09/03/2011

This week Libby Purves is joined by Clarence B Jones, Carodoc King and Yangzom Brauen. Clarence B Jones was the co-author of the 'I Have a Dream' speech and a close confidant to Martin Luther King himself. He was there, on the road, collaborating with the great minds of the time, and hammering out the ideas that would shape the civil rights movement. He is the sole survivor of those who had direct participation in these events. His book 'Behind the Dream', co-written by Stuart Connelly, is published by MacMillan. Carodoc King is a leading literary agent. In his memoir 'Problem Child' he tells of his childhood growing up in the 1950s in a large and eccentric family in Essex. He was treated harshly by his mother, sent to boarding school aged six and when he was fifteen found out he was adopted and a year later his parents removed him from school and ejected him completely from the family. With a natural survival instinct he got a place at Oxford, and thirty years later he goes in search of his natural family. 'Problem Child' is published by Simon & Schuster. Yangzom Brauen's grandmother Kunsang was one of Tibet's youngest nuns, who escaped the Chinese invasion of her country with her young family. They fled over the Himalayas to India, where they spent several years in refugee camps where both her husband and younger child died. She and her daughter eventually went to live in Switzerland, where Yangzom was born. She is now an actress living in Los Angeles and very involved with the Free Tibet movement. Kunsang is still alive and in her nineties. Their story is told in the book 'Across Many Mountains: Three Daughters of Tibet', published by Harvill Secker.