Health & Medicine

More than 20 years ago, Jody Arlington was at home when her 18-year-old brother murdered their parents and younger sister. She thought she was next, but instead her brother told her they were now free. He went to prison, and Arlington changed her name and had to learn how to live without her family. A similar family slaying has prompted her to speak out about her experiences.

Dr. Francis DuFrayne is a gastroenterologist in his 50s at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He is also a captain in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He recently returned from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq, where he was called up to treat wounded soldiers. While he was in Iraq, his son was also serving there in the Marines.

The latest novel from best-selling English author Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down, focuses on a group of suicidal people who accidentally meet atop a tall building — and how that meeting changes their fates. He also writes "Stuff I've Been Reading," a column for The Believer magazine. Many of Hornby's novels have been made into films, including About a Boy, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch.

Dr. Sandra Horning and Dr. David Johnson are both oncologists. Horning is the current president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the largest group of cancer-treatment specialists. Johnson was president before her. Both of them are cancer survivors — the first to lead the 41-year-old society. Horning practices and does research on lymphomas at Stanford. She is also co-chairman of the oncology society's task force on cancer survivorship. Johnson is deputy director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn.

Surgeon and medical historian Ira Rutkow's new book is Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine. Rutkow is also the author of Surgery: An Illustrated History, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

The new novel Thirty-Three Swoons by Martha Cooley is a detailed intrigue set in Manhattan, interweaving the worlds of theatre and the perfume industry. Cooley's previous work includes The Archivist. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new French film Kings & Queen, directed by Arnaud Desplechin.

Musa Mayer is a breast cancer survivor and is the author of several books about breast cancer, including Advanced Breast Cancer: A Guide to Living with Metastatic Disease and After Breast Cancer: Answers to the Questions You're Afraid to Ask. She has also written Examining Myself: One Woman's Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and Recovery.

Gareth Cook covers science for The Boston Globe. Last week, he won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism for his yearlong series of stories on stem-cell research. The judges praised Cook's work for explaining "the complex scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research."

Writer Samuel G. Freedman's new book is Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life. Freedman's mother died many years ago, when he was just 18, and as he approached his mother's age when she died, he decided to find out all about her life. The result is a narrative fueled by facts.

In the past several months, singer Marianne Faithfull has released two CDs: a two-disc set of her hits, and Before the Poison, which includes tracks written by PJ Harvey.

Writer James Atlas' new book is a collection of essays called My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale. James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. He writes for The New Yorker. He was also an editor at The New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Journalist Jack El-Hai is the author of The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness. El-Hai is the executive vice president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and a winner of the June Roth Memorial Award for Medical Journalism.

Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato are the team behind Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the 1972 porn classic Deep Throat. We talk with them about their movie -- and the original.

Edward Berkowitz is a professor of history and public administration and at George Washington University, where he also directs the Program in History and Public Policy. He is an expert on the history of Social Security.

With Desmond Tutu leaving as the Anglican Bishop of Capetown, South Africa, Njongonkulu Ndugane will replace him. He is an outspoken leader against poverty, third-world debt, and HIV/AIDS.

As half of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong, Tommy Chong made a career out of making jokes about being stoned. Along with Cheech Marin, Chong recorded six gold comedy albums and starred in seven films. He currently has a recurring role on FOX TV's That '70s Show.

Temple Grandin is one of the nation's top designers of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. Grandin's new book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Writer Susan Sontag died Wednesday at age 71 of leukemia. We listen back to two interviews with her: a 1989 conversation about her book AIDS and Its Metaphors; and 1993 interview conducted shortly after Sontag returned from Sarajevo, where she directed a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Serbo-Croatian.

Actor Hank Azaria stars in the new Showtime series Huff, about an urban psychiatrist with troubles of his own. Azaria does the voices of Apu the convenience store owner, Moe the bartender and Chief Wiggum, among others, on The Simpsons. He directed and starred in the film Nobody's Perfect, and has acted in many other movies, including The Birdcage, Eulogy, and Shattered Glass.