Author and museum director James Cameron. Sixty four years ago, an organized mob of more than 10,000 white men and women dragged Cameron and two other black teenage men from a jail cell in Marion, Indiana. The mob mercilessly beat the three young men. They lynched two. Cameron was spared. In 1984, he recounted this experience in his memoir "A Time of Terror" (Available now from Black Classic Press). Then in 1988, Cameron founded the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.
Journalist Nguyen Qui Duc. He works for KALW-FM in San Francisco, supplies commentaries to NPR and received the Overseas Press Club's 1989 Award of Excellence for his public radio series about returning to Viet Nam. Nguyen has written a new memoir about his family's struggle during and after the war. NGUYEN's father was an official in the South Vietnamese government who was captured by the Viet Cong and imprisoned for 12 years. In 1975, Nguyen gained passage to the U.S. on a cargo ship, and moved about from relative to relative until he settled in California.
Novelist Benjamin Cheever. He's written a second novel, "The Partisan," (Atheneum). It follows on the heels of his first novel, "The Plagiarist." Both books are funny novels. Of his first, one reviewer wrote, "Wit and pathos, so finely meshed they become inseparable, buoy the main events in this achingly funny first novel. . . This is a touching, entertaining debut." Ben is the son of the late writer John Cheever. In writing his novels Ben said he finally found his own voice, separate from his father's.
TV critic David Bianculli reviews two new TV series: ABC's "The Byrds of Paradise" and CBS's "The Road Home." He says both are products of this year's trend--Family Values on TV.
Comedienne and superstar Roseanne Arnold. Her show "Roseanne" debuted in 1988 and has consistently been a top TV series. She has often made news--she forced out the show's executive producer in a dramatic confrontation, she went public with accusations of incest, she performed a controversial rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" at a baseball game. In 1989, she published her first book, "Roseanne: My Life as a Woman" which became a best seller. Now she has written "My Lives" (Ballantine Books).
Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak. Sprinzak has written a book called "The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right" (Oxford University Press 1991). He follows the emergence in Israel since 1984 of a radical right-wing movement shaped by religious fundamentalism, extreme nationalism and aggressive anti-Arab sentiment. Sprinzak believes that the influence of the radical right pervades Israeli politics and culture as well as Arab-Israeli relation. He sees Israel's radical right exercising increasing control over the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Donna Williams. Her first book "Nobody Nowhere" offered a journey through the mysterious condition of autism; it was an international bestseller. Once her case was properly diagnosed, Williams began therapy which took her out of the "world under glass" and into the real world of speech and emotion. This treatment is the subject of her new book "Somebody, Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism" (Times Books).
Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist at MIT and director of its Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has a new book on how language works: "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" (Morrow). He argues that language is not simply a cultural invention taught by parents and schools, but a biological system, --an instinct-- partly learned, and partly innate. To Pinker, a three year old toddler is a "grammatical genius", capable of obeying adult rites of language, similar to web-spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.
Journalist Misha Glenny. Glenny has been covering the war in former Yugoslavia--first as correspondent for the BBC and now as an independent journalist. He is the author of the book "The Fall of Yugoslavia." He will talk about the recent mortar attack on the market in Sarajevo and the effects of the recent downing by NATO forces of four Serbian warplanes.
Political writer and correspondent in the Middle East for the New Yorker, Milton Viorst. Terry will talk with him about the massacre last week in the mosque in the West bank, and it's affect on the peace process between Israel and the P.L.O. They'll also discuss his new book "Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of The Modern World" (Knopf). Called by one commentator "a psychological and social tour of the Arab people and the wondrous cities they live in", "Sandcastles" features VIORST's travels in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon.
Actress and comedian Janeane Garofalo. She's a regular on HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show," where she plays the caustic casting agent, and was a regular on FOX's "The Ben Stiller Show." Now she's appearing in the new film directed and starring Ben Stiller, "Reality Bites." Her stand-up persona has been described as "a bitter, boot-wearing feminista." Which they go on to describe as "no act" on her part.
Former Major Leaguer Keith Hernandez. Called by some baseball purists the finest First Baseman in the game, Hernandez played with the St. Louis Cardinals, the New York Mets, and the Cleveland Indians. He is the winner of eleven consecutive Golden Glove Awards for fielding, and played in two World Championships. Hernandez's new book is "Pure Baseball: Pitch by Pitch for the Advanced Fan" (Harper): analysis of two 1993 match-ups, with play by play commentary, based on his seventeen years in the game.
