Places & Travel

Film critic David Bianculli reviews 30 Rock the new NBC sitcom created by and starring Tina Fey, former head writer and "Weekend Update" anchor on Saturday Night Live. It's the second NBC show about a behind-the-scenes look at a fictional late-night live variety show.

Religion professor Philip Jenkins talks about his latest book, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. The book is a follow-up to his 2002 title, The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity, which was named on of the top religion books of that year by USA Today.

In Dexter, the new Showtime series starring Michael C. Hall of Six Feet Under fame, a forensics expert investigates serial killers by day and turns into one at night, stalking and murdering criminals.

Writer Ian Buruma's new book is about the 2004 death of a popular media personality at the hands of a Muslim radical. In writing Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Buruma found long-standing tensions between native-born Dutch and Muslim immigrants.

A new film of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men stars Sean Penn as political boss Willie Stark, a role that won Broderick Crawford an Oscar in 1949. The remake also features Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, and James Gandolfini. It's directed by Steven Zaillian, who won his own Oscar for the screenplay of Schindler's List.

Former New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey. His new memoir, The Confession details his life and events leading up to his August 2004 coming-out speech. McGreevey was governor from January 2002 to November 2004, when he resigned. In addition to coming out as a homosexual, McGreevey appointed alleged Israeli lover Golan Cipel to the position of New Jersey's Homeland Security adviser. Since the publication of The Confession, Cipel has stated that he was not McGreevey's lover, as detailed in McGreevey's book.

Nell Freudenberger lived every young writer's dream when her first short story was published in The New Yorker. She was 26 at the time and an editorial assistant at the magazine, writing fiction in the morning before work. Her award-winning short story collection, Lucky Girls, was published in 2003 and made our best books list that year. Freudenberger has just published her first novel, The Dissident.

On today's show we look into the Christian Zionist movement, made up of evangelical Christians who see the rebirth of Israel as a prelude to the second coming of Christ. Journalist Gershom Gorenberg is former associate editor and columnist for The Jerusalem Report.

Max Blumenthal is a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute, based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in various publications, and he is a research fellow at Media Matters for America. He has written extensively about the conservative movement, and the Christian right. His recent article in The Nation is "Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism."

John Hagee is the founder of the Christian Zionist group, Christians United for Israel. He is the senior pastor of Cornerstone Church an evangelical church in San Antonio, Texas. He is also the author of a number of books; his most recent is Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World.

Journalist T. Christian Miller of The Los Angeles Times talks about his new book, Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq. Miller writes, "In almost every way, the rebuilding has fallen short."

Gordon Corera, security correspondent for the BBC, warns in his new book that we may be entering a new era of accelerated weapons proliferation. In Shopping for Bombs, Corera writes about the challenges of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons and about A.Q. Khan, the man described by a former CIA director as at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden.

Foreign policy expert Joseph Cirincione is senior vice president for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. He s been called a nonproliferation guru. His soon-to-be-published book is called Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons.

Conservative thinker Michael Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, but prefers the term "democratic revolutionary" to "neoconservative." He discusses the current and future U.S. policy toward Iran, arguing that the United States should encourage change from within the country, rather than launching an all-out attack.

Disaster science specialist Ivor Van Heerden is the cofounder and deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center and director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. His new book is The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina -- the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist.

Before most Americans had heard of the Taliban, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote a book about them. After the Sept. 11 attacks, it became a best-seller. Rashid's recent reporting for English-language newspapers involves Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Middle East peace expert Sari Nusseibeh is the founder of the Palestinian Consultancy Group and the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization, the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and a professor of Islamic philosophy. He co-wrote the People's Voice Initiative to build grassroots support for a two-state solution. Until December 2002, he was the representative of the Palestinian National Authority in Jerusalem.

Anthony Shadid of The Washington Post has been reporting from Lebanon. Shadid won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for international reporting. His latest book, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, has just come out in paperback. Shadid is of Lebanese descent and grew up in Oklahoma City, Okla.

TV critic David Bianculli previews When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's two-part HBO documentary about New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Fiction writer Claire Messud has twice been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award. Our book critic says Messud's just-published novel, The Emperor's Children, might just be the one to propel her out of the "finalist" category and win her the gold.