A Tribute to Mothers from Fresh Air's Archives

Joe Beam died of AIDS in 1989. He was a writer who was in the process of editing his second anthology of Black gay writing. His mother Dorothy helped finish the work her son started, and it was published in 1992 as Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. (Rebroadcast)

Haggard has been on the country music scene since the early sixties and has more number one hits than any country music star except Conway Twitty. We replay part of our interview with him recorded earlier this year. (Rebroadcast)

In this 1995 interview, poet and countercultural activist talks about caring for his mother, who suffered from mental illness. His poem "Kaddish" is about her.

Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club, is the story of four Chinese women who gather to gossip and play mah jong, and of the rebellious ways of their Americanized daughters. The story parallels Tan's own life. Her mother left China in 1952, and Tan grew up torn between her mother's culture of the past and her American surroundings of the present. (Rebroadcast)

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews "Crimson Tide," the new submarine movie starring Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. Schiff says he wonders why other critics haven't praised the movie for its intelligence.