Society & Culture

Language commentator Geoffrey Nunberg takes the "Cosmopolitan" grammar quiz.

Writer/Director Kayo Hatta. Her film "Picture Bride," is the story of a young woman who moves to Hawaii as a "picture bride." Picture brides were Japanese women who moved to Hawaii in order to marry the Japanese plantation workers who settled there. The women would only have seen a picture of their future husband before they were married. The film is Hatta's first commercial release and the first Hawaiian production to gain a commercial release, and also won the 1995 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for best dramatic film.

Allende has published her first work of non-fiction, Paula. It's about her 28 year old daughter, who fell into an irreversible coma. Paula began as a letter to her dying daughter and turned into an autobiographical work about Allende's childhood in Chile, her exile in Venezuela and her move to San Francisco.

McNamara has written a book, In Retrospect, which contains the long awaited admission that he felt U.S. policy in Vietnam was wrong and the war was unwinnable. He details the behind-the-scenes decision-making that escalated the war, and the atmosphere of the times which made policymakers feel they had no choice but to do so.

Kenyon died Saturday of leukemia. She and her husband, poet Donald Hall, had both been struggling with cancer for years. Many of their works were inspired by their battles with the disease. Their last book of poems, entitled Constance, is about Hall's surgery and recovery. We replay our 1993 interview with the couple.

Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Cambridge, MA. He has spent 14 years tracking right-wing groups in America. He talks about the connection of militant right-wing militia groups to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Writer Scott Peck and his father Colonel Fred Peck. The younger Peck has written his first book, All American Boy, a memoir of his life growing up in an abusive home with his step-father and the rebuilding of his relationship with his father after a fourteen year estrangement. Peck was thrust on the national scene in May 1993 when his Marine Colonel father spoke against gays in the military to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Col. Peck went on to say his oldest son, Scott, was gay, and though he loved him, he should not be able to serve in the military.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg looks at how some names lose their capital letter status, but in exchange gain a coveted slot as common nouns.

Producer/ Director Terry Zwigoff recently released a new documentary "Crumb." The film was shot over seven years and follows the life of Robert Crumb, the famous underground artist who popularized character's such as Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont and Keep on Truckin'. The film won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary and cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival.

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews the new film "Don Juan de Marco" starring Johnny Depp, Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway -- a cast full of attractive magnetism.

We continue our interview with NPR reporter and All Things Considered producer/host Linda Wertheimer. In this segment, she talks about her experiences as a woman during the early days of her career.

Writer Jan L. Waldron was 17 when she gave her baby daughter, Simone, up for adoption. Waldron's own mother was adopted, and in turn left her children when Waldron was eleven. In Giving Away Simone: A Memoir, Waldron tells of the parting and then meeting again with her eleven-year-old daughter, now renamed Rebecca. Rebecca is the fifth generation of women in the family to be abandoned by their mothers; in reuniting with her, Waldron is determined to break that cycle of leaving.

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews the new film starring Jessica Lange. He says its focus on message over narrative makes it a poor fit for the big screen, better suited for network TV.

Judith Musick is the director of the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a pregnancy prevention and teenage-parent programs in Illinois, and author of the new book, "Young, Poor and Pregnant: The Psychology of Teenage Motherhood." Musick believes that impoverished adolescent girls become young mothers as an attempt to create a future and an identity.

Michael Tonry is a professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota. His new book, Malign Neglect: Race Crime, and Punishment in America, discusses how our current approach to fighting crime victimizes disadvantaged black Americans. He calls for a reform of sentencing and parole policies.

Director of the National Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition at Tufts University, Dr. Larry Brown. He directed a recent study titled "Statement on Key Welfare Reform Issues: The Empirical Evidence." It revealed the assumptions behind the Republican "Contract With America" regarding welfare reform to be wrong. He agrees reform is necessary but must be focused on the right target.

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.

Biographer Deirdre Bair has written acclaimed biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Her newest subject is writer and diarist Anais Nin. A reviewer in the Kirkus Reviews writes, "Bair's Nin emerges as the complex woman she was, a woman who inspired both wrath and passion in those whose paths crossed hers. It's called Anais Nin: A Biography.

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.