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In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died after a long battle with cervical cancer. Doctors cultured her cells without permission from her family. The story of those cells — known as HeLa cells, in Lacks' honor — and of the medical advances that came from them, is told in Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

The '70s Memphis-based rock band Big Star won rave reviews for their albums and influenced countless followers, but never managed to become stars. Rock and Roll historian Ed Ward says a new box set and a collection of recordings by founding member Chris Bell offer a chance to look back on the band's troubled life.

Mare's-urine cocktails? Do-it-yourself forceps? Randi Hutter Epstein's new book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth From the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank is full of delightful — and sometimes disturbing — anecdotes about the history of pregnancy and childbirth.

In 1967, mathematician Ed Thorp revolutionized Wall Street with a method of using math and computers to predict the future of the stock market — and his hedge fund has been profitable ever since. Thorp's story, and those of many other market-driven math whizzes, is told in Scott Patterson's new book The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It.

Back when Theodore White did his groundbreaking book The Making of the President 1960, it was easy to write about elections. Most Americans didn't know very much about how campaigns actually worked. These days, we're all experts on push-polling, NASCAR dads, and those oddball Iowa caucuses. For an election book to register now, it must offer something new, something hot. It has to dish.

Here's Mel Gibson as a Boston police detective, shambling onto the screen in Edge of Darkness for the first time in nearly a decade — and it's hard for us (and probably harder for him) to shake off that decade's effects.

One of writer-director Mike Judge's favorite themes is American stupidity. His popular animated series Beavis and Butt-Head featured two brainless 15 year-olds obsessed with MTV. His 2007 film, Idiocracy, envisions a not-so-utopian American future in which evolution has bred the intelligence out of humanity. Judge's latest comedy, Extract, now out on DVD, revisits a second favorite subject — the American workplace. Where his cult classic Office Space pitted disgruntled office employees against their incompetent bosses, Extract focuses Judge's satirical eye on management.

Political scientist Gregory Koger's new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate, addresses the institutionalization of the filibuster — and describes congressional loopholes by way of which fast thinking and hard work can beat the numbers. Koger teaches American politics at the University of Miami. He joins host Terry Gross for a conversation about what has happened to simple majority rule.

David Bianculli reviews the television show "Damages."

Historian Garry Wills won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America and now he's back with a new book about how the atomic bomb transformed our nation. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State explores the ways in which the bomb helped expand the power of the American presidency and turn the United States into a national security state.

There's a basic tension in the true-ish docudrama Extraordinary Measures that lifts it above the formula disease-of-the-week picture. Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley, a Bristol-Myers Squibb executive with a daughter and son born with the rare Pompe disease, a cousin to muscular dystrophy that fatally weakens muscles — including the biggie, the heart.

Jonah Lehrer decided to write a book about it. In How We Decide, Lehrer explores the science of how we make decisions and what we can do to make those decisions better. Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired and has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He joins Terry Gross for a conversation about his book, the cereal aisle and paralysis by analysis.

Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle died Monday after a lifetime of making music with her family and friends. She was 63. McGarrigle grew up singing old French and Irish tunes with her parents and sisters, and went on to perform in a duo with her sister Anna.

Have you ever wondered about the personal life of the man who developed the theory of evolution? On today's Fresh Air, the conservationist Randal Keynes — Charles Darwin's great-great grandson — talks about the man behind the science: his relationship with his wife, Emma, and how they handled the death of their daughter. In 2002, Keynes wrote a book on the subject called Annie's Box, which shares personal letters and diaries documenting how Darwin cared for his daughter in the last months of her life. The book is the basis for the new film Creation.

Once word got out about Sen. Harry Reid's recently reported 2008 remarks about then-candidate Barack Obama's skin color and speech, just about everybody thought he needed to apologize — not least Reid himself. But people had different stories about why.

You often hear the '50s called the Golden Age of Television. If so, we're deep into the Platinum Age. There have never been more sophisticated shows, from ambitious dramas such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Big Love to delirious conceptual series such as 24, Lost and Flash-Forward.

It was in 1967, on her first day in New York, that 20-year-old aspiring poet Patti Smith met fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Their friendship, romance and creative collaboration began on that day and lasted until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989.

Andrea Arnold had captured something volatile and splendid in Fish Tank

Fresh Air's guest host and TV critic recaps the best of last night's salvos from the talk-show wars — which are getting fiercer with every passing hour.