Terry Gross

Steven Bach's biography Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl examines the filmmaker who celebrated the Nazi ideal and created the Third Reich's iconic images in Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. Bach details Riefenstahl's ruthless, opportunistic ambition, analyzes her "self-righteous entitlement," and explores her relationships with Hitler, Goebbels and Albert Speer. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work.

Judd Apatow has been a writer for Larry Sanders and Ben Stiller, and he worked on the cult-favorite TV comedy Freaks and Geeks. But you'll know him as the writer-director of the hit film The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Now he's back with Knocked Up; guest host David Bianculli talks to Apatow and to Knocked Up star Seth Rogen, who plays an oafish slacker confronted with the prospect of fatherhood after a one-night stand.

Yanar Mohammed, an internationally renowned Iraqi activist, founded the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq to advocate for women's rights. It's an uphill fight: From the 1950s to the 1970s, Iraqi women could legally work, study, marry and divorce, and wear what they wanted, but the new constitution in Iraq, based on the Islamic Sharia law system, denies women the civil and social rights guaranteed to men.