Terry Gross

Steven Bach's biography Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl examines the filmmaker who celebrated the Nazi ideal and created the Third Reich's iconic images in Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. Bach details Riefenstahl's ruthless, opportunistic ambition, analyzes her "self-righteous entitlement," and explores her relationships with Hitler, Goebbels and Albert Speer. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work.

Husband-and-wife team Win Butler and Regine Chassagne lead the band Arcade Fire, an art-rock outfit that hails from Montreal.

The seven-member band, which deploys everything from piano, sax and violin to dobro, harpsichord and hurdy-gurdy, has two albums to its credit: Neon Bible and 2004's Funeral.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book, Everyman, centers on a successful septuagenarian's response to his physical decline and approaching death.

The man, who's never named, has no religion or philosophy to cling to; reviewer Gail Caldwell of the Boston Globe writes that the book is a "swift, brutal novel about a heartbreakingly ordinary subject, and it is also testament to Roth that the book leaves you a little breathless and not at all bereft."

Judd Apatow has been a writer for Larry Sanders and Ben Stiller, and he worked on the cult-favorite TV comedy Freaks and Geeks. But you'll know him as the writer-director of the hit film The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Now he's back with Knocked Up; guest host David Bianculli talks to Apatow and to Knocked Up star Seth Rogen, who plays an oafish slacker confronted with the prospect of fatherhood after a one-night stand.

Yanar Mohammed, an internationally renowned Iraqi activist, founded the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq to advocate for women's rights. It's an uphill fight: From the 1950s to the 1970s, Iraqi women could legally work, study, marry and divorce, and wear what they wanted, but the new constitution in Iraq, based on the Islamic Sharia law system, denies women the civil and social rights guaranteed to men.

Singer and songwriter Dion says that his latest project was inspired by a visit to Fresh Air. The acoustic CD, Bronx in Blue, has Dion exploring the blues music he heard during his youth.

In the late 1950s, Dion and his band the Belmonts topped the pop charts with hits like "I Wonder Why" and "A Teenager In Love," which earned the singer teen-idol status. Dion split amicably with the band in 1960 and continued to write Top 10 hits — "Runaround Sue," "The Wanderer" — until the British Invasion changed popular tastes.

Martha Raddatz, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, has been to Iraq 13 times since the war began. Her book The Long Road Home focuses on the battle for Sadr City in April 2004. That's when American troops realized they were facing an insurgency. (This interview was first broadcast on March 1, 2007.)

Navy surgeon Richard Jadick earned a Bronze Star for his service during the battle of Fallujah, treating the wounded during the worst street fighting Americans had faced since Vietnam. His memoir is On Call in Hell. (This interview as first broadcast on March 7, 2007.)

Dick Dale is the man known as "the King of the Surf Guitar." He launched surf rock in 1960 with his band, the Deltones. Four of Dale's early albums are being re-released by Sundazed Music: King of the Surf Guitar, Checkered Flag, Mr. Eliminator and Summer Surf.

He described the surf sound in a 1963 article as "a heavy staccato sound on the lowkey guitar strings, with a heavy throbbing beat — like thunder, or waves breaking over you." It's also played loud and with plenty of reverb.