With plenty of nods to The Great Gatsby Joseph O'Neill's Netherland explores dreams and ambition in post-Sept. 11 New York City. Maureen Corrigan calls the novel "marvelous."
From jazz concerts and cabaret acts to multimedia art installations, Theo Bleckmann has made a name for himself in new York. Now, the vocalist and composer looks back to his native Germany.
Harvard Law professor returns to Fresh Air to talk about how credit-card debt is becoming more costly due to increased fees and interest rates. Warren is a bankruptcy expert and an outspoken critic of abusive lending practices.
Prof. Elizabeth Warren, a specialist in bankruptcy and contract law at Harvard Law School, reports that one in four credit reports contain errors significant enough to affect a credit score.
It's taken actor Jason Bateman a while to achieve real big-screen presence, but now the former child actor seems to be inescapable. In the past year, Bateman has appeared in Juno, The Kingdom, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Now, he's co-starring alongside Will Smith in the movie Hancock, which opens tomorrow. In Hancock, Bateman plays a PR executive who is rescued by a cocky superhero who leaves destruction in his wake.
Pixar has always focused on loss, decay, and the dark side of materialism. Here that theme extends to the ruination of the planet — and Wall-E ranks among the most sublime feature-length works of animation ever made in this country.
Journalist James Glanz is Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times; he's just reported on a government study criticizing the Bush administration for broadly overstating certain gains in Iraq.
Hopkins, which premieres tonight, is the sequel to a 2000 ABC documentary series that told intimate, very real stories about medical staff and patients at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. Fresh Air's TV critic has a review.
Inspired by Sinn Sisamouth and other Cambodian stars of the '60s and '70s, brothers Zac and Ethan Holzman created a fusion cover band — complete with a former Cambodian pop star who had recently moved to Los Angeles.
With the end of the writer's strike, live programming returned to network television this weekend in a big way. TV critic David Bianculli reviews last night's 80th Annual Academy Awards telecast, as well as the weekend's new episode of Saturday Night Live, starring Tina Fey.
Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews John Edgar Wideman's new book, Fanon (a Novel), which mixes fiction, biography and memoir in an effort to capture the life and mind of psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon.
Neurological researcher Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke 12 years ago. While the damage caused by a stroke is often devastating, Taylor was able to make a complete recovery after becoming her own experimental subject.
In July 2007, Brent Stirton shocked the world with a photo of a murdered mountain gorilla — one of seven killed, execution-style, in their jungle preserve. This year, Stirton returned to the Congo to help answer a question many had asked: Who killed the Virunga gorillas?
Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews Like Before, Somewhat After, the new recording from drummer George Schuller and his quintet Circle Wide. The disc salutes the music of pianist Keith Jarrett's '70s-era quartet.
In the 1970s, George Carlin's seven dirty words routine was the center of a famous obscenity case. More recently, the comic was named the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Carlin died of heart failure Sunday at the age of 71.
The '60s sitcom was often a one-joke affair; the film's starry-eyed geek has room for nuance. You can make a case for both Maxes, but critic David Edelstein misses the tube's lovable boob. Anne Hathaway's Agent 99, now ... that's another matter.
The debut short-story collection by Nigerian writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan offers a sobering view of a world in which atrocity is commonplace, and the unthinkable is the everyday.
