Health & Medicine

Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters in Joachim Trier's new film. Critic David Edelstein says Louder than Bombs is intimate, touching and "insistently alive."

Arnaud Desplechin's new film centers on the memories of a middle-aged Frenchman who returns to Paris after years of living abroad. Critic John Powers says My Golden Days is "achingly romantic."

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults cast his own family in his home-for-Thanksgiving psychodrama. Reviewer David Edelstein says Krisha "marks the arrival of a truly adventurous, humanist filmmaker."

Oncologist Theodora Ross discusses the hereditary nature of cancer and her own predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer, which led her to have a double mastectomy and to have her ovaries removed.

At the height of her addiction to heroin, Tracey Helton Mitchell lived in an alley and sold her body. Now she works as an addiction specialist helping others. Her new memoir is The Big Fix.

Comic Louie Anderson has had a hugely successful stand-up career for the last 30 years, but he admits he wasn't a very good actor early on. "I didn't know who I was or how to do it," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

In her new book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Shah discusses the history and science of contagious diseases. She notes that humans put themselves at risk by encroaching on wildlife habitats. "About 60 percent of our new pathogens come from the bodies of animals," she says.

Rick Famuyiwa's new film is about a black high-school student who's into 90s hip hop and Japanese comic books. He calls Dope a celebration of kids whose interests don't fit into pop-culture norms.

Astronomer Chris Impey discusses the future of space travel, sex in space and the connection between science and Buddhism. Impey is the author of Beyond: Our Future in Space.

Noah Baumbach's new comedy is about a couple in their 40s who befriend 20-something hipsters and go wild. It gets off to a fun start, but two-thirds of the way through takes a surprising turn.

Daniel Genis, son of Soviet emigre writer Alexander Genis, served 10 years for armed robbery. The crimes fueled his heroin addiction. "It was so obvious I didn't fit in," he says.

In Abigail Thomas' What Comes Next and How to Like It, the aging process robs the 70-something of beauty and energy. In H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald trains a goshawk after her father dies.

n the 1800s, the Thames River was thick with human sewage and the streets were covered with horse dung, the removal of which, according to Lee Jackson, presented an "impossible challenge."

Offutt's late father went from running a small insurance agency to writing more than 400 books, mostly pornography. The writer tells Fresh Air his dad believed he would be "extremely famous" for it.

"Nature knows how to let animals live a very long time," says Bill Gifford, whose latest book is Spring Chicken, a look at the history of anti-aging schemes and current ways people try to live longer.

In his new memoir, Philip Connors writes about "living in the shadow of suicide." Wracked by guilt and haunted by what-ifs, Connors investigated his brother's death and learned a terrible secret.

Carr, media columnist for The New York Times, died Thursday after collapsing in the newsroom. He was 58. Carr talked with Fresh Air in 2008 about his memoir and in 2011 about the future of journalism.

The film, based on E.L. James' best-selling novel, has been denounced by decency brigades. But it's a surprisingly mild, corny romance that affirms traditional values: It's Jane Eyre with ropes.

The Huffington Post's Jason Cherkis investigated the heroin epidemic in Kentucky, and found that the abstinence-based approach used in most treatment centers was leading to many fatal relapses.

While embedded with troops in Iraq, David Morris almost died when a Humvee he was riding in ran over a roadside bomb. His book explores the history and science of post-traumatic stress disorder.