Terry Gross

Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report talks about his book I Am America (And So Can You!) and his successful television show.

The former correspondent and contributor to The Daily Show created his own Emmy-nominated late-night show to parody Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor.

In I Am America, Colbert targets race, religion, sports and the American family as well as more mundane topics like breakfast cereal.

He spent a year reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and writing The Know-It-All, an account of what he learned.

Now author A.J. Jacobs has accomplished another annually retentive feat: Living life the way the Good Book says we should.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible chronicles Jacobs' attempts to follow every rule in the Bible — and considers the lessons he learned along the way.

In his memoir Foreskin's Lament, author Shalom Auslander writes about his attempt to break free from the strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish environment of his childhood.

Auslander is the author of the short-story collection Beware of God. He's contributed to The New Yorker, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

Author and historian Robert Satloff discusses his book Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands.

Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His book recounts the stories of Arabs who protected or aided Jews in North Africa during World War II.

This interview originally aired on Dec. 14, 2006

Actor, writer and director George Clooney stars in the new legal thriller Michael Clayton. Clooney recently starred in Syriana and co-wrote, directed, and co-starred in Good Night, and Good Luck about the showdown between legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

This interview originally aired on Oct. 18, 2005.

In a new book about the constitutional separation of church and state, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills insists that that separation was meant as "the great protector of religion, not its enemy." That, as Wills tells guest host Dave Davies, hasn't stopped fervent believers from challenging the concept.

Wills, a translator of St. Augustine and author of What Jesus Meant, is an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University; the new book is titled Head and Heart: American Christianities.

In The Secret History of the War on Cancer, environmental-health expert Devra Davis warns that we're ignoring dozens of cancer-causing chemicals, like asbestos, benzene, vinyl chloride, and dioxin.

She writes that, like the tobacco companies, the chemical industry has managed to obfuscate the carcinogenic dangers of chemical and other toxic waste.

Davis directs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and teaches epidemiology in the university's public-health graduate program.

Snacking on water beetles in Laos, dining on dog in Korea: Tom Parker Bowles, food writer for Britain's The Mail on Sunday, Night and Day, and Tatler (and son of Prince Charles' wife, Camilla Parker Bowles), has written what he's described as "a travel book about weird food."

It's called The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes.

September 11, AIDS, the Holocaust — comic and actress Sarah Silverman has repeatedly proved that practically nothing need be off limits in a joke. Take the title of her Off-Broadway show, which later became a film: Jesus Is Magic. Or the music video, available on her Comedy Central show's blog, of "The Doodie Song."

Silverman has appeared in films including School of Rock and There's Something About Mary and she was a member of the Saturday Night Live ensemble in the early '90s.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. He has written in depth about the Bush administration. His article in this week’s edition (“Shifting Targets”) is about the administration’s shift in position on Iran, redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the U.S. and Iran. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004, in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes.