Terry Gross

Ira Glass is the host of the popular public radio program This American Life. A TV version of his show will premiere on Showtime in March. What will it be like to make the transition?

Hisham Nitar's semi-autobiographical debut novel In the Country of Men was short-listed for the 2006 Mann Booker Prize.

Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli, Libya, and later in Cairo, Egypt. He has lived in Great Britain since 1986.

Matar's father, a critic of the Libyan regime, was arrested in 1990. Matar has been unable to find out what happened to him.

S.V. Date writes for Florida's Palm Beach Post. He closely followed Gov. Jeb Bush during his eight years in the state house in Tallahassee. Date's new book is Jeb: America's Next Bush.

Ishmael Beah has written a memoir about his years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Orphaned by the civil war there, he was carrying an AK-47 by the age of 12. Pumped up by drugs, he was forced to kill or be killed.

When he was 15, UNICEF took Beah to a rehabilitation center. He was eventually adopted by an American woman and brought to the United States, where he attended high school and graduated from Oberlin College.

His book is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

Composer and writer Allen Shawn is the author of the new memoir, Wish I Could Be There. The book documents his many phobias. Shawn is deathly afraid of a lot of things, including heights, water, fields, parking lots and unknown streets.

Jazz trumpeter and New Orleans native Irvin Mayfield lost his father, Irvin Mayfield Sr., in the floods resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Mayfield talks about his Mardi Gras memories, and the state of his hometown today.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts the life and work of Abraham Lincoln, and key characters of his information. Her most recent book is Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Goodwin has just won the 16th Annual Lincoln Prize for the book. (This interview was first broadcast on Nov. 8, 2005.)

David Schwartz, chief curator of film at the American Museum of the Moving Image, talks about the history of political commercials, from their inception in 1952 to the present.

Schwartz is the organizer of the exhibit "The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004." (This interview was first broadcast on July 29, 2004.)

Ben Affleck's role in Hollywoodland (as the ill-fated Superman star George Reeves) has made it to DVD. Affleck also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film Gone, Baby, Gone, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. (This interview was first broadcast on Sept. 25, 2006.)

Actor and director Clint Eastwood's most recent films, Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, examine the World War II battle for the island of Iwo Jima from competing perspectives. (This interview was first broadcast on Jan. 10, 2007.)