Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru is the first album of Chicha music released outside of Peru. The unique music style grew out of the booming cities of the Peruvian Amazon in 1970 and incorporates surf guitars, synthesizers and distinctive melodies.
Novelist Junot Diaz's first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores the complexities of living in two cultures at once. Set in both the United States and in the Dominican Republic, the novel follows the story of Oscar Wao in prose that frequently mixes Spanish and English in the same sentence.
Fiery Furnaces' fifth album, Widow City, is the band's most accessible so far, says Ken Tucker. The band's musical landscape is simultaneously disorienting and inviting, peculiar and witty.
In the book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, neurologist Oliver Sacks explores the relationship between music and the mind.
Through a series of case studies ranging from songs stuck in one's mind to a newfound passion for concert piano after being struck by lightning, the professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the NYU School of Medicine examines the complexity of human beings and the role music plays in our lives.
As host of the NPR news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, Peter Sagal spends a lot of time reading the newspaper.
Lately, though, he's also spent many an hour going to strip joints, a swingers club, a porn-movie set and casinos — among other dens of what some call iniquity.
All research, of course, for his new project, The Book of Vice. He wanted to get a perspective on the indulgences of others, and report back to the rest of us.
Author Alice Sebold has produced difficult books before: Her novel The Lovely Bones, soon to be filmed by director Peter Jackson, centers on a 14-year-old looking down from heaven after her own rape and murder.
Now comes Sebold's latest fiction, The Almost Moon: Its narrative involves a middle-aged woman who murders her ailing elderly mother.
Magic, Bruce Springsteen's first studio album with the E Street Band in five years, came out earlier this month. The event has occasioned at least a pair of network-TV appearances — including a live morning concert on NBC's Today show and a mortifying 60 Minutes interview.
Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker says Springsteen's approach to promoting the album — and the way the news media are receiving it — says something about both the state of the media (precarious) and Springsteen's place in American pop culture.
Richard Russo's novel, Bridge of Sighs, is a story about unexceptional people in an unexceptional upstate New York town. But the novel, Maureen Corrigan says, is anything but unexceptional; it's pound-for-pound the best new fiction on shelves today. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, a story about the relationships between people in a small town in Maine.
We Own the Night is a crime drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. They play two brothers — one a cop, the other a nightclub owner — who find themselves on opposite sides of the law. James Gray directed this thriller.
In Reservation Road Mark Ruffalo plays a divorced lawyer who accidentally kills a child and then speeds away. Based on a novel by the same name, the film is directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda). Ruffalo has appeared in Zodiac, 13 Going on 30 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Rock historian Ed Ward reviews the new classic rock box set Rockin' Bones: 1950s Punk and Rockabilly. Hits from Elvis, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee light up this 101-track, four-disc collection produced by Rhino Records
Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist Gretchen Morgenson talks about the subprime mortgage crisis and its effects on the markets and on the economy. Morgenson, an assistant business and financial editor for The New York Times, has covered the financial markets for The Times since 1998.
This year the Human Rights First Award for Excellence in Television will be given to a show that "depicts torture and interrogation in a nuanced, realistic fashion." According to interviews with military leaders, portrayal of torture on television shows has changed interrogation techniques in the field.
TV producer Adam Fierro (The Shield), intelligence expert Col. Stuart Herrington and human rights advocate David Danzig discuss TV violence.
Shows nominated for the award include Lost, Criminal Minds, The Closer and The Shield.
Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report talks about his book I Am America (And So Can You!) and his successful television show.
The former correspondent and contributor to The Daily Show created his own Emmy-nominated late-night show to parody Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor.
In I Am America, Colbert targets race, religion, sports and the American family as well as more mundane topics like breakfast cereal.
He spent a year reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and writing The Know-It-All, an account of what he learned.
Now author A.J. Jacobs has accomplished another annually retentive feat: Living life the way the Good Book says we should.
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible chronicles Jacobs' attempts to follow every rule in the Bible — and considers the lessons he learned along the way.
In his memoir Foreskin's Lament, author Shalom Auslander writes about his attempt to break free from the strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish environment of his childhood.
Auslander is the author of the short-story collection Beware of God. He's contributed to The New Yorker, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.
Film critic David Edelstein reviews Michael Clayton, the new corporate thriller starring George Clooney. Despite a routine outline, the film is sensationally well done, Edelstein says, and Clooney is as good as he's ever been.
Fresh Air's rock critic reviews Is It News, the new album from Texas blues musician Doyle Bramhall. He's had two previous discs, but this is the first collection where the songs are all his own.
The singer, songwriter and drummer has played in his own band, the Chessmen, and with a host of Texas music titans from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Marcia Ball.
In a new book about the constitutional separation of church and state, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills insists that that separation was meant as "the great protector of religion, not its enemy." That, as Wills tells guest host Dave Davies, hasn't stopped fervent believers from challenging the concept.
Wills, a translator of St. Augustine and author of What Jesus Meant, is an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University; the new book is titled Head and Heart: American Christianities.
