Books

David Martin, Pentagon correspondent for CBS News and co-author of The Best Laid Plans, an account of America's flawed war against international terrorism.

Astronaut Michael Collins. He controlled the Apollo 11 command module that circled the moon while Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on its' surface. Collins has written a history of the space program titled Liftoff.

Lawrence Weschler, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He writes about politics and art, and his profiles are gathered in a new book, Shapinsky's Karma, Bogg's Bill and Other True Tales.

Estelle Freedman co-author of Intimate Matters, A History of Sexuality in America. Among the principal observations Freedman makes in her book is that sexual puritanism was never as all-encompassing as most historians state when chronicling the mores of the 19th and early 20th Century. The book charts the liberalization of sex as value in itself, independent of reproduction. Freedman is a professor of history at Stanford University.

Dance writer Deborah Jowitt. In her new book, Time and the Dancing Image, Jowitt approaches dance as an anthropologist, trying to reconnect dance to history by placing dance's major developments in the context of the culture that spawned it. Jowitt, a former dancer and choreographer, is the principal dance critic of The Village Voice.

Financial writer Connie Bruck. Her first book, The Predators' Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Man who Staked Them, is a profile of the controversial junk bond financier Michael Milken, and the junk bond department of the investment firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Milken's financing schemes, and Drexel Burnham's resources, have been the engine behind many of the hostile takeovers and mergers that have rocked Wall Street over the last six years. Bruck is a reporter for The American Lawyer magazine.

Detective Josiah Thompson. Thompson was a tenured professor of philosophy at Haverford College when he applied for a job at a San Francisco detective agency. He has since left academia and works full-time as a private eye. He's written an account of his work titled Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye. Thompson's cases run the gamut from recovering money from an attic in a drug case to saving an innocent man from the gas chamber.

Journalist Teresa Carpenter. Her new book, Missing Beauty, is the story of the obsession of a medical professor for a Boston prostitute, and obsession that ended with the prostitute's murder. Carpenter is a staff writer for The Village Voice and won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for her reports on three murders, including those of former congressman Allard Lowenstein and Playmate Dorothy Stratten.

Writer Gerald Clarke. Clarke's biography of writer Truman Capote has just been published. Capote was the author of the seminal work In Cold Blood, but his writing was overshadowed by the excesses of his lifestyle and his reputation as the clownish fixture of the talk show circuit. Clarke's biography was 14 years in the making and was undertaken with Capote's full cooperation. Clarke has written extensively for Time magazine.

Journalist David Wise. His new book, The Spy Who Got Away, is the story of Edward Lee Howard, the CIA agent who divulged secrets to the Russians and then eluded an FBI dragnet to flee to the Soviet Union. The book is based on six days of interviews with Howard in Budapest and reveals a CIA coverup of suspicions about Howard's character and the agency's refusal to share the information with the FBI's counterintelligence division. Wise, a former Washington bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune, has written extensively on espionage.