History

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews The Rising (Sony) the new CD by Bruce Springsteen, inspired by the events of Sept. 11.

Shawn Levy is the author of the new book Ready Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London. It's about London from 1961-1969. He writes, "for those few evanescent years it all came together: youth, pop music, fashion, celebrity, satire, crime, fine art, sexuality, scandal, theater, cinema, drugs, media: the whole mad modern stew." Levy is also the author of Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey & the Last Great Showbiz Party and the biography, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis.

Journalist James Bennet of the New York Times. Hes the papers Jerusalem Bureau Chief. Hes been in the Middle East covering how the crisis there is affecting both Israelis and Palestinians.

Film critic Henry Sheehan reviews K-19.

Journalist Steven Erlanger is the Berlin Bureau Chief for the New York Times. Hell talk about European reaction to the Bush administration, its planned invasion of Iraq, and its position on the middle east, and its response to September 11th. And about how the European union is changing the lives of Europeans.

Leo Litwak is a retired San Francisco State University professor of English. He's the author of the new memoir, The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II (Penguin Books). Litwak was a 19-year-old medic. One reviewer writes, "[A] book that should be given to every schoolboy in the country at the age of 13... the Medic teaches us so much, makes clear that sometimes the monsters in war are not only the enemy."

Dr. David Zangen, senior pediatrician, and Dr. Radgonde Amer, an ophthalmologist at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. They are part of the group of Arab and Jewish doctors who work side by side at the hospital treating casualties of the conflict in the Middle East.

Writer Gary Shteyngart. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, is receiving critical acclaim. The main character of the book, like Shteyngart, is a Russian-American Jew who emigrated to the United States as a child. In a New York Times Magazine cover article, Daniel Zalewski wrote, "Gary Shteyngart has rewritten the classic immigrant narrative — starring a sarcastic slacker instead of a grateful striver. And after all his parents have done for him!"

Retired Navy Capt. Peter Huchthausen wrote the book K19: The Widowmaker: The Secret Story of the Soviet Nuclear Submarine. This true story of a barely averted catastrophe aboard a nuclear-powered submarine has been adapted into a film of the same name starring Harrison Ford. Huchthausen served as technical director on the film. On July 4, 1961, the sub was taking part in a military exercise in the North Atlantic. A pipeline in a reactor's cooling system ruptured. In a race against time, the crew worked to improvise a repair. Until now, the story has been kept secret.

Arab-American stand-up comics Ahmed Ahmed and Maz Jobrani. They've changed their routines since Sept. 11, cracking jokes about attending flight school and the like. Both have had small parts as terrorists in action films. Jobrani was in a Chuck Norris film and Ahmed was Terrorist #4 in Executive Decision. They live in Los Angeles.

Film critic Henry Sheehan reviews Windtalkers, directed by John Woo and starring Nicolas Cage.

National security expert Loch Johnson. Hes written several books about intelligence and the trade-off of personal freedom, including Bombs, Bugs, Drugs and Thugs: Intelligence and Americas Quest for Security. Johnson is a professor of political science at the University of Georgia. He has served on several US Senate committees on Intelligence.

The Rev. Roy Hawthorne is one of the original windtalkers. They were a group of Navajo men who developed a secret code for American World War II fighters. The Japanese were able to break every other code the military developed. The Navajo code was the only one never solved by the Japanese and is considered the key tool in winning that war. The code was declassified in 2001, and the code talkers received Medals of Honor from President Bush. The new film Windtalkers is based on the story of the codemakers. Hawthorne gives talks about the codemaking process to schoolchildren nationwide.

Raha Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer whose latest book is Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine. (Steer Forth Press) He is a founder of the nonpartisan human rights organization Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and author of several books about international law, human rights and the Middle East. Shehadeh lives in Ramallah. He was a guest on Fresh Air in February of this year and returns to talk about the latest news from the occupied territories.

Writer Michael Oren's new book is Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. (Oxford University Press) Oren was raised and educated in the United States, and emigrated to Israel more than 25 years ago. He is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based institute for Jewish social thought and public policy. He is also the head of the Middle East history project.

Photographer and reporter Scott Peterson of The Christian Science Monitor has been covering the war on terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks. He is also the paper's Moscow bureau chief, and a former Middle East correspondent. Peterson recently attended a training camp for journalists to learn how to deal with kidnappers and gunmen. He was also a friend of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl. Peterson is the author of the book Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda.

David Newman is a political columnist for The Jerusalem Post. He is also chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and editor of The International Journal of Geopolitics. He'll discuss the history of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He's written about the settlements in The New York Times. Newman is also author of the book, Population, Settlement and Conflict: Israel and the West Bank.

Foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman. He's just won his third Pulitzer Prize, this time for his "clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat." Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for his international reporting from Lebanon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting from Isreal. He's also the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization.

Producers, writers, directors Justine Shapiro and B.Z. Goldberg. Their new documentary film Promises takes a look at the Palestinian-Isreali conflict thru the eyes of seven children living in or near Jerusalem. It was filmed between 1997 and the summer of 2000. SHAPIRO grew up in Berkeley, California and hosts and co-writes the award-winning travel series, Lonely Planet. Goldberg was born in Boston and grew up outside of Jerusalem and has been a television journalist. Promises was broadcast on PBS last December as part of the P.O.V. series.

Journalist Scott Anderson. He traveled with a platoon of elite Isreali commandos into the West Bank and wrote about it in the article "An Impossible Occupation" which was the cover story of last Sundays New York Times Magazine.