History

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."

NPR's Senior Foreign Correspondent Anne Garrels was one of the few journalists still in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq. Often she reported from her room at the Palestine Hotel as bombs flew overhead. In her new book, Naked in Baghdad, she writes about the war and its aftermath. The book also contains the e-mails that her husband Vint Lawrence sent to friends keeping them informed of her daily life in Baghdad. Garrels has also reported from the former Soviet republics, China, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Israel, and is the recipient of the Alfred I.

Jack Devine was stationed in Chile during the coup as part of the agency's Chile task force. He is now a crisis management consultant in New York with the firm The Arkin Group.

Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project.

Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project. He led the campaign to declassify official documents of the secret history of the United States government support for the Pinochet dictatorship. That information has now been collected in the new book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. The book chronicles 20 years of policy in Chile from 1970 to 1990.

Helen Stickler's new documentary, Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, tells the story of former skateboarding star Mark "Gator" Rogowski. Rogowski is now serving 31 years in prison for the rape and murder of a former girlfriend. Ken Park, a former skateboarder and friend of Rogowski, is interviewed in the film. Park is now the president and CEO of John Galt Media. Stickler is an Emmy-nominated writer, producer and director of documentary films and commercials.

Dr. Sheri Fink's new book is War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival. It's about a group of doctors who treated patients in Srebrenica, Bosnia, under the most extreme conditions. They treated thousands of patients, often without electricity, water or proper medicine. Fink, a physician and writer based in New York, works with the humanitarian organization International Medical Corps. She just returned from Iraq and has also worked in the Balkans, southern Africa and Central Asia.

In the 1990s he covered Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo for Reuters. Three of his colleagues were killed by a mob in Somolia during a rebellion against the presence of U.S. forces, and he witnessed the atrocities in Rwanda. Hartley grew up in Africa, the son of a British colonial officer. After the death of his father, Hartley found in a chest his father had given him the diaries of his father's best friend who had died mysteriously 50 years earlier. Hartley set out to find out what happened.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Jacqueline Winspear's debut novel, Maisie Dobbs.

Noah Feldman is a professor of the New York University School of Law with a doctorate in Islamic Thought from Oxford. Until recently he was head of the constitutional team with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq. He is serving as an adviser as Iraq seeks to draft a new constitution. Feldman is also the author of the new book, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. In the book he argues that it is time for Islamic democracies.

Stothard is the author of the new book, Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History. Stothard chronicles the 30 days leading up to the Iraq war and the early days of the war. Stothard had unprecedented access to Blair during that time. Stothard is currently editor of The London Times Literary Supplement, and is former editor of The Times from 1992 to 2002.

Arn Chorn-Pond is the subject of the new documentary The Flute Player. As a child, Chorn-Pond was held in a Khmer Rouge labor camp where many children starved to death, many others were murdered, and those who survived were forced to work from 5 a.m. to midnight. He was taught to play the flute to play propaganda songs which helped assure his survival. Later at age 14, Chorn-Pond was forced into the Khmer Rouge army to fight the invading Vietnamese. After seeing his friends die, he fled into the jungle.

His work is part of the new Time Magazine book, 21 Days to Baghdad: The Inside Story of How America Won the War Against Iraq. Morris is a contract photographer for Time, and has documented more than 18 foreign conflicts. He has documented drug-related violence in Colombia, guerilla fighting in Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf war. Morris has won many photojournalism awards during his career.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new documentary Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films by director Bred Wood. It's about the Highway Safety Foundation of Mansfield, Ohio, which made a series of graphic driver's education films in the 1960s to warn students about the dangers of driving recklessly, sleepily or drunk.

He covers the economy for The New York Times. He recently returned from Iraq, where he wrote about a number of things, including the country's economy.

Singer wrote the new book, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Over the last decade, private companies have provided tactical support, advice, training, security and even intelligence to the military. In the recent war against Iraq, private military employees handled everything from feeding and housing U.S. troops to maintaining sophisticated weapons like the B-2 stealth bomber. The practice raises troubling ethical questions.