this just had a transformational impact on my, my mother, my late mother.

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