Rock critic Ken Tucker continues his look at the latest in pop rock. He reviews the CD Red Head by the Boston-based musician known as Bleu (his real name is William McAuley).
Soul singer Barry White, the sweet-talking, deep-voiced performer who rhapsodized about love, died on July 4. He was 58. The cause was kidney failure. His hits included "My First, My Last, My Everything," "Never Never Gonna Give Up," and "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More." Before he became a hit as a solo performer, White put together the female vocal trio Love Unlimited and founded the Love Unlimited Orchestra, a 40-piece ensemble, to accompany himself and the trio.
Ted Conover is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He went to Guantanamo Bay to report on the detention of suspected jihadists and terrorists there. He has written about it in the June 29th edition of The New York Times Magazine, "In the Land of Guantanamo." Previously, Conover spent a year as a prison guard inside New York State's infamous Sing Sing prison to experience first hand the conditions within a prison. He wrote about it in his book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing.
He has written the new biography Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Reviewer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writes of the book, "both an absorbing narrative biography and an acute assessment of the man and his impact on his time and on posterity." Isaacson is also the author of a biography of Kissinger, is president of the Aspen Institute, and was managing editor of Time magazine.
Veteran producer, pianist, singer, club owner George Wein. He's the founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, the Newport Folk Festival, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. In the early 1950s he founded the jazz clubs Storyville and Mahogany Hall in Boston where jazz giants Art Tatum, Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz and Miles Davis played. In 1954 he launched the Newport Jazz Festival where he presented Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Dave Brubeck and others.
Performance artist, writer and theater director Rhodessa Jones is co-artistic director of the San Franciso performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is also founder and director of the "Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women," a performance workshop for women in prison in which she helps them develop and stage works based on their own stories. Jones' solo performance works include Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers, and Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women.
Writer and producer Chris Albertson is considered an authority on blues singer Bessie Smith. His 1971 biography of Smith has been reissued in a new revised and expanded edition. It's called Bessie, and it contains new details on Smith's early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted to events and responses that followed the original publication.
His new book is Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Among the commercial activities at many universities and colleges these days are: drug companies giving money to medical schools, industry buying the rights to scientific discoveries and industry-endowed faculty chairs. Bok is critical of such ventures.
James Wood is book critic for The New Republic. He's making his own literary debut with the novel The Book Against God. It's about a priest's son who becomes an atheist. Wood is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief.
TV critic David Bianculli previews Dead Like Me the new series on Showtime Cable that begins Friday, June 27. It's about a group of characters who died with unresolved issues and have to work them out in the after life.
Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new film 28 Days Later. The movie is based on the best-selling novel The Beach, in which animal-rights activists break into a lab and free infected monkeys, letting loose a virus that puts people into a permanent state of murderous rage.
Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1994 she wrote a profile of David Friedman, one of the Friedman sons. David was known as Silly Billy, a popular clown who was a favorite at children's birthday parties in New York City. David's father and brother were accused of molesting children, and the family's story is told through their own home movies in the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. Orlean is also the author of the best-selling book, The Orchid Thief.
He has written his first novel for adults, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The narrator of the story is an autistic teenager who is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and who must prove his innocence when a neighborhood dog is killed. One reviewer described it as "wonderful, simple, moving, and likely to be a smash." Haddon lives in England and teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and for Oxford University.
In his recent columns he has been writing about the intelligence officers who disclosed to him that the Bush administration exaggerated the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war. Kristof recently returned from Iraq.
