Books

Tim Cahill writes for Outside and Rolling Stone about his adventure traveling. His humorous columns have been collected in a new book called A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg. Cahill joins Fresh Air to talk about some of his more memorable trips.

Sautter says that, in order to break into the industry, aspiring television writers need to craft better material than what they see on air. His new book explains the mechanics and unspoken rules of scriptwriting.

Scholar Kathryn Montgomery says that deregulation in the late 1980s has led to the rise of different advocacy groups who seek to influence television programming, often by targeting advertisers. Her new book, Target: Prime Time, explains how both minority and religious groups have mobilized in recent years.

Writer Mark Ribowsky has a new biography on the prolific and reclusive record producer, called He's a Rebel. Phil Spector innovated new studio techniques; his airy, heavily-overdubbed music helped form the California sound. Ribowsky also describes Spector's severe, domineering personality, and his frustration with changing trends in pop music.

Baker's new book, The Mezzanine, documents a man's meandering and sometimes obsessive thoughts throughout the day.

Ted Schultz edited a new book called The Fringes of Reason, which compiles conflicting opinions of supernatural, New Age, and cosmological world views. Schultz is now studying entomology, which he says is related to his curiosity about what is and isn't real.

Critic and composer Gunther Schuller's new book, The Swing Era, examines the history of big band music. Though he is already a jazz enthusiast, Schuller says he researched his book as if he had no prior knowledge of the genre, hoping to craft a more comprehensive and objective account of that its development.

William and Jane Tubman are American scholars of the Soviet Union's politics and literature, respectively. Their new book, Moscow Spring, documents their six months in the country during the reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost under the Gorbachev administration.

Award-winning book reviewer Jonathan Yardley has recently published a memoir called Our Kind of People, about his family, his parents' marriage, and WASP culture. He says that, at the age of 47, he was finally able to see his mother and father as people -- not just his parents. He joins Fresh Air to talk about his book, as well as his work as a critic.

The author's books follow the lives of fictional characters in real historical situations. Several of them have been made into films. Doctorow's newest novel, Billy Bathgate, takes place in the criminal underworld of early-twentieth-century New York City.