Books & Literature

Poet Sharon Olds. She writes passionate and intensely personal poems about her childhood with abusive and alcoholic parents, and her own experiences as a mother and a wife. Suicide attempts in New York, and encounters on the subway also provide inspiration for her work. Sharon Olds is the recipient of the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection titled The Dead and the Living.

Writer Paul Monette. His new book, Borrowed Time, is a memoir about watching his lover die from AIDS.

Language Commentator Geoffrey Nunberg discusses the logic behind the dictionary and thesaurus.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews the latest installment of the Spencer detective series, the novel Crimson Joy by Robert Parker.

Writer Jeanette Winterson. Her autobiographical first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is the coming-out story of a young British girl raised in an evangelical household who must come to the religion's severe view of right and wrong. Winterson was the recipient of the Whitbread Prize for best first novel and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best writer under thirty-five. Her new book, "The Passion," is a historical novel set at the time of the Napoleonic wars.

David Martin, Pentagon correspondent for CBS News and co-author of The Best Laid Plans, an account of America's flawed war against international terrorism.

Astronaut Michael Collins. He controlled the Apollo 11 command module that circled the moon while Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on its' surface. Collins has written a history of the space program titled Liftoff.

Lawrence Weschler, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He writes about politics and art, and his profiles are gathered in a new book, Shapinsky's Karma, Bogg's Bill and Other True Tales.

Estelle Freedman co-author of Intimate Matters, A History of Sexuality in America. Among the principal observations Freedman makes in her book is that sexual puritanism was never as all-encompassing as most historians state when chronicling the mores of the 19th and early 20th Century. The book charts the liberalization of sex as value in itself, independent of reproduction. Freedman is a professor of history at Stanford University.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews Women in A River Landscape, the last novel by the late German author Heinrich Boll.

Michael Harrington, a political scientist, author and co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America. His 1962 book, The Other America, caught the attention of President John Kennedy and became the handbook for Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Harrington's central theme is that poverty is growing, not shrinking, and that the free market has proven inadequate to the task of reducing it. His more recent works include The New American Poverty and The Next Left. His latest work, The Long-Distance Runner, is his autobiography.

Dance writer Deborah Jowitt. In her new book, Time and the Dancing Image, Jowitt approaches dance as an anthropologist, trying to reconnect dance to history by placing dance's major developments in the context of the culture that spawned it. Jowitt, a former dancer and choreographer, is the principal dance critic of The Village Voice.

Financial writer Connie Bruck. Her first book, The Predators' Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Man who Staked Them, is a profile of the controversial junk bond financier Michael Milken, and the junk bond department of the investment firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Milken's financing schemes, and Drexel Burnham's resources, have been the engine behind many of the hostile takeovers and mergers that have rocked Wall Street over the last six years. Bruck is a reporter for The American Lawyer magazine.

Detective Josiah Thompson. Thompson was a tenured professor of philosophy at Haverford College when he applied for a job at a San Francisco detective agency. He has since left academia and works full-time as a private eye. He's written an account of his work titled Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye. Thompson's cases run the gamut from recovering money from an attic in a drug case to saving an innocent man from the gas chamber.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews Capote: A Biography, the biography of the American writer Truman Capote that was 14 years in the making. The author is Time magazine writer Gerald Clarke.

Writer Bharati Mukherjee. Her new book of short stories, The Middleman and Other Stories, portrays immigrants from Third World countries who strive to maintain their indigenous identity while embracing much of Western culture and lifestyle.

Frank Robinson, manager of the Baltimore Orioles. In 1975, he became the first black manager in baseball, and today he is the only one. As a player, Robinson was legendary. He is the only player ever to win the Most Valuable Player award in both leagues; and his 586 home runs place him behind Hand Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays on the all-time list.

Journalist Teresa Carpenter. Her new book, Missing Beauty, is the story of the obsession of a medical professor for a Boston prostitute, and obsession that ended with the prostitute's murder. Carpenter is a staff writer for The Village Voice and won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for her reports on three murders, including those of former congressman Allard Lowenstein and Playmate Dorothy Stratten.

Writer Gerald Clarke. Clarke's biography of writer Truman Capote has just been published. Capote was the author of the seminal work In Cold Blood, but his writing was overshadowed by the excesses of his lifestyle and his reputation as the clownish fixture of the talk show circuit. Clarke's biography was 14 years in the making and was undertaken with Capote's full cooperation. Clarke has written extensively for Time magazine.

Writer and humanitarian Elie Weisel. Weisel won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize for his message of "peace and atonement and human dignity." A concentration camp survivor, he has been the most impassioned and poetic supporter of efforts to memorialize the six million Jews who died in Hitler's death camps. He is author of 24 works, including Night and Dawn. His latest work, a novel, is titled Twilight.