Terry Gross

Jazz bassist Charlie Haden. His newest release with his Quartet West is "The Art of The Song" (Verve). Haden formed the quartet to play the music of the 1940s and early 50s. He's worked with jazz musicians Art Pepper, Paul Bley, Ornette Coleman. And he's recorded with many artists including Abbey Lincoln, Bill Frisell, Joshua Redman, Rick Lee Jones, and others.

Eric Idle was one of the six original members of Monty Python's Flying Circus which, by the way, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. He wrote many of the songs from the show like, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." Since then, Idle has written a number of books. His latest is a comic science-fiction thriller, "The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel." (Pantheon books)

Screenwriter and director Audrey Wells. She is making her directorial debut with the new film "Guinevere" starring Stephen Rea and Sarah Polley. The film is about a mentor relationship between an older man and a young woman, and the needs and insecurities that compel them. Wells also wrote the screenplay for "The Truth about Cats and Dogs."

Former mail order magnate J. Peterman. His text-heavy apparel catalogs spun stories of adventure, and earned him a place as a fictional character on the hit T-V series "Seinfeld." But his business failed, and now he's written an article in the current issue of "The Harvard Business Review" to tell what happened.

Writer Edmund Morris. His biography of former president Ronald Reagan, "Dutch," (Random House) has garnered a lot of controversy. Morris uses a fictional narrator to tell much of the story, taking unprecedented artistic liberties. This is the first biography authorized by a sitting president, and it took Morris fourteen years to finally complete the work. Morris, a South African by birth, is the author of "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," which won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. He is currently at work on a second volume of the Roosevelt biography.

Former president Jimmy Carter turns 75 today. We celebrate by rebroadcasting excerpts of several of his interviews in which he discusses his faith, his life in politics, and his love of poetry. His books related to these topics are: "Always a Reckoning: and other Poems" (Random House, 1995), "Turning Point: A Candidate, A State, and a Nation Come of Age" (Time Books, 1993), and "Living Faith" (Times Books, 1996). (Carter's interviews are rebroadcast from 1/12/93, 1/17/95, 12/25/96).

Today, Gunter Grass won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel Academy cited his first novel, "The Tin Drum," published in 1959, for ushering in a new era of German literature after decades of linguistic and moral destruction. We're going to hear an excerpt of an interview recorded with Grass in 1992. Although he's now staunchly anti-Nazi, he had been a member of Hitler Youth, then fought in the war. Rebroadcast of 12/16/92

Jose Ramos-Horta ("Joe-zay Ra-MOSH Horta") is an exiled East Timorese resistance leader. In 1996 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Bishop Belo from East Timor. Since 1975, when Indonesia invaded and annexed the newly independent East Timor, Ramos-Horta has denounced Indonesia's actions and defended the rights of East Timorese, as an ambassador to the U.N. and a representative for independence groups.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter discusses his work helping monitor elections in East Timor at the time of the referendum for independence.