Business, Economics and Finance

In his new book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate he charts the history of the relationship between the powerful Texas oil industry and politics. His last book, Pipe Dreams, documented the infamous rise and fall of Enron. Bryce's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Guardian.

New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas Friedman is the reporter/narrator of the Discovery Channel documentary, The Other Side of Outsourcing — about jobs going to India. (Thursday, June 3 at 10 p.m. EST). Friedman has written about outsourcing and globalization in his columns. He is the author of the best-selling book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of the Middle East.

The demand for oil increases each year, but the supply is not inexhaustible. Experts predict that within 30 years our oil energy sources will be depleted. In his book, The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, Roberts looks at the implications for the world in terms of the economy, politics and the environment, and what alternatives exist for oil. Roberts writes about the energy industry for Harper's magazine and for other national publications.

Underhill studies and tracks the habits of shoppers in order to learn the best way to lead them to make purchases. His retail consulting firm, Envirosell, has helped big-name companies such as McDonald's, Levi Strauss and Blockbuster to study their customers' browsing and buying habits. He's the author of the book Why We Buy, and the new book Call of the Mall.

His new book is The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Shipler is a former reporter for The New York Times. He's also written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. His book Arab and Jews: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land won the Pulitzer Prize.

David Denby is a staff writer and film critic for The New Yorker. His new book, American Sucker, is a memoir about his brief obsession with the stock market — during the height of irrational exuberance in 2000-2001. It started with his wife's announcement that she was leaving him. Denby began an attempt to make $1 million so that he could buy out his wife's share of their New York apartment. (This interview continues into the second half of the show).

O'Neill and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ron Suskind speak about the new book on which they collaborated, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill. The book chronicles his nearly two years with the Bush administration. O'Neill was the administration's top economic official and a principal of the National Security Council. The book has created a firestorm because of O'Neill's assertion that President Bush was intent on invading Iraq as soon as he took office, nine months before Sept. 11.

He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his investigative reporting in The New York Times. His new book is Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else. Johnston was hired by the Times to cover taxes and he approached it like an ongoing investigation. In his new book he writes, "I was especially surprised to find that some of the biggest tax breaks for the rich are not even in the tax code, and that the IRS was completely unaware of many widely used tax fraud schemes.

His new book is The New Great Game. The book is about the battle over the world's largest reserve of untapped oil and gas resources, located in the Caspian Sea and surrounding Central Asian republics. The oil alone is said to be worth $4 trillion. Kleveman claims that the United States, China, Russia and Iran are now engaged in a power struggle for control of the region's vast reserves and pipeline routes. Lutz Kleveman was born in Germany and studied at the London School of Economics.

Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. He's credited with helping President Bush formulate his administration's tax plan.