Health & Medicine

Advances in military medicine mean that more soldiers are surviving on the battlefieled, but many are coming home with missing limbs. When they come home, those soldiers turn to Colonel Paul Pasquina, medical director of the amputee program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for the latest in in prosthetics.

It's been nine years since Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, has released a new novel -- but is The Lacuna worth the wait? Critic Maureen Corrigan says this personalized perspective on the Red Scare in Mexico reflects the hidden meaning of the book's title: vacancy.

Weekends at Bellevue is psychiatrist Julie Holland's account of her years treating patients in a New York City psychiatric ER. She says one of the hardest parts of her job was figuring out which patients were manic or schizophrenic and which were high on cocaine or methamphetamines.

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer joins Fresh Air host Terry Gross to talk about what she discovered while researching her upcoming article "The Predator War." The story explores the ethics and controversies surrounding the CIA's covert drone program, in which remote-controlled airplanes target and kill terror suspects within Pakistan — a country that's a U.S. ally, not an adversary.

For most of his life, music critic Tim Page felt like an outsider. Restless and isolated, he was uneasy around others. Finally, when he was 45, Page was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

Shot on a $15,000 budget, director Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity is a bare-bones thriller about things that go bump in the night.

A Serious Man is the Coen Brothers latest (and most specifically Jewish) take on the question of cosmic injustice. Larry Gopnik, a staid Mid-western physics professor, watches helplessly as his life begins to crumble. Critic David Edelstein says the movie unfolds like a strange, sad joke that makes you wonder whether the punchline "will make you laugh or want to kill yourself."

Your kids are perfect — just don't tell them that. NurtureShock, the new book by Po Bronson, explores how Americans have misunderstood the role of praise in parenting and what we can do to save our kids from ourselves.

Unitarian minister Forrest Church believed that the knowledge that we must die makes us question what life means. Church, who died Sept. 24, 2009 after a long battle with cancer of the esophagus, was the author of Love and Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow.

When coping with cancer, sometimes laughter is the best medicine. Kairol Rosenthal and Iva Skoch explain the phenomenon of "cancertainment."

Perhaps best known for his work on the Fox TV show Arrested Development, Jason Bateman discusses his upcoming role as the boss at a vanilla extract company in Mike Judge's new the workplace comedy Extract.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died Tuesday night of complications related to a cancerous brain tumor. In this archival interview from 2006, Kennedy spoke with guest host Dave Davies about the problem of — and possible solutions to — America's burgeoning health care costs.

Rafael Yglesias' novel is inspired by his wife, Margaret, who died in 2004. A Happy Marriage spans their three-decade relationship, from their courtship to her battle with cancer.

Lisa Sanders' monthly "Diagnosis" column in The New York Times Magazine was an inspiration for the TV series House. Sanders, an internist on the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine, is the show's technical advisor; her new book is Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis.

Puppies Behind Bars is a canine training program that enlists prison inmates to train puppies as bomb-sniffing dogs or as service animals. Many of the dogs are then paired with wounded or disabled veterans.

With a national health-care conversation in high gear, linguist Geoff Nunberg notes that "government" (as in "government-run plan") wasn't always such a dirty word. From "G-men" to "government bureaucrats," on this edition of Fresh Air.

Writer-director Max Mayer's latest film is a romantic comedy in which — what else? — boy meets girl. In Adam, boy has Asperger's syndrome; it's a high-functioning variant of autism that can cause social awkwardness. The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at Sundance.

Washington Post military correspondent Ann Scott Tyson was recently embedded with Marines in Afghanistan fighting in Helmand Province, a stronghold of the Taliban.

Leidy Bonanno had just graduated nursing school when she was killed by an ex-boyfriend in 2003. Slamming Open the Door is Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno's way of remembering.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that free markets alone can't fix the health care system. Heritage Foundation Vice President Stuart Butler advocates a restructured system based on consumer choice.