August 25, 2025, 12:36pm
In this surging sea of celebrity book clubs, it’s nice to hear of an established brand wading into public letters. Shakes things up, anyway. Today, that brand is C-SPAN, the cable non-profit best known for bringing daytime television viewers straight into the high-octane halls of Congress.
This fall, perhaps acting on the suspicion that most of us don’t want to hang out in the Senate these days, C-SPAN will be launching some counter-programming.
America’s Book Club is “a dynamic new weekly primetime television series…designed to explore the ideas that shaped America’s past, challenge the nation’s present, and inspire our future.”
Hosted by David M. Rubenstein—lawyer, impresario, and billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group—the show will take viewers in and around Washington’s choicest archival sites. About town, C-SPAN will provide “unrivaled access” to founding documents, rare treaties, and other curios from the halls of antiquity. The show itself will center around interviews with impressive literary guests.
The initial episodes will find best-sellers on location at subject-suitable monuments. Skip Gates, John Grisham, José Andrés, Arthur Brooks, and—alas—Amy Coney Barrett are scheduled to chat around the proverbial fireside at the Library of Congress. Where Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff will converse at the National Archives.
We find a lone reed in David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon. His interview is the only one set to be taped so far at the Folger Shakespeare Library—for what I assume are theatrical reasons.
Given its slate criss-crossing the political spectrum, we can infer that America’s Book Club is angling to appeal to a wide audience.
That’s at least in part because the club is an open product of Trump-mandated “America 250” programming. C-SPAN’s “network-wide, multi-platform initiative dedicated to honoring, exploring and celebrating the 250th birthday of the nation” comes in response to the administration’s Orwellian cultural guidelines, as outlined earlier this year in that same spate of executive orders that would neuter the NEA.
So this American book club has a Pyrrhic quality. After all, it is the beneficiary of a call for semiquincentennial content that comes at the direct expense of less openly patriotic arts programs.
We may not have individual creative writing grants this year. But we will get a sit-down with some of the best-paid authors in the biz. Okay, okay—I’m being glib. But suffice to say, given the rank and file of the club, let’s hope those fancy guests really take the opportunity to challenge and inspire. Their hosts, and their viewers.
We’ve at least some reason to hope: America’s Book Club will be produced by several pros, like C-SPAN veteran Peter Slen, and Marie Arana, former editor of The Washington Post Book World and inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress.
