Listen to Support it, WNYC Studios. Brian Lear on

on WNYc. Jonathan Alter is with a columnist documentary filmmaker, author of best-selling books

about President Obama, FDR, and Jimmy Carter. Some of you will remember 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 is 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

...