History

Corrigan's choices include: The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon; Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left by Susan Braudy; and They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 by David Maraniss.

Journalist Vernon Loeb covers the military for The Washington Post. He just returned from five weeks in Iraq. He discusses the situation there and the capture of Saddam Hussein.

The 82-year-old historian and rabbi has been at the center of events that shape American Jewish life for more than 50 years. He is the former president of the American Jewish Congress, and helped to found the movement called Peace Now in Israel. His 1959 book, The Zionist Idea, is considered a classic. Last year he wrote his memoir A Jew in America: My Life and a People's Struggle for Identity. His new book is The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine.

Goemaere is head of Doctors Without Borders ( Medecins Sans Frontieres) in South Africa and a leading AIDS activist for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign. He was recently featured on a Frontline report, "AIDS Treatment for Africa: The South African Struggle," that appeared on PBS.

We catch up with him about the latest news from Iraq. He's in the United States for just one day, and then he goes back to Baghdad. Burns has won several Pulitzer Prizes for his overseas war reports.

Sennott covered the war in Iraq, but not as an imbedded reporter. He talks about his recent return to Iraq and also discusses the relationship between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are about to meet in London. Sennott is the London bureau chief for The Boston Globe. Sennott is also the author of the book The Body and The Blood: The Holy Land's Christians At the Turn of a New Millennium.

His novel, The Known World, is receiving critical acclaim and has been selected as a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. It's about a black farmer and former slave who becomes a slave owner. Jones made his literary debut more than 10 years ago with Lost in the City, a collection of short stories about struggling black residents of Washington, D.C. It won the Lannan Literary Award. Until recently Jones made his living as a proofreader for the trade magazine Tax Notes.

His new book is An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. It explores Washington's moral struggle with the issue of slavery. Wiencek won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for his book The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White.

From May of this year until September, he was in Iraq helping with the reconstruction of the Iraqi police, forming a special enforcement and investigations team, developing informants and arresting individuals on the coalition forces wanted list (those whose faces showed up on the most-wanted deck of cards). Shubbar was born and raised in Baghdad, and fled the country in 1981.

With his wife, writer Maggie Barrett, he'd planned to begin work on a book about Tuscany in mid-September, 2001, but the project was interrupted by the terrorist attacks. He photographed the excavation of Ground Zero, culminating in an exhibition that is now on tour around the world. Several months later, they resumed work on the Tuscany project. The book, Tuscany, is out now.

His new book Brundibar is based on a Czech opera of the same name. It was set to music by Hans Krasa, who was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin and later killed in Auschwitz. The opera was performed 55 times by the children of Terezin. Sendak has also written and illustrated the classic children's books Where the Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen and Outside Over There. Time magazine has said, "For Sendak, visiting the land of the very young is not something that requires a visa.

Shehadeh is the author of the new memoir When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege. His previous book is the memoir, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine. Shehadeh is a founder of Al-Haq, a pioneering, nonpartisan human rights organization.

Horovitz is editor of The Jerusalem Report and author of the forthcoming book Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terror.

A talk with foreign correspondent Elizabeth Rubin. Rubin writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. She has reported from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq.

Maureen Corrigan reviews The Fifth Book of Peace by Maxine Hong Kingston.

His new book is The New Great Game. The book is about the battle over the world's largest reserve of untapped oil and gas resources, located in the Caspian Sea and surrounding Central Asian republics. The oil alone is said to be worth $4 trillion. Kleveman claims that the United States, China, Russia and Iran are now engaged in a power struggle for control of the region's vast reserves and pipeline routes. Lutz Kleveman was born in Germany and studied at the London School of Economics.

The name is a pseudonym, which combines the Arabic and Latin words for peace. Pax's web log is still going on today. Peter Maass of the online magazine Slate said Pax was "the Anne Frank of this war ... and its Elvis. Pax's diary entries have been collected in book form in the forthcoming The Baghdad Blog.

Katz is the features editor at the Guardian in London. He traced and verified the identity of the Baghdad blogger, who created an Internet diary about life in Iraq a few months before the recent war began.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg examines the term "911."