Parenting & Families

Pianist and bandleader Paul Weston and singer Jo Stafford. They're better known as Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, satirists of inept musicianship.

Humorist Alice Kahn reflects on the difficulty of returning to your childhood home.

Writer Gloria Naylor. Her novels, Linden Hills and the recent Mama Day create a world in which blacks achieve success at the expense of their own history and identity. Naylor's first work, The Women of Brewster Place, won the 1983 American Book Award for First Fiction.

Ken Tucker reviews the home video release of "The Shadow of the Thin Man," the last of the five "Thin Man" movies, a series made in the 30s and 40s and created by Dashiell Hammett that starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as a dashing husband-and-wife detective team.

Dr. David Elkind, a professor and author of books on child development. His new book, Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk, warns of possible dangers to children who are pushed too hard to achieve too much at too early an age.

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews the movie "3 Men and a Baby."

Jan Harold Brunvand explores the urban legend about the solid cement car.

Critic-at-Large Laurie Stone discusses the new ABC television series "thirtysomething."

Singer Judy Collins. She's just written an autobiography; it's titled Trust Your Heart.

Actress Colleen Dewhurst. She is currently starring as Eugene O'Neill's widow in the one-woman show "My Gene."

English writer Ian McEwan, whose new novel is called The Child in Time. It's about the loss of a child and the child that endures through adulthood.

TV Critic David Bianculli will preview the new ABC series "thirtysomething."

Adam Hochschild, founder of the leftist magazine "Mother Jones." He's written a memoir about his ambivalent relationship with his father, an industrialist who operated a string of gold and diamond mines in South Africa.

Humorist Alfred Gingold describes the sensation of sorting through a sprawling record collection with a loved one.

Fifty-one-year-old author Avery Corman has a new book called 50. He joins Fresh Air guest host Liane Hansen to talk about the different ways men and women view aging. Corman first rose to prominence with his novel Kramer Versus Kramer.

The renowned soloist says the nature of his instrument demands that he be flexible about also playing supportively in ensemble settings. He talks about how the death of his parents, both of whom were musicians, contributed to his artistic development.

New music composer John Harbison was drawn to classical music because the genre leant itself to longer pieces and a deeper exploration of musical ideas. He often writes for his wife, the violinist Rosemary Harbison.

Critic Ken Tucker says that the movie adaptation of the celebrated play Crimes of the Heart, now shrunk down for home consumption, is no better--and sometimes worse--than many popular television shows.

Psychotherapist Eileen Simpson grew up as an orphan; her mother died from tuberculosis. As a young adult, she moved to Greenwich Village and married the poet John Berryman. Writing came to her later in life, after she split up with the renowned poet. Her new book is called Orphans: Real and Imaginary.

Former New York Times reporter Joyce Maynard moved to New Hampshire to start a family, where she started her Domestic Affairs column, which examines her new life as a writer and mother. A book of the same name has just been published.