Parenting & Families

TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new CBS series "Under One Roof," starring James Earl Jones and Joe Morton. It's notable for being the first television drama focusing on an African American family.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on his five-year-old daughter's developing literary tastes.

Lee has written two volumes of poetry, Rose and The City in Which I Love You. He's won many awards for his work, including the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He's just completed a memoir about his family's refugee experience in America, The Winged Seed. Lee was born in Indonesia; his parents were from China, where his father had been private physician to Mao. After escaping Southeast Asia, the family ended up in a small town in Pennsylvania, where his father headed an all-white Presbyterian church.

TV critic David Bianculli previews tonight's episode of "Mad About You," which features a guest appearance by Carl Reiner as Alan Brady -- the character he played on "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

Poet Mark Halliday reads "Separated Father," a poem about the differences between familial and romantic love.

Golden in the author of the new memoir, "Saving Our Sons." She writes about bringing up her son in Washington D.C., where homicide is the leading cause of death for Black males between 18 and 24. In the preface, she says, "I stopped work on a novel in order to write this book. The unremitting press of young lives at risk, the numbing stubbornness of annual, real-life death tolls, rendered fiction suddenly unintriguing, vaguely obscene."

Johnson was a member of The Johnson Family, which sang gospel and country music for two decades. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a fan; the group was invited to sing at his memorial service. Johnson went solo in the late-1950s, and was a regular on Don McNeill's "Breakfast Club" and Jack Paar's TV show. After making a dozen records, she left show business to raise a family and earn a degree in drama at Dartmouth. She has since returned to her singing career, with a cabaret act at The Oak Room. Her new album is called "A Family Affair."

Chong is the author of "The Concubine's Children." It's a history of her family, beginning with her grandmother, May-Ying, a concubine brought to Canada by Chong's wealthy grandfather. May-Ying had two daughters in China, and Chong's mother in Canada -- three sisters who hadn't met until Chong persuaded her mother to take the trip to China when she was writing this book. "Publisher's Weekly" says "this superbly told saga of family loyalties and disaffections reads...like a novel."

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Paperboy," a new novel about from Pete Dexter. She says its sole flaw is the lack of complex women characters.

Film critic Stephen Schiff has a review of Little Women, the latest of many adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel.

Grimsley is a writer-in-residence at the 7 Stages Theater in Atlanta, and the winner of Newsday's George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright in 1988. His first novel is "Winter Birds," about an eight-year-old hemophiliac in a poor family who witnesses violent fight between his parents on Thanksgiving. Grimsley says the book is "autobiographical, but not an autobiography." He also has been HIV positive for 14 years, making him one of the longest survivors of the virus.

The former congresswoman became Louisiana's first woman member of Congress in 1972. She was elected after her husband, then House majority leader Hale Boggs, died in a plane crash. Boggs was an advocate for civil rights and women's issues before her retirement in 1990. She is the mother of NPR and ABC-TV's Cokie Roberts, Washington lobbyist Thomas Hale Boggs, and the late Barbara Sigmund, who was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. Boggs has new autobiography is called "Washington Through a Purple Veil: Memoirs of a Southern Woman."

Reynolds, who died Thursday, appeared in scores of films, including Deliverance and Boogie Nights. He spoke to Terry Gross in 1994 about growing up the son of a sheriff in a small Florida town.

Dagoberto Gilb with a commentary on fatherhood in light of his newfound literary fame.

Frazier is the author of "Family," a book which traces his ancestors back to the 1600s. His inspiration for the book came from old letters he found after the death of his parents in 1987 and 1988. Their death gave him the desire to find "a meaning that would defeat death" in the letters. Frazier is also the author of "Dating Your Mom," "Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody," and "Great Plains." He is a regular contributor to the "New Yorker."

TV dramas are becoming wildly popular again. Critic David Bianculli says two stand out from the rest: "Homicide: Life on the Streets" and "Picket Fences."

Wideman is the author of "Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society," which explores his relationship with both his father and his son. Wideman's earlier book, "Brothers and Keepers," tells of his relationship with his brother, who, like his son, was convicted of murder. He is also the author of novels and short stories, and is a professor of English literature.

Sexton has just written "Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton," her seventh book. She spent a long time coming to terms with her relationship with her mother, who committed suicide in 1974.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews Quindlen's second novel -- Quindlen's first since her announcement that she's going to give up her editorial page column to become a full-time novelist.

Former First Lady, Barbara Bush. She's written her memoir, which she describes as a story of a "life of privilege." The book chronicles her early life, her marriage to George Bush during World War Two at the age of 19, and the political path that took them to the White House. She also writes about a depression she fell into in the mid-1970s in which she wept each night in the arms of her husband, and had thoughts about crashing her car into a tree or oncoming auto. The depression finally lifted on its own.