Sheed wrote the text for The Kennedy Legacy, which features photographs of the late president. He joins Fresh Air to discuss his work as a critic and author. Sheed grew up interested in sports; a bout of polio turned him into an avid reader. His parents ran one of the largest Catholic publishing houses.
His new book is The New Great Game. The book is about the battle over the world's largest reserve of untapped oil and gas resources, located in the Caspian Sea and surrounding Central Asian republics. The oil alone is said to be worth $4 trillion. Kleveman claims that the United States, China, Russia and Iran are now engaged in a power struggle for control of the region's vast reserves and pipeline routes. Lutz Kleveman was born in Germany and studied at the London School of Economics.
In 2013, three young women who had vanished years earlier escaped from a house where they had been held captive. Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, along with writer Mary Jordan, discuss their new memoir.
Clint Eastwood's film recounts the based-on-a-true-story tale of a Los Angeles woman's struggle to find her missing son — after police return the wrong child to her. David Edelstein has a review.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. To learn more about the meat industry in the United States he bought a calf, and then followed the process from fattening to slaughter. His article, "Power Steer," is the cover story of the March 31, 2002, issue of the New York Times Magazine. Pollan is also the author of the book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World in which he maintains that plants and humans have developed a reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationship.
Correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter John Allen. He covers the Vatican for the paper and has a regular column, "The View From Rome." This week American cardinals are meeting in Rome to discuss the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in the United States.
Peter Manseau's mother is a former nun; his father is a priest who remains under suspension. Manseau tells of their marriage — and his upbringing — in a new memoir, Vows.
Will Hunt's curiosity took him to the subways of New York City, the catacombs of Paris, underground cities in Turkey, and the inner recesses of caves where ancient societies practiced religious rituals.
Theater critic Richard Gilman was born into a Jewish family, later joined the Catholic Church, and now identifies as an atheist. In his new memoir, he describes how restrictive teachings on sexuality drove him away form organized religion.
Richard Gilman, who died Saturday at age 83, was a writer and professor at the Yale School of Drama. Ben Brantley of The New York Times writes, "Mr. Gilman was one of a breed of philosopher-critics... who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. They located in modern drama the elements of abstraction, alienation and absurdity that had long been at the core of discussions of other forms of art and literature." In this archive interview from 1987, Gilman recounts his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and then to atheism.
Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Lieutenant Nun: The Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World" by Catalina De Erauso (published by Beacon).
Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Reader's Catalogue." It's a listing of 40,000 books--fiction and non-fiction--in more than 200 subjects, complete with recommended editions and an "800" number for ordering the books.
Boston Globe reporters Walter Robinson and Mike Rezendes. They're part of the investigative staff that broke the story of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The staff has written a new book about the scandal called Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church. In January of 2002, the Globe published a two-part series revealing the details of a decades-long cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese. They told how a pedophile priest had been shuttled from parish to parish, and of the millions of dollars paid to victims to keep the story secret.
The Catholic nun became an opponent of the death penalty following the events in her book Dead Man Walking. She details her spiritual journey in River of Fire. Originally broadcast Aug. 12, 2019.
Counter tenor Anthony Ross Costanzo sings in what's considered a woman's range - in the range of the castrati, men who maintained their high voices by being castrated before puberty. He's about to star in the Philip Glass opera 'Akhenaten.'
The Tulip and the Pope is the new memoir from Deborah Larsen. The story explores young women on the road to becoming nuns in the 1960s. Larsen's previous work includes the novel The White.
Parish Priest John McNamee. For twenty five years he's lived and worked the poorer neighborhoods of Philadelphia. His book, "Diary of a City Priest" (Sheed & Ward) documents his struggle to keep faith, when surrounded by poverty and despair.
