Books

Ted Solotaroff, senior editor at the book publisher Harper and Row. He has worked with many of the great writers of our time and written widely on the current state of writing and publishing.

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been made into a music theater production. Sacks is also the author of Awakenings, a work about victims of sleeping sickness, to whom he administered the experimental drug L-dopa.

Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review. He's written a book on the Media Lab, MIT's state-of-the-art computer lab.

Robert Brustein, theater critic for The New Republic since 1959. Brustein founded the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard. His new book of essays is titled Who Needs Theatre: Dramatic Opinions.

Film producer Ismail Merchant, who, with film director James Ivory, is responsible for films like "The Bostonians," and "Room with a View." His upcoming film, "Maurice," is, like "Room with a View," an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel.

Michael Denneny a senior editor at St. Martin's Press. His latest project is a small press called Stonewall Inn Editions, specializing in gay literature.

Enter James Randi, magician and debunker of people with claims to extrasensory perception.

Barry Gifford, publisher and founder of Black Lizard Press. The press specializes in reprints of hard-boiled detective fiction, complete with the original book jackets.

Writer Jay Stevens has a new book about the creation of LSD in the 1940s, research into its therapeutic and weaponized potential in the 1950s, and its role in the 1960s counterculture--fueled in part by the influence of people like Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and Aldous Huxley.

Scientist and writer James Trefil has a new book about meteorology called Meditations at Sunset. He hopes that a better understanding of the rules of physics will help people appreciate the mysteries of nature.