Terry Gross

Empire Falls, for which Richard Russo won a Pulitzer Prize, has been made into an HBO miniseries. Russo has written five novels in all, including Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody's Fool.

Political scientist Jonathan Oberlander is an expert on health politics and policy. He is an associate professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of the book The Political Life of Medicare. His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in Health Affairs, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times.

Surgeon and medical historian Ira Rutkow's new book is Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine. Rutkow is also the author of Surgery: An Illustrated History, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Director Gregg Araki and novelist Scott Heim have collaborated on the new film Mysterious Skin, based on Heim's novel of the same name. It's the story of two young men who were sexually molested as boys, and the different ways in which trauma has shaped their lives.

Journalist David Kirkpatrick covers Congress for The New York Times. As part of a series on class issues for the paper, he co-authored a story on the increase of evangelical Christians on Ivy League campuses. The article was published in the Sunday, May 22, edition.

Rev. Thomas Breidenthal is dean of religious life at Princeton University. Breidenthal is a scholar, teacher and Episcopal priest. He is the author of the 1997 book Christian Households: The Sanctification of Nearness.

Matt Bennett is the founder of Christian Union, an organization of evangelicals at Ivy League schools whose goal is to reach those who will go on to become part of America's academic elite. The group operates ministry centers at Brown, Cornell and Princeton universities. Bennett, a graduate of Cornell, founded the organization in 2002. Rachel Blair is a student at Princeton and is a member of Christian Union.

His memoir is The Good, the Bad, and Me. Wallach's long career on stage and screen, included spaghetti westerns of the '60s and the Godfather trilogy. He won a Tony for his role in Tennessee Williams' Rose Tattoo. (This interview was initially broadcast on Nov. 13, 1990.)

Journalist and novelist Philip Caputo's new novel, Acts of Faith, is set in Sudan during that country's civil war. It depicts the consequences — intended and otherwise — the conflict has on aid workers and missionaries involved in relief work.