Journalism

To some, Detroit may be a symbol of urban decay; but to journalist Charlie LeDuff, it's home. In Detroit: An American Autopsy, he says the city's heart beats on. "We're still here trying to reconstruct the great thing we once had," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

In a new book, Nick Turse says the pressure on U.S. forces to produce a body count during the Vietnam War led to mass civilian deaths. "The idea," he says, "was that the Vietnamese, they weren't really people."

Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief looks at the world of the controversial church and the life of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986.

Journalist Carolyn Jones wrote about her experience with the law for The Texas Observer after having an abortion last year. The state requires that a woman seeking an abortion receive a sonogram at least 24 hours before the procedure.

In an article for The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz writes that as people have increasingly waited until their 30s to become parents, there has been a rise in developmental and neurocognitive disorders. Moreover, she says that the age of both parents affects the health of the child.

The nature writer has an essay in January's Harper's Magazine that details the four years of his childhood during which he says he was routinely raped and molested by a family friend.

Adam Nossiter, the West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, is one of the few reporters covering the situation in northern Mali, where Islamist extremists allied with al-Qaida have taken control after a coup destabilized the country in April.

Senior analyst for the Violence Policy Center Tom Diaz says one of the weapons found at the site of the Newtown, Conn. shooting was a variant of a type of gun developed for troops in Vietnam.

Thomas Ricks' new book, The Generals, is about what he sees as a decline of American military leadership and accountability. He says that in World War II, generals were held accountable for their lack of success — but that started to change with the Korean War.

Michelle Shephard has traveled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, more than two dozen times and has been following the stories of men who've been released from the U.S. detention center. She's the author of Guantanamo's Child and Decade of Fear: Reporting From Terrorism's Grey Zone.