Terry Gross

Executive producer and writer, Tom Fontana. He was writer and producer for the TV show, "St. Elsewhere." He's currently executive producer, along with filmmaker Barry Levinson, of "Homicide: Life on the Street," a new cop drama on NBC. Reviewers say it goes beyond formula to offer a "more complex psychological portrait" of crime fighters and criminals.

Attorney and writer Mary Frances Berry. She's a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and a professor of history and law at the University of Pennsylvania. She's written a new book about the tradition of "mother-care" in our society, the notion that women have principal responsibility for childcare.

Writer and professor Mary Jo Weaver teaches Religious and Women's Studies at Indiana University. Her new book is, "Springs of Water in a Dry Land." It's about the double bind that many Catholic women find themselves in, of either living within a institutionalized and oppressive church structure, or rejecting a church which is a source of spiritual enrichment. Weaver argues that it is possible for a woman to be a feminist and remain Catholic.

Medical writer Robin Marantz Henig is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Mirabella, and Vogue. Her new book, "A Dancing Matrix" is about the work being done to understand viruses. The field has taken on new urgency since the spread of the AIDS virus. Hening says scientists have realized that emergence of a new virus is not as rare as previously though, and that it's caused mostly by human error rather than genetic mutation.

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews "Mad Dog & Glory," starring Robert De Niro and Bill Murray.

New York Times journalist Jane Perlez has been covering Africa since 1988 and has been credited with recognizing stories before the rest of the media. She was reporting on the trouble in Somalia, and the threat of famine a year ago, long before it became the focus of world attention.

Journalist Ray Bonner lived in Africa from 1988 until January of this year. He has a new article in "Mother Jones" about why the U.S. sent Marines into Somalia. He questions our role as the world's "missionary." Bonner also reported from Central America. Just recently he was exonerated for reporting on a massacre in El Salvador. Officials denied the event, but archeologists have since uncovered a mass grave.

Sawyer's new television news magazine show, Day One, premieres this Sunday night on ABC. He was recognized for his reporting during the Gulf War, when he split off from the pack and brought in some of the earliest footage of surrendering Iraqi soldiers and the American liberation of Kuwaiti. Sawyer also subs for Ted Koppel on Nightline.

Investigative journalist Tom Powers has written a new book about the German attempt to get an atomic bomb, the threat that terrified American scientists and military during World War II. The book is "Heisenberg's War." At the center of the story is German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg. While other preeminent scientists left Germany with the rise of the Reich, Heinsenberg chose to stay to defend what was left of "good science." The program weapons program failed.

Journalist Robert Kaplan has been a foreign correspondent for "The Atlantic," and "The New Republic." In the 1980s and early 1990s, he was the first American writer to warn of the coming crisis in the Balkans. His latest book, "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History," is a political travel book about his journeys through southern Austria and Croatia, Old Serbia and Albania, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece.