Terry Gross

Writer Howard Rheingold. In his newest book, "The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier" (Addison- Wesley) he argues that although computer mediated communication has made it possible for people to have access to almost anything, it is dangerous as well. Rheingold says individuals must keep using the internet as a way to express their views or they will loose the ability to do so, as the government and large corporations become more aware of the technology's capabilities.

Middle East expert and British hostage in Beirut, Terry Waite. While in Lebanon in 1987, as an Anglican Church envoy to negotiate the release of hostages there, Waite himself was captured. He was held for 1,763 days (nearly five years); four years of that time was spent in solitary confinement. He had made numerous trips to the Middle East to negotiate hostage releases in Tehran and Beirut, and was no stranger to the danger of factional conflicts: in 1969 Waite and his wife narrowly escaped the Idi Amin coup in Uganda.

Bill Littlefield. He's a writer and regular sports commentator on NPR's "Morning Edition." Littlefield has a new book about baseball, "Baseball Days: From the Sandlots to the Show" (Bulfinch Press). Littlefield has been in love with the game since he was a kid, "Baseball Days" is a sentimental look at America's favorite past-time.

Anne Lamott on her son's first asthma attack.

Jazz musician Joshua Redman. A self-taught tenor saxophonist, Redman has a new album, "Wish," which is his second album released this year. Redman won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 1991. Son of renowned free-jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman, Joshua Redman had the most influence from his mother who raised him alone. After Redman graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1991 he decided to pursue his love of jazz.

Writer Dagobero Gilb. His new book of short stories, "Magic of Blood" (University of New Mexico Press), offers fiction from the Chicano and Anglo working-class worlds of America's southwest. GILB's prosaic realism has been called by one critic, "the most lethal kind of fiction a Chicano can write".

Poet James Merrill. The son of the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage house, Merrill took to Europe at age 24, a newly published poet "meaning to stay as long as possible". That was in 1950. His new memoir "A Different Person" (Knopf) details his two and a half years there, and features encounters with psychoanalysts, new and old lovers, and Alice Toklas. Merrill is the author of eleven books of poems, the winner of two National Book Awards, the Bolligen Prize for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer. Kramer has written "Listening to Prozac" (Viking Books): an examination of the larger issues behind drugs that reshape temperament. Prozac is the most widely prescribed antidepressant today, with some four and a half million users since its introduction in 1987. Kramer raises serious questions about this "miracle mood enhancer": are we headed into an age of cosmetic pharmacology? If a pill is not used to alter an illness, but rather personality, what then is "the self"?

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews "The Beverly Hillbillies," the movie version of the popular TV series, starring Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin and Jim Varney.

Detective novelist James Crumley. It's been ten years since his last book. In Crumley's fourth novel, "The Mexican Tree Duck" (Mysterious Press), redneck detective C.W. Sughrue (pronounced Shoog-rue) returns. Crumley gets a lot of materials for his novels hanging out in bars in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. Crumley has written three other detective novels.