History

Two momentous films open nationwide on the same day. Sicko radically challenges our perspective on health care. Ratatouille radically challenges our perspective on rats in kitchens. Cynics will say there's a better chance of a rodent becoming a chef than of universal health care for Americans. That underestimates the big fighting rat at the center of Sicko.

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner discusses his book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Weiner did extensive archival research and conducted interviews with CIA insiders, including former chiefs Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner.

Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks — author of the bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq — talks about his latest trip to that country and the latest strategies the Pentagon is employing there. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Wall Street Journal staffer, is also author of Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty.

Louise Arbour, the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Human Rights and onetime chief prosecutor in the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals, discusses U.S. policy on detainees in the fight against terrorism.

Journalist Scott Shane writes for The New York Times about terrorism and the CIA's interrogation techniques. His article "Soviet-Style 'Torture' Becomes 'Interrogation'" describes how the United States has adopted interrogation techniques that it decried when they were used by the Soviet Union.

Author Tara McKelvey interviewed former prisoners from Abu Ghraib for her book Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War McKelvey is senior editor at The American Prospect and a research fellow at the NYU School of Law's Center on Law and Security.

Writer and editor David Talbot founded the online journal Salon.com; he was editor-in-chief from 1995 to 2005, and still serves as board chairman of Salon Media Group. He's written a book about Robert and John F. Kennedy called Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

Ever since word got out that Don DeLillo was working on a novel about Sept. 11, anticipation has been building. After all, DeLillo has claimed plots and conspiracies as his literary subject. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man.

In Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989, historian Michael Beschloss takes a look at nine crucial moments when a president risked his political career for the good of the country, often by taking an unpopular or controversial stand.

In 1961, an integrated group of self-proclaimed "Freedom Riders" challenged segregation by riding together on segregated buses through the Deep South. They demanded unrestricted access to the buses — as well as to terminal restaurants and waiting rooms — but pledged nonviolence.

Carlo Bonini, investigative reporter for the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, broke the story about an Italian intelligence agency's involvement in forging documents saying that Iraq secured uranium from Niger. Those documents helped the White House make the case for invading Iraq. Bonini's new book is Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror.

Presidential historian Robert Dallek has written about LBJ, JFK, FDR and Ronald Reagan. Now, in his book Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, he tackles two political titans he describes as "self-serving characters with grandiose dreams of recasting world affairs."

Sari Nusseibeh is the president of and a professor of philosophy at al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem. He's written a memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life; he's also co-author of the People's Voice Initiative, aimed at building grassroots support for a two-state solution in the Middle East. Until December 2002, he was the representative of the Palestinian National Authority in Jerusalem.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday at the age of 84. His most famous book was the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five; based on Vonnegut's own experiences in World War II, the book became a cultural touchstone at the height of popular protest against the war in Vietnam. In this archived interview, he talks to Terry Gross about writing, censorship, and the experience of war. Rebroadcast from May 13, 1986

Mike Binder has directed nine feature films, although before his last, The Upside of Anger, he was best known as an actor and for the television series The Mind of the Married Man.

In Reign Over Me, he gives a serious — an extremely serious — part to the comic Adam Sandler, who plays a man whose life is destroyed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has an upcoming PBS documentary series that tells the story of the World War II through the eyes of the soldiers who fought in it.

Simply called The War, the 14-hour, seven-part series begins airing in September.

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has died at 89. We listen back to an interview recorded with him at the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. Schlesinger was a special assistant in the White House to President Kennedy.

Rebroadcast from Oct. 16, 2002.

Journalist Matt Beynon Rees is now a crime novelist, too. The Collaborator of Bethlehem follows a Palestinian schoolteacher who turns detective to solve a murder set in the violence-ridden West Bank. Rees was based in Jerusalem as a Middle East reporter for Time magazine for more than a decade, serving as bureau chief from 2000 to 2006.

Joe Hunter, who died last week at the age of 79, was one of the Funk Brothers, the session musicians who helped create the Motown Sound. He could be heard on such hits as "Money" by Barrett Strong, "Shop Around" by The Miracles and "Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas. This interview originally aired on Nov. 18, 2002.

Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski died on January 23, 2007, at the age of 74. As a foreign correspondent, Kapuscinski covered coups and revolutions in the developing world for forty years. Many of his articles appeared in a series of books that made him famous: The Soccer War, Another Day of Life, and Shah of Shahs. This interview originally aired in 1/21/1988.