Terry Gross

In his new memoir, writer Ken Foster talks about his experience in recovering and sheltering lost animals. His book is called The Dogs Who Found Me: What I've Learned from Pets who were Left Behind. Foster also contributed to and edited the collection Dog Culture: Writers on the Character of Canines.

Stephen Kinzer has reported from more than 50 countries for The New York Times and has been the paper's bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua. In his new book, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, he writes that in the past 110 years, America has overthrown 14 governments that displeased them for "ideological, political, and economic" reasons.

Come up with a list of the dream writing jobs in comedy and at least three of them are likely to come up on one man's resume: Ben Karlin is executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and co-executive producer of The Colbert Report, both on the cable channel Comedy Central. Before that, Karlin was editor of the satirical weekly newspaper The Onion.