Society & Culture

Book critic John Leonard reviews Brett Easton Ellis' controversial new novel. The book's been vilified because of its many graphic scenes of rape, torture, murder, and cannibalism.

Nature writer Rick Bass's new book chronicles his life in isolation on a remote ranch in Montana without electricity.

Peebles is the son of the legendary director Melvin Van Peebles. His film New Jack City is set in Harlem, and features a grim, gritty, and violent world of crack dealers and users.

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews the new comedy "Defending Your Life," starring director Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep as a recently deceased couple who fall in love while living in a squeaky-clean purgatory.

National Affairs Director of the National Black Police Association, Officer Ron Hampton, has been a policeman for 19 years. He's gotten a reputation for speaking out against the misuse of power in the police force, which Hampton says is distressingly common. He'll discuss the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers.

In 1971, writer Lorene Cary was one of the first black female students to be enrolled at St. Paul's, a private prep school in New Hampshire; Cary grew up middle class in Philadelphia. Her memoir about entering the privileged, elite world of the school is called "Black Ice."

The author and educator has written a new book call "A Man Without Words." It's a first-person account of her struggle to teach sign language to a deaf man who had reached adulthood without anyone making any effort to teach him how to communicate.

The young novelist has been vilified for his new novel, which contains many graphic scenes of violence against women, including ape, murder, mutilation, and cannibalism. The book was dropped by its original publisher, and has divided readers and critics alike.

Tammy Bruce of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. That group opposes Ellis's book, and claims it's scenes of violence against women are pure exploitation, devoid of social commentary. NOW has set up a hotline explaining their objections to the book, featuring an excerpt from the novel.

Journalist Nicholas Lemann's new book, "The Promised Land," is an account of the American black migration; between the early 1940s and the late 1960s more than five million blacks left the Deep South and headed north, looking for a better life.

Journalist James Ridgeway has a new book on the rise of the white supremacy movement in the United States called "Blood In The Face." Ridgeway also co-produced a documentary film on the subject, also called "Blood On The Face."

Rock historian Ed Ward looks at some of the early integrated doo-wop groups. He says unlike today's white acts which appropriate black styles, those early groups truly mixed black and white performers and black and white musical styles.

Terry talks with David McReynolds co-secretary of the War Resistors League. The group advised military men and women who didn't want to fight in the Gulf, and coordinated the peace movement. McReynolds regrets the war couldn't be stopped -- which cost the lives of many soldiers and civilians.

Amichai is one of his country's leading poets. Born in Europe, he fought in the Israeli army through many of the country's conflicts. He contemplates war in his new collection of poetry, "Even a Fist was Once an Open Palm with Fingers."

From London, Dr. Muhammad Al-Rumayhi, editor of the "Voice of Kuwait," a paper of the resistance. Ten days after the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, they started publishing leaflets from London. Since then, the Voice of Kuwait has been distributed to Kuwaitis living in exile throughout the Middle East. Al-Rumayhi leaves today to return to his home country.

World music critic Milo Miles gives a brief primer on the music of the newly-liberated country.

Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new biography of the former slave, writer, and abolitionist by Pulitzer Prize-winning author William McFeely. The book fills in the many gaps and silences in all three of Douglass's autobiographies.

Say's brother is Terry Anderson, the Associated Press reporter who's been held hostage in Lebanon since March 1985. During the past five years, Say has worked to free her brother, and to keep the American government, and the American people from forgetting her brother's plight. Her new memoir documents that ordeal.

In honor of Saint Valentine's Day, film critic Owen Gleiberman reviews the 1946 romance, "Humoresque," with Joan Crawford and John Garfield. He says no recent romance films capture Hollywood's early edginess.

Actress Blair Brown of the Lifetime cable sitcom, "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd." She plays a single, divorced woman living in New York. The show is in its last season; Molly, who is white, is forty and pregnant with the child of her late boyfriend, who is black.