Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews Keith Jarrett's new album, "At the Deer Head Inn." Jarrett, on piano, teams up with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian.
Fred Waitzkin has written two books about chess. His first, "Searching For Bobby Fischer," is about his young son Josh's gift for the game. The book was made into a movie of the same name. Waitzkin's latest book is called "Mortal Games." It's a portrait of the world chess champion Garry Kasparov as he prepared, in 1990, to defend his title against sworn enemy Anatoly Karpov.
Writer Alexs Pate's first novel is called "Losing Absalom." It's a fictionalized tribute to his father that chronicles end of the title character's life as his family has gathered around his hospital bed. Writer John Willimas wrote, "Losing Absalom is a powerful yet sensitive embrace with black America today." Pate grew up in North Philadelphia and lives in Minneapolis.
Film Critic Stephen Schiff reviews the new Arnold Schwarzenegger/Jamie Lee Curtis film. Schiff says it features small-scale wit and large-scale pyrotechnics -- though it never manages to blend the two.
Nelson Peery has just published his memoir, "Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary," about coming of age against a background of racism, the Depression, and World War II. The book chronicles Peery's travels west during the Depression, and his experiences as a soldier fighting in World War II. He writes about his simultaneous love for America and hatred for the people who discriminated against African Americans, especially in the Army.
John Helyar's new book, “Lords of the Realm,” looks at the corporate world of baseball. Instead of tracing the history of the game through its players, Helyar focuses on the behind the scenes people-- the agents, owners, and general managers-- who shaped baseball. He's is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Barbarians at the Gate.
Russell is the writer and director of the movie “Spanking the Monkey." It's about Raymond, who returns after his freshman year at MIT to find he has to spend the summer caring for his mother, who’s broken her leg. His loneliness, combined with his mother’s depression, results in a dark comedy about mother-son incest. “Spanking the Monkey” won the Audience Award for the most popular dramatic film at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
Patrick Bellgarde-Smith is a professor of Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Today, he will place Haiti’s current political situation in a historical context, explaining the history of American involvement in Haiti. Bellgarde-Smith grew up in Haiti, at the height of the Duvalier dictatorship. His grandfather was Dantes Bellegarde, one of Haiti’s leading social philosophers.
Susan Douglas is a professor of media and American studies at Hampshire College. She has just written a book “Where the Girls Are,” that looks at women in baby-boomer pop culture. She explains how the media’s alternating images of stereotypical femininity and feminism created a kind of “schizophrenia” in American women. She talks about how this confusion has caused ambivalence in American women about what feminism means.
Rock Critic Ken Tucker reviews the Rolling Stones' new album, “Voodoo Lounge." He says their sound has been revitalized by the direction of producer Don Was
In 1986, Donna Murphy was a woman in drag in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” In 1991, she was introduced as “a girl who will steal your heart and then forget where she put it,” playing the amnesiac songstress in “Song of Singapore.” Having become one of Broadway’s most sought-after actresses, Murphy is now playing the lead in Stephen Sondheim’s latest musical, “Passion.” Of the role, which has her playing an ugly, hysterical woman obsessively pursuing a handsome army captain, Murphy says, “I love transformation of any kind...I want to look in the mirror and not see Donna looking back at me.”<
Dr. Fred Sheftell is founder and co-director, respectively, of the New England Center for Headache and National President for the American Council on Headache Education. He argues that chronic headache sufferers have faced stigma, often thought to have brought their condition on themselves. He says, “Unlike the pain of ulcers or colitis, the pain caused by a headache has no easily visible source. This relects more on the state of medical knowledge than on the reality of the condition.”
TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new public television sitcom “The Steven Banks Show," starring the comedian of the same name. Bianculli says it's a little like "Seinfeld," but with more music.
Journalist Christopher Joyce has just written a book, "Earthly Goods," about searching for medicinal plants in rain forests. He'll talk about the history of seeking treatments in nature and the recent attempt of pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers, and anthropologists, to preserve the rain forests while they search for cures to disease.
Josephine Humpreys and Ruthie Bolton. Humpreys is a fiction writer who won the Pen/Hemingway award in 1985 for "Dreams of Sleep." She recently transcribed and edited the life story of Bolton, who grew up in the same area of Charleston, South Carolina as Humphreys. The novel is called "Gal," and details Bolton's experiences growing up with an abusive grandfather in 1960's South Carolina.
