Music critic Milo Miles reviews Beautiful Dreamer: the Songs of Stephen Foster, featuring performances by many contemporary artists, including John Prine, Yo Yo Ma and Mavis Staples.
Gordon, host of Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown, made big bucks in the world of hi-tech before winning more than $1 million in poker tournaments. His new book is called Poker: The Real Deal.
The acclaimed HBO series begins its third season. Simon is the show's creator and executive producer. Simon was a police reporter for The Baltimore Sun who moved to television and wrote for the show Homicide: Life on the Street. Pelecanos is a D.C.-based crime novelist who now writes for TV and film. Esquire magazine calls him "the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world."
Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews End of the Century, a new documentary film about the Ramones. All members except the drummer have passed away; Johnny Ramone, the lead guitarist, died Sept. 15, 2004.
Clarke, a former member of the National Security Council says the Bush administration missed opportunities to avert the Sept. 11 crisis. His controversial book, Against All Enemies: America's War on Terror, is now out in paperback.
The new reality TV series, Family Bonds follows Evangelista's bail bonds business. Evangelista lends money to post bond, and if the customer doesn't pay up, he tracks them down. The show airs on HBO Sundays at 10 p.m. ET.
Anderson writes the Letters from Baghdad column for The New Yorker magazine. His new book is The Fall of Baghdad. Anderson's conversations with people in Iraq, including an artist, a driver and a plastic surgeon, as well as his travels around the country, formed the basis of his new book.
DeParle is The New York Times' welfare policy reporter. His new book is American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare. DeParle tracks the lives of three families in Milwaukee affected by welfare reform laws.
Critic David Bianculli has some thoughts about the fall season and cable's impact on network television. He says ABC may have the year's two best shows: the prime-time soap opera Desperate Housewives and the action/suspense show Lost.
Spiegelman won a Pulitzer prize for his two-part graphic novels about his father in Nazi Germany and the holocaust Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds and Maus: A Survivor's Tale: Here My Troubles Began. His new graphic nonfiction novel is about his family's experience on Sept. 11, In the Shadow of No Towers.
Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Love Wife by Gish Jen. The novel tells the story of Carnegie Wong, a second-generation Chinese American and his complicated family life.
Christopher Dickey is Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek.. His new novel, The Sleeper, is a thriller about a former terrorist living the United States who hunts down his former al Qaeda comrades after Sept. 11.
Jazz Critic Kevin Whitehead reviews new reissues of Duke Ellington recordings between 1950 and 1961: Blues in Orbit, Masterpieces By Ellington, Piano in the Background, and Piano in the Foreground.
Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker broke the story of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. His new book is Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. He won a Pulitzer prize 35 years ago when he first reported the story of the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam.
Sorry, the Web audio for this segment is unavailable due to Internet rights issues. Donovan Leitch, known for psychedelic hits such as "Mellow Yellow," is back with his first album in 8 years, Beat Cafe. Known best by his first name alone, Leitch grew up in Glasgow, and was a big part of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s.
The daughter of former presidential candidate, Vice President Al Gore, Kristin Gore has just written her first novel, Sammy's Hill. It's about a young health care analyst who is trying to balance her personal life with her work for a U.S. senator. Gore has been a TV writer since she graduated from Harvard, where she wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. She has written for Saturday Night Live and Futurama
