Terry Gross

Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's American Life In Poetry is a free weekly column providing a brief poem and description as a way to bring verse to the masses. Monday, Kooser won a Pulitzer Prize.

Robert Sullivan is the author of the book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (now out in paperback). It's about what he learned when he set out to observe the life of New York's rats. This interview was originally broadcast on April 5, 2004.

Edward Conlon's memoir, Blue Blood (now out in paperback) begins with his first days on the street as a cop and goes back three generations. His great-grandfather was a an "officer of dubious integrity" during the Tammany-era NYPD. Conlon also wrote the Cop Diary columns in The New Yorker, and is a graduate of Harvard. This interview was originally broadcast on April 14, 2004.

Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. As Syria is prodded to withdraw its troops — and influence — from neighboring Lebanon, the region faces potentially drastic changes.

State Department representative Elizabeth Dibble is the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Dibble addresses the question of the U.S. State Department policy toward Syria and Lebanon.

Rami Khouri is Palestinian-Jordanian, with a U.S. citizenship. He is an internationally syndicated political columnist and the host of Encounter, a weekly current affairs talk show on Jordan Television. He also hosts a weekly radio program, and he spent the 2001 academic year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow. He was editor-in-chief for the Jordan Times newspaper for seven years. He often comments on Middle East issues for the BBC, NPR and CNN.

DJ Kool Herc is the father of the breakbeat, the deejay practice of isolating and repeating "breaks," the most danceable portions of songs; breakbeats make up the foundation of modern hip-hop. Herc has written the introduction to the new book Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (St.Martins, 2005) by Jeff Chang.

Writer Samuel G. Freedman's new book is Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life. Freedman's mother died many years ago, when he was just 18, and as he approached his mother's age when she died, he decided to find out all about her life. The result is a narrative fueled by facts.

Donald Kroodsma is a renowned specialist in the interpretation of bird songs. His new book, The Singing Life of Birds, describes how birds communicate and why. But Kroodsma is also the subject of another book — about those who listen to birds.

In the past several months, singer Marianne Faithfull has released two CDs: a two-disc set of her hits, and Before the Poison, which includes tracks written by PJ Harvey.