Jo Ann Kay McNamara talks with Terry Gross about her book "Sisters In Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia." It is published by Harvard University Press. McNamara is a Professor of History at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

This month Woody Harrelson stars in a powerful new movie about the costs of war. He plays Capt. Tony Stone, a veteran of the Army's Casualty Notification service, charged with the task of notifying the families of fallen soldiers. The film opens Nov. 13, but Harrelson's performance is already generating Oscar chatter.

The Vidocq Society is a Philadelphia-based group of criminologists and forensic experts; they gather together once a month to solve cold cases. Writer Michael Capuzzo explains what it was like to shadow the crime-fighters in The Murder Room.

In the 1950s, Gelbart he was part of a team of television writers that included Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and others who wrote for Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour." Gelbart went on to develop and write for the television version of "M*A*S*H. Also, he wrote the screenplays for "Oh, God!" and "Tootsie," and the stage play for "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" There's a new PBS special about Sid Caesar's comedy team, "Caesar's Writers."

Journalist John Allen has a book about the new pope, The Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside Story of How the Pope Was Elected, and Where He Will Take the Catholic Church.

Our guest, Father John Barkemeyer, left a parish on Chicago's South Side to become an Army chaplain in 2003, the year U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq. There's a shortage of Catholic priests in the Army, and for much of his current tour in Iraq, Barkemeyer has been the service's only Catholic chaplain in the province of Anbar.

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been made into a music theater production. Sacks is also the author of Awakenings, a work about victims of sleeping sickness, to whom he administered the experimental drug L-dopa.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews "Ordinary Time: Cycles in Faith, Marriage, and Renewal" the new autobiography by Nancy Mairs, who is dying of multiple sclerosis.

Temple Grandin is one of the nation’s top designers of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. In her book, Thinking in Pictures: and other reports from my life with Autism she describes how her inner-autistic world has led her to develop animal empathy. She is currently an assistant professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Her new book is published by Doubleday 1995. Grandin was the subject of Oliver Sack’s 1993 New Yorker article An Anthropologist on Mars.

Mike Hudson is a contributing editor for "Southern Exposure," a public policy magazine. He recently wrote a series of stories on the "poverty industry" -- how pawn shops, finance companies, and rent-to-own stores charge high interest rates, sometimes as high as 35%, to people who can almost never pay them back.

Durang is best-known for his controversial play, "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You." A new collection of six of his plays has just come out called "Christopher Durang Explains It All For You." He joins Fresh Air to talk about some of his successes and failures, and his frustrations with New York theater.

Cuban-born poet Heberto Padilla (air-BARE-toe puh-DEE-uh). He was a friend of Castro and an early supporter of the revolution in Cuba. But later he became disillusioned and was imprisoned by Castro as a counter-revolutionary in 1971. He left Cuba in 1980 and has been living and teaching in the U.S. He has a new memoir, "Self Portrait of the Other," published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Poet, writer, and teacher Nancy Mairs. She's a Catholic feminist, who started out Protestant, and who late in life became a feminist. She calls herself, "the connoisseur of catastrophe." She's known for writing honestly about her struggles with multiple sclerosis, depression, and the life-threatening illness of her husband, also about being a woman, a mother, and a wife. Her newest book of personal essays is "Ordinary Time," (Beacon). One reviewer calls it "a small miracle of honesty mediated by dignity and humor."

Eley Williams tells the story of two word-mad characters who work for the same dictionary publisher 120 years apart. This novel is perfect for anyone who loves puns, crosswords and witty writing.

Fred de Cordova, executive producer of "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson." His autobiography, "Johnny Came Lately," is a behind-the-scenes tell-all about the workings of one of television's longest-running and highest rated shows. de Cordova credits include directing Ronald Reagan in "Bedtime for Bonzo," directing "The Jack Benny Show," "The Burns and Allen Show," and "My Three Sons."

It's commonly thought that the Catholic Church fought heroically against the fascists in Italy. But in The Pope and Mussolini, historian David Kertzer says the church actually lent organizational strength and moral legitimacy to Mussolini's regime.

In 2007, journalist and former soldier Kelly Kennedy embedded with the U.S. Army's Charlie Company in Iraq. In 15 months, the 26th Infantry Regiment had the most casualties of any U.S. battalion since Vietnam. Kennedy details her year with the troops in her book They Fought for Each Other.

Screenwriter Mike White and his father, gay rights activist Mel White, recently danced, ran and bobsledded around the globe as part of The Amazing Race. The duo talks about their relationship and reality-TV adventures.