Middle East expert and British hostage in Beirut, Terry Waite. While in Lebanon in 1987, as an Anglican Church envoy to negotiate the release of hostages there, Waite himself was captured. He was held for 1,763 days (nearly five years); four years of that time was spent in solitary confinement. He had made numerous trips to the Middle East to negotiate hostage releases in Tehran and Beirut, and was no stranger to the danger of factional conflicts: in 1969 Waite and his wife narrowly escaped the Idi Amin coup in Uganda.
Bill Littlefield. He's a writer and regular sports commentator on NPR's "Morning Edition." Littlefield has a new book about baseball, "Baseball Days: From the Sandlots to the Show" (Bulfinch Press). Littlefield has been in love with the game since he was a kid, "Baseball Days" is a sentimental look at America's favorite past-time.
Jazz musician Joshua Redman. A self-taught tenor saxophonist, Redman has a new album, "Wish," which is his second album released this year. Redman won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 1991. Son of renowned free-jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman, Joshua Redman had the most influence from his mother who raised him alone. After Redman graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1991 he decided to pursue his love of jazz.
Writer Dagobero Gilb. His new book of short stories, "Magic of Blood" (University of New Mexico Press), offers fiction from the Chicano and Anglo working-class worlds of America's southwest. GILB's prosaic realism has been called by one critic, "the most lethal kind of fiction a Chicano can write".
Poet James Merrill. The son of the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage house, Merrill took to Europe at age 24, a newly published poet "meaning to stay as long as possible". That was in 1950. His new memoir "A Different Person" (Knopf) details his two and a half years there, and features encounters with psychoanalysts, new and old lovers, and Alice Toklas. Merrill is the author of eleven books of poems, the winner of two National Book Awards, the Bolligen Prize for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews "The Beverly Hillbillies," the movie version of the popular TV series, starring Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin and Jim Varney.
Detective novelist James Crumley. It's been ten years since his last book. In Crumley's fourth novel, "The Mexican Tree Duck" (Mysterious Press), redneck detective C.W. Sughrue (pronounced Shoog-rue) returns. Crumley gets a lot of materials for his novels hanging out in bars in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. Crumley has written three other detective novels.
Defensive lineman for the Atlanta Falcons, Tim Green. Green's written a novel, "Ruffians" (Turner), about a football star who's NFL experience is dominated by money and steroids. During football season, Green writes a weekly column for the "Syracuse Herald-Journal". Off season, Green attends law school. His sports commentaries can be heard occasionally on NPR.
Classical Music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviewed a new recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, played by Nigel Kennedy, conducted by Klaus Tennstedt, on the EMI label.
Dr. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. His groundbreaking study of breast cancer patients showed that women who had psychosocial intervention lived twice as long, after diagnosis, as those without that intervention. His new book, "Living Beyond Limits" (Times Books) covers current research on mind/body interactions, how to build sustaining support networks, control pain through self-hypnosis and detoxify fears of dying.
Journalist and former anchor of the CBS News, Walter Cronkite. Thirty years after Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech, Cronkite questions whether African-Americans choose to integrate into society or socialize primarily with each other. Cronkite's newest project "The Faltering Dream," questions whether integration is still a goal or if a "equal but separate" is a more appropriate approach to race relations. In "The Faltering Dream," Cronkite interviews notable black leaders including Reverend Jesse Jackson and Spike Lee.
One of Bosnia's leading film makers, and professor of film at the Academy of Film and Theatre in Sarajevo Ademir Kenovic. His newest film "SA-Life" (SA stands for Sarajevo) is compiled of scenes shot by himself, other film makers, and film students in and around Sarajevo that capture the horror of the war. Each day, Kenovic and his fellow film makers would meet in his basement studio to plan the day's shoot, going out with hand-held cameras. Kenovic has made three other films.
TV critic David Bianculli previews the premiere of "I'll Fly Away," the drama series set in the south at the time of the civil rights movement. It used to air on NBC; PBS has just picked it up and added tonights episode to it.
