National security correspondent Roy Gutman takes a look at the tense relations between the United States and Nicaragua, in light of the conflict between the Contras and Sandinistas. His new book about the topic is called Banana Diplomacy.
PBS's newest show, POV, showcases a diverse selection of documentaries, many of which have been screened in theaters or broadcast on other networks. TV critic David Bianculli has this review.
Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says Paul Motian's new album, Misterioso, keeps listeners off-balance with its quick shifts from the rhapsodic to the rambunctious.
Newsweek photojournalist William Gentile. Gentile covered the Nicaraguan revolution for UPI ten years ago, and he's the only foreign correspondent from that time still working in Nicaragua. Gentile's new book, Nicaragua, contrasts the violence of the Contra war with the natural beauty of Nicaragua and the lives of everyday people there.
Sportswriter Phil Berger. Berger covers boxing for The New York Times and has written a new book about heavyweight champ Mike Tyson called Blood Season.
Film Critic Stephen Schiff reviews "Coming to America," the new Eddie Murphy film that co-stars one-time TV talk show host Arsenio Hall. The movie is a comic fable about a pampered African prince who travels to the slums of New York to find the perfect woman.
Newsweek correspondent Sylvester Monroe. He recently returned to the ghetto housing project in Chicago where he was raised for a reunion with his boyhood friends. He chronicles their successful and failed attempts to escape the ghetto and ghetto culture in his book Brothers.
Horror writer Patrick McGrath. McGrath has been described as "a Poe for the 80's," a postmodern-gothic storyteller. His new collection of short stories is titled Blood and Water and Other Tales. Horror writing is a genre that comes easily to McGrath, who grew up on the grounds of an English asylum for the criminally insane.
Poet Sharon Olds. She writes passionate and intensely personal poems about her childhood with abusive and alcoholic parents, and her own experiences as a mother and a wife. Suicide attempts in New York, and encounters on the subway also provide inspiration for her work. Sharon Olds is the recipient of the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection titled The Dead and the Living.
Investigative journalist Paul Eddy, co-author of The Cocaine Wars, which traces the course of cocaine from the hills of Bolivia to American street corners, and the domination of the market by a group of drug barons based in the resort town of Medellin, Colombia. The book also details the extent of cocaine corruption in both Dade County, Florida (Miami) and the Bahamas. Eddy writes for the Insight Team, the investigative arm of the Sunday Times of London.
Writer Jeanette Winterson. Her autobiographical first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is the coming-out story of a young British girl raised in an evangelical household who must come to the religion's severe view of right and wrong. Winterson was the recipient of the Whitbread Prize for best first novel and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best writer under thirty-five. Her new book, "The Passion," is a historical novel set at the time of the Napoleonic wars.
