Books & Literature

Ted Solotaroff, senior editor at the book publisher Harper and Row. He has worked with many of the great writers of our time and written widely on the current state of writing and publishing.

Buck Clayton, jazz trumpeter, arranger and band leader. He was a member of Count Basie's original band.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews Bluebeard, the new book by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Mark Mathabane. He grew up in poverty in a black township in South Africa. His skill at tennis caught the attention of Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith, who brought him to the U.S. on an athletic scholarship. He's written a book about his upbringing and the horrors of Apartheid. It's titled Kaffir Boy.

Richard Ford, who wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Sportswriter.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews The Fords, by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, the biography of the family that built the automobile empire. The Fords follows Horowitz' and Collier's books on the Rockefellers and Kennedys.

Betty White, longtime television actress. She currently stars in the NBC series "The Golden Girls."

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been made into a music theater production. Sacks is also the author of Awakenings, a work about victims of sleeping sickness, to whom he administered the experimental drug L-dopa.

Mamie Van Doren, one of Hollywood's blond bombshells in the fifties and sixties. She starred in the cult classics "Untamed Youth," "High School Confidential," and "Born Reckless." She's written a kiss-and-tell memoir called Playing the Field.

Book Critic John Leonard will review The Sergeant's Cat, a new mystery novel by Janwillem Van De Wetering, a former police officer in the Amsterdam police force.

English writer Ian McEwan, whose new novel is called The Child in Time. It's about the loss of a child and the child that endures through adulthood.

Gordon Lish, editor of The Quarterly, a journal of new American writing. He's a leading exponent of the minimalist style of writing.

Issac Asimov [a.k.a. Paul French], the dean of science fiction writers. Asmiov is arguably one of the most widely published authors ever.

Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Joshua Then and Now, both of which were adapted into films.

Tip O'Neill, former Congressman from Massachusetts and Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Book Critic John Leonard will review two new novels by two young writers, From Rockaway, by Jill Eisenstadt, and The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis.

Crime writer Elmore Leonard. His new novel is titled Touch and follows two successful novels, Glitz and Bandits.

Jazz Critic Kevin Whitehead will review a reissue of the 1959 album, "Ellington Jazz Party." His review includes a discussion of the controversial biography of Duke Ellington by James Lincoln Collier, controversial because Collier alleges that true credit for many of Ellington's most famous tunes belongs to his band members.

Indian writer Ved Mehta. He's written several books of autobiography, most all of which have been serialized in "The New Yorker" magazine. His autobiographies are poignant accounts of his blindness, his education in England, and the role that language came to play in his life.

Writer Michael Ignatieff. His new book, Russian Album, recalls, through diaries, photographs and a few mementoes, his forebearers, aristocrats at the time of the Russian Revolution. While most of the upper class was killed in the Revolution, Ignatieff's family fled to Canada.