Art Pepper's Box Set is Only Slightly Too Much of a Good Thing.

Novelist and essayist Phillip Lopate. In "Against Joie de Vivre," his new collection of essays, Lopate writes about - and rails against - the enforced gaiety of dinner parties, camaraderie in bars, teaching Chekhov to 10-year-olds and overwrought writing about architecture. In one essay, `Samson and Delilah,' Lopate uses the biblical essay to ruminate on power relations within his own family, and his confused love relationship with his mother and wife.

Poet and essayist John Haines. Haines' new book "The Stars, The Snow, The Fire," recalls the 25 years he spent homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness. Haines is "one of our best nature writers," according to Hayden Carruth of Harpers Magazine. Carruth writes that Haines also "knows the ecological crisis ... as a crisis of consciousness, the human mind in ultimate confrontation with itself." (Rebroadcast. Original date July 25, 1989).

This week marks the 10th anniversary of ABC's "Nightline," and television critic David Bianculli examines how the show went from a special on the hostage crisis to one of the most important programs in broadcast journalism.