Books

Author John Cavanagh. Cavanagh is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. He is the co-author with Richard Barnet, of "Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations & the New World Order" (Simon & Schuster), which examines the growth of multi-national corporations. They profile five of the world's most powerful corporations, and show how they are less accountable to public authorities, are paving the way for future political conflict, and are "stimulating political and social disintegration".

Rapper and actor Ice-T...one of the most popular of the "gangsta" rappers. Although he does not often get his songs played on the radio, all five of his albums have gone gold. Greg Knot of The Chicago Tribune has written that "Ice-T. is that rare gangster rapper who leads with his brain instead of his gun or his crotch." IIce-T.'s 1992 song "Cop Killer," landed him at the center of a controversy about gangsta rap--is it a legitimate form of expression or is it incendiary hate-mongering. Ice-T.

Dr. Sherwin Nuland is a surgeon, and he teaches surgery and the history of medicine at Yale. In his new book, "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter," (Knopf), he writes that few of us have an understanding of the way people die because 80 percent of Americans die in the hospital, and, for the most part their deaths are concealed. Nuland's new book is an attempt to "demythologize" the process of dying and he presents death in its biological and clinical reality.

David Garrow is a Pulitzer Prize winning author for his biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., "Bearing the Cross." His newest book is a history of the struggle for birth control rights during the 1920s and 30s and how that paved the way for the abortion rights struggle. Along the way, Garrow examines how these rights are tied in with issues of privacy and sexuality. Garrow found that the arguments used in the birth control rights struggle were the same ones used in the struggle for abortion rights.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Partisan" (Atheneum) by Benjamin Cheever.

Physicist James Trefil. His new book, "A Scientist in the City," (Doubleday) is a exploration of how the laws of nature and technology came together to make our cities. Trefil starts by looking at cities as natural ecosystems, and then looks at the key scientific discoveries that made cities possible. Trefil has written more than ten books on science, including, "1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Science." Trefil is also a regular commentator for NPR, and he teaches at George Mason University.

Journalist Erik Larson of the Wall Street Journal. Larson has been on the show before to talk about polling, privacy and direct marketing and about how a gun goes from the manufacturer to the hands of a teenager. In fact he's written a new book, "Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis," (Crown Publishers). Today Terry will talk again with Larson about guns, about gun control laws, the NRA, etc. Larson is also the author of "The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities."

Mary Fisher was the face of AIDS/HIV at the Republican National Convention in 1992 where she gave a speech imploring the party to lift the "shroud of silence" about the disease. Fisher comes from a wealthy prominent Republican family. Her father, Max Fisher was Honorary Chairman of the Bush/Quayle '92 National Finance Committee. Since she went public about her HIV-positive status, Fisher has been an eloquent voice in the fight against AIDS misinformation and discrimination. She's also the founder of the Family AIDS Network, Inc.

Contributing Editor and essayist for Newsweek magazine Ellis Cose. His new book, "The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care?" (HarperCollins) is about what many middle-class blacks feel, but few white americans understand: that middle-class blacks still struggle against racial stereotyping, discrimination, and alienation, despite their financial success and their best efforts to "play by the rules." Cose argues that many white americans make assumptions about Blacks which are at odds with reality.

Astrophysicist George Smoot. Since 1974 he's worked on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, leading the instrument team that detected cosmic "seeds." In 1992 he announced that he and a team of researchers had detected the biggest, oldest objects ever observed in the universe, the "cosmic seeds" that were the origin of galaxies and clusters of galaxies.