In his new biography, Kirby: King of Comics, TV and comics writer Mark Evanier details the life and career of noted comic artist Jack Kirby, the co-creator of the Marvel Comics characters the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men.
In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in a landslide victory; eight years later, Republican president Richard Nixon was reelected in an equally lopsided race. In his new book, Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein looks at the chaotic years between those elections.
Fresh Air TV critic David Bianculli reviews DVD collections of British TV shows, including a few series that have never before been televised in the U.S.
U.S. Senator Jim Webb, a onetime Republican who won his Senate seat as a Democrat, has stayed clear of endorsing a candidate in the Democratic primaries. The retired Marine explains why — and talks about his disagreements with the Bush administration, the legislation he's introduced to expand benefits for Iraq War veterans, and his new book, A Time to Fight.
Reverend Carroll Pickett was the death-house chaplain at the Walls prison unit in Huntsville, Texas for 13 years. During his tenure, he ministered to 95 inmates executed by lethal injection. He is the subject of a new documentary, At the Death House Door.
There are beach books full of sun and cotton candy and beach books dappled with shadow and sardonic humor. The very different beach books Maureen Corrigan recommends all have one thing in common: They carry a reader far beyond the familiar.
Air travel keeps getting more confusing, frustrating and expensive, says columnist Scott McCartney. McCartney, who's covered the industry for 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, writes the paper's "Middle Seat" column.
Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker reviews two albums from two one-named singers: Madonna's Hard Candy and the self-titled release from Swedish pop singer Robyn.
It's become a $50 billion a year industry: Corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, and IBM are being paid to do things the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon usually do, including analysis, covert operations, electronic surveillance and reconnaissance.
Artist Suze Rotolo — the woman walking beside Bob Dylan on the album cover for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan — was Dylan's girlfriend in the '60s. She's written about the relationship, and about that era's New York, in a new memoir.
Iran's president was relatively unknown on the international stage before he was elected, but he's a standard-bearer for a new generation of hardliners. In a new biography, journalist Kasra Naji explores Ahmadinejad's rise to power, his complex character and his motivations.
In her book Unveiled, Deborah Kanafani recounts her marriage and divorce to a high-ranking Palestinian diplomat — and the cultural rift between her "American" upbringing and her married life.
The celebrated Irish memoirist, who had been battling lung cancer, died May 9. Her 1996 memoir — about growing up poor in the Ireland of the '40s and '50s — became a best-seller. Terry Gross talked to her in 2001.
Veteran peace negotiator Padraig O'Malley worked on the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa. Mac Maharaj played a role in the latter nation's anti-apartheid movement. Both took part in recent closed-door negotiations in Finland, aimed at bringing reconciliation among rival factions in Iraq.
Fresh Air film critic David Edelstein reviews Redbelt, the new martial-arts film written and directed by David Mamet. The film tells the story of a principled martial-arts master who steps into the professional fighting ring to save his business.
The United States is home to less than five percent of the world's population — and almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Adam Liptak, national legal correspondent for The New York Times , says that's one of the ways America's legal system differs from those of other countries.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez commanded ground troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2004; it was on his watch that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal took place. Subsequently, Sanchez has vocally criticized the conduct of the Iraq war — especially the Bush administration's "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan." His new book is Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story.
In her new book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of A Great Victorian Detective, Kate Summerscale revisits the gruesome 150-year-old murder that helped catapult British mystery fiction into being. Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan offers a review.
