Terry Gross

Novelist Benjamin Cheever. He's written a second novel, "The Partisan," (Atheneum). It follows on the heels of his first novel, "The Plagiarist." Both books are funny novels. Of his first, one reviewer wrote, "Wit and pathos, so finely meshed they become inseparable, buoy the main events in this achingly funny first novel. . . This is a touching, entertaining debut." Ben is the son of the late writer John Cheever. In writing his novels Ben said he finally found his own voice, separate from his father's.

Film director John Schlesinger. He started his career directing publicity films on the making of "The Guns of Navarone"; his first feature film was "Terminus," a documentary on 24 hours in the life of the enormous Waterloo train station.

Film critic Stephen Schiff on the new comedy: "Ace Ventura, Pet Detective."

Actress and Stanford Theater Professor, Anna Deavere Smith. She performs solo, multi-casted pieces, the scripts of which are created from interviews she did with people who lived thru events of social upheaval. "Fires in the Mirrors" (aired on PBS) gave voice to the many facets of the Crown Heights riots. Her new show "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992", condenses 170 interviews Smith conducted with 21 Los Angelenos, including: Darryl Gates, Reginald Denny, Rodney King's aunt, and a Korean shopkeeper (whose lines are spoken in perfect Korean and translated overhead).

Comedienne and superstar Roseanne Arnold. Her show "Roseanne" debuted in 1988 and has consistently been a top TV series. She has often made news--she forced out the show's executive producer in a dramatic confrontation, she went public with accusations of incest, she performed a controversial rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" at a baseball game. In 1989, she published her first book, "Roseanne: My Life as a Woman" which became a best seller. Now she has written "My Lives" (Ballantine Books).

Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak. Sprinzak has written a book called "The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right" (Oxford University Press 1991). He follows the emergence in Israel since 1984 of a radical right-wing movement shaped by religious fundamentalism, extreme nationalism and aggressive anti-Arab sentiment. Sprinzak believes that the influence of the radical right pervades Israeli politics and culture as well as Arab-Israeli relation. He sees Israel's radical right exercising increasing control over the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Donna Williams. Her first book "Nobody Nowhere" offered a journey through the mysterious condition of autism; it was an international bestseller. Once her case was properly diagnosed, Williams began therapy which took her out of the "world under glass" and into the real world of speech and emotion. This treatment is the subject of her new book "Somebody, Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism" (Times Books).

Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist at MIT and director of its Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has a new book on how language works: "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" (Morrow). He argues that language is not simply a cultural invention taught by parents and schools, but a biological system, --an instinct-- partly learned, and partly innate. To Pinker, a three year old toddler is a "grammatical genius", capable of obeying adult rites of language, similar to web-spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.

Journalist Misha Glenny. Glenny has been covering the war in former Yugoslavia--first as correspondent for the BBC and now as an independent journalist. He is the author of the book "The Fall of Yugoslavia." He will talk about the recent mortar attack on the market in Sarajevo and the effects of the recent downing by NATO forces of four Serbian warplanes.

Commentator Gayle Pemberton comments on Black History Month.