Terry Gross

Lewis and a team of researchers at the Center for Public Integrity have investigated the financing of all of this year's presidential contenders in the new book The Buying of the President 2004: Who's Really Bankrolling Bush and His Democratic Challengers — and What They Expect in Return.

He wrote the book Touching the Void about his ill-fated climb of Siula Grande mountain in Peru with his climbing partner Simon Yates. Now there's a movie adaptation of the book. During the climb, Simpson fell and broke several bones in his leg, crippling him. His friend, determined to find a way to get Simpson home, tied their two lengths of rope together (each was 150 feet) and lowered his friend down the mountain 300 feet at a time. When Simpson failed to respond to Yate's signal to retie the rope, Yates made the agonizing decision to cut the rope.

Landesman is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He investigated the sex slave industry for this week's cover story (Sunday, Jan. 25), "The Girls Next Door." He found that tens of thousands of women, girls and boys are smuggled into the United States from Eastern Europe and held captive as sex slaves in American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago. Landesman reports that the U.S. government has done little to pursue the traffickers.

The husband and wife song-writing duo is responsible for such songs as You've Lost that Loving Feeling, On Broadway, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Here You Come Again and Don't Know Much, among others. The two met when they were both working in the famous songwriting landmark, the Brill Building — Mann as a composer and Weil as a lyricist. They've been writing together ever since. In addition to their many pop hits, Mann and Weil have also written songs for films. A new musical called "They Wrote That" pays tribute to the songwriting team.

Plant formally fronted the band Led Zeppelin. His new solo CD includes tracks he recorded before Zeppelin and after. It's called Sixty Six to Timbuktu. (The interview continues through the end of the show.)

He wrote the introduction and commentary for the new book The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of The Civil War by Writers and Reporters of The New York Times. McPherson is a professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author of many books on the Civil War era including Battle Cry of Freedom.

She is Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post. She has covered South Asia for the Post since 1999, reporting from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. She has a new memoir, Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia.

He is a founder of the conservative group rightmarch.com. According to the group's Web site, rightmarch.com "is an umbrella Web site for many conservative organizations." The group has launched media and e-mail campaigns, some of them against Moveon.org. They are planning to sponsor TV ads criticizing the liberal group. One of the group's members recently released a country song entitled "Hey Hollywood." The song pokes fun at so-called liberal actors and country musicians, like Willie Nelson and The Dixie Chicks, who speak out against the war in Iraq.

The group was founded by Boyd and Joan Blades, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in the late '90s as a liberal political force. MoveOn.org recently sponsored the "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest. Some 1,500 contestants submitted ads and more than 100,000 people voted for them online. Moveon.org is now raising money to air the winning ad on TV this week and is even trying to get the ad aired during the Super Bowl.

His new book is Oracle Night. Auster is the author of 11 novels, three screenplays, five books of poetry and seven works of nonfiction. His recent works include the best selling novels The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu, and he also edited the NPR National Story Project anthology I Thought My Father Was God.