It's the Brian Larra Show on WNYC.

Good morning everyone.

For this summer Friday, we've put together

some recent conversations, edited just a bit

for clarity and time, including Henry Lewis Gates on his latest book that looks at the role of literature in defining blackness.

Judith Butler re-examining gender 34 years after the release of her classic book, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity, plus praise for appliances that actually last, but we start with this conversation

from May.

You know how we like to talk about history on this show and related to the present?

Well, we have a special guest who will take us on a 500-year ride through major social changes, he calls them revolutions, that have led us

to the America of today.

This will begin in the Netherlands, in the to the left versus right model that has so defined our politics and how we think about our

politics for generations.

Who can lead a 500 year history tour in one book and try to convey the arc of all that social change in one radio segment

it's Farid Zakaria, the Washington Post Foreign Affairs columnist and host of

GPS, the Sunday Global Affairs show on CNN.

His new book is called Age of Revolutions

Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the present.

We'll do this in two parts to follow the framing of the book, three revolutions from the past that

help set up today's world and then four revolutions that Fareed sees us in

the middle of today, each one in brief. revolutions that's

for ereid sees us in the middle of today each one in brief obviously to make it work on a radio show timeline

...