Society & Culture

Commentator Maureen Corrigan has a review of a new biography of a turn of the century journalist: "Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist." (Times Books).

Former Drug Czar William Bennett. He is currently co-director of the conservative organization "Empower America." In 1981, he was appointed by Ronald Reagan to be Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1985, he became President Reagan's Secretary of Education, and from March of 1989 to November of 1990, he served as President Bush's director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Bennett has written extensively on social and domestic issues and is the author of five books.

Film director Ted Demme. His new movie is "The Ref," starring Denis Leary, Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis. It's a dark comedy about a burglar stuck with two obnoxious hostages on Christmas Eve. Demme, who is 30, has also directed and produced for MTV; he's responsible for creating the popular hip-hop show "Yo! MTV Raps." His first feature film was "Who's The Man?" He is director Jonathan Demme's nephew.

Floyd Cochran used to be a recruiter and public relations man for the racist, anti-Semitic Aryan Nations, based in Idaho. But about two years ago Cochran left the group and denounced it and it's racist views. Now he travels the country speaking out against the Aryan Nations.

Singer/songwriter Alejandro Escovedo. Escovedo has just released his second solo album. It is called "Thirteen Years" (Watermelon Records). He was a founding member of San Francisco's '70's punk band the Nuns, the cowpunk band Rank & File and rock band True Believers. The title of the new album refers to a point during his marriage when all he had to offer his wife was song. After Escovedo and his former wife separated, she committed suicide.

Teresa "Terry" Phelps. Author, law professor and wife of Digger Phelps, former head basketball coach at Notre Dame. Terry Phelps has written a memoir called "The Coach's Wife" (Norton). In 1991, Digger Phelps left Notre Dame and not one Notre Dame official attended his farewell address. Terry Phelps says her husband was the victim of the clashing demands placed on college coaches--be an educator, but be a money maker and entertainer too. She writes about her role as the "lovely wife," as coach's wives are often called in the world of college sports.

Gary Orfield. He is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Director of its Project on School Desegregation. His report, "The Growth of Segregation in American Schools: Changing Patterns of Separation and Poverty since 1968" was recently issued to the National School Board Association. In 1954 the United States Supreme Court found that the races in America's schools were segregated and the education was unequal. For awhile, integration was on the increase. But Orfield has found that today our schools have slipped backward.

Lionel Dahmer is the father of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who committed some of the most ghastly crimes imaginable. Lionel has written a new memoir about his life with his son, "A Father's Story." (William Morrow), in which he tries to understand what happened to his son, and how he could turn into such a monster.

Actor and playwright David Drake. In 1985, Drake saw the play "The Normal Heart" by playwright Larry Kramer. It was a turning point for Drake. Kramer went on to become a founder of ACT UP--the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Drake a gay man, started on a path of self discovery and activism that has led to his writing a series of vignettes called "The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me" (Anchor Books). (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Author and museum director James Cameron. Sixty four years ago, an organized mob of more than 10,000 white men and women dragged Cameron and two other black teenage men from a jail cell in Marion, Indiana. The mob mercilessly beat the three young men. They lynched two. Cameron was spared. In 1984, he recounted this experience in his memoir "A Time of Terror" (Available now from Black Classic Press). Then in 1988, Cameron founded the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.

Journalist Nguyen Qui Duc. He works for KALW-FM in San Francisco, supplies commentaries to NPR and received the Overseas Press Club's 1989 Award of Excellence for his public radio series about returning to Viet Nam. Nguyen has written a new memoir about his family's struggle during and after the war. NGUYEN's father was an official in the South Vietnamese government who was captured by the Viet Cong and imprisoned for 12 years. In 1975, Nguyen gained passage to the U.S. on a cargo ship, and moved about from relative to relative until he settled in California.

Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist at MIT and director of its Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has a new book on how language works: "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" (Morrow). He argues that language is not simply a cultural invention taught by parents and schools, but a biological system, --an instinct-- partly learned, and partly innate. To Pinker, a three year old toddler is a "grammatical genius", capable of obeying adult rites of language, similar to web-spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.

Rock Critic Ed Ward on encountering the hip new language in Berlin: English.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan on the return of the "dirty" book: Robert Olen Butler's "They Whisper" (Henry Holt) and Nicholson Baker's "The Fermata"

Commentator Gayle Pemberton comments on Black History Month.

Doctor of Psychology and editorial writer for the New York Times, Brent Staples. His new memoir is "Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black & White" (Pantheon). In 1984, Staples' younger brother, a cocaine dealer, was murdered. Staples began a process of reconsideration of the major questions in his life: his distance from his family by graduate study at the University of Chicago; the demise and racial divisions of his industrial hometown in Pennsylvania. On missing his brother's memorial, Staples writes "Choose carefully the funerals you miss."

Reporter for The Washington Post Nathan McCall. He's written a new autobiography, "Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America." (Random House). When McCall was twenty years old he was sent to prison for armed robbery.

Lebanese-born author and journalist Hanan Al-Shaykh. Her novel "The Story of Zahra" (Anchor Books) has just been published in the United States. Several Arab countries have banned the book since its original publication 14 years ago. The Story of Zahra tells of a contemporary Lebanese woman struggling with life in her family and her war-ravaged native city of Beirut. Al-Shaykh's novel "Women of Sand and Myrrh" was published in the United States last year.

Tribute to Randy Shilts who died of AIDS. (Rebroadcast of 07/05/1990 and 04/23/1993)

Poet and Professor of English at Yale, Wayne Koestenbaum explores the affinity of gay men for opera in his new book: "The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire" (Vintage). Koestenbaum traces the art-form back to its origins in The Camerata, a 16th century group of Florentine gentlemen, who studied ancient Greek musical theory. A self proclaimed "Opera Queen", Koestenbaum explores this rarely examined territory with what one critic has called "a brilliantly obsessive and funny memoir".