Books & Literature

Novelist Francine Prose. Her new book “Blue Angel” (Harper Collins) echoes the title of the film classic about a German teacher who becomes infatuated with a show girl (played by Marlene Dietrich). In Prose’s novel, a creative writing teacher falls in love with his talented student. Recently Prose wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine (Feb 13, 2000) about the problems with cultural programing ‘for women, by women.’

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz is also a poet. He reviews “The Voice of the Poet” (Random House) a collection of poets reading their own work on audio tape.

British anthropologist Tudor Parfitt. His new book is “Journey to the Vanished City: The Search for a Lost Tribe of Israel” (Vintage paperbacks). Parfitt went to southern Africa to find the Lemba people, who claim to be Jewish. Recently geneticists have found that many Lemba men carry DNA consistent with Jewish ancestry

Pro-wrestler Bret “Hitman” Hart of World Championship Wrestling (WCW). He comes from a wrestling family: his father was a wrestling promoter and ran a wrestling school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. All his brothers were wrestlers including his brother, Owen Hart, who was killed in a wrestling stunt last year. Bret Hart is the subject of a new biography, “Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart: The Best There Is, The Best There Was, The Best There Ever Will Be.”

Contributing editor for This American Life, and columnist for Salon.com, Sarah Vowell. She has a new collection of essays, “Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World” (Simon & Schuster).

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel by Saul Bellow, “Ravelstein”

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new biography about Joan of Arc.

Journalist Bill Turque is Washington correspondent for Newsweek and author of the new biography, “Inventing Al Gore” (Houghton Mifflin). Turque covered both of Gore’s vice presidential campaigns and the Clinton White House. He began work on the book in 1997

Religion scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong. She’s the author of the bestselling book, “A History of God.” Her new book, “The Battle for God” examines the fundamentalist movement in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths that began to emerge in the 1970s. She writes that today’s fundamentalist movements differ from previous ones, in that they are no longer throwbacks to the past, but are complex movements that are shaped by the modern culture they also decry.

Jerome Groopman, MD. His new book is "Second Opinions: Stories Of Intuition And Choice In A Changing World Of Medicine." (Viking) The Harvard Medical School doctor and researcher says patient and doctor should be working together, using intuition, cutting-edge science and personal values to make critical medical decisions. The book's case histories include Goodman’s infant son, who was misdiagnosed in a hospital emergency room and almost died.

Writer Ted Heller. His new book is “Slab Rat.” Heller was responsible for the famous “Separated at Birth” feature in Spy Magazine, a concept that has lived on long after the publication. His new book is a satire about a magazine staffer who will do just about anything to get ahead. Heller has also worked at a number of magazines, including Details, Premiere and Vanity Fair.

Writer Ernesto Quinonez His debut novel, “Bodega Dreams” (Vintage books), is set in Spanish Harlem. Like his narrator, Quinonez is half Ecuadorean, half-Puerto Rican. A reviewer in the Kirkus Reviews writes of the book, “Edgy, street-smart. . . An admirable debut, brimming with energy and refreshingly devoid of genre clichés.”

Tens of thousands of African-American men, women, and children were lynched by mobs in the United States between 1882 and 1968. Some of these lynchings were photographed, and the photos were saved as souvenirs, and were even sometimes used as postcards. Antique dealer James Allen came across these disturbing images and began to collect them. His collection is currently on display at the New York Historical Society. The book about Allen’s collection, called “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America” (Twin Palms Publishers) was published earlier this year.

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel by Susan Sontag called In America (Farrar Straus & Giroux).

Lennard Davis talks about his new memoir “My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood With Deafness” (University of Illinois Press), about Davis's experiences, growing up a hearing child with deaf parents. He'll talk about his complex and sometimes difficult relationship with his deaf, working-class Jewish immigrant parents. DAVIS is a professor and Graduate Director of the English Department at State University of New York, Binghamton. He has written several books and published essays in The Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other publications.

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer has written the new book, “The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father’s Struggle with Madness” (Broadway Books). His father, Charles, was a professor of sociology who lived a normal suburban life with his family until the onset of schizophrenia. The disease destroyed his life: he lost his job, his family, and ended up homeless. Nathaniel corresponded with his father until it became too difficult to continue. After learning of his father’s death in 1995, he decided to find out what happened to him.

Poets Sonia Sanchez and Michael Harper. The two are featured on a new CD anthology, "Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers" (Rhino) a collection of African American poetry from 1919 to 1999. It Includes the work of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-heron, Amiri Baraka and others.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews “The Romantics” (Random House) by Pankaj Mishra.