Terry Gross

Joel Selvin, the Rock Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, talks with Fresh Air Producer Amy Salit about the life of Grateful Dead band leader Jerry Garcia. Marin County officials in California say Garcia died early this morning of apparently natural causes. He was 53.

TV producer, writer, director and actor Garry Marshall. He's considered a "One man Who's Who" of Television. He's written for The Lucy Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Tonight Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Jack Parr Show, and Love American Style. He created 14 prime time sitcoms including Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy, The Odd Couple. During one week in 1979, Marshall boasted four of the top five rated TV shows.

Writer Clifton Taulbert grew up in the segregated South in the 1950s. His experiences growing up black in America are chronicled in his two memoirs When We Were Colored and the Pulitzer Prize nominated The Last Train North, (Penguin Books). Taulbert lives in Tulsa Oklahoma where he is a businessman. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Father Thomas Keating teaches the centuries old art of Contemplative Prayer This prayer is done without words and even without thoughts. Keating believes this opens the heart and mind to God. Keating teaches at the St Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. The Monastery also supports a network of prayer workshops through Contemplative Outreach Ltd. in Butler, New Jersey. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Veteran journalist Ben H. Bagdikian discusses the recent buyout offers for ABC & CBS. Bagdikian's book The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press 1983) examines the influence corporate ownership has on programming. Bagdikian newest book Double Vision, (Beacon 1995) is his personal memoir. He has been a Washington bureau chief and foreign correspondent for the Providence Journal, an assistant managing editor for the Washington Post and a dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Jo Giovannoni, she is the editor of Harley Women. She says the sound of a loud Harley can hardly be described as noise but finds the word "music" a better description and she says women are changing the image of "bikers."

Freelance firefighter Peter Leschak battles forest fires in the Northwoods and the West...He's not a smoke jumper he says, he’s a grunt-hiking to remote locations, putting out fires sometimes on his hands and knees-spark by spark. His memoir is called Hellroaring. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Novelist Jane Hamilton. Her novel A Map of the World (Anchor Books), is a searing account of guilt and forgiveness and an unflinching portrait of small town mean spiritedness. This is Hamilton's second novel, her first, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award in 1989. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Film critic Stephen Schiff has a review of the Gus Van Sant produced “Kids;" director Larry Clark’s first film.

This Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. We talk with James Yamazaki, the Japanese-American pediatrician who was sent to Nagasaki four years later to study the impact of radiation on children. Yamazaki has written a memoir about his life and work in Nagasaki called Children of the Atomic Bomb. He is currently clinical professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine at the University of California. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)