Books

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews the "Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales," edited by Alison Lurie. It includes 40 fairy tales written during the last century and a half by British and American writers.(Oxford University Press).

Rock and roll critic Dave Marsh talks about the song "Louie, Louie". He's written a book about it called, "Louie, Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock 'n' Roll Song: Including the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I., and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for the First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty Lyrics." (Hyperion) The song was written by Richard Berry in 1957...as a tale of a lovesick Jamaican sailor.

Anthropologist Elliot Liebow. He is the author of the classic 1967 study "Tally's Corner," a look at African-American street corner life. The bestseller was Liebow's doctoral dissertation, and it's still used by many college students. His new work, the first he's published in over twenty years, is called "Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women."(Free Press/Macmillan). He investigates the patterns and routines of homeless women around Washington, D.C.

Dr. Kevin Cahill. He specializes in tropical medicine, and he looks at the role of health in promoting world peace. He is President and Director of the Center for International Health and Cooperation in New york. His work looking at health amid natural disasters and wars has taken him all over the world, from Nicaragua in the 70s to Somalia today. He is the author or editor of 22 books.

Maureen Corrigan has a review of "The Art of Fiction," novelist David Lodge's collection of 50 essays of literary criticism, published by Viking.

Betsy Lieberman, Executive Director of AIDS Housing of Washington which has built the country's first nursing home designed for people dying of AIDS. It's called the Bailey-Boushay House. The House also offers adult day-care services and activities for people with AIDS. The House has been in operation for a little over a year now. Since then more than 130 people have died there. A new book about the project has been published, "Breaking New Ground: Developing Innovative AIDS Care Residences." (published by AIDS Housing of Washington, Original Trade Paperback).

Architect Peter Calthorpe, whose new book "The Next American Metropolis" (Princeton Architectural Press) advocates designing suburban communities with environmental, social and economic limits in mind, and without a reliance on the automobile. His developments would be connected by light rail systems, not multi-lane freeways. Calthorpe proposes neighborhoods which encourage walking as a way to emphasize community building.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt examines a chilling new trend in historical revisionism: disavowing the deaths of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Her new book, "Denying the Holocaust" (Free Press) traces the rise of this opposition: its practitioners' change in influence as isolated pamphleteers and cranks forty years ago to their point today, where a new poll found one fifth of the American public think it seems "possible" that the Holocaust never happened.

After researching and writing about girl gangs, psychologist and criminologist Anne Campbell decided to tackle the question of why men commit the majority of violent crimes. In her book "Men, Women and Aggression" (Basic Books), Campbell says the key lies in what men and women think their own aggression means: control, or loss of control?

Maureen Corrigan reviews "Peerless Flats," the new novel by Esther Freud, great-grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud.