Terry Gross

Writer Nick Hornby's novel, About a Boy, has been made into a film starring Hugh Grant and Toni Collette. It opens Friday, May 17. Hornby also wrote the novel High Fidelity, which became a hit film of the same name starring John Cusack. This interview first aired Sept. 26, 1995.

Sherpa Jamling Tenzing Norgay was Climbing Leader for the 1996 Everest IMAX Filming Expedition and summitted the Mountain that year. He's also the son of Tenzing Norgay, one of the first men in history to summit Mt. Everest. In his book, Touching My Father's Soul, Jamling Norgay recounts his 1996 Mt. Everest ascent: the climb and its familial meaning. He now heads Tenzing Norgay Adventures, which is based in India. This interview originally aired April 19, 2001.

Journalist Scott Anderson. He traveled with a platoon of elite Isreali commandos into the West Bank and wrote about it in the article "An Impossible Occupation" which was the cover story of last Sundays New York Times Magazine.

Since September 11th, Joel Meyerowitz has taken over 7000 photographs of Ground Zero. He gained unlimited access to the site and did so in conjunction with the Museum of the City of New York. A selection of those pictures can been seen in the May 20th issue of The New Yorker.

Architecture critic for The New Yorker Paul Goldberger discusses the different ideas for what to do with the site of the World Trade Center.

Writer, musician and broadcaster Jamie Bernstein Thomas. She is the daughter of composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. She hosts The New York Festival of Song on WQXR which features highlights from that concert series. She and her siblings founded the Bernstein Education Through the Arts (BETA) Fund. On Friday, May 24th she will be the speaker for a production of Leonard Bernstein Symphony No. 3, Kaddish based on the Jewish liturgical prayer. The concert will be part of the Cinncinnati May Festival held at Cincinnati historic Music Hall.

Maria Rosa Menocal is a R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is also the author of the new book: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown). Menocal details Andalucia, Spain from 786 to 1492 where literature, science, and tolerance flourished.

This year marks the centennial of the birth of composer Richard Rodgers. He was born on June 28, 1902. Rodgers was one of Americas most prolific and best-loved composers. He collaborated with Lorenz Hart on the songs "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady is a Tramp," "Blue Moon" and "Bewitched." Later he went on to collaborate with Oscar Hammerstein on the musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. Well hear a concert of Rodgers songs performed by singer Rebecca Kilgore and pianist Dave Frishberg.

Writer Alec Wilkinson is the author of new memoir, My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin) about his relationship with writer and editor William Maxwell. Maxwell was fiction editor for the New Yorker from 1936-1976 and worked with such authors as J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty and scores of others. Maxwell was the author of a number of novels, including Time Will Darken It, and So Long, See You Tomorrow, as well as several short story collections. He died at the age of 91 in August 2000.

Comic Phyllis Diller. She retired from doing stand-up last Sunday after nearly half a century on the stage. She is 84.