Segments by Date

With 13 days still to go, some listeners might be crying "Enough!" (already) when the carols play. For them, Fresh Air's resident rock critic offers up two Christmas albums that might help make the holiday chestnuts seem fresh again: It's Christmas, Of Course, from Darlene Love, and Raul Malo's Marshmallow World and Other Holiday Favorites.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular Fresh Air guest, joins us again to assess recent developments in his home country and to preview the upcoming election there. Born in Lahore and based in Pakistan, Rashid has written for The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, London's Daily Telegraph and other publications. He's also the author of several best-selling books.

Fresh Air's resident book critic surveys the shelves and offers a few recommendations for what the bibliomanes in your life might like to find inside the gift wrap. On her list are two examinations of the creative life, plus four titles from the 2X2 Series, a Feminist Press project pairing literature by men and women:
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (25th anniversary edition), by Lewis Hyde

Canadian author Jane Rule, best known for her novel Desert of the Heart, died Nov. 27 at the age of 76. She'd been battling liver cancer. Rule, whose other work included Memory Board, was one of the best-known and most widely read lesbian writers. Desert of the Heart was published in 1964 — five years before the lesbian and gay civil-rights movement burst into the public consciousness after New York's Stonewall riots. Set in 1950s Nevada, it was adapted for the big screen in 1985 as Desert Hearts.

There's nothing like binge-watching a season or three of first-rate television. Herewith, holiday gift suggestions for the serious TV-watchers on your list.

Drummer Levon Helm once backed Bob Dylan and sang with Van Morrison. Now, 30 years after The Band split up — and 10 years after he was diagnosed with throat cancer — Helm is putting out a solo album. The Washington Post has called Dirt Farmer "an exquisitely unvarnished monument to Americana from a man whose keening, lyrical vocals have become synonymous with it."

After former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes reported on the fall of the Taliban in 2001, she decided to stay in Afghanistan as the country was being rebuilt. In 2005, she established the Arghand Cooperative, a business that sells local products for use in perfumes, soaps and food. The author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, Chayes wrote about her experiences starting the cooperative and selling beauty products in December's Atlantic Monthly.

Jason Reitman's new teen comedy Juno, like Knocked Up, disguises its family-values stance with a liberal helping of four-letter words. Film critic David Edelstein says it's targeted firmly at the tweener crowd, and the relentless banter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets taken to a new level here. But every character's wisecracks, as in bad Neil Simon, come from the same place.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new album by country singer Gene Watson. It's called In A Perfect World.

Primatologist duo Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth discuss their new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The husband-and-wife team spent years studying a group of baboons in Botswana, observing their behavior, vocalizations — and even their feces — to better understand the primates' complex social structure.

David Wilcove, one of world's leading experts on endangered species, discusses his new book, No Way Home, which chronicles the decline of the world's animal migrations. Wilcove is professor of ecology, evolutionary biology and public affairs at Princeton University.

We continue our conversation about A Slave No More and the men whose stories it tells with three of John Washington's descendants: granddaughter Ruth Washington, great-granddaughter Barbara Anne Hinksman, and great-great-granddaughter Maureen Ramos.

In A Slave No More, historian David W. Blight showcases the emancipation narratives of two men, one from Alabama and one from Virginia. Manuscripts written by Wallace Turnage and John Washington, and genealogical information compiled by Blight, combine to tell the stories of their lives as slaves and their harrowing flights to freedom.

With a new career retrospective of his recordings, a biographical film starring actors impersonating him, and a display of over 120 of his watercolors in a German museum, Bob Dylan is in the public eye a lot at the moment. The latest addition to the Dylan avalanche is a film, The Other Side of the Mirror, chronicling his performances at three consecutive Newport Folk Festivals, from 1963 to 1965. Ed Ward reports that there's more to it than just a concert film.

A couple of years ago, director Jake Kasdan woke up in the middle of the night, knowing suddenly that his next film would be a fake music biopic called Walk Hard. He went on to cast John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox, the putative legend at the heart of the story, who has trouble with women and drugs and who tries on a multitude of musical personalities. Walk Hard, due out Dec. 21, also features Jenna Fischer from NBC's The Office; it was co-written and produced by Judd Apatow. Apatow and Kasdan worked together previously on the critically acclaimed TV show Freaks and Geeks.

Joel Hafvenstein spent a year in Afghanistan trying to convince opium-poppy farmers to give up what he calls "the perfect crop." Working for a private company funded by the United States Agency for International Development, Hafvenstein helped provide Afghan farmers with alternative jobs — like building canals and roads — in hopes that they'd give up their alliance with the Taliban.

Tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, who died last year, recorded as a sideman with Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra.

He also led and recorded with his own groups — and was the father of another tenor saxophonist, Joshua Redman. Fresh Air's jazz critic says Dewey Redman never quite got the acclaim he deserved — and that a just-reissued album from 1982 shows how good he really was.

In a recent New York Times Magazine cover story, reporter Andrea Elliott explained how the small Moroccan neighborhood of Jamaa Mezuak has bred terrorists responsible for a number of recent high-profile attacks. Some were involved in the Madrid train bombings; some went to Iraq. Elliott won a Pulitzer Prize this year for her series An Imam in America.

Britney Spears has had what you might call a busy year: A child-custody fight, a much-derided MTV Video Music Awards performance, a public meltdown involving an unexpected hairstyling choice.

But she's recently put out a new album — Blackout, her first studio disc since 2003 — and though there's been much comment about how much she's revealing in the seemingly personal songs, the music is what matters, right? Rock critic Ken Tucker has a review.