Robert Birnbaum

Name, Date of Birth, Web site if you have one: Robert Birnbaum, 20 February 1947, Identitytheory.com

Occupation title(s), both real and desired-in-another-lifetime: Journalist (writer/photographer/editor/creative director/publisher). I don’t have enough imagination to think what I might be in another lifetime.

What makes you laugh: Everything

Out of all the interviews you’ve conducted, the most enjoyable chat you’ve had: Very, very, very tough to answer. If I had to answer (you know, a gun to my head and all that), I will say that the three or four times I have talked with Richard Russo have been fun.

Heroes: Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel, Robert Frank, Angela Davis, IF Stone, Susan Meiselas, Anthony Braxton, Jose Marti, Eduardo Galeano, George Orwell

Unsung authors of the last century we’ll see revered in the next: I have no clue

Traits required in a good interviewer: I don’t know. I think you have to love your conversational partner. I am not particularly fond of Charlie Rose but the best interview I ever saw him do was with Henri Cartier-Bresson. I think he loved that man.

Favorite books:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Man With the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
• The English Patient, Micheal Ondaatje
• Los Gusanos, John Sayles
• Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros
• Ninety Two In The Shade, Thom McGuane
• Dreaming in Cuban, Christine Garcia
• Mile Zero, Thomas Sanchez
• In the Foreseeable Future, Reynolds Price
• Bargains in the Real World, Elizabeth Cox
• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
• Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
• The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks
• Immortality, Milan Kundera
• Wildlife, Richard Ford
• Burning Marguerite, Elizabeth Iness-Brown
• Shadow Play, Charles Baxter
• Imagining Argentina, Lawrence Thornton
• Nobody’s Fool, Richard Russo
• Even A Blind Man Can Tell I Love You, Amy Bloom
• Our House in the Last World, Oscar Hijuelos
• Enduring Love, Ian McEwen
• The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
• The Missing World, Margot Livesey
• Swordfish, David McLintock
• The Poet, Michael Connelly
• Plain Song, Kent Harouf
• House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• A Good Day To Die, Jim Harrison
• Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
• In the Cut, Susanna Moore
• Bullet Heart, Michael Doane
• The Devil’s Own Work, Alan Judd
• All Our Yesterdays, Robert Parker
• Being Dead, Jim Crace
• Almost Heaven, Marianne Wiggins
• Shelly’s Heart, Charles McCarry
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
• The World At Night, Alan Furst
• The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion
• The Hours, Michael Cunningham
• The World As I Found It, Bruce Duffy
• The Conformist, Albert Moravia
• Badland, Jonathan Raban
• Taking Lives, Michael Pye

This is an arbitrary list. If asked on another day, I think it might be different, give or take ten books...

Five words that sound great: Implore, Purloin, Mellifluous, Revolution, Dystopian

Charity worth giving to: Doctors Without Borders