Books & Literature

Ricky Jay, one of the world's great sleight-of-hand artists, a scholar of the unusual, curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts, an actor and author of Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews Belfast Diary, the non-fiction account of the civil war that has flared through Northern Ireland. The author is Chicago journalist John Conroy.

Ed McBain (also known as Evan Hunter), prolific writer of detective fiction, best known for his "87th Precinct" series of police procedurals and mystery novels. His most recent novel is titled Tricks. McBain writes in other genres under different pseudonyms.

Father Niall O'Brien. He has worked for over 20 years as a missionary priest in the Philippines. He was imprisoned by the Marcos regime because he helped the poor to start self-reliant Christian communities. He continues his work in the Philippines under the Aquino government.

James Conaway, author of The Kingdom in the Country, which looks at the wide expanse of public lands in the West and how the myths of the west - cowboys, gunslingers, gold miners - are enduring.

Cousin Brucie, one of the leading top-40 DJs in New York City in the early 60s when AM radio was king and New York radio set the national tastes in pop music.

Ted Solotaroff, senior editor at the book publisher Harper and Row. He has worked with many of the great writers of our time and written widely on the current state of writing and publishing.

Buck Clayton, jazz trumpeter, arranger and band leader. He was a member of Count Basie's original band.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews Bluebeard, the new book by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Mark Mathabane. He grew up in poverty in a black township in South Africa. His skill at tennis caught the attention of Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith, who brought him to the U.S. on an athletic scholarship. He's written a book about his upbringing and the horrors of Apartheid. It's titled Kaffir Boy.

Richard Ford, who wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Sportswriter.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews The Fords, by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, the biography of the family that built the automobile empire. The Fords follows Horowitz' and Collier's books on the Rockefellers and Kennedys.

Betty White, longtime television actress. She currently stars in the NBC series "The Golden Girls."

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been made into a music theater production. Sacks is also the author of Awakenings, a work about victims of sleeping sickness, to whom he administered the experimental drug L-dopa.

Mamie Van Doren, one of Hollywood's blond bombshells in the fifties and sixties. She starred in the cult classics "Untamed Youth," "High School Confidential," and "Born Reckless." She's written a kiss-and-tell memoir called Playing the Field.

Book Critic John Leonard will review The Sergeant's Cat, a new mystery novel by Janwillem Van De Wetering, a former police officer in the Amsterdam police force.

English writer Ian McEwan, whose new novel is called The Child in Time. It's about the loss of a child and the child that endures through adulthood.

Gordon Lish, editor of The Quarterly, a journal of new American writing. He's a leading exponent of the minimalist style of writing.

Issac Asimov [a.k.a. Paul French], the dean of science fiction writers. Asmiov is arguably one of the most widely published authors ever.

Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Joshua Then and Now, both of which were adapted into films.