Terry Gross

Ed Gillespie, co-editor of the book The Contract With America and policy and communications director of the House Republican Conference. He believes the welfare reforms outlined in the Republican agenda are accurate assessments of what is needed to correct the current welfare system.

Director of the National Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition at Tufts University, Dr. Larry Brown. He directed a recent study titled "Statement on Key Welfare Reform Issues: The Empirical Evidence." It revealed the assumptions behind the Republican "Contract With America" regarding welfare reform to be wrong. He agrees reform is necessary but must be focused on the right target.

Falk is best known for his role as a rumpled L.A. detective in the TV series "Columbo," where he garnered three Emmy awards. He currently stars in the recently released film "Roommates," detailing the relationship between a grandfather and grandson.

Mamet's new novel is a conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter preparing a traditional Passover meal. The grandmother reveals the horrific family history of living through the Polish Pogroms. Mamet also wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, Writing in Restaurants, and the screenplays for The Untouchables and Hoffa.

Hammerstein is also past president of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. He has recently helped in the making of a new PBS tribute show about his father, Oscar Hammerstein.

Fresh Air prison correspondent Wilbert Rideau is editor emeritus of the Angolite, the news magazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola where he is serving a life sentence. He talks about dying in prison. With longer sentences and less parole, prisoners are beginning to die in prison. Rideau recently spoke with a dying inmate, a prison nurse and a warden who handles funeral arrangements.

Biographer Deirdre Bair has written acclaimed biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Her newest subject is writer and diarist Anais Nin. A reviewer in the Kirkus Reviews writes, "Bair's Nin emerges as the complex woman she was, a woman who inspired both wrath and passion in those whose paths crossed hers. It's called Anais Nin: A Biography.

Scholars, social critics, and futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, authors of Future Shock (1970). They've gotten a lot of publicity lately because of their association with Newt Gingrich. Gingrich sought them out 20 years ago because he was fascinated by their ideas about the "intersection of history and the future." He suggested that every member of Congress read the Toffler's newest, called Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave.

Plotkin wrote a book about what he learned about botany and medicine from the medicine men of the tropical rain forests. It's called Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest, and is now out in paperback. (Rebroadcast)

In 1989, there was a small outbreak of an extremely contagious virus, the Ebola virus, in a lab in Reston, Virginia. The Army was brought in to stop the spread of the disease. The disease causes its victims to bleed to death. Richard Preston has written a new book about the incident, called "The Hot Zone." (Rebroadcast)