James Wood is book critic for The New Republic. He's making his own literary debut with the novel The Book Against God. It's about a priest's son who becomes an atheist. Wood is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief.
His new book is Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Among the commercial activities at many universities and colleges these days are: drug companies giving money to medical schools, industry buying the rights to scientific discoveries and industry-endowed faculty chairs. Bok is critical of such ventures.
Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new film 28 Days Later. The movie is based on the best-selling novel The Beach, in which animal-rights activists break into a lab and free infected monkeys, letting loose a virus that puts people into a permanent state of murderous rage.
TV critic David Bianculli previews Dead Like Me the new series on Showtime Cable that begins Friday, June 27. It's about a group of characters who died with unresolved issues and have to work them out in the after life.
He has written his first novel for adults, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The narrator of the story is an autistic teenager who is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and who must prove his innocence when a neighborhood dog is killed. One reviewer described it as "wonderful, simple, moving, and likely to be a smash." Haddon lives in England and teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and for Oxford University.
Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1994 she wrote a profile of David Friedman, one of the Friedman sons. David was known as Silly Billy, a popular clown who was a favorite at children's birthday parties in New York City. David's father and brother were accused of molesting children, and the family's story is told through their own home movies in the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. Orlean is also the author of the best-selling book, The Orchid Thief.
In his recent columns he has been writing about the intelligence officers who disclosed to him that the Bush administration exaggerated the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war. Kristof recently returned from Iraq.
His new movie is Capturing the Friedmans. It's a non-fiction feature film about a seemingly normal Long Island, New York family. The film takes a look at the convoluted case and attempts to determine the true story. Capturing the Friedmans won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance festival. This is Jarecki's first feature film. He was also the founder and CEO of Moviefone, which was acquired by AOL in 1999 for nearly $400 million.
Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1994 she wrote a profile of David Friedman, one of the Friedman sons. David was known as Silly Billy, a popular clown who was a favorite at children's birthday parties in New York City. Orlean wrote the profile before the story came out surrounding David's father and brother. She is also the author of the best-selling book, The Orchid Thief.
In the summer of 1998 she began work on her new album, Roads of Travel, and it was released in March, 2003. It includes a duet with her father, Johnny Cash. Other guest vocalists include Sheryl Crow and Steve Earle. Last month, Cash's stepmother June Cash died.
Dr. Samuel Barondes is a professor and director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of California. He's also the author of the new book, Better than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs. In the book he traces the history and analyzes the effectiveness of the current crop of antidepressants and considers the drugs of the future.
Her new book, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's, is about her two-year affair with the writer Patricia Highsmith. They met at a Greenwich Village bar and were both writing lesbian pulp novels under pseudonyms. Meaker wrote Spring Fire (1952) under the pen name Vin Packer. It sold 1.5 million copies. She also wrote under the name Ann Aldrich. Meaker writes young adult novels under the name M.E. Kerr. Highsmith is known for her classic novels Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
He died June 15, 2003, of prostate cancer at the age of 92. His first film role was in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. He went on to star in several more Hitchcock films, later co-writing the screenplays for Rope and Under Capricorn. He also had starring roles in the films The Postman Always Rings Twice, Brute Force and Ziegfeld Follies. In the 1950s and 60s, Cronyn went to Broadway, often co-starring with his wife, the late Jessica Tandy. He won a Tony award in 1964 for his role as Polonius in the Broadway production of Hamlet.
He was the co-leader of the team that discovered three very important skulls in Ethiopia. The human remains are about 160,000 years old and offer evidence of the earliest ancestors of modern humans. They bolster the theory that modern humans emerged in Africa and are not related to Neanderthals, who lived in Europe. White is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.
He responds to concerns about conflict of interest in awarding military contracts to private companies. Pawlik explains how the Army Corps of Engineers gave contracts to put out oil fires in Iraq to Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Secretary of Defense, was the CEO of Halliburton before he became vice president.
