Terry Gross

Rubin worked with Johnny Cash for the last 10 years of Cash's life, collaborating on four critically acclaimed and Grammy award-winning albums (American Recordings, Unchained, American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around.) At the time of Cash's death, they were collaborating on a box set that collects many unreleased tracks from those previous sessions, as well as a best-of CD. The five-CD collection is called Unearthed.

This was originally broadcast on WKSU in Kent, Ohio.

He's a former senior producer for CBS News and CNN with three Emmys to his credit. For the past 30 years he's lived with multiple sclerosis, even continuing to work in a war zone shortly after the diagnosis and with failing eyesight. He's written a new memoir called Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness/A Reluctant Memoir.

A new book investigates Operation Condor, the secret alliance between six Latin American military dictatorships in the 1970s. It was formed to track down the regimes’ enemies and assassinate them. Author John Dinges is a former managing editor of NPR News, and has written for The Washington Post and Time. He teaches journalism at Columbia University. His book is The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents.

His new book is The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Shipler is a former reporter for The New York Times. He's also written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. His book Arab and Jews: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land won the Pulitzer Prize.

Sheffer is the founder, conductor and artistic director of the New-York based orchestra. The group is known for the diversity of its musical program and rediscovering neglected works. They've performed works by Wagner, George Gershwin, Franz Schubert, Philip Glass and Paul Bowles. In March, the orchestra will perform the U.S. premiere of the Jonathan Dove adaptation of Wagner's The Valkyrie.

His songs include "By The Time I Get to Phoenix," "Up Up and Away," "Wichita Lineman," "Macarthur Park," "Galveston," "Didn't We," "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "All I Know." His songs have been recorded by Glenn Campbell, Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstadt, Art Garfunkle and the Fifth Dimension. At one point in the 1960s, he had five Top 10 hits within a 20-month period.

Health and Science writer Carl Zimmer's new book is Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain-and How it Changed the World. It's about Thomas Willis, the scientist whose research on the workings of the brain during the 17th century became the basis of modern neurology. Zimmer's work appears regularly in The New York Times, National Geographic, Newsweek, Discover, Natural History, and Science. He is also a John S. Guggenheim Fellow and received the Pan-American Health Organization Award for Excellence in International Health Reporting.

Artist and photographer Joseph Scheer is a professor of print media and co-director of the Institute of Electronic Art at Alfred University in New York. Over the last few years he's collected more than 20,000 specimen of moths. He then photographed them up close, capturing the varied colors and patterns not visible to the naked eye. He's collected them in the new over-sized book, Night Visions: The Secret Designs of Moths. It includes an introduction by Marc Epstein, a Lepidopterist (moth expert) at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institute.

He is the editorial page editor of The Rutland Herald in Vermont, where he won that paper's first Pulitzer for his series of editorials in support of same-sex unions. He's the author of the new book, Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage. Vermont became the first state in the country to make civil unions legal for gay and lesbian couples. In 1999, the state Supreme Court ruled that gay couples were due the legal rights of marriage, and told the state legislature to decide how best to do that.