Terry Gross

Neurobiologist Susan R. Barry was born cross-eyed, and for most of her life, she saw the world in two dimensions, instead of three. But in her late 40s, Barry retrained her brain and her eyes to perceive the world in a new way. She explains how her vision -- and her whole sense of self -- changed in her memoir, Fixing My Gaze.

Everything you wanted to know about bug sex (but didn't bother to ask) is explained in a new book. Insect expert Marlene Auk describes how ants learn, why some crickets don't chirp and how various bugs mate in Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love and Language from the Insect World.

The Vidocq Society is a Philadelphia-based group of criminologists and forensic experts; they gather together once a month to solve cold cases. Writer Michael Capuzzo explains what it was like to shadow the crime-fighters in The Murder Room.

In Crude World, journalist Peter Maass argues that our relentless pursuit of oil has created a host of problems in the world — particularly in the countries that hold the most deposits. He explains why our dependence on the fossil fuel is not without social and environmental costs.

During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500 people across New York City — many of them tenement-dwellers. In Hot Time in the Old Town, historian Ed Kohn describes the disaster — and how a little-known police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt championed the efforts to help New Yorkers survive the heat.

Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum followed President Obama and his advisers around for a day this summer. He says the modern-day presidency would be unrecognizable to previous chief executives -- "thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systematic corruption and disintegrating media."

Jonathan Eig's new book Get Capone reveals new insights about the famous Chicago gangster — including how freely he spoke to reporters, the time he shot himself in the groin, and how venereal disease eventually robbed him of his health and sanity.

Post-modern writer David Mitchell pulls off an old-fashioned yet action-packed tale in his fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet. The story follows Jacob, a bookkeeper at an outpost of the Dutch East Indies Company, as he falls for a local midwife in early 19th century Japan.

Will Ferrell plays a cop who prefers pushing paper to chasing criminals in the new comedy from his frequent collaborator Adam McKay. Actor and director join Fresh Air to discuss how they prepared for the buddy-cop film.

In 2008, jazz pianist Fred Hersch slipped into an AIDS-related coma for more than two months. When he came out of the coma, he couldn't walk, eat or play piano. Hersch explains how he rebuilt himself after his illness and composed music for his latest album, Whirl.