American history

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction by historian Linda Gordon (Harvard Press).

Maureen Corrigan reviews "Big Trouble" (Simon & Schuster) by J. Anthony Lukas.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "When We Were Good," a book about the folk revival by Robert Cantwell.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry," by Frank Walsh (Yale Univ. Press).

Commentator Maureen Corrigan on two new books of non-fiction: "Theirs Was The Kingdom" by John Heidenry (Norton) a history of Readers Digest, and "Land Of Desire" by William Leach (Pantheon) about rise of the department store in the nineteenth century.

Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933" by Blanche Wiesen Cook (Viking press).

Critic David Bianculli reviews "The Quiz Show Scandal," a new documentary that's part of PBS's "The American Experience" series. It's about the quiz shows that were fixed during the 1950s.

Television critic David Bianculli reviews two of the many specials commemorating the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tonight's two hour special on ABC, "Pearl Harbor: Two Hours That Changed the World," and Saturday's special on CBS, called "Remember Pearl Harbor."

Television critic David Bianculli reviews two new historical shows, one on PBS and the other on ABC. One is a documentary series, "Columbus and the Age of Discovery," and the other a docudrama about the Gulf War, "Heroes of Persian Gulf."

Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "American Nervousness." It's a new book by Tom Lutz about a turn of the century disease called neurasthenia. Neurasthenia was a term applied to a wide variety of conditions related to just being "stressed out" by 19th century life. Perversely, neurasthenia was taken as a sign of status, that if you suffered from it, it meant you were fashionably sensitive. (It's published by Cornell University Press).