Writer Peter Matthiessen "On the River Styx."

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews the recordings of music by composer, Sofia Gubaidulina (So-FEE-ah Goo-bye-DOO-lee-na). She's the Soviet Union's leading female composer.

Writer and shopper Paul Rudnick, and his mother, Selma. Paul Runick, best-known for his play Poor Little Lambs, for the novel Social Disease, and for his essays in such publications as Esquire and Vanity Fair, has just published a novel about, among other things, a mother and son shopping team. Titled I'll Take It, the thinly veiled autobiographical novel is about the developed inability to resist the temptation to shop, and about the quest for ultimate bliss - a good sale.

Television critic David Bianculli reviews "The Neon Empire" a new mini-series on Showtime which stars Martin Landau, Gary Busey, and Ray Sharkey. It follows in the footsteps of NBC's belated "Crime Story."